English Nurse's Opionion of the Boer Men

The following extracts from a letter written by "Sister Lucy" and published in the Ceylon Review of January,1901 :

''We are working", she wrote, "under Burgher doctors, very decent men. One I like very much. Truly the Boers are very pleasant to nurse. You do not hear bad language or at least very little , and never a bad remark or expression, or even a look so that in all this crowd of men I can safely allow my fair young nurse to go with me".

"Having nursed my own countrymen, alas! the difference is perceptible. How often my young nurses in English hospitals have had to appeal to me. These Boers seem a moral, simple, quaint sort of people, and with little idea of truth, their religion seems so much one of form."

What a vivid period-piece, and how naturally too this older lady, with years behind her and intelligence to sum conditions up, contemplates the perils which beset the pleasant looking maid who, pre-occupied with "good works", engaged herself to nurse the sick in the days of the Boer War.