Mr. Barnes was exceedingly well liked by all who knew him in the army, and was much sought as a companion, for his unvarying good humour and for such a fund of anecdotes, songs, and imitations as was possessed by no one else of our acquaintance. I think the best of his anecdotes of his own experiences in the war was concerning the Boer losses at Driefontein. The British had found more than sixty bodies, and knew that fifty other Boers had been killed. (I will not say that these are the exact figures, but they give a just idea of the actual losses of the Boers.) Nevertheless, when Barnes questioned a Boer prisoner taken at that battle, the man said that his force had suffered a loss of only eight killed.
"Then who is it that gets killed by our bullets in all these fights?" Barnes asked. "We fight you, and after each battle we see the dead being carried off; we find other dead on the field, and we see the loose mounds of earth under which you have hastily buried others. Who are these dead men?"
"I don't know," said the prisoner, "our commandant said we only had eight men killed at Abraham's Kraal (Driefontein)."
"I understand," said Barnes. "He must know how many you lost. But we saw over sixty dead bodies where you had been fighting. Whose bodies do you suppose they were? Not Boers, of course, but still, they belonged to some people who had been shot. There seems to be in South Africa a mysterious race of people who follow you around in this war and persist in getting in the way of our bullets. I should think you would warn them of their danger, or give orders for them to stop coming to all the battles. They may have wives and children who mourn them; at all events, they are not needed as filters in all the rivers, or for starting informal cemeteries all over the veldt as they have been doing ever since the fighting began. I wonder what people they are."
"I don't know. We only lost eight," said the Boer.
"And we buried sixty," said Barnes. "Really you ought to find out who these bullet-stoppers are, and warn them not to be always getting killed by us who have no quarrel with them and are only trying to shoot Boers."
Another of Mr. Barnes's tales is of that awful daybreak massacre at Maghersfontein. Mr. Barnes was forging ahead to learn what had happened when he met three men in kilts dashing over the veldt, away from the battle.