The Newtown bee., 1900-09-14
BRITAIN. Royal Hotel,
Cape Town, August 6, 1900.

Cape Town, August 6, 1900.
 Dear Parents: Since writing you last week have succeeded in getting very small room on the top floor of this hotel, for which pay s day.. including three very poorly cooked meals. There is great difference between Cape Town now and what it was when was here last year and the year before. Then it was a sleepy old dutch town with no life and nothing to draw people here but the beautiful scenery of Table Mountain. I can look out of my window and see the grand old mountain so near, rising 40O0 feet, with it's top for some miles as level as floor. Jts walls In front rising near ly perpendicularly almost the whole of the 4OOO.
 But to return to Cape Town. It is to- day the great base of supplies for the English army now in South Africa and the docks and railway stations are very lively places. Between l5, 900 and 30, 900 soldiers are here, some being employed in sending supplies to the front, others waiting to be sent up country, as we'll az those who have seen service and are be- ing invalided home to England. At present there are 80 big ships in tte bay waiting to. be unloaded and the docks are all full, too. The ships are filled with all kinds of supplies for the great Eng lish army of 200, 900 men now in South Africa. Gangs of men are working day and night unloading the ships to the long trains that are made up to be sent to the front. Beside this there are 15O00 Johan- nesburg people here waiting to go back, SO old Cape Town never has before and probably will never again be so crowded. Hotels, houses and even sta bles are full of people, and still they keep coming Where they can put any more do not know, but you know "there is always room for one more, 'and we don't care as long as they do not make us share our room with that last one. There are many sad sights here, though one does not have to go far to see them. At the railway station one sees long trairs come in, full of sick and wounded just from the front, these poor fellows are for the hospitals here, if there is room, or to be sent home on hospital ships. Many o1 them come back minus leg or an arm ol heve enteric fever, which has carried off so many thouaands. It is sad sigh ! to sea these men carried from the trajl ! on stretchers, so wasted and weak iron the il ght against the awful fever or fron the shock of loss ot limbs. Their uni forms are dirty and brown ard torn Many have not had shave or a hair GU
 since they get foot in Africa. All 0
 them have been through South Africa1
 summer and the tropical gun has bur2ec them until they would not be reco9rizsd d
 At the hotels one meets hundreds of tn poor fellows, who are mere shadows 0
 what they once were. They manage t' get out and sit in the sun few hour
 each day. Most of them will never
 we'll and strong again.
 Some of the regiments are being eer
 down for transportation home and a
 they march through the street, notic
 that in some of the companies not an O.
 fcer is left and not one half the mel
 Many 6 poor fellow has left his bones
 beach under the burning sun on the hig
 veldt. What difference in compariso
 with theee game men as saw them con