When the war broke out, Saxonstowe and his wife, after nearly three
years of globe-trotting, were in Natal, where they had been studying the
conditions of native labour. Saxonstowe, who had made himself well
acquainted with the state of affairs in South Africa, knew that the
coming struggle would be long and bitter. He and his wife entered into a
discussion as to which they were to do: stay there, or return to
England. Sprats knew quite well what was in Saxonstowe’s mind, and she
unhesitatingly declared for South Africa. Then Saxonstowe, who had a new
book on hand, put his work aside, and set the wires going, and within a
few hours had been appointed special correspondent of one of the London
newspapers, with the prospect of hard work and exciting times before
him.
‘And what am I to do?’ inquired Lady Saxonstowe, and answered her own
question before he could reply. ‘There will be sick and wounded--in
plenty,’ she said. ‘I shall organise a field-hospital,’ and she went to
work with great vigour and spent her husband’s money with inward
thankfulness that he was a rich man.
Before they knew where they were, Lord and Lady Saxonstowe were shut up
in Ladysmith, and for one of them at least there was not so much to do
as he had anticipated, for there became little to record but the story
of hope deferred, of gradual starvation, and of death and disease. But
Sprats worked double tides, unflinchingly and untiringly, and almost
forgot that she had a husband who chafed because he could not get more
than an occasional word over the wires to England. At the end of the
siege she was as gaunt as a far-travelled gypsy, and as brown, but her
courage was as great as ever and her resolution just as strong. One day
she received an ovation from a mighty concourse that sent her,
frightened and trembling, to shelter; when she emerged into the light of
day again it was only to begin reorganising her work in preparation for
still more arduous duties. The tide of war rolled on northwards, and
Sprats followed, picking up the bruised and shattered jetsam which it
flung to her. She had never indulged in questionings or speculations as
to the rights or wrongs of the war. Her first sight of a wounded man had
aroused all the old mothering instinct in her, and because she had no
baby of her own she took every wounded man, Boer or Briton, into her
arms and mothered him.