Read it through once

No event in many years has created such keen interest amongst, and been so closely followed by, the Royal family of Great Britain as the war in South Africa. Apart from Queen Victoria's natural and life-long dislike of the horrors of war, there was the earnest sympathy which she felt in the last two years of her reign with thousands of her subjects who had suffered in the loss of husband, or brother, or father, or friend; and the womanly sorrow which she herself felt for the many promising young officers whom she had personally known or liked, or whose relations and friends had been upon terms of intimacy with members of the Royal circle. The matter was still more brought home to her, in a personal sense, by the death of her grandson, Prince Christian Victor, who, after months of hard campaigning and with the reputation of an able, modest and hard-working officer, succumbed in the autumn of 1900 to enteric fever, and was buried, at his own request, upon the South African veldt. But these personal considerations had never been so potent with the Queen as had her broader sympathies for her people, and there can be no doubt the gloomy days of Colenso and Spion Kop told severely upon the sensibilities of a Sovereign who was as proud of the nation's position and as keen to feel national humiliation, or sorrow, as was the humblest and most loyal of her subjects. And the fact that her duty to the people and the Empire lay in supporting her Ministers and pressing, if necessary, for a still more vigorous prosecution of the struggle, could not but have its effect upon the constitution of a Queen who felt her responsibilities very keenly and who was an aged woman as well as a great ruler.