Cigars. Cigarettes.
"I wrote the menu out in French first, but it seemed not to suit.
"All the afternoon the same desolation, like pictures one sees of the moon's surface. About six, water and feed at Beaufort West, and horses led out, trucks mucked out, and tea served out.
"The night was very cold; in fact, the climate is quite different on these high table-lands. I woke up about six, looked out, and saw, just opposite, the legend DE AAR, which for the first time seemed to connect us with the war. We stopped a moment, and then moved on through lines of tents, loaded waggons, mountains of ammunition, etc. Then I saw a strange sight, in the shape of ice on puddles and white hoarfrost. Soon out on the broad, brown veldt, far-distant hills showing finely cut in the exquisitely clear air. Such an atmosphere I have never seen for purity. The sun was rising into a cloudless sky from behind a kopje. The flat-topped kopje is now the regular feature. They are just like miniature Table-mountains, and it is easy to see how hard to capture they must be. Water, feed, and breakfast at a tiny roadside place, with the inevitable couple of tents and khaki men. We were at whist when we steamed up to a big, busy camp-station, the Red Cross flying over a dozen big marquee tents, and a couple of hundred sorry-looking remounts (by the look of them) picketed near. This was Naauwport. We stopped alongside a Red Cross train full of white, unshaven faces—enterics and wounded going back to the base. They were cheerful enough, and we shouted inquiries about one another. They were unanimous in saying we were too late, which was very depressing news, but I don't suppose they knew much about it. We washed ourselves in big buckets here. As we were steaming out I saw a long unfamiliar sight, in the shape of a wholesome, sunburnt English girl, dressed in short-skirted blue serge, stepping out as only an English girl can. She was steering for the Red Cross over the tents, and, I daresay, was nursing there. Off again, over the same country, but looking more inhabited; passed several ostrich farms, with groups of the big, graceful birds walking delicately about; also some herds of cattle, and a distant farm or two, white against the blue hill-shadows. Soon came the first visible signs of war—graves, and long lines of trenches here and there. At a stop at a shanty (can't call it a station) a man described a fight for a kopje just by the railway. Coleskop was in view, a tall, flat-topped mountain, and later we steamed into the oft-taken and retaken Colesberg Junction, and were shown the hill where the Suffolks were cut up. All was now barren veldt again, and the strangeness of the whole thing struck me curiously. Why should men be fighting here? There seemed to be nothing to fight for, and nothing behind to get to when you had fought.
"May 22.—Tuesday.—As I write we are standing just outside Bloemfontein; cold, sunny morning; the Kaffir quarter just on our right, a hideous collection of mud houses with tin roofs; camps and stores on the left; boundless breadth of veldt beyond; the town in front under a long, low kopje, a quiet, pretty little place.
"We reached the frontier—Norval's Pont—at 6 P.M. yesterday, and after a long delay, moved slowly out in the dark, till the shimmer of water between iron girders told us we were crossing the Orange river. Once off the bridge, a shout went up for our first step on the enemy's country. Then all went on the same. We made ourselves comfortable, and brewed hot cocoa, for all the world as though we were travelling from Boulogne to Geneva. The only signs of hostility were the shrill execrations of a crowd of infant aborigines.
"We woke up to a changed country. The distances were still greater, low hills only occasionally breaking the monotony of flat plain, but the scrub had given way to grass, not verdant Irish grass, but sparse, yellow herbage. Ant-hills and dead horses were the only objects in the foreground, except eternal wreaths and tangles of telegraph wire along the tracks, and piles of sleepers, showing the damage done, and now repaired, to line and wire. The same pure crisp air and gentle sunlight.
"May 24.—Thursday.—I write in our tent on the plateau above Bloemfontein, and will go on where I left off on the 22nd. To our utter disgust, after standing for hours in a siding of the station, chatting to all sorts and conditions of the species soldier, the order came to detrain. We drivers took the horses first to water, and then picketed them on an arid patch of ground near the station, where the gunners had meantime brought the guns and waggons. It was now dark, and there were no rations served out; very cold, too, and we had no kit, but it wasn't these things we minded, but the getting out instead of training on. 'Kroonstadt' is redolent of war, but, 'Bloemfontein' spells inaction. However, there was no help for it. We slept on the ground, and precious cold this new climate was. I hadn't my Stohwasser blanket, and spent most of the night stamping about and smoking. At reveillé next day rations were still lacking, but we all trooped off to a tin hut and had tea, given by an unseen angel, named Sister Bagot. 'Boot and saddle' sounded at nine, and we marched off to the camp, about two miles away. There was a very nasty ravine to cross, and we had to have drag ropes on behind, with the gunners on them, to steady us down the descent. I was driving centres as usual, and saw the leaders almost disappear in front of me. At the bottom we crossed a stream, and then galloped them up the other side. Soon after we passed through Bloemfontein, a quiet, dull-looking place, like a suburb of Cape Town, mounted a long hill, and came out on to another broad plain, kopjes in the distance, and tents dotted far and wide. The first moving thing I saw was a funeral,—slow music, a group of khaki figures, and the bright colours of a Union Jack glinting between.
"Our right section, that is, the other half of the Battery, from which we had been separated ever since Stellenbosch, had trained on a day ahead of us, and were now already encamped, so we marched up and joined our lines to theirs, pitched our tents, and once more the Battery was united. And what a curious meeting it was! Half of them were unrecognizable with beards and sunburn, as were many of us, I suppose. What yarns we had! All that day, in the intervals between fatigues, and far into the night, in the humming tents. Jacko was with them. He had been lost on the journey, but came on by a later train very independently."
We all had a presentiment of evil, and, as it turned out, we were kept nearly a month at Bloemfontein, while still reports of victories came in. Yet news was very scarce, and had we known it, the period was only just beginning, of that long, irregular warfare, by which the two provinces had to be conquered, when the brilliancy of Roberts's meteoric march to Pretoria was past. We were to take our small share in work as necessary and arduous as any in these latter stages of the war.