July 24.—­Reveille at five.  Directly after breakfast we took our waggon back to the convoy to fill up with shells from the reserve.  All the artillery, including ours, took position again, and began hammering away, but not for long, as the Boers had been evacuating the whole position in the night, and the last of their trenches was now occupied.  I believe the Royal Irish have lost heavily, the Munsters only a few.  We got away, and marched through the nek, up and down steep grassy slopes, and through the site of the Boer laager.  I was struck by its remarkable cleanliness; I thought that was not a Boer virtue.  We halted close to the emplacement where one of the Boer guns had been yesterday.  There was a rush to see some horrible human debris found in it.  I was contented with the word-pictures of enthusiastic gunners, and didn’t go myself.  From the brow, a glorious view opened out.  The nek, flanked by its frowning crags, opened out into an immense amphitheatre of rich undulating pasture-land, with a white farm here and there, half hidden in trees.  Beyond rose tier on tier of hills, ending on the skyline in snow-clad mountain peaks.  You could just conjecture that a “happy valley” ran right and left.  After the scorched monotony of the veldt it was a wonderful contrast.  We camped just where the nek ends, near an empty farm, which produced a fine supply of turkeys, geese, and chickens.  The Captain, who has charge of our commissariat, never misses a chance of supplementing our rations.  Williams was sent to forage, and for personal loot got some coffee and a file of Boer newspapers, or rather war-bulletins, published in Bethlehem, and roughly lithographed, chiefly lies, I expect.[A] The Boers have retired south, deeper into the trap.  Poultry was issued, and the gunners and drivers of our waggon drew by lot the most amazing turkey I have ever seen.  It had been found installed in a special little enclosure of its own, and I fear was being fattened for some domestic gala-day which never dawned.  It was prodigiously plump.

[Footnote A:  Here is an extract, since translated, from one of these precious “newspapers,” which ought to be one day edited in full.  It is a telegram from General Snyman at the Boer laager at Mafeking, dated March 2, 1900, when the famous siege had been going on for five months and a half.  After some trivial padding about camp details, it concludes:  “The bombardment by the British (sic) is diminishing considerably.  Our burghers are still full of courage. Their sole desire is to meet the enemy!” This is only a mild specimen of the sort of intelligence that was allowed to penetrate to a remote farm like this at Slabbert’s Nek, whose owner was now fighting us, probably, to judge from these documents, in utter ignorance of the hopelessness of his cause.]