August 13.—­I write sitting wedged among my comrades on the floor of the truck, warm sun bathing us after an Arctic night, and up to my knees in kit, letters, newspapers, parcels, boxes of cigarettes, chocolate, etc., for all our over-due mails have been caught up in a lump somewhere, and the result of months of affection and thoughtful care in distant England are heaped on us all at once.  I have about thirty letters.  It is an orgie, and I feel drunk with pleasure.  All the time the train rolls through the wilderness, with its myriad ant-hills, its ribbon of empty biscuit tins and dead horses, its broken bridges, its tiny outpost camps, like frail islands in the ocean, its lonely stations of three tin houses, and nothing else beyond, no trees, fields, houses, cattle, signs of human life.  We stopped all last night at Zand River.  All trains stop at night now, for the ubiquitous De Wet is a terror on the line.  To-day we passed the charred and twisted remains of another train he had burnt; graves, in a row, close to it.  Williams and I slept on the ground outside the truck, after feeding and watering horses and having tea.  It was an uneasy slumber, on dust and rubble, interrupted once by the train quietly steaming away from beside us.  But it came back.  We were off again at 4.30 A.M., a merry crowd heaped together under blankets on the floor of the truck.  We ground slowly on all day, and halted for the night at Viljoen’s Drift, the frontier station.

August 14.—­Sleepy heads rose from a sea of blankets, and blinked out to see the crossing of the Vaal river, and a thin, sleepy cheer hailed this event; then we relapsed and waited for the sun.  When it came, and we thawed and looked about, we saw an entire change of country; hills on both sides, trees here and there, and many farms.  Soon the upper works of a mine showed, and then more, and all at once we were in a great industrial district.  At Elandsfontein, the junction for Johannesburg, we had a long halt, and a good breakfast, getting free coffee from a huge boiling vat.

(9 P.M.)—­We reached Pretoria just at dusk, the last five miles or so being a very pretty run through a beautiful pass, with woods and real green fields in the valley, a refreshing contrast to the outside veldt.  We detrained by electric light, and bivouacked in an open place just outside the station.  I write this in the station bar, where some of us have been having a cup of tea.  Paget’s Brigade are all here, and I hear Roberts is to review us to-morrow.  A Dublin Fusilier, who had been a prisoner since the armoured-train affair at Estcourt until Roberts reached Pretoria, told us we “had a good name here,” for Bethlehem, etc.  He vaguely talked of Botha and Delarey “dodging round” near here.  We have heard nothing of the outside world for a long time, and as far as I can make out, the Transvaal has still to be conquered, just as the Free State has had to be, long after the capture of both capitals.