take a spoonful, when you find the centres tying themselves up in a knot with the leaders.  Up you get, straighten them out, and sit down again.  After two more spoonfuls, you find the wheelers playing cat’s-cradle with the centres’ traces.  Perhaps the wheel-driver is asleep, and you get up and put them right.  Then the grazing operations of the leaders bring them round in a circle to the wheelers.  Up you get, and finally, as the fifth spoonful is comforting a very empty stomach, you hear, “Stand to your horses!” “Mount!” You hurriedly stuff the tin into a muzzle hanging from the saddle, where you have leisure to observe its fragrant juices trickling out, stick the spoon under a wallet-strap, buckle up wither-straps, and mount.  At the next halt you begin again, and the same thing happens.  It is a positive relief to hear the shriek of a shell, and have something definite to do or interest you.  About two the 38th fired a few shots at some Boers on the sky-line, and then we came to Waterval, where we camped and watered.  The Petersberg railway runs up here, and this was a station on it, with a few houses besides.  Its only interest is the cage in which several thousand English prisoners were kept, till released by Roberts’ arrival.  I visited it on the way to a delicious bathe in the river after tea.  It is a large enclosure, full of the remains of mud huts, and fitted with close rows of tall iron posts for the electric light, which must have turned night into day.  It is surrounded by an elaborate barbed-wire entanglement.  In one place was a tunnel made by some prisoners to escape by.  It began at a hole inside a hut, and ran underground for quite forty yards, to a point about five yards outside the enclosure.  Some of our chaps passed through it.  In a large tin shed near the enclosure was a fine electric-lighting plant for lighting this strange prison on the open veldt.

This morning the Captain came back, to our great delight.  He had been away since Winberg, getting stores for us at Bloemfontein.  He brought a waggon full of clothing and tobacco, which was distributed after we had come in.  There were thick corduroy uniforms for winter use.  If they had reached us in the cold weather they would have been more useful.  It is hot weather now; but a light drill tunic was also served out, and a sign of the times was stewed dry fruit for tea.  The ration now is five biscuits (the full ration) and a Maconochie, or bully beef.  Only extreme hunger can make me stomach Maconochies now.  They are quite sound and good, but one gets to taste nothing but the chemical preservative, whatever it is.  We have had no fresh meat for a long time back, but one manages with an occasional change of bully beef or a commandeered chicken.

The camp is a big one, for infantry reinforcements have come in, and two cow-guns.