I was sitting on my tarpaulins writing, and feeling rather grateful for the “softness” of my job, when a shout of “Ord’ly!” sent me into the office.  The Captain, who is a good-natured, pleasant chap, asked me if I could do clerk’s work.  I said I was a clerk at home, and thought I could.  He said he thought I must find it irksome and lonely to be sitting outside, and I might just as well pass the time between errands in writing up ledgers inside.  I was soon being initiated into Ordnance accounts, which are things of the most diabolical complexity.  Ordnance comprises practically everything; from a gun-carriage to a nail; from a tent, a waggon, a binocular, a blanket, a saddle, to an ounce of grease and all the thousand constituents which go to make up everything.  These are tabulated in a book which is a nightmare of subsections, and makes you dizzy to peruse.  But no human brain can tabulate Ordnance exhaustively, so half the book is blank columns, in which you for ever multiply new subsections, new atoms of Ordnance which nobody has thought of before.  The task has a certain morbid fascination about it, which I believe would become a disease if you pursued it long enough, and leave you an analyticomaniac, or some such horror.  Myriad bits of ordnance are continually pouring in and pouring out, and the object is to track them, and balance them, and pursue every elusive atom from start to finish.  It may be expendible, like paint, or non-expendible, like an anvil.  You feel despairingly that a pound of paint, born at Kimberley, and now at Mafeking, is disappearing somewhere and somehow; but you have to endow it with a fictitious immortality.  An anvil you feel safer about, but then you have to use it somewhere, and account for its surplus, if there is any.  Any one with a turn for metaphysics would be at home in Ordnance; Aristotle would have revelled in it.

It has just struck me that 1s. 5d. a day for a charwoman, a messenger and an accountant, to say nothing of a metaphysician, all rolled into one, is low pay.  In London you would have to give such a being at least a pound a week.

September 25.—­Ledgers, vouchers, errands, most of the day.  Melting hot, with a hot wind.  Good news from the Sergeant-major that he is putting in an application for a railway pass for me to Waterval, without waiting for the other formalities.

September 26.—­Wednesday.—­Hopes dashed to the ground.  Commandant won’t sign the application till some other officer does something or other, which there seems little chance of his doing.

CHAPTER XIII.

SOUTH AGAIN.

Ordered home—­Back to the Battery—­Good-bye to the horses—­The charm of the veldt—­Recent work of the Battery—­Paget’s farewell speech—­ Hard-won curios—­The last bivouac—­Roberts’s farewell—­The southward train—­De Wet?—­Mirages—­A glimpse of Piquetberg road—­The Aurania—­ Embarkation scenes—­The last of Africa—­A pleasant night.