After about two, hours’ easy marching the cavalry reached the point of rendezvous among the hills opposite Trichardt’s Drift, and here we halted and awaited developments in the blackness.  An hour passed.  Then there arrived Sir Charles Warren and staff.  ’Move the cavalry out of the way—­fifteen thousand men marching along this road to-night.’  So we moved accordingly and waited again.  Presently the army began to come.  I remember that it poured with rain, and there was very little to look at in the gloom, but, nevertheless, it was not possible to stand unmoved and watch the ceaseless living stream—­miles of stern-looking men marching in fours so quickly that they often had to run to keep up, of artillery, ammunition columns, supply columns, baggage, slaughter cattle, thirty great pontoons, white-hooded, red-crossed ambulance waggons, all the accessories of an army hurrying forward under the cover of night—­and before them a guiding star, the red gleam of war.

We all made quite sure that the bridges would be built during the night, so that with the dawn the infantry could begin to cross and make an immediate onfall.  But when morning broke the whole force was revealed spread about the hills overlooking the drift and no sound of artillery proclaimed the beginning of an action.  Of course, since a lightning blow had been expected, we all wondered what was the cause of the delay.  Some said folly, others incapacity, others even actual laziness.  But so far as the operations have proceeded I am not inclined to think that we have lost anything by not hurrying on this occasion.  As I write all is going well, and it would have been a terrible demand to make of infantry that they should attack, after a long night march, such a position as lay and still lies in part before us.  In fact it was utterly impossible to do anything worth doing that day beyond the transportation; so that, though the Boers were preparing redoubts and entrenchments with frantic energy, we might just as well take our time.  At about eight o’clock a patrol of the Imperial Light Horse, under Captain Bridges, having ascertained that only a few Dutch scouts were moving within range on the further bank, the passage of the river began.  Two battalions of Hildyard’s Brigade, the West Yorkshires and the Devons, moved towards the drift in the usual open formation, occupied the houses, and began to entrench themselves in the fields.  Six batteries came into action from the wooded heights commanding the passage.  The pontoons advanced.  Two were launched, and in them the West Yorkshire Regiment began to cross, accumulating gradually in the shelter of the further bank.  Then the sappers began to build the bridges.  Half a dozen Boers fired a few shots at long range, and one unfortunate soldier in the Devons was killed.  The batteries opened on the farms, woods, and kopjes beyond the river, shelling them assiduously, though there was not an enemy to be seen, and searching out the ground with