LETTER XXV

THE SITUATION

  CAMP ON THE VAAL,
  NEAR KLERKSDORP,
  December 23, 1900.

We are encamped close to the Vaal, which is here a fine stream, as wide as the Thames at Richmond.  I have just been bathing in it.  It is early morning, and I am sitting under a thicket of great weeping willows by the river.  The banks slope down and make a trough for the stream a good deal below the level of the plain, and in this hollow, hidden till you are close to it, congregates all the verdure there is for miles, especially a quantity of willow trees, with gnarled black trunks leaning down to the stream, sometimes bending over and burying themselves in the ground and then shooting up again, making arches and long vistas, with green grass below and silvery foliage waving above.  After our long marches on the veldt, the contrast here is wonderfully refreshing.  One seems to drink in the coolness and greenness of the scene with eyes that have grown thirsty for such things.  The trees straddling down the bank are rather like figures of men, giants that have flung themselves down, resting on hands and elbows, delighted, one would think, as I am, to come and rest near water again.

I can hardly believe that it only wants two days to Christmas.  Our last Christmas we spent on the Modder.  I remember it well; a wet night, and all night long we sat on a steep kopje watching the lights of a Boer laager and expecting to be attacked.  Methuen’s little campaign strikes one now as a sort of prelude, or overture, to the main show; but how very much surprised we should have been that November morning when we marched from Orange River Camp if you had told us we should ever be looked at in that light.  Ten thousand men was a big army in those days.

We have been on the trek now for about six weeks with Bruce-Hamilton, and though we have not so far been seriously engaged, there has been almost daily fighting round the fringes and skirts of the column ("skirt-fighting,” you may call it).

“November 17.—­Left Lindley.  This neighbourhood quite as disturbed as ever.  Shooting.

“November 18.—­More shooting.  Boers in all hills.

“November 19.—­More shooting and galloping about.  Reached Heilbron.

“November 20.—­Left for Frankfort.  Boers in attendance as usual.  Our two guns and pompom very useful.”

Those were the last entries I made in my diary.  The day’s events became too monotonous to chronicle, but very much the same sort of entries would have applied to almost every day since.  Sometimes there are exciting incidents.  Yesterday half-a-dozen Boers hid in a little hollow which just concealed them until our column came along, and opened fire at close range on the flank guard.  One or two men were hit and several horses.  My friend Vice had five bullets through his horse and was not touched