I talked to several of them.  They all agreed in saying that they had been through the most ghastly time in the last ten days and were heartily glad it was over.  They exchanged nods and good-days with us and the soldiers who were standing about, and altogether seemed in a very friendly and conciliatory mood.  All this, however, it struck me, was rather put on, a bit of acting which was now and then a trifle overdone.  Boers are past-masters at hiding their real feelings and affecting any that they think will be acceptable.  It is a trait which has become a national characteristic, and the craft, dissimulation, the slimness, as it is called, of the Boers is a by-word.  I suppose it comes from the political situation, the close neighbourhood of a rival race, stronger and more energetic, which fosters in the stolid Dutchman, by way of buckler, this instinctive reticence and cunning.  His one idea is to make what he can out of the situation without troubling his head for a moment about his own candour and sincerity.  It is Oriental, the trait you expect to find in a John Chinaman, but which surprises you in a burly old Dutchman.  Still there it is.  At any farm you go to, men, women, and children will put on a semblance of friendship, and set to work to lie with a calmness which is really almost dignified.  No one in this country ever believes a thing a bit the more because a Dutchman says it.

We went on into the captured laager.  It was an extraordinary, interesting, and loathsome sight.  Dead bodies of horses and men lay in all directions in various stages of decomposition, and the reeking smell was something quite indescribable.  I fancied, even after leaving the place, that I carried the smell about with me, and that it had got into my clothes.  The steep river banks were honeycombed with little holes and tunnels, and deep, narrow pits, like graves; narrow at the top, and hollowed out below to allow less entrance for shells.  Evidently each man had cut his own little den.  Some were done carelessly, mere pits scooped out.  Others were deep, with blankets or old shawls spread at the bottom, and poles with screens of branches laid across the top to keep off the sun.  I saw one or two which were quite works of art; very narrow tunnels cut into the side of the river-cliff, and turning round after you entered, making a quite secure retreat, unless perhaps an extra heavy old lyditte might happen to burst the whole bank up.  This actually happened, they told us, with the very last shot fired the night before; a bit of the bank having been blown up with eight men in it, of whom five were killed and three wounded.  The whole river channel looks as if a big colony of otters or beavers had settled here, honeycombing the bank with their burrows, and padding the earth bare and hard with their feet.  It was all worn like a highroad.  On the other side, the waggons were a sight; shattered, and torn, and wrecked with shot; many of them burnt; several, huge as they are, flung