upside down by the force of a shell bursting beneath them.  All their contents were littered and strewn about in every direction; blankets, clothes, carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ tools, cooking utensils, furniture.  You would have thought the Boers were settlers moving to a new country with all their effects, instead of an army on the march.  This is how they do things, however, in the homely, ponderous fashion.  They often take their women and children with them.  There were many in the crowd we captured.

I wandered about alone a long time, looking at the dismal, curious scene where so much had been endured.  White flags, tied to poles or stripped branches, fluttered from waggon tops.  Our ambulance carts came along, and the Tommies, stripping to the waist, proceeded to carry, one by one, the Dutch wounded through the ford on stretchers.

We are bivouacked ourselves far up the river, in a secluded nook among mimosas and kopjes with the thick current of the lately unknown, but now too celebrated, Modder rolling in front of us.  The weather has changed of late.  It is now autumn.  We have occasional heavy rains, and you wake up at night sometimes to find yourself adrift in a pool of water.  It gets chilly too.

The enemy are all about the place, and we interview them every morning at daybreak, sometimes exchanging shots, sometimes not.  We lay little traps for each other, and vary our manoeuvres with intent to deceive.  This advance guard business (we are dealing here with the relief parties of Boers that have come up between us and Bloemfontein) always reminds me of two boxers sparring for an opening.  A feint, a tap, a leap back, both sides desperately on the alert and wary.

We lost poor Christian yesterday in one of these little encounters.  He was mortally wounded in stopping at short range to pick up a friend whose horse had been shot.  I have mentioned him, I think, to you in my letters.  There was no one in the corps more popular.  “Tell the old dad I died game,” was what he said when the Major, coming up with supports, knelt down to speak to him.

Nothing very noteworthy has occurred since the surrender.  The army has been quietly resting, taking stock of the prisoners, and sending them to the railway, and we are expecting every day now the order to advance.  The enemy, meanwhile, have been collecting in some force, and are evidently prepared to dispute our march east.  Yesterday we had a duel with a gun which they have managed, goodness knows how, to drag up to the top of a commanding hill some miles up the river.  However, it was too strongly placed.  We lost several men.  The enemy’s fire was very accurate, and they ended up by sending three shots deliberately one after the other right into our ambulance waggons.