For months Pretoria has been our beacon, and at first it seemed quite an impossibly long way off.  Looked at from Bloemfontein, across 300 miles of dreary veldt and rugged kopjes and steep-banked rivers, and allowing for the machinations and devilments of ten or fifteen thousand Boers, our arrival here did seem a vague, indefinite, and far-off prospect.  And yet in a day or two over the month here we are.  Lord Roberts has brought us up in the most masterly way.  He has moved with a big central column on the railway, while at the same time other columns, stretched far to right and left, moved parallel and threatened to outflank and enclose the enemy at every stand.  So with wings beating and body steadily advancing, like some great kite or bird of prey, we have flapped our way northward.

Even here no stand was made.  The town is strongly defended with several new forts, armed, we were told, with 10-inch guns, with a range of about twelve miles, which we supposed would put the noses of our poor cow-guns completely out of joint.  The Boers had burnt the grass on all the hills to the south of the town, so that the blackened surface might show up the khaki uniform of our men, and offer a satisfactory mark, and things generally, as we slowly approached the tall black rampart of mountain south of Pretoria, seemed to point to a big engagement.  But here, as so often elsewhere, it was borne in upon them that if they finally stayed and defended their capital, they would assuredly be surrounded and cut off; and so, though only at the last moment, we hear, they decided to leave.  They put up an afternoon fight on the hills near the town, but this was only the work of a handful of men, probably intended to stave us off for a while while they finished their packing in Pretoria and got away.  Lord Roberts got a battery up to the crest of a great big ridge, and we got a pompon up a still steeper one, and a vigorous cannonade was kept up and a good deal of rifle-fire indulged in till nearly dark.  But this is often very deceptive.  No doubt if it was the first battle you had been at, you would have put down the casualties, judging from the noise made, at several hundred.  As a matter of fact, the peculiar thing about all this shooting is that, like the cursing in the Jackdaw of Rheims, “nobody seems one penny the worse.”  Loading is now so easy that it is not the slightest trouble to fire.  The consequence is that a glimpse of a Boer’s head on the sky-line a couple of miles off will find work for a battery of guns and a few score of rifles for the rest of the afternoon.  About sunset time, when it begins to get cold, they will limber up and come away, and the report will go in that our shelling was very accurate, but that the enemy’s loss could not be positively ascertained.