Hunter is looking after us now.  Poor Ian Hamilton, as you will know, had an accident at Heidelberg.  His horse put a foot in an antbear’s hole, just in front of me as it happened, and came down, flinging the general forward over his head.  I thought he was killed, he lay so still, but it was only his collar-bone and a bad shaking.  He is in the field again now.

Hunter has a great reputation as a fighter, which is rather alarming, especially when we are confronted with such a poisonous country as the one before us now; a medley of big mountain ranges, fantastically heaped, stretching thirty miles south to Basutoland, and forming part of the great mountain formation that reaches to and culminates in the Drakensberg range.  These hills are garrisoned by about 7000 Boers with several guns, and De Wet to lead them; altogether a formidable force.  There is a saying, that you should not bite off more than you can chew.  I hope we have not done that.  Hunter looks as if he could chew a good lot, I think.  Still the job is likely to be a difficult one to handle, and if he asks my advice I shall tell him to leave it to Rundle.

I should think a life of this sort would be likely to have some permanent effect on one’s mind and intellect.  The last mail—­that is to say, the last news of any sort of the outside world—­which we have received was on April 27th before leaving Bloemfontein; three months less a week since any whisper concerning events or people out of our immediate sight has reached us.  My ignorance of things in general weighs on me.  It is a taste of life in the dark ages before modern inventions kept one in touch with the world.

During all this time we have been wandering like an army in a dream over the unlimited surface of the veldt.  The same programme is repeated day by day.  A little before dawn you hear through your blanket-folds the first unwelcome “Saddle up,” and the muttered curses in reply.  You unwind yourself with groans.  A white-frost fog blots out everything at fifty yards, and a white sugary frost encrusts the grass.  These first hours are piercingly cold, for it is now mid-winter with us.  A cup of water left overnight is frozen solid.  You dress by simply drawing your revolver-strap over your shoulder, and flinging your blanket round you, make your way to where a couple of black boys are bending over the beginnings of a fire, and to which several other blanketed and shivering figures are converging with the same thought—­coffee—­in every mind.

Then the great army column that has curled itself up like a caterpillar for the night begins slowly to uncurl.  On the march our huge convoy stretches out in line, waggon following waggon along the rude track, and extending to a length of nearly ten miles.  At night, of course, it collects (parks is the proper word) at some selected spot where the ground is favourable, and where in the shape of a sluit, river, or farm-dam there is water.  On the slopes and hills around