No use waiting for sensational stories among these men, going about their daily camp duties as if battles and sieges and forced marches with the enemy on your flank were the most ordinary business of life.  No use waiting for fighting either; in open country the force could have knocked thousands of Boers to pieces, and there was not the least chance of the Boers coming to be knocked.  So I rode back through the rolling veldt basin.  As I passed the stream and the nek beyond the battery of artillery, the Gordons and Manchesters were lighting their bivouac fires.  This pass, crevicing under the solid feet of two great stony kopjes, was the only place the Boers would be likely to try their luck at.  It was covered; already the Dundee column was all right.

Presently I met the rest of the Gordons, swinging along the road to crown the heights on either side the nek.  Coming through I noticed—­and the kilted Highlanders noticed, too, they were staying out all night—­that the sky over Ladysmith was very black.  The great inky stain of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole circumference.  In five minutes it was night and rain-storm.  It stung like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall.  Ladysmith streets were ankle deep in half an hour; the camps were morass and pond.  And listening to the ever-fresh bursts hammering all the evening on to deepening pools, we learned that the Dundee men had not camped after all, had marched at six, and were coming on all night into Ladysmith.  Thirty-two miles without rest, through stinging cataract and spongy loam and glassy slime!

Before next morning was grey in came the 1st Rifles.  They plashed uphill to their blue-roofed huts on the south-west side of the town.  By the time the sun was up they were fed by their sister battalion, the 2nd, and had begun to unwind their putties.  But what a sight!  Their putties were not soaked and not caked; say, rather, that there may have been a core of puttie inside, but that the men’s legs were embedded in a serpentine cast of clay.  As for their boots, you could only infer them from the huge balls of stratified mud men bore round their feet.  Red mud, yellow mud, black mud, brown mud—­they lifted their feet toilsomely; they were land plummets that had sucked up specimens of all the heavy, sticky soils for fifteen miles.  Officers and men alike bristled stiff with a week’s beard.  Rents in their khaki showed white skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have judged them half red men, half soot-black.  Eyelids hung fat and heavy over hollow cheeks and pointed cheek-bones.  Only the eye remained—­the sky-blue, steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English eye—­to tell that thirty-two miles without rest, four days without a square meal, six nights—­for many—­without a stretch of sleep, still found them soldiers at the end.