and long lines
of guns and limbers and picketed horses, and the whole place crawled
with khaki, and one felt around one all the bustle and energy of a huge
camp. I felt quite melancholy, as when one revisits some scene of
childhood changed beyond recall. Trains were running regularly up to
Kimberley and ordinary citizens were travelling up and down. It seemed
the war was forgotten. To me, who had been living in the head and front
of a big army for seven months, all these old signs of peace and a quiet
life seemed strange enough. There were some children going up with their
papas and mamas. As we came one after another to the lines of hills at
Belmont and Graspan they pointed and crowded to the windows, and papa
began to explain that the great fights had been here, and to tell all
about them, quite wrong.

The hills look peaceful enough now. The children press their noses and
little india-rubber fingers against the glass, and chatter and laugh and
bob up and down--

"Little they think of those strong limbs
That moulder deep below."

And I sit back in my corner ashamed of my dirty old tunic and the holes
in it, and peer between two small flaxen heads at hills I last saw alive
with bursting shell.

At Modder village I hired a horse and rode across the plain to
Magersfontein. I must often have described the place to you--the great
flat and the beak of hill, like a battleship's ram, thrust southward
into it. Do you know, I felt quite awestruck as I approached it. It
seemed quite impossible that I, alone on my pony, could be going to ride
up to and take single-handed that redoubtable hill, which had flung back
the Highlanders, and remained impregnable to all our shelling. I thought
some Boer, or ghost of a Boer, would pop up with his Mauser to defend
the familiar position once more. However, none did. I picked my way
through the trench, littered with scraps of clothing and sacks and
blankets, with tins and cooking things, and broken bottles and all sorts
of rags and debris littered about. The descriptions of the place sent
home after the battle are necessarily very inaccurate. Those I have seen
all introduce several lines of trenches and an elaborate system of
barbed wire entanglements. There is only one trench, however, and no
barbed wire, except one fence along a road. There are, however, a great
number of plain wire strands, about ten yards long perhaps, made fast
between bushes and trees, and left dangling, s