ery 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.

The day after the fight we made a triumphal procession through Pretoria,
and marched past Lord Roberts and his staff, and all his generals and
their staffs, assembled in the big square facing the Parliament House.
We came along a long, straight street, with verandahed houses standing
back in gardens, and trees partly shading the road, a ceaseless, slow,
living river of khaki; solid blocks of infantry, with measured, even
tread, the rifle barrels lightly rising and falling with the elastic,
easy motion that sways them altogether as the men keep time; cavalry,
regular and irregular, and, two by two, the rumbling guns. Mile after
mile of this steady, deliberate, muddy tide that has crept so far,
creeps on now through the Dutch capital. Look at the men! Through long
exposure and the weeding out of the weak ones, they are now all picked
men. The campaign has sorted them out, and every battalion is so much
solid gristle and sinew. They show their condition in their lean,
darkly-tanned faces; in the sinewy, blackened hands that grasp the rifle
butts; in the way they carry themselves, with shoulders well back and
heads erect, and in the easy, vigorous swing of their step.

I should like, while I am about it, to speak to you rather more at
length about the British soldier. I should think my time spent on
service, especially the five months in the ranks, time well spent, if
only for the acquaintanceship it has brought with soldiers. In the
field, on the march, in bivouac, I