ing the most important developments or listening to the
reports of orderlies from various parts of the field, more often than
not without any comment at all. Yet nothing escapes him.

Our action with Olivier is a rather stupid one, and I shall not attempt
to describe it. We take the first position, losing from forty to fifty
men, only to find that the enemy have retired to the second range, and
that it is too late to follow them up. Probably the only man at all
satisfied with the day's performance is old Mac.

Through a weary land we have come marching north these ten days. The
veldt is at its worst, parched and dry and dead. Our column trekking
raises a huge cloud of reddish dust that hangs still in the air, and
marks for miles back the way we have come. The whole expanse is quite
colourless--almost white, or a dirty grey. All day long the blue sky is
unvaried, and the sun glares down unobscured by a cloud; sky and earth
emphasising each other's dull monotony. Only at sunrise and late evening
some richer and purer lines of colour lie across the distant plain, and
the air is fresh and keen. Round about the town, which, like all these
Boer towns, stuck down in the middle of the veldt, reminds one of some
moonstruck flotilla becalmed on a distant sea, the grass is all worn and
eaten to the very dust. Whiffs of horrid smell from dead carcases of
horses and cattle taint the air. All the water consists of a feeble
stream, stagnant now and reduced to a line of muddy pools, some reserved
for horses, some for washing, and some for drinking, but all of the same
mud colour.

And yet even for this country, I think it with a kind of dull surprise
as I look out over the naked hideousness of the land, men can be found
to fight. What is it to be a child of the veldt, and never to have known
any other life except the life of these plains? It is to reproduce in
your own nature the main features of this extraordinary scenery. Here is
a life of absolute monotony, a landscape, huge, and on a grand scale,
but dull and unvaried, and quite destitute of any kind of interest, of
any noteworthy detail, of any feature that excites attention and remark.
And the people, its children, are like unto it. Their minds are as
blank, as totally devoid of culture and of ideas as the plains around
them. They have an infinite capacity for existing without doing anything
or thinking anything; in a state of physical and mental inertia that
would drive an Eng