country through which it will endeavor to throw off its pursuers. It
darts through them as though striving to escape, it doubles on its
tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the open plain rises
to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and remains motionless on
an incline, and on the level ground twists and turns so frequently that
when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he means he has crossed it once
at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad bridge, and once over a pontoon.
And then he is not sure that he is not still on the same side from which
he started.

Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or dark
red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him. Indeed, the khaki is the
English soldier's sole protection. It saves him in spite of himself, for
he apparently cannot learn to advance under cover, and a sky-line is the
one place where he selects to stand erect and stretch his weary limbs. I
have come to within a hundred yards of a hill before I saw that scattered
among its red and yellow bowlders was the better part of a regiment as
closely packed together as the crowd on the bleaching boards at a
base-ball match.

Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's column
has been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching, capturing
one position after another, to find it was enfiladed from many hills, and
abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The greater part of the
column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking in the open. It is a
wonderful and impressive sight. At the first view, an army in being,
when it is spread out as it is in the Tugela basin back of the hills,
seems a hopelessly and irrevocably entangled mob.

An army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a gun
on shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least, even if it
seems the most, important part of it. Before one reaches the firing-line
he must pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs of men, who are
feeding, mending, repairing, and burying the men at the "front." It is
these latter that make the mob of gypsies, which is apparently without
head or order or organization. They stretched across the great basin of
the Tugela, like the children of Israel, their camp-fires rising to the
sky at night like the reflection of great search-lights; by day they
swarmed across the pl