te for timely preparation. Like a man who starts
behindhand with his day, the catching up meant double worry, if not
double work. Hildyard's brigade, which sailed October 20, had, thirty
days before, been preceded by two hospital ships, three batteries of
field artillery and a thousand infantry;[7] the last-named getting
away on the 19th, only one day before Hildyard. No British field
troops had then reached South Africa, save a couple of {p.103}
battalions additional to Cape Colony, and the reinforcements to Sir
George White drawn mainly from India, which, with most of his corps in
Natal, and despite his well-directed energy, the Boers by their
superior numbers were able to round up and corral in Ladysmith in
three weeks after their ultimatum was issued. There were then also on
the way some fifteen hundred of the Army Service Corps, an organised
body of men trained for the supply and transport service of the army,
and of skilled mechanics, whose duties are to construct and maintain
works of various kinds for the facilitation of army supply--transport
and depot. These had sailed in the early days of October.

[Footnote 7: There may have been one or two more
battalions of infantry, but I have not been able to
trace such.]

Such was the mighty enginery antecedently set in motion, to crush the
liberties of the Transvaal. An interesting further illustration of the
way decision was precipitated toward the end is found in the fact that
Sir George White was gazetted Governor of Gibraltar in the last week
in August, and on September 15 sailed to command the forces in Natal.

"My small experience," wrote Steevens about October 12 from the
well-advanced station {p.104} of Stormberg Junction, in Cape Colony,
"has been confined to wars you could put your fingers on; for this war
I have been looking long enough and have not found it.... We are
heavily outnumbered, and have adopted no heroic plan of abandoning the
indefensible. We have an irregular force of mounted infantry at
Mafeking, a regiment (regulars) at Kimberley, a regiment and a half at
De Aar" (the most important of junctions), "half of the Berkshires at
Naauwport, the other half here." Stormberg and Naauwport were also
junctions, secondary only, if secondary, to De Aar, in the strategic
importance that always attaches to cross-roads. "The famous fighting
Northumberlands came crawling up behind our train, and may n