f soup for the inhabitants
as long as some bullock meat which they possessed lasted; to organise
relief works by making roads and fences in a town which belongs chiefly
to themselves; and to allow people to shelter in their mines. Perhaps
they could do no more. Considering everything, and remembering some
facts in connection with this and other political troubles, I ask, Could
they well have done less?

VIII

PAARDEBERG

From Modder River to Paardeberg the road rolls over a bare yet beautiful
plain, brown and dry before the rain, but after a heavy rain bursting
into endless stretches of purple and scarlet flowers of the karoo. I
went by Jacobsdaal. Early on Wednesday morning, February 28th, I rode
out from the little town with General Wavell, who put me a couple of
miles on the road. You are to understand that this was something of an
adventure. I had nothing but a Cape cart and a couple of horses to draw
it--a thing that holds, with one's kit, about three hundred pounds of
forage. I was going to a camp where I could get no forage and hardly any
food; there was not a despatch-rider to be had at Modder; my telegrams
must be ridden back from the front, now thirty and soon to be ninety
miles away. Sickness had tethered me to Modder River camp throughout the
exciting week that had ended with Cronje's surrender; and now on
February 28th I was following the army, feeling like one who should
enter a theatre as the curtain was falling on the first act.

The thirty-mile ride through the lonely country would have been
delightful but for the dismal trail left by the war--carcases of horses
and oxen lining the road, a carcase every few hundred yards surrounded
by a gorged flock of aasvoegels, the foulest of the vulture tribe. With a
nervous horse the passage of these pestilential spots was made difficult
as well as revolting, and it was with a feeling of relief that one saw
the tents and waggons of the Paardeberg camp by the river trees.

Along the road, I should have said, the trail was one of devastation. In
the midst of the dry veldt one sometimes came upon a farmhouse with its
grove of trees, and spring, and pleasant fields; but always the farm was
derelict, windows broken, rooms gutted, stock destroyed, with often some
poor abandoned creature tethered to a tree, and waiting, in the midst of
the dead silence of the empty country, to be fed and watered.

At Paardeberg I found the headquarters camp situated on the r