e--not a coloured thing, like
the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself.

It is sheer witching desert for five hundred miles, and for aught I know
five hundred miles after that. At the rare stations you see perhaps one
corrugated-iron store, perhaps a score of little stone houses with a
couple of churches. The land carries little enough stock--here a dozen
goats browsing on the withered sticks goats love, there a dozen
ostriches, high-stepping, supercilious heads in air, wheeling like a
troop of cavalry and trotting out of the stink of that beastly train. Of
men, nothing--only here at the bridge a couple of tents, there at the
culvert a black man, grotesque in sombrero and patched trousers,
loafing, hands in pockets, lazy pipe in mouth. The last man in the
world, you would have said, to suggest glorious war--yet war he meant
and nothing else. On the line from Capetown--that single track through
five hundred miles of desert--hang Kimberley and Mafeking and Rhodesia:
it runs through Dutch country, and the black man was there to watch it.

War--and war sure enough it was. A telegram at a tea-bar, a whisper, a
gathering rush, an electric vibration--and all the station and all the
train and the very niggers on the dunghill outside knew it. War--war at
last! Everybody had predicted it--and now everybody gasped with
amazement. One man broke off in a joke about killing Dutchmen, and could
only say, "My God--my God--my God!"

I too was lost, and lost I remain. Where was I to go? What was I to do?
My small experience 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.
I have been accustomed to wars with headquarters, at any rate to wars
with a main body and a concerted plan: but this war in Cape Colony has
neither.

It could not have either. If you look at the map you will see that the
Transvaal and Orange Free State are all but lapped in the red of
British territory. That would be to our advantage were our fighting
force superior or equal or even not much inferior to that of the enemy.
In a general way it is an advantage to have your frontier in the form of
a re-entrant angle; for then you can strike on your enemy's flank and
threaten his communications. That advantage the Boers possess against
Natal, and that is why Sir George White has abandoned Laing's Nek and
Newcastle, and holds the line of the Biggarsberg: even so the B