miles that would bring them into camp,
fifteen miles outside Ladysmith. They were coming to help Ladysmith, if
you like; but the idea of Ladysmith helping them!

At his urgency they sent the convoy back. I rode on miles through the
openest country I had yet seen hereabouts--a basin of wave-like veldt,
just growing thinly green under the spring rains, spangled with budding
mimosa-thorn. Scarred here and there with the dry water-courses they
call sluits, patched with heaves of wire-fenced down, livened with a
verandah, blue cactus-hedged farmhouse or two, losing itself finally in
a mazy fairyland of azure mountains--this valley was the nearest
approach to what you would call a smiling country I had seen in Africa.

Eight miles or so along the road I came upon the Border Mounted Rifles,
saddles off, and lolling on the grass. All farmers and transport riders
from the northern frontier, lean, bearded, sun-dried, framed of steel
and whipcord, sitting their horses like the riders of the Elgin marbles,
swift and cunning as Boers, and far braver, they are the heaven-sent
type of irregular troopers. It was they who had ridden out and made
connection with the returning column an hour before.

Two miles on I dipped over a ridge--and here was the camp. Bugles sang
cheerily; mules, linked in fives, were being zigzagged frowardly down to
water. The Royal Irish Fusiliers had loosened their belts, but not their
sturdy bearing. Under their horses' bellies lay the diminished 18th
Hussars. Presently came up a subaltern of the regiment, who had been on
leave and returned just too late to rejoin before the line was cut. They
had put him in command of the advanced troop of the Lancers, and how he
cursed the infantry and the convoy, and how he shoved the troop along
when the drag was taken off! Now he was laughing and talking and
listening all at once, like a long wanderer at his home-coming.

No use waiting for sensational stories among these men, going about
their daily camp duties as if battles and sieges and forced marches with
the enemy on your flank were the most ordinary business of life. No use
waiting for fighting either; in open country the force could have
knocked thousands of Boers to pieces, and there was not the least chance
of the Boers coming to be knocked. So I rode back through the rolling
veldt basin. As I passed the stream and the nek beyond the battery of
artillery, the Gordons and Manchesters were lighting their bivouac