Kaffirs, who are wandering in
swarms over the country, coming down from Johannesburg and the
collieries, and naturally finding it rather hard to give account of
themselves. The peculiarity of the trials which I have attended has been
that if a Kaffir could give the name of his father it was taken as a
sufficient guarantee of respectability With one miserable Bushman, for
instance--a child's caricature of man--it was really going hard till at
last he managed to explain that his father's name was Nicodemus Africa,
and then every one looked satisfied, and he left the court without a
stain upon his character.

So we live from day to day. The air is full of rumours. One can see them
grow along the street. One traces them down. Perhaps one finds an atom
of truth somewhere at the root of them. One puts that atom into a
telegram. The military censor cuts it out with unfailing politeness, and
a good day's work is done. Heat, dust, and a weekly deluge with
stupendous thunder complete the scene.

CHAPTER IV

BATTLE OF ELANDS LAAGTE

LADYSMITH, _October 22, 1899_.

It was a fair morning yesterday, cool after rain, the thin clouds
sometimes letting the sun look through. At half-past ten I was some six
or seven miles out along the Newcastle road--a road in these parts being
merely a worn track over the open veldt, distinguishable only by the
ruts and mud. Close on the left were high and shapely hills, like Welsh
mountains, but on the right the country was more open. A Mr. Malcolm's
farm stood in the middle of a waving plain, with a few fields, aloe
hedges, and poplars. The kraal of his Kaffir labourers was near it, and
about a mile away the plain ended in a low ridge of rocky "kopjes,"
which ran to join the mountainous ground on the left at a kind of "nek"
or low pass over which the railway runs. Beyond that low ridge lay
Elands Laagte, an important railway station with a few collieries close
by, a store, a hotel, and some houses.

The Boers had occupied it two days before, had captured a train there,
and torn up the rail in two places, making a number of prisoners and
seizing 100 head of cattle and quantities of other private stores and
the luggage going to Dundee. Early in the morning we had gone out with
four companies of the Manchesters in an armoured train with an ordinary
train behind it, a battery of Natal Field Artillery, and the Imperial
Light Horse under Colonel Scott Chisholme, to reconnoitre with a vi