orest, and the scenery of lower Natal amazed me. I had expected
nothing nearly so tropical, so rich and vivid. There were little
Mozambique monkeys chattering in the thick-set trees beside the line and
a quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers amidst the abundant
deep greenery. There were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of unfamiliar
cultivation upon the hills; bunchy, frondy growths that I learnt were
bananas and plantains, and there were barbaric insanitary-looking Kaffir
kraals which I supposed had vanished before our civilization. There
seemed an enormous quantity of Kaffirs all along the line--and all of
them, men, women, and children, were staring at the train. The scenery
grew finer and bolder, and more bare and mountainous, until at last we
came out into the great basin in which lay this Ladysmith. It seemed a
poor unimportant, dusty little street of huts as we approached it, but
the great crests beyond struck me as very beautiful in the morning
light....

I forgot the beauty of those hills as we drew into the station. It was
the morning after the surrender of Nicholson's Nek. I had come to join
an army already tremendously astonished and shattered. The sunny
prospect of a triumphal procession to Pretoria which had been still in
men's minds at Durban had vanished altogether. In rather less than a
fortnight of stubborn fighting we had displayed a strategy that was
flighty rather than brilliant, and lost a whole battery of guns and
nearly twelve hundred prisoners. We had had compensations, our common
soldiers were good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear that we
were fighting an army not only very much bigger than ours but better
equipped, with bigger guns, better information, and it seemed superior
strategy. We were being shoved back into this Ladysmith and encircled.
This confused, disconcerted, and thoroughly bad-tempered army, whose
mules and bullocks cumbered the central street of the place, was all
that was left of the British Empire in Natal. Behind it was an
unprotected country and the line to Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and the
sea.

You cannot imagine how amazed I felt at it. I had been prepared for a
sort of Kentucky quality in the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good
shooting, but to find them with more modern arms than our own, more
modern methods! Weren't we there, after all, to teach _them_! Weren't we
the Twentieth and they the Eighteenth Century? The town had been shelled
the day