r. There is something deadly about that word
Modder. Say it over to yourself. Pah! It leaves a taste of blood in the
mouth.

We have been fighting in a desultory kind of way for the last week here.
Coming from Kimberley, where we had gone to holloa back French (you
could follow him by scent all the way from the dead horses), we made a
forced march and rejoined him here by the river, where he is busily
engaged, with Kitchener at the other end, in bombarding old Cronje in
the middle. They have fairly got the old man. Kitchener had stuck to him
pretty tight, it seems, after we left them that evening at Klip Drift.
French has nicked in ahead. Macdonald has arrived, I believe, or is
arriving, and there are various other brigades and divisions casting up
from different quarters, all concentrating on unhappy Cronje. Lord
Roberts, I suppose, will get the credit, but part of it, one would
think, belongs to Kitchener, who planned the movement and put it in
train before Lord Roberts arrived.

Cronje, by all accounts, has about 4000 men with him. He has dug
himself into the river banks, which are steep and afford good cover. You
would never guess, sweeping the scene with your glasses, that an army
could be hiding there. The river curves and winds, its course marked by
the tops of the willows that grow along its banks. The land on both
sides stretches bare and almost level, but there are a few rises and
knolls from which our artillery smashes down its fire on the Boer
laager. At one point you can make out a ragged congregation of waggons,
broken and shattered, some of them burning or smouldering. That is where
the laager is, but not a soul can one see move. The place looks an utter
solitude, bare and lifeless in the glare of the sun. There is no reply
to our busy guns. The little shrapnel clouds, stabbed with fire, burst
now here now there, sometimes three or four together, over the spot, and
the blue haze floats away, mingling with the darker, thicker vapour from
the less frequent lyddite. "What are they shooting at?" a stranger would
say; "there is nobody there." Isn't there? Only 4000 crafty, vigilant
Boers, crowding in their holes and cuddling their Mausers. Ask the
Highlanders.

You will have heard all about that by this time. The desperate attempt
last Sunday to take the position by storm. It was another of those
fiendish "frontal attacks." Have we been through Belmont and Graspan and
Modder River and Magersfontein for noth