up with eight men in it, of whom
five were killed and three wounded. The whole river channel looks as if
a big colony of otters or beavers had settled here, honeycombing the
bank with their burrows, and padding the earth bare and hard with their
feet. It was all worn like a highroad. On the other side, the waggons
were a sight; shattered, and torn, and wrecked with shot; many of them
burnt; several, huge as they are, flung upside down by the force of a
shell bursting beneath them. All their contents were littered and strewn
about in every direction; blankets, clothes, carpenters' and
blacksmiths' tools, cooking utensils, furniture. You would have thought
the Boers were settlers moving to a new country with all their effects,
instead of an army on the march. This is how they do things, however, in
the homely, ponderous fashion. They often take their women and children
with them. There were many in the crowd we captured.

I wandered about alone a long time, looking at the dismal, curious scene
where so much had been endured. White flags, tied to poles or stripped
branches, fluttered from waggon tops. Our ambulance carts came along,
and the Tommies, stripping to the waist, proceeded to carry, one by one,
the Dutch wounded through the ford on stretchers.

We are bivouacked ourselves far up the river, in a secluded nook among
mimosas and kopjes with the thick current of the lately unknown, but now
too celebrated, Modder rolling in front of us. The weather has changed
of late. It is now autumn. We have occasional heavy rains, and you wake
up at night sometimes to find yourself adrift in a pool of water. It
gets chilly too.

The enemy are all about the place, and we interview them every morning
at daybreak, sometimes exchanging shots, sometimes not. We lay little
traps for each other, and vary our manoeuvres with intent to deceive.
This advance guard business (we are dealing here with the relief parties
of Boers that have come up between us and Bloemfontein) always reminds
me of two boxers sparring for an opening. A feint, a tap, a leap back,
both sides desperately on the alert and wary.

We lost poor Christian yesterday in one of these little encounters. He
was mortally wounded in stopping at short range to pick up a friend
whose horse had been shot. I have mentioned him, I think, to you in my
letters. There was no one in the corps more popular. "Tell the old dad I
died game," was what he said when the Major, coming up wi