g parallel to the Zand River. There was also a line from
Boshof, across the Cape Colony frontier, to Kimberley.

Last, but not least, came the "White Elephant" with which the reader is
already acquainted--the line from Bloemfontein to Ladybrand, through
Thaba'Nchu.

All these lines were in the Free State. I make no mention here of the
thousands of miles of similar blockhouse lines, which made a sort of
spider's web of the South African Republic.

The blockhouses themselves were sometimes round, sometimes angular,
erections. The roofs were always of iron. The walls were pierced with
loop-holes four feet from the ground, and from four to six feet from one
another. Sometimes stone was used in the construction of these walls, at
other times iron. In the latter case the wall is double, the space of
from six to nine inches between the inner and the outer wall being
filled with earth.

These buildings stood at a distance of from a hundred to a thousand
paces from one another; everything depended upon the lie of the ground,
and the means at the enemy's disposal; a greater distance than a
thousand paces was exceptional. They were always so placed that each of
them could be seen by its neighbours on both sides, the line which they
followed being a zigzag.

Between the blockhouses were fences, made with five strands of barbed
wire. Parallel with these was a trench, three feet deep and four to five
feet across at the top, but narrower at the bottom. Where the material
could be procured, there was also a stone wall, to serve as an
additional obstacle. Sometimes there were two lines of fences, the upper
one--erected on the top of the earth thrown up from the
trench--consisting of three or four strands only.

There was thus a regular network of wires in the vicinity of the
blockhouses--the English seemed to think that a Boer might be netted
like a fish. If a wild horse had been trapped there, I should like to
have been there to see, but I should not have liked to have been the
wild horse.

The building of these blockhouses cost many thousands of pounds, and
still greater were the expenses incurred in providing the soldiers in
them with food, which had to be fetched up by special convoys. And it
was all money thrown away! and worse than thrown away! for when I come
to describe how I broke through these blockhouse lines (see next page),
the reader will see that this wonderful scheme of the English prolonged
the war for at least