id and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive
sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then
became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son,
and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the
Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and
Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues--English severely
excepted--made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues
weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.

It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been
cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low,
flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east,
and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra
of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village
from British shell-practice.

Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and
fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their
carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies
of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock,
decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican
noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the
rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of
egg spilt upon a war-map.

Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each
fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside
him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and
smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the
unrestricted space and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches
wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp
alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of
sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the
abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active
Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the
throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.

A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn
away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.

Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and
boxes of ammuni