ses or what price they had paid
for their poultry.

It would require a clever cook to provide a man with three savoury and
substantial meals out of a mugful of flour, about a pound of tough
trek ox, and a pinch of tea. Yet occasionally that was all it proved
possible to serve out to the men, and their ingenuity in dealing with
that miserable mugful of flour often made me marvel. They reminded me
not unfrequently of the sons of the prophets, who, in a day of dearth
went out into the fields to gather herbs and found a wild vine, and
gathered thereof wild gourds and shred them into the pot and they
could not eat thereof. Violent attacks of dysentery and kindred
complaints only too plainly proved that occasionally in this case
also, as in that ancient instance, there was apparently ample
justification for the cry, "Oh thou man of God, there is death in the
pot." Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the lynx-eyed vigilance of the
police, the smell from the pot was sometimes astonishingly like unto
the smell of chicken-broth; which clearly shows what good cooking can
accomplish even on the barren veldt.

[Sidenote: _A General's glowing eulogy of the Guards._]

This amazing ability of the Guards to face long marches with short
rations was triumphantly maintained, not for a few months merely but
to the very end of the campaign. In the February of 1901 it fell to
the lot of the Scots Guards, for instance, to accompany General
French's cavalry to the Swaziland border. They took with them no tents
and the least possible amount of impedimenta of any kind. But for
three weeks they had to face almost incessant rain, and as they had no
shelter except a blanket full of holes, they were scarcely ever dry
for half a dozen hours at a time. The streams were so swollen that
they became impassable torrents, and the transport waggons were thus
left far behind, with all food supplies. For eight or ten days at a
stretch men and officers alike had no salt, no sugar, no tea, no
coffee, no jam, no flour, bread or biscuits; no vegetables of any
kind; but only one cupful of mealies or mealie meal per day, and as
much fresh killed meat as their rebellious stomachs could digest
without the aid of salt or mustard. Yet the only deaths were two by
drowning; and at the close of the operations the general addressed
them as follows:--

General French's farewell speech to the 1st Brigade, Scots Guards at
Vryheid, on April 1st, 1901:--

Major Cuthber