a group of irregular officers, some of whom ultimately yielded to this
spirit of lawless avenging, but were, in consequence, sternly
court-marshalled, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law. It is,
however, the only case of the kind that has come to my knowledge
during thirty months of provocative strife.

[Sidenote: _Hotel Life on the Trek._]

Close to the railway station at Waterval Onder was a comfortable
little hotel, kept by a French proprietor, whose French cook had
deserted him, and who would not therefore undertake to cater for the
Grenadier officers, though he courteously placed his dining-room at
their disposal, with all that appertained thereto; and sold to them
almost his entire stock of drinkables, probably at fancy prices. The
men of the Norfolk Regiment are to this day called "Holy Boys" because
their forbears in the Peninsular War, so it is said, gave their Bibles
for a glass of wine; but the Norfolks are not the only lovers of
high-class liquor the army contains, though army Bibles will not now
suffice to buy it. British officers on the trek, however, not only
know how to appreciate exquisitely any appropriate home comforts, when
for a brief while procurable, but also how to surrender them
unmurmuringly at a moment's notice when duty so requires. We had been
in possession of our well-appointed hotel table only two days when a
sudden order sent us all trekking once again.

It is worth noting that this French hotelkeeper and the German baron
in the adjoining hospital had both fought, though of course on
opposite sides, in the great Franco-Prussian war of thirty years ago,
and now they found themselves overwhelmed by another great war wave
in one of the remotest and seemingly most inaccessible fastnesses of
South Central Africa. In this new war between Boer and Briton the
German lost a limb, if not his life, and the Frenchman a large part of
his fortune. So intimately are men of all nationalities now bound in
the same bundle of life!

[Sidenote: _A Sheep-pen of a Prison._]

On Monday afternoon we marched to Nooitgedacht, where the prisoners
already referred to had been confined like sheep in a pen for many a
weary week. That pen was made by a double-barbed wire fence; the inner
fence consisting of ten strands of wire, about eight inches apart, and
the outer fence of five strands, with sundry added entanglements; and
a series of powerful electric lights was specially provided to watch
and prote