told his men that they
were to travel the rest of the way by rail; whereupon they gave a
ringing cheer and started at a prodigious pace to walk down the line
in momentary expectation of meeting the presumably approaching train.
Each man seemed to go like a locomotive with full head of steam on,
and it took me all my time and strength to keep up with them.
Nevertheless that train never met us. It never even started, and at
that puffing perspiring pace the battalion proceeded all the way on
foot. We had indeed come by _rail_, but that we found was quite
another thing from travelling by _train_; and the sequel forcefully
reminded one of the simpleton who was beguiled into riding in a
sedan-chair from which both seat and bottom had been carefully
removed. When the ride was over he is reported to have summed up the
situation by saying he might as well have walked but for "the say so"
of the thing. And but for the say so of the thing that merrily
beguiled battalion might as well have gone by road as by rail.

It was, however, a most wonderful sight that greeted them as they
stumbled through the darkness into the junction. At one end of the
station there was a huge engine-house, surrounded as well as filled,
not only with locomotives but also with gigantic stacks of food
stuffs, now all involved in one vast blaze that had not burned itself
out when the Brigade returned ten days later. There were long trains
of trucks filled with flour, sugar and coffee, over some of which
paraffin had been freely poured and set alight. So here a truck and
there a truck, with one or two untouched trucks between, was burning
furiously. In some cases the mischief had been stopped in mid-career
by friendly Kaffir hands, which had pulled off from this truck and
that a newly-kindled sack, and flung it down between the rails where
it lay making a little bonfire that was all its own. Then too broken
sacks of unburnt flour lay all about the place looking in the
semi-darkness like the Psalmist's "snow in Salmon"; but flour so
flavoured and soaked with paraffin that when that night it was served
out to be cooked as best it could be by the famished men some of them
laughingly asserted it exploded in the process. Oh, was not that a
dainty dish to set before such kings! At the far end of the station
were ten trucks of coal blazing more vigorously than in any grate,
besides yet other trucks filled with government stationery and no one
knows what beside. It