ediately followed that on which I travelled was thus thrown off the
rails near Pan, and about twenty of the Coldstream Guards, by whose
side I had tramped for so many months, were killed or severely
injured. The provision trains on which not the soldiers only, but the
Boers' own wives and children, depended for daily food, were wrecked,
looted or set on fire. Finally, they took to dynamiting ordinary
passenger trains, and robbed of their personal belongings helpless
women, including nursing sisters.

In Pretoria, I had the privilege of conversing with a cultured and
godly lady who told me that she had been twice wrecked on her one
journey up from the coast, and that the wrecking was as usual of a
fatal type though fortunately not for her. Like one of the ironies of
fate seemed the fact, of which she further informed me, that she had
brought with her from England some hundreds of pounds' worth of bodily
comforts, and yet more abounding spiritual consolations for free
distribution among the wives and children of the very men who thus in
one single journey had twice placed her life in deadly peril.

Among the Bush Veldt Carabineers at Pietersburg I found an
engine-driver who in the course of a few months had thus been shot at
and shattered by Boer drivers till he grew so sick of it that he threw
up a situation worth L30 a month and joined the Fighting Scouts by way
of finding some less perilous vocation. On the Sunday I spent there I
worshipped with the Gordons who had survived the siege of Ladysmith;
the day following as I returned to Pretoria, the train I travelled by
was thrice ineffectually sniped; but soon after the turn of these same
Gordons came to escort a train on that same line when nearly every man
among them was killed or wounded, including their officer, and a
sergeant with whom during that visit I had bowed in private prayer;
but the driver, stoker and guard were deliberately led aside and shot
after capture in cold blood. So my friend in the Carabineers had not
long to wait for the justifying of his strange choice. Not until
Norman William had planted stout Norman castles at every commanding
point could he complete the conquest of our Motherland; and not until
sturdy little block-houses sprang up thick and fast beside 5000 miles
of rail and road was travelling in the Transvaal robbed of its worst
peril, and the subjugation of the country made complete.

The worst of all our railway smashes, however, occurr