e do! A little reproachfully, perhaps; for it is dull
work fighting week after week without alcohol or green vegetables.

Well, it looks as if their trials were very nearly over. Sir Charles
Warren's Division marches to Frere to-day. All the hospitals have been
cleared ready for those who may need them. If all's well we shall have
removed the grounds of reproach by this day week. The long interval
between the acts has come to an end. The warning bell has rung. Take
your seats, ladies and gentlemen. The curtain is about to rise.

'High time, too,' say the impatient audience, and with this I must
agree; for, looking from my tent as I write, I can see the smoke-puff
bulging on Bulwana Hill as 'Long Tom' toils through his seventy-second
day of bombardment, and the white wisp seems to beckon the relieving
army onward.

CHAPTER XV

THE DASH FOR POTGIETER'S FERRY

Spearman's Hill: January 13, 1900.

Secrets usually leak out in a camp, no matter how many people are
employed to keep them. For two days before January 10 rumours of an
impending move circulated freely. There are, moreover, certain signs by
which anyone who is acquainted with the under machinery of an army can
tell when operations are imminent. On the 6th we heard that orders had
been given to clear the Pietermaritzburg hospitals of all patients,
evidently because new inmates were expected. On the 7th it was reported
that the hospitals were all clear. On the 8th an ambulance train emptied
the field hospitals at Frere, and that same evening there arrived seven
hundred civilian stretcher-bearers--brave men who had volunteered to
carry wounded under fire, and whom the army somewhat ungratefully
nicknames the 'Body-snatchers.' Nor were these grim preparations the
only indications of approaching activity. The commissariat told tales of
accumulations of supplies--twenty-one days' packed in waggons--of the
collection of transport oxen and other details, meaningless by
themselves, but full of significance when viewed side by side with other
circumstances. Accordingly I was scarcely surprised when, chancing to
ride from Chieveley to Frere on the afternoon of the 10th, I discovered
the whole of Sir Charles Warren's division added to the already
extensive camp.

This was the first move of the complicated operations by which Sir
Redvers Buller designed to seize the passage of the Tugela at
Potgieter's Ferry: Warren (seven battalions, comprising Coke's and
Woodg