ce or to headquarter
staffs. The latter order immediate reinforcement at Modder
River, and Price has decided to send me up with more men to
proceed to Paardeberg, or wherever the troops are, to get
things straight."

[Footnote 2: St. Martins le Grand, vol. x., page 201.]

The preliminary arrangements necessitated by the vast area of the
operations provided for two base offices, the one in Cape Colony and
the other in Natal, and 43 field post offices, and by June, 1900, the
Army Postal Corps was composed of ten officers and 400 N.C.O.'s and
men, exclusive of post office telegraphists, etc., serving with the
Royal Engineers. Many interesting statistics of the mails at different
periods of the war have been given in various records, but it
will suffice to quote some general ones on the authority of the
Postmaster-General. His forty-sixth report, 1900, states:

During eight months of the Crimean War, 362,000 letters were
sent out, and 345,000 were sent home. During a similar period
of the war in South Africa 5,629,938 letters were sent out,
and 2,731,559 were sent home.

The work of the corps was not undisturbed by the depredations of the
enemy, and not infrequently the members of the corps had to defend the
mails in their charge along with the guards provided by the military.
On June 7, 1900, General De Wet, who has lately extinguished the
admiration in which Britons held him for his brilliant and elusive
tactics, by his treachery in the present war, swooped down with 1200
men and 5 guns on Roodewal Station where Lieutenant Preece had 2000
bags, a several weeks' accumulation of mails for Lord Roberts' main
army. There were 17 men of the Army Postal Corps, and these, with
about 160 men in charge of supplies, etc., had to defend the station.
Two of the seventeen were killed, and Lieutenant Preece and the
remainder of his gallant little corps were taken prisoners. The 2000
mail bags were used as a barricade. It is recorded that when the
gallant little band surrendered, and De Wet, riding an English cavalry
horse, came up, the Boer general was most polite and even kind in many
ways, and expressed himself as "very sorry to do it," when asked not
to destroy the letters and registered parcels. He said if he did not
do so, his young Boers would open and read them and turn the letters
of the soldiers into ridicule. The bags were opened, the contents
strewed about, and the Boers possessed themsel