A few regulars--sunburnt men, who had fought their way in with Buller--sauntered up to the trucks, and began a conversation with the reinforcement. I caught a fragment: ’Cattle trucks, are they? Well, they didn’t give us no blooming cattle trucks. No, no! We came into Ladysmith in a first-class doubly extry Pullman car. ’Oo sent ’em? Why, President ---- Kruger, of course,’ whereat there was much laughter. I must explain that the epithet which the average soldier uses so often as to make it perfectly meaningless, and which we conveniently express by a ----, is always placed immediately before the noun it is intended to qualify. For instance, no soldier would under any circumstances say ’---- Mr. Kruger has pursued a ---- reactionary policy,’ but ’Mr. ---- Kruger has pursued a reactionary ---- policy.’ Having once voyaged for five days down the Nile in a sailing boat with a company of Grenadiers, I have had the best opportunities for being acquainted with these idiomatic constructions, and I insert this little note in case it may be useful to some of our national poets and minstrels. The train started across the well-known ground, and how fast and easily it ran. Already we were bounding through the scrub in which a month before Dundonald’s leading squadrons, galloping in with beating hearts, had met the hungry picket line. Intombi Spruit hospital camp was reached in a quarter of an hour. Hospital camp no longer, thank goodness! Since the bridge had been repaired the trains had been busy, and two days before I left the town the last of the 2,500 sick had been moved down to the great hospital and convalescent camps at Mooi River and Highlands, or on to the ships in the Durban Harbour. Nothing remained behind but 100 tents and marquees, a stack of iron cots, the cook houses, the drinking-water tanks, and 600 graves. Ghastly Intombi had faded into the past, as a nightmare flies at the dawn of day. We sped swiftly across the plain of Pieters, and I remembered how I had toiled across it, some five months before, a miserable captive, casting longing eyes at the Ladysmith balloon, and vigilantly guarded by the Boer mounted escort. Then the train ran into the deep ravine between Barton’s Hill and Railway Hill, the ravine the Cavalry had ’fanned’ on the day of the battle, and, increasing its pace as we descended towards the Tugela, carried us along the whole front of the Boer position. Signs of the fighting appeared on every side. Biscuit tins flashed brightly on the hill-side like heliographs. In places the slopes were honey-combed with little stone walls and traverses, masking the sheltering refuges of the Infantry battalions during the week they had lain in the sun-blaze exposed to the cross-fire of gun and rifle. White wooden crosses gleamed here and there among the thorn bushes. The dark lines of the Boer trenches crowned the hills. The train swept by--and that was all.