Noble as amazing was the hurried response of the Volunteers to the intimation that their services would be accepted for the war. Hastily they pressed forward in crowds to enrol themselves. Their promptitude was goodly to look upon and to read of, for it showed that, in spite of the theories of Tolstoi and the influence of the spirit of modernity, patriotism is inherent and not a mere exotic or cultivated sentiment in the British race. We now found that though many traditions may be worn to rags, those of the British army had grown, like old tapestry, the more precious for the passage of time. Still the military position was pregnant with anxieties. A horse that is left at the post may perhaps win in the end, but his chances of success are remote. An army that lands in driblets three months after time is scarcely calculated to succeed against a rival army which has spent that interval in equipping itself for the fray. We were forced to remember that at the onset our officers were placed in the most dangerous positions, with inadequate support and no prospect of reinforcement, until their energies, mental and physical, had been sapped by undue and prolonged strain. On the north Tuli had but a handful of troops to resist an enormous and powerful enemy; Mafeking was surrounded, isolated, and able only to resist to the death the persistent attacks of shot and shell; Vryburg was allowed to be treacherously given away to the enemy; and Kimberley was left in the lurch as it were, to fight or fall according to the pluck of those who were ready to exhaust their vitality in loyalty to the Queen. On the Natal side things were still worse. The country, every inch of which is familiar to the Boer, had almost invited invasion. The whole strength of Boers and Free Staters was permitted to launch itself against an army which was entirely without reserves, and which could not be reinforced under a month. That brave and unfortunate soldier, Sir George Colley, had a theory that small, well-organised troops were worth as much again as large and desultory ones; but he took no account of peculiar facilities which are almost inherent to armies fighting on their own soil, as it were, and habits of warfare which have, so to speak, become ancestral with the Boer. From old time the Dutchman has employed his mountain fastnesses, his boulders, and his tambookie grass as screens and shelters, till in war the "tricks of the trade" have become a second nature to him, and serve in place of more complicated European methods. The small Natal army was, on Sir George Colley's principle, allowed to pit itself against a fighting mass, dense and desultory it may be, but a fighting mass of enormous dimensions, which, whatever their failings, had weight, equipment, courage, obstinacy, and intimacy with their surroundings entirely in their favour. That the enemy was first in the field they had to thank the original promoters of war, the Peace party--the