Tommy at the front was externally scarcely the Tommy of our acquaintance. His bright spick and span exterior was gone. Kharki had sobered him and planed down his individuality. His uniform no longer sat without a crease. It was washed and worn and shrunken from hard and honourable usage, and his carriage was no longer the carriage of Tommy on parade. He seemed to have taken a leaf out of Jack's book, and the slight slouch became him well. It gave him the air of a workman and an individual, and seemed to point to the fact that there was no longer occasion for him to be judged by appearances. We knew the inner man now. He did his duty grandly, and his splendid courage and perseverance had made him independent of the pomp and panoply of war. In the matter of "grit" they were all alike. But in externals they had curious differences, their characteristics varying considerably according to the regiment to which they belonged. Some were dapper still--the newly arrived ones--with hair clipped to an eighth of an inch for head and half an inch for moustache; others had succumbed to circumstances, and had grown beards of odd sizes and shapes and colours (scumbled in all cases with dust), while the youngsters displayed an unhappy medium, styled by an officer "pieces of unexpected wool," on promiscuous parts of their faces! Still, when all was said, joviality and "grit" put an identical veneer on them all! The officers too were transmogrified. They were dressed exactly like the men. Tan brown belts, swords, and revolvers were no longer in evidence. When going off to war, or any other duty at all under arms, each officer arrayed himself in his servant's belt and equipment--stained with clay paste to the prevalent dust or kharki colour--and took with him his servant's rifle and one hundred rounds of ammunition. There was a difference without a distinction. The officer carried a field-glass, and this when not in use was concealed in a coat-pocket. Every precaution was now adopted to prevent them from inviting an undue share of attention. The mounted officers had carbines--neat, handy weapons, which slipped into a leather carbine bucket in the saddle, on the other side of which went the very necessary wire-cutters. Barbed wire entanglements were so much a part of the Boer programme--"to cheer you up in crossing the drifts," some one said--that the cutters became an essential part of warlike gear. A strange innovation this; very small but very full of meaning. The Boers were teaching us a great deal. We were beginning to understand, almost to admire, their curious modes of warfare--their strange ability to "sit tight," wire themselves in, and yet to fly away! Years ago, when some tactician ventured to say that the war of the future embraced only the question of long-range rifles and wire-entangled trenches, we were inclined to pooh-pooh! Now we were beginning to see wisdom in this stubborn and persistent, and yet