So Johannesburg was ours! The advance, which appeared to be so rapid, straightforward, and simple, owed these qualities to Lord Roberts's splendid, almost prophetic, instinct for gauging the enemy's expectations with a view to disappointing them; to his strategic manipulation of his cavalry and mounted infantry, and to the magnificent marching capability of the infantry. Everywhere, the Boers had fenced themselves across the route, sometimes extending their line of defence for twenty miles or more, and everywhere, in dread of having one flank or the other turned, they had been kept oscillating between stubborn resistance and rapid flight till their nerves had given way, and they had scuttled back and back to their undoing. At the Vet, the Zand, the Valsch, the Rhenoster, and the Klip Rivers, they had cunningly prepared themselves, till, with the infantry menacing them in front and the cavalry and infantry threatening both flanks, they had realised that retreat was inevitable. Their last hope had been set on the city of mines; and now from thence, a routed, raging rabble, they were fleeing in despair. The splendid progress of the infantry was a remarkable achievement, of which enough cannot be said. It was no mere feat of pedestrianism. It was a march in face of an enterprising enemy, and harassed with discomforts sufficiently multifarious to try the endurance of a Socrates. A scorching sun by day and a frigid temperature by night, occasional sand blasts rendering drier than ever parched throats already dry as husk from the tramp through a sand-clogged and almost waterless country, were but items in the programme. If water there chanced to be, it was ochreous and fouled by the passage of many quadrupeds, and such food as there was--bully beef and adamantine biscuit--demanded the jaws and digestion of an alligator. Yet these sturdy fellows plodded along, lumbering through sand drifts and squelching in mire and morass, or laid themselves to rest on the hard or soggy ground with a philosophy so devil-may-care as almost to fringe on the sublime. With unquenchable gaiety, they had accomplished a march of 254 miles (the distance from Bloemfontein to Elandsfontein) in eighteen days, giving as an average fourteen miles a day. (This calculation naturally excludes the ten days' halt at Kroonstad.) From Kroonstad to Elandsfontein, a distance of some 126 miles--covered in seven days (22nd to 29th)--marching had gone forward at the rate of eighteen miles a day. Napoleon's much vaunted march from the Channel to the Rhine in 1805 showed an average of sixteen miles a day, when the distance traversed was 400 miles, and the time taken twenty-five days. But that march, unopposed throughout, was comparatively plain sailing. Quicker forced marches have been known,[7] but in the present case the march was continuous, and may be said to beat all records of rapid marching under equally inconvenient conditions. * * * * *