Bread and coffee formed our breakfast, and this meagre meal was welcome enough. Our guards themselves had no more, so we could not complain. As the morning wore on, the sun became rather trying, and once again we were accommodated with a tent, wherein we discussed at length the events of yesterday. As this conversation turned inevitably to our own capture, needless to say we gradually began to despond. But we were shortly to have our hearts lightened by the discovery of fellow sufferers—how company in trouble eases one! In marched Firth, McGillivray, Macdonald, Petersen, and Williams, of our own corps, followed by Coghlan, of Sergeant-Major Healy’s regiment. Coghlan had a broken leg, done up in plaster of Paris, and lay on an ambulance pallet. Needless to say, we had much to tell each other, and Saunders and myself then heard how Franks, Case, Daubney, and H.C. Lumsden had been killed, and Lieutenant Crane wounded and a prisoner. It was not until afterwards we heard that Major Showers had been killed and several others wounded on the same day. The frugal fare of the morning was repeated in the afternoon, except in the case of the bread. Of it the Boers had none, but they furnished us with a plentiful supply of a kind of rusk. This appeared to be simply broken bread dried in an oven. It made a very good meal, but tried those of us whose teeth had been somewhat worn down by eating _moorghis_[9] in India. To march forth in the morning with a gun in your hand to fight your country’s battles; to endanger your life that you may return to your female relatives, decorated and a hero; to hear the vicious ping of bullets, the shrieking of shells, and know yourself alarmed but undismayed, are fine things. But to sit at night in the enemy’s laager with wings clipped, no gun, and a sinking stomach is so untoward a thing that a man who suffers it may well question the reason of his birth and entertain hopes that the world is about to end. Six of us sat in the dusky light of a tent in a Boer laager near Brandfort, and our own mothers could not have comforted us. It wasn’t as if we had had a bellyful of fighting, like others who had begun the campaign in Cape Colony, or as if after a tremendous struggle we had been overpowered. Without practically a chance to retaliate, we had been deluged with bullets that went by in such numbers you could hear them rattle against each other in their flight. Then instead of the bullets came the Boers, and we were prisoners—hands up, pockets empty, hopes vanished!—this in our first fight! When night had fallen, the sentries—there were two of them, with loaded rifles and revolvers—passed us in a big kettle in which had been boiled water and, they said, coffee.