Our rustic repast over, the Kaffirs began to collect the mules. This they did not by running round them, but by sitting still and emitting sounds into the tenor of which God forbid that any civilised human being should inquire. Sufficient to say that they were weird enough to ‘kid’ the mules into leaving their feed and travelling half a mile to the waggon, there to be yoked again in slavery. Thereafter our journey was uneventful until we struck the railway, where we fondly hoped to find a train. But the advance of the British from Bloemfontein had begun, and the Boers, to prevent a sudden descent on the railway within their own lines, had taken the precaution of blowing up every bridge and culvert for many miles inside their own outposts. So we had to traverse six more weary miles, witnessing for diversion the destruction that dynamite can bring upon the handiwork of man. Great iron bridges broken and tossed aside, huge embankments shattered, railway stations annihilated. Cruel signs, but the inevitable consequences of war. At dark we reached Smaldeel, a little station sixty miles north of Bloemfontein, and at that time the southernmost depôt of the Boer forces on the railway. Three days later the British were in possession of Smaldeel and fired on the last Boer train steaming out of the station. But knowing that afterwards did not comfort us a bit when they locked us up that night. Smaldeel is not an attractive place. We were dumped down in the most unattractive part of it! Imagine a four-roomed house built of wood and corrugated iron, one window per room and each one of them nailed down, as it had been for a long time. Imagine in one of these rooms Boer lumber—old clothes, empties, forgotten bedding; remember the boarded window, call for a glass of brandy, and think with sympathy of us poor sinners condemned to such a place for a livelong night.