What a ghastly night it was! They passed us in a small kettleful of coffee that ran to about half a mug per man. We were dreadfully thirsty, but the only water was a single water-bottleful between the crowd of us—they said there was no more available. For solids we had the remains of the rusks. On this slender nourishment we had to recoup our jaded bodies and revive our flagging spirits. Needless to say, in the morning we looked and felt but sorry representatives of Queen and country. At daylight we were cleared out of that room, the taste of which will remain with me until the day I die. The effect on us of the cold clean air outside was indescribable. We blew ourselves out with it like pouter pigeons, and nearly dropped down from shock to the system. We breathed the good air till we forgot to be hungry, thirsty, or even ashamed of our lamentable plight. The surging of it through our corrupted lungs was better than—but that would be departing from the plain unvarnished style with which the soldier man is allowed to embellish his narrative in lieu of literary grace. We were popped into a waiting train the carriages of which for narrowness and hardness were like coffins without the compensating immunity from pain and trouble so characteristic of the ordinary coffin. That we might fit in easily they gave us nothing to eat or drink, and when the train started we rattled about our compartment like dried peas in a drum. To see us off the station was crowded with all sorts and conditions of the human race. It was astonishing to realise that the throat of man was so constituted that it could be used to emit sounds which were nothing like anything we had ever heard before. I heard a hundred High Court chaprassies hold the concert in which their champion sang a solo in so raucous a voice that it caused the great crack which now ornaments the Calcutta High Court building. But it was nothing to Smaldeel station! Take a Boer who has lived on the high veldt of the Transvaal with his next-door neighbour four miles off, and bring him into a space where his conversation has to carry for feet instead of miles, and you are overwhelmed by his voice.