At Keetmanshoop all the chief military authorities were stationed. It became the headquarters of the Medical Corps, the Ordnance Department, the Engineer and Railway Corps, and the Intelligence Corps of the Southern Command. It was the point of mobilisation for all the troops in that Command. It had a considerable garrison, and it had, also, an arsenal which a correspondent of the _Transvaal Chronicle_, who visited the town about two years before the outbreak of war in 1914 and gathered much information concerning the military preparations which had then already been made,[60] described as four times as large, and, in regard to its contents, four times as important, as the arsenal at Windhoek. Those contents included--47 gun carriages; fourteen 16-pounders; eighteen ambulances; 82 covered convoy vehicles; 3,287 wheels, mostly for trek ox-wagons; three large transportable marquees used as magazines and containing 28,000 military rifles; huge quantities of bandoliers, kits, etc.; three further magazines for ammunition, and large stores of fodder; while further military supplies were constantly arriving by train from Lüderitzbucht, whither they were brought from Germany by German ships. In the arsenal workshops was a staff of men actively engaged on the making of, among other military requirements, 1,000 saddles and water bags for the Camel Corps kept available for crossing the desert between the furthest limit of the railway and the Cape Province border. It was, also, in this south-eastern district, and in immediate proximity, therefore, to Cape Province and Bechuanaland, that the military forces kept in the colony had all their principal manoeuvres. Of still greater importance, from a strategical standpoint, was the branch of this Southern Railway which, starting from Seeheim, forty miles west of Keetmanshoop, continued in a south-easterly direction to Kalkfontein, eighty miles north of Raman's Drift, on the Orange River, and less than ninety miles from Ukamas, where the Germans had established a military post within five miles of Nakob, situate on the Bechuanaland border, only forty miles from Upington, in Cape Province. From Kalkfontein the branch was to be continued another thirty miles to Warmbad, and so on to Raman's Drift--a convenient point for the passage of the Orange River into Cape Province territory by an attacking force. At Seeheim, the junction of this branch line, a Service Corps was stationed; Kalkfontein was the headquarters of the Camel Corps of 500 men and animals; and at Warmbad there was a military post and a military hospital.