The cemetery here is in close proximity to the Boer lines, and lies to the north of the town. It is a small enclosure banked by white rough stones, and set amid green trees, where gentle fragrance imparts a balminess to the breeze. It is as quiet and peaceful, by force of contrast to the dried-up veldt around, as some oasis in the desert. There is a winding path from the hospital to the cemetery; a road which at the present moment is flanked in two places by the forts of the Railway Division, and kept well defined by the footsteps of those who bear their burdens to the tomb. Since the siege began we have lost twenty-five, and with one engagement following rapidly upon another, nightfall usually ushers in a scene in which a small body of men may be seen gathered round an open grave, waiting irresolutely to take some share in the rites of the burial service. We paced slowly and solemnly along this veldt track, depressed not so much by the fate which had befallen them, as by the hideous realism with which the appalling uncertainty of war had been brought home to us. In the darkness of the evening we could see across the veldt the fires of the enemy's position, and as the _cortège_ wound its way from the hospital we marched to the boom of the Boer artillery, while passing bullets sang the notes of our evening hymn above our heads, and dropped about us in the sand. Along the eastern front of the town as it lay behind us, an occasional blaze of light in the sky told us where the shells of the enemy were bursting, and to many came the thought that perhaps even of those who had remained to do their duty in the trenches, there were some who, less fortunate than others, might have already kept their last vigils. In time we reached the grave side, then as we gathered round the open spaces which had been so quickly prepared, those who felt their loss the keenest, those who had been comrades and close friends of the killed, paid their last homage to their memory by placing some little trinket, some slight token of personal friendship and affection, upon the winding sheet. At this juncture, when war is all around us, when every able-bodied man is standing to his arms, it is not possible to provide the dead with anything better than a simple sheet. The men who fall in these days are interred in their blood-stained uniforms, since there be no time in which to dress their bodies. Those upon whom the funeral service was about to be read lay in two waggons, silent shrouded witnesses to the fleeting vanity which attends all heroes. Around the entrance to the cemetery the officers of the staff, the commanding officers of the outposts, representatives of every corps and every troop had foregathered, following closely upon the heels of those who, bearing the grim burdens upon their shoulders epitomised in their action the horrors of war. It seemed as we stood there waiting, listening to the solemn words of the service, punctuated now and then as they were, by the