One may gather, from this detailed description, the immense natural difficulties of the country, and how hard it may be to turn an enemy out of such positions. Here the only area of open space—viz. the mealie-field—down which an attacking force might push rapidly forward, was ruthlessly exposed to enemy fire from no less than three sides—from the village, from the low bush north of the road, and from the dark tree-belt south of the road. It meant death to too many to attempt it. The alternative attack was to advance slowly, through the all-screening, hampering bush, upon those concealed entrenchments in the grass; never sure, even when the enemy are located by their fire, of the exact position of the foe; never sure, at any time, what the next twenty yards of jungle hold in store for you. You are blind from the time you enter the rank jungle growth until you reach the enemy’s position, and you are lucky if at the end you have sighted an enemy at all, though you have been blazing away at one another at some fifty yards. And picture the difficulty of keeping in touch with your own people in such jungle, which, the moment you enter it, swallows you up in its depth of undergrowth as if you were a rabbit taking cover in a field of ripe corn. Not only is it difficult—I might say impossible, sometimes—to know where your own people are, who are advancing on the right or left, but also it is difficult to know the movements of the enemy. One moment they may be in front of you; a few moments more, and they may be gone, undetected—all but a few bluffing rifles—to a new position, or may be working round on an open flank. Truly the enemy chooses his positions well, and it is the country, not he, well though he fights, that robs us again and again of decisive battle. Their positions are, with rare exceptions, chosen where they and their movements cannot be seen, and thus their strength, at the many points of battle, may be either a handful of men or a dozen companies. Moreover, under cover of the bush, their lines are flexible to any change, while always, in the rear, they have sure and safe lines of retreat by which they can escape in the bush, in a dozen directions, to meet again at a given point when their flight is over. Moreover, the enemy is always on his own soil, whereas each new battle-front is, in all its details, for us an unmapped riddle of which eye and mind have no clear conception. [Sidenote: BUSH FOILS DECISIVE COMBAT]