They were too late, however, to save the train, which was burning fiercely; many wagons of biscuits, beef and other supplies were burned clean out, only the iron frames of the wagons and thousands of blackened and empty tins being left on the line. Some of the wagons, thrown off the line, and tons of empty tins, showed us, as we passed, where the incident had occurred. We reached Ventersburg Road about seven o'clock, and found some troops there under command of Lieut.-Colonel White, R.A.; the permanent garrison was composed of the Malta Company of Mounted Infantry, under Captain Pine-Coffin, who had come out with us on the "Pavonia," and a company of the Buffs Militia, under Captain O'Grady, a cousin of our Major of the same name. We camped outside the station, and bye-and-bye the General arrived, with the Camerons, followed about six o'clock by our Head Quarters and the other half battalion. Ventersburg Road, a little roadside station, boasted only a couple of sheds besides the usual station buildings, water tank and goods shed; everything, however, was strongly entrenched and defended; a huge Supply Depôt had been established, and the boxes and the bags were utilised to form protection for the garrison, an interesting sight being a machine gun mounted on a pyramid of sacks of oats. The Supply subordinates had made themselves comfortable inside houses built of biscuit and beef boxes and roofed with tarpaulins, but the valuable sacks of oats, bags of mealies, sacks of sugar and other stores were pitched about anywhere, and were rotting and mouldering away on all sides; four bags of costly sugar were utilised to form steps up to a water tank, and were, of course, ruined with wet and mud; the enormous goods shed, which would have held the whole stock of the more valuable Supply stores then going to waste in the open, was full of bales of wool belonging to Boer farmers, of which the greatest care was apparently being taken by the railway authorities, while valuable food supplies were being ruined. The responsible man was a Corporal of the Army Service Corps, who was some time afterwards placed under arrest for selling rum and stores to the Boer residents and sympathisers in Ventersburg; they had run out of supplies, and thus replenished their larder. On our next visit, some time later, we brought with us the Brigade Supply officer, Lieut. Lloyd, whose energy was only equalled by his capability; and he very soon had things put shipshape, the wool bales fired out of the shed, and everything done Bristol fashion, as they say at sea. The water supply of Ventersburg Road was its chief drawback: the Boers had damaged the water tank and the pumping engine, and had blown up the windmill pump, throwing it across the platform, where it remained for weeks; the only other source of supply for water was a spruit, about 2 miles away, to which water carts had to be despatched daily, and where all animals had to be taken to water.