We went on into the captured laager. It was an extraordinary, interesting, and loathsome sight. Dead bodies of horses and men lay in all directions in various stages of decomposition, and the reeking smell was something quite indescribable. I fancied, even after leaving the place, that I carried the smell about with me, and that it had got into my clothes. The steep river banks were honeycombed with little holes and tunnels, and deep, narrow pits, like graves; narrow at the top, and hollowed out below to allow less entrance for shells. Evidently each man had cut his own little den. Some were done carelessly, mere pits scooped out. Others were deep, with blankets or old shawls spread at the bottom, and poles with screens of branches laid across the top to keep off the sun. I saw one or two which were quite works of art; very narrow tunnels cut into the side of the river-cliff, and turning round after you entered, making a quite secure retreat, unless perhaps an extra heavy old lyditte might happen to burst the whole bank up. This actually happened, they told us, with the very last shot fired the night before; a bit of the bank having been blown up with eight men in it, of whom five were killed and three wounded. The whole river channel looks as if a big colony of otters or beavers had settled here, honeycombing the bank with their burrows, and padding the earth bare and hard with their feet. It was all worn like a highroad. On the other side, the waggons were a sight; shattered, and torn, and wrecked with shot; many of them burnt; several, huge as they are, flung upside down by the force of a shell bursting beneath them. All their contents were littered and strewn about in every direction; blankets, clothes, carpenters' and blacksmiths' tools, cooking utensils, furniture. You would have thought the Boers were settlers moving to a new country with all their effects, instead of an army on the march. This is how they do things, however, in the homely, ponderous fashion. They often take their women and children with them. There were many in the crowd we captured. I wandered about alone a long time, looking at the dismal, curious scene where so much had been endured. White flags, tied to poles or stripped branches, fluttered from waggon tops. Our ambulance carts came along, and the Tommies, stripping to the waist, proceeded to carry, one by one, the Dutch wounded through the ford on stretchers. We are bivouacked ourselves far up the river, in a secluded nook among mimosas and kopjes with the thick current of the lately unknown, but now too celebrated, Modder rolling in front of us. The weather has changed of late. It is now autumn. We have occasional heavy rains, and you wake up at night sometimes to find yourself adrift in a pool of water. It gets chilly too.