The 10th, after the deluge of the 9th, was sunny and intensely hot. The earlier hours of the day the men spent in drying their dripping belongings, while the hundreds of transport waggons were packed with twenty days' stores and provisions for the whole force. As the afternoon drew on and the heat of the sun abated, the march to the west began. Battalion followed battalion, brigade followed brigade, and last of all came interminable strings of ox-waggons, carts, ambulances, cannon, and all the vast paraphernalia of an army in motion. The men turned their backs upon Colenso and the scene of the defeat of December 15; they strode blithely along towards the Upper Tugela--into a land new to most, a land of promise and hope. Nor could they know that they were facing disaster upon disaster, defeat piled upon defeat, or that after a month of march, and battle, and toil they were doomed to return empty-handed and rebuffed. No such thoughts troubled the hearts of the men; for them it was enough that the hour of action had come, and that vengeance was at last to be taken for Colenso and the dismal past. [Illustration: AMMUNITION CARTS AT A DRIFT: MULES OBJECTING TO CROSS.] [Sidenote: Hampered by baggage.] The march of the column was vexatiously slow. The exceeding badness of the tracks--for to call them roads is impossible--the quantity of water in the spruits and rivulets, and the enormous amount of baggage caused continual halts in the centre and rear of the column. A hundred years ago Napoleon wrote that no army carries with it so much baggage as the British, and his criticism was justified. In the interval we have not improved. Says Mr. Churchill: "The vast amount of baggage this army takes with it on the march hampers its movements and utterly precludes all possibility of surprising the enemy. I have never before seen even officers accommodated with tents on service, though both the Indian frontier and the Sudan lie under a hotter than the South African sun. But here to-day, within striking distance of a mobile enemy whom we wished to circumvent, every private soldier has canvas shelter, and the other arrangements are on an equally elaborate scale. The consequence is that the roads are crowded, drifts are blocked, marching troops are delayed, and all rapidity of movement is out of the question. Meanwhile the enemy completes the fortification of his positions and the cost of capturing them rises. It is poor economy to let a soldier live well for three days at the price of killing him on the fourth." The Boer somehow managed to do without these elaborate arrangements. He found it possible to subsist without being constantly accompanied by a supply train; he carried a sufficiency of food with him, and slept in the open, or in some rough improvised shelter behind a heap of stones. With his strip of dried beef, bag of biscuits, 200 rounds of ammunition, and his rifle, he could cover in one day the distance which the British