It was, however, a most wonderful sight that greeted them as they stumbled through the darkness into the junction. At one end of the station there was a huge engine-house, surrounded as well as filled, not only with locomotives but also with gigantic stacks of food stuffs, now all involved in one vast blaze that had not burned itself out when the Brigade returned ten days later. There were long trains of trucks filled with flour, sugar and coffee, over some of which paraffin had been freely poured and set alight. So here a truck and there a truck, with one or two untouched trucks between, was burning furiously. In some cases the mischief had been stopped in mid-career by friendly Kaffir hands, which had pulled off from this truck and that a newly-kindled sack, and flung it down between the rails where it lay making a little bonfire that was all its own. Then too broken sacks of unburnt flour lay all about the place looking in the semi-darkness like the Psalmist's "snow in Salmon"; but flour so flavoured and soaked with paraffin that when that night it was served out to be cooked as best it could be by the famished men some of them laughingly asserted it exploded in the process. Oh, was not that a dainty dish to set before such kings! At the far end of the station were ten trucks of coal blazing more vigorously than in any grate, besides yet other trucks filled with government stationery and no one knows what beside. It was an awe-inspiring sight and pitiful in the extreme. [Sidenote: _A welcome lift by the way._] Though too late to save all the treasure stored at this junction, we nevertheless secured an invaluable supply of rolling stock and of certain kinds of provender, so that for a few days we lacked little that was essential except biscuits for the men and forage for the mules. But to prevent if possible further down the line another such holocaust as took place here, our men started at break of day on a forced march towards Koomati Poort. The line we learned was in fair working order for the next fifteen miles, and for that distance the heavy baggage with men in charge of the same was sent by train. I did not confess to being baggage nor was I in charge thereof, but none the less when my ever courteous and thoughtful colonel urged me to accompany the baggage for those few miles I looked upon his advice in the light of a command, and so accepted my almost only lift of any sort in the long march from the Orange River to Koomati Poort. The full day's march for the men was twenty-five miles through a region that at that season of the year had already become a kind of burning fiery furnace; and the abridging of it for me by at least a half was all the more readily agreed to because my solitary pair of boots was unfortunately in a double sense on its last legs. A merciful man is merciful to his boots, especially when they happen to be his only pair. [Sidenote: "_Rags and tatters get ye gone._"]