When, on the 3rd of May, we started from Karee Camp the Guards' Brigade consisted, as from the outset, of the 1st and 2nd Coldstream battalions, the 3rd Grenadier Guards, and the 1st Scots Guards, all under the command of General Inigo Jones, from whom I received unfailing courtesy. With them was linked General Stephenson's Brigade, consisting of the Welsh, the Warwicks, the Essex, and the Yorks, these two Brigades forming the Eleventh Division under General Pole Carew. On our left was General Hutton with a strange medley of mounted infantry to which almost every part of the empire had contributed some of its noblest sons. On our right was General Tucker's Division, the Seventh; and beyond that again other Divisions, covering a front of about forty miles, which gradually narrowed down to twenty as we neared Kroonstad. Reserves were left at Bloemfontein under General Kelly Kenny; and Lord Methuen was on our remote left flank not far from Mafeking; while on our remote right was Rundle's Division, the Eighth. There thus set out for the conquest of the Transvaal a central force nearly 50,000 strong--the finest army by far that England had ever yet put into the field, and led by the ablest general she has produced since Wellington. Yet it perhaps would be more correct to speak of it as the first army _Greater_ Britain had ever fashioned; and in my presence Lord Roberts openly gloried in being the first general the empire had entrusted with the command of a really Imperial host. In this epoch-making conflict neither the commander nor the commanded had any cause to be ashamed one of the other. Yet from this point onward there was astonishingly little fighting. Before the campaign was over some of the guardsmen wore out several pairs of boots, but scarcely fired another bullet. The Boers were so out-manoeuvred that their mausers and machine-guns availed them little. They fought scarcely any but rear-guard actions, and their retreat was so rapid as to be almost a rout. Within about a month of leaving Bloemfontein the Guards' Brigade was in Pretoria; which, considering all they had to carry, and the constant repairing of the railway line required from day to day, would be considered good marching even if there had been no pom-poms planted to oppose progress. [Sidenote: _Brandfort._]