"Straight down the crooked lane And right round the square," where the most toothsome little porkers cried "Come eat me if you please." That, to the famine-haunted imagination of the troops, was precisely what many a well-fed porker on the veldt seemed to say, but as a rule say in vain. After thousands of troops had gone by, I have with my own eyes seen that lucky porker still there, with ducks of unruffled plumage still floating on the farmhouse pond, and fat poultry quite unconscious how perilous an hour they had just passed. Yet the owner of the aforesaid pig and poultry was out on commando, his mauser charged with a messenger of death, which any moment might wing its way to any one of us. No wonder if the famished soldiers could not quite see the equity of the arrangement which left him at liberty to hunt for their lives but would not allow them to lay a finger on one of his barndoor fowls. It would be absurd to suppose that, in the face of such pressure, the vigilance of the police was never eluded; and our mounted scouts were always well away from police control. As the result their saddles became sometimes like an inverted hen-roost; heads down instead of up; but they were seldom asked in what market they had made their purchases or what price they had paid for their poultry. It would require a clever cook to provide a man with three savoury and substantial meals out of a mugful of flour, about a pound of tough trek ox, and a pinch of tea. Yet occasionally that was all it proved possible to serve out to the men, and their ingenuity in dealing with that miserable mugful of flour often made me marvel. They reminded me not unfrequently of the sons of the prophets, who, in a day of dearth went out into the fields to gather herbs and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds and shred them into the pot and they could not eat thereof. Violent attacks of dysentery and kindred complaints only too plainly proved that occasionally in this case also, as in that ancient instance, there was apparently ample justification for the cry, "Oh thou man of God, there is death in the pot." Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the lynx-eyed vigilance of the police, the smell from the pot was sometimes astonishingly like unto the smell of chicken-broth; which clearly shows what good cooking can accomplish even on the barren veldt. [Sidenote: _A General's glowing eulogy of the Guards._]