Where they found the sheep at pasture there sprang up a canvas camp, three or four large store tents such as circus side-shows use in England, and a number of large wooden buildings framed with corrugated iron, and filled with food for men and horses, ammunition, and the essentials of warfare and soldier existence. Planted on the pasture, too, was a great kraal full of new transport waggons, carts, and carriages-by the hundred.

A week after the engineers began work Captain Mackenzie, of the Royal Artillery, who had been in the Free State buying horses, had orders to set up a remount office at this place for the purchase of horses and mules, and to establish a kraal for the animals. He bought, or leased, a piece of ground to accommodate a hundred beasts. Ever since then he had been leasing more and more land, until his camp kraals extended for at least a mile.

An outer kraal had been established in the near distance, and he had already a thousand or more mules, and hundreds of horses, while strings of valuable beasts were coming in every day. Next to his Remount Camp was the Army Service Camp, and next to that the Medical Camp, with its Red Cross flag flapping from a pole. On the other side of the railway were the quarters of the

Royal Engineers, the Artillery, and the Yorkshire Regiment. Far off, behind everything else, stretched the largest of these canvas villages-the Kaffir camp, where live the Kaffirs, Cape boys, and Basutos who are clothed, fed, housed, and paid so highly for their work as mule drivers and transport men.

Scattered about in and between these camps were new iron-sheathed storehouses, and the bowery enclosure which holds the cottage chosen for the British General's headquarters. This juts out into the desert tract, a refreshing green oasis, whose air is cooled by the shade of many trees, and scented by the perfume of honeysuckle.

The rapid and masterly construction of storesheds was a source of constant interest and wonder to us civilians. On one morning we saw men laying a lot of floor timbers on the ground. By nightfall the framework of a building had sprung up around the beams, and in twenty-four hours men were sheathing the framework with iron, while others were building inner walls, with counters, lockers, and shelves complete. In this way, as by magic, we came upon a soldiers' canteen or a fifty feet storehouse, across a path over which we had walked to the village on the previous day.

Most men know the extreme importance of the Army Service Corps in modern military affairs. In the Omdurman campaign, for instance, Lord Kitchener's genius was shown in the use he made of this body, and of the Engineers and Ordnance Corps. He was thus enabled to carry an army perpetually equipped, and wanting nothing, straight to the battlefield, where the combatant force did its decisive work in a day.

Everything seemed to promise that the work in this Boer campaign would be the same, as one began to realise what a perfectly complete organisation is this Army Service Corps, in which every private has a trade and is skilled at it. Here were carpenters, builders, railway clerks, smiths, wheelwrights, harness makers, joiners—every sort of mechanic and workman. They were up at bugle call at daybreak, and worked like beavers until six o'clock in the evening. They could make you a waggon, or a saddle, or a cabinet; I almost think they could mend a watch, or build a bicycle.

They are trained to run a railway after the engineers have built it, and we had the Ordnance Corps here to supply clothing and arms, the medical men for doctors, the engineers for sanitation, and all of them together as warriors. In a

word, De Aar was a complete city except for jewellers, milliners, and dressmakers, and if it was to be permanent we had the means to turn its canvas tents into stone houses, and its desert trails into paved streets.

All this was the civil aspect of the camp as a base of supplies. But the military who ruled and guarded it were quite as active. They had dotted the hills with breastworks, thrown up redoubts of earth or stone or provender boxes on the plain, and spent their own busy days in drilling, gun firing, and hill climbing, while our corps of scouts had been ranging all over the adjacent country.

Meantime our natives had been invaluable. They had fed and groomed the horses, and trained the mules in ten-span teams to drag the heavy transport waggons up and down the roads in clouds of dust from morning until night. Capetown at night is a most exciting city. De Aar by day and night was almost as exciting, and a thousand times more novel.

CHAPTER IX

THE SITUATION AT DE AAR

ERY striking was the extreme youth of De

VERY

Aar, this important point in the military programme of the war, and its amazing growth. What was desert ground, harbouring a few sheep, less than five weeks before, rapidly became the seat of five camps surrounding half a million pounds' worth of stores. How it would spread, how it would look, what would be its insurable value, inside of three weeks, when tens of thousands of troops were there, the mind hesitated to picture, or even to surmise.

At first it was quite common to hear casual remarks by officers to the effect that artillery were needed here, and that perfect protection required mounted infantry. Such comments were so often made that, as soon as the value of the stores was estimated at half a million pounds I took the