the Cape. What will they find their brothers in arms doing these stalwart veterans who look so smart and dandified when we see them in Chelsea, or the barracks near Buckingham Palace? They will find them clothing themselves with dust and mud-nothing more or less.

Men might be seen dissolving mud in their pails, and dipping brushes in it to paint their white straps mud-colour. Every pouch and strap and cloth-covered water-bottle that would show white or dark underwent this treatment. And the drummers did the same with their drums-painting the white tightening cords with mud, muddying over the golden lions and unicorns and the gaudy regimental mottoes, so that everything should look like the veldt-so that we should be as dusty as our surroundings.

When the heroines of the Arabian Nights' tales watched from their palace roofs to see the clouds of dust that announced the coming of their husbands and lovers, they knew that out of those clouds would emerge figures in gaudy silks, or lustrous gold and silver. But here on the veldt, if the hapless heroines in Kimberley and Mafeking were watching for us who were in Lord Methuen's flying force, it would be different. They would

see the dust separate from the moving body beneath it, but what that body was their best glasses could not have told them until it was within a mile or two.

It might be no more than a troop of dustcoloured sheep moving in enormous bands upon the scorched veldt; it might be only a line of dust-hued farm waggons, or, if they were not mistaken, and looked at just the right time, lo! a dust-coated general and his staff, leading a myriad armed men, clothed and stained to match the colour of the ground.

While Tommy was thus wholly dull and dusty in tone, his officers differed from him, wearing shiny buttons, stars, crowns, and sword-hilts, and pipe-clayed belts and straps. In this difference has lain the danger of all in battle in this campaign, and from it has come the death of far too many. All alike recognise this, yet how differently they discuss the proposal that officers should dress like the men.

The Tommies were all in favour of the change, though it would greatly increase their own danger and losses. They were enthusiastic for having the officers doff swords, carry light carbines, and do away with their ornaments. They discussed the

mortality above the ranks with bated breath, as a thing altogether awful; and after one skirmish, where an officer was killed and two were wounded, I did not hear a Tommy speak of the two privates who died at the same time. Among officers the subject was differently treated. Some discussed the prospect of disguising themselves as if it were a thing to be considered only for the sake of deceiving an unfair foe, and gaining a point that way. Others indignantly spurned the idea as undignified and unworthy.

As brave a man as any is Major Rimington, head of the Imperial Corps of Guides.

"You may be sure," he said, "that the Boers will never know which are the officers and which the men in my troop. They'll all seem as like as so many peas.

He might better have said "as so many walnuts," for these guides-scouts in reality—were more like the veldt than are the red ant-hills which dot it all over. They were the most picturesque body in Lord Methuen's advance column-two hundred of them--all rough-riders and all beautifully mounted. Each man was obliged to speak Boer or Kaffir, and many speak both. Every one must be thoroughly well acquainted with some

part of the country around and before us. All carried carbines and pistols, and round each man's dust-brown slouch hat was bound a strip of striped fur, like the racoon skin of the early American trappers and later Texan rangers.

These men had been scouring the country literally for hundreds of square miles day and night while on duty at De Aar. Their pay is 5s. a day. The people of the region called them the "night cats," and their leader called them his "catch-em-alive-os." Two were Americans fresh from the Klondike, and their troop doctor was an American named Lindley, well known all over South Africa. The rest were all Afrikanders of English descent. Many had left the Transvaal and the Free State to side with the British. They liked their hard life, but prayed to be included in the fighting.

In their troop the officers were as dusty as the men, and therefore they best of all typified the dusty army that was to blend itself with the dusty veldt, except when its rifles and guns vomited

the flames of battle.

CHAPTER XIII

BATTLE OF BELMONT

IT

T was on the southern and western sides of the Orange Free State that offensive warfare was begun by the British.

Like a tiger stalking its prey by night, in almost absolute silence, Lord Methuen's splendid flying column of nearly ten thousand men started from Belmont Farm at half-past three on the morning of the 23rd of November. The moonlight fell softened through fleecy clouds, and the battalions, marching in a long, narrow queue, hugged the nearer hills so as to be hidden in their shadow.

The army knew that the Boers held the greater range, which ran north and south to form the easterly wall of the four which enclose a noble but desolate valley.

Like a colossal centipede with twenty thousand legs, the column moved along the shadow of the