previous battle-fields combined showed no such number of riderless steeds as Modder River. There were literally hundreds of them. I had lost mine in the fight, but in the first half-hour of the next morning I took my choice of four, and might have made my pick from a hundred, saddled and bridled, before I had gone half over the field.

We now know that it was our artillery fire that thinned the ranks and broke the nerve of the enemy. It was a fearful assault produced by an extraordinary discharge of shot and shell.

The four naval guns fired some five hundred and fourteen rounds, the 18th Battery fired eleven hundred rounds, the 75th fired nine hundred rounds, and the 62nd five hundred; or three thousand rounds in all. As to the rifle fire, most of our men took into the fight one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty rounds, and the average fire per rifle by the nine battalions must have been one hundred rounds. The climax of the Boers' desire to vacate the field was reached when a stalwart British cheer broke upon their ears at their side and in their rear.

There should not be any confusion as to what men raised this cheer and were the first to ford the river; but there is. It is due to the fact that men of several ambitious commands composed the first body of ford

ers.

To put history right, the credit of first crossing the

river belongs to a small party of Coldstream Guardsmen who early in the day waded in to their waists, and then swam, laden with all their gear and one hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition. There were between twenty-four and forty men in this body, and though many won across, two were nearly drowned, and all saw that it was wise to return. The river was too deep, and when they reached the further shore they sank in mud to their knees.

This happened on the extreme right of the line, where Lord Methuen made his first gallant attempt to

force a passage.

He tried again on the far left, and it was there that, beyond any doubt or dispute, Colonel Barter, of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, got across by a fairly good fording-place with a score or two dozen men, some of whom were his own, while others were men of the Argyll and Sutherlandshire and the North Lancashire Regiments. They landed against some trenches and an angle of stone wall which were held by some three hundred Boers.

Just as they were crossing a battery of Royal Artillery rolled up in the rear of our men, and, before it had time to unlimber, all the Boers fled, jostling and even knocking each other down in eagerness to mount. In time our force across the river numbered four hundred, and Brigadier-General Pole-Carew took command. Our own shells and our own rifle fire beat upon this

little band, and it halted and cheered to disclose its

nationality.

That is the truth of a heroic movement, of which too many versions have been given.

It is said that the Boers fight in deadly terror of our bayonets, which we had not yet had a chance to use upon them, and this increased their fever for flight. They have also had a wholesome dread of our lyddite shells of which, likewise, we had not yet made any use; but at this battle General Cronje, who watched the whole fight, supposed our naval guns were firing lyddite, and said to his staff, "I've been watching that stuff all day, and I don't think much of it.”

CHAPTER XVIII

FILLING TOMMY'S WATER-BOTTLE

We knew what fighting was, but we also learned a few things about water--we men on Methuen's march. When we were over-civilised, and lived in London, we made poor jokes at the expense of water, saying that it gave laundresses a living, that it was invented to float Noah's "greatest Zoo on earth," and other such puerilities.

We never joke about water now. The first time we really appreciated it we were starting out from Orange River. The previous night had been so cold that I spent it in walking all over several camps, between the prostrate bodies of restless, shivering soldiers. Some made no pretence of sleeping, but divided their time between gathering sticks, and building little fires to huddle round while they lasted.

In time that agony was over; and we were marching, and watching the day break. In breaking it seemed to rend the earth's blanket of atmosphere, and let the sun's heat out upon us as if we were so many thousand stokers in the broiling belly of a ship.

On and on we marched, in heavy sand, or over stones, or stumbling across furrowed ground—all gasping like fishes thrown on a beach.

At first our lips dried and cracked, then our mouths parched, and finally our throats became as if they were coated with plaster of Paris. The hair shrivelled on our hands, and our feet grew dry as devilled bones. Here and there a man fell forward on his hands and knees, or stumbled out of the ranks, and lurched prone on the veldt.

In the course of the march some skimpy, light-green trees broke the line of the horizon ahead, and put new heart in us, for it was to those trees-at a place called "Fincham's "-that we were to march.

Everything has its ending, and at last we came to the first of the three verdant clumps of trees. They were poplars, and at their feet, darkening under their foliage, was a mud-banked pool of dirty water, which tailed off to the northward in a tiny, stagnant-looking brooklet. Men with horses who had been ahead were watering their beasts, and to these our Tommies called, as we halted, "Fill this bottle for me, will ye, mate?" But their officers, riding beside them, and ever apprehensive of dysentery and typhoid, called aloud, "Pass the order that no one is to drink this water. It will only make the men ill."

My horse showed me how the men regarded this order, for all men are but babies of varying growth,