in it ripening and grapes already ripe.

One of the little pictures I shall remember belonging to Modder camp is
the sight of the soldiers at early mass. You can picture to yourself a
wide, flat dusty plain held in the bent arm of the river, with not a
tree or bush on it; flat as a table, ankle-deep in grey dust, and with a
glaring, blazing sun looking down on it. The dust is so hot and deep
that it reminds one more of the ashes on the top of Vesuvius--you
remember that night climb of ours?--than of anything else.

Laid out in very formal and precise squares are the camps of the various
brigades, the sharp-pointed tents ranged in exact order and looking from
far off like symmetrical little flower-beds pricked out on the sombre
plain.

A stone's throw from the river is a mud wall, with a mud house at one
side scarcely rising above it, yet house and wall giving in the early
morning a patch of black shadow in the midst of the glare. Here the old
priest used to celebrate his mass. A hundred or two of Tommies and a few
officers would congregate here soon after sunrise, and stand bare-headed
till the beams looked over the wall, when helmet after helmet would go
on; or kneel together in the dust while the priest lifted the host.
Every man had his arms, the short bayonet bobbing on the hip; every
brown and grimy hand grasped a rifle; and as the figures sink low at the
ringing of the bell, a bristle of barrels stands above the bowed heads.
Distant horse hoofs drum the plain as an orderly gallops from one part
of the camp to another. Right facing us stands Magersfontein, its ugly
nose with the big gun at the end of it thrust out towards us. How many
of this little brotherhood under the mud wall, idly I wonder, will ever
see English meadows again?