them with the names of Cecil Rhodes and Mistah Chamberlain, which may or
may not appear complimentary to the owners of those titles--anyway, the
mules did not seem to be offended. One thing was made manifest to me then,
and confirmed later on, viz., the nigger is a game fellow; give him a
little excitement, and he is full of "devil"--it's the doing of deeds in
cold blood that finds him out. After seeing the way the transport was
handled, I moved along to look at the ambulance arrangements, and found
them practically perfect. The medical staff was cool and collected, the
helpers were alert and attentive to business; the waggons, with their
conspicuous red crosses, were all well and carefully placed--though in such
a fight it was a sheer impossibility to dispose them so as to render them
absolutely immune from danger, for shells have a knack of falling where
least expected, and when they burst he is a wise man who falls flat on his
face and leaves the rest to his Creator and the fortune of war. My next
move was to secure a position on the top of a kopje, to try to gather some
idea concerning the actual strength of the Boer position. It needed no
soldier's training to tell a man who knew the rugged Australian ranges
thoroughly that the enemy had chosen his ground with consummate skill. To
get at the Boers our men had either to go down the sides of the kopjes in
full view of the clever enemy, or else make their way between narrow
gullies, where shells would work havoc in their packed ranks. After they
had reached the open, level ground, they had to cross open spaces of veldt
commanded by the Boer guns and rifles, whilst the Boers themselves sat
tight in a row of ranges that ran from east to west, mile after mile, in
almost unbroken ruggedness. If we turned either flank, they could promptly
fall back upon another line of kopjes as strong as those they held. Away
behind their position the grim heights of Thaba Nchu rose towards the blue
sky, solemn and stately. Far away to the eastward, a little south of east
perhaps, I could see the hills that hid Wepener, distant about eighteen
miles from the Boer centre. There we knew, and the enemy knew, that the