it runs through Dutch country, and the black man was there to watch it.

War--and war sure enough it was. A telegram at a tea-bar, a whisper, a
gathering rush, an electric vibration--and all the station and all the
train and the very niggers on the dunghill outside knew it. War--war at
last! Everybody had predicted it--and now everybody gasped with
amazement. One man broke off in a joke about killing Dutchmen, and could
only say, "My God--my God--my God!"

I too was lost, and lost I remain. Where was I to go? What was I to do?
My small experience has been confined to wars you could put your fingers
on: for this war I have been looking long enough, and have not found it.
I have been accustomed to wars with headquarters, at any rate to wars
with a main body and a concerted plan: but this war in Cape Colony has
neither.

It could not have either. If you look at the map you will see that the
Transvaal and Orange Free State are all but lapped in the red of
British territory. That would be to our advantage were our fighting
force superior or equal or even not much inferior to that of the enemy.
In a general way it is an advantage to have your frontier in the form of
a re-entrant angle; for then you can strike on your enemy's flank and
threaten his communications. That advantage the Boers possess against
Natal, and that is why Sir George White has abandoned Laing's Nek and
Newcastle, and holds the line of the Biggarsberg: even so the Boers
might conceivably get between him and his base. The same advantage we
should possess on this western side of the theatre of war, except that
we are so heavily outnumbered, and have adopted no heroic plan of
abandoning the indefensible. We have an irregular force of mounted
infantry at Mafeking, the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment at Kimberley,