Little they knew what was in the mind of the great general! But late at
night the summons came, and within two hours the whole brigade of
Guards, suddenly roused out of sleep and called in from outpost duty,
were marching out into the darkness. Whither they did not know. They
took with them neither blanket nor overcoat, but, as their chaplain
says, 'only an ample store of pluck and smokeless powder.' They did not
stop till they had covered about twenty miles, and before their
destination was reached hardly a man of them fell out. They too were
part of the great movement--a movement that would continue until they
marched into Bloemfontein with Lord Roberts.


=The Chaplains on the March.=

The chaplains were not allowed to accompany them. They followed with the
doctors and the baggage. Whether they were considered impedimenta or not
they hardly knew. Certainly their work was over for a short time, to be
renewed all too soon when the first batch of wounded came down from the
ever-advancing front.

So the senior Church of England chaplain and the senior Wesleyan
chaplain trudged off side by side, and marched steadily through the
night until, about sunrise, they set foot for the first time since they
had landed in South Africa on hostile soil. A few miles further on they
passed a deserted Boer camp, and among the _débris_ strewing the floor
of a farm-house found two English Bibles.

About nine o'clock in the morning Jacobsdal was reached. In England it
would be called a village, for it had only seven hundred inhabitants;
but it was quite an important town in those parts.