costs half-a-crown; and Natal grows fat on war. A shilling for a bit of
bread! What is the good of Christianity? So the dusky hands are
withdrawn, and the poor Zulu with untutored maw goes starving on. But if
any still doubt our primitive ancestry, let them hear that Zulu's
outcries of pain, or watch the fortunate man who has really got a loaf,
and gripping it with both hands, gnaws it in his corner, turning his
suspicious eyes to right and left with fear.

The air is full of wild rumours. A boy riding over Laing's Nek saw 1,000
armed Boers feeding their horses on Manning's farm. The Boers have been
seen at a Dutch settlement this side Van Reenen's. Yesterday a section
of the Gordons on their arrival were sent up to look at them in an
armoured train. It is thought that war will be proclaimed to-day. That
has been thought every day for a fortnight past, and the land buzzes
with lies which may at any moment be true.

Half the Manchesters have just marched in to trumpet and drum. When I
think of those ragged camps of peasants just over the border the pomp
and circumstance seem all on one side.


_Friday, October 13, 1899._

So it has begun at last, for good or evil. Here we think it began
yesterday, just at the very moment when Sir George White arrived. Late
at night scouts brought news of masses of Boers crossing the Tintwa
Pass, and going into laager with their waggons only fifteen miles away
to the west. The men stood to their arms, and long before light we were
marching steadily forward along the Van Reenen road. First came the
Liverpools, then the three batteries of Field Artillery with a mountain