_August 12._--_Sunday._--Reveillé at six. Harnessed up, and waited for orders to entrain for Pretoria. The 38th Battery have gone already, and the Wilts Yeomanry. A draft of twenty new men from England came in by train. They looked strangely pale and clean and tidy beside our patched and soiled and sunburnt selves. Marched down to station, and were entraining guns, waggons, horses, etc., till about four. The usual exciting scenes with mules, but it all seems routine now. Our subdivision of thirty men were packed like herrings into an open truck, also occupied by a gun and limber.
_August 13._--I write sitting wedged among my comrades on the floor of the truck, warm sun bathing us after an Arctic night, and up to my knees in kit, letters, newspapers, parcels, boxes of cigarettes, chocolate, etc., for all our over-due mails have been caught up in a lump somewhere, and the result of months of affection and thoughtful care in distant England are heaped on us all at once. I have about thirty letters. It is an orgie, and I feel drunk with pleasure. All the time the train rolls through the wilderness, with its myriad ant-hills, its ribbon of empty biscuit tins and dead horses, its broken bridges, its tiny outpost camps, like frail islands in the ocean, its lonely stations of three tin houses, and nothing else beyond, no trees, fields, houses, cattle, signs of human life. We stopped all last night at Zand River. All trains stop at night now, for the ubiquitous De Wet is a terror on the line. To-day we passed the charred and twisted remains of another train he had burnt; graves, in a row, close to it. Williams and I slept on the ground outside the truck, after feeding and watering horses and having tea. It was an uneasy slumber, on dust and rubble, interrupted once by the train quietly steaming away from beside us. But it came back. We were off again at 4.30 A.M., a merry crowd heaped together under blankets on the floor of the truck. We ground slowly on all day, and halted for the night at Viljoen's Drift, the frontier station.
_August 14._--Sleepy heads rose from a sea of blankets, and blinked out to see the crossing of the Vaal river, and a thin, sleepy cheer hailed this event; then we relapsed and waited for the sun. When it came, and we thawed and looked about, we saw an entire change of country; hills on both sides, trees here and there, and many farms. Soon the upper works of a mine showed, and then more, and all at once we were in a great industrial district. At Elandsfontein, the junction for Johannesburg, we had a long halt, and a good breakfast, getting free coffee from a huge boiling vat.