Their artillery is inferior in numbers, but in nothing else, to ours.  Yesterday I visited Colenso in the armoured train.  In one of the deserted British-built redoubts I found two boxes of shrapnel shells and charges.  The Boers had not troubled to touch them.  Their guns were of a later pattern, and fired powder and shell made up together like a great rifle cartridge.  The combination, made for the first time in the history of war, of heavy artillery and swarms of mounted infantry is formidable and effective.  The enduring courage and confident spirit of the enemy must also excite surprise.  In short, we have grossly underrated their fighting powers.  Most people in England—­I, among them—­thought that the Boer ultimatum was an act of despair, that the Dutch would make one fight for their honour, and, once defeated, would accept the inevitable.  All I have heard and whatever I have seen out here contradict these false ideas.  Anger, hatred, and the consciousness of military power impelled, the Boers to war.  They would rather have fought at their own time—­a year or two later—­when their preparations were still further advanced, and when the British were, perhaps, involved in other quarters.  But, after all, the moment was ripe.  Nearly everything was ready, and the whole people sprang to arms with alacrity, firmly believing that they would drive the British into the sea.  To that opinion they still adhere.  I do not myself share it; but it cannot be denied that it seems less absurd to-day than it did before a shot had been fired.

To return to Estcourt.  Here we are passing through a most dangerous period.  The garrison is utterly insufficient to resist the Boers; the position wholly indefensible.  Indeed, we exist here on sufferance.  If the enemy attack, the troops must fall back on Pietermaritzburg, if for no other reason because they are the only force available for the defence of the strong lines now being formed around the chief town.  There are so few cavalry outside Ladysmith that the Boers could raid in all directions.  All this will have been changed long before this letter reaches you, or I should not send it, but as I write the situation is saved only by what seems to me the over-confidence of the enemy.  They are concentrating all their efforts on Ladysmith, and evidently hope to compel its surrender.  It may, however, be said with absolute certainty that the place can hold out for a month at the least.  How, then, could the Boers obtain the necessary time to reduce it?  The reinforcements are on the seas.  The railway works regularly with the coast.  Even now sidings are being constructed and troop trains prepared.  It is with all this that they should interfere, and they are perfectly competent to do so.  They could compel us to retreat on Pietermaritzburg, they could tear up the railway, they could blow up the bridges; and by all these means they could delay the arrival of a relieving army, and so have a longer time to worry Ladysmith, and a better