Of this great number two only offered insults to the gang of prisoners.  One was a dirty, mean-looking little Hollander.  He said, ’Well, Tommy, you’ve got your franchise, anyhow.’  The other was an Irishman.  He addressed himself to Frankland, whose badges proclaimed his regiment.  What he said when disentangled from obscenity amounted to this:  ’I am glad to see you Dublin fellows in trouble.’  The Boers silenced him at once and we passed on.  But that was all the taunting we received during the whole journey from Frere Station to Pretoria, and when one remembers that the Burghers are only common men with hardly any real discipline, the fact seems very remarkable.  But little and petty as it was it galled horribly.  The soldiers felt the sting and scowled back; the officers looked straight before them.  Yet it was a valuable lesson.  Only a few days before I had read in the newspapers of how the Kaffirs had jeered at the Boer prisoners when they were marched into Pietermaritzburg, saying, ‘Where are your passes?’ It had seemed a very harmless joke then, but now I understood how a prisoner feels these things.

It was about eleven o’clock when we reached Elandslaagte Station.  A train awaited the prisoners.  There were six or seven closed vans for the men and a first-class carriage for the officers.  Into a compartment of this we were speedily bundled.  Two Boers with rifles sat themselves between us, and the doors were locked.  I was desperately hungry, and asked for both food and water.  ‘Plenty is coming,’ they said, so we waited patiently, and sure enough, in a few minutes a railway official came along the platform, opened the door, and thrust before us in generous profusion two tins of preserved mutton, two tins of preserved fish, four or five loaves, half a dozen pots of jam, and a large can of tea.  As far as I could see the soldiers fared no worse.  The reader will believe that we did not stand on ceremony, but fell to at once and made the first satisfying meal for three days.  While we ate a great crowd of Boers gathered around the train and peered curiously in at the windows.  One of them was a doctor, who, noticing that my hand was bound up, inquired whether I were wounded.  The cut caused by the splinter of bullet was insignificant, but since it was ragged and had received no attention for two days it had begun to fester.  I therefore showed him my hand, and he immediately bustled off to get bandages and hot water and what not, with which, amid the approving grins of the rough fellows who thronged the platform, he soon bound me up very correctly.

The train whereby we were to travel was required for other business besides; and I noticed about a hundred Boers embarking with their horses in a dozen large cattle trucks behind the engine.  At or about noon we steamed off, moving slowly along the line, and Captain Haldane pointed out to me the ridge of Elandslaagte, and gave me some further account of that successful action and of the great skill with which Hamilton had