De Aar lies in the centre of a large plain, shut in on every side by kopjes.  In fact its position is very similar indeed to that of Ladysmith.  The hills on the east and west were always held by pickets with some field guns belonging to the Royal Artillery and the Prince Alfred’s Artillery Volunteers.  A much loftier line of kopjes to the north was untenanted by the British, but any approach over the veldt from the north-east was blocked by several rows of shelter trenches and a strongly-constructed redoubt with wire entanglements, ditch, and parapet topped with iron rails.  Signallers were continually at work, and at night it was quite a pretty sight to watch the twinkling points of the signal lights as they flashed between the tents on the plain and the distant pickets on the tops of the kopjes.  Boers had been seen to the east and on the west; some at least of the Dutch colonists were in open revolt; so officers and men were always prepared at a moment’s notice to line the trenches for defence, while the redoubts and the batteries on the hills were permanently garrisoned.

Everybody loathed De Aar.  With the exception of some feeble cricket played on some unoccupied patches of dusty ground, and a couple of shabby tennis courts, usually reserved for the “patball” of the local athletes of either sex, there was absolutely nothing to do, and we were too far off Modder River to feel that we were at all in the swim of things.  The heat was sometimes appalling.  On Christmas day the temperature was 105 deg. in the shade, and most people took a long siesta after the midday dinner and read such odds and ends of literature as fell into their hands.

We train people, of course, read and slumbered in one of the wards, while our comrades under canvas lay with eight heads meeting in the centre of a tent and sixteen legs projecting from it like the spokes of a wheel.  Mercifully enough scorpions were few and far between at De Aar, so one could feel fairly secure from these pests.  How different it was in the Sudan campaign, especially at some camps like Um Teref, where batches of soldiers black and white came to be treated for scorpion stings, which in one case were fatal. A propos of reading we were wonderfully well provided with all manner of literature by the kindly forethought of good people in England.  The assortment was very curious indeed.  One would see lying side by side The Nineteenth Century, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, and the Christian World.  This literary syncretism was especially marked in the mission tent at De Aar, where the forms were besprinkled with an infinite variety of magazines and pamphlets—­to such an extent indeed that in some cases the more vivid pages of a Family Herald would temporarily seduce the soldier’s mind from the calmer pleasures of Mr. Moody’s hymn book, and those who came to pray remained to read.