The water question is always a difficult one in exploring or campaigning.  One can do a certain amount with alum towards rendering the water less foul.  Rub the inside of a bucket with a lump of alum, and in ten minutes most of the mud sinks to the bottom, and the water is comparatively clear.  But besides producing a nasty flavour in the water, if used in any quantity, the astringent alum tends to produce disagreeable effects internally.  Of course the only absolute guarantee against the bacilli of enteric fever or other diseases which may be admitted into one’s system by drinking, is to boil the waters for five minutes; but it is very provoking, when the thermometer stands at 90 deg. in the shade, to wait until the boiled water cools, and as it is impossible to boil a whole river a few thousand bacilli may quite well get into our food through “washing up”.

The Boers have almost raised trench digging to the level of a fine art, and on every occasion when their commandants have found it necessary to withdraw they have had an entrenched position ready for them at some distance in the rear.  At Modder River the trenches on either side of the stream were, as far as I saw them, a series of short ditches holding about six riflemen.  These small trenches were separated from each other in order possibly to avoid that appearance of continuity which would have rendered their detection more easy to our scouts.  In the Modder River fight a new factor is noticeable.  For the first time in the campaign the Boers fought on level ground.  Hitherto their bullets had come from the summits of the hills, and for this reason had not proved nearly so effective as a sustained fire from rifles raised, say, about four and a half feet from the ground.  It is of course very much harder to hit a moving enemy when you aim from above at a considerable angle than when you merely hold your rifle steadily at the level of his chest and fire off Mauser cartridges at the rate of twenty a minute.  The enemy’s fire was very deadly at the Modder.  As Lord Methuen said in his despatch, it was quite unsafe to remain on horseback at 2,000 yards’ range.  The result was that our infantry were compelled to lie prone on the ground, and, without being able to do much by way of retaliation, were exposed for hours to a scathing fusilade from the trenches beside the river.  One poor fellow, of whom I saw a good deal, had been through the battle despite the fact that he was suffering great pain from dysentery.  He, together with two friends, lay on the veldt for no less than fourteen hours.  They had fortunately descried a slight hollow in the ground some 500 yards from the Boer trenches, and between them they “loosed off” quite 1,000 rounds of ammunition.  “Well,” I asked him, “did you hit anything?” “I don’t think we did,” was his reply, “because we never saw a Boer the whole day.”  When the enemy are firing smokeless powder behind their splendidly constructed earthworks they are practically