This account of the advance through the desert of General Botha’s Northern Force is purposely bald.  The process of a vast flooding of water over a country is in essence bald and direct.  And that is as near as I can get for comparison.  General Botha’s advance was like a well-ordered flood:  which, I take it, was exactly the idea.  At a fixed time organised bodies of men, mounted, dismounted and with artillery, were systematically poured over the German territory.  I am sure most of the fellows who took part in that advance and recall it in detail will in the future look back and wonder.  For it is a subject for wonder, even if history does contain some marches more eventful.  It has been stated since that all transport was left behind.  But that is not strictly true:  a large quantity of transport was brought on by the Union Forces; passed through the deepest sand in waterless desert, between gorges, over big kopjes, into almost trackless bushveld—­and was never more than a day and a half behind.  At one place out of a convoy of twenty-seven wagons, seventeen capsized.

It is hackneyed, I know, but there is only one way to describe the great trek to Windhuk.  It was absolutely “a chequer-board of nights and days.”  Looking at my diary just now, that I have had ten years’ practice at keeping, I see a confusion got into the dates.  You didn’t know anything about the date or the day of the week.  Existence was just a dateless alternation of light and darkness, of saddle-up and off-saddle, of cossack-post, of thinking about water—­and of yearning with every fibre of one’s being for the ineffable boon of a long sleep.

It will be seen that the key to the advance over the Namib Desert was the Swakop River.  The water-holes of the Swakop River are very singular; they form the nucleus of a kind of settlement (even if it be only a couple of small huts) right in the dry river bed.  At Kaltenhausen, to take but one example, there is a splendid shooting-lodge slapbang in the centre of the river; it has a fine courtyard walled and railed in.  It seemed extraordinary.  At these water-holes you suddenly leave the stony sand of the desert and come on to finest soft sand.  It is quite pleasant at night, but day tells another story.  Just after sunrise a wind starts blowing down the river valley and raises this superfine, mineralised sand.  To lie exposed to this for a day is an awful experience; the fine dust will penetrate anywhere.  I am sure it must lead to positive blindness in time.

I mentioned the water-holes of the Swakop River for the particular reason that their situation in most cases adds immensely to the merit of the Northern Army’s great trek.  The trek-road from Swakopmund follows the river only in a broad sense; the Haigamkhab, Husab and Gawieb water-holes are really three to four and five miles from the road and the camping grounds.  That is to say, the columns, after a twenty mile trek in the sand and sun had another quarter of the distance