Ladysmith | Page 4

are already
suffering from the change of life and food in camp. That is inevitable
when volunteers first take the field.
But Ladysmith has an evil reputation besides. Last year the troops here
were prostrated with enteric. There is a little fever and a good deal of
dysentery even now among the regulars. The stream by the camp is
condemned, and all water is supplied in tiny rations from pumps. The
main permanent camp is built of corrugated iron, practically the sole
building material in South Africa, and quite universal for roofs, so that
the country has few "architectural features" to boast of. The cavalry are

quartered in the tin huts, but the Liverpools, Devons, Gordons, and
Volunteers have pitched their own tents, and a terrible time they are
having of it. Dust is the curse of the place. We remember the Long
Valley as an Arcadian dell. Veterans of the Soudan recall the black
sand-storms with regretful sighs. The thin, red dust comes everywhere,
and never stops. It blinds your eyes, it stops your nose, it scorches your
throat till the invariable shilling for a little glass of any liquid seems
cheap as dirt. It turns the whitest shirt brown in half an hour, it creeps
into the works of your watch and your bowels. It lies in a layer mixed
with flies on the top of your rations. The white ants eat away the flaps
of the tents, and the men wake up covered with dust, like children in a
hayfield. Even mules die of it in convulsions. It was in this land that the
ostrich developed its world-renowned digestive powers; and no
wonder.
[Illustration: MAP OF LADYSMITH AND NEIGHBOURHOOD]
The camp stands on a barren plain, nearly two miles north-west of the
town--if we may so call the one straight road of stores and tin-roofed
bungalows. Low, flat-topped hills surround it, bare and rocky. But to
understand the country it is best to climb into the mountains of the long
Drakensberg, which forms the Free State frontier in a series of
strangely jagged and precipitous peaks, and at one place, by the
junction with Basutoland, runs up to 11,000 feet. Last Sunday I went
into the Free State through Van Reenen's Pass, over which a little
railway has been carried by zigzag "reverses." The summit is 5,500 feet
above the sea, or nearly 2,000 feet above Ladysmith. From the steep
slopes, in places almost as green as the Lowlands or Yorkshire fells, I
looked south-east far over Natal--a parched, brown land like the desert
beyond the Dead Sea, dusty bits of plain broken up by line upon line of
bare red mountain. It seemed a poor country to make a fuss about, yet
as South Africa goes, it is rich and even fertile in its way. Indeed, on
the reddest granite mountain one never fails to find multitudes of
flowering plants and pasturage for thinnish sheep. Across the main
range, Van Reenen's is the largest and best known pass. The old farmer
who gave it the name is living there still and bitterly laments the chance
of war. But there are other passes too, any of which may suddenly

become famous now--Olivier's Hoek, near the gigantic Mont aux
Sources, Bezuidenhaut, Netherby, Tintwa, and (north of Van Reenen's)
De Beer's Pass, Cundycleugh, Muller's, and Botha's, beyond which the
range ends with the frontier at Majuba. Three or four of these passes
are crossed by waggon roads, but Van Reenen's has the only railway.
The frontier, marked by a barbed wire fence across the summit of the
pass, must be nearly forty miles from Ladysmith, but from the cliffs
above it, the little British camp can be seen like a toy through this clear
African air, and Boer sentries watch it all day, ready to signal the least
movement of its troops, betrayed by the dust. Their own main force is
distributed in camps along the hills well beyond the nine-miles' limit
ordained by the Convention. The largest camp is said to be further
north at Nelson's Kop, but all the camps are very well hidden, though in
one place I saw about 500 of the horses trying to graze. The rains are
late, and the grass on the high plateau of the Free State is not so good
as on the Natal slopes of the pass. The Boer commandoes suffer much
from want of it. When all your army consists of mounted infantry,
forage counts next to food.
At present the Van Reenen Railway ends at Harrismith, an arid but
cheerful little town at the foot of the great cliffs of the Plaatburg. It
boasts its racecourse, golf-links, musical society, and some
acquaintance with the German poets. The Scotch made it their own,
though a few Dutch, English, and other