2. Passing round Cape Agulhas, and continuing north-east for four hundred miles, we come next to Port Elizabeth, an exclusively English town on Algoa Bay. There is a fine pier like the admiralty pier at Dover, with complete railway connection; but from large vessels the landing is by steam tug and lighter, and, the bay being much exposed to weather, is unreliable for heavy stores or live stock.

3. East London, sixty miles up the coast-mainly a group of warehouses on a high cliff-is also a railway terminus, but trains do not run to the wharves. The outside anchorage is more exposed even than at Algoa Bay, and there is an awkward bar which excludes vessels of heaviest draught. Inside, however, at the mouth of a small river, there is complete shelter and fair depth of water.

4. Durban from East London is two hundred and fifty miles. Here, too, there is a bar to cross; but, thanks to the enterprise and perseverance of the colony, it has been deepened to over twenty feet, and kept down by a fleet of dredgers. It is, moreover, protected by a splendid breakwater, inside which there is an estuary-Southampton Water on a small scalewith good wharfage and rail to the ships' side.

Outside the bar the anchorage is risky; easterly gales are violent at certain seasons, and it sometimes happens that vessels are compelled to run far out to sea for safety. All things considered, however, Durban is a good port, and on no occasion has there been cause to complain of it during the present war,

So much for the sea-ports; now let us glance at the hinterland. Returning to the maps, it will appear that the theatre of war is divided, for over one thousand miles, by a band of connected mountain ranges forming an inverted letter C, the upper loop of which crosses the Transvaal from west to east, and then runs along the coast, at a hundred to one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, until opposite Cape Town, when it turns north-west, and follows the shores of the South Atlantic into Namaqualand. Now this belt of mountain region is a determining factor of many South African problems, political as well as military. Of immediate importance is the cir

cumstance that from whichever of the ports the start is made, we are bound to traverse a certain number of mountain passes, and, whereas up to the edge of the hills we travel, for the most part, among English friends, it behoves us to advance with the utmost caution through the ravines, and out upon the other side, if we are on bad terms with our Dutch fellow subjects and neighbours.

From the coast to the backbone of the high-lands is the region of highest fertility, and here are the sugar plantations of Natal and the richer forests and best arable land of the Cape Colony. Across the hills are vast table lands, fit only for nomadic grazing, varied for hundreds of miles only by an occasional oasis of cultivation, and by mining districts, such as the Diamond Fields and the Golden Rand.

It happens in South Africa, as elsewhere, that nationalities. and races are prone to group themselves according to the natural boundaries of their chief industries and aptitudes, and thus it has come about that on the east coast, where high farming is practicable, the English race is paramount, while elsewhere it predominates only in the larger towns and in the mining districts, leaving the outlying veldt and the village communities to a peasantry of Dutch or semi-Dutch descent-a peasantry of far higher character, it is true, than the aboriginal natives it terrorises, but only one remove above them in ignorance and contempt of civilization.

I have remarked that the country is roadless except for the railways. As a matter of fact, however, it is intersected by many waggon tracks which pass for roads, and which lead to the drifts or fords, which in South Africa take the place of bridges. All the same, the railways are the main medium of transport, and lines of marches must perforce conform to lines of railway, not to save the troops from fatigue, but for easy conveyance of food and stores.

There is a section of the public which seems to imagine that generals are free to move their forces as players manoeuvre their pieces on a chess board, and that armies can travel in any direction, and for any distances, their own or the horses' legs can carry them. Not so. The problem of

locomotion is governed by the problem of transport, and that requires more generalship even than strategy and tactics.

None, I suppose, but professional soldiers, and only some of them, really appreciate the desperate difficulties of the feeding, clothing, housing, doctoring, and replenishment of ammunition for an army in the field, especially in a halfsavage country. To get some approach to a conception of it, one may think of the trouble it is to organise a week's camp for a dozen men on the moors-the tents, the rolls of bedding, the crates of necessaries, the baskets of provisions, that have to be provided, and the further onus of a daily supply of fresh and palatable food. What then must it be when the men are not twelve units, but twenty thousand, when the camp is not for a week in the genial autumn, but for months of extremes of heat, cold, and rain, and when, instead of being confined to a small and well known locality, it is for ever moving onward, so that each sunset leaves it further off thau it was at sunrise. Twenty thousand men! That means 20,000 lbs. of meat, 25,000 lbs. of bread, 20,000 lbs. of biscuits, and 5000 lbs. of groceries, daily; besides forage for horses and hospital needs. Add to this 20,000 sets of clothing to be maintained, 20,000 pairs of boots to be repaired, and often renewed; supplement it all with a mass of ammunition and equipment that must keep pace with the troops, and the wonder will seem not that an army does not fly to any spot the public would have it, in less time than elapses between the morning and the evening papers, but rather that it ever manages to march at all. And it is indeed a wonderful undertaking, though simple enough in its way, if everything goes smoothly. Putting aside technicalities, it is all done on the system of depots, augmenting in number and diminishing in size the nearer they get to the front. This is much on the same principle as the distribution of commodities in civil life, where the merchant supplies the wholesale dealer, who again supplies the large retailer, who in his turn replenishes the modest stock of the village shopkeeper. But what if things do not go smoothly? What if supplies run short at the base? What if waggons break down or if horses and mules perish? What, too, if the

enemy crosses the communications, and plays havoc with every department? Why, just anything, from mere delay to privations like those of the Moscow campaign, and finally perhaps to defeat and surrender.

But to return to the subject of railways; it is calculated that a single train with two locomotives and thirty-five ten-ton waggons, running a course of 200 miles per day, will just do the work of 10,000 army waggons, needing from 40,000 to 50,000 horses, a fact conclusive, I think, in favour of hugging the iron road, especially when no others are available.

Now the railways at the seat of war are:

(1)—The Western System; Cape Town, De Aar, Kimberley, Mafeking, Buluwayo (Mr. Rhodes' line). This runs all the way through British territory;

(2) The Midland System; Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, Pretoria. This crosses the Orange River at Norvals Port. A cross line, De Aar, Naauwpoort, connects these two trunk lines;

(3) The Eastern System; East London, Springfontein, Bloemfontein, etc. This joins the Midland at Springfontein in the Free State, but a cross line through the Cape Colony from Stormberg to Rosmead connects it with Port Elizabeth, and via Naauwpoort with Cape Town;

(4) The Natal System; Durban, Maritzburg, Charleston, Standerton, Pretoria. This line has no connection with the Cape Colony.

Taking these railway systems in succession, it will be useful to have a bird's-eye view of the country through which they pass.

Starting from the terminus at Cape Town, we may pause for a moment to notice that in the Cape Peninsula, England possesses the one great maritime fortress of the southern seas. Placed where two oceans meet, with its great backbone of mountains cut off from the Continent by a neck of sand longer than the longest range of artillery, it requires but little fortification to make it a new and magnified Gibraltar, with this advantage, however, that instead of one cramped Bay to the west, it has two grand ones to east and west, False Bay in the Indian, Table Bay in the Atlantic Ocean, one dominated

by the naval station at Simons Town, the other by the batteries of Cape Town.

Leaving the capital and following the ordinary route to the north, the railway first, crosses the Cape Flats, then traverses a paradise of vineyards and peach orchards, with many fine old country houses interspersed, until by degrees the scenery assumes a colder aspect, and at the wild Hex River Pass the first ascent is made.

At Touws River, some 160 miles from Cape Town, the traveller makes his first acquaintance with the South African Veldt, and from there to De Aar, he will see no more vineyards and gardens, no more stately avenues of oaks, but illimitable plains of scanty vegetation, with only a peep here and there of far distant and flat topped mountains. At certain seasons the lower spurs and plains put on a mantle of richest green, but for the greater part of the year all is forbiddingly bare; now scorched by the sun; now desolated by frost and biting winds. For miles on either side the track no objects meet the eye but the everlasting kopjes; i.e., clusters of broken rocks, like ruined castles upon little hill tops. Such is the great Karroo.

At Beaufort West, 390 miles from Cape Town, the line enters another series of passes, from which it emerges upon a higher plateau, less desolate than the Karroo, but still treeless and dreary, with farm houses few and far between, white specks in a rolling ocean of grass. Thus the journey continues to De Aar (500 miles from Cape Town), and for anyone going to Mafeking on the Western Line, or to Johannesburg on the Midland, it seems everywhere the same monotonous repetition of veldt and kopje, kopje and veldt, with nothing to enliven the outlook except it be the great iron bridges which span the bigger rivers—the Orange, the Modder, and the Vaal.

Take now the Midland system. Starting from Port Elizabeth, the railway clears the passes of two subordinate chains of hills, with familiar Devonian scenery, then having crossed the Great Fish River 220 miles from the sea, runs by Rosmead Junction (connecting with East London) into the main range of the Stormbergen, out through the Naauwpoort Pass, and on to the table lands, in the neighbourhood of an exclusively Dutch