PREFACE.

6

THESE papers, reprinted from Black wood's Magazine,' and written hastily from the seat of war in the intervals of the events they describe, are not to be taken as aiming at anything more than they do-viz., to sketch occurrences as accurately as possible before time could wear away the impressions they left on a participant. They are, therefore, not History, nor to be considered as such, but merely an attempt to fill up something of what History, perhaps necessarily, omits, the human side of the great document of war, that side which rapidly becomes illegible when the men who wrote it have forgotten the peril, toil, and fury which inspired them in the writing. Once faded, a palimpsest of such a document is an impossibility.

This little volume is thus more a sketchbook of emotions than of facts, though I have

endeavoured as far as possible to verify all
statements of fact herein made, lest injustice
should be done to any one.
But it is a comfort
to think that where facts and deeds have in
almost every case produced nothing in their
narrator but humble admiration of the doers
of them, little injustice is to be feared from
inaccuracies inevitable to stories written of the
heat of war amid the rumour of camp.
any that may be found I crave pardon, asking
the discoverer-if a stay-at-home-to remember
that lookers-on proverbially see more of a game
than a player; and if a comrade during the
campaign, to recollect the vast extent of the
operations, and his own daze and preoccupation
whilst they were in progress.

For

If these articles do no more than faintly picture to the vicariously warlike some idea of the realities of war, they will not have been written in vain. Wars are not always-as this one has been-a necessity; and when they are not, he who enters upon them with a "light heart" may find his possession a curiously heavy one when the prick of inexorable Time has let out the passion which inflated it.

"LINESMAN."

TRANSVAAL, September 1901.