Parallel with these was a trench, three feet deep and four to five feet across at the top, but narrower at the bottom.

Where the material could be procured, there was also a stone wall, to serve as an additional obstacle.

Sometimes there were two lines of fences, the upper one--erected on the top of the earth thrown up from the trench--consisting of three or four strands only.
There was thus a regular network of wires in the vicinity of the blockhouses--the English seemed to think that a Boer might be netted like a fish.

If a wild horse had been trapped there, I should like to have been there to see, but I should not have liked to have been the wild horse.
The building of these blockhouses cost many thousands of pounds, and still greater were the expenses incurred in providing the soldiers in them with food, which had to be fetched up by special convoys.

And it was all money thrown away! and worse than thrown away! for when I come to describe how I broke through these blockhouse lines (see next page), the reader will see that this wonderful scheme of the English prolonged the war for at least three months.
Let us turn now to another, and a more successful device of the enemy.
From the first weeks of the winter, 1901--the reader must remember that our winter commences in _May_--the English began to make night attacks upon us; at last they had found out a way of inflicting severe losses upon us, and these night attacks grew more and more frequent during the last period of the war.