In a lonely valley under the mimosa-covered heights which dominate the
Great Tugela is the lonely homestead of Spearman's Farm. Those who
built it and made a home in it could have had little thought that it
would one day figure in the annals of history. The farmhouse and the
farm buildings and the garden were enclosed by a rough stone wall, and
upon this solitary homestead the hand of the Boer had fallen heavily.
The house had been looted, and what was breakable in it had been broken.
The garden had been trampled out of recognition, the gates were gone,
the agricultural implements had been wantonly destroyed, and the
unpretending road which led to the farm was marked by the wheels of
heavy guns. The house was small and of one story, and was possessed of
the unblushing ugliness which corrugated iron alone can provide. The
door swung open, and any could enter who would, and through the broken
windows there was nothing to be seen but indiscriminate wreckage. There
was about the little house and its cluster of outbuildings a suggestion
of the Old Country, and it wanted but a rick or so, and a pond with
white ducks to complete a picture of a small English farm. The garden
had evidently been the subject of solicitous care, and was on that
account all the more desolate, and what delight it ever had had been
trampled out of it by countless hoofs or obliterated by the rattling
passage over it of a battery or so of artillery.
At the back of the farm, and at the foot of a green kopje, was a quaint
little burial ground--little because it held but two graves, and quaint
because these were surmounted by unexpected stone memorials of a type to
be associated with a suburban English cemetery. These monuments were
fitly carved, and were distinctly the product of no mean town, and they
were to the memory respectively of George Spearman and of Susan
Spearman. For some undefinable reason these finished memorials, so
formal and so hackneyed in their design, appeared inappropriate and even
unworthy of the dignity of the lonely graves at the foot of the kopje.
Some more rugged emblem, free from artificiality and from any suggestion
of the crowded haunts of men, would have covered more fittingly the last
resting-place of these two pioneers. A few trees, almost the only trees
within sight, shaded the little graveyard, and the trees and the
monuments were enclosed by a very solid iron railing. It was in the
shadow of this oasis that the dead from our hospital were buried.