"Were you the station-master here before this?" I asked the man in the
straw hat, at Colenso. "I mean before this war?"
"No fear!" snorted the station-master, scornfully. "Why, we didn't know
Colenso was on the line until Buller fought a battle here. That's how it
is with all these way-stations now. Everybody's talking about them. We
never took no notice to them."
And yet the arriving stranger might have been forgiven his point of view
and his start of surprise when he found Chieveley a place of only a half
dozen corrugated zinc huts, and Colenso a scattered gathering of a dozen
shattered houses of battered brick.
Chieveley seemed so insignificant in contrast with its fame to those who
had followed the war on maps and in the newspapers, that one was not sure
he was on the right road until he saw from the car-window the armored
train still lying on the embankment, the graves beside it, and the donga
into which Winston Churchill pulled and carried the wounded.
And as the train bumped and halted before the blue and white enamel sign
that marks Colenso station, the places which have made that spot familiar
and momentous fell into line like the buoys which mark the entrance to a
harbor.
We knew that the high bare ridge to the right must be Fort Wylie, that
the plain on the left was where Colonel Long had lost his artillery, and
three officers gained the Victoria Cross, and that the swift, muddy
stream, in which the iron railroad bridge lay humped and sprawling, was
the Tugela River.
Six hours before, at Frere Station, the station-master had awakened us to
say that Ladysmith would be relieved at any moment. This had but just
come over the wire. It was "official." Indeed, he added, with local
pride, that the village band was still awake and in readiness to
celebrate the imminent event. He found, I fear, an unsympathetic
audience. The train was carrying philanthropic gentlemen in charge of
stores of champagne and marmalade for the besieged city. They did not
want it to be relieved until they were there to substitute _pate de foie
gras_ for horseflesh. And there were officers, too, who wanted a "look
in," and who had been kept waiting at Cape Town for commissions,
gladdening the guests of the Mount Nelson Hotel the while with their new
khaki and gaiters, and there were Tommies who wanted "Relief of
Ladysmith" on the claps of their medals, as they had seen "Relief of
Lucknow" on the medals of the Chelsea pensioners. And there was a
correspondent who had journeyed 15,000 miles to see Ladysmith relieved,
and who was apparently going to miss that sight, after five weeks of
travel, by a margin of five hours.
We all growled "That's good," as we had done for the last two weeks every
time we had heard it was relieved, but our tone was not enthusiastic.
And when the captain of the Natal Carbineers said, "I am afraid the good
news is too premature," we all said, hopefully, we were afraid it was.
We had seen nothing yet that was like real war. That night at
Pietermaritzburg the officers at the hotel were in mess-jackets, the
officers' wives in dinner-gowns. It was like Shepheard's Hotel, at the
top of the season. But only six hours after that dinner, as we looked
out of the car-windows, we saw galloping across the high grass, like men
who had lost their way, and silhouetted black against the red sunrise,
countless horsemen scouting ahead of our train, and guarding it against
the fate of the armored one lying wrecked at Chieveley. The darkness was
still heavy on the land and the only lights were the red eyes of the
armored train creeping in advance of ours, and the red sun, which showed
our silent escort appearing suddenly against the sky-line on a ridge, or
galloping toward us through the dew to order us, with a wave of the hand,
to greater speed. One hour after sunrise the train drew up at Colenso,
and from only a mile away we heard the heavy thud of the naval guns, the
hammering of the Boer "pom-poms," and the Maxims and Colt automatics
spanking the air. We smiled at each other guiltily. We were on time.
It was most evident that Ladysmith had not been relieved.
This was the twelfth day of a battle that Buller's column was waging
against the Boers and their mountain ranges, or "disarranges," as some
one described them, without having gained more than three miles of
hostile territory. He had tried to force his way through them six times,
and had been repulsed six times. And now he was to try it again.
No map, nor photograph, nor written description can give an idea of the
country which lay between Buller and his goal. It was an eruption of
high hills, linked together at every point without order or sequence. In
most countries mountains and hills follow some natural law. The
Cordilleras can be traced from the Amazon River to Guatemala City; they
make the water-shed of two continents; the Great Divide forms the
backbone of the States, but these Natal hills have no lineal descent.
They are illegitimate children of no line, abandoned broadcast over the
country, with no family likeness and no home. They stand alone, or
shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles, or at a tangent, or join hands
across a valley. They never appear the same; some run to a sharp point,
some stretch out, forming a table-land, others are gigantic ant-hills,
others perfect and accurately modelled ramparts. In a ride of half a
mile, every hill completely loses its original aspect and character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed by
the other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value until
its crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this confusion, the
river Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith as occupying the
country through which it will endeavor to throw off its pursuers. It
darts through them as though striving to escape, it doubles on its
tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the open plain rises
to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and remains motionless on
an incline, and on the level ground twists and turns so frequently that
when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he means he has crossed it once
at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad bridge, and once over a pontoon.
And then he is not sure that he is not still on the same side from which
he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or dark
red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him. Indeed, the khaki is the
English soldier's sole protection. It saves him in spite of himself, for
he apparently cannot learn to advance under cover, and a sky-line is the
one place where he selects to stand erect and stretch his weary limbs. I
have come to within a hundred yards of a hill before I saw that scattered
among its red and yellow bowlders was the better part of a regiment as
closely packed together as the crowd on the bleaching boards at a
base-ball match.
Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's column
has been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching, capturing
one position after another, to find it was enfiladed from many hills, and
abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The greater part of the
column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking in the open. It is a
wonderful and impressive sight. At the first view, an army in being,
when it is spread out as it is in the Tugela basin back of the hills,
seems a hopelessly and irrevocably entangled mob.
An army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a gun
on shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least, even if it
seems the most, important part of it. Before one reaches the firing-line
he must pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs of men, who are
feeding, mending, repairing, and burying the men at the "front." It is
these latter that make the mob of gypsies, which is apparently without
head or order or organization. They stretched across the great basin of
the Tugela, like the children of Israel, their camp-fires rising to the
sky at night like the reflection of great search-lights; by day they
swarmed across the plain, like hundreds of moving circus-vans in every
direction, with as little obvious intention as herds of buffalo. But
each had his appointed work, and each was utterly indifferent to the
battle going forward a mile away. Hundreds of teams, of sixteen oxen
each, crawled like great black water-snakes across the drifts, the Kaffir
drivers, naked and black, lashing them with whips as long as lariats,
shrieking, beseeching, and howling, and falling upon the oxen's horns to
drag them into place.
Mules from Spain and Texas, loaded with ammunition, kicked and plunged,
more oxen drew more soberly the great naval guns, which lurched as though
in a heavy sea, throwing the blue-jackets who hung upon the drag-ropes
from one high side of the trail to the other. Across the plain, and
making toward the trail, wagons loaded with fodder, with rations, with
camp equipment, with tents and cooking-stoves, crowded each other as
closely as cable-cars on Broadway. Scattered among them were fixed lines
of tethered horses, rows of dog-tents, camps of Kaffirs, hospital
stations with the Red Cross waving from the nearest and highest tree.
Dripping water-carts with as many spigots as the regiment had companies,
howitzer guns guided by as many ropes as a May-pole, crowded past these
to the trail, or gave way to the ambulances filled with men half dressed
and bound in the zinc-blue bandages that made the color detestable
forever after. Troops of the irregular horse gallop through this
multitude, with a jangling of spurs and sling-belts; and Tommies, in
close order, fight their way among the oxen, or help pull them to one
side as the stretchers pass, each with its burden, each with its blue
bandage stained a dark brownish crimson. It is only when the figure on
the stretcher lies under a blanket that the tumult and push and
sweltering mass comes to a quick pause, while the dead man's comrade
stands at attention, and the officer raises his fingers to his helmet.
Then the mass surges on again, with cracking of whips and shouts and
imprecations, while the yellow dust rises in thick clouds and buries the
picture in a glaring fog. This moving, struggling mass, that fights for
the right of way along the road, is within easy distance of the shells.
Those from their own guns pass over them with a shrill crescendo, those
from the enemy burst among them at rare intervals, or sink impotently in
the soft soil. And a dozen Tommies rush to dig them out as keepsakes.
Up at the front, brown and yellow regiments are lying crouched behind
brown and yellow rocks and stones. As far as you can see, the hills are
sown with them. With a glass you distinguish them against the sky-line
of every hill, for over three miles away. Sometimes the men rise and
fire, and there is a feverish flutter of musketry; sometimes they lie
motionless for hours while the guns make the ways straight.
Any one who has seen Epsom Downs on a Derby day, with its thousands of
vans and tents and lines of horses and moving mobs, can form some idea of
what it is like. But while at the Derby all is interest and excitement,
and every one is pushing and struggling, and the air palpitates with the
intoxication of a great event, the winning of a horse-race--here, where
men are killed every hour and no one of them knows when his turn may
come, the fact that most impresses you is their indifference to it all.
What strikes you most is the bored air of the Tommies, the undivided
interest of the engineers in the construction of a pontoon bridge, the
solicitude of the medical staff over the long lines of wounded, the rage
of the naked Kaffirs at their lumbering steers; the fact that every one
is intent on something--anything--but the battle.
They are wearied with battles. The Tommies stretch themselves in the sun
to dry the wet khaki in which they have lain out in the cold night for
weeks, and yawn at battles. Or, if you climb to the hill where the
officers are seated, you will find men steeped even deeper in boredom.
They are burned a dark red; their brown mustaches look white by contrast,
theirs are the same faces you have met with in Piccadilly, which you see
across the tables of the Savoy restaurant, which gaze depressedly from
the windows of White's and the Bachelors' Club. If they were bored then,
they are unbearably bored now. Below them the men of their regiment lie
crouched amid the bowlders, hardly distinguishable from the brown and
yellow rock. They are sleeping, or dozing, or yawning. A shell passes
over them like the shaking of many telegraph wires, and neither officer
nor Tommy raises his head to watch it strike. They are tired in body and
in mind, with cramped limbs and aching eyes. They have had twelve nights
and twelve days of battle, and it has lost its power to amuse.
When the sergeants call the companies together, they are eager enough.
Anything is better than lying still looking up at the sunny, inscrutable
hills, or down into the plain crawling with black oxen.
Among the group of staff officers some one has lost a cigar-holder. It
has slipped from between his fingers, and, with the vindictiveness of
inanimate things, has slid and jumped under a pile of rocks. The
interest of all around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder.
The Tommies begin to roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of the
men below them, and half the kopje is obliterated. They are as keen as
terriers after a rat. The officers sit above and give advice and
disagree as to where that cigar-holder hid itself. Over their heads, not
twenty feet above, the shells chase each other fiercely. But the
officers have become accustomed to shells; a search for a lost
cigar-holder, which is going on under their very eyes, is of greater
interest. And when at last a Tommy pounces upon it with a laugh of
triumph, the officers look their disappointment, and, with a sigh of
resignation, pick up their field-glasses.
It is all a question of familiarity. On Broadway, if a building is going
up where there is a chance of a loose brick falling on some one's head,
the contractor puts up red signs marked "Danger!" and you dodge over to
the other side. But if you had been in battle for twelve days, as have
the soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells would interest you no
more than do passing cable-cars. After twelve days you would forget that
shells are dangerous even as you forget when crossing Broadway that
cable-cars can kill and mangle.
Up on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General
Buller and his staff. The hill is all of rocks, sharp, brown rocks, as
clearly cut as foundation-stones. They are thrown about at irregular
angles, and are shaded only by stiff bayonet-like cacti. Above is a blue
glaring sky, into which the top of the kopje seems to reach, and to draw
and concentrate upon itself all of the sun's heat. This little jagged
point of blistering rocks holds the forces that press the button which
sets the struggling mass below, and the thousands of men upon the
surrounding hills, in motion. It is the conning tower of the relief
column, only, unlike a conning tower, it offers no protection, no
seclusion, no peace. To-day, commanding generals, under the new
conditions which this war has developed, do not charge up hills waving
flashing swords. They sit on rocks, and wink out their orders by a
flashing hand-mirror. The swords have been left at the base, or coated
deep with mud, so that they shall not flash, and with this column every
one, under the rank of general, carries a rifle on purpose to disguise
the fact that he is entitled to carry a sword. The kopje is the central
station of the system. From its uncomfortable eminence the commanding
general watches the developments of his attack, and directs it by
heliograph and ragged bits of bunting. A sweating, dirty Tommy turns his
back on a hill a mile away and slaps the air with his signal flag;
another Tommy, with the front visor of his helmet cocked over the back of
his neck, watches an answering bit of bunting through a glass. The bit
of bunting, a mile away, flashes impatiently, once to the right and once
to the left, and the Tommy with the glass says, "They understand, sir,"
and the other Tommy, who has not as yet cast even an interested glance at
the regiment he has ordered into action, folds his flag and curls up
against a hot rock and instantly sleeps.
Stuck on the crest, twenty feet from where General Buller is seated, are
two iron rods, like those in the putting-green of a golf course. They
mark the line of direction which a shell must take, in order to seek out
the enemy. Back of the kopje, where they cannot see the enemy, where
they cannot even see the hill upon which he is intrenched, are the
howitzers. Their duty is to aim at the iron rods, and vary their aim to
either side of them as they are directed to do by an officer on the
crest. Their shells pass a few yards over the heads of the staff, but
the staff has confidence. Those three yards are as safe a margin as a
hundred. Their confidence is that of the lady in spangles at a
music-hall, who permits her husband in buckskin to shoot apples from the
top of her head. From the other direction come the shells of the Boers,
seeking out the hidden howitzers. They pass somewhat higher, crashing
into the base of the kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their
own ignominious graves. The staff regard them with the same
indifference. One of them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel
Stuart-Wortley is seated, another destroys his diary. His men, lying at
his feet among the red rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does
not shift his position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.
On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts were
sent out to take a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack was one
of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new weapons,
have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to the prestige
of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the prestige of the
men by whom the attack was ordered. The result of this attack was
peculiarly disastrous. It was made at night, and as soon as it
developed, the Boers retreated to the trenches on the crest of the hill,
and threw men around the sides to bring a cross-fire to bear on the
Englishmen. In the morning the Inniskillings found they had lost four
hundred men, and ten out of their fifteen officers. The other regiments
lost as heavily. The following Tuesday, which was the anniversary of
Majuba Hill, three brigades, instead of a regiment, were told off to take
this same Railway Hill, or Pieter's, as it was later called, on the
flank, and with it to capture two others. On the same day, nineteen
years before, the English had lost Majuba Hill, and their hope was to
take these three from the Boers for the one they had lost, and open the
way to Bulwana Mountain, which was the last bar that held them back from
Ladysmith.
The first two of the three hills they wanted were shoulder to shoulder,
the third was separated from them by a deep ravine. This last was the
highest, and in order that the attack should be successful, it was
necessary to seize it first. The hills stretched for three miles; they
were about one thousand two hundred yards high.
For three hours a single line of men slipped and stumbled forward along
the muddy bank of the river, and for three hours the artillery crashed,
spluttered, and stabbed at the three hills above them, scattering the
rocks and bursting over and behind the Boer trenches on the crest.
As is their custom, the Boers remained invisible and made no reply. And
though we knew they were there, it seemed inconceivable that anything
human could live under such a bombardment of shot, bullets, and shrapnel.
A hundred yards distant, on our right, the navy guns were firing lyddite
that burst with a thick yellow smoke; on the other side Colt automatics
were put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets; the field-guns and the
howitzers were playing from a hill half a mile behind us, and scattered
among the rocks about us, and for two miles on either hand, the infantry
in reserve were firing off ammunition at any part of the three hills they
happened to dislike!
The roar of the navy's Four-Point-Sevens, their crash, their rush as they
passed, the shrill whine of the shrapnel, the barking of the howitzers,
and the mechanical, regular rattle of the quick-firing Maxims, which
sounded like the clicking of many mowing-machines on a hot summer's day,
tore the air with such hideous noises that one's skull ached from the
concussion, and one could only be heard by shouting. But more impressive
by far than this hot chorus of mighty thunder and petty hammering, was
the roar of the wind which was driven down into the valley beneath, and
which swept up again in enormous waves of sound. It roared like a wild
hurricane at sea. The illusion was so complete, that you expected, by
looking down, to see the Tugela lashing at her banks, tossing the spray
hundreds of feet in air, and battling with her sides of rock. It was
like the roar of Niagara in a gale, and yet when you did look below, not
a leaf was stirring, and the Tugela was slipping forward, flat and
sluggish, and in peace.
The long procession of yellow figures was still advancing along the
bottom of the valley, toward the right, when on the crest of the
farthermost hill fourteen of them appeared suddenly, and ran forward and
sprang into the trenches.
Perched against the blue sky on the highest and most distant of the three
hills, they looked terribly lonely and insufficient, and they ran about,
this way and that, as though they were very much surprised to find
themselves where they were. Then they settled down into the Boer trench,
from our side of it, and began firing, their officer, as his habit is,
standing up behind them. The hill they had taken had evidently been
abandoned to them by the enemy, and the fourteen men in khaki had taken
it by "default." But they disappeared so suddenly into the trench, that
we knew they were not enjoying their new position in peace, and every one
looked below them, to see the arriving reinforcements. They came at
last, to the number of ten, and scampered about just as the others had
done, looking for cover. It seemed as if we could almost hear the
singing of the bullet when one of them dodged, and it was with a distinct
sense of relief, and of freedom from further responsibility, that we saw
the ten disappear also, and become part of the yellow stones about them.
Then a very wonderful movement began to agitate the men upon the two
remaining hills. They began to creep up them as you have seen seaweed
rise with the tide and envelop a rock. They moved in regiments, but each
man was as distinct as is a letter of the alphabet in each word on this
page, black with letters. We began to follow the fortunes of individual
letters. It was a most selfish and cowardly occupation, for you knew you
were in no greater danger than you would be in looking through the
glasses of a mutoscope. The battle unrolled before you like a panorama.
The guns on our side of the valley had ceased, the hurricane in the
depths below had instantly spent itself, and the birds and insects had
again begun to fill our hill with drowsy twitter and song. But on the
other, half the men were wrapping the base of the hill in khaki, which
rose higher and higher, growing looser and less tightly wrapt as it spun
upward. Halfway to the crest there was a broad open space of green
grass, and above that a yellow bank of earth, which supported the track
of the railroad. This green space spurted with tiny geysers of yellow
dust. Where the bullets came from or who sent them we could not see.
But the loose ends of the bandage of khaki were stretching across this
green space and the yellow spurts of dust rose all around them. The men
crossed this fire zone warily, looking to one side or the other, as the
bullets struck the earth heavily, like drops of rain before a shower.
The men had their heads and shoulders bent as though they thought a roof
was about to fall on them; some ran from rock to rock, seeking cover
properly; others scampered toward the safe vantage-ground behind the
railroad embankment; others advanced leisurely, like men playing golf.
The silence, after the hurricane of sounds, was painful; we could not
hear even the Boer rifles. The men moved like figures in a dream,
without firing a shot. They seemed each to be acting on his own account,
without unison or organization. As I have said, you ceased considering
the scattered whole, and became intent on the adventures of individuals.
These fell so suddenly, that you waited with great anxiety to learn
whether they had dropped to dodge a bullet or whether one had found them.
The men came at last from every side, and from out of every ridge and
dried-up waterway. Open spaces which had been green a moment before were
suddenly dyed yellow with them. Where a company had been clinging to the
railroad embankment, there stood one regiment holding it, and another
sweeping over it. Heights that had seemed the goal, became the
resting-place of the stretcher-bearers, until at last no part of the hill
remained unpopulated, save a high bulging rampart of unprotected and open
ground. And then, suddenly, coming from the earth itself, apparently,
one man ran across this open space and leaped on top of the trench which
crowned the hill. He was fully fifteen yards in advance of all the rest,
entirely unsupported, and alone. And he had evidently planned it so, for
he took off his helmet and waved it, and stuck it on his rifle and waved
it again, and then suddenly clapped it on his head and threw his gun to
his shoulder. He stood so, pointing down into the trench, and it seemed
as though we could hear him calling upon the Boers behind it to
surrender.
A few minutes later the last of the three hills was mounted by the West
Yorks, who were mistaken by their own artillery for Boers, and fired upon
both by the Boers and by their own shrapnel and lyddite. Four men were
wounded, and, to save themselves, a line of them stood up at full length
on the trench and cheered and waved at the artillery until it had ceased
to play upon them. The Boers continued to fire upon them with rifles for
over two hours. But it was only a demonstration to cover the retreat of
the greater number, and at daybreak the hills were in complete and
peaceful possession of the English.
These hills were a part of the same Railway Hill which four nights before
the Inniskillings and a composite regiment had attempted to take by a
frontal attack with the loss of six hundred men, among whom were three
colonels. By this flank attack, and by using nine regiments instead of
one, the same hills and two others were taken with two hundred
casualties. The fact that this battle, which was called the Battle of
Pieter's Hill, and the surrender of General Cronje and his forces to Lord
Roberts, both took place on the anniversary of the battle of Majuba Hill,
made the whole of Buller's column feel that the ill memory of that
disaster had been effaced.