and the white cloud flung itself on to the very line of our batteries
unlimbering on the brow. Whirr and scream--another dashed itself into
the field between the guns and limbers. Another and another, only now
they fell harmlessly behind the guns, seeking vainly for the waggons
and teams which were drawn snugly away under a hillside on the right.
Another and another--bursting now on the clear space in rear of the guns
between our right and left infantry columns. All the infantry were lying
down, so well folded in the ground that I could only see the Devons on
the left. The Manchesters and Gordons on the right seemed to be
swallowed by the veldt.
Then between the bangs of their artillery struck the hoarser bay of our
own. Ball after ball of white smoke alighted on the kopje--the first at
the base, the second over, the third jump on the Boer gun. By the fourth
the Boer gun flashed no more. Then our guns sent forth little white
balloons of shrapnel, to right, to left, higher, lower, peppering the
whole face. Now came rifle-fire--a few reports, and then a roll like the
ungreased wheels of a farm cart. The Imperial Light Horse was at work on
the extreme right. And now as the guns pealed faster and faster we saw
mounted men riding up the nearer swell of kopje and diving over the
edge. Shrapnel followed; some dived and came up no more.
The guns limbered up and moved across to a nearer position towards the
right. As they moved the Boer gun opened again--Lord, but the German
gunners knew their business!--punctuating the intervals and distances of
the pieces with scattering destruction. The third or fourth shell
pitched clean into a labouring waggon with its double team of eight
horses. It was full of shells. We held our breath for an explosion. But,
when the smoke cleared, only the near wheeler was on his side, and the
waggon had a wheel in the air. The batteries unlimbered and bayed again,
and again the Boer guns were silent. Now for the attack.
The attack was to be made on their front and their left flank--along the
hog-back of the big kopje. The Devons on our left formed for the front
attack; the Manchesters went on the right, the Gordons edged out to the
extreme rightward base, with the long, long boulder-freckled face above
them. The guns flung shrapnel across the valley; the watchful cavalry
were in leash, straining towards the enemy's flanks. It was about a
quarter to five, and it seemed curiously dark for the time of day.
No wonder--for as the men moved forward before the enemy the heavens
were opened. From the eastern sky swept a sheer sheet of rain. With the
first stabbing drops horses turned their heads away, trembling, and no
whip or spur could bring them up to it. It drove through mackintoshes as
if they were blotting-paper. The air was filled with hissing; underfoot
you could see solid earth melting into mud, and mud flowing away in
water. It blotted out hill and dale and enemy in one grey curtain of
swooping water. You would have said that the heavens had opened to drown
the wrath of man. And through it the guns still thundered and the khaki
columns pushed doggedly on.
The infantry came among the boulders and began to open out. The supports
and reserves followed up. And then, in a twinkling, on the stone-pitted
hill-face burst loose that other storm--the storm of lead, of blood, of
death. In a twinkling the first line was down behind rocks firing fast,
and the bullets came flicking round them. Men stopped and started,
staggered and dropped limply as if the string were cut that held them
upright. The line pushed on; the supports and reserves followed up. A
colonel fell, shot in the arm; the regiment pushed on.
They came to a rocky ridge about twenty feet high. They clung to cover,
firing, then rose, and were among the shrill bullets again. A major was
left at the bottom of that ridge, with his pipe in his mouth and a
Mauser bullet through his leg; his company pushed on. Down again, fire
again, up again, and on! Another ridge won and passed--and only a more
hellish hail of bullets beyond it. More men down, more men pushed into
the firing line--more death-piping bullets than ever. The air was a
sieve of them; they beat on the boulders like a million hammers; they
tore the turf like a harrow.
Another ridge crowned, another welcoming, whistling gust of perdition,
more men down, more pushed into the firing line. Half the officers were
down; the men puffed and stumbled on. Another ridge--God! Would this
cursed hill never end? It was sown with bleeding and dead behind; it was
edged with stinging fire before. God! Would it never end? On, and get to
the end of it! And now it was surely the end. The merry bugles rang out
like cock-crow on a fine morning. The pipes shrieked of blood and the
lust of glorious death. Fix bayonets! Staff officers rushed shouting
from the rear, imploring, cajoling, cursing, slamming every man who
could move into the line. Line--but it was a line no longer. It was a
surging wave of men--Devons and Gordons, Manchester and Light Horse all
mixed, inextricably; subalterns commanding regiments, soldiers yelling
advice, officers firing carbines, stumbling, leaping, killing, falling,
all drunk with battle, shoving through hell to the throat of the enemy.
And there beneath our feet was the Boer camp and the last Boers
galloping out of it. There also--thank Heaven, thank Heaven!--were
squadrons of Lancers and Dragoon Guards storming in among them,
shouting, spearing, stamping them into the ground. Cease fire!
It was over--twelve hours of march, of reconnaissance, of waiting, of
preparation, and half an hour of attack. But half an hour crammed with
the life of half a lifetime.
VII.
THE BIVOUAC.
A VICTORIOUS AND HELPLESS MOB--A BREAK-NECK HILLSIDE--BRINGING DOWN
THE WOUNDED--A HARD-WORKED DOCTOR--BOER PRISONERS--INDIAN
BEARERS--AN IRISH HIGHLANDER IN TROUBLE.
LADYSMITH, _Oct. 23._
Pursuing cavalry and pursued enemy faded out of our sight; abruptly we
realised that it was night. A mob of unassorted soldiers stood on the
rock-sown, man-sown hillside, victorious and helpless.
Out of every quarter of the blackness leaped rough voices. "G Company!"
"Devons here!" "Imperial Light Horse?" "Over here!" "Over where?" Then a
trip and a heavy stumble and an oath. "Doctor wanted 'ere! 'Elp for a
wounded orficer! Damn you there! who are you fallin' up against? This
is the Gordon 'Ighlanders--what's left of 'em."
Here and there an inkier blackness moving showed a unit that had begun
to find itself again.
But for half an hour the hillside was still a maze--a maze of bodies of
men wandering they knew not whither, crossing and recrossing, circling,
stopping and returning on their stumbles, slipping on smooth rock-faces,
breaking shins on rough boulders, treading with hobnailed boots on
wounded fingers.
At length underfoot twinkled lights, and a strong, clear voice sailed
into the confusion, "All wounded men are to be brought down to the Boer
camp between the two hills." Towards the lights and the Boer camp we
turned down the face of jumbled stumbling-block. A wary kick forward, a
feel below--firm rock. Stop--and the firm rock spun and the leg shot
into an ankle-wrenching hole. Scramble out and feel again; here is a
flat face--forward! And then a tug that jerks you on to your back again:
you forgot you had a horse to lead, and he does not like the look of
this bit. Climb back again and take him by the head; still he will not
budge. Try again to the right. Bang! goes your knee into a boulder.
Circle cannily round the horse to the left; here at last is something
like a slope. Forward horse--so, gently! Hurrah! Two minutes gone--a
yard descended.
By the time we stumbled down that precipice there had already passed a
week of nights--and it was not yet eight o'clock. At the bottom were
half-a-dozen tents, a couple of lanterns, and a dozen waggons--huge,
heavy veldt-ships lumbered up with cargo. It was at least possible to
tie a horse up and turn round in the sliding mud to see what next.
What next? Little enough question of that! Off the break-neck hillside
still dropped hoarse importunate cries. "Wounded man here! Doctor
wanted! Three of 'em here! A stretcher, for God's sake!" "A stretcher
there! Is there no stretcher?" There was not one stretcher within
voice-shot.
Already the men were bringing down the first of their wounded. Slung in
a blanket came a captain, his wet hair matted over his forehead, brow
and teeth set, lips twitching as they put him down, gripping his whole
soul to keep it from crying out. He turned with the beginning of a smile
that would not finish: "Would you mind straightening out my arm?" The
arm was bandaged above the elbow, and the forearm was hooked under him.
A man bent over--and suddenly it was dark. "Here, bring back that
lantern!" But the lantern was staggering up-hill again to fetch the
next. "Oh, do straighten out my arm," wailed the voice from the ground.
"And cover me up. I'm perishing with cold." "Here's matches!" "And 'ere;
I've got a bit of candle." "Where?" "Oh, do straighten out my arm!"
"'Ere, 'old out your 'and." "Got it," and the light flickered up again
round the broken figure, and the arm was laid straight. As the touch
came on to the clammy fingers it met something wet and red, and the
prone body quivered all over. "What," said the weak voice--the smile
struggled to come out again, but dropped back even sooner than
before--"have they got my finger too?" Then they covered up the body
with a blanket, wringing wet, and left it to soak and shiver. And that
was one out of more than two hundred.
For hours--and by now it was a month of nights--every man with hands and
legs toiled up and down, up and down, that ladder of pain. By Heaven's
grace the Boers had filled their waggons with the loot of many stores;
there were blankets to carry men in and mattresses whereon to lay them.
They came down with sprawling bearers, with jolts and groans, with "Oh,
put me down; I can't stand it! I'm done anyhow; let me die quiet." And
always would come back the cheery voice from doctor or officer or
pal,--"Done, colour-sergeant! Nonsense, man! Why, you'll be back to duty
in a fortnight." And the answer was another choked groan.
Hour by hour--would day never break? Not yet; it was just twenty minutes
to ten--man by man they brought them down. The tent was carpeted now
with limp bodies. With breaking backs they heaved some shoulder-high
into waggons; others they laid on mattresses on the ground. In the
rain-blurred light of the lantern--could it not cease, that piercing
drizzle to-night of all nights at least? The doctor, the one doctor,
toiled buoyantly on. Cutting up their clothes with scissors, feeling
with light firm fingers over torn chest or thigh, cunningly slipping
round the bandage, tenderly covering up the crimson ruin of strong
men--hour by hour, man by man, he toiled on.
And mark--and remember for the rest of your lives--that Tommy Atkins
made no distinction between the wounded enemy and his dearest friend. To
the men who in the afternoon were lying down behind rocks with rifles
pointed to kill him, who had shot, may be, the comrade of his heart, he
gave the last drop of his water, the last drop of his melting strength,
the last drop of comfort he could wring out of his seared, gallant
soul. In war, they say,--and it is true,--men grow callous: an afternoon
of shooting and the loss of your brother hurts you less than a week
before did a thorn in your dog's foot. But it is only compassion for the
dead that dries up; and as it dries, the spring wells up among good men
of sympathy with all the living. A few men had made a fire in the
gnawing damp and cold, and round it they sat, even the unwounded Boer
prisoners. For themselves they took the outer ring, and not a word did
any man say that could mortify the wound of defeat. In the afternoon
Tommy was a hero, in the evening he was a gentleman.
Do not forget, either, the doctors of the enemy. We found their wounded
with our own, and it was pardonable to be glad that whereas our men set
their teeth in silence, some of theirs wept and groaned. Not all,
though: we found Mr Kok, father of the Boer general and member of the
Transvaal Executive, lying high up on the hill--a massive, white-bearded
patriarch, in a black frock-coat and trousers. With simple dignity,
with the right of a dying man to command, he said in his strong voice,
"Take me down the hill and lay me in a tent; I am wounded by three
bullets." It was a bad day for the Kok family: four were on the field,
and all were hit. They found Commandant Schiel, too, the German
free-lance, lying with a bullet through his thigh, near the two guns
which he had served so well, and which no German or Dutchman would ever
serve again. Then there were three field-cornets out of four, members of
Volksraad, two public prosecutors--Heaven only knows whom! But their own
doctors were among them almost as soon as were ours.
Under the Red Cross--under the black sky, too, and the drizzle, and the
creeping cold--we stood and kicked numbed feet in the mud, and talked
together of the fight. A prisoner or two, allowed out to look for
wounded, came and joined in. We were all most friendly, and naturally
congratulated each other on having done so well. These Boers were
neither sullen nor complaisant. They had fought their best, and lost;
they were neither ashamed nor angry. They were manly and courteous, and
through their untrimmed beards and rough corduroys a voice said very
plainly, "Ruling race." These Boers might be brutal, might be
treacherous; but they held their heads like gentlemen. Tommy and the
veldt peasant--a comedy of good manners in wet and cold and mud and
blood!
And so the long, long night wore on. At midnight came outlandish Indians
staggering under the green-curtained palanquins they call doolies: these
were filled up and taken away to the Elandslaagte Station. At one
o'clock we had the rare sight of a general under a waggon trying to
sleep, and two privates on top of it rummaging for loot. One found
himself a stock of gent's underwear, and contrived comforters and gloves
therewith; one got his fingers into a case and ate cooking raisins.
Once, when a few were as near sleep as any were that night, there was a
rattle and there was a clash that brought a hundred men springing up and
reaching for their rifles. On the ground lay a bucket, a cooking-pot, a
couple of tin plates, and knives and forks--all emptied out of a sack.
On top of them descended from the waggon on high a flame-coloured shock
of hair surmounting a freckled face, a covert coat, a kummerbund, and
cloth gaiters. Were we mad? Was it an apparition, or was that under the
kummerbund a bit of kilt and an end of sporran? Then said a voice, "Ould
Oireland in throuble again! Oi'm an Oirish Highlander; I beg your
pardon, sorr--and in throuble again. They tould me there was a box of
cigars here; do ye know, sorr, if the bhoys have shmoked them all?"
VIII.
THE HOME-COMING FROM DUNDEE.
SUPERFLUOUS ASSISTANCE--A SMILING VALLEY--THE BORDER MOUNTED
RIFLES--A RAIN-STORM--A THIRTY-TWO MILES' MARCH--HOW THE TROOPS
CAME INTO LADYSMITH.
LADYSMITH, _Oct. 27._
"Come to meet us!" cried the staff officer with amazement in his voice;
"what on earth for?"
It was on October 25, about five miles out on the Helpmakaar road, which
runs east from Ladysmith. By the stream below the hill he had just
trotted down, and choking the pass beyond, wriggled the familiar tail of
waggons and water-carts, ambulances, and doolies, and spare teams of old
mules in new harness. A couple of squadrons of Lancers had off-saddled
by the roadside, a phalanx of horses topped with furled red and white
pennons. Behind them stood a battery of artillery. Half a battalion of
green-kilted Gordons sunned their bare knees a little lower down; a
company or two of Manchesters back-boned the flabby convoy. The staff
officer could not make out what in the world it meant.
He had pushed on from the Dundee column, but it was a childish
superstition to imagine that the Dundee column could possibly need
assistance. They had only marched thirty odd miles on Monday and
Tuesday; starting at four in the morning, they would by two o'clock or
so have covered the seventeen miles that would bring them into camp,
fifteen miles outside Ladysmith. They were coming to help Ladysmith, if
you like; but the idea of Ladysmith helping them!
At his urgency they sent the convoy back. I rode on miles through the
openest country I had yet seen hereabouts--a basin of wave-like veldt,
just growing thinly green under the spring rains, spangled with budding
mimosa-thorn. Scarred here and there with the dry water-courses they
call sluits, patched with heaves of wire-fenced down, livened with a
verandah, blue cactus-hedged farmhouse or two, losing itself finally in
a mazy fairyland of azure mountains--this valley was the nearest
approach to what you would call a smiling country I had seen in Africa.
Eight miles or so along the road I came upon the Border Mounted Rifles,
saddles off, and lolling on the grass. All farmers and transport riders
from the northern frontier, lean, bearded, sun-dried, framed of steel
and whipcord, sitting their horses like the riders of the Elgin marbles,
swift and cunning as Boers, and far braver, they are the heaven-sent
type of irregular troopers. It was they who had ridden out and made
connection with the returning column an hour before.
Two miles on I dipped over a ridge--and here was the camp. Bugles sang
cheerily; mules, linked in fives, were being zigzagged frowardly down to
water. The Royal Irish Fusiliers had loosened their belts, but not their
sturdy bearing. Under their horses' bellies lay the diminished 18th
Hussars. Presently came up a subaltern of the regiment, who had been on
leave and returned just too late to rejoin before the line was cut. They
had put him in command of the advanced troop of the Lancers, and how he
cursed the infantry and the convoy, and how he shoved the troop along
when the drag was taken off! Now he was laughing and talking and
listening all at once, like a long wanderer at his home-coming.
No use waiting for sensational stories among these men, going about
their daily camp duties as if battles and sieges and forced marches with
the enemy on your flank were the most ordinary business of life. No use
waiting for fighting either; in open country the force could have
knocked thousands of Boers to pieces, and there was not the least chance
of the Boers coming to be knocked. So I rode back through the rolling
veldt basin. As I passed the stream and the nek beyond the battery of
artillery, the Gordons and Manchesters were lighting their bivouac
fires. This pass, crevicing under the solid feet of two great stony
kopjes, was the only place the Boers would be likely to try their luck
at. It was covered; already the Dundee column was all right.
Presently I met the rest of the Gordons, swinging along the road to
crown the heights on either side the nek. Coming through I noticed--and
the kilted Highlanders noticed, too, they were staying out all
night--that the sky over Ladysmith was very black. The great inky stain
of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole
circumference. In five minutes it was night and rain-storm. It stung
like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall. Ladysmith
streets were ankle deep in half an hour; the camps were morass and pond.
And listening to the ever-fresh bursts hammering all the evening on to
deepening pools, we learned that the Dundee men had not camped after
all, had marched at six, and were coming on all night into Ladysmith.
Thirty-two miles without rest, through stinging cataract and spongy
loam and glassy slime!
Before next morning was grey in came the 1st Rifles. They plashed uphill
to their blue-roofed huts on the south-west side of the town. By the
time the sun was up they were fed by their sister battalion, the 2nd,
and had begun to unwind their putties. But what a sight! Their putties
were not soaked and not caked; say, rather, that there may have been a
core of puttie inside, but that the men's legs were embedded in a
serpentine cast of clay. As for their boots, you could only infer them
from the huge balls of stratified mud men bore round their feet. Red
mud, yellow mud, black mud, brown mud--they lifted their feet
toilsomely; they were land plummets that had sucked up specimens of all
the heavy, sticky soils for fifteen miles. Officers and men alike
bristled stiff with a week's beard. Rents in their khaki showed white
skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have judged them half
red men, half soot-black. Eyelids hung fat and heavy over hollow cheeks
and pointed cheek-bones. Only the eye remained--the sky-blue,
steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English eye--to tell that
thirty-two miles without rest, four days without a square meal, six
nights--for many--without a stretch of sleep, still found them soldiers
at the end.
That was the beginning of them; but they were not all in till the middle
of the afternoon--which made thirty-six hours on their legs. The Irish
Fusiliers tramped in at lunch-time, going a bit short some of them,
nearly all a trifle stiff on the feet, but solid, square, and sturdy
from the knees upward. They straightened up to the cheers that met them,
and stepped out on scorching feet as if they were ready to go into
action again on the instant. After them came the guns--not the sleek
creatures of Laffan's Plain, rough with earth and spinning mud from
their wheels, but war-worn and fresh from slaughter; you might imagine
their damp muzzles were dripping blood. You could count the horses'
ribs; they looked as if you could break them in half before the
quarters. But they, too, knew they were being cheered; they threw their
ears up and flung all the weight left them into the traces.
Through fire, water, and earth, the Dundee column had come home again.
IX.
THE STORY OF NICHOLSON'S NEK.
AN ATTENUATED MESS--A REGIMENT 220 STRONG--A MISERABLE STORY--THE
WHITE FLAG--BOER KINDNESS--ASHAMED FOR ENGLAND.
LADYSMITH, _Nov. 1_.
The sodden tents hung dankly, black-grey in the gusty, rainy morning. At
the entrance to the camp stood a sentry; half-a-dozen privates moved to
and fro. Perhaps half-a-dozen were to be seen in all--the same hard,
thick-set bodies that Ladysmith had cheered six days before as they
marched in, square-shouldered through the mud, from Dundee. The same
bodies--but the elastic was out of them and the brightness was not in
their eyes. But for these few, though it was an hour after _reveillé_,
the camp was cold and empty. It was the camp of the Royal Irish
Fusiliers.
An officer appeared from the mess-tent--pale and pinched. I saw him when
he came in from Dundee with four sleepless nights behind him; this
morning he was far more haggard. Inside were one other officer, the
doctor, and the quarter-master. That was all the mess, except a second
lieutenant, a boy just green from Sandhurst. He had just arrived from
England, aflame for his first regiment and his first campaign. And this
was the regiment he found.
They had been busy half the night packing up the lost officers' kits to
send down to Durban. Now they were packing their own; a regiment 220
strong could do with a smaller camp. The mess stores laid in at
Ladysmith stood in open cases round the tent. All the small luxuries the
careful mess-president had provided against the hard campaign had been
lost at Dundee. Now it was the regiment was lost, and there was nobody
to eat the tinned meats and pickles. The common words "Natal Field
Force" on the boxes cut like a knife. In the middle of the tent, on a
table of cases, so low that to reach it you must sit on the ground, were
the japanned tin plates and mugs for five men's breakfast--five out of
five-and-twenty. Tied up in a waterproof sheet were the officers'
letters--the letters of their wives and mothers that had arrived that
morning seven thousand miles from home. The men they wrote to were on
their way to the prisoners' camp on Pretoria racecourse.