_Almost every word of this story is based on fact. The Boer War of
1899–1902 was a very small one as wars were reckoned, and was fought
without any particular malice, but it taught our men the practical value
of scouting in the field. They were slow to learn at the outset, and it
cost them many unnecessary losses, as is always the case when men think
they can do their work without taking trouble beforehand._
The guns of the Field-Battery were ambushed behind white-thorned
mimosas, scarcely taller than their wheels, that marked the line of a
dry nullah; and the camp pretended to find shade under a clump of gums
planted as an experiment by some Minister of Agriculture. One small hut,
reddish stone with a tin roof, stood where the single track of the
railway split into a siding. A rolling plain of red earth, speckled with
loose stones and sugar-bush, ran northward to the scarps and spurs of a
range of little hills—all barren and exaggerated in the heat-haze.
Southward, the level lost itself in a tangle of scrub-furred hillocks,
upheaved without purpose or order, seared and blackened by the strokes
of the careless lightning, seamed down their sides with spent
watercourses, and peppered from base to summit with stones—riven, piled,
scattered stones. Far away, to the eastward, a line of blue-grey
mountains, peaked and horned, lifted itself over the huddle of the
tortured earth. It was the only thing that held steady through the
liquid mirage. The nearer hills detached themselves from the plain, and
swam forward like islands in a milky ocean. While the Major stared
through puckered eyelids, Leviathan himself waded through the far
shallows of it—a black and formless beast.
“That,” said the Major, “must be the guns coming back.” He had sent out
two guns, nominally for exercise—actually to show the loyal Dutch that
there was artillery near the railway if any patriot thought fit to
tamper with it. Chocolate smears, looking as though they had been swept
with a besom through the raffle of stones, wandered across the
earth—unbridged, ungraded, unmetalled. They were the roads to the brown
mud huts, one in each valley, that were officially styled farm-houses.
At very long intervals a dusty Cape-cart or a tilted wagon would move
along them, and men, dirtier than the dirt, would come to sell fruit or
scraggy sheep. At night the farm-houses were lighted up in a style out
of all keeping with Dutch economy; the scrub would light itself on some
far headland, and the house-lights twinkled in reply. Three or four days
later the Major would read bad news in the Capetown papers thrown to him
from the passing troop trains.
The guns and their escort changed from Leviathan to the likeness of
wrecked boats, their crews struggling beside them. Presently they took
on their true shape, and lurched into camp amid clouds of dust.
The Mounted Infantry escort set about its evening meal; the hot air
filled with the scent of burning wood; sweating men, rough-dried
sweating horses with wisps of precious forage; the sun dipped behind the
hills, and they heard the whistle of a train from the south.
“What’s that?” said the Major, slipping into his coat. The decencies had
not yet left him.
“Ambulance train,” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, raising his
glasses. “I’d like to talk to a woman again, but it won’t stop here....
It _is_ stopping, though, and making a beastly noise. Let’s look.”
The engine had sprung a leaky tube, and ran lamely into the siding. It
would be two or three hours at least before she could be patched up.
Two doctors and a couple of Nursing Sisters stood on the rear platform
of a carriage. The Major explained the situation, and invited them to
tea.
“We were just going to ask _you_,” said the medical Major of the
ambulance train.
“No, come to our camp. Let the men see a woman again!” he pleaded.
Sister Dorothy, old in the needs of war, for all her twenty-four years,
gathered up a tin of biscuits and some bread and butter new cut by the
orderlies. Sister Margaret picked up the tea-pot, the spirit-lamp, and a
water-bottle.
“Capetown water,” she said with a nod. “Filtered too. _I_ know Karroo
water.” She jumped down lightly on to the ballast.
“What do you know about the Karroo, Sister?” said the Captain of Mounted
Infantry, indulgently, as a veteran of a month’s standing. He understood
that all that desert as it seemed to him was called by that name.
She laughed. “This is my home. I was born out they-ah—just behind that
big range of hills—out Oudtshorn way. It’s only sixty miles from here.
Oh, how good it is!”
She slipped the Nurses’ cap from her head, tossed it through the open
car-window, and drew a breath of deep content. With the sinking of the
sun the dry hills had taken life and glowed against the green of the
horizon. They rose up like jewels in the utterly clear air, while the
valleys between flooded with purple shadow. A mile away, stark-clear,
withered rocks showed as though one could touch them with the hand, and
the voice of a native herdboy in charge of a flock of sheep came in
clear and sharp over twice that distance. Sister Margaret devoured the
huge spaces with eyes unused to shorter ranges, snuffed again the air
that has no equal under God’s skies, and turning to her companion,
said:—“What do _you_ think of it?”
“I am afraid I’m rather singular,” he replied. “Most of us hate the
Karroo. I used to, but it grows on one somehow. I suppose it’s the lack
of fences and roads that’s so fascinating. And when one gets back from
the railway——”
“You’re quite right,” she said, with an emphatic stamp of her foot.
“People come to Matjesfontein—ugh!—with their lungs, and they live
opposite the railway station and that new hotel, and they think _that’s_
the Karroo. They say there isn’t anything in it. It’s _full_ of life
when you really get into it. You see that? I’m so glad. D’you know,
you’re the first English officer I’ve heard who has spoken a good word
for my country?”
“I’m glad I pleased you,” said the Captain, looking into Sister
Margaret’s black-lashed grey eyes under the heavy brown hair shot with
grey where it rolled back from the tanned forehead. This kind of nurse
was new in his experience. The average Sister did not lightly stride
over rolling stones, and—was it possible that her easy pace uphill was
beginning to pump him? As she walked, she hummed joyously to herself, a
queer catchy tune of one line several times repeated:—
Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek.
It ran off with a little trill that sounded like,
Zwaar draa, alle en de ein kant;
Jannie met de hoepel bein![1]
“Listen!” she said, suddenly. “What was that?”
“It must be a wagon on the road. I heard the whip, I think.”
“Yes, but you didn’t hear the wheels, did you? It’s a little bird that
makes just that noise. ‘Whe-ew’!” she duplicated it perfectly. “We call
it”—she gave the Dutch name, which did not, of course, abide with the
Captain. “We must have given him a scare! You hear him in the early
mornings when you are sleeping in the wagons. It’s just like the noise
of a whiplash, isn’t it?”
They entered the Major’s tent a little behind the others, who were
discussing the scanty news of the Campaign.
“Oh, no,” said Sister Margaret coolly, bending over the spirit-lamp,
“the Transvaalers will stay round Kimberley and try to put Rhodes in a
cage. But, of course, if a commando gets through to De Aar they will all
rise——”
“You think so, Sister?” said the medical Major, deferentially.
“I know so. They will rise anywhere in the Colony if a commando comes
actually to them. Presently they will rise in Prieska—if it is only to
steal the forage at Van Wyk’s Vlei. Why not?”
“We get most of our opinions of the war from Sister Margaret,” said the
civilian doctor of the train. “It’s all new to me, but, so far, all her
prophecies have come true.”
A few months ago that doctor had retired from practice to a country
house in rainy England, his fortune made and, as he tried to believe,
his life-work done. Then the bugles blew, and, rejoicing at the change,
he found himself, his experience, and his fine bedside manner, buttoned
up in a black-tabbed khaki coat, on a hospital train that covered eleven
hundred miles a week, carried a hundred wounded each trip and dealt him
more experience in a month than he had ever gained in a year of home
practice.
Sister Margaret and the Captain of Mounted Infantry took their cups
outside the tent. The Captain wished to know something more about her.
Till that day he had believed South Africa to be populated by sullen
Dutchmen and slack-waisted women; and in some clumsy fashion betrayed
the belief.
“Of course, you don’t see any others where you are,” said Sister
Margaret, leniently, from her camp-chair. “They are all at the war. I
have two brothers, and a nephew, my sister’s son, and—oh, I can’t count
my cousins.” She flung her hands outward with a curiously un-English
gesture. “And then, too, you have never been off the railway. You have
only seen Capetown? All the schel—all the useless people are there. You
should see _our_ country beyond the ranges—out Oudtshorn way. We grow
fruit and vines. It is much prettier, _I_ think, than Paarl.”
“I’d like to very much. I may be stationed in Africa after the war is
over.”
“Ah, but we know the English officers. They say that this is a ‘beastly
country,’ and they do not know how to—to be nice to people. Shall I tell
you? There was an aide-de-camp at Government House three years ago. He
sent out invitations to dinner to Piet—to Mr. Van der Hooven’s wife. And
she had been dead eight years, and Van der Hooven—he has the big farms
round Craddock—just then was thinking of changing his politics, you
see—he was against the Government,—and taking a house in Capetown,
because of the Army meat contracts. That was why, you see?”
“I see,” said the Captain, to whom this was all Greek.
“Piet was a little angry—not much—but he went to Capetown, and that
aide-de-camp had made a joke about it—about inviting the dead woman—in
the Civil Service Club. You see? So of _course_ the opposition there
told Van der Hooven that the aide-de-camp had said he could not remember
all the old Dutch vrows that had died, and so Piet Van der Hooven went
away angry, and now he is more hot than ever against the Government. If
you stay with us you must not be like _that_. You see?”
“I won’t,” said the Captain, seriously. “What a night it is, Sister!” He
dwelt lovingly on the last word, as men did in South Africa.
The soft darkness had shut upon them unawares and the world had
vanished. There was not so much breeze as a slow motion of the whole dry
air under the vault of the immeasurably deep heavens. “Look up,” said
the Captain; “doesn’t it make you feel as if we were tumbling down into
the stars—all upside down?”
“Yes,” said Sister Margaret, tilting her head back. “It is always like
that. I know. And those are _our_ stars.”
They burned with a great glory, large as the eyes of cattle by
lamp-light; planet after planet of the mild Southern sky. As the Captain
said, one seemed to be falling from out the hidden earth sheer through
space, between them.
“Now, when I was little,” Sister Margaret began very softly, “there was
one day in the week at home that was all our own. We could get up as
soon as we liked after midnight, and there was the basket in the
kitchen—our food. We used to go out at three o’clock sometimes, my two
brothers, my sisters, and the two little ones—out into the Karroo for
all the day. All—the—long—day. First we built a fire, and then we made a
kraal for the two little ones—a kraal of thorn bushes so that they
should not be bitten by anything. You see? Often we made the kraal
before morning—when those”—she jerked her firm chin at the stars—“were
just going out. Then we old ones went hunting lizards—and snakes and
birds and centipedes, and all that sort of nice thing. Our father
collected them. He gave us half-a-crown for a spuugh-slange—a kind of
snake. You see?”
“How old were you?” Snake-hunting did not strike the Captain as a safe
amusement for the young.
“I was eleven then—or ten, perhaps, and the little ones were two and
three. Why? Then we came back to eat, and we sat under a rock all
afternoon. It was hot, you see, and we played—we played with the stones
and the flowers. You should see our Karroo in spring! All flowers! All
our flowers! Then we came home, carrying the little ones on our backs
asleep—came home through the dark—just like this night. That was our own
day! Oh, the good days! We used to watch the meer-cats playing, too, and
the little buck. When I was at Guy’s, learning to nurse how home-sick
that made me!”
“But what a splendid open-air life!” said the Captain.
“Where else _is_ there to live except the open air?” said Sister
Margaret, looking off into twenty thousand square miles of it with eyes
that burned.
“You’re quite right.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” said Sister Dorothy, who had been
talking to the gunner Major; “but the guard says we shall be ready to go
in a few minutes. Major Devine and Dr. Johnson have gone down already.”
“Very good, Sister. We’ll follow.” The Captain rose unwillingly and made
for the worn path from the camp to the rail.
“Isn’t there another way?” said Sister Margaret. Her grey nursing gown
glimmered like some big moth’s wing.
“No. I’ll bring a lantern. It’s quite safe.”
“I did not think of _that_,” she said with a laugh; “only _we_ never
come home by the way we left it when we live in the Karroo. If any
one—suppose you had dismissed a Kaffir, or got him sjamboked,[2] and he
saw you go out? He would wait for you to come back on a tired horse, and
then.... You see? But, of course, in England where the road is all
walled, it is different. How funny! Even when we were little we learned
never to come home the way we went out.”
“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and
he approved of that.
“That’s a curious sort of woman,” said the Captain to the Major, as they
smoked a lonely pipe together when the train had gone.
“_You_ seemed to think so.”
“Well—I couldn’t monopolize Sister Dorothy in the presence of my senior
officer. What was she like?”
“Oh, it came out that she knew a lot of my people in London. She’s the
daughter of a chap in the next county to us, too.”
* * * * *
The General’s flag still flew before his unstruck tent to amuse Boer
binoculars, and loyal lying correspondents still telegraphed accounts of
his daily work. But the General himself had gone to join an army a
hundred miles away; drawing off from time to time every squadron, gun
and company that he dared. His last words to the few troops he left
behind covered the entire situation.
“If you can bluff ’em till we get round up north to tread on their
tails, it’s all right. If you can’t, they’ll probably eat you up. Hold
’em as long as you can.”
So the skeleton remnant of the brigade lay close among the kopjes till
the Boers, not seeing them in force on the sky-line, feared that they
might have learned the rudiments of war. They rarely disclosed a gun,
for the reason that they had so few; they scouted by fours and fives
instead of clattering troops and chattering companies, and where they
saw a too obvious way opened to attack they, lacking force to drive it
home, looked elsewhere. Great was the anger in the Boer commando across
the river—the anger and unease.
“The reason is they have so few men,” the loyal farmers reported, all
fresh from selling melons to the camp, and drinking Queen Victoria’s
health in good whisky. “They have no horses—only what they call Mounted
Infantry. They are afraid of us. They try to make us friends by giving
us brandy. Come on and shoot them. Then you will see us rise and cut the
line.”
“Yes, we know how you rise, you Colonials,” said the Boer commandant
above his pipe. “We know what has come to all your promises from
Beaufort West, and even from De Aar. _We_ do the work—all the work,—and
you kneel down with your parsons and pray for our success. What good is
that? The President has told you a hundred times God is on our side. Why
do you worry Him? We did not send you Mausers and ammunition for that.”
“We kept our commando-horses ready for six months—and forage is very
dear. We sent all our young men,” said an honoured member of local
society.
“A few here and a few servants there. What is that? You should have
risen down to the sea all together.”
“But you were so quick. Why did not you wait the year? We were not
ready, Jan.”
“That is a lie. All you Cape people lie. You want to save your cattle
and your farms. Wait till _our_ flag flies from here to Port Elizabeth
and you shall see what you will save when the President learns how you
have risen—you clever Cape people.”
The saddle-coloured sons of the soil looked down their noses. “Yes—it is
true. Some of our farms are close to the line. They say at Worcester and
in the Paarl that many soldiers are always coming in from the sea. One
must think of that—at least till they are shot. But we know there are
very few in front of you here. Give them what you gave the fools at
Stormberg, and you will see how we can shoot rooineks.”[3]
“Yes. I know that cow. She is always going to calve. Get away. I am
answerable to the President—not to the Cape.”
But the information stayed in his mind, and, not being a student of
military works, he made a plan to suit. The tall kopje on which the
English had planted their helio-station commanded the more or less open
plain to the northward, but did not command the five-mile belt of broken
country between that and the outmost English pickets, some three miles
from camp. The Boers had established themselves very comfortably among
these rock-ridges and scrub-patches, and the “great war” drizzled down
to long shots and longer stalking. The young bloods wanted rooineks to
shoot, and said so.
“See here,” quoth the experienced Jan van Staden that evening to as many
of his commando as cared to listen. “You youngsters from the Colony talk
a lot. Go and turn the rooineks out of their kopjes to-night. Eh? Go and
take their bayonets from them and stick them into them. Eh? You don’t
go!” He laughed at the silence round the fire.
“Jan—Jan,” said one young man appealingly, “don’t make mock of us.”
“I thought that was what you wanted so badly. No? Then listen to me.
Behind us the grazing is bad. We have too many cattle here.” (They had
been stolen from farmers who had been heard to express fears of defeat.)
“To-morrow, by the sky’s look, it will blow a good wind. So, to-morrow
early I shall send all our cattle north to the new grazing. That will
make a great dust for the English to see from their helio yonder.” He
pointed to a winking night-lamp stabbing the darkness with orders to an
out-lying picket. “With the cattle we will send all our women. Yes, all
the women and the wagons we can spare, and the lame ponies and the
broken carts we took from Andersen’s farm. That will make a big dust—the
dust of our retreat. Do you see?”
They saw and approved, and said so.
“Good. There are many men here who want to go home to their wives. I
shall let thirty of them away for a week. Men who wish to do this will
speak to me to-night.” (This meant that Jan needed money, and furlough
would be granted on strictly business lines.) “These men will look after
the cattle and see that they make a great dust for a long way. They will
run about behind the cattle showing their guns, too. So _that_, if the
wind blows well, will be our retreat. The cattle will feed beyond
Koopman’s Kop.”
“No good water there,” growled a farmer who knew that section. “Better
go on to Zwartpan. It is always sweet at Zwartpan.”
The commando discussed the point for twenty minutes. It was much more
serious than shooting rooineks. Then Jan went on:
“When the rooineks see our retreat they may all come into our kopjes
together. If so, good. But it is tempting God to expect such a favour.
_I_ think they will first send some men to scout.” He grinned broadly,
using the English word. “Almighty! To scoot! They have none of that new
sort of rooinek that they used at Sunnyside.” (Jan meant an
incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the
Southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to kill.) “They
have only some Mounted Infantry,”—again he used the English words. “They
were once a Red-jacket regiment, so their scoots will stand up bravely
to be shot at.”
“Good—good, we will shoot them,” said a youngster from Stellenbosch, who
had come up on free pass as a Capetown excursionist just before the war
to a farm on the border, where his aunt was taking care of his horse and
rifle.
“But if you shoot their scoots I will sjambok you myself,” said Jan,
amid roars of laughter. “We must let them _all_ come into the kopjes to
look for us; and I pray God will not allow any of us to be tempted to
shoot them. They will cross the ford in front of their camp. They will
come along the road—so!” He imitated with ponderous arms the Army style
of riding. “They will trot up the road this way and that way”—here he
snaked his hard finger in the dust—“between kopjes, till they come here,
where they can see the plain and all our cattle going away. Then they
will _all_ come in close together. Perhaps they will even fix their
bayonets. _We_ shall be up here behind the rock—there and there.” He
pointed to two flat-topped kopjes, one on either side of the road, some
eight hundred yards away. “That is our place. We will go there before
sunrise. Remember we must be careful to let the very last of the
rooineks pass before we begin shooting. They will come along a little
careful at first. But we do not shoot. Then they will see our fires and
the fresh horse-dung, so they will know we have gone on. They will run
together and talk and point and shout in this nice open place. Then we
begin shooting them from above.”
“Yes, uncle, but if the scouts see nothing and there are no shots and we
let them go back quite quiet, they will think it was a trick. Perhaps
the main body may never come here at all. Even rooineks learn in
time—and so we may lose even the scouts.”
“I have thought of that too,” said Jan, with slow contempt, as the
Stellenbosch boy delivered his shot. “If you had been _my_ son I should
have sjamboked you more when you were a youngster. I shall put _you_ and
four or five more on the Nek [the pass], where the road comes from their
camp into these kopjes. You go there before it is light. Let the scoots
pass in or I will sjambok you myself. When the scoots come back after
seeing nothing here, then you may shoot them, but not till they have
passed the Nek and are on the straight road to their camp again. Do you
understand? Repeat what I have said, so that I shall know.”
The youth obediently repeated his orders.
“Kill their officers if you can. If not, no great matter, because the
scoots will run to camp with the news that our kopjes are empty. Their
helio-station will see your party trying to hold the Nek so hard—and all
that time they will see our dust out yonder, and they will think you are
the rear-guard, and they will think _we_ are escaping. They will be
angry.”
“Yes—yes, uncle, we see,” from a dozen elderly voices.
“But this calf does not. Be silent! They will shoot at you, Niclaus, on
the Nek, because they will think you are to cover our getting away. They
will shell the Nek. They will miss. You will then ride away. All the
rooineks will come after you, hot and in a hurry—perhaps, even, with
their cannon. They will pass our fires and our fresh horse-dung. They
will come here as their scoots came. They will see the plain so full of
our dust. They will say, ‘The scoots spoke truth. It is a full retreat.’
_Then_ we up there on the rocks will shoot, and it will be like the
fight at Stormberg in daytime. Do you understand _now_?”
Those of the commando directly interested lit new pipes and discussed
the matter in detail till midnight.
Next morning the operations began with, if one may borrow the language
of some official despatches—“the precision of well-oiled machinery.”
The helio-station reported the dust of the wagons and the movements of
armed men in full flight across the plain beyond the kopjes. A Colonel,
newly appointed from England, by reason of his seniority, sent forth a
dozen Mounted Infantry under command of a Captain. Till a month ago they
had been drilled by a cavalry instructor, who taught them “shock”
tactics to the music of trumpets. They knew how to advance in echelon of
squadrons, by cat’s cradle of troops, in quarter column of
stable-litter, how to trot, to gallop, and above all to charge. They
knew how to sit their horses unremittingly, so that at the day’s end
they might boast how many hours they had been in the saddle without
relief, and they learned to rejoice in the clatter and stamp of a troop
moving as such, and therefore audible five miles away.
They trotted out two and two along the farm road, that trailed lazily
through the wind-driven dust; across the half-dried ford to a nek
between low stony hills leading into the debatable land. (Vrooman of
Emmaus from his neatly bushed hole noted that one man carried a sporting
Lee-Enfield rifle with a short fore-end. Vrooman of Emmaus argued that
the owner of it was the officer to be killed on his return, and went to
sleep.) They saw nothing except a small flock of sheep and a Kaffir
herdsman who spoke broken English with curious fluency. He had heard
that the Boers had decided to retreat on account of their sick and
wounded. The Captain in charge of the detachment turned to look at the
helio-station four miles away. “Hurry up,” said the dazzling flash.
“Retreat apparently continues, but suggest you make sure. Quick.”
“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from
a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If
anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my
fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and
advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”
“’Don’t see much ’ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of
the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.
“No? We’ll go on.”
“If we get among these steep ’ills we lose touch of the ’elio.”
“Very likely. Trot.”
The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under
a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the
scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.
Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of
two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards
within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have
explored all the round earth.
They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with
stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed
bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them
over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon
an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty
ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale
bandage.
A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been
thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the
hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes
entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the
nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.
“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire
and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.”
He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A
vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung
motionless.
“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting
commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need
not look, but _here_, where they should look on both sides, they look at
our retreat—straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I
pray God no one will shoot them.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from
his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of
retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.”
He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje
commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less
than Nature’s carelessness.
“That ’ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied—and that other one,
too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ’em.
Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above
his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown
boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The
short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at
their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness
of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest
for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was
pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the
valley, sat heavily on their horses—it never occurred to them to
dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An
impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all
sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.
“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ’em! We’re done!” The
thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly—so
clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for
us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt!
And I led ’em into it!... You fool,” said his other self, above the beat
of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up
there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the
rest of the attack. They don’t want you _now_. You’re to go back and
bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll
suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of
them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go
with the news—the real news.”
“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell
the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for
guns, don’t you think?”
“Hear you that?” said Jan van Staden, gripping a burgher’s arm. “God is
on our side to-day. They _will_ bring their little cannons after all!”
“Go easy. No good bucketing the horses to pieces. We’ll need ’em for the
pursuit later,” said the Captain. “Hullo, there’s a vulture! How far
would you make him?”
“Can’t tell, sir, in this dry air.”
The bird swooped towards the second flat-topped kopje, but suddenly
shivered sideways, and wheeled off again, followed intently by the
Captain’s glance.
“And that kopje’s simply full of ’em, too,” he said, flushing.
“Perfectly confident they are, that we’d take this road—and then they’ll
scupper the whole boiling of us! They’ll let us through to fetch up the
others. But I mustn’t let ’em know we know. By Jove, they do _not_ think
much of us! ’Don’t blame ’em.”
The cunning of the trap did not impress him until later.
Down the track jolted a dozen well-equipped men, laughing and talking—a
mark to make a pious burgher’s mouth water. Thrice had their Captain
explicitly said that they were to march easy, so a trooper began to hum
a tune that he had picked up in Capetown streets:—
Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek;
Jannie met de hoepel bein, Ferriera,
Jannie met de hoepel bein!