“Bullets--The air was a sieve of them.--They beat upon the boulders like
a million hammers. They tore the turf like a harrow!”
These three lines came out of a recent number of the _Daily Mail_, and
they describe Elandslaagte. Is it, I wonder, because Literature is so
much more familiar to me than War that I seem to require the aid of the
one in order to bring home to me the reality of the other? These three
lines are certainly literature, literature of the impressionist kind,
which, if not the best in the abstract, is at any rate the best for such
a purpose. Trying to put oneself into the position of such a bystander
as the writer of them, I am able to fancy that if the bullets came thick
enough they really _might_ seem to tear the turf like a harrow. In what
way exactly the air could be said to be a sieve of them, I am not clear,
yet the phrase seems to live, and therefore to carry its own
justification. As it happens I was out yesterday in a rather
exceptionally imposing hail-storm. It was so dry that there was no
occasion to hurry, and I stood still for a while to study effects. The
stones, as they pattered and rattled round me, might--danger apart--have
quite served as a suggestion of the other sort of rattling and
pattering. Looking at them dispassionately I inquired of myself, “Would
one run?” and Truth--there being no one else present--promptly replied,
“Madly!” So, save for the grace of acquired training, I take it would
nearly everybody. My hail bullets seemed to be in a prodigious hurry,
and were being prodigally, if not very scientifically, directed by
marksmen concealed somewhere above Leith hill. They hissed, they danced,
they ricochetted off the trees, they bespattered the ground in all
directions in a very businesslike and realistic fashion. There was a
good deal of snow still lying unmelted in corners, and into that snow
the new-comers as they fell cut deep little pits, and disappeared from
sight in an instant. Elsewhere they drove in white flocks over the
ground, hardly melting at all. They were not quite so large as carrots,
as someone assured me that he had once seen hailstones, but they were
certainly as large as fair-sized gooseberries. Through such a furious
hail--only appropriately black--the famous Bagarrah cavalry rode to
their deaths last September year. Through such a hail, as thick, as
fierce, as brutally indifferent, who that one knows, that one cares for,
may not be riding or walking to-day?