If what lies beyond the next few weeks could be suddenly laid open to
us, what should we see? It is, I am aware, rank cowardice upon my part,
but if by merely ruffling over the blank pages of this diary which I
hold in my hand I could in an instant find out, I know that I should
refuse to do so. The same feeling has beset me before now, but hitherto
always with regard to personal matters; never, so far as I can remember,
with regard to public ones. Three weeks! It is not a very long time.
Only a few more crocuses and scillas will be out in our little Dutch
garden; only a few more oaks and chestnuts cut in the copse, yet within
that time the fate of Ladysmith must be decided. Should help fail to
reach it--and it may well prove impossible--what shall we see? what will
the world see? what will our various enemies see? Only two alternatives
appear to be open: an unbelievable surrender, and an only too easily
believable slaughter. That last of course is the central thought, the
unendurable one; the vision that hangs before one’s eyes day and night.
Death upon those iron hills; death without the possibility of
accomplishing anything; death under the most unendurable of conditions;
shot helplessly, like the furred or the feathered beasts of a _battue_.
I write it down deliberately, in the hope of thereby getting rid of it,
for it haunts one unendurably. With that perversity, which makes us all
at times our own most ingenious torturer, my mind revolves continually
around the disaster before it comes, and fills up every detail with the
most diabolical distinctness. “Fall of Ladysmith! Fall of Ladysmith!
Destruction of the garrison!” It seems to reverberate along the roads;
it presents itself upon every village hoarding, as a friend of mine saw
it several times this winter upon those of the Paris boulevards. Before
I open my paper in the morning it seems to be hidden under the folds,
ready like an asp to spring out and poison me. At night I fall asleep to
the thought of it, and in my dreams it performs wild and Weirtz-like
antics, projecting itself in and out of them with all that monstrous
reduplication which the besetting idea has a way of achieving for
itself, when the brain that originated it is nominally asleep, and at
peace.