Impressions of a War Correspondent Part 1

Impressions of a War Correspondent.

by George Lynch.

INTRODUCTION

There are few people in the world who have more opportunity for getting close to the hot, interesting things of one's time than the special correspondent of a great paper. He is enabled to see "the wheels go round;" has the chance of getting his knowledge at first hand. In stirring times the drama of life is to him like the first night of a play. There are no preconceived opinions for him to go by; he ought not to, at least, be influenced by any prejudices; and the account of the performance is to some extent like that of the dramatic critic, inasmuch as that the verdict of the public or of history has either to confirm or reverse his own judgment. There is a peculiar and unique fascination about this reading of contemporary history, as it grows and develops while one peers with straining eyes through one's gla.s.ses. There is something like a first night, too, about the way the critics view things. Sometimes great difference of opinion. I recollect the afternoon of Nicholson's Nek-Black Monday, as it was afterwards called-when we returned into Ladysmith half the correspondents seemed to be under the impression that the day had been quite a successful one; while, on the other hand, one had headed his despatch with the words, "Dies Irae, dies illa!" To get to the heart of things; to see the upspringing of the streams of active and strenuous life; to watch the great struggles of the world, not always the greatest in war, but the often more mighty, if quiet and dead silent, whose sweeping powerfulness is hidden under a smooth calmness of surface-to watch all this is to intimately taste a great delicious joy of life. The researches of the historian of bygone times are fascinating-absorbingly fascinating, although he is always handicapped by remoteness; but the historian of to-day-of his day-this day-whose day-page of history is read by hundreds of readers, the day after has set to him a task that calls for all, and more than all, that he can give-stimulates while it appalls, and would be killingly wearying if it were not so fascinatingly attractive. That close contact with the men of this struggling world, and the men who do things, and shove these life-wheels round, warms up in one a great love for one's kind-a comrade feeling, like that which comes from being tent-mates in a long campaign. Two o'clock in the morning wake to the tramp, tramp of men marching in the dark-marching out to fight-and the unknown Tommy you march beside and talk to in low voice, as men talk at that hour, is your comrade unto the day's end of fighting; when returning, to the sentries' challenge you answer "A friend," and, dog-tired, you re-enter the lines, welcomed by his sesame call, "Pa.s.s, friend; all is well."

IMPRESSIONS OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT

I

THE DANCE OF DEATH

Death from a Mauser bullet is less painful than the drawing of a tooth. Such, at least, appears to be the case, speaking generally from apparent evidence, without having the opportunity of collecting the opinions of those who have actually died. In books we have read of shrieks of expiring agony; but ask those who have been on many battlefields, and they will not tell you they have heard them. As a rule a sudden exclamation, "I'm hit!" "My G.o.d!" "d.a.m.n it!" They look as if staggering from the blow of a fist rather than that from a tiny pencil of lead-then a sudden paleness, perhaps a grasping of the hands occasionally as if to hold on to something, when the bottom seems to be falling out of all things stable, but generally no sign of aught else than the dulling of death-dulling to sleep-a drunken sleep-drunken death it often seems-very commonplace as a rule. A smile as often as, or oftener than, any sign of pain, but generally no sign of either. Think of this, mourning mothers of England. Don't picture your sons as drowning out of the world racked with the red torture from the bullet's track, but just as dropping off dully to sleep, most probably with no thought of you or home, without anxiety or regret. Merciful Mauser! He suffered much more pain when you brought him long ago to the dentist, and his agony in that horrible chair was infinitely greater than on his bed on the veldt. Merciful Mauser be thanked!

The first man I saw badly hit during the war was a Devon at Elandslaagte, just after they had advanced within rifle-range. He was shot through the head, and it seemed quite useless for the bearers to take the trouble of carrying him off the field; yet they went back looking in vain for a field ambulance. They carried him instead to the cart belonging to a well-known war correspondent. The owner had given the driver strict orders to remain where he was until his return, but the sh.e.l.ls were falling around the cart, which, in fact, seemed to be made a mark of by the Boer gunners-perhaps they thought it belonged to one of our generals, whom they may have imagined had taken to driving, like Joubert and some others of theirs. The arrival of the wounded man was a great G.o.dsend to the driver, who immediately, with the most humane insistence, offered to drive him to the nearest field hospital. Neither cart nor driver was again seen until long after the battle was over, about nine o'clock in the evening. Strange to say, the man recovered from his wound.

In our first engagements there was rather too much anxiety on the part of a wounded man's comrades to carry him to the rear; but it did not continue for long. The actuating motive is not always kindness and humanity, but a desire to get out of danger. It was soon evident that it was only going from the frying-pan into the fire, as the danger of walking back carrying a wounded man was immensely greater than remaining or advancing more or less on one's stomach. Sometimes it was the unfortunate wounded man who was. .h.i.t again. Men carrying off a wounded comrade of course render themselves strictly liable to be regarded as combatants.

A still more absurd practice was that of sometimes attempting to carry off the dead during an engagement. An instance of this was seen at Rietfontein. A couple of men of a Volunteer regiment were coming across the open ground below the hill under a pretty brisk fire, when Dr. H--, himself one of the most fearless of men, called out to them, "S-- has been killed down there; better bring him in." They turned back immediately, and one of them, J. Gillespie, got off his horse and lifted the corpse on to the saddle, they holding it in position by hanging on to a leg on either side, and walked back, while the bullets were whistling around them, and knocking up little spurts of dirt on the ground in front of them. It was a most ghastly sight; the head of the corpse bobbed about with the motion of the horse, and the lips of the corpse were drawn back in a horrible grin, as if he were laughing idiotically at them for trying to qualify for a Victoria Cross with a corpse. I really think they deserved it just as much as if he had been alive.

A curious thing happened to a horse of one of the men who were performing this feat. The owner found when he had returned to Ladysmith that his water-bottle, which was attached to his saddle, had been perforated by a bullet. Showing it to another in the evening, they came to the conclusion, from the position of the holes, that it would be impossible for the holes to be made in the position they were without wounding the horse. The next day, on examining the horse, he found a bullet had actually pa.s.sed through and through him, and yet apparently he seemed none the worse.

There was another but different instance of a horse carrying a corpse at the battle of Lombard's Kop. There was no leering and hideous grinning at us, however, as the rider's head had been blown clean away by a Boer sh.e.l.l. The 5th Lancers were riding out on our right, when a single horse came galloping past them, clattering furiously over the stony veldt. No wonder the men stared; it was a sight to be remembered. The rider was firmly fixed in the deep cavalry saddle; the reins tossed loose with the horse's mane, and both hands were clenched against either side of his breast; and the head was cut off clean at the shoulders. Perhaps in the spasm of that death-tear the rider had gripped his horse's sides with his long-spurred heels; perhaps the horse also was wounded; anyhow, with head down, and wild and terrified eyes, his shoulders foam-bespewed, he tore past as if in horror of the ghastly burden he carried.

How wonderfully expressive are the eyes of these cavalry horses at times! There it seemed sheer horror; but often when wounded they look towards one with a world of pitiful appeal for relief; in their dumbness loud-voicedly reproachful against the horrors of war.

Two men being killed on one horse seems rather a tall order, yet it is perfectly true. It happened at the cavalry charge after Elandslaagte. Some of the Boers stood their ground with great stubbornness till our cavalry were only a few yards away. One middle-aged, bearded fellow stayed just a little too long, and had not time to get to his horse, which was a few yards away. He scrambled up behind a brother Boer who was just mounting, but almost immediately the 5th Lancers were upon them. There was a farrier-corporal, an immensely big, powerful fellow, who singled them out. They were galloping down a slight incline as hard as they could get their horse to travel, but their pursuer was gaining on them at every stride. When he came within striking distance he jammed his spurs into his big horse, who sprang forward like a tiger. Weight of man and horse, impetus of gallop and hill, focused in that bright lance-point held as in a vice. It pierced the left side of the back of the man behind, and the point came out through the right side of the man in front, who, with a convulsive movement, threw up his hands, flinging his rifle in the air. The Lancer could not withdraw his lance as the men swayed and dropped from their horse, but galloped on into the gathering darkness punctured with rifle flashes here and there and flitting forms that might be friend or foe. This poor fellow was killed a few days after at the battle of Rietfontein. How heartily the Boers hated these Lancers! They would have liked so much to have had lances barred as against the rules of war; and it would certainly have made an immense difference if our side had succeeded in getting a few more chances, especially at the commencement of the war, of using the lance.

The natives, numbers of whom were looking on at this battle, were greatly delighted with the cavalry charge. It seemed to take their fancy even more than did the artillery. "Great fight, baas-plenty much blood, plenty much blood," one of them described it. He said he was crouching down behind a sheltering rock while the Boers were running away past him, and then "the men with the a.s.segais" came galloping after them. A Boer without his horse came running along, and, pulling him out, took his place behind the stone. A soldier galloped along and called out, "Hallo, Johnny, what are you doing here? You'll get hurt." Then, catching sight of the Boer, he stuck him down through the back as he pa.s.sed. "Ah, baas, great fight-plenty much blood."

Wounds or death by Mauser bullets, or even by the thrust of a lance, are not to be compared, from the point of view of their pain-inflicting possibilities, with what may be done in that way by the fragment of a sh.e.l.l. That's the thing that hurts. Sh.e.l.l fire, speaking generally, is the "Bogy of Battle" to those not accustomed to it. The main purpose it accomplishes is to "establish a funk." When the actual damage done by sh.e.l.l fire after a battle is counted up and the number of sh.e.l.ls fired, the results are most surprising. A poet in the Ladysmith Lyre wrote-

"One thing is certain in this town of lies: If Long Tom hits you on the head you dies."

You do-unquestionably; but perhaps it is worse still to get a piece of a sh.e.l.l somewhere else. What frightful wounds they make sometimes! what mangled butchery in their track! See some poor fellow stretched on the operating-table, stripped for the patching or tr.i.m.m.i.n.g which half-helpless surgery can supply. Apart from head and hands, which are sure to be khaki-colour with dirt caked in with sweat, the average Tommy usually presents a fine specimen of the human form divine-what is there finer in the world than the body of a well-shaped, muscular man? I always prefer the figure of the fighting gladiator to that of the Apollo Belvedere-and then, when sh.e.l.l fragments tear this body, it looks like some unspeakably unhallowed sacrilege. The horribly unlucky way these fragments seem to go in-an uncouth and butchering way instead of the gentlemanly puncture of the Mauser. One afternoon a young fellow galloped past me in the main street of Ladysmith. He had just got opposite the Town Hall hospital, when a sh.e.l.l from Bulwana burst right under his horse. When the cloud of dust and smoke cleared away, we found the horse lying on the road completely disembowelled, and the poor fellow flung on to the footpath, with a long piece of sh.e.l.l sticking in his side. As he was taken into the hospital he said, "This means two more Dutchmen killed." But the wound was obviously fatal; there was no use even in removing the piece of sh.e.l.l. The clergyman came to him and spoke to him for some time, and told him that there was no hope of recovery for him. He seemed to get tired of his ministrations, and asked them to "send down for my chum." When this chum arrived he was unable to speak, but just pressed his hand and smiled, and went off into his death-sleep.

A boy, who could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, was lying on the side of the hill with his head on a flat stone. He had been hit by a piece of sh.e.l.l, and both his legs were broken and mangled above the knee. He was done for, and his life was only a matter of lasting some minutes. Another man, wounded somewhere internally, was lying beside him. There was no sign of pain on the boy's face; his eyes were closed. He just seemed very tired. Opening his eyes, he looked downwards intently at his legs, which were lying at an oblique angle with his body, from where they had been hit. It looked as if his trousers were the only attachment. As he gazed intently, a troubled look came over his face, and his wounded comrade beside him was watching him and saw it. The tired eyes closed again wearily, and then the wounded man alongside him, cursing with variegated and rich vocabulary, bent, or half rolled over, and caught first one boot and then the other, and lifted each leg straight down, swearing under his breath the while. Then he lay back, swearing at the blankety blank young blanker, and still watching him. Soon the tired eyes opened again, and instinctively looked down at his legs. They seemed to open wider as he looked; then he smiled faintly, thinking he had been mistaken about them before, and lay back, and the eyes did not open any more. The fellow beside him chuckled and said to himself, "Well, I'm d.a.m.ned!" but possibly the Recording Angel has put down a mark that may help to prevent it.

Times are changed from ages past; there is no longer the mighty "shock of arms," the pomp and panoply of glorious war. Men fall to the shrill whisper of a bullet, the sound of which has not time to reach their ears, fired by an invisible foe. Their death is merely the quod erat demonstrandum of a mathematical and mechanical proposition. But with bow and arrow, spear or battle-axe, Mauser or Lee-Metford, the heart behind the weapon is just the same now as then. Probably faint hearts fail now as then, just as much-shrink to a panic that falls on them suddenly as cold mist on mountain-top; and the stout hearts wait and endure, and perhaps do more of the waiting, and have to sweat and swear and endure this waiting longer now than then before the intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts' desire, when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their souls cries "Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low in every man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured, like the juicy battlefields of old, "with carrion men groaning for burial."

II

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The reading of a liver advertis.e.m.e.nt in one of the home papers would show all your symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one knew it was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the indifferent food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food becomes absolutely distasteful, when the appet.i.te begins to go. A long day's riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appet.i.te for dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only just lies down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there is something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very distasteful, so he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day he comes very near a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy, and then some comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his temperature is perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question of being sent out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being exiled to Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said good-bye when it would have been more cheering to have said au revoir. The train left for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the morning, carrying its load of those who had been wounded in the previous twenty-four hours, as well as the sick. It was a sad journey out; men could not help cursing their bad luck and wondering what would be before them as a result of the journey, wondering if they should ever rejoin their regiments or if their next journey would not be back to the cemetery they were now pa.s.sing on their right, growing every day more ominously populous. The hospital camp at Intombi was a collection of tents and large marquees, civilian doctors attending the Volunteers and Army doctors the Regulars. There was also a considerable number of the inhabitants of Ladysmith, not alone women and children, but men. Hence the reason that it got christened Camp Funk by the inhabitants that remained in the town. Situated on the flat of the plain, on a level with the river banks, it was by no means an ideal situation for a fever hospital, but still it was a great thing to be out of the way of these irregularly dropping sh.e.l.ls and to know one was away from them. "Long Tom," on Bulwana, shook the very ground when he fired, and, with the other guns there, often got on the nerves of many of the patients to a trying extent, and the Boers, as a rule, started firing at sunrise, just about the time when the poor devil who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot night in fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just sinking into sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head and the rush of the sh.e.l.l, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as it speeds on its arched course towards the devoted town.

A curious pa.s.sive fight the patient settles down to, with a fatal little thermometer keeping score and marking the game-a sort of tug-of-war between doctors and Disease. The ground is marked in degrees from 98.4 to 106, the former being normal temperature, the later the point at which, as a rule, disease wins the game.

Take the case of a fellow the author knows intimately. He had held out too long without going to hospital, putting down his weakness, la.s.situde, and general feeling of extreme cheapness to the climate instead of the real cause, with the result that he started on the real struggle with a temperature of 104.8. At the very start Disease had pulled him over nastily close to his line, and was still pulling him over, as his temperature was rising point by point. There are various methods of treatment-with him they fought it with a drug called phenacetin, and to the lay mind a wonderful drug it appears. It is not effective with every one. A man in the next bed to him might have been taking breadcrumbs for all effect it produced. With him, however, it worked like clockwork. No sooner was a five-grain dose swallowed than the temperature stopped in its upward course. Then, gradually, like in a good Turkish bath, the pores of his skin opened, and a most complete and profuse perspiration ensued, which was allowed to go on for a couple of hours. Then, with bed and bedclothes drenched, he lay weak, limp, and feeling like a squeezed sponge, but with a temperature that shows three degrees marked down towards his own line. Should there be a nurse available the patient is washed down and put into fresh clothes and pyjamas; if not, as was most usually the case, he lies in his sweat, his skin chilling in patches for a while, and feeling sticky and uncomfortable all over, but too limp to move. The drug has a strange and wonderfully clearing effect on the brain. He feels as if all his previous life had been pa.s.sed in some land of twilight. Now he lives in a land of glorious light-light that pervades everything. His eyelids are closed to shut in the glorious light. He seems to have been sitting in some dark theatre when the lights have been turned on on a glorious transformation scene. He has circled the world and seen its loveliest places, but only now sees how beautiful they were. In Samoa, and the Pali at Honolulu, he sees the individual leaves s.h.i.+mmering in the clear air, and then on his quickened consciousness falls a great sense of the beauty of the world. Separate from the beauty of the world seems the life on it, and now for the first time his lips are pressed to her bluest veins. "I want to take your temperature, please," as he feels the little gla.s.s tube at the dry skin of his lips. "105.2," he hears whispered when it is withdrawn. They think he cannot hear as he lies motionless with eyes closed. All the three degrees have been lost, and more-it is a score for Disease. Another dose of phenacetin-surely all that glorious, untravelled, half-tasted world is too beautiful and rich with promise to leave, too full of music he has not heard, too full of pictures he has not seen, too full of unplucked laurels, of lips unkissed, of sunsets which have not yet painted the clouds in their setting-above all, along the pa.s.sed path of his life are neglected flowers of love lying which he has walked on with scarce a smile of thanks for the throwers, whose hands, perchance now withering, he longs to kiss.

Temporarily the thermometer score is favourable to him again, but all he can do is to lie very still, knowing that every feather-pressure of strength will be wanted. Lying sideways, as he has been s.h.i.+fted round by his nurse on the pillow, he hears the pump, pump of his heart. He never noted that pumping before as he does now-quick and strenuous it is, but still strong, without the spur of stimulants. Pump on, old heart, he thought-speaks, and on it pumps through the long hours of watching and waiting; and he watches as a captain might watch the pumping of his water-logged s.h.i.+p. He is lucky to have a heart that works like that. The man beside him was being given brandy every three hours to help the action of his heart. Another thing he was lucky in was in being free from headache. A sufferer farther down from time to time called aloud in agony from the terrible splitting pains in his head, while his was clear to a supersensitive degree-too clear and active to allow of sleep-and soon came the time when he longed with a great yearning for the sleep that would not come. It seemed cruel and unfair that any beggar, any coolie in the fields, any convict could have this sleep that was denied him. How he tried to fix his mind on quiet scenes with the sound of falling water, or the sound of falling breakers fringing the rocks of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn! But sleep would not come; the panorama of the world spun from scene to scene all the faster as he tossed limply and wearily. Custos, quid de nocte? How slowly pa.s.ses the night, and night sleepless merges into sleepless day, and for a week the struggle hangs on the winning line of Disease. Each time the thermometer is drawn from his mouth an ever new-born hope which has risen dies with the whispered score, but still the heart pumps strenuously, telling of life and hope the while. On the morning of the sixth day the score is down a degree. Too good to believe in until confirmed by the midday record, and then very, very slowly, by fractions of degrees, it shows less than the record of the previous days. In the cool quietude of some Continental sculpture gallery-he cannot tell where-he has seen a statue of Icarus-Icarus just feeling the earth-spurning power of his new-given wings; Icarus on tip-toe, with head up and G.o.dly-moulded chest and dilated nostrils, drinking in the clear air, and extended arms towards his new possession of the clouds. The glorious embodiment of G.o.d-like life, earth-spurning, heavens-enjoying-and as such he feels-he forgets that his frame is a skin-covered skeleton, that his legs would not bear him upright. He knows only that the spirit of life has been breathed into him again, and that it is very good to be alive. The feeling of being "half in love with easeful death" has pa.s.sed. The orchestra of life will play for him again. How irksomely slow the days pa.s.s until the score reaches his winning-line of normal! and in time he sees how easily it might have been otherwise. His room-mate on his right got delirious, and refused all nourishment. He struggled violently even against the stimulants prescribed for him. His nurse would spend half an hour trying to get a little down. Then he had seen an extreme attempt made to feed him one night. He was held while a tube was pa.s.sed through the back of his nose and so down his throat, but no sooner was it down than the strength of fever, like that of a maniac, proved too strong for his nurses; they could no longer hold him. There was a horrible struggle, with choking coughs and dark blood flowing from his nostrils, and the brandy was spilt on his face and smarting in his eyes. He spent days dying, and more rapid and more feeble grew his pulse, and many times the nurse said there was none perceptible, and then the life would flicker up again. One morning early a bugle sounded outside. He said, "I am on outpost duty to-day; I must get up at once." He half lifted himself in the bed, repeating, "I tell you I am on outpost duty." The nurse pressed him back gently, and he died. He seemed to have no friends or relatives, no one who knew anything about him. There was a letter found in his pocket showing that he had a mother in a village in Ireland, and that he was her only son.

On the other side of our friend was a poor fellow unceasingly racked with pain either in head or abdomen. His temperature was not extremely high, but he seemed to be falling away from the pain of the poisonous disease. His pulse was weak, and had to be kept going with constant stimulants. When in the ordinary course of things the disease should have pa.s.sed he got a series of rigors and s.h.i.+vering fits about every third day, with a cold sweat. While the s.h.i.+vering was on him his temperature would drop to normal or lower, and then bound up to 103 or 104. He had a terrible dread of these fits, and it was pitiful to see him watching their oncoming. Each one that came left him weaker as it pa.s.sed off.

We are coming back to England in a s.h.i.+p laden with the human wreckage of war-the wounded, the maimed, the sick, who to their graves will carry the maiming of their sickness. There are, amongst these men, those who will crawl about the world lop-sided, incomplete cripples, or those who will be perpetually victims to intermittent or chronic disease; but there is a worse than any of these disasters to the victim. The man without a leg can get along with a crutch. We know one who lost both legs in Egypt who goes about on a little four-wheeled wooden cart, propelling himself with his hands, and haunts the precincts of a certain club, where the members, seeing the badge which he still wears in his cap, often give him enough to get drunk on. The man who loses his sight from the earth-scattering sh.e.l.l can at worst carry a label to tell that he was blinded in the war, and his charitable fellow-countrymen will give him enough to keep him enjoying life through the channels of the four other senses, and he will still admit that it is good to be alive. Blindness is bad, but war deals worse blows than in the eyes. It deals blows under which the reason itself staggers and is maimed. The lunatic asylum is worse than the hospital. We are carrying back nine men who have lost their reason at Magersfontein and other battles; two have been mercifully treated and have lost it completely-the padded cell must mean a certain unconsciousness; but the greatest, deepest pity of which the human heart is capable is called forth by those who are maimed in mind. Long lucid intervals of perfect sanity give them time to learn the meaning of the locks and bars. "Yes, I know; I went off my head after Magersfontein," one poor fellow tells you; another repeatedly asks, "Will they put me into an asylum when I go home?" What a home-coming! Sure enough it is to the asylum they are going. They will be lost to what friends or relatives they have in that oblivion of a living grave. When their comrades return, not the faintest echo of the cheering will reach their cells. Men do not like to talk of madness; they will point with pride and pity to chums and comrades bearing honourable wounds, but these poor wretches will just disappear, lost in the great aftermath of war. We still have the expressions "frightened out of his senses" or "frightened out of his wits," and here are instances of its actually occurring, the strain on nerves being more than the brains of these men could stand. Is it that their nervous organisation has become more highly strung and bears the strain less st.u.r.dily than in times past, or that there is for some minds a hidden terror in the sightless, invisible death that whistles over them as they lie belly-pressing the earth in the face of an unseeable foe? It is not inconceivable that this may have an effect like some horrible nightmare amid all the glare of daylight on some minds. The man is held there in terror by the worse terror of running away; a comrade on his right grows callous by waiting, and to relieve the wants of nature raises himself up and gets. .h.i.t; the thirst of another overcomes him, and he runs to fill his water-bottle and falls; and all day long, through heat and hunger and thirst, he is held there in a vice of increasing terror, like a child left in the dark denied the language of a cry. It takes strong nerves to stand that strain, we all must admit who have any personal knowledge of what it means; and what a gathering up of the reins of self-control we often experience! What wonder, then, that weak nerves cannot stand it, but sometimes break down under the strain? Such a collapse has a way of being regarded as the uttermost sign of abject cowardice, which by no means follows-nervous men are frequently the bravest of the brave. The refinement of modern shooting-irons seems to call for a certain corresponding refinement of courage-the cold, steel-like courage that can stand and wait, and win by the waiting of their stand.

III

ELANDSLAAGTE

Up before daybreak, but still not early enough, as the Imperial Light Horse and a battery of Natal Artillery had already gone towards Elandslaagte, about sixteen miles from here, at three o'clock.

It was bitterly cold when we started, and for a couple of hours of our journey. About half a mile beyond Modder's Spruit Station we met a man walking along the road in his socks, carrying a pair of heavy boots. He told us he had just escaped from the Boers, after having been, with thirty other miners, their prisoner since Thursday last. His feet were sore from running in the big boots, and he was nearly exhausted.

The Boers had looted the stores, station, and mining office at Elandslaagte, and in addition had looted a lot of luggage taken in the captured train. The evening before he had seen a drunken Boer strutting about dressed in a suit of evening clothes belonging to an English officer. There were a lot of low-cla.s.s Boers amongst the eight hundred there who spent riotous evenings, getting drunk on the liquor found in the stores; but others of them seemed decent sort of farmers, and all the prisoners were very well treated by General Koch, and were allowed to go about on parole, being merely required to report themselves once a day.

Bringing Wounded Back Into Ladysmith.

We pushed on, and in the distance could hear the report of cannon. We soon discovered a little artillery duel in progress between the Natal battery and the Boer guns. The Natals were barking away pluckily, but quite ineffectually against their very superior opponents, who were making really excellent practice, and they struck an artillery waggon, blowing it to pieces, and missed the artillery train by barely twenty yards, a sh.e.l.l falling on either side of it. It was clear we could remain here no longer, so the order was given to retire. The guns limbered up, leaving the shattered wreck of the waggon behind, and the trains commenced to move back slowly, keeping pace with the cavalry and artillery. The Boer guns kept firing until out of range, and then there was a desultory pitter-patter of rifle fire at a sufficient distance to be completely ineffectual.

We retired back just behind Modder's Spruit Station and rested there. The sun had now broken through the clouds and poured down hot on the yellow veldt, where we were. A beautiful scene stretched away before us. The veldt was not all yellow, but in low-lying places, after the recent rain, was beginning to be streaked with vivid green. Opposite us, across the flat or gently undulating veldt in the middle distance, were hills and kopjes, while beyond, purple under clouds or light blue in suns.h.i.+ne, rose to the far horizon mountains, pointed, or of that quite flat-topped shape so characteristic of this country.

No one who has been through this day can ever forget the beautiful series of military tableaux, the gorgeous colouring, the constantly varying effects of light and shade, under clear, blue sky, or when piles of great white c.u.muli were pa.s.sing, until, darkening with the progress of the fight, an unnatural gloom blackened the heavens, and from the inky clouds torrents of rain poured upon the combatants. The variety of colour, light, and shade was only equalled by the variety of the military movements during the day. A complete series of sketches or photographs would serve for ill.u.s.trations for a handbook of modern tactics-the reconnaissance in force in the morning-engagement-orderly retreat carried out exactly according to book-march out of main body; advance of main body, cavalry on each flank, skirmis.h.i.+ng outflanking movement on the right, etc., etc., on to the cavalry charging through and through retreating and beaten enemy.

At 11.20 two squadrons of cavalry and a battery of artillery arrive, and shortly after another train full of troops is seen approaching in the distance.

Chatting with Colonel Chisholme, of the Imperial Light Horse, I was chaffing him about calling them "light," pointing out a group of giants standing near him; but he agreed that their hearts were light, anyhow, whatever their weight might be. He had commenced his military career when eighteen in the 9th Lancers, and his Imperial Light Horse was embodied on the 9, 9, 99. He was telling how all the important dates of his life had a 9 in them, as Major Douglas Haig galloped up and told him we were going to start. I said, "All these nines clearly point to your living to ninety-nine." "Oh no," he laughed back, cheerily, "I don't wish to live to be as old as that." His wish was gratified.

"Saddle," "Prepare to mount," "Mount." We were going forward again.

At 1.30 we started, after just two hours' rest, in which the main body had come up, so that our entire force now consisted of the 5th Lancers, Imperial Light Horse, two field batteries of Royal Artillery, the Devons.h.i.+re Regiment, half a battalion of the Manchester, and half a battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. At 1.55 fire opened from the tops of the line of ridges running parallel to the railway line, which were all lined with men. Some of the 5th Lancers have already gone off to the extreme right. At the foot of the first hill, from which firing proceeds, a squadron of the Border Mounted Rifles are dismounting, and now two lines of khaki figures are climbing steadily up the hill. Long before they reach the top the Boers are seen retiring. They have no idea of making a stand yet, and as the khaki figures reach the summit the Lancers, sweeping round from the extreme right flank, join them. During this time the Devons and Manchesters have been pouring out of the train, and are now crossing the veldt in dotted lines towards the ridge of hills.

2.15.-Another train now appears, bringing further reinforcements.

2.30.-Quite a hot fire now opens on the extreme left, and in a few minutes the artillery are ordered forward, and the six guns pa.s.s us at a gallop. They are soon lined up and firing shrapnel at some Boers, who scurry away over the brow of a kopje. The guns limber up and jump the railway line-a pretty stiff little obstacle-the narrow gauge metals being on top of a narrow embankment. Then across a level field of veldt, and they commence to ascend a slight depression, which is just behind a shouldering billow of veldt. It is hard work for the artillery horses over this ground, but it is fine the way they tug and strain at their work. The officers urge the men to hurry forward. Already a gun is heard from the Boers. They have opened fire. Two wheelers of an artillery waggon drop down, apparently dead, from exhaustion.

I had just been watching their heavy sweating sides and foam-streaming mouths before they collapsed. Already two spare horses are being brought round to replace them as we hurry forward.

Now, all of a sudden, things become lively, and do not slacken again until the finish. No sooner have the first of the cavalry appeared than the Dutch guns open fire. R-r-r-r rip-a sh.e.l.l drops amongst the artillery and cavalry just ahead of us. The cavalry wheel and spread themselves into more open order none too soon, as now the sh.e.l.ls come fast. The Boers have got the range exactly. Bang bursts a sh.e.l.l amongst the Imperial Light Horse near me. A sh.e.l.l bursts quite close, and a piece drops between Bennett Burleigh and me. The life, vigour, and swing of movement of these few minutes when we first came under fire was magnificent, the cavalry wheeling and circling, infantry deploying, the rattle of the artillery waggons, the cracking of the drivers' whips on the backs of the straining, struggling horses, the rending sound of the sh.e.l.ls in the air like the tearing of a great canvas mainsail; the loud report when a sh.e.l.l exploded, or the dull thud when they simply buried themselves in the veldt.

How lucky for us so few of them exploded! There would have been terrible damage done, especially by the first few shots, when the cavalry and artillery were ma.s.sed together. It was now for a while an artillery duel, but the Devons were quietly getting forward for the front attack. The cavalry had swung out on the extreme right flank, and the Manchesters and Gordons were going on to the ridge to take them on their right flank there, while the Devons went up the face.

The Boers changed their artillery fire from time to time; first it was at our artillery and cavalry, then into the Devons as they advanced or as they lay down in the last field of veldt, waiting for the final charge; and then they sent a few sh.e.l.ls into a body of cavalry that was on our extreme left. The very last shot they fired was a good one, just when the fight was over, right into our guns.

I saw a little rocky point ahead of me, as if made on purpose for a war correspondent. By running across some open ground I was on to it. There was good if not ample cover on the top. It was in the middle of the angle made by the line of advance of the men along the ridge and the line of the Devons' main advance, and quite close to the hill. Stretching away on our left over a level khaki-coloured sloping field (if I may so call it) of veldt, were the Devons lying behind ant-hills, placed as if on purpose to give scant but welcome shelter to troops advancing under fire. The colour-scheme of the whole stretch was perfect for concealment, and there was Tommy learning more of how to take advantage of scant cover in this half-hour, under the bitter pitter-patter of Mauser bullets, than he would learn at home in years of manuvres.