Privates Sobbed With Their Stained Faces Buried
In Their Hands.
Of all tests of discipline that ever they had
stood, the hardest to many was to conform to all that the cursed
flapping handkerchief meant to them.
'Father, father, we had rather
have died,' cried the Fusiliers to their priest. Gallant hearts,
ill paid, ill thanked, how poorly do the successful of the world
compare with their unselfish loyalty and devotion!
But the sting of contumely or insult was not added to their
misfortunes. There is a fellowship of brave men which rises above
the feuds of nations, and may at last go far, we hope, to heal
them. From every rock there rose a Boer - strange, grotesque figures
many of them - walnut-brown and shaggy-bearded, and swarmed on to
the hill. No term of triumph or reproach came from their lips. 'You
will not say now that the young Boer cannot shoot,' was the
harshest word which the least restrained of them made use of.
Between one and two hundred dead and wounded were scattered over
the hill. Those who were within reach of human help received all
that could be given. Captain Rice, of the Fusiliers, was carried
wounded down the hill on the back of one giant, and he has narrated
how the man refused the gold piece which was offered him. Some
asked the soldiers for their embroidered waist-belts as souvenirs
of the day. They will for generations remain as the most precious
ornaments of some colonial farmhouse.
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