Indeed, The Khaki Is
The English Soldier's Sole Protection.
It saves him in spite of
himself, for he apparently cannot learn to advance under cover, and a
sky-line is the one place where he selects to stand erect and stretch
his weary limbs.
I have come to within a hundred yards of a hill
before I saw that scattered among its red and yellow bowlders was the
better part of a regiment as closely packed together as the crowd on
the bleaching boards at a base-ball match.
Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's
column has been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching,
capturing one position after another, to find it was enfiladed from
many hills, and abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The
greater part of the column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking
in the open. It is a wonderful and impressive sight. At the first
view, an army in being, when it is spread out as it is in the Tugela
basin back of the hills, seems a hopelessly and irrevocably entangled
mob.
An army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a
gun on shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least,
even if it seems the most, important part of it. Before one reaches
the firing-line he must pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs
of men, who are feeding, mending, repairing, and burying the men at
the "front." It is these latter that make the mob of gypsies, which
is apparently without head or order or organization.
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