When The Sergeants Call The Companies Together, They Are Eager
Enough.
Anything is better than lying still looking up at the sunny,
inscrutable hills, or down into the plain crawling with black oxen.
Among the group of staff officers some one has lost a cigar-holder.
It has slipped from between his fingers, and, with the vindictiveness
of inanimate things, has slid and jumped under a pile of rocks. The
interest of all around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder.
The Tommies begin to roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of
the men below them, and half the kopje is obliterated. They are as
keen as terriers after a rat. The officers sit above and give advice
and disagree as to where that cigar-holder hid itself. Over their
heads, not twenty feet above, the shells chase each other fiercely.
But the officers have become accustomed to shells; a search for a
lost cigar-holder, which is going on under their very eyes, is of
greater interest. And when at last a Tommy pounces upon it with a
laugh of triumph, the officers look their disappointment, and, with a
sigh of resignation, pick up their field-glasses.
It is all a question of familiarity. On Broadway, if a building is
going up where there is a chance of a loose brick falling on some
one's head, the contractor puts up red signs marked "Danger!" and you
dodge over to the other side. But if you had been in battle for
twelve days, as have the soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells
would interest you no more than do passing cable-cars.
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