An Army Of Twenty-Five Thousand
Men Advancing In Full View Across A Great Plain Appeals To You As
Something Entirely Lacking In The Human Element.
You do not think of
it as a collection of very tired, dusty, and perspiring men with
aching legs
And parched lips, but as an unnatural phenomenon, or a
gigantic monster which wipes out a railway station, a cornfield, and
a village with a single clutch of one of its tentacles. You would as
soon attribute human qualities to a plague, a tidal wave, or a slowly
slipping landslide. One of the tentacles composed of six thousand
horse had detached itself and crossed the river below the bridge,
where it was creeping up on Botha's right. We could see the burghers
galloping before it toward Ventersburg. At the bridge General Botha
and President Steyn stood in the open road and with uplifted arms
waved the Boers back, calling upon them to stand. But the burghers
only shook their heads and with averted eyes grimly and silently rode
by them on the other side. They knew they were flanked, they knew
the men in the moving mass in front of them were in the proportion of
nine to one.
When you looked down upon the lines of the English army advancing for
three miles across the plain, one could hardly blame them. The
burghers did not even raise their Mausers. One bullet, the size of a
broken slate-pencil, falling into a block three miles across and a
mile deep, seems so inadequate.
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