Six Hours Before, At Frere Station, The Station-Master Had Awakened
Us To Say That Ladysmith Would Be Relieved At Any Moment.
This had
but just come over the wire.
It was "official." Indeed, he added,
with local pride, that the village band was still awake and in
readiness to celebrate the imminent event. He found, I fear, an
unsympathetic audience. The train was carrying philanthropic
gentlemen in charge of stores of champagne and marmalade for the
besieged city. They did not want it to be relieved until they were
there to substitute pate de foie gras for horseflesh. And there were
officers, too, who wanted a "look in," and who had been kept waiting
at Cape Town for commissions, gladdening the guests of the Mount
Nelson Hotel the while with their new khaki and gaiters, and there
were Tommies who wanted "Relief of Ladysmith" on the claps of their
medals, as they had seen "Relief of Lucknow" on the medals of the
Chelsea pensioners. And there was a correspondent who had journeyed
15,000 miles to see Ladysmith relieved, and who was apparently going
to miss that sight, after five weeks of travel, by a margin of five
hours.
We all growled "That's good," as we had done for the last two weeks
every time we had heard it was relieved, but our tone was not
enthusiastic. And when the captain of the Natal Carbineers said, "I
am afraid the good news is too premature," we all said, hopefully, we
were afraid it was.
We had seen nothing yet that was like real war. That night at
Pietermaritzburg the officers at the hotel were in mess-jackets, the
officers' wives in dinner-gowns. It was like Shepheard's Hotel, at
the top of the season. But only six hours after that dinner, as we
looked out of the car-windows, we saw galloping across the high
grass, like men who had lost their way, and silhouetted black against
the red sunrise, countless horsemen scouting ahead of our train, and
guarding it against the fate of the armored one lying wrecked at
Chieveley. The darkness was still heavy on the land and the only
lights were the red eyes of the armored train creeping in advance of
ours, and the red sun, which showed our silent escort appearing
suddenly against the sky-line on a ridge, or galloping toward us
through the dew to order us, with a wave of the hand, to greater
speed. One hour after sunrise the train drew up at Colenso, and from
only a mile away we heard the heavy thud of the naval guns, the
hammering of the Boer "pom-poms," and the Maxims and Colt automatics
spanking the air. We smiled at each other guiltily. We were on
time. It was most evident that Ladysmith had not been relieved.
This was the twelfth day of a battle that Buller's column was waging
against the Boers and their mountain ranges, or "disarranges," as
some one described them, without having gained more than three miles
of hostile territory. He had tried to force his way through them six
times, and had been repulsed six times. And now he was to try it
again.
No map, nor photograph, nor written description can give an idea of
the country which lay between Buller and his goal. It was an
eruption of high hills, linked together at every point without order
or sequence. In most countries mountains and hills follow some
natural law. The Cordilleras can be traced from the Amazon River to
Guatemala City; they make the water-shed of two continents; the Great
Divide forms the backbone of the States, but these Natal hills have
no lineal descent. They are illegitimate children of no line,
abandoned broadcast over the country, with no family likeness and no
home. They stand alone, or shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles,
or at a tangent, or join hands across a valley. They never appear
the same; some run to a sharp point, some stretch out, forming a
table-land, others are gigantic ant-hills, others perfect and
accurately modelled ramparts. In a ride of half a mile, every hill
completely loses its original aspect and character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed
by the other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value
until its crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this
confusion, the river Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith
as occupying the country through which it will endeavor to throw off
its pursuers. It darts through them as though striving to escape, it
doubles on its tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the
open plain rises to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and
remains motionless on an incline, and on the level ground twists and
turns so frequently that when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he
means he has crossed it once at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad
bridge, and once over a pontoon. And then he is not sure that he is
not still on the same side from which he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or
dark red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him. 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.
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