They Are Tired In Body And In Mind, With Cramped
Limbs And Aching Eyes.
They have had twelve nights and twelve days
of battle, and it has lost its power to amuse.
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. After twelve
days you would forget that shells are dangerous even as you forget
when crossing Broadway that cable-cars can kill and mangle.
Up on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General
Buller and his staff. The hill is all of rocks, sharp, brown rocks,
as clearly cut as foundation-stones. They are thrown about at
irregular angles, and are shaded only by stiff bayonet-like cacti.
Above is a blue glaring sky, into which the top of the kopje seems to
reach, and to draw and concentrate upon itself all of the sun's heat.
This little jagged point of blistering rocks holds the forces that
press the button which sets the struggling mass below, and the
thousands of men upon the surrounding hills, in motion. It is the
conning tower of the relief column, only, unlike a conning tower, it
offers no protection, no seclusion, no peace. To-day, commanding
generals, under the new conditions which this war has developed, do
not charge up hills waving flashing swords. They sit on rocks, and
wink out their orders by a flashing hand-mirror. The swords have
been left at the base, or coated deep with mud, so that they shall
not flash, and with this column every one, under the rank of general,
carries a rifle on purpose to disguise the fact that he is entitled
to carry a sword. The kopje is the central station of the system.
From its uncomfortable eminence the commanding general watches the
developments of his attack, and directs it by heliograph and ragged
bits of bunting. A sweating, dirty Tommy turns his back on a hill a
mile away and slaps the air with his signal flag; another Tommy, with
the front visor of his helmet cocked over the back of his neck,
watches an answering bit of bunting through a glass. The bit of
bunting, a mile away, flashes impatiently, once to the right and once
to the left, and the Tommy with the glass says, "They understand,
sir," and the other Tommy, who has not as yet cast even an interested
glance at the regiment he has ordered into action, folds his flag and
curls up against a hot rock and instantly sleeps.
Stuck on the crest, twenty feet from where General Buller is seated,
are two iron rods, like those in the putting-green of a golf course.
They mark the line of direction which a shell must take, in order to
seek out the enemy. Back of the kopje, where they cannot see the
enemy, where they cannot even see the hill upon which he is
intrenched, are the howitzers. Their duty is to aim at the iron
rods, and vary their aim to either side of them as they are directed
to do by an officer on the crest. Their shells pass a few yards over
the heads of the staff, but the staff has confidence. Those three
yards are as safe a margin as a hundred. Their confidence is that of
the lady in spangles at a music-hall, who permits her husband in
buckskin to shoot apples from the top of her head. From the other
direction come the shells of the Boers, seeking out the hidden
howitzers. They pass somewhat higher, crashing into the base of the
kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their own ignominious
graves. The staff regard them with the same indifference. One of
them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel Stuart-Wortley is seated,
another destroys his diary. His men, lying at his feet among the red
rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does not shift his
position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.
On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts
were sent out to take a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack
was one of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new
weapons, have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to
the prestige of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the
prestige of the men by whom the attack was ordered.
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