"We didn't recognize him."
"But you knew he was a general officer, you knew he was the first of
the relieving column?" "Ye-es, but we didn't know who he was."
I decided that the bare fact of the relief of Ladysmith was all I
would be able to wire to my neglected paper, and with remorses
started to find the Ladysmith censor. Two officers, with whom I
ventured to break the hush that hung upon the town by asking my way,
said they were going in the direction of the censor. We rode for
some distance in guarded silence. Finally, one of them, with an
inward struggle, brought himself to ask, "Are you from the outside?"
I was forced to admit that I was. I felt that I had taken an
unwarrantable liberty in intruding on a besieged garrison. I wanted
to say that I had lost my way and had ridden into the town by
mistake, and that I begged to be allowed to withdraw with apologies.
The other officer woke up suddenly and handed me a printed list of
the prices which had been paid during the siege for food and tobacco.
He seemed to offer it as being in some way an official apology for
his starved appearance. The price of cigars struck me as especially
pathetic, and I commented on it. The first officer gazed mournfully
at the blazing sunshine before him. "I have not smoked a cigar in
two months," he said. My surging sympathy, and my terror at again
offending the haughty garrison, combated so fiercely that it was only
with a great effort that I produced a handful. "Will you have
these?" The other officer started in his saddle so violently that I
thought his horse had stumbled, but he also kept his eyes straight in
front. "Thank you, I will take one if I may - just one," said the
first officer. "Are you sure I am not robbing you?" They each took
one, but they refused to put the rest of the cigars in their pockets.
As the printed list stated that a dozen matches sold for $1.75, I
handed them a box of matches. Then a beautiful thing happened. They
lit the cigars and at the first taste of the smoke - and they were not
good cigars - an almost human expression of peace and good-will and
utter abandonment to joy spread over their yellow skins and cracked
lips and fever-lit eyes. The first man dropped his reins and put his
hands on his hips and threw back his head and shoulders and closed
his eyelids. I felt that I had intruded at a moment which should
have been left sacred. {5}
Another boy officer in stainless khaki and beautifully turned out,
polished and burnished and varnished, but with the same yellow skin
and sharpened cheek-bones and protruding teeth, a skeleton on horse-
back, rode slowly toward us down the hill. As he reached us he
glanced up and then swayed in his saddle, gazing at my companions
fearfully. "Good God," he cried. His brother officers seemed to
understand, but made no answer, except to jerk their heads toward me.
They were too occupied to speak. I handed the skeleton a cigar, and
he took it in great embarrassment, laughing and stammering and
blushing. Then I began to understand; I began to appreciate the
heroic self-sacrifice of the first two, who, when they had been given
the chance, had refused to fill their pockets. I knew then that it
was an effort worthy of the V. C.
The censor was at his post, and a few minutes later a signal officer
on Convent Hill heliographed my cable to Bulwana, where, six hours
after the Boers had abandoned it, Buller's own helios had begun to
dance, and they speeded the cable on its long journey to the
newspaper office on the Thames Embankment.
When one descended to the streets again - there are only two streets
which run the full length of the town - and looked for signs of the
siege, one found them not in the shattered houses, of which there
seemed surprisingly few, but in the starved and fever-shaken look of
the people.
The cloak of indifference which every Englishman wears, and his
instinctive dislike to make much of his feelings, and, in this case,
his pluck, at first concealed from us how terribly those who had been
inside of Ladysmith had suffered, and how near to the breaking point
they were. Their faces were the real index to what they had passed
through.
Any one who had seen our men at Montauk Point or in the fever camp at
Siboney needed no hospital list to tell him of the pitiful condition
of the garrison. The skin on their faces was yellow, and drawn
sharply over the brow and cheekbones; their teeth protruded, and they
shambled along like old men, their voices ranging from a feeble pipe
to a deep whisper. In this pitiable condition they had been forced
to keep night-watch on the hill-crests, in the rain, to lie in the
trenches, and to work on fortifications and bomb-proofs. And they
were expected to do all of these things on what strength they could
get from horse-meat, biscuits of the toughness and composition of
those that are fed to dogs, and on "mealies," which is what we call
corn.
That first day in Ladysmith gave us a faint experience as to what the
siege meant. The correspondents had disposed of all their tobacco,
and within an hour saw starvation staring them in the face, and raced
through the town to rob fellow-correspondents who had just arrived.
The new-comers in their turn had soon distributed all they owned, and
came tearing back to beg one of their own cigarettes.
