"A little hungry,
perhaps. Yes?" He seemed to draw much comfort from his friend the
pony, and the pony rubbed his head against the Englishman's shoulder.
"The commandant says he will question you in the morning. You will
come with us to the jail now," his captor directed. "You will find
three of your people there to talk to. I will go bring a blanket for
you, it is getting cold." And they rode off together into the night.
Two days later he would have heard through the windows of Jones's
Hotel the billiard balls still clicking joyously, but the men who
held the cues then would have worn helmets like his own.
The original Jones, the proprietor of Jones's Hotel, had fled. The
man who succeeded him was also a refugee, and the present manager was
an American from Cincinnati. He had never before kept a hotel, but
he confided to me that it was not a bad business, as he found that on
each drink sold he made a profit of a hundred per cent. The
proprietress was a lady from Brooklyn, her husband, another American,
was a prisoner with Cronje at St. Helena. She was in considerable
doubt as to whether she ought to run before the British arrived, or
wait and chance being made a prisoner. She said she would prefer to
escape, but what with standing on her feet all day in the kitchen
preparing meals for hungry burghers and foreign volunteers, she was
too tired to get away.
War close at hand consists so largely of commonplaces and trivial
details that I hope I may be pardoned for recording the anxieties and
cares of this lady from Brooklyn. Her point of view so admirably
illustrates one side of war. It is only when you are ten years away
from it, or ten thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull
places, and only the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque,
and momentous. We have read, in "Vanity Fair," of the terror and the
mad haste to escape of the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo.
That is the obvious and dramatic side.
That is the picture of war you remember and which appeals. As a
rule, people like to read of the rumble of cannon through the streets
of Ventersburg, the silent, dusty columns of the re-enforcements
passing in the moonlight, the galloping hoofs of the aides suddenly
beating upon the night air and growing fainter and dying away, the
bugle-calls from the camps along the river, the stamp of spurred
boots as the general himself enters the hotel and spreads the blue-
print maps upon the table, the clanking sabres of his staff, standing
behind him in the candle-light, whispering and tugging at their
gauntlets while the great man plans his attack. You must stop with
the British army if you want bugle-calls and clanking sabres and
gauntlets. They are a part of the panoply of war and of warriors.
But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg that night, only a few cattle-
breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had won from
the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of gentleman
adventurers - gathered around a table discussing other days in other
lands. The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the
people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming
in the distance, or as one sees it in "Shenandoah," where aides
gallop on and off the stage and the night signals flash from both
sides of the valley. That is the obvious and dramatic side; the
other side of war is the night before the battle, at Jones's Hotel;
the landlady in the dining-room with her elbows on the table,
fretfully deciding that after a day in front of the cooking-stove she
is too tired to escape an invading army, declaring that the one place
at which she would rather be at that moment was Green's restaurant in
Philadelphia, the heated argument that immediately follows between
the foreign legion and the Americans as to whether Rector's is not
better than the Cafe de Paris, and the general agreement that Ritz
cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being robbed. That
is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle. We heard no
galloping aides, no clanking spurs, only the click of the clipped
billiard balls as the American scouts (who were killed thirty-six
hours later) knocked them about the torn billiard-cloth, the drip,
drip of the kerosene from a blazing, sweating lamp, which struck the
dirty table-cloth, with the regular ticking of a hall clock, and the
complaint of the piano from the hotel parlor, where the correspondent
of a Boston paper was picking out "Hello, My Baby," laboriously with
one finger. War is not so terribly dramatic or exciting - at the
time; and the real trials of war - at the time, and not as one later
remembers them - consist largely in looting fodder for your ponies and
in bribing the station-master to put on an open truck in which to
carry them.
We were wakened about two o'clock in the morning by a loud knocking
on a door and the distracted voice of the local justice of the peace
calling upon the landlord to rouse himself and fly. The English, so
the voice informed the various guests, as door after door was thrown
open upon the court-yard, were at Ventersburg Station, only two hours
away. The justice of the peace wanted to buy or to borrow a horse,
and wanted it very badly, but a sleepy-eyed and sceptical audience
told him unfeelingly that he was either drunk or dreaming, and only
the landlady, now apparently refreshed after her labors, was keenly,
even hysterically, intent on instant flight.
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