They advanced steadily, and two hours later when
we had ridden to a kopje still nearer the bridge, they were
apparently in the same formation as when we had first seen them, only
now farms that had lain far in their rear were overrun by them and
they encompassed the whole basin. 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. It was like trying to turn back the
waves of the sea with a blow-pipe.
It is true they had held back as many at Colenso, but the defensive
positions there were magnificent, and since then six months had
passed, during which time the same thirty thousand men who had been
fighting then were fighting still, while the enemy was always new,
with fresh recruits and re-enforcements arriving daily.
As the English officers at Durban, who had so lately arrived from
home that they wore swords, used to say with the proud consciousness
of two hundred thousand men back of them: "It won't last much longer
now. The Boers have had their belly full of fighting. They're fed
up on it; that's what it is; they're fed up."
They forgot that the Boers, who for three months had held Buller back
at the Tugela, were the same Boers who were rushed across the Free
State to rescue Cronje from Roberts, and who were then sent to meet
the relief column at Fourteen Streams, and were then ordered back
again to harass Roberts at Sannahspost, and who, at last, worn out,
stale, heartsick, and hopeless at the unequal odds and endless
fighting, fell back at Sand River.
For three months thirty thousand men had been attempting the
impossible task of endeavoring to meet an equal number of the enemy
in three different places at the same time.
I have seen a retreat in Greece when the men, before they left the
trenches, stood up in them and raged and cursed at the advancing
Turk, cursed at their government, at their king, at each other, and
retreated with shame in their faces because they did so.
But the retreat of the burghers of the Free State was not like that.
They rose one by one and saddled their ponies, with the look in their
faces of men who had been attending the funeral of a friend and who
were leaving just before the coffin was swallowed in the grave. Some
of them, for a long time after the greater number of the commando had
ridden away, sat upon the rocks staring down into the sunny valley
below them, talking together gravely, rising to take a last look at
the territory which was their own. The shells of the victorious
British sang triumphantly over the heads of their own artillery,
bursting impotently in white smoke or tearing up the veldt in
fountains of dust.
But they did not heed them. They did not even send a revengeful
bullet into the approaching masses. The sweetness of revenge could
not pay for what they had lost. They looked down upon the farm-
houses of men they knew; upon their own farm-houses rising in smoke;
they saw the Englishmen like a pest of locusts settling down around
gardens and farm-houses still nearer, and swallowing them up.
Their companions, already far on the way to safety, waved to them
from the veldt to follow; an excited doctor carrying a wounded man
warned us that the English were just below, storming the hill. "Our
artillery is aiming at five hundred yards," he shouted, but still the
remaining burghers stood immovable, leaning on their rifles, silent,
homeless, looking down without rage or show of feeling at the great
waves of khaki sweeping steadily toward them, and possessing their
land.
THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR: BATTLES I DID NOT SEE
We knew it was a battle because the Japanese officers told us it was.
In other wars I had seen other battles, many sorts of battles, but I
had never seen a battle like that one. Most battles are noisy,
hurried, and violent, giving rise to an unnatural thirst and to the
delusion that, by some unhappy coincidence, every man on the other
side is shooting only at you.
