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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