In The
Morning We Were Awakened By The Sound Of The Vickar-Maxim Or The
"Pom-Pom" As The English Call It, Or "Bomb-Maxim" As The Boers Call
It.
By any name it was a remarkable gun and the most demoralizing of
any of the smaller pieces which have been used in this campaign.
One
of its values is that its projectiles throw up sufficient dust to
enable the gunner to tell exactly where they strike, and within a few
seconds he is able to alter the range accordingly. In this way it is
its own range-finder. Its bark is almost as dangerous as its bite,
for its reports have a brisk, insolent sound like a postman's knock,
or a cooper hammering rapidly on an empty keg, and there is an
unexplainable mocking sound to the reports, as though the gun were
laughing at you. The English Tommies used to call it very aptly the
"hyena gun." I found it much less offensive from the rear than when
I was with the British, and in front of it.
From the top of a kopje we saw that the battle had at last begun and
that the bridge was the objective point. The English came up in
great lines and blocks and from so far away and in such close order
that at first in spite of the khaki they looked as though they wore
uniforms of blue. 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.
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