"Were you the station-master here before this?" I asked the man in the straw
hat, at Colenso. "I mean before this war?"
"No fear!" snorted the station-master, scornfully. "Why, we didn't know
Colenso was on the line until Buller fought a battle here. That's how it is
with all these way-stations now. Everybody's talking about them. We never
took no notice to them."
And yet the arriving stranger might have been forgiven his point of view and
his start of surprise when he found Chieveley a place of only a half dozen
corrugated zinc huts, and Colenso a scattered gathering of a dozen shattered
houses of battered brick.
Chieveley seemed so insignificant in contrast with its fame to those who had
followed the war on maps and in the newspapers, that one was not sure he was
on the right road until he saw from the car-window the armored train still
lying on the embankment, the graves beside it, and the donga into which
Winston Churchill pulled and carried the wounded.
And as the train bumped and halted before the blue and white enamel sign
that marks Colenso station, the places which have made that spot familiar
and momentous fell into line like the buoys which mark the entrance to a
harbor.
We
knew that the high bare ridge to the right must be Fort Wylie, that the
plain on the left was where Colonel Long had lost his artillery, and three
officers gained the Victoria Cross, and that the swift, muddy stream, in
which the iron railroad bridge lay humped and sprawling, was the Tugela
River.
Six hours before, at Frere Station, the station-master had awakened us to
say that Ladysmith would be relieved at any moment. This had but just come
over the wire. It was "official." Indeed, he added, with local pride, that
the village band was still awake and in readiness to celebrate the imminent
event. He found, I fear, an unsympathetic audience. The train was carrying
philanthropic gentlemen in charge of stores of champagne and marmalade for
the besieged city. They did not want it to be relieved until they were
there to substitute pate de foie gras for horseflesh. And there were
officers, too, who wanted a "look in," and who had been kept waiting at Cape
Town for commissions, gladdening the guests of the Mount Nelson Hotel the
while with their new khaki and gaiters, and there were Tommies who wanted
"Relief of Ladysmith" on the claps of their medals, as they had seen "Relief
of Lucknow" on the medals of the Chelsea pensioners. And there was a
correspondent who had journeyed 15,000 miles to see Ladysmith relieved, and
who was apparently going to miss that sight, after five weeks of travel, by
a margin of five hours.
We
all growled "That's good," as we had done for the last two weeks every time
we had heard it was relieved, but our tone was not enthusiastic. And when
the captain of the Natal Carbineers said, "I am afraid the good news is too
premature," we all said, hopefully, we were afraid it was.
We
had seen nothing yet that was like real war. That night at Pietermaritzburg
the officers at the hotel were in mess-jackets, the officers' wives in
dinner-gowns. It was like Shepheard's Hotel, at the top of the season. But
only six hours after that dinner, as we looked out of the car-windows, we
saw galloping across the high grass, like men who had lost their way, and
silhouetted black against the red sunrise, countless horsemen scouting ahead
of our train, and guarding it against the fate of the armored one lying
wrecked at Chieveley. The darkness was still heavy on the land and the only
lights were the red eyes of the armored train creeping in advance of ours,
and the red sun, which showed our silent escort appearing suddenly against
the sky-line on a ridge, or galloping toward us through the dew to order us,
with a wave of the hand, to greater speed. One hour after sunrise the train
drew up at Colenso, and from only a mile away we heard the heavy thud of the
naval guns, the hammering of the Boer "pom-poms," and the Maxims and Colt
automatics spanking the air. We smiled at each other guiltily. We were on
time. It was most evident that Ladysmith had not been relieved.
This was the twelfth day of a battle that Buller's column was waging against
the Boers and their mountain ranges, or "disarranges," as some one described
them, without having gained more than three miles of hostile territory. He
had tried to force his way through them six times, and had been repulsed six
times. And now he was to try it again.
No
map, nor photograph, nor written description can give an idea of the country
which lay between Buller and his goal. It was an eruption of high hills,
linked together at every point without order or sequence. In most countries
mountains and hills follow some natural law. The Cordilleras can be traced
from the Amazon River to Guatemala City; they make the water-shed of two
continents; the Great Divide forms the backbone of the States, but these
Natal hills have no lineal descent. They are illegitimate children of no
line, abandoned broadcast over the country, with no family likeness and no
home. They stand alone, or shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles, or at
a tangent, or join hands across a valley. They never appear the same; some
run to a sharp point, some stretch out, forming a table-land, others are
gigantic ant-hills, others perfect and accurately modelled ramparts. In a
ride of half a mile, every hill completely loses its original aspect and
character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed by the
other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value until its
crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this confusion, the river
Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith as occupying the country
through which it will endeavor to throw off its pursuers. It darts through
them as though striving to escape, it doubles on its tracks, it sinks out of
sight between them, and in the open plain rises to the dignity of
water-falls. It runs uphill, and remains motionless on an incline, and on
the level ground twists and turns so frequently that when one says he has
crossed the Tugela, he means he has crossed it once at a drift, once at the
wrecked railroad bridge, and once over a pontoon. And then he is not sure
that he is not still on the same side from which he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or dark
red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is indistinguishable
from the rocks around him. Indeed, the khaki is the English soldier's sole
protection. It saves him in spite of himself, for he apparently cannot
learn to advance under cover, and a sky-line is the one place where he
selects to stand erect and stretch his weary limbs. I have come to within a
hundred yards of a hill before I saw that scattered among its red and yellow
bowlders was the better part of a regiment as closely packed together as the
crowd on the bleaching boards at a base-ball match.
Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's column has
been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching, capturing one
position after another, to find it was enfiladed from many hills, and
abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The greater part of the
column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking in the open. It is a
wonderful and impressive sight. At the first view, an army in being, when
it is spread out as it is in the Tugela basin back of the hills, seems a
hopelessly and irrevocably entangled mob.
An
army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a gun on
shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least, even if it seems
the most, important part of it. Before one reaches the firing-line he must
pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs of men, who are feeding,
mending, repairing, and burying the men at the "front." It is these latter
that make the mob of gypsies, which is apparently without head or order or
organization. They stretched across the great basin of the Tugela, like the
children of Israel, their camp-fires rising to the sky at night like the
reflection of great search-lights; by day they swarmed across the plain,
like hundreds of moving circus-vans in every direction, with as little
obvious intention as herds of buffalo. But each had his appointed work, and
each was utterly indifferent to the battle going forward a mile away.
Hundreds of teams, of sixteen oxen each, crawled like great black
water-snakes across the drifts, the Kaffir drivers, naked and black, lashing
them with whips as long as lariats, shrieking, beseeching, and howling, and
falling upon the oxen's horns to drag them into place.
Mules from Spain and Texas, loaded with ammunition, kicked and plunged, more
oxen drew more soberly the great naval guns, which lurched as though in a
heavy sea, throwing the blue-jackets who hung upon the drag-ropes from one
high side of the trail to the other. Across the plain, and making toward the
trail, wagons loaded with fodder, with rations, with camp equipment, with
tents and cooking- stoves, crowded each other as closely as cable-cars on
Broadway. Scattered among them were fixed lines of tethered horses, rows of
dog-tents, camps of Kaffirs, hospital stations with the Red Cross waving
from the nearest and highest tree. Dripping water-carts with as many
spigots as the regiment had companies, howitzer guns guided by as many ropes
as a May-pole, crowded past these to the trail, or gave way to the
ambulances filled with men half dressed and bound in the zinc-blue bandages
that made the color detestable forever after. Troops of the irregular horse
gallop through this multitude, with a jangling of spurs and sling-belts; and
Tommies, in close order, fight their way among the oxen, or help pull them
to one side as the stretchers pass, each with its burden, each with its blue
bandage stained a dark brownish crimson. It is only when the figure on the
stretcher lies under a blanket that the tumult and push and sweltering mass
comes to a quick pause, while the dead man's comrade stands at attention,
and the officer raises his fingers to his helmet. Then the mass surges on
again, with cracking of whips and shouts and imprecations, while the yellow
dust rises in thick clouds and buries the picture in a glaring fog. This
moving, struggling mass, that fights for the right of way along the road, is
within easy distance of the shells. Those from their own guns pass over
them with a shrill crescendo, those from the enemy burst among them at rare
intervals, or sink impotently in the soft soil. And a dozen Tommies rush to
dig them out as keepsakes. Up at the front, brown and yellow regiments are
lying crouched behind brown and yellow rocks and stones. As far as you can
see, the hills are sown with them. With a glass you distinguish them against
the sky-line of every hill, for over three miles away. Sometimes the men
rise and fire, and there is a feverish flutter of musketry; sometimes they
lie motionless for hours while the guns make the ways straight.
Any one who has seen Epsom Downs on a Derby day, with its thousands of vans
and tents and lines of horses and moving mobs, can form some idea of what it
is like. But while at the Derby all is interest and excitement, and every
one is pushing and struggling, and the air palpitates with the intoxication
of a great event, the winning of a horse-race--here, where men are killed
every hour and no one of them knows when his turn may come, the fact that
most impresses you is their indifference to it all. What strikes you most
is the bored air of the Tommies, the undivided interest of the engineers in
the construction of a pontoon bridge, the solicitude of the medical staff
over the long lines of wounded, the rage of the naked Kaffirs at their
lumbering steers; the fact that every one is intent on
something--anything--but the battle.
They are wearied with battles. The Tommies stretch themselves in the sun to
dry the wet khaki in which they have lain out in the cold night for weeks,
and yawn at battles. Or, if you climb to the hill where the officers are
seated, you will find men steeped even deeper in boredom. They are burned a
dark red; their brown mustaches look white by contrast, theirs are the same
faces you have met with in Piccadilly, which you see across the tables of
the Savoy restaurant, which gaze depressedly from the windows of White's and
the Bachelors' Club. If they were bored then, they are unbearably bored
now. Below them the men of their regiment lie crouched amid the bowlders,
hardly distinguishable from the brown and yellow rock. They are sleeping,
or dozing, or yawning. A shell passes over them like the shaking of many
telegraph wires, and neither officer nor Tommy raises his head to watch it
strike. They are tired in body and in mind, with cramped limbs and aching
eyes. They have had twelve nights and twelve days of battle, and it has
lost its power to amuse.
When the sergeants call the companies together, they are eager enough.
Anything is better than lying still looking up at the sunny, inscrutable
hills, or down into the plain crawling with black oxen.
Among the group of staff officers some one has lost a cigar-holder. It has
slipped from between his fingers, and, with the vindictiveness of inanimate
things, has slid and jumped under a pile of rocks. The interest of all
around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder. The Tommies begin to
roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of the men below them, and half
the kopje is obliterated. They are as keen as terriers after a rat. The
officers sit above and give advice and disagree as to where that
cigar-holder hid itself. Over their heads, not twenty feet above, the
shells chase each other fiercely. But the officers have become accustomed to
shells; a search for a lost cigar-holder, which is going on under their very
eyes, is of greater interest. And when at last a Tommy pounces upon it with
a laugh of triumph, the officers look their disappointment, and, with a sigh
of resignation, pick up their field-glasses.
It
is all a question of familiarity. On Broadway, if a building is going up
where there is a chance of a loose brick falling on some one's head, the
contractor puts up red signs marked "Danger!" and you dodge over to the
other side. But if you had been in battle for twelve days, as have the
soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells would interest you no more than
do passing cable-cars. After twelve days you would forget that shells are
dangerous even as you forget when crossing Broadway that cable-cars can kill
and mangle.
Up
on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General Buller and
his staff. The hill is all of rocks, sharp, brown rocks, as clearly cut as
foundation-stones. They are thrown about at irregular angles, and are
shaded only by stiff bayonet-like cacti. Above is a blue glaring sky, into
which the top of the kopje seems to reach, and to draw and concentrate upon
itself all of the sun's heat. This little jagged point of blistering rocks
holds the forces that press the button which sets the struggling mass below,
and the thousands of men upon the surrounding hills, in motion. It is the
conning tower of the relief column, only, unlike a conning tower, it offers
no protection, no seclusion, no peace. To-day, commanding generals, under
the new conditions which this war has developed, do not charge up hills
waving flashing swords. 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. The result of this attack was peculiarly disastrous.
It was made at night, and as soon as it developed, the Boers retreated to
the trenches on the crest of the hill, and threw men around the sides to
bring a cross- fire to bear on the Englishmen. In the morning the
Inniskillings found they had lost four hundred men, and ten out of their
fifteen officers. The other regiments lost as heavily. The following
Tuesday, which was the anniversary of Majuba Hill, three brigades, instead
of a regiment, were told off to take this same Railway Hill, or Pieter's, as
it was later called, on the flank, and with it to capture two others. On
the same day, nineteen years before, the English had lost Majuba Hill, and
their hope was to take these three from the Boers for the one they had lost,
and open the way to Bulwana Mountain, which was the last bar that held them
back from Ladysmith.
The first two of the three hills they wanted were shoulder to shoulder, the
third was separated from them by a deep ravine. This last was the highest,
and in order that the attack should be successful, it was necessary to seize
it first. The hills stretched for three miles; they were about one thousand
two hundred yards high.
For three hours a single line of men slipped and stumbled forward along the
muddy bank of the river, and for three hours the artillery crashed,
spluttered, and stabbed at the three hills above them, scattering the rocks
and bursting over and behind the Boer trenches on the crest.
As
is their custom, the Boers remained invisible and made no reply. And though
we knew they were there, it seemed inconceivable that anything human could
live under such a bombardment of shot, bullets, and shrapnel. A hundred
yards distant, on our right, the navy guns were firing lyddite that burst
with a thick yellow smoke; on the other side Colt automatics were
put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets; the field-guns and the howitzers were
playing from a hill half a mile behind us, and scattered among the rocks
about us, and for two miles on either hand, the infantry in reserve were
firing off ammunition at any part of the three hills they happened to
dislike!
The roar of the navy's Four-Point-Sevens, their crash, their rush as they
passed, the shrill whine of the shrapnel, the barking of the howitzers, and
the mechanical, regular rattle of the quick-firing Maxims, which sounded
like the clicking of many mowing-machines on a hot summer's day, tore the
air with such hideous noises that one's skull ached from the concussion, and
one could only be heard by shouting. But more impressive by far than this
hot chorus of mighty thunder and petty hammering, was the roar of the wind
which was driven down into the valley beneath, and which swept up again in
enormous waves of sound. It roared like a wild hurricane at sea. The
illusion was so complete, that you expected, by looking down, to see the
Tugela lashing at her banks, tossing the spray hundreds of feet in air, and
battling with her sides of rock. It was like the roar of Niagara in a gale,
and yet when you did look below, not a leaf was stirring, and the Tugela was
slipping forward, flat and sluggish, and in peace.
The long procession of yellow figures was still advancing along the bottom
of the valley, toward the right, when on the crest of the farthermost hill
fourteen of them appeared suddenly, and ran forward and sprang into the
trenches.
Perched against the blue sky on the highest and most distant of the three
hills, they looked terribly lonely and insufficient, and they ran about,
this way and that, as though they were very much surprised to find
themselves where they were. Then they settled down into the Boer trench,
from our side of it, and began firing, their officer, as his habit is,
standing up behind them. The hill they had taken had evidently been
abandoned to them by the enemy, and the fourteen men in khaki had taken it
by "default." But they disappeared so suddenly into the trench, that we
knew they were not enjoying their new position in peace, and every one
looked below them, to see the arriving reinforcements. They came at last,
to the number of ten, and scampered about just as the others had done,
looking for cover. It seemed as if we could almost hear the singing of the
bullet when one of them dodged, and it was with a distinct sense of relief,
and of freedom from further responsibility, that we saw the ten disappear
also, and become part of the yellow stones about them. Then a very
wonderful movement began to agitate the men upon the two remaining hills.
They began to creep up them as you have seen seaweed rise with the tide and
envelop a rock. They moved in regiments, but each man was as distinct as is
a letter of the alphabet in each word on this page, black with letters. We
began to follow the fortunes of individual letters. It was a most selfish
and cowardly occupation, for you knew you were in no greater danger than you
would be in looking through the glasses of a mutoscope. The battle unrolled
before you like a panorama. The guns on our side of the valley had ceased,
the hurricane in the depths below had instantly spent itself, and the birds
and insects had again begun to fill our hill with drowsy twitter and song.
But on the other, half the men were wrapping the base of the hill in khaki,
which rose higher and higher, growing looser and less tightly wrapt as it
spun upward. Halfway to the crest there was a broad open space of green
grass, and above that a yellow bank of earth, which supported the track of
the railroad. This green space spurted with tiny geysers of yellow dust.
Where the bullets came from or who sent them we could not see. But the
loose ends of the bandage of khaki were stretching across this green space
and the yellow spurts of dust rose all around them. The men crossed this
fire zone warily, looking to one side or the other, as the bullets struck
the earth heavily, like drops of rain before a shower.
The men had their heads and shoulders bent as though they thought a roof was
about to fall on them; some ran from rock to rock, seeking cover properly;
others scampered toward the safe vantage-ground behind the railroad
embankment; others advanced leisurely, like men playing golf. The silence,
after the hurricane of sounds, was painful; we could not hear even the Boer
rifles. The men moved like figures in a dream, without firing a shot. They
seemed each to be acting on his own account, without unison or
organization. As I have said, you ceased considering the scattered whole,
and became intent on the adventures of individuals. These fell so suddenly,
that you waited with great anxiety to learn whether they had dropped to
dodge a bullet or whether one had found them. The men came at last from
every side, and from out of every ridge and dried-up waterway. Open spaces
which had been green a moment before were suddenly dyed yellow with them.
Where a company had been clinging to the railroad embankment, there stood
one regiment holding it, and another sweeping over it. Heights that had
seemed the goal, became the resting-place of the stretcher-bearers, until at
last no part of the hill remained unpopulated, save a high bulging rampart
of unprotected and open ground. And then, suddenly, coming from the earth
itself, apparently, one man ran across this open space and leaped on top of
the trench which crowned the hill. He was fully fifteen yards in advance of
all the rest, entirely unsupported, and alone. And he had evidently planned
it so, for he took off his helmet and waved it, and stuck it on his rifle
and waved it again, and then suddenly clapped it on his head and threw his
gun to his shoulder. He stood so, pointing down into the trench, and it
seemed as though we could hear him calling upon the Boers behind it to
surrender.
A
few minutes later the last of the three hills was mounted by the West Yorks,
who were mistaken by their own artillery for Boers, and fired upon both by
the Boers and by their own shrapnel and lyddite. Four men were wounded, and,
to save themselves, a line of them stood up at full length on the trench and
cheered and waved at the artillery until it had ceased to play upon them.
The Boers continued to fire upon them with rifles for over two hours. But
it was only a demonstration to cover the retreat of the greater number, and
at daybreak the hills were in complete and peaceful possession of the
English.
These hills were a part of the same Railway Hill which four nights before
the Inniskillings and a composite regiment had attempted to take by a
frontal attack with the loss of six hundred men, among whom were three
colonels. By this flank attack, and by using nine regiments instead of one,
the same hills and two others were taken with two hundred casualties. The
fact that this battle, which was called the Battle of Pieter's Hill, and the
surrender of General Cronje and his forces to Lord Roberts, both took place
on the anniversary of the battle of Majuba Hill, made the whole of Buller's
column feel that the ill memory of that disaster had been effaced.
