hem 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 ove