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 d