a sight which
one would wish to have seen or care now to dwell upon. Haggard officers
cracked their sword-blades and cursed the day that they had been born.
Privates sobbed with their stained faces buried in their hands. Of all
tests of discipline that ever they had stood, the hardest to many was
to conform to all that the cursed flapping handkerchief meant to them.
'Father, father, we had rather have died,' cried the Fusiliers to
their priest. Gallant hearts, ill paid, ill thanked, how poorly do
the successful of the world compare with their unselfish loyalty and
devotion!

But the sting of contumely or insult was not added to their misfortunes.
There is a fellowship of brave men which rises above the feuds of
nations, and may at last go far, we hope, to heal them. From every rock
there rose a Boer--strange, grotesque figures many of them--walnut-brown
and shaggy-bearded, and swarmed on to the hill. No term of triumph or
reproach came from their lips. 'You will not say now that the young Boer
cannot shoot,' was the harshest word which the least restrained of them
made use of. Between one and two hundred dead and wounded were scattered
over the hill. Those who were within reach of human help received all
that could be given. Captain Rice, of the Fusiliers, was carried wounded
down the hill on the back of one giant, and he has narrated how the man
refused the gold piece which was offered him. Some asked the soldiers
for their embroidered waist-belts as souvenirs of the day. They will
for generations remain as the most precious ornaments of some colonial
farmhouse. Then the victors gathered together and sang psalms, not
jubilant but sad and quavering. The prisoners, in a downcast column,
weary, spent, and unkempt, filed off to the Boer laager at Waschbank,
there to take train for Pretoria. And at Ladysmith a bugler of
Fusiliers, his arm bound, the marks of battle on his dress and person,
burst in upon the camp with the news that two veteran regiments had
covered the flank of White's retreating army, but at the cost of their
own annihilation.

CHAPTER 8. LORD METHUEN'S ADVANCE.

At the end of a fortnight of actual hostilities in Natal the situation
of the Boer army was such as to seriously alarm the public at home,
and to cause an almost universal chorus of ill-natured delight from
the press of all European nations. Whether the reason was hatred of
ourselves, or the sporting instinct which backs the smaller against