on the south-west side of the town.
By the time the sun was up they were fed by their sister battalion,
the 2nd, and had begun to unwind their putties. But what a sight!
Their putties were not soaked and not caked; say, rather, that there
may have been a core of puttie inside, but that the men's legs were
imbedded in a serpentine cast of clay. As for their boots, you could
only infer them from the huge balls of stratified mud they bore round
their feet. Red mud, yellow mud, black mud, brown mud--they lifted
their feet toilsomely; they were land plummets that had sucked up
specimens of all the heavy, sticky soils for fifteen miles. Officers
and men alike bristled stiff with a week's beard. Rents in their khaki
showed white skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have
judged them half red men, half soot-black. Eyelids hung fat and heavy
over hollow cheeks and pointed cheekbones. Only {p.062} the eye
remained--the sky-blue, steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English
eye--to tell that thirty-two miles without rest, four days without a
square meal, six nights--for many--without a stretch of sleep, still
found them soldiers at the end.

"That was the beginning of them; but they were not all in till the
middle of the afternoon--which made thirty-six hours on their legs.
The Irish Fusiliers tramped in at lunch-time--going a bit short some
of them, nearly all a trifle stiff on the feet--but solid, square and
sturdy from the knees upward. They straightened up to the cheers that
met them, and stepped out on scorching feet as if they were ready to
go into action again on the instant. After them came the guns--not the
sleek creatures of Laffan's Plain, rough with earth and spinning mud
from their wheels, but war-worn and fresh from slaughter; you might
imagine their damp muzzles were dripping blood. You could count the
horses' ribs; they looked as if you could break them in half before
the quarters. But they, too, knew they were being cheered; they threw
their ears up and flung {p.063} all the weight left them into the
traces.

"Through fire, water and earth, the Dundee column had come home
again."[3]

The undeniable error of placing an advanced detachment in Dundee had
thus been redeemed; at much material cost, it may be granted, but the
moral gain probably exceeded, and the gallant author of the mistake
paid for his error with his life. General Symons died in Dundee on the
day his column came in touch with the La