fires. This pass, crevicing under the solid feet of two great stony
kopjes, was the only place the Boers would be likely to try their luck
at. It was covered; already the Dundee column was all right.

Presently I met the rest of the Gordons, swinging along the road to
crown the heights on either side the nek. Coming through I noticed--and
the kilted Highlanders noticed, too, they were staying out all
night--that the sky over Ladysmith was very black. The great inky stain
of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole
circumference. In five minutes it was night and rain-storm. It stung
like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall. Ladysmith
streets were ankle deep in half an hour; the camps were morass and pond.
And listening to the ever-fresh bursts hammering all the evening on to
deepening pools, we learned that the Dundee men had not camped after
all, had marched at six, and were coming on all night into Ladysmith.
Thirty-two miles without rest, through stinging cataract and spongy
loam and glassy slime!

Before next morning was grey in came the 1st Rifles. They plashed uphill
to their blue-roofed huts 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 embedded in a
serpentine cast of clay. As for their boots, you could only infer them
from the huge balls of stratified mud men 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 cheek-bones. Only 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