promised a pension for the
widow if the old man was killed. "But how if you get pom-pom too, boss?"
he plaintively asked. I pledged the _Chronicle_ to take over the
obligation. The word "obligation" consoled him. The lady's name is Mrs.
Louis Nicodemus, now of Maritzburg. For the Zulu's ancestry I promised
no provision.

CHAPTER VIII

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

_Sunday, November 5, 1899._

The armistice lasted all day, except that the enemy threw two shells at
a waggon going up the Helpmakaar road and knocked it to pieces, and, I
hear, killed a man or two--I don't know why. The townspeople were very
busy building shelters for the bombardment. The ends of bridges and
culverts were closed up with sandbags and stones. Circular forts were
piled in the safest places among the rocks. The Army Service Corps
constructed a magnificent work with mealy-bags and corn-beef cases--a
perfect palace of security. But, as usual, the Kaffirs were wisest. They
have crept up the river banks to a place where it flows between two
steep hills of rock, and there is no access but by a narrow footpath.
There they lie with their blankets and bits of things, indifferent to
time and space. Some sort of Zulu missionary is up there, too, and I saw
him nobly washing a cooking-pot for his family, dressed in little but
his white clerical choker and a sort of undivided skirt. A few white
families have gone to the same place, and I helped some of them to
construct their new homes in the rocks amidst great merriment. The boys
were as delighted as children with a spade and bucket by the sea, and
many an impregnable redoubt was thrown up with a dozen stones. What
those homes will be like at the end of a week I don't know. A picnic
where love is may be endurable for one afternoon, when there are plenty
of other people to cook and wash up. But a hungry and unclean picnic by
day and night, beside a muddy river, with little to eat and no one to
cook, nowhere to sleep but the rock, and nothing to do but dodge the
shells, is another story. "I tell you what," said a serious Tory soldier
to me, "if English people saw this sort of thing, they'd hang that
Chamberlain." "They won't hang him, but perhaps they'll make him a
Lord," I answered, and watched the women trying to keep the children
decent while their husbands worked the pick.

In the afternoon the trains went out, bearing the wounded to their new
camp across the plain at Intombi's Spruit. The move wa