be it all?

Yet hardly a single combatant could be discerned. Attacked and attackers
alike were invisible. One soldier only stood in plain view on the crest
of the hill, signalling with a flag. Our men reached the crest, and the
soldier disappeared. Whether in response to his signals or not,
reinforcements presently reached the hill.

In long, thin lines of yellow they ran across the plateau to the crest,
hoping to drive the Boers back the way they had come. As it approached
the line grew thinner and thinner, until there was nothing of it left.
And so on, for hour after hour, the yellow lines of gallant men flung
themselves into the open, only to fall beneath the raging fire poured
upon them from the sternly held mountain crest.

Down the hill our wounded dribbled, thirsty men, pale men, men covered
with blood and weeping with rage. How grim must be the fire they have
just passed through! One man is brought down lying across a horse. His
face hangs in strips, shattered by a dum-dum bullet. Thank goodness,
some of ours are using buckshot to-day!

A Boer mounts on a waggon.

"Who will take in ammunition?"

No response.

I turn to my chief. "Do you advise me to try?"

"I cannot; you must decide for yourself."

Throwing a sack of cartridges over my horse's back, I set off. No sooner
in the open, than whizz, whizz, went the bullets past my ear. The pony
stopped, confused. I struck the spurs into his flanks, and on we flew,
the rapid motion, the novelty of the affair, and the continual whistle
of the bullets producing in me a peculiar feeling of exaltation.

Then the sack tumbled off. I sprang down, hooked the bridle to a tree,
rushed back for the bag, and started forward again. The firing now
became so severe that I raced for a clump of trees, hoping to find
temporary shelter there. Some of our men were here, lying behind the
slender tree-trunks and taking a shot at the enemy now and then.

"Absolutely impossible to live in the open," they said. "Better wait
awhile and see how things go."

I laid myself down under the trees and listened to the bullets as they
sang through the branches.

The very heavens vibrated as the roar of artillery grew ever fiercer,
and the loud echoes rolled along from hill to hill and died away in an
awful whisper that shook the grass-tops like an autumn wind.

What were those lines of Bret Harte's about the humming of the battle
bees?... I could not remember.

My eyelids grew heav