Читать книгу Reports from the Boer War - Edgar Wallace - Страница 16
ОглавлениеReproduced from The Star (New Zealand), June 3, 1901
KALKFONTEIN, North of Steynsburg, March 22, 1901
The S.M.O.—which in plain English means Senior Medical Officer—drew aside the curtains of the tent and interrupted my shaving operations.
We are late risers this morning, for we are waiting for instructions from somebody, and only that a persistent individual had been amusing himself by intermittently banging a piece of galvanised iron on a neighbouring kopje to the banishment of all sleep, I should have yet been dozing.
The S.M.O. is a genial Coldstreamer who, having served his term in India, is privileged to swear in Hindustani, and he spoke.
"Come along, Roz-Roz, if you want to see a little fight." Roz-Roz is an abbreviation of Roz-Roz dak, which is the nearest equivalent for Daily Mail that the bat* will provide. Outside the camp kettles are steaming and breakfast is ready—but Atkins is gathered in little groups, eyeing a distant ridge curiously—and the centre of each little group is a pile of arms.
[* Bat (Hindi)—language, speech. ]
"Clik-clok, clik-clok, clik-clok!" No doubt about that, is there, C.I.V.?
You know the old "clik-clok," and the whine of the bullet overhead. You heard it that time Diamond Hill was the subject of your weekly letter home.
You heard it just before something gave you a smack in the side, and your knees went weak and the darkness came.
And you heard the R.A.M.C. orderly using violent language concerning it, as you woke to consciousness and a stretcher.
So it wasn't somebody banging galvanised iron after all, and I hurried forth in time to see that Victorian come.
WHAT FOLLOWS HIM
That Victorian came, unshaven and unkempt, his horse's flanks aheave, and his short story was about a man who belonged to a patrol which sighted the Boers.
And the Boers were very many in number, but as they were only six times the strength of the patrol, of course the patrol felt it couldn't creditably retire, and so it was sitting tight at the foot of a kopje, waiting for Colonel Henniker to sally out, when it had no doubt that everything would end more or less unhappily for the Boers.
It was one of the true little stories that the nursing Scouts tell the restless column to beep it quiet. And so we moved out: Henniker, burly and alert, Powell, the gunner, cheerful and unconcerned, the Victorian gleeful and profane, and all the time from the ridge ahead the spasmodic clap of the Mauser sounded, "Clik-clok, clik-clok!"
We are forming a lane, which is a variation of the cordon.
When you put half-a-dozen columns round De Wet at a distance of a score of miles one from the other, except at one point where the gap is forty miles in width, you call it a cordon, and the big gap you refer to as the line of least resistance.
When you take a long stretch of country and line two sides of at with columns, you call it a lane, and if the enemy doesn't advance straight up the centre of that lane, and give everybody a chance of falling on him and devouring him, it is because he has no conception of his duty as a sportsman.
We are on the left side of the lane; Codrington is at Venterstadt, Crabbie is at Vlakfontein, and Henniker is further south and in line.
A REARGUARD ACTION
The burghers we have struck are not trying to break through— not a bit. They, are simply coming up behind us, almost on the same road; we are in their way, and they are trying to push us off—hence the disturbance.
"Clik-clok-clok-clok-clok!"
A fusillade; the Yeomanry and Victorians that moved from camp in solid chunks are stretching themselves into long skinny skirmishing lines, and are galloping for protecting ridges, swerving and wheeling slightly leftward, for the Boers' position lies diagonally commanding the road. Powell's guns have halted, and the foremost Victorians are firing steadily from behind the walls of a heaven-sent Kraal.
The gunners have not stopped to admire the scenery, and a tiny, white woolly ball catching on to the shoulder of the kopje which shelters the enemy proclaims the proximity of percussion shrapnel.
We know it is a rear-guard action; that the main body of the Boers is miles away; we know that, probably by the time our guns get into action the ridge does not shelter more than twenty Boers.
If the mountain was not there, if the country leading up to the mountain was not a succession of ridges each commanding the other, if there were no other kopjes for the Boers to retire on—in fact, if it were not South Africa we were fighting in, but Salisbury Plain, we should send out a corporal's picket and arrest "the enemy." As it is, we shell them till the sniping ceases—and that Victorian comes and tells us that the commando had broken clear. That Victorian always comes.
THE WAY HE COMES AND GOES
From the flanks, or the front, or from the rear he arrives, and he has always got a story worth telling, and doubly worth hearing. As the column chases along at the breakneck speed of three-and-a-half miles an hour, he drops down from the top of a kopje and bumps into the advance guard.
And he tells the officer commanding that force many things; there are Boers on the farm three miles ahead!, or a Boer convoy is five miles to the left front.
Sometimes he is flicked across the firm line of the horizon and slides down to the main body with news, and suspicions and opinions.
You can call him "The Scout," but he is a sort of nurse that has the infant column in his charge, and he feels his responsibility.
For days he will ride—a mote on the sky-line, and then he will come tearing down to the trailing troops, and jerking up his horse will gaze approvingly on us as we pass him. He will ride miles and miles away from the road and never lose himself once, that Victorian, and he sees lots and lots that the column never sees or dreams of.
Out he goes to the dark unknown, with a lighted pipe between his teeth and his sooty billy clattering at his saddle, and when he comes back he will know more about the farms within a ten-mile radius, their values, their possibilities as forage providers, and the loyalty of their owners than the smartest Intelligence Officer that ever wore a khaki yachting cap, and he will certainly have a better idea of the topography of the country than the Government surveyor who prepares the maps we march by. Sometimes he stays out all night—the gay dog!—and turns up in the morning after a night's debauch on rain-sodden biscuit and doubtful bully beef. Sometimes he doesn't turn up at all, and then Crooke-Lawless sends an ambulance out for him—and under the driver's seat is a spade.
