Far away on our left flank the enemy hold the heights, and watch us moving outward, whilst between them and us, stretching mile after mile in a line with our column, ripples a line of scarlet flame, for the foe has fired the veldt to starve the transit mules, horses, and oxen. Like a sword unsheathed in the sunlight, the flames sparkle amidst the grass, which grows knee-deep right to the kopje's very lips. Birds rise on the wing with harsh, resonant cries, flutter awhile above their ravished homes, then wheel in mid-air and seek more peaceful pastures. Hares spring up before the crackling flames quite reach their forms, and, like grey streaks in a sailor's beard on a stormy day, flash suddenly into view, and as suddenly disappear again. Here and there a graceful springbok dashes through the smoke, with head thrown back and graceful limbs extended, his glossy, mottled hide looking doubly beautiful backed by that red streak of fire. The wind catches the quivering crimson streak, and for awhile the flames race, as I have seen wild horses, neck to neck, rush through the saltbush plains at the sound of the stockman's whip. Then, as the wind drops, the flames curl caressingly around the wealth of growing fodder, biting the grass low down, and wrapping it in a mantle of black and red, as flame and smoke commingle.
Here and there a pool of water, hidden from view until the fire fiend stripped the veldt land bare, leaps to life like a silver shield in the grim setting of the bare and blackened plain. Small mobs of cattle stand stupidly snuffing the smoke-laden air, until the breath of the blaze awakens them to a sense of peril; then, with horns lowered like bayonets at the charge, with tails stiff and straight behind them as levelled lances, they leap onward, over or through everything in front of them, bellowing frantically their brute beast protest against the red ruin of war. The flames roll on; they reach the stone walls of a cattle pen, and leap it as a hunter takes a brush fence in his stride; onward still, until a Kaffir kraal is reached. The soft-lipped billows kiss the uncouth mud wall, and for a moment transfigure them with a nameless beauty, the beauty that precedes ruin. Only a moment or two, and then the resistless destroyer flaunts its pennons amidst the reed-thatched roofs; the sparks leap up, the black smoke curls towards the sky, whilst on the neighbouring hills the negro women, with their babes in their arms, wail woefully, for those rude huts, with all their barbarous trappings, meant home—aye, home and happiness—to them. The flames roll onward now in two long lines, for the Kaffir encampment had sundered them, and now they look, with their beautifully rounded curves sweeping so gracefully out into the unknown, like the rich, ripe lips of a wanton woman in the pride of her shameless beauty. All that they leave behind is desolation, darkness, despair, ruin unutterable, only blackened walls, simmering carcases, weeping women, and wailing children.
Away on our right flank we can just make out the skeletons of what a few hours before had been a cluster of smiling farmhouses. They do not smile now; they grin horribly in the sunlight, grin as the fleshless skulls of dead men grin on a battlefield after those sextons of the veldt the grey-hooded, curved-beaked vultures have screamed their final farewell to the charnel-houses of war—noble war, splendid war, pastime of potentates and princes, invented in hell and patented in all the temples of sorrow.
As we look on those grim relics of this dreary time we catch the maddening sound of distant guns. The chargers prick their ears, and quiver from muzzle to coronet. The khaki-clad figures on the plain throw up their heads and turn their eyes towards the sound; the tired shoulders square themselves, each foot seems to tread the blackened plain with firmer, prouder tread. The sound of guns is like the rush of wine through sluggish veins, and men forget that they are faint with hunger, weary to the verge of wretchedness with ceaseless marching. The sound of guns bespeaks the presence of the foe, and those gaunt soldiers of the Queen are galvanised to life and lust of battle by the very breath of war. A ripple runs along the line, the farthest flanks catch the gleam of the sun on distant rifle barrels. An order rings out sharp and crisp; the column stands as if each man and horse were carved in rock.
The infantry lean lightly on their guns, the cavalry crane forward in their saddles. We pause and wait until we see the green badge of O'Driscoll's scouts on the hats of the advancing riders. O'Driscoll rides towards the staff with loosened rein, and every spur in all his gallant little troop shows how the scouts had ridden. We strain our ears to catch the news the Irish scout has brought. It comes at last Clements has met the foe, and death is busy in those distant hills.
Rundle sits silently, hard pressed in his saddle—a gallant figure, with soldier and leader written all over him. We wait his verdict anxiously, for on his word our fate may hinge. We have not long to wait—Clements can hold his own; Brabant will outflank the Boers. Forward, march! The men droop as wheat fields droop in the sultry air of a seething day. They are tired, deadly tired; not too tired to fight, but weary of the endless marching from point to point to keep the enemy from breaking through their lines and striking southward.
Now, overhead, betwixt the smoking earth and smiling sky, flocks of vultures come and go, fluttering their great pinions noiselessly. To them the sound of guns is merriest music; it is their summons to the banquet board. Foul things they look as the float over us, silent as souls that have slipped from some ash heap in Hades, grey with the greyness that grows on the wolf's hide; their feathers hang upon them in ridges, unkempt, unlovely, soiled with blood and offal. They float above our heads, they wheel upon our flanks.
A horse drops wearily upon its knees, looks round dumbly on the wilderness of blackness, then turns its piteous eyes upward towards the skies that seem so full of laughing loveliness; then, with a sob which is almost human in the intensity of its pathos, the tired head falls downwards, the limbs contract with spasmodic pain, then stiffen into rigidity; and one wonders, if the Eternal mocked that silent appeal from those great sad eyes, eyes that had neither part nor lot in the sin and sorrow of war, how shall a man dare look upwards for help when the bitterness of death draws nigh unto him? The grey lines above, on flank, and front, and rear, were with greedy speed converging to one point, until they flock in a horrid, struggling, fighting, revolting mass of beaks and feathers above the fallen steed, as devils flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; his gutted carcass, flattened into a shapeless streak, shrinks towards the earth, as if asking to be veiled from the laughter of the skies. But there is neither pity from above nor shelter from below as the red wave of war, like the curse of the white Christ, sweeps over the land. God grant that merry England may never witness, on her own green meadow lands, these sights and sounds which meet the eye and ear on African soil.
Oh, England, England, if I had a voice whose clarion tones could reach your ears and stir your hearts in every city and town, village and hamlet, wayside cot and stately castle, in all your sea-encircled isle, I would cry to you to guard your coasts! Better, it seems to me, writing here, with all the evidences of war beneath my eyes, that every man born of woman's love on British soil should die between the decks, or find a grave in foundering ships of war, than that the foot of a foreign foe should touch the Motherland. Better that your ships be shambles, where men could die like men, sending Nelson's royal message all along the armoured line; better that our best and bravest found a grave where grey waves curl towards our coastline, than that our womanhood should look with woe-encircled eyes into the wolfish mouth of war. Better that our strong men perished, with the brine and ocean breezes playing freshly on the gaping wounds through which their souls passed outward, than that our little maids and tiny, tender babes should face the unutterable shame, the anguish, and the suffering of a war within our borders.
Do not laugh the very thought to scorn and brand the thing impossible, for fools have laughed before to-day whilst kingdoms tottered to their fall You who stay at home miss much that others know—and, knowing, dread. If England at this hour could only realise what manner of men control her destinies, then all the lion in the breed would spring to life again. I do not know if lack-brains of a similar strain control the supplies for England's Navy; but if, in time of war, it proves to be the case, then God help us, God help the old flag and the stout hearts who fight for it.