About one o'clock, without any order and without any reason, the Boers, who were occupying another little kopje on our left, forsook their position. The English artillerymen at once rushed forward, and now began to fire upon us at a distance of 3,500 metres. Then, all at once, there was a cry of, 'To the horses!' At our feet, behind us in the plain, a regiment of Lancers, who had come round the big kopje where we were stranded as on an island, sweep forward in loose order, to seize our horses which are sheltered below.
There is a rush to protect them. A few Boers, coming from I know not whence, took ambush in a little spruit, and drove off the Lancers by a withering fire; but while this feint was being carried out, the English made another rush forward, more serious than the first. A fierce fusillade was kept up on both sides.
We are now only hanging on to the kopje by the left corner.
Suddenly, not having been able to seize our horses, the enemy open a terrible artillery fire upon them obliquely. The Boers retreat before it, and the position becomes untenable; we have only just time to reach our horses. As we come down the kopje, one of my comrades, who is a great declaimer of verse, recites 'Rolla'; but his memory fails him at a certain verse, and he asks me to help him out. I reply that I don't know 'Rolla,' but my answer is cut short by a shell which, passing between us, bursts and carries off the head of a Burgher clean from the nape of the neck.
And through the crash of shells and the whistle of bullets I hear a few metres off the voice of my friend De C---- speaking to someone I cannot see:
'It was at Tabarin, you know.'
At last we reach the horses; Buhors arrives, bringing the water-bottles he has filled at a little spring a hundred metres off under a hail of projectiles. An ambulance is on the spot, riddled with bullets, and the doctor, admirably calm, tends the wounded, while the natives hastily harness the mules. We see two or three more men fall; a horse drops disembowelled by a shell; then we are in the saddle.
Four or five men, who were firing at us from a distance of about 200 metres on top of the kopje we had just abandoned, and the battery which was working away unceasingly 3,000 yards off, had got us in an angle of fire. The ground was ploughed up by a hail of projectiles, and the shower of bullets raised thousands of little clouds.
A hard gallop of 2,000 metres under these convergent fires carried us pretty well out of danger.
A German, with a long fair beard, whom I knew well, galloped past me. He had no coat, no hat, no arms; his horse had neither saddle nor bridle; he was guiding it by a halter. Pale, with staring eyes, his face contracted, he dashed past me. There was a large blood-stain on his shirt. He had been shot right through the body!