Four weeks may seem a short time in comfort, but it is a very long one under conditions such as those, amid horrible sights and sounds and smells, while a haze of flies spread over everything, covering your food and trying to force themselves into your mouth—every one of them a focus of disease. It was bad enough when we had a full staff, but soon the men began to wilt under the strain. They were nearly all from the Lancashire cotton mills, little, ill-nourished fellows but with a great spirit. Of the fifteen twelve contracted the disease and added to the labours of the survivors. Three died. Fortunately we of the staff were able to keep going, and we were reinforced by a Dr. Schwartz of Capetown. The pressure was great, but we were helped by the thought that the greater the work the more we proved the necessity of our presence in Africa. Above all, our labours were lightened by the splendid stuff that we had for patients. It was really glorious to see the steady patience with which they bore their sufferings. The British soldier may grouse in days of peace, but I never heard a murmur when he was faced with this loathsome death.
Our hospital was no worse off than the others, and as there were many of them the general condition of the town was very bad. Coffins were out of the question, and the men were lowered in their brown blankets into shallow graves at the average rate of sixty a day. A sickening smell came from the stricken town. Once when I had ridden out to get an hour or two of change, and was at least six miles from the town the wind changed and the smell was all around me. You could smell Bloemfontein long before you could see it. Even now if I felt that low deathly smell, compounded of disease and disinfectants, my heart would sink within me.
At last there came the turn. The army had moved on. Hospitals up the line absorbed some of the cases. Above all the water works had been retaken, and with hardly any resistance. I went out with the force which was to retake it, and slept for the night in a thin coat under a wagon, an experience which left me colder than I can ever remember being in my life—a cold which was not only on the surface, but like some solid thing within you. Next morning there was every prospect of a battle, for we had been shelled the night before and it looked as if the position would be held, so Ian Hamilton, who commanded, made a careful advance. However, there was no resistance, and save for some figures watching us from distant hills there was no sign of the enemy. He had slipped away in the night.
In the advance we passed over the Drift at Sanna’s Post where the disaster had occurred some weeks before. The poor artillery horses were still lying in heaps where they had been shot down, and the place was covered with every kind of litter—putties, cholera belts, haversacks, and broken helmets. There were great numbers of Boer cartridge papers which were all marked “Split Bullets. Manufactured for the Use of the British Government, London.” What the meaning of this was, or where they came from, I cannot imagine, for certainly our fellows had always the solid Lee-Metford bullet, as I can swear after inspecting many a belt. It sounded like some ingenious trick to excuse atrocities, and yet on the whole the Boer was a fair and good-humoured fighter until near the close of the war.
The move of Hamilton’s was really the beginning of the great advance, and having cleared the water works he turned north and became the right wing of the army. On his left was Tucker’s 7th Division, then Kelly Kenny’s 6th Division, Pole-Carew’s 1st Division, including the Guards, and finally a great horde of mounted infantry, including the Yeomanry, the Colonial and the Irregular Corps. This was the great line which set forth early in May to sweep up from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. Things had become more quiet at the hospital and presently Archie Langman and I found a chance to get away and to join the army at the first stage of its advance. I wrote our experience out while it was still fresh in my mind, and the reader will forgive me if I reproduce some of this, as it is likely to be more vivid and more detailed than the blurred impression now left in my memory after more than twenty years.
CHAPTER XVII
DAYS WITH THE ARMY
Pole-Carew—Tucker—Snipers—The Looted Farm—Taking of Brandfort—Artillery Engagement—Advance of the Guards— The Wounded Scout—The Dead Australian—Return.
Stand in the pass at Karee, and look north in the clear fresh morning air! Before you lies a great plain, dull green, with white farmhouses scattered here and there. One great donga slashes it across. Distant hills bound it on all sides, and at the base of those in front, dimly seen, are a line of houses and a steeple. This is Brandfort, ten miles off, and we are advancing to attack it.
The troops are moving forward, line after line of red faces and khaki, with rumbling columns of guns. Two men sit their horses beside us on a knoll, and stare with their glasses at the distant houses. Gallant figures both of them; the one spruce, debonnaire, well-groomed, with laughing eyes and upward-curved moustache, a suggestion of schoolboy mischief about his handsome face; the other, grim, fierce, all nose and eyebrow, white scales of sun-dried skin hanging from his brick-red face. The first is Pole-Carew, General of Division; the second is Brigadier Stephenson. We are finding our men, and these are among them.