But Commandant Andries Botma declined. He seldom touched stimulants, he said, and now, if he did so at the beginning of a fight, would it not be said that he required a dose of what the English call “Dutch courage”—with a whimsical look at Colvin, at whom he was poking sly fun?
The quondam emissary to the Colonial Boers, among whom we first made his acquaintance, was no mere frothy stump orator. The name by which he was deferentially known among these—“The Patriot”—he had subsequently done everything to justify. He was not the man to preach others into peril he dare not face himself, and when his crusade had culminated in an appeal to arms, he had always been among the foremost where hard knocks were given or received. Now he was in command of an important wing of General Cronje’s force.
A mighty engine of destruction or defence this—its lines extending for miles and miles—waiting there grim, dogged, resolute, to give battle to the richest, most resourceful, and determined Power in the world. A terrible force to reckon with; its impelling factor, a calm fanaticism born of an unswerving conviction of the justice of the cause and the sure and certain alliance of Heaven.
In the simplicity of his veldt attire, with little or nothing to mark him out from those whom he commanded, Andries Botma looked even more a born leader of men than when last we saw him, swaying his countrymen with all the force of his fiery oratory. His strong rugged face, eager, yet impassive, was bent upon the scene of battle, as though not to lose a detail, not to miss a chance. He was surrounded by a little knot of middle-aged and elderly Boers, most of them holding subordinate commands under himself.
“Whirr!” The screech of a shrapnel sailing over the foremost lines. It falls into the river, throwing up the mud with a tremendous splash. Another and another. This last, better aimed, strikes among the rear lines—result as before: agony, wounds, death. At the same time another hits the kopje not many yards below, exploding in all directions with appalling effect.
The splinters fly from an ironstone boulder not two yards distant, but Andries Botma does not move a muscle. One Boer in the group utters a mild ejaculation, and then is seen to be winding a bit of oiled rag, kept for gun-sponging purposes, around his middle finger. Through this rude bandage the blood slowly oozes, but nobody seems to think the circumstance worthy of remark. Colvin is conscious of a creeping sensation in the region of the spine, as the jagged iron explodes around him with vicious metallic hiss. And the voices of the long-range duel undergo no diminution, the deep-mouthed boom of the heavy guns, and the sharp, snapping bark of the smaller ones.
Things, however, are not destined to continue that way. As the hours wear on the advance of the attacking force is made out. From this part of the field the latter can be seen in skirmishing order, drawing nearer and nearer; those khaki-clad dots on the great brown expanse affording but an insignificant mark. And then there begins the sound of rifle-shooting, literally as “the crackling of thorns under a pot.” Down and along the lines it sweeps, in waves of sharp staccato sounds, and the spludges of dust, before and behind those khaki lines of advancing skirmishers, but mostly before, are like the dropping of water on red-hot iron. Now, too, it is near enough to mark the effect of those deadly volleys. That inexorable advance continues, but as it does it leaves behind lines of dead and dying and grievously wounded. Not all on one side, though, is the red slaughter. Here among the patriot trenches men are falling, and falling fast. Shell after shell, too, drops into the little township, and the crash of shattered brickwork, and the shrill clangour of battered-in corrugated iron, mingles with the gradating roar of projectiles, as they leave each grim nozzle sentinelling miles and miles of that sullen river front.
Those on the kopje are now well within the line of fire. More than frequently a shrill vicious “whigge” as the Lee-Metford bullets clip the air, or shatter to a flattened lead mushroom against a stone, causes an involuntary duck. The American is taking plentiful notes in shorthand. Colvin, who is without this resource, also devoid of the natural excitement of the combatant of firing at the enemy as well as being fired at by him, takes longer to get used to the hum of bullets and the bursting of shrapnel than would otherwise have been the case, for he is totally unarmed, a precaution taken against the eventuality of capture by his own countrymen. And the effect of this precaution is strange. He feels out of it. Needless to say he has no desire to draw trigger on his said countrymen, yet the consciousness that he is being shot at—no matter whom by—without the power of replying, is strange and novel. But his nerves at last become attuned to the hum of missiles, and he watches the whole arena of the battle with a vivid and increasing interest.
Higher and higher mounts the sun, more blistering and scorching his rays, giving forth from the ironstone of the kopje as though reflected from an oven. A strange mirage, watery, crystallised, hangs over the brown expanse of veldt, going off into limpid blue on the far horizon, where the distant flat-topped hills seem to be suspended in mid-air. Whether it is that this lake-like liquid tranquillity emphasises the torrid heat or not, those on the kopje feel what the burning of thirst means. They have water-bottles from which they refresh, but sparingly. Those in the trenches feel it too, but their attention is on the dire, stern business of the day. No time have they to dwell upon mere corporeal cravings.
Whigge! Crash! Shell after shell is breaking within their lines. Men writhe, shattered, screaming, where the hideous dismemberment of the human frame is beyond all human endurance, however willing the spirit, the dogged, stern, manly, patriotic spirit—proof against mere ordinary pain—agony even. One of the group round Andries Botma sinks to the earth as a Nordenfelt missile, crashing and splintering among the stones which form his cover, buries a great fragment of jagged iron deep in his thigh. All run to him, foremost among them the Commandant, reckless of the perfect hailstorm of bullets which already, although at long-range, is beginning to spray the kopje, while some signal wildly to the ambulance waggons away and below in the rear. But Field-cornet Theunis Van Wyk has got his death-blow, and his wife and children—he has three sons fighting below in the trenches—and grandchildren will see him at home smoking the pipe of peace no more. The flow of blood is already rendering him faint, and with a hasty jerked-out message delivered to his old friend and Commandant to carry to them, and a quavering attempt at singing a Dutch hymn upon his lips, he passes out like a brave man, without complaint or rancour, as many and many a one has done and will do before this day of striving and of carnage is over.