Chapter Eleven.
The Colonel’s Plans.
The effects of the night alarm were dying out, for there was plenty to take the attention of the defenders of Groenfontein every day—days full of expectancy—for a Boer attack might take place at any moment, while every now and then some one at an outpost had a narrow escape; and two men were hit by long-range bullets, fired perhaps a mile away by some prowling Boer who elevated his piece and fired on chance at the buildings in the village.
“Sniping,” the men termed it, and all efforts to suppress this cowardly way of carrying on the war were vain, for in most cases there was no chance of making out from what scrap of cover the shots had been despatched; while it became evident that, from sheer malignity, the undisciplined members of the enemy’s force would crawl in the darkness to some clump of rocks, or into some ditch-like donga, or behind one of the many ant-hills, and lie there invisible, firing as he saw a chance, and only leaving it when the darkness came on again.
The rations issued grew poorer; but the men only laughed and chaffed, ridiculing one another and finding nicknames for them.
Colour-Sergeant James, the sturdy non-commissioned officer, the back of whose head still showed the blasting effects of the explosion which he had shared with Lennox, was known as the “Fat Boy,” on account of the general shrinking that had gone on in his person till he seemed to be all bone and sinew, covered with a very brown skin; another man came to be known as the “Greyhound;” while Captain Roby’s favourite corporal, an unpleasant-looking fellow, much disliked by Lennox and Dickenson for his smooth, servile ways, had grown so hollow-cheeked that he was always spoken of as the “Lantern,” after being so dubbed by the joker of his company.
In fact, the men generally had been brought down to attenuation by the scarcity of their food; while their khaki uniforms were not uniform in the least, the men for the most part looking, as Bob Dickenson put it, “like scarecrows in their Sunday clothes.”
“The lads are getting terribly thin, sergeant,” said Lennox one day, after the men had been dismissed from parade.