The Judgment House

by Gilbert Parker

A world of light, of commendable trees, of grey grass flecked with flowers, of life having the supreme sense of a freedom which has known no check. It is a life which cities have not spoiled, and where man is still in touch with the primeval friends of man; where the wildest beast and the newest babe of a woman have something in common.

Drink your fill of the sweet intoxicating air with eyes shut till the lungs are full and the heart beats with new fulness; then open them upon the wide sunrise and scan the veld so full of gracious odour. Is it not good and glad? And now face the hills rising nobly away there to the left, the memorable and friendly hills. Is it not—

Upon the morning has crept suddenly a black cloud, although the sun is shining brilliantly. A moment before the dawn all was at peace on the veld and among the kopjes, and only the contented sighing of men and beasts broke the silence, or so it seemed; but with the glimmer of light along the horizon came a change so violent that all the circle of vision was in a quiver of trouble. Affrighted birds, in fluttering bewilderment, swept and circled aimlessly through the air with strange, half-human cries; the jackal and the meerkat, the springbok and the rheebok, trembled where they stood, with heads uplifted, vaguely trying to realize the Thing which was breaking the peace of their world; useless horses which had been turned out of the armies of Boers and British galloped and stumbled and plunged into space in alarm; for they knew what was darkening the morning. They had suffered the madness of battle, and they realized it at its native first value.

There was a battle forward on the left flank of the Boer Army. Behind Hetmeyer's Kopje were the horses of the men whom Rudyard Byng had brought to take a position and hold it till support came and this flank of the Farmer's Army was turned; but the men themselves were at work on the kopjes—the grim work of dislodging the voortrekker people from the places where they burrowed like conies among the rocks.

Just before dawn broke Byng's men were rushing the outer trenches. These they cleared with the wild cries of warriors whose blood was in a tempest. Bayonets dripped red, rifles were fired at hand-to-hand range, men clubbed their guns and fought as men fought in the days when the only fighting was man to man, or one man to many men. Here every "Boojer" and Rooinek was a champion. The Boer fell back because he was forced back by men who were men of the veld like himself; and the Briton pressed forward because he would not be denied; because he was sick of reverses; of going forward and falling back; of taking a position with staggering loss and then abandoning it; of gaining a victory and then not following it up; of having the foe in the hollow of the hand and hesitating to close it with a death-grip; of promising relief to besieged men, and marking time when you had gained a foothold, instead of gaining a foothold farther on.

Byng's men were mostly South-Africans born, who had lived and worked below the Zambesi all their lives; or else those whose blood was in a fever at the thought that a colony over which the British flag flew should be trod by the feet of an invader, who had had his own liberty and independence secured by that flag, but who refused to white men the status given to "niggers" in civilized states. These fighters under Byng had had their fill of tactics and strategy which led nowhere forward; and at Wortmann's Drift the day before they had done a big thing for the army with a handful of men. They could ride like Cossacks, they could shoot like William Tell, and they had a mind to be the swivel by which the army of Queen Victoria should swing from almost perpetual disaster, in large and small degree, to victory.

From the first trenches on and on to the second trenches higher up! But here the Boer in his burrow with his mauser rifle roaring, and his heart fierce with hatred and anger at the surprise, laid down to the bloody work with an ugly determination to punish remorselessly his fellow-citizens of the veld and the others. It was a fire which only bullet-proof men could stand, and these were but breasts of flesh and muscle, though the will was iron.

Up, up, and up, struggled these men of the indomitable will. Step by step, while man after man fell wounded or dead, they pushed forward, taking what cover was possible; firing as steadily as at Aldershot; never wasting shots, keeping the eye vigilant for the black slouch hat above the rocks, which told that a Boer's head was beneath it, and might be caught by a lightning shot.

Step by step, man by man, troop by troop, they came nearer to the hedges of stone behind which an inveterate foe with grim joy saw a soldier fall to his soft-nosed bullet; while far down behind these men of a forlorn hope there was hurrying up artillery which would presently throw its lyddite and its shrapnel on the top of the hill up where hundreds of Boers held, as they thought, an impregnable position. At last with rushes which cost them almost as dearly in proportion as the rush at Balaclava cost the Light Brigade, Byng's men reached the top, mad with the passion of battle, vengeful in spirit because of the comrades they had lost; and the trenches emptied before them. As they were forsaken, men fought hand to hand and as savagely as ever men fought in the days of Rustum.

In one corner, the hottest that the day saw, Rudyard and Barry Whalen and a scattered handful of men threw themselves upon a greatly larger number of the enemy. For a moment a man here and there fought for his life against two or three of the foe. Of these were Rudyard and Barry Whalen. The khaki of the former was shot through in several places, he had been slashed in the cheek by a bullet, and a bullet had also passed through the muscle of his left forearm; but he was scarcely conscious of it. It seemed as though Fate would let no harm befall him; but, in the very moment, when on another part of the ridge his men were waving their hats in victory, three Boers sprang up before him, ragged and grim and old, but with the fire of fanaticism and race-hatred in their eyes. One of them he accounted for, another he wounded, but the wounded voortrekker—a giant of near seven feet clubbed his rifle, and drove at him. Rudyard shot at close quarters again, but his pistol missed fire.