Presently arrived the cooks and camp kettles, and we settled down to a good "buster." When nothing was left but empty pots and vain longings, we lit our pipes, and the aromatic fumes of our Boer's Head cabbagio were wafted heavenwards, our veracious raconteur related how he had captured the calf. How our pulses throbbed and our blood rose to fever heat as he told how he tore away his game from under the very horns of its enraged mother; and how, with the calf on his back, he had been chased five miles and over a big kopje strewn with boulders as big as an A.S.C. waggon, and finally, seeing no other mode of escape, had hurled the animal (the calf, not its maternal relative) from the top of the kopje, and in sheer desperation had leaped down after it, breaking his fall by alighting on its body.
Bidding us good-night, he left us to imagine what he would have broken had he alighted off its body.
Feeling the spirit of contentment hovering o'er us, we prepared to turn in. The guns had previously been unlimbered and were ready for action, with their muzzles pointing to the enemy. Formed up in rear were the six gun limbers and six ammunition waggons, each with its team of six horses still hooked in in case of any emergency. In addition were the horses of the single riders, tied by their headropes to different parts of the carriages, making a total of somewhere about a hundred horses.
Well, we had comfortably settled down and were enjoying our first sleep when the sentries were startled by a most unearthly noise from the vicinity of the camp. It sounded like a dyspeptic groan from a more than ordinarily cavernous stomach. The horses pricked up their ears and the sentries clutched their carbines tighter as they peered into the darkness. Suddenly came the sound again—a mournful, melancholy, hair-raising sound. Like a flash the whole battery of horses, as though acting on a signal, stampeded into the night, taking the waggons with them; over sleeping men they went, stopping for no obstacles, overturning guns in their mad career, and heading straight for the enemy's trenches. The outposts, thinking the Boers were trying to break through the lines, opened fire at nothing. The Boers, thinking they were attacked, did ditto. It was a perfect pandemonium for a few minutes. The spiteful spit-puff of the Mauser and sharp crack of the Lee-Metford, the whole blending with the cries of the injured and the shouts of the men who were trying to stop the runaways, made an impression that few who witnessed the scene will ever forget.
We had several more or less severely injured, lost about thirty horses and one waggon, besides several that were overturned and smashed.
All this damage was caused by the lowing of an old cow who had wandered through the camp seeking her lost offspring.
Moral.—Hanker ye after the fleshpots, commandeer ye not, but buy! buy! buy!
Note.—Wanted to know—vide the Press report of Paardeberg action—Since when has the 82nd Battery, R.F.A., become a mule battery?