"Good business!" said the brigadier, turning to his chief of staff. "Will you canter up and mark out a camp? It's a great relief to find that that advance squadron hasn't been scuppered."
A more dismal camping-ground could not have been found. The fair veldt seemed to have vanished. Instead of a sprinkling of farms, there was only one human habitation within sight—a miserable edifice of mud and unbaked bricks belonging to a Boer shepherd of the lowest type. The dam was a natural depression formed by what appeared to have been the crater of some long-extinct volcano. The country surrounding it was of the roughest, and to make the situation more depressing, with sundown great banks of cloud had gathered in the west. The brigadier might well be anxious for his small force of raw troops in such a fastness, and it is easy to appreciate the feeling which prompted him to personally post the night pickets. But raw troops, raw transport, all will settle down in time, and an hour after sundown the men were having their food.
Before the main body moved into camp the Tiger had made a discovery. He had found a wounded Boer in the shepherd's shanty. A stalwart young Dutchman, with his right hand horribly shattered by a pom-pom shell. The youth was in great pain, and, as the Boer so often has proved, was very communicative under his hurt. He was a Free Stater from Philippolis, and belonged to Judge Hertzog's commando. He was one of fifteen scouts sent by Hertzog, under a commandant called Lotter, to pick up the Richmond rebels and take them down to Graaf Reinet, where De Wet's invaders had orders to concentrate, before undertaking the more desperate venture of the invasion. He indorsed the other wounded man's version of the attack they had made upon us in the morning, and he also volunteered the information that Brand, Hertzog, and Pretorius were due to attack Britstown—our destination—this very evening. This information so far interested the brigadier that he ordered an officer's patrol from the 20th Dragoon Guards to leave camp at 3 A.M. and ride right through to Britstown without a halt, so as to arrive there by nine or ten in the morning. It was important to know if Britstown had been attacked, since until the concentration took place on the morrow the garrison there was weak: it was also important that the general officer commanding the combined movement should know of the deflection from Hertzog's commando which we had encountered. Lieutenant Meadows, having proved so successful in avoiding the enemy in the morning, was again entrusted with the mission, and he was given Stephanus as his guide.
The gathering clouds did not prove simply a seasonable warning. A great icy blast swept up the valley, driving a broad belt of stinging dust before it, and the bivouac was smitten through and through by a South African dust-storm. Five minutes of fierce gale, with lightning that momentarily dispelled the night, then a pause—the herald of coming rain. A few great ice-cold drops smote like hail on the tarpaulin shelter that served headquarters for a mess-tent. Then followed five minutes of a deluge such as you in England cannot conceive. A deluge against which the stoutest oil-skin is as blotting-paper. A rain which seems also to entice fountains from the earth beneath you. In ten minutes all is over. The stars are again demurely winking above you, and all that you know of the storm is that you see the vast diminishing cloud, revealed in the west by the fading lightning-flashes, and that you have not a dry possession either in your kit or on your person.
"Not much fear of sleeping sentries to-night," said the chief of the staff as we cowered round a fire under the waggon-sail.
"No; and it is just as well: it is on these sleepless nights that 'brother'[16] is fond of showing himself," answered the brigadier. "I don't like all these Free Staters about. They may be able to stir up the new crop of rebels into doing something desperate. Raw guerillas, with a leaven of hard-bitten cases, are always a source of danger. But I think that we worked our own salvation in the skirmish this morning. They would hardly believe that we should have such a small force with so many guns. No; our luck was in to-day, when they discovered us instead of Twine's squadron. We shall make something out of the 20th. They are the right stuff: that squadron went for that rise to-day in splendid style. The Boer cannot stand galloping. I may be a crank—they believe that I am one at Pretoria—but I am convinced that I have discovered the true Mounted Infantry formation for the sort of fighting that we are now experiencing out here. If you find your enemy in any position that you can gallop over, without riding your horse to a standstill, go for him in extended order. You will get more results from an enterprise of this kind than from a week of artillery and dismounted attack. I hear that D. claims to have originated this formation. Why, I was practising it with my fellows in Natal before D. was born, or rather when he was an infant in the knowledge of war. I am as convinced that I am right as I am that the rifle is the cavalry-man's arm. It is not for shock tactics that you require to mount men nowadays: the use of a horse is to get into the best fire-position in the shortest possible time. The battles of the future will be decided by rifles and machine-guns, not by lance and sabre. There's heresy for you; but it's my honest conviction!"
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Scoundrel.