The Tale of a Field Hospital Part 8

There were many grim evidences of better days. Thus one restaurant presented, among other cheery signs, the announcement of "Meals at all hours." Another establishment was gay with placards of "Ice creams."

Notices of groceries of all kinds for sale made radiant a shop which was empty of everything but a table and some rough chairs.

Such was the aspect of the weary town. Streets empty of all but a few tired and listless men, stores without goods, shops without customers, a railway station without pa.s.sengers, a post office without letters, stamps, or post cards. No words, indeed, can fully describe this city of desolation, this little colony of the almost hopeless, this poor, battered, worn-out, hungry town of Ladysmith, with a bright summer sun making mockery of its dismal streets.

The wretchedness of the place was not mitigated by the horrible smells which greeted one at every corner, nor by the miserable, dirty river which crawled slimily through the place.

We left the town about 5 P.M., and met on our way back the long convoy of wagons with food. It was dark when we reached the river by Umbulwana; and as it was dangerous, and, indeed, impossible to cross the drift except in daylight, we outspanned by the river bank and made a pretence of sleeping.

When yet it was dark on the following morning the mules were put in, and with the earliest streak of dawn we crossed the river and made for Colenso. The wagons were still toiling onwards towards Ladysmith.

The road, as I have said, was very rough, and the poor cart, which had served me well for three months, began to show signs of giving out. It broke down at last, one of the wheels coming to pieces. We were then some seven miles from Colenso, and the vehicle was beyond all repair.

So it was left by the roadside among other wreckage, a forlorn relic of what was once a smart "'bus." Our very scanty luggage was packed upon the mules' backs, our remaining food was distributed among the pa.s.sers-by, and we proceeded to walk to Colenso. From Colenso we travelled to Chieveley by a casual goods train, sitting on the floor of an open truck, as there was no guard's van. We reached Chieveley on Sat.u.r.day at 1 P.M., tired and dirty.

XXVIII

A STRAGGLER

The photograph which is appended to this paragraph was taken during the course of our journey to Ladysmith. The scene is on the north bank of the Great Tugela below the waterfall, and close to the pontoon bridge by which the troops had crossed on their victorious march. Sitting in the sun on a pile of timbers, which the engineers have left, is a typical straggler. His company has moved on to Pieters, and he has fallen out somehow and somewhere on the march, and is following the lost column as best he can.

The day is hot, and his jacket is thrown across his shoulders. A small cloud of flies buzz over him. He is tired, dirty, thirsty, and hungry.

Fever has taken hold of him, and he is--as he would say--feeling "a bit thick." He is sitting by the river bank to await the first wagon across the pontoon on which a conductor will give him a lift. In the meantime some good Samaritan is getting him a drink of water from the stream.

XXIX

HOW A SURGEON WON THE VICTORIA CROSS

On December 15th was fought the battle of Colenso, on the morning of a brilliant summer's day. At dawn the men had marched out eagerly and in keen spirits, and with a swing of the shoulders which told of a certain victory. Before sundown they were beaten back, more than a thousand dead and wounded were lying on the field, the hospital tents were crammed to overflowing, and the wagons, which were prepared to move forwards, were moving back.

The small hamlet of Colenso, battered, empty, and woe-begone, stands on the south bank of the river, and clings about the railway as a homely, unpretending little settlement made up of a few corrugated iron cottages on either side of a single street.

It looks almost like a toy village, and its prim formality is tempered by a friendly growth of cactus, aloes, and mimosa, by a few trees and by many gardens. Behind Colenso is the veldt, which here extends southwards as a vast undulating plain to Chieveley, Frere, and Estcourt.

Between Chieveley and the river the veldt is smooth, and is broken only by ant-hills, by a few Kaffir kraals, and by the precise line of the railway. The plain is green, but it is not the luxuriant green of England, and in the early morning and about the time of the setting sun, tints of yellow and brown and pink spread over the wold and render the place strangely beautiful.

During the glare of noonday the veldt gives simply a blinding sense of scorched and faded green and its monotony and its boundlessness, and the utter lack of shade and variation, make the expanse dreary as a desert.

Beyond the village the brown torrent of the great Tugela tears seawards between high banks and under broken bridges, and among the _debris_ of pitiless ruin. Across the river are the bare, stony, trench-lined kopjes and hills held for so many long weeks by the Boers. About the foot of these bastion-like ridges is the squalor of a neglected camp, and on all sides are rifle pits and trenches and stone shelters and hidden holes. Man seems on this river bank to have gone back to the savagery of the cave dweller, and to be once more crawling on the earth.

Beyond these low hills are the grey heights of Umbulwana towering over Ladysmith.

It was to the right of Colenso that the battle raged fiercest on December 15th, 1899. It was here that Colonel Long's batteries of field artillery were surprised by the enemy and were abandoned after a hideous sacrifice of horses and men. It was here that Lieutenant Roberts received his fatal wound, and it was here that Babtie won the Victoria Cross.

The batteries were moving towards the river with the usual British unconcern, and in the quiet of a summer's morning. Suddenly there was poured upon them from the shelter of a mimosa wood such a torrent of lead that in a few moments there was scarcely a horse or a man standing.

The men faced the wood as only the British soldier can face death. The gallant attempts made to save the guns led only to further loss of life.

Colonel Long had been shot down, some fifty horses had been sacrificed, and the scanty ranks of the English were thinning rapidly. Still the cry went up, "Hold fast to the guns!" and when the last forlorn hope had been attempted and had failed, the green veldt was littered with the wounded, the dying, and the dead.

Near by the guns was a donga, and into this many of the wounded had crawled. The galloper who took up the news of the disaster reported the need of help for the injured. To this call Major Babtie, R.A.M.C., at once responded as a volunteer. His duty did not take him to the battlefield. He rode down to this Inferno. He might as well have ridden before a row of targets during the smartest moment of rifle practice. Three times was his horse shot under him before he reached the donga. Here, in the face of a galling fire, he dragged the wounded into shelter, and a little later he ventured out under a rain of lead to bring in Lieutenant Roberts, who was lying in the open desperately wounded.

For some seven hours Babtie kept by the wounded in the shallow donga, no one daring to lift a head above the edge of the dip. He alone had a water-bottle, and he doled out what water he had in a 60-minim measuring gla.s.s. He was also able to relieve pain by morphine, and when not otherwise occupied he sheltered poor Roberts's face from the scorching sun by holding above it a letter he chanced to have in his pocket. It was not until darkness was setting in that it was possible to venture from the scant shelter the donga provided.

The scene of this heroic act was a level stretch of green veldt lying between the river and a brown road which led with many desultory turns to Hlangwani. To the left were the village and gardens of Colenso, and to the right the grove of mimosa trees in which the Boer force was hidden. Beyond the river rose the enemy's entrenchments and the grim ridge of Grobler's Kloof.

The last time I pa.s.sed over this spot was on the day after our cavalry had reached Ladysmith. It was on a day of peace. The sky was cloudless and no breath of air stirred along the gra.s.s. The bodies of the horses belonging to the lost guns were lying in a long line across the veldt.

Their bones were as white as are the bones of museum skeletons, for the vultures and the ants had done their work thoroughly. The hides were still drawn over the bleaching bones, and round the necks of these ill-fated beasts were still the collars and the harness by which they had dragged the guns into action. There was an absolute stillness over the whole scene. To the left a train was being shunted at Colenso station with leisurely persistence, for the day was hot and the sun dazzling. To the right were the mimosa groves, glorious with yellow blossom, in the shadows of which the Boers had hidden. It was strange that it was from these dainty woods that the h.e.l.lish fire had poured forth which laid low so many gallant English lads, for on this quiet day the trees were busy with complaining doves.

By the banks of the donga, which had been for a whole summer's day a valley of the shadow of death, a Kaffir was crooning over a concertina, from which came a lazy, dirge-like music.

The railway engine, the doves, and the rapt Kaffir were the sole moving objects in this garden of peace, and in the blue distance was the ridge of Grobler's Kloof, no longer belching fire and sh.e.l.l, but standing out delicately against the tender sky.

No brave deed had ever a gentler setting.

x.x.x

"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI."

"The Glory of the World," as the soldier sees it, can be understood by most of us. There is the glory of having served his Queen and his country, and of having done his duty like a man. There is, probably, the glorious memory of some great charge and of the storming of some stubborn trench. And there is the home-coming, made glorious by the ringing of bells and the waving of flags, by a march through familiar streets and through shouting and cheering crowds, with the rattle of drums and fifes, with hurrahs and yells of welcome for the regiment he loves so well. A home-coming like this is worth many days of hardship, many a Spion Kop, and many a dull week in a hospital tent. But it does not fall to the lot of all.

I remember at Chieveley one morning before breakfast watching a solitary man approach the hospital lines. He was as melancholy an object as ever a war has produced. He was a soldier who had fought at Colenso, at Vaal Krantz, and before Pieters, and he was now staggering towards the hospital, a ragged, broken-down, khaki-coloured spectre of a man. He dragged his rifle along with him; his belt was gone; his helmet was poised at the back of his head; his frowsy tunic was thrown over his shoulders; he was literally black with flies. His clothes had not been off for many days, and he had missed the ambulance, he said, and had walked to the hospital.

How far he had come he could not tell, nor could anyone gather how he had fared or where he had slept. All that was evident was that he was wet with dew and had spent the night in the open. He knew that for vague hours he had been making his way, with ever faltering steps and failing eyes, towards the red cross flag on the crest of the hill. And now he had reached it. As to why he had come: "Well! he had a touch of the dysentery," he said, "and was about played out."

Poor lad! this was a sorry home-coming at the last. A squalid ending of a march; staggering in alone, a shuffling wreck, without a single comrade, with no fifes and drums, no cheering crowd, and no proud adoration of mother or wife. He was helped to a bell tent and put to bed on a stretcher, and on the stretcher he died; and this was the end of his soldiering. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!