Page images
PDF
EPUB

PATRICK BRADE, MURDERER.

BY LINESMAN.

WATCHMAN! What of the night? A restless night, with gusts of wind booming up from nowhere so suddenly and so briefly that it seems as if a great cathedral door were opening intermittently, and let ting the gale rush in amongst the craggy naves and aisles of the kopjes. Clang! the door is to again; a million little echoes remaining behind in the suddenly restored quiet, whinny faintly up amongst the pinnacles and rustle over the floors. Never still, this night, though between the blasts the heart of all the Universe seems to have stopped beating, so utter is the hush. But the flattened grass and the strained mimosa bough straighten themselves again with a subdued crackle, far down in the valley the sound of the swollen spruit growls up once more like the roll of a distant train, and ahead, deep in the very bosom of the night, fifty leagues of grass, a hundred hills, a thousand kloofs, all Africa, seems to be settling down to rest again, with countless hummings eddying in the wake of that last rush of wind. An unhappy thing is Night, the tragedy of the drama of Nature. Has any one ever beheld it coming on without sadness, or awaked in the midst of it without alarm? Every man at some time has had his soul buried in Night

for a moment, maybe on a ship at sea, or down in a wooded valley, or even in the empty street of a sleeping city, and when he has dug it up again has found it lapped in something very much more like horror than Peace.

On this particular gusty night ten thousand men, nearly all asleep, a few dead, lay in open order, sprinkled out at regular intervals along the ridge of a mountain. Both dead and alive, sleeping and waking, lay as still as a row of corbels along a Gothic parapet, and almost as grotesque, for both the sleeps of civilised men are particularly hideous in face and attitude. Did Homer's sightless eyes close in slumber with that imbecile droop at the angles; and slaughtered Hector, did he drop with the leer and contortion of a clown at the circus? So these ten thousand slept and grew cold amongst the stones, the aerial shouting and the sudden stabs of calm equally unnoticed. The dead stiffened like drying plaster, each in the pose in which he had been struck down. The living were scarcely more motionless; only their flesh crept and shuddered at the sticky touch of damp underclothing, of steaming boots and socks, things which take the courage from a man more surely than the bursting of a shell.

Beside each lay a rifle

so rusty that it looked fitter for the scrap-heap of a marine store dealer than the field of battle. For this was a battle in the New Style, and these ten thousand unclean sleepers were fighting as certainly as if they had been swinging the bayonet and blaspheming body to body with the enemy, instead of snoring and sighing five hundred black yards away from him down below the ridge line. It was a battle, and not a first nighter either. Five days ago there had been a march from a sunny, mimosascented camp somewhere in the Elysian Fields,-a march so sudden that the officers ran to parade with their breast-pockets bulging with the letters of the just arrived mail, and read them with bent heads when the march began, stumbling out of step at the heads of their companies, to the extreme annoyance of the leading sections of fours, the mer of which winked at each other when the Captain grew so dreamy over 8 certain fat manuscript, filling many leaflets of pale blue linen paper, -so dreamy that he held an unlighted match to an unfilled pipe, and thereafter smoked nothing for an hour as he strode along.

But soon dreams and winking alike had fled, with all other pleasant things, from the line of march. Heat and dust came instead, and the agonies of fatigue and thirst, the torment of heavy straps and buckles grating, grating, grating interminably against the same sore inches of flesh, the

VOL, CXCI. NO. MCLVII.

blow of hard boots against the same aching toe, the pressure of the helmet upon the same throbbing spot on the temples. The sun rose higher and hotter, piercing like a fiery sword the fog of dust which enveloped the column. The maize crackled like green flames on either side of the track; the open veld beyond glared fiercely, burning through the rough boots as if it hid a furnace ; the dry river - beds sent up eddies

of scorching sand, though there was no wind, and the dancing whorls seemed to contain their own motive power; the tops of the kopjes stared pitilessly out over the burning air, which, shimmering up from the kloofs below, made their granite bulk tremble like shaken gauze. It had been a long and evil march, which had dragged the army, sick with exhaustion, to the underfeatures of the mountains which, seen from the campingground, had seemed so smoothly blue and sheer. Here they were, close ahead, not blue any more, but brown and scarred; no longer sheer, but leaning in

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

skirmishing of the now dismounted troopers, until a formidable unison, rolling across three miles of front, disclosed the first tier of a hostile position which stepped, in a series of shelves, up to the crest-line showing black and ragged against the steel-blue sky. As evening fell, and the firing, dying with the light, began to dance in runnels of red sparks from the mountain shadows, the army shook itself out into battle formation across the heated plain below. A weary job this, after a long march, imposing more stumbling miles on the troops who had to form the extended flanks. Night was far spent when the last of them, struggling over dark and broken country, had reached their positions. Drenched with sweat, throbbing with fatigue and faint with hunger, the silent men flung themselves down with a clatter, the majority too weary even to lighten their haversacks of the bread and beef which, wrapped in dirty paper, had joggled all day, in tune with their steps, amongst pipes, tobacco, rags, spare socks, and old letters, the precious, uncleanly litter which takes the place of home with soldiers in the field. Then a few short hours of silence, in which the sweat cooled to a bitter chill, the boots hardened on the blistered feet, and every little fold of clothing became a ragged file. For all the stillness there is little sleep in a bivouac under arms after the first hour or so. One by one the men are awakened by the

cold, and though they lie as motionless as before, many wide, troubled eyes, like those of a suffering animal, will look into yours should you steal down the prone ranks by the light of the moon or lantern. It is a relief when, an hour before dawn, there is a general rousing, though it is an oppressed and furtive return to life that of an army which has not slept well in the presence of the enemy. There is a strict order abroad-"No noise"-but it is unnecessary. Few wish to talk; there is a little quiet munching of the bread and beef, 8 little stir and stumbling as the "orderly men " return, each festooned with a score of his comrades' water-bottles which he has filled at a neighbouring trickle, a little more stir as the soldiers fall in; a subdued "numbering off," raised a semitone here and there by the blunderings of the inevitable softy whom half a century of campaigning would never teach his place in the ranks or his number when he gets there. Just as dawn breaks in a slit of peacock-blue over the black ridges ahead, the army is ready for battle, and the battle begins. It begins with a scattered, crackling advance through the tangled underfeatures below the mountain, through which the men fight their way like beaters in a pheasant cover, bursting through the thickets, whipped by twigs and torn by thorns, falling into ditches and hollows, clambering up sudden hillocks and brambly banks, bumping

themselves suddenly attacked with demoniac strength and ferocity by a creature with nothing human about it but its clothes, a creature which after a short and brutal struggle with its benefactors falls headlong to the ground again, and with a long howl, dies.1 Another couple, who are just bringing their burden into the field hospital, grumble audibly at

into trees, sometimes actually held immovable, in spite of their struggles, in the grip of a knot of creepers, whilst leaves and twigs spin and whistle, and trunks and branches thud and drum at the lashing blows of a sleet of bullets falling steeply. Some invisible fieldguns open rapidly upon the brakes, the trees strip under the shrapnel as if shredded by fire, hurricanes seem to the waste of their long and whirl their woody fragments dangerous tramp from the into the quiet air, whilst front, when a spent bullet, blazing fireballs in the shape dropping perpendicularly from of "common-shell" pounce a great height, perforates the screaming into the bushes and exact centre of their patient's rend them with a thousand forehead with no more sound red-hot splinters. Not many than a pencil thrust into men are hit, for the attack is bread.1 as invisible as the defence, but those who are struck fall unhappily enough, headlong into brambly holes, or hanging like drying clothes over bushes too stiff to let them through. It is impossible to see more than a yard or two on either side, and it can only be conjectured who has just howled like a whipped dog somewhere on the right of the company, or who it is has been left, sobbing and retching in a little overgrown pit behind the centre. The stretcher-bearers, blundering along in rear, listen intently for such sounds amidst the uproar, and often circle laboriously more than once around the lair of a sufferer before they find him, or what is left of him. They have many strange experiences these chiffoniers of the field. One pair, stooping to lift a crumpled figure, find

Meanwhile the enemy having yielded up, as he had always intended, the skirts of his position, or "line of observation," has coagulated on the real crest, or "line of resistance," and will budge no farther. It is curious to watch the invariable effect of this in a

widespread battle. Advancing against a retreating foe, when prolonged over many hours, becomes so much 8 habit that only the most terrible challenge will often bring the attacking force to the halt; and this not from enthusiasm, for there is mighty little of that in the presence of the small bore bullet, but from the carelessness or callousness induced by fatigue. The consequence is that from out of a line of attack, "brought to" and thickening before a standing

1 A fact.

enemy, there are sure to be a number of disconnected and spasmodic little rushes forward, made usually by fresh arrivals, which in a few moments may easily double the casualties of the day. In fact, a general in such a position, with whom all has hitherto being going well, will do well to prepare his soul for one or two little tragedies towards evening, such as a company or two cut up or "missing," or a battalion getting itself into such a fix that, there being such things a's evening papers, the whole of his tactics for to-morrow must be altered to rescue the castaways. Such incidents had not been wanting in the action sketched above. There was scarcely a regiment but had quite a number of men and officers unaccountably absentee, supposed to have gone forward in the gathering darkness, but not unaccountably invisible to the patrols which could only orawl a little ahead flat on their stomachs, in extreme danger from the rifles of both sides. Such meagre reports as came in were very little comforting. "Ave found Lootenant Smith, sir; I knowd 'im by 'is ring."-"Beg pardon, sir, the 'ole of my section, sir, is lyin', most of 'em wounded, close up agin' the enemy's trench; they wants to know what is the orders, sir." Even when the main body sinks to silence for the night, shoulder to shoulder on the bare ground, there is quite a bustle out in the gloom in front of them. Single shots, single bursts of shots, faint

calls, the clink and sparks of boots on stones, the rustle of creeping forms, the yellow wink of a match lighted and instantly extinguished, every now and then, one would swear it, a sob, once and again a shriek; occasionally, too, a general alarm, caused by the stumble of a sentry, by the startled shout of a dreaming soldier, by the blundering appearance of a knot of stragglers, by nothing at all. Once there is a regular turmoil, which only just stops short of a panic. Down the slope, amongst the silent bivouacs of the supports and reserves, a span of sixteen oxen, their drivers either killed or bolted, have been standing harnessed to their waggon for hours, pathetic, patient, and motionless, as is their wont, but with terror slowly mantling to a whirlwind in their dull heads. Suddenly they give way; without a sign of warning, as if lashed by a single fierce whip-stroke, the great team bounds forward in unison, and with a roar of fear thunders away over the acres of sleeping men, the ponderous waggon bounding behind, splintering against every boulder, and flinging on every side fragments of itself and its load. Scarcely less in unison the startled troops leap to their feet, many still asleep as they spring. There are shouts of "the enemy!" Piercing yells arise from some who are run over; others, rushing as they think from the track of the peril, either rush into it or spread confusion amongst their comrades. For twenty

« PreviousContinue »