CHAPTER VIII.

SLABBERT’S NEK AND FOURIESBERG.

July 23.—­Harnessed up at 4.30, and marched out in a raw, cold fog, all wet, but very cheerful.  While halting at the rendezvous to await our escort, there were great stories of the night, especially of a tempestuous scene under a big waggon-sheet crowded with irreconcilable interests.  We marched straight towards the mountains, ten or twelve miles, I suppose, till we were pretty close up, and then Clements’s two great lyddite five-inch guns came into position and fired at long range.  They are called “Weary Willie” and “Tired Tim,” and each is dragged by twenty-two splendid oxen.  We soon moved on a mile or two farther, crossed one of the worst spruits I remember, climbed a very steep hill, and came into action just on its brow, firing at a distant ridge.  All this time the infantry had been advancing on either flank in extended order.

(3.30 P.M.)—­We and the 38th and the cow-guns, as they are called, have been raining shell on the Boer positions and on their guns.  The situation, as I see it, is this:  we are exactly opposite the mouth of the nek, stretching back into the mountains like a great grass road, bordered with battlements of precipitous rock, which at this end—­the gate we are knocking at—­swell out on either side into a great natural bastion of bare rock.  On these are the Boer trenches, tier above tier, while their guns are posted on the lower ground between.  It looks an impregnable position.  The Royal Irish, I hear, are attacking the right hand bastion; the Munsters, I think, the left, and there is a continuous rattle of rifle-fire from both.

Our teams, waggons, and limbers, have been shell-dodging under the brow of the hill.  They have fallen all around us, but never on us.  One, which I saw fall, killed five horses straight off, and wounded the Yeomanry chap who was holding them.  We have shifted position two or three times; it is windy, and very cold.  A new and unpleasant experience in the shape of a pom-pom has come upon the scene.  Far off you hear pom-pom-pom-pom-pom, five times, and directly afterwards, like an echo, pom-pom-pom-pom-pom in your neighbourhood, five little shells bursting over an area of about eighty yards, for all the world like a gigantic schoolboy’s cracker.  The new captain of the unlucky 38th has been hit in two places by one.

At the close the day was undecided; the infantry had taken some trenches, but were still face to face with others, and fire was hottest at sunset.  But I believe the pom-pom was smashed up, and a big gun silenced, if not smashed.  We bivouacked where we were, but desultory rifle-fire went on long after dark.