“God will protect us.  Here is a pound of coffee,” is about what they all come to.  It is the fashion to scoff at the calm way in which our enemies have appropriated the services of the Almighty, but all the same it shows a dangerous temper.  People who believe they have formed this alliance have always been difficult to beat.  You remember Macaulay’s Puritan, with his “Bible in one hand and a two-edged sword in the other.”  The sword has given place to a Mauser now, but I am not sure that we are likely to benefit much by the change.  As to the Bible, it is still very much in evidence.  Not a single kit but contained one; usually the family one in old brown leather.  Now it is an historical fact that Bible-reading adversaries are very awkward customers to tackle, and remembering that, I dislike these Bibles.

More practically important than love-letters and Bibles, we found also a lot of abandoned ammunition, shell and Mauser.  Our ambulance parties were at work in the hills.  Several Boers, as they fled, had been shot down near the laager.  We found one, shot through the thigh, groaning very much, and carried him into the shade of a waggon, and did what we could for him.  Meantime some of us had gathered bits of boxes and wood, and made a fire and boiled water.  Tea-cups, coffee, sugar, and biscuits were found, and we made a splendid feast in the midst of the desolation.  Horrid, you will say, to think of food among the dead and wounded.  And yet that coffee certainly was very good.  Somehow I believe the Boers understand roasting it better than we do.

Before going we collected all the ammunition and heaped it together and made a pile of wood round it which we set ablaze and then drew out into the plain and reined in and looked back.  Never shall I forget the view.  The hills, those hills the English infantry had carried so splendidly, were between us and the now setting sun, and though so close were almost black with clean-hacked edges against the sunset side of the sky.  To eastward the endless grassy sea went whitening to the horizon, crossed in the distance with the horizontal lines of rich brown and yellow and pure blue, which at sunrise and sunset give such marvellous colouring to the veldt.  The air here is exactly like the desert air, very exhilarating to breathe and giving to everything it touches that wonderful clearness and refinement which people who have been brought up in a damp climate and among smudged outlines so often mistake for hardness.  Our great ammunition fire in the hollow of the hill burned merrily, and by-and-by a furious splutter of Mauser cartridges began, with every now and then the louder report of shells and great smoke balls hanging in the air.  But sheer above all, above yellow veldt and ruined Boer laager, rose the hill, the position we had carried, grim and rigid against the sunset and all black.  And, with the sudden sense of seeing that comes to one now and then, I stared at it for a while and said out loud “Belmont!” And in that aspect it remains photographed in my memory.