The line was still interrupted, although I had repaired several faults.  I accordingly rode back to Spion Kop early the next morning.  When I entered the laager it was to find that all the waggons had already retreated, and the tents standing deserted.  Not quite deserted, for in one of them half a dozen bodies were lying.  The enemy had unexpectedly retired during the night, and the entire commando was now on the hill, gazing at the plentiful harvest reaped by our Nordenfeldts.  Thither I also went.

British ambulance men were busy collecting corpses.  It was a mournful sight; it seemed to me as if war really meant nothing else than butchering men like sheep, quietly, methodically, and without any pomp or circumstance.

“A sad sight!” I remarked to the British chaplain.

“They only did their duty,” was his unfeeling reply.  Duty!  Is it any man’s duty to kill and be killed without knowing why?  For what did these poor Lancashire lads know or care about the merits of the war?

“What do you think the confounded English have had the cheek to do?” asked a friend.  “You know they always keep our wounded as prisoners when they get the chance.  Well, this morning their ambulance came here and coolly carted away all their wounded!  Louis Botha says they might have asked permission first.  I should have turned a Maxim on them!”

We went down to the laager, found the line in order, and wired the news of the victory to Pretoria.  I had not been able to get into communication the day before because the chief had taken a hand in the fighting instead of attending to the instrument.

Believing that Warren would make another attempt, this time more to our right, we shifted the office a few miles in that direction and pitched our tent next to a farmhouse, which was being utilised as a hospital.

GLORIOUS WAR

Late that evening I heard someone outside the tent asking where the hospital was.  It was my father.  We had no idea of meeting each other here, as I had parted from him in Johannesburg before the war began, when he had no intention of going to Natal.  He himself had been under the impression that I was still at Ladysmith.

He told me he had come to see my young cousin, Johannes, who had been wounded on Spion Kop the day before.  We walked over to the hospital.  The wounded lad, a frail boy of fifteen, looked terribly exhausted lying there on the floor, his left arm completely shattered.

“We were two together,” he said, “myself and another boy.  We crept closer and closer to one of the small sangars, firing into it as we crept, until there was only one Englishman left alive in it.  He called out ‘Water!’ and I ran to give him my flask.  When I got close to him he pointed his gun at me and fired.  I sprang aside, and the bullet ploughed up my arm.  My chum then shot him dead.  Our doctor was too busy with the English officers to attend to me, so I fear I shall lose my arm.”