VIII.

THE HOME-COMING FROM DUNDEE.

     SUPERFLUOUS ASSISTANCE—­A SMILING VALLEY—­THE BORDER MOUNTED
     RIFLES—­A RAIN-STORM—­A THIRTY-TWO MILES’ MARCH—­HOW THE TROOPS
     CAME INTO LADYSMITH.

LADYSMITH, Oct. 27.

“Come to meet us!” cried the staff officer with amazement in his voice; “what on earth for?”

It was on October 25, about five miles out on the Helpmakaar road, which runs east from Ladysmith.  By the stream below the hill he had just trotted down, and choking the pass beyond, wriggled the familiar tail of waggons and water-carts, ambulances, and doolies, and spare teams of old mules in new harness.  A couple of squadrons of Lancers had off-saddled by the roadside, a phalanx of horses topped with furled red and white pennons.  Behind them stood a battery of artillery.  Half a battalion of green-kilted Gordons sunned their bare knees a little lower down; a company or two of Manchesters back-boned the flabby convoy.  The staff officer could not make out what in the world it meant.

He had pushed on from the Dundee column, but it was a childish superstition to imagine that the Dundee column could possibly need assistance.  They had only marched thirty odd miles on Monday and Tuesday; starting at four in the morning, they would by two o’clock or so have covered the seventeen miles that would bring them into camp, fifteen miles outside Ladysmith.  They were coming to help Ladysmith, if you like; but the idea of Ladysmith helping them!

At his urgency they sent the convoy back.  I rode on miles through the openest country I had yet seen hereabouts—­a basin of wave-like veldt, just growing thinly green under the spring rains, spangled with budding mimosa-thorn.  Scarred here and there with the dry water-courses they call sluits, patched with heaves of wire-fenced down, livened with a verandah, blue cactus-hedged farmhouse or two, losing itself finally in a mazy fairyland of azure mountains—­this valley was the nearest approach to what you would call a smiling country I had seen in Africa.

Eight miles or so along the road I came upon the Border Mounted Rifles, saddles off, and lolling on the grass.  All farmers and transport riders from the northern frontier, lean, bearded, sun-dried, framed of steel and whipcord, sitting their horses like the riders of the Elgin marbles, swift and cunning as Boers, and far braver, they are the heaven-sent type of irregular troopers.  It was they who had ridden out and made connection with the returning column an hour before.

Two miles on I dipped over a ridge—­and here was the camp.  Bugles sang cheerily; mules, linked in fives, were being zigzagged frowardly down to water.  The Royal Irish Fusiliers had loosened their belts, but not their sturdy bearing.  Under their horses’ bellies lay the diminished 18th Hussars.  Presently came up a subaltern of the regiment, who had been on leave and returned just too late to rejoin before the line was cut.  They had put him in command of the advanced troop of the Lancers, and how he cursed the infantry and the convoy, and how he shoved the troop along when the drag was taken off!  Now he was laughing and talking and listening all at once, like a long wanderer at his home-coming.