That was the beginning of them; but they were not all in till the middle of the afternoon—­which made thirty-six hours on their legs.  The Irish Fusiliers tramped in at lunch-time, going a bit short some of them, nearly all a trifle stiff on the feet, but solid, square, and sturdy from the knees upward.  They straightened up to the cheers that met them, and stepped out on scorching feet as if they were ready to go into action again on the instant.  After them came the guns—­not the sleek creatures of Laffan’s Plain, rough with earth and spinning mud from their wheels, but war-worn and fresh from slaughter; you might imagine their damp muzzles were dripping blood.  You could count the horses’ ribs; they looked as if you could break them in half before the quarters.  But they, too, knew they were being cheered; they threw their ears up and flung all the weight left them into the traces.

Through fire, water, and earth, the Dundee column had come home again.

IX.

THE STORY OF NICHOLSON’S NEK.

     AN ATTENUATED MESS—­A REGIMENT 220 STRONG—­A MISERABLE STORY—­THE
     WHITE FLAG—­BOER KINDNESS—­ASHAMED FOR ENGLAND.

LADYSMITH, Nov. 1.

The sodden tents hung dankly, black-grey in the gusty, rainy morning.  At the entrance to the camp stood a sentry; half-a-dozen privates moved to and fro.  Perhaps half-a-dozen were to be seen in all—­the same hard, thick-set bodies that Ladysmith had cheered six days before as they marched in, square-shouldered through the mud, from Dundee.  The same bodies—­but the elastic was out of them and the brightness was not in their eyes.  But for these few, though it was an hour after reveille, the camp was cold and empty.  It was the camp of the Royal Irish Fusiliers.

An officer appeared from the mess-tent—­pale and pinched.  I saw him when he came in from Dundee with four sleepless nights behind him; this morning he was far more haggard.  Inside were one other officer, the doctor, and the quarter-master.  That was all the mess, except a second lieutenant, a boy just green from Sandhurst.  He had just arrived from England, aflame for his first regiment and his first campaign.  And this was the regiment he found.

They had been busy half the night packing up the lost officers’ kits to send down to Durban.  Now they were packing their own; a regiment 220 strong could do with a smaller camp.  The mess stores laid in at Ladysmith stood in open cases round the tent.  All the small luxuries the careful mess-president had provided against the hard campaign had been lost at Dundee.  Now it was the regiment was lost, and there was nobody to eat the tinned meats and pickles.  The common words “Natal Field Force” on the boxes cut like a knife.  In the middle of the tent, on a table of cases, so low that to reach it you must sit on the ground, were the japanned tin plates and mugs for five men’s breakfast—­five out of five-and-twenty.  Tied up in a waterproof sheet were the officers’ letters—­the letters of their wives and mothers that had arrived that morning seven thousand miles from home.  The men they wrote to were on their way to the prisoners’ camp on Pretoria racecourse.