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To be sure, they might not last quite as long as their antagonists could a whisky training is not conducive to long wind but they always lasted plenty long enough. Sand-bags and brass knuckles helped some, ruthless singleness of purpose counted, and team work finished the job. At times the storm rose high, but up to now McNeill had always ridden it.
Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Labyrinth sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags.
He said, in a most pleasant even musical voice, but with quiet and cultured decision: "It's a charming town, with a hell of a hotel." I was astonished. It seemed so odd to hear a minister swear out loud. He went placidly on: "It's the worst hotel in Australia. Well, one may go further, and say in Australasia." "Bad beds?" "No none at all. Just sand-bags." "The pillows, too?"
The doorstep of 74 was covered by a couple of mattresses and sand-bags. Beneath this, in a dingy sort of coal-bin, heaped with straw, I found crouching the tenants of "Thompson's fort." Next to Berchem, the southern quarter of the city, where the Germans were approaching, the Rue de Peage was the worst spot in Antwerp. We sat for a time listening to the shells.
"He's gone to secure the paper he saw Captain Waterman throw," was Penrose's reply. A second later Major Blundell was leaning over the sand-bags, looking across the "No-man's-Land" towards the enemy's trenches. By this time a number of other men had gathered; as if by magic the news had flown, and for a moment even discipline was in abeyance.
But the life of the Swamp Angel, whose shells were the most destructive, was but short; for, after a few days' work, it burst, scattering the sand-bags, of which the battery was built, far and wide over the swamp.
The plaza in the centre of the city was the citadel, properly speaking. All the streets leading from it were swept by artillery, cannon being intrenched behind temporary parapets. The house-tops near the plaza were converted into infantry fortifications by the use of sand-bags for parapets. Such were the defences of Monterey in September, 1847.
Ten thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not counting the blacks they have armed against us.... And, behind our railway-sleepers and sand-bags, eight hundred fighting European units, twenty per cent, of them raw civilians; and seven thousand neutral Barala and Kaffirs and Zulus in the native Stad an element of danger lying dormant, waiting the spark that may hurry us all sky-high.... By God, Doctor, the game's worth playing, except by cowards and curs!"
Within three days order, subordination, hope, and almost confidence were completely restored. Not a man was idle. The troops left their barracks and lay in tents close to their respective alarm posts. On the open space by St. Louis Gate a crowd of convalescents were busy in filling sand-bags to strengthen the defences, while the sick and wounded in the hospitals made wadding for the cannon.
One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield, with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in chalky ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a colleague of mine and said in a startled way: "This must never happen again! Never!" It will never happen again for him, as for many others.
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