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One example of that historical luck was ever before their eyes in the shape of those invaluable naval guns which had arrived so dramatically at the very crisis of the fight, in time to check the monster on Pepworth Hill and to cover the retreat of the army. But for them the besieged must have lain impotent under the muzzles of the huge Creusots.
The men had no knowledge of where they were going or what they had to do, but they crept silently along under a drifting sky, with peeps of a quarter moon, over a mimosa-shadowed plain. At last in front of them there loomed a dark mass it was Gun Hill, from which one of the great Creusots had plagued them. A Dutch outpost challenged, but was satisfied by a Dutch-speaking Carabineer.
Five minutes later their cannon joined in the roar, with machine-guns, one-pounder Maxims, and the great Creusots and Krupps. And yet through this storm of lead and iron our soldiers went on quietly and steadily. The very ground round them was torn up by bullet and ball.
Three shells burst near where I stood, on the extreme western shoulder of Observation Hill, just missing the howitzer, and one went far beyond the longest range yet reached by any of the enemy's Creusots. For a long time I watched Boer movements, and saw their waggons hurrying back in some confusion from the Helpmakaar road across Conrad Pieter's farm towards Elandslaagte.
The French 75-millimeter Creusots came into play again, and after a battle that lasted in all twenty-four hours, the Germans were driven back to their own trenches. In the morning of October 2, 1915, the Germans made a demonstration in front of the Belgian trenches at Dixmude, consisting of a bombardment and a violent discharge of bombs. On one small section alone 400 bombs were dropped.
This is mere sentiment, you may say, instead of fact about arms and battles; yet the hardest fact that rings beneath your stamp is no more real than poor, flimsy sentiment, which is a living force in the world, and will remain to be reckoned with when pom-poms and Creusots are rusting in archæological museums monuments only to the mechanical and political clumsiness of the nineteenth century.
The Boer trek continued for several hours this morning and well on into the afternoon, when it slackened. Then we saw some horsemen turn back to make for the cleft ridge of Doorn Kloof, where one of the big Creusots had opened fire, Buller's naval guns or howitzers replying with Lyddite shells.
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