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The Devons went straight forward, coming into infantry fire as they crossed that low wave of ground in the middle of the valley. On the further slope they were ordered to lie down and wait till the flanking movement was developed. Happily the slope, as is usual in South Africa, was thickly spotted over with great ant-hills, beneath which the ant-eater digs his den.
Between Lombard's Kop and the town, on the north-east, were the Devons. To the north, at what seemed the vulnerable point, were the Rifle Brigade, the Rifles, and the remains of the 18th Hussars. To the west were the 5th Lancers, 19th Hussars, and 5th Dragoon Guards. The rest of the force was encamped round the outskirts of the town.
Two beds further along the Padre was playing a game of chess with a Major in the Devons; and on the opposite side of the tent another chaplain, grey haired and clean shaven, was talking and laughing with a boy, whose face and head were swathed in bandages.
Two battalions of Hildyard's Brigade, the West Yorkshires and the Devons, moved towards the drift in the usual open formation, occupied the houses, and began to entrench themselves in the fields. Six batteries came into action from the wooded heights commanding the passage. The pontoons advanced.
Pursuing cavalry and pursued enemy faded out of our sight; abruptly we realised that it was night. A mob of unassorted soldiers stood on the rock-sown, man-sown hillside, victorious and helpless. Out of every quarter of the blackness leaped rough voices. "G Company!" "Devons here!" "Imperial Light Horse?" "Over here!" "Over where?" Then a trip and a heavy stumble and an oath. "Doctor wanted 'ere!
Only by holding the contours of extreme spurs on Helpmakaar Hill could the Devons hope to sweep by rifle fire a wide zone of slightly undulating veldt, and thus command all possible approaches from Lombard's Kop or Bulwaan in that direction.
Among those so captured were fourteen of the Devons and as many gunners, with Colonel Hunt, Colonel Bullock, Major MacWalter, and Captains Goodwin, Vigors, and Congreve; the total loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners amounted to about one thousand five hundred, of whom nearly half belonged to the Irish brigade.
That was why one paid thirty thousand a year for one's apartments, and thirty thousand more for a girl's clothes! No wonder it was better to spend Christmas week at the Eldridge Devons than to labour at one's law books! "One more question," Montague went on. "Why are you introducing me to them?" "Well," his brother answered, "it won't hurt you; you'll find it amusing.
That from Deadham to the edge of the forest runs north; the other, from Beaupres-on-Sea to Marychurch, Stourmouth and Barryport, due west. Damaris, having a fancy to keep the coast-line out of sight, chose the former, following the valley of the Arne, between great flat meadows where herds of dairy cows, of red Devons and black Welsh runts, feed in the rich deep grass.
The statistics of the Devons are equally heroic. Those yeomen who had not yet reached the crest were in a perfectly impossible position, as the Boers were firing from complete cover right down upon them. There was no alternative for them but surrender. By seven o'clock every British soldier upon the hill, yeoman or fusilier, had been killed, wounded, or taken.
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