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Updated: May 3, 2025
At 8.15 that night Wilde and I, the Headquarters party, and the dog, having waited an hour and a half for the orderly that Major Veasey had promised to send back to guide us to a new headquarters, settled in some old German gun-pits, scooped out of a lofty chalk bank.
The staff officer who told me this knew the trouble I had previously experienced in trying to obtain good films of the Prince, and warned me to be very careful. I enquired the time of his arrival at the gun-pits. So far as I could ascertain, it was to be at 11.30 a.m. I therefore decided to be there half an hour earlier, and make a "hide-up" for myself and camera.
We've got a big job; we know that we've got to "Carry On" whatever happens so we wear a stern grin and go to it. There's far more heroism in the attitude of men out here than in the footlight attitude that journalists paint for the public. It isn't a singing matter to go on firing a gun when gun-pits are going up in smoke within sight of you. What a terrible desecration war is!
Of the minor points of interest there will always remain the record of the forced march of the 62nd Battery, and artillerymen will note the use of gun-pits by the Boers, which ensured that the range of their positions should never be permanently obtained.
I steadied myself by their example. We came to a point where our Major was waiting for us, turned out of the road, followed him down a grass slope and so into a valley. Here gun-pits were in the process of construction. Guns were unhooked and man-handled into their positions, and the teams sent back to the wagon-lines. All day we worked, both officers and men, with pick and shovel.
The artillery were immediately responsible for it all the artillery, for which, in spare moments from the firing line, they had dug this communication trench and gun-pits beyond, and had even dragged the pieces up. Now, at this infernal hour, they chose to bring their ammunition up.
Besides the gun-pits, the hill has no defences except a few low walls, only two or three stones high, piled up at intervals round the edge, as shelters from long-range fire. The top is broad and flat, covered with grass and loose stones.
The night has been passed in preparing a surprise for the big Creusot gun on Middle Hill, which, because of his propensity for throwing shells into everybody's mess, has come to be known as the "Meddler." Deep gun-pits are dug on the northern slope of Waggon Hill, where on a nek they are screened by the higher spur from view of Middle Hill.
The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked. The men in the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a scheme to cheer him up.
By the fourth day the new gun-pits, or whatever it was that the Hun tried to smuggle into place unnoticed, have been demolished and is replaced by a wide rash of shell-holes. Wonderful indeed is the record of war as preserved by prints in the archives of our photographic section.
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