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"The next depressing morning," continued Catherine, happily oblivious of what was passing through one's mind, "the first thing I saw, the first time I put my nose outside, was a great pink placard with 'Spion Kop Abandoned! Duncan, it was too awful." "I wish we'd sat tight," I said, "I must confess." "Tight!" cried Catherine in dry horror. "I should have abandoned it long before.
If we went to the left we could only advance 2,000 paces before being visible to the English on the kop close to Hopetown, from where they could make known our movements by heliograph. At our front, at our back, on our left, the outlook was hopeless; and to the right lay the cruel river.
They bought the special editions of the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and Colenso and Spion Kop.
Later Sir Charles Warren summoned all the officers commanding corps, and pointed out that there was not sufficient food remaining to allow of the wide circuit by Acton Homes to be carried out, and gave his opinion that now they had won so much ground, it was better to continue to advance by the shorter line on which they were pushing, but that in order to do this it was necessary that Spion Kop, whose fire would take them in the rear, should be captured.
We went out from the stuffy hot tent into the clear sharp air of a starlight night on the hills, and from a lighted tent, high above us on the slope of Lombard's Kop, came the chant of a psalm taken up by many voices outside. "Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered," they sang, like Cromwell's soldiers at Dunbar.
He had been through the Boer War, and was wounded at Spion Kop, so he had done his duty by his country; this being so, she could not help being glad now that Alick had retired when he had. But she had wisely kept that gladness to herself as long as he was with her. To Mrs. Guthrie's thinking, this War was France's war, and Russia's war; only in an incidental sense England's quarrel too. Russia?
Braver men than the burghers have never lived, but they had reached the limits of human endurance, and a long experience of defeat in the field had weakened their nerve and lessened their morale. They were no longer men of the same fibre as those who had crept up to the trenches of Spion Kop, or faced the lean warriors of Ladysmith on that grim January morning at Caesar's Camp.
The others spread out and held on, firing occasionally at the whisk of a rifle-barrel or the glimpse of a broad-brimmed hat. From morning to midday, the shell, Maxim, and rifle fire swept across the kop in a continual driving shower. The British guns in the plain below failed to localise the position of the enemy's, and they were able to vent their concentrated spite upon the exposed infantry.
We returned to the column, which was marching wonderfully slowly, and informed Scheepers, who was pleased to find his men so punctual. As we rode along he asked me a few particulars about the vibrator, wire tapping, and so on. I told him how at Spion Kop the wire failed at the very moment it was needed most. "Yes," he remarked thoughtfully, "trifles often make all the difference.
My laager had been at Potgietersdrift all this time, and for the time being we were deprived of our tents. We were not sorry, therefore, when we were ordered to leave Colenso and to return to our camp. A few days after we were told off to take up a position at the junction of the Little and the Big Tugela, between Spion Kop and Colenso.
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