Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
We were racing by this time, Lambie's big chestnut mare had gained a length on my little veldt pony, and we were not more than a hundred yards away from the Mauser rifles that had closed in on us from the kopjes. A voice called in good English: "Throw up your hands, you d fools."
The advance had been on the line of the Cape Town to Kimberley Railway, and the damage done to it by the Boers had been repaired to the extent of permitting an armoured train with a naval gun to accompany the troops. It was six o' clock upon the morning of Saturday the 25th that this gun came into action against the kopjes, closely followed by the guns of the field artillery.
Here and there they passed kopjes stacked against the blazing blue of the sky. They held a weird attraction for her. They were like the stark bones of the earth pushing up through the coarse desert grasses. Their rugged strength and their isolation made her marvel. The veldt was swept by a burning wind. The clouds of the night before had left no rain behind.
Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But the earthly artillery made no reply. Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the twilight.
I rode along the railway line to watch the action from one of the low kopjes. A capricious shell fire annoyed the whole army as it sheltered behind the rocky hills, and an unceasing stream of stretchers from the front bore true witness to the serious nature of the conflict, for this was the third and bloodiest day of the seven days' fighting called the battle of Pieters.
The detachment thus composed settled down a little in advance of Chieveley, just east of the railroad line, about three miles from Colenso and four from the kopjes on the far side of the Tugela overlooking the railroad bridge, upon the nearest of which stands Fort Wylie. The exact range to the latter, as determined the next day, was 7,200 yards.
They would sit on the kopjes and watch the fighting and the various manoeuvres, congratulating each other when the enemy approached a little nearer to them. I will now ask the reader's indulgence to describe one of our little practical jokes enacted at Dullstroom Church, which was characteristic of many other similar incidents in the Campaign.
The excitement was tremendous; we were riding slap into what looked like a hornets' nest. There were kopjes flanking us now on both sides; I wished that I hadn't come. I expected every moment to hear the rattle of Mausers. Someone's horse kicked a tin can, and we ducked our heads like one man.
My father took me to Basutoland when I was a boy, and I reckon I have scrambled over almost every bit of upland south of the Zambesi, from the Hottentots Holland to the Zoutpansberg, and from the ugly yellow kopjes of Damaraland to the noble cliffs of Mont aux Sources. One of the things I had looked forward to in coming home was the chance of climbing the Alps.
The Boers on the kopjes were reinforced by a body of German auxiliaries under Schiel, who had been driven out of a position north of the railway by the cavalry acting on the left and who circled round to the main position, but the reinforcement did not avail them. Hardly pressed on their left, they were unable to withstand the frontal charge of the Devons led by Hamilton in person.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking