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Updated: June 26, 2025
Then would come hundreds of limbers and "G. S." wagons drawn by sleek, well-fed mules, ridden by sleek, well-fed men, ever smiling. Although grimy with sweat and covered with the fine, white dust of the marvellously well-made French roads.
At 8-0 p.m. we were relieved by the 5th South Staffordshires and, after placing Lewis Guns on the limbers, which had been waiting all day for us behind the farm, went to Fresnoy. It can hardly be called a march, and few of us remember much about it.
Here I was, on the contrary, in conditions of absolute calm, of the most impressive silence conceivable. Until that day the country, at that hour of the day, had echoed with the innumerable noises made by an army in retreat. Thousands of cannon, limbers, and convoys had been passing along all the roads and all practicable by-ways monotonously and ceaselessly.
The officers, fearing that fire would be opened along the whole line, ordered the cannoniers to their posts; men were sent down into the magazine with lanterns to arrange the ammunition for the heavy guns; the lids of the limbers of the field-pieces were thrown up; the cannoniers were counted off at their posts; the brush which had been piled before the embrasures was torn away; and, with implements in hand, all stood at "attention!" till the last shot was fired.
After he gets up at the end of his six weeks, the knee, though still weak and stiff and sore, within a few weeks' time "limbers up" completely, and usually becomes practically as good as ever. In short, the violence and swiftness of the onset are only matched by the rapidity and completeness of the retreat.
The right section, with the Major and Captain, left us and went to another one. We had a tough job getting our guns and waggons up. A Boer gun is searching the valley on our left, but they can't see the limbers and waggons. They have just placed two shells, one fifty yards in front of it, and the other fifty yards behind; one of them burst on impact, the other didn't.
All night long through our streets we heard the endless tramping of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, the sharp orders, the halting and the marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps of a straggler. Then it grew into the absolute silence of death.
Dead horses were everywhere; a few disabled caissons, or limbers, reclining on one elbow, as it were; ammunition wagons standing disconsolate behind four or six sprawling mules. Men? There were men enough; all dead, apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time.
From Moscow to Cairo we had travelled everywhere, but we went in larger parties than were convenient to those whom we visited, and we carried our passports in our limbers.
As the water dashed up into the lower tier of beds, it was found necessary to lift one of the scuttles in the floor, and let it flow into the limbers of the ship. Fortunately no one was hurt, and Ruby succeeded in gaining the deck before the hatch was reclosed and fastened down upon the scene of discomfort and misery below. This state of things continued the whole day.
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