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All the forenoon he dodged them, in and out of the kopjes, along the sluits, up and down the dongas; sometimes they pelted him at long range with flying bullets, sometimes he sent them a reminder of the same sort. And so the day wore on; but at last, towards evening, they fixed him so that he had to make a dash out across the veldt.
Kitchener's plan might have been foreseen by any officer who had been present at manoeuvres: a preliminary bombardment of the laager, followed by a holding frontal attack, in combination with rolling-up flank attacks. The strength of Cronje's position was supposed to be the laager itself, whereas it was rather the river banks and tributary dongas which he had occupied.
The harried Boers moved a hundred miles north to Rustenburg, followed by Methuen, Fetherstonhaugh, Hamilton, Kekewich, and Allenby, who found the commandos of De la Rey and Kemp to be scattering in front of them and hiding in the kloofs and dongas, whence in the early days of September no less than two hundred were extracted.
The salient was so prominent and jutted out so far from the general line of hills, and was besides shaped so like a blunted redan, that its front face was secure from flanking fire. In fact there was plenty of dead ground in its approaches, and, moreover, dongas which are the same as nullahs in India or gullies in Australia ran agreeably to our wishes towards the hill in all directions.
Others saw large parties of Boers fleeing for life up dongas and over plains, the phantom carriage-and-four driving hastily north-westward after an urgent warning, and other such melodramatic incidents, which escaped my notice. The position of the falling shells, and the movement of those minute black specks were to me enough of drama for one day's life.
"Yes, fresh batches of waggons are going on, and we are to escort them, and if we reach Springfield by to-morrow night we may think ourselves lucky, for some of the officers who went with the first lot have come back, and say that the roads are simply awful there are dongas to be passed where the waggons sink up to their axles and that at one point ninety oxen were fastened to a single waggon and could not pull it out from a hole in which it was sunk, and there it would be now if one of the Woolwich traction engines hadn't got hold of it and drawn it out.
The numerous small dongas and rifts lent themselves readily to flanking fire, and in many places the vertical banks required no cutting in order to give ideal protection against even artillery. In others, the sides of the crooked waterways had to be merely scooped out a little, or a shelf cut to stand upon.
In writing of the country around Suvla Bay the same correspondent said: "The country is in fact terrible; the hills are an awful jumble, with no regular formation, but broken up into valleys, dongas, ravines, and partly bare sandstone, and partly covered with dense shrub.
In the wooded valley at the foot of the hill they themselves, under Geneva flags, were searching the bushes and dongas for their own dead, and disturbing the little wild deer beside the stream. On the summit parties of our own men were still engaged unwillingly in finding the Boer dead and carrying them down the cliff.
They came creeping along the dongas, right into the midst of our men, as well as cutting off retreat. Then it was that we wanted that quarter of an hour lost by the fuse. The men hastily formed up into their four companies and began the retirement in succession. Each company had simply to fight its way through with the sword-bayonet.
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