G. W. Steevens

“ We had more guns, but they were as useless as catapults: only the six naval guns could touch Pepworth's Hill or Bulwan.
For these reasons we only fired, I suppose, one shell to their twenty, or thereabouts; so that though we actually had far more guns, we yet enjoyed all the sensations of a true bombardment.
What were they? That bombardments were a hollow terror I had always understood; but how hollow, not till I experienced the bombardment of Ladysmith. Hollow things make the most noise, to be sure, and this bombardment could at times be a monstrous symphony indeed. ”

“ Beyond is the world—war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star. But you sit here to be idly shot at. You are of it, but not in it—clean out of the world. To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as dead—except that dead men have no time to fill in. ”

“ Despite verandahs and trees, the sunshine soaks down into every corner—genially, languorously warm. All Burghersdorp basks. You see half-a-dozen yoke of bullocks with a waggon, standing placidly in the street, too lazy even to swish their tails against the flies; pass by an hour later, and they are still there, and the black man lounging by the leaders has hardly shifted one leg; pass by at evening, and they have moved on three hundred yards, and are resting again. In the daytime hens peck and cackle in every street; at nightfall the bordering veldt hums with crickets and bullfrogs. ”

“ Four companies of the Berkshire Regiment and the mounted infantry section—in all they may count 400 men. Fifty miles north is the Orange river, and beyond it, maybe by now this side of it, thousands of armed and mounted burghers—and war.
I wonder if it is all real? By the clock I have been travelling something over forty hours in South Africa, but it might just as well be a minute or a lifetime. It is a minute of experience prolonged to a lifetime. South Africa is a dream—one of those dreams in which you live years in the instant of waking—a dream of distance. ”

“ At first it staggers you to think that mountain-shaking bang can have no result; but after a little experience and thought you see it would be a miracle if it had. The emplacement is a small mountain in itself; the men have run out into holes. Once in a thousand shots you might hit the actual gun and destroy it—but shell is being saved for Christmas.
If the natives and deserters are not lying, and the sailors really hit Pepworth's Long Tom, then that gunner may live on his exploit for the rest of his life. ”

“ It is for ever fooling you, and yet you for ever pursue it. And then it is only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony—tawny sand, silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance, blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. AndPg 13 above all broods the intense purity of the South African azure—not a coloured thing, like the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself. ”

“ Great-hearted, strong-souled, brave without a hesitation, tender as a child, intolerant of wrong because he was incapable of it, tolerant of every human weakness, slashing controversialist in speech, statesman-like in foresight, finely versed in the wisdom of many literatures, a man of genius scarce aware of his innumerable gifts, but playing them all with splendid skill, with full enjoyment of the crowded hours of life,—here was George Steevens. ”

“ The land carries little enough stock—here a dozen goats browsing on the withered sticks goats love, there a dozen ostriches, high-stepping, supercilious heads in air, wheeling like a troop of cavalry and trotting out of the stink of that beastly train. Of men, nothing—only here at the bridge a couple of tents, there at the culvert a black man, grotesque in sombrero and patched trousers, loafing, hands in pockets, lazy pipe in mouth. ”

“ A regiment would have had no paint or gold-leaf; the sailors always have everything. They carry their home with them, self-subsisting, self-relying. Even as the constant bluejacket says, "Right Gun Hill up, sir," there floats from below ting-ting, ting-ting, ting.
Five bells!
The rock-rending double bang floats over you unheard; the hot iron hills swim away. ”

“ At length emerging in front of them you found two clanking field-batteries, and sections of mountain guns jingling on mules. Ahead of these again long khaki lines of infantry sat beside the road or pounded it under their even tramp. Then the General himself and his Staff; then best part of a regiment of infantry; then a company, the reserve of the advanced-guard; then a half-company, the support; then a broken group of men, the advanced party; then, in the very front, the point, a sergeant and half-a-dozen privates trudging sturdily along the road, the scenting nose of the column. ”

“ Always the same stiff, naked ridges, flat-capped with our intrenchments—always, always the same. As morning hardens to the brutal clearness of South African mid-day, they march in on you till Bulwan seems to tower over your very heads. There it is close over you, shady, and of wide prospect; and if you try to go up you are a dead man. ”

“ Let the Free Staters bring down two thousand good shots and resolute men to-morrow morning—it is only fifty miles, with two lines of railway—and what will happen to that little patch of white tents by the station? The loss of any one means the loss of land connection between Western and Eastern Provinces, a line open into the heart of the Cape Colony, and nothing to resist an invader short of the sea.
It is dangerous—and yet nobody cares. There is nothing to do but wait—for the Army Corps that has not yet left England. Even to-day—a day's ride from the frontier—the war seems hardly real. ”

“ In the night somebody on the Boer side—or elsewhere—goes out shooting, or looses off his rifle on general grounds; two loyalists and a refugee spring up and grasp their revolvers. In the morning everybody wakes up unsjamboked. The hotel-keeper takes me out to numerous points whence Pieter's farm can be reconnoitred: there is not a single tent to be seen, and no sign of a single Boer. ”

“ The futility of death makes that an absolute necessity; but I like to think of a possible George Steevens who, when the dust and sand of campaigns and daily journalism had been wiped away from his shoon, would have combined in a great and single-hearted career all the various powers of his fine mind. ”

“ And yet, if they never hit a man, this handful of sailors have been the saving of Ladysmith. You don't know, till you have tried it, what a worm you feel when the enemy is plugging shell into you and you can't possibly plug back. ”

“ Departing from Capetown by night, I awoke in the Karroo. Between nine and six in the morning we had made less than a hundred and eighty miles. Now we were climbing the vast desert of the Karroo, the dusty stairway that leads on to the highlands of South Africa. Once you have seen one desert, all the others are like it; and yet once you have loved the desert, each is lovable in a new way. In thePg 12 Karroo you seem to be going up a winding ascent, like the ramps that lead to an Indian fortress. You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a corner round one of the ranges. ”

“ Another lesson is the use of very, very thin firing-lines of good shots, with the supports snugly concealed: the other day fourteen men of the Manchesters repulsed 200 Boers. The gunners have momentarily thrown over their first commandment and cheerfully split up batteries. They also lie beneath the schanzes and let the enemy bombard the dumb guns if he will—till the moment comes to fire; that moment you need never be afraid that the R.A. will be anywhere but with the guns.
The enemy's shell and long-range rifle-fire dropped at half-past six. ”

“ A somewhat shy and quiet manner did not prepare men for the urbanity, the tolerance, the magnanimity that lay at the back of his heart. Generosity in thought—the rarest form of generosity that is reared among the flowers of this sorrowful earth—was with him habitual. ”

“ In the afternoon one of our guns on Cæsar's Camp smashed a pompom. Fiddling Jimmy has been waved away, it seems. The Manchesters are cosy behind the best built schanzes in the environs of Ladysmith. Above the wall they have a double course of sandbags—the lower placed endwise across the stone, the upper lengthwise, which forms a series of loopholes at the height of a man's shoulder.
The subaltern in command sits on the highest rock inside; the men sit and lie about him, sleeping, smoking, reading, sewing, knitting. ”

“ He could, and did, resent at every point the qualities in men that ran counter to his principles of honour, and he did not spare his keen irony when such things crossed his path; but, on the other side, he loved his friends with a whole and simple heart. I think that very few men who came under his influence refused him their love, none their admiration. ”

“ Remains the loss to the great reading public, which we believe that Steevens must have done a vast deal to educate, not to literature so much as to a pride in our country's imperial destiny. Where the elect chiefly admired a scarcely exampled grasp and power of literary impressionism, the man in the street was learning the scope and aspect of his and our imperial heritage, and gaining a new view of his duties as a British citizen. ”

“ We have forgotten when the siege began; and now we are beginning not to care when it ends.
For my part, I feel it will never end.
It will go on just as now, languid fighting, languid cessation, for ever and ever. We shall drop off one by one, and listlessly die of old age.
And in the year 2099 the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten townPg 126 of Ladysmith. And he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers with white beards down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown ruin. ”

“ The pen that had taught us to see and comprehend India and Egypt and the reconquest of the Soudan would have burned in on the most heedless the line which duty marks outPg 167 for us in South Africa. Men who know South Africa are pretty well united. Now Steevens would have taken all England to South Africa. Nay, more, we are no longer able to blink the truth that all is not for the best in the best of all possible armies, and the one satisfaction in our reverses is that, when the war is over, no Government will dare to resist a vigorous programme of reform. ”

“ But it is only compassion for the dead that dries up; and as it dries, the spring wells up among good men of sympathy with all the living. A few men had made a fire in the gnawing damp and cold, and round it they sat, even the unwounded Boer prisoners. ”

“ Perhaps one falls quite near you, swooping irresistibly, as if the devil had kicked it. You come to watch for shells—to listen to the deafening rattle of the big guns, the shrilling whistle of the small, to guess at their pace and their direction. ”

“ The four 12-pounder field-guns on Bulwana—I say four, because one day there were four; but the Boers continually shifted their lighter guns from hill to hill—were very different. These creatures are stealthy in their habits, lurking among woods, firing smokeless powder with very little flash; consequently they are very difficult guns to locate. Their favourite diet appeared to be balloons; or, failing them, the Devons in the Helpmakaar Road or the Manchesters in Cæsar's Camp. Both of these they enfiladed; also they peppered the roads whenever troops were visible moving in or out. ”

“ One ring shell burst, fizzing inside a schanz, with a steamy curly tail, and splinters that wailed a quarter of a mile on to the road below us; the men only raced to pick up the pieces.
When this siege is over this force ought to be the best fighting men in the world. We are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.
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Our infantry are already nearly as patient and cunning as he; nothing but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover, but they get plenty of that nowadays. ”