Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 4

baas--plenty much blood,
plenty much blood," one of them described it. He said he was
crouching down behind a sheltering rock while the Boers were running
away past him, and then "the men with the assegais" came galloping
after them. A Boer without his horse came running along, and, pulling
him out, took his place behind the stone. A soldier galloped along and
called out, "Hallo, Johnny, what are you doing here? You'll get hurt."
Then, catching sight of the Boer, he stuck him down through the back
as he passed. "Ah, baas, great fight--plenty much blood."
Wounds or death by Mauser bullets, or even by the thrust of a lance,
are not to be compared, from the point of view of their pain-inflicting

possibilities, with what may be done in that way by the fragment of a
shell. That's the thing that hurts. Shell fire, speaking generally, is the
"Bogy of Battle" to those not accustomed to it. The main purpose it
accomplishes is to "establish a funk." When the actual damage done by
shell fire after a battle is counted up and the number of shells fired, the
results are most surprising. A poet in the Ladysmith Lyre wrote--
"One thing is certain in this town of lies: If Long Tom hits you on the
head you dies."
You do--unquestionably; but perhaps it is worse still to get a piece of a
shell somewhere else. What frightful wounds they make sometimes!
what mangled butchery in their track! See some poor fellow stretched
on the operating-table, stripped for the patching or trimming which
half-helpless surgery can supply. Apart from head and hands, which are
sure to be khaki-colour with dirt caked in with sweat, the average
Tommy usually presents a fine specimen of the human form
divine--what is there finer in the world than the body of a well-shaped,
muscular man? I always prefer the figure of the fighting gladiator to
that of the Apollo Belvedere--and then, when shell fragments tear this
body, it looks like some unspeakably unhallowed sacrilege. The
horribly unlucky way these fragments seem to go in--an uncouth and
butchering way instead of the gentlemanly puncture of the Mauser. One
afternoon a young fellow galloped past me in the main street of
Ladysmith. He had just got opposite the Town Hall hospital, when a
shell from Bulwana burst right under his horse. When the cloud of dust
and smoke cleared away, we found the horse lying on the road
completely disembowelled, and the poor fellow flung on to the footpath,
with a long piece of shell sticking in his side. As he was taken into the
hospital he said, "This means two more Dutchmen killed." But the
wound was obviously fatal; there was no use even in removing the
piece of shell. The clergyman came to him and spoke to him for some
time, and told him that there was no hope of recovery for him. He
seemed to get tired of his ministrations, and asked them to "send down
for my chum." When this chum arrived he was unable to speak, but just
pressed his hand and smiled, and went off into his death-sleep.

A boy, who could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, was
lying on the side of the hill with his head on a flat stone. He had been
hit by a piece of shell, and both his legs were broken and mangled
above the knee. He was done for, and his life was only a matter of
lasting some minutes. Another man, wounded somewhere internally,
was lying beside him. There was no sign of pain on the boy's face; his
eyes were closed. He just seemed very tired. Opening his eyes, he
looked downwards intently at his legs, which were lying at an oblique
angle with his body, from where they had been hit. It looked as if his
trousers were the only attachment. As he gazed intently, a troubled look
came over his face, and his wounded comrade beside him was watching
him and saw it. The tired eyes closed again wearily, and then the
wounded man alongside him, cursing with variegated and rich
vocabulary, bent, or half rolled over, and caught first one boot and then
the other, and lifted each leg straight down, swearing under his breath
the while. Then he lay back, swearing at the blankety blank young
blanker, and still watching him. Soon the tired eyes opened again, and
instinctively looked down at his legs. They seemed to open wider as he
looked; then he smiled faintly, thinking he had been mistaken about
them before, and lay back, and the eyes did not open any more. The
fellow beside him chuckled and said to himself, "Well, I'm damned!"
but possibly the Recording Angel has put down