unsteadily to his feet.
'Get down, you bastards!' He took up the cry. 'Get down and chase
them. ' A horse brushed against him and he staggered but kept his
balance. The trooper slid down from its back beside Sean.
'Are you all right, Colonel?' He reached out to steady Sean, AND a
bullet took him in the chest below his raised arm and killed him
instantly. Sean stared down at the body and felt his brain click back
into focus.
'The bastards,' he snarled and snatched up the man's rifle, then, 'Come
on!' he roared. 'Follow me!' and he led them out of the shambles of
struggling horses into the rocks.
In the next half, hour, grimly and irresistibly, they used their
superior numbers to drive the Boers back up the kopje. Each outcrop of
rocks was a strongpoint that had to be assaulted and carried, and paid
for in blood. On a front of perhaps two hundred yards, the attack
became a series of isolated skirmishes over which Sean could not
maintain command. He gathered those men who were near him and boulder
by boulder they fought their way towards the top, while the burghers in
front of him held each position until the last moment and then fell
back on the next.
The top of the kopJe was flattened into a saucer with fifty feet of
steep open ground falling away on all sides, and finally sixty burghers
reached this natural fortress and held it with the determination of men
who knew that they fought for the last time AND they threw the British
from the lip of the saucer and sent them scrambling and sliding back
into the shelter of the broken rock below.
After the second repulse a heavy unnatural silence settled on the
kopje.
Sean sat with his back to a rock and took the water, bottle that a
corporal offered him. He rinsed the slime of blood and congealing
saliva from his mouth and spat it pink on to the ground beside him.
Then he tilted the bottle and swallowed twice with his eyes tightly
closed in the intense pleasure of drinking.
'Thanks. ' He passed the bottle back.
'More?' the corporal asked.
'No.' Sean shook his head and looked back down the slope.
The sun was well up now, throwing long shadows behind the horses that
were grazing far out across the veld below. But at the foot of the
slope lay the dead animals, most of them on their sides with legs
thrust stiffly out. Blanket, rolls had burst open to litter the grass
with the pathetic possessions of the dead men around them.
The men in their khaki and brown were as inconspicuous as piles of dead
leaves in the grass, mostly British but with here and there a burgher
lying amongst them in the fellowship of death.
'Mbejane. ' Sean spoke softly to the big Zulu who squatted beside him.
'Find Nkosi Saul and bring him to see me here.'
He watched the Zulu crawl away. Mbejane had been left behind at the
start of that wild gallop, but before Sean was halfway up the kopJe he
had glanced back to find him kneeling two paces behind, ready with a
