across it.
'Alinagtig! ' Jan Paulus gasped. 'Now we have them.'
Above the crude parapet of the trench, like birds on a fence rail, so
close that he could see the chin straps and the button on each crown,
the light khaki helmets contrasted clearly with the darker earth and
grass. While beyond the trench, completely exposed from boots to
helmets, standing in the open or moving leisurely forward with
ammunition and water canteens, were hundreds of English soldiers.
For long seconds the silence persisted, as though the burghers who
stared over their rifles at this unbelievable target could not bring
themselves to press the triggers on which their fingers rested. The
English were too close, too vulnerable. A universal reluctance held
the mausers silent.
'Shoot!' roared Jan Paulus. 'Skiet, Kerels, Skiet, ' and his voice
carried to the English behind the trenches. He saw all movement among
them suddenly paralysed, white faces turn to stare in his direction-and
he sighted carefully into the chest of one of them. The rifle jumped
against his shoulder, and the man went down into the grass.
That single shot broke the spell. Gunfire crackled in hysterical
unison and the frieze of khaki figures along the trench exploded into
violent movement as the bullets, thudded amongst them. At that range
most of Jan Paulus's burghers could be trusted to knock down four
running springbok with five shots. In the few seconds that it took the
English to dive into the trench, at least fifty of them went down, dead
or wounded, and lay sprawled against the red earth.
Now there were only the helmets and heads above the parapet to shoot at
and these were never still. They ducked and weaved and bobbed as
Woodgate's men fired and reloaded, and seventeen hundred Lee-Metford
rifles added their voices to the pandemonium
Then the first shell, lobbed from a field gun on the reverse slope of
Conical Hill, shrieked over the heads of the burghers and burst in a
leap of smoke and red dust fifty feet in front of the English trench.
A lull while Jan Paulus's heliograph team below the crest signalled the
range correction to the battery, then the next shell burst beyond the
trench; another lull and the third fell full upon the trench. A human
body was thrown high, legs and arms spinning like the spokes of a wagon
wheel. When the dust cleared there was a gap in the parapet and half a
dozen men frantically trying to plug it with loose rock.
Together all the Boer guns opened. The constant shriek of big shells
was punctuated by the @icious whine of the quick-firing pompoms.
And once again a mist covered the peak, this time a thin sluggish mist
of dust and lyddite fume which diluted the sunlight and clogged the
nostrils and eyes and mouths of men for whom a long, long day had
begun.
Lieutenant-Colonel Garrick Courtney was damnably uncomfortable.
It was hot in the sun. Sweat trickled down under his tunic and
moistened his stump so that already it was chafed. His field-glasses
magnified the glare as he looked out across the Tugela River to the
great hump of the mountain four miles away.
