again that day.
He could sense the despondency among his burghers. He knew that
already the faint-hearted were slipping away to where their ponies
waited at the foot of the mountain. He knew with sickened acceptance
that he had lost Spion Kop. Oh! The English had paid a heavy price
all right, there must be fifteen hundred of their dead and wounded
strewn upon the peak, but they had torn a gap in his line. He had lost
Spion Kop and through this breach would pour twenty-five thousand men
to relieve Ladysmith, and to drive his burghers out of Natal and into
the Transvaal. They had lost. It was finished.
John Acheson tried desperately to ignore the agony of his bloated foot,
he tried to shut out the shrill chorus of the wounded pleading for
water. There was no water on the peak. He turned his gaze away from
the trench where men, drugged with exhaustion, oblivious to the thunder
of bombardment that still raged about them, lay in sleep upon the
bodies of their dead and dying comrades.
He looked instead at the sun, that great, bloody orb lightly screened
with long streamers of cloud. In an hour it would be dark-and he knew
he had lost. The message he held in his hands admitted it, the
grotesque piles of dead men that clogged the trench proved it. He
re-read the message with difficulty for his vision jerked and swam
giddily.
'If you cannot hold until tomorrow, retire at Your discretion.
Buller. ' 'Tomorrow. What would tomorrow bring, if not a repetition
of today's horror? 'rhey had lost. They were going down from this
mountain. They had lost.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the rough stone of the
parapet. A nerve in his eyelid began to twitch insistently, he could
not stop it.
How many are there left? Half perhaps. I do not know. Half my men
gone, all night I heard their ponies galloping away, and the crack and
rumble of their wagons, and I could not hold them.
Jan Paulus stared up at the mountain in the dawn.
'Spion Kop.' He mouthed the name with loathing, but its outline was
blurred for his eyes could not focus. They were rimmed with angry red
and in each corner was a lump of yellow mucus. His body seemed to have
shrunk, dried out like that of an ancient mummy. He slumped wearily in
the saddle, every muscle and nerve in his body screamed for rest. To
sleep for a while. Oh God, to sleep.
With a dozen of his loyal commandants he had tried all night to staunch
the dribble of deserters that was bleeding his army to death.
He had ridden from laager to laager, blustering, pleading, trying to
shame them. With many he had succeeded, but with many he had not-and
once he had himself been shamed. He remembered the old man with the
long white beard straggling from his yellow, wizened face, his eyes
glistening with tears in the firelight.
'Three sons I have given you today, Jan Paulus Leroux. My brothers
have gone up your accursed mountain to beg for their bodies from the
English. Three sons! Three fine sons! What more do you want from
