78 Pages - The Black Vault

of our sentries at something moving amoung thebush, which resulted in close-range fire opening upto us from all sides. This time we were not rushed,but a perfect hail of bullets whistled in from everydirection–from in front of each trench, and over andthrough our parapet. It was sufficient to put a handor head up to have a dozen bullets through and allround it, and the strange part was, we saw no one.As the detachment wag plaintively remarked, wecould have seen lots of Beers, ‘(if it wasn’t for thebushes in between. ”After vainly trying until bright daylight to see theenemy in order to do some damage in return, somany men were hit, and the position seemed soutterly hopeless, that 1 had to hoist the white flag.We had by then 24 men killed and six wounded. Assoon as the white flag went up the Beers ceased firingat once, and stood up; every bush and ant-hillup to 100 meters range seemed to have hid a Boerbehind it. This close range explained the marvelousaccuracy of their shooting, and the great proportionof our killed (who were nearly all shot through thehead) to our wounded.As we were collecting ourselves preparatory tomarching off there were one or two things whichstruck me; one was that the Dutchman who had presentedme with eggs and butter was in earnest confabulationwith the Boer commandant, who was callinghim “Oom” most affectionately. 1also noticed thatall male Kaffirs from the neighboring kraal hadbeen fetched and impressed to assist in getting theBoer guns and waggons across the drift and to loadup our captured gear, and generally do odd anddirty jobs. These same Kaffirs did their work with23