78 Pages - The Black Vault

amazing alacrity, and looked as if they enjoyed it;there was no “backchat” when an order was given--usually by friend “Oorn. ”Again, as I trudged with blistered feet that Iivelongday, did I think over my failure. It seemed so stran~~,I had done all I knew, and yet, here we were, ignominiouslycaptured, 24 of us killed, and the Beers overthe drift, “Ah, BF, my boy, ” I thought, “there mustbe a few more lessons to be learnt besides those youalready know.”’ in order to find out what these were,! pondered deeply over the details of the fight,The Beers must have known of our position, buthow had they managed to get close up all round withinsnapshooting range without being discovered?What a tremendous advantage they had gained inshooting from among the bushes on the bank, wherethey could not be seen, over us who had to show upover a parapet every time we looked for an enemy,and show up, moreover, just in the very place whereevery Boer expected us to. There seemed to besome fault in the position. How the bullets seemedsometimes to come through the parapet, and howthose that passed over one side hit the men defendingthe otl~er side in the back. How, on the whole,that “natural obstacle, ” the river-bed, seemed to bemore of a disadvantage than a protection.Eventually the following lessons framed themselvesin my head--some of them quite new, someof them supplementing those four I had alreadylearnt:5. With modern rifles, to guard a drift or localitydoes not necessitate sitting on top of it (as if it couldbe picked up and carried away), unless the locality24