This actually
happened, they told us, with the very last shot fired the night before;
a bit of the bank having been blown up with eight men in it, of whom
five were killed and three wounded. The whole river channel looks as if
a big colony of otters or beavers had settled here, honeycombing the
bank with their burrows, and padding the earth bare and hard with their
feet. It was all worn like a highroad. On the other side, the waggons
were a sight; shattered, and torn, and wrecked with shot; many of them
burnt; several, huge as they are, flung upside down by the force of a
shell bursting beneath them. All their contents were littered and strewn
about in every direction; blankets, clothes, carpenters' and
blacksmiths' tools, cooking utensils, furniture. You would have thought
the Boers were settlers moving to a new country with all their effects,
instead of an army on the march. This is how they do things, however, in
the homely, ponderous fashion. They often take their women and children
with them. There were many in the crowd we captured.
I wandered about alone a long time, looking at the dismal, curious scene
where so much had been endured. White flags, tied to poles or stripped
branches, fluttered from waggon tops. Our ambulance carts came along,
and the Tommies, stripping to the waist, proceeded to carry, one by one,
the Dutch wounded through the ford on stretchers.
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