They had not much choice,
for the fighting Boers simply came along and took them.
My visit to old Modder River was very interesting. It was quite
deserted; only a few odds and ends of militia, where, when I remember it
last, there were stately great squares of ordered tents and long lines
of guns and limbers and picketed horses, and the whole place crawled
with khaki, and one felt around one all the bustle and energy of a huge
camp. I felt quite melancholy, as when one revisits some scene of
childhood changed beyond recall. Trains were running regularly up to
Kimberley and ordinary citizens were travelling up and down. It seemed
the war was forgotten. To me, who had been living in the head and front
of a big army for seven months, all these old signs of peace and a quiet
life seemed strange enough. There were some children going up with their
papas and mamas. As we came one after another to the lines of hills at
Belmont and Graspan they pointed and crowded to the windows, and papa
began to explain that the great fights had been here, and to tell all
about them, quite wrong.
The hills look peaceful enough now. The children press their noses and
little india-rubber fingers against the glass, and chatter and laugh and
bob up and down--
"Little they think of those strong limbs
That moulder deep below."
And I sit back in my corner ashamed of my dirty old tunic and the holes
in it, and peer between two small flaxen heads at hills I last saw alive
with bursting shell.
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