"Men of the Gordons, officers of the Gordons,
I want to tell you how proud I am of you; of my father's old regiment,
and of the regiment I was born in. You have done splendidly. To-morrow
all Scotland will be ringing with the news." This charge will, no doubt,
take rank as one of the most brilliant things of the war.
Next morning at dawn, escorting the cow-guns, I came to where the Boers
had held out so long among the scattered rocks. The Gordons were burying
some of the Boer dead. There were several quite youngsters among them.
One was a boy of not more than fourteen, I should think, like an English
schoolboy. One of the Gordons there told me he saw him, during the
advance, kneeling behind a stone and firing. He was shot through the
forehead. There is something pathetic and infinitely disagreeable in
finding these mere children opposed to one.
These infantry advances are the things that specially show up the
courage of our troops. Each man, walking deliberately and by himself, is
being individually shot at for the space of ten minutes or more, the
bullets whistling past him or striking the ground near him. To walk
steadily on through a fire of this sort, which gets momentarily hotter
and better aimed as he diminishes the distance between himself and the
enemy, in expectation every instant of knowing "what it feels like," is
the highest test of courage that a soldier in these days can give.
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