and made a fire and boiled water. Tea-cups, coffee, sugar, and biscuits
were found, and we made a splendid feast in the midst of the desolation.
Horrid, you will say, to think of food among the dead and wounded. And
yet that coffee certainly was very good. Somehow I believe the Boers
understand roasting it better than we do.

Before going we collected all the ammunition and heaped it together and
made a pile of wood round it which we set ablaze and then drew out into
the plain and reined in and looked back. Never shall I forget the view.
The hills, those hills the English infantry had carried so splendidly,
were between us and the now setting sun, and though so close were almost
black with clean-hacked edges against the sunset side of the sky. To
eastward the endless grassy sea went whitening to the horizon, crossed
in the distance with the horizontal lines of rich brown and yellow and
pure blue, which at sunrise and sunset give such marvellous colouring to
the veldt. The air here is exactly like the desert air, very
exhilarating to breathe and giving to everything it touches that
wonderful clearness and refinement which people who have been brought up
in a damp climate and among smudged outlines so often mistake for
hardness. Our great ammunition fire in the hollow of the hill burned
merrily, and by-and-by a furious splutter of Mauser cartridges began,
with every now and then the louder report of shells and great smoke
balls hanging in the air. But sheer above all, above yellow veldt and
ruined Boer laager, rose the hill, the position we had carried, grim and
rigid against the sunset and all black. And, with the sudden sense of
_seeing_ that comes to one now and then, I stared at it for a while and
said out loud "Belmont!" And in that aspect it remains photographed in
my memory.