With Rimington by L. March Phillipps
page 87 of 184 (47%)
page 87 of 184 (47%)
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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. At Modder village I hired a horse and rode across the plain to Magersfontein. I must often have described the place to you--the great flat and the beak of hill, like a battleship's ram, thrust southward into it. Do you know, I felt quite awestruck as I approached it. It seemed quite impossible that I, alone on my pony, could be going to ride up to and take single-handed that redoubtable hill, which had flung back the Highlanders, and remained impregnable to all our shelling. I thought some Boer, or ghost of a Boer, would pop up with his Mauser to defend the familiar position once more. However, none did. I picked my way through the trench, littered with scraps of clothing and sacks and |
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