With Roberts to Pretoria: A Tale of The South African WarHenty, G. A. (George Alfred)
General
With Roberts to Pretoria: A Tale of The South African War
Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
South African War, 1899-1902 -- Juvenile fiction
On reaching the summit he saw that it had been carefully prepared for
defence, and had evidently been occupied for a long time. The wall was
not, as it had appeared, continuous, but was broken up into little
enclosures or forts, each sufficiently large for two or three men to
live and sleep in; straw, old sacking, and brushwood formed the beds.
In each were generally to be seen the ashes of a fire, a cooking pot,
meat tins, fragments of bread, and other signs of continued occupation.
Empty cartridge-cases littered the ground everywhere, while many still
loaded showed how hasty had been the flight of the Boers. Several dead
bodies lay in these little forts; they were for the most part of men
of the lower class, farm-servants and others, with rough ill-fitting
clothes and closely-cropped heads. Among them, however, were a few of a
very much superior class, clean and carefully dressed, but these were
quite the exception; and Yorke afterwards heard from the prisoners that
men of that class generally sent on their best horses, and rode in on
spare animals or in light carriages and carts, and as soon as they saw
that the fight was going against them, ran down the hill, jumped on to
their fresh horses, and rode off, leaving the unmounted men to fight
and die. Eighty-three Boers were found dead, but it was certain that
the bodies of many of the better-class Boers had been carried off when
they fell. More than fifty prisoners were taken, and twenty wounded;
sixty-four waggons and a considerable number of horses were captured.
The next day all the wounded were sent down by train. That afternoon
the troops moved forward again, knowing that another Boer force was
collected at Graspan, some seven miles to the North. The Ninth Brigade
and the Naval Brigade started in the afternoon for Swingspan, while the
Guards moved on somewhat later with the Naval guns, armoured train, and
baggage. Lord Methuen's intention was this time to attack the left of
the Boer position, which was planted along a low range of hills, the
highest and most commanding of which lay on their left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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