CHAPTER XXIV

SCENES AND SOUNDS OF MODERN WAR

THE pictures of our battles which are produced in illustrated papers are not at all like real scenes at the front.

Art cannot keep pace with the quick advances of science, and illustrators find that for effect they must still put as much smoke and confusion in their battle studies as went with the old pictures of Waterloo. If this were left out the public would be disappointed, and unable to tell a battle-field from a parade.

Lately a picture in one of our leading papers, by a very capable artist, showed the British storming a Boer position. In the middle distance was a Boer battery, and the only gunner left alive was standing up with a bandage round his head, while smoke and flame and flying fragments of shells filled the air in his vicinity. In the rush of the instant he must have been bandaged by the same shot that struck him, and as for the smoke and flying débris, there was more of this in a corner of that picture than was to be seen in all the four battles we have fought!

What then is a modern battle-how does it look and sound?

Really, the field of operations is so extensive, and the range of modern guns is so great, that fighting conditions have altered, until there is no longer any general "noise of battle hurtled in the air,” no possibility of grasping or viewing an engagement from any single point.

You may hear one of our big guns loosed three miles over on the right, and another two miles on the left. If you are near they make a tremendous noise, yet I have not heard any explosion so loud as a good strong clap of thunder. The guns of the enemy cough far in front of you, and their shells burst within your lines with a louder sound-but with no real crash or deafening roar.

Our guns at their muzzles create but little smoke, though our lyddite shells throw up clouds of dust and smoke where they fall miles away. Because the Boers are using old-fashioned powder in their cannon there is a small white cloud wherever one is fired, and a spurt of red sand where their shells dig into the veldt. The smoke of war, therefore, and the so-called roar of battle are now-a-days occasional, scattered, inconsiderable.

Rifle-firing has been the principal feature of our fights. It sounds like the frying of fat, or like the crackling and snapping of green wood in a bonfire. If

you are within two miles of the front you are apt to be under fire, and then you hear the music of individual bullets. Their song is like the magnified note of a mosquito. "Z-z-z-z-z" they go over your head; “z—z—z-z-p" they finish as they bury themselves in the ground. This is a sound only to be heard when the bullets fly very close. You pick up your heels and run a hundred, or even fifty, yards, and you hear nothing but the general crackle of rifle-fire in and before the trenches.

The "putt-putt," or Vickers-Nordenfeldt gun, is able to interest you at a distance of three miles. Its explosions are best described by the nickname given to the gun by one regiment: "the blooming doorknocker." Its bullets or shells are as big as the bowl of a large briar-root pipe, and they tear and slit the air with a terrible sound, exploding when they strike. The firing of this gun was heard all over the largest of our battle-fields, and the sound of exploding shells carried far, because they were apt to fall on the quiet, outer edge of the field. The whizz that even these missiles make in flying, however, is, like the whispered answers of a maid in love, only to be heard by the favoured individual who is especially addressed.

Thus the many separate sounds are not loud enough to blend. The crowning, all-pervading noises are those of the guns and of the rifle-fire, and on the vast veldt, spread over a double line of five to seven

miles in length, only those that are very near are very loud.

The scene of battle-the general view-is exceedingly orderly. There may be a desperate scrimmage where a company or two are storming a kopje, but level your glass on yonder hill, and what do you see— a fringe of tiny jets of fire from the top where the Boers are, and our men in khaki rising, and reclining, and occasionally firing, as they win their way upward. The general view displays an arrangement as methodical as a chess-board. There are several battalions flat on their faces in two or three long lines. Over here is a battery in perfect order, with its limber of horses at rest near by. Another battery, equally well arranged, as if to have its photograph taken, is to be seen in the middle field; a third is on the farther side. The cavalry is sweeping across the veldt in perfect rank and alignment. There is no confusion anywhere -nothing is helter-skelter or slap-dash.

I remember only two momentary disturbances of this stern steady discipline. One was in the afternoon, during the Modder River fight, when a large band of mounted Boers made a flank movement on our extreme right, and fired a volley at our immense mass of transport and ambulance waggons, water-carts, and ammunition trains.

The drivers were taken by surprise, and fell to lashing their mule teams and horses, generally to the

accompaniment of high-keyed Kaffir yells. The rout lasted but five minutes or less, and was comical beyond description, because the leading mules climbed over the wheelers, and the faster the bullets fell the louder the Kaffirs yelled, and the more they plied their enormous whips.

The bravery of our stretcher-bearers is as much beyond question as it is beyond praise. All historians who tell of the dash and valour of the generals, colonels, majors, captains, and "Tommies" of the army, in common justice must also describe how the chaplains, doctors, and stretcher-bearers went in and out of the most hellish fire, not once or twice, but all through every battle.

It is just outside the range of fire that you see and realise the horrors of war. It is there that the wounded crawl and stagger by you; it is there that they spend their final output of energy, and fall down to lie until assistance comes; it is there that you see stretchers laden with their mangled freight, and sound soldiers bearing the wounded on their backs and in their arms.

More certainly to know the brutality and woe of war, happen upon a kopje that has just been stormed, or a trench that has been carried. Go to such a place to-day, twenty centuries after Christ came with His message of peace on earth, and good-will to men, and behold what you shall see.

"Here," said I to a photographer in such a place