The day is hot, and his jacket is thrown across his shoulders. A small cloud of flies buzz over him. He is tired, dirty, thirsty, and hungry. Fever has taken hold of him, and he is--as he would say--feeling "a bit thick." He is sitting by the river bank to await the first wagon across the pontoon on which a conductor will give him a lift. In the meantime some good Samaritan is getting him a drink of water from the stream.
On December 15th was fought the battle of Colenso, on the morning of a brilliant summer’s day. At dawn the men had marched out eagerly and in keen spirits, and with a swing of the shoulders which told of a certain victory. Before sundown they were beaten back, more than a thousand dead and wounded were lying on the field, the hospital tents were crammed to overflowing, and the wagons, which were prepared to move forwards, were moving back.
The small hamlet of Colenso, battered, empty, and woe-begone, stands on the south bank of the river, and clings about the railway as a homely, unpretending little settlement made up of a few corrugated iron cottages on either side of a single street.
It looks almost like a toy village, and its prim formality is tempered by a friendly growth of cactus, aloes, and mimosa, by a few trees and by many gardens. Behind Colenso is the veldt, which here extends southwards as a vast undulating plain to Chieveley, Frere, and Estcourt. Between Chieveley and the river the veldt is smooth, and is broken only by ant-hills, by a few Kaffir kraals, and by the precise line of the railway. The plain is green, but it is not the luxuriant green of England, and in the early morning and about the time of the setting sun, tints of yellow and brown and pink spread over the wold and render the place strangely beautiful.
During the glare of noonday the veldt gives simply a blinding sense of scorched and faded green and its monotony and its boundlessness, and the utter lack of shade and variation, make the expanse dreary as a desert.
Beyond the village the brown torrent of the great Tugela tears seawards between high banks and under broken bridges, and among the _débris_ of pitiless ruin. Across the river are the bare, stony, trench-lined kopjes and hills held for so many long weeks by the Boers. About the foot of these bastion-like ridges is the squalor of a neglected camp, and on all sides are rifle pits and trenches and stone shelters and hidden holes. Man seems on this river bank to have gone back to the savagery of the cave dweller, and to be once more crawling on the earth. Beyond these low hills are the grey heights of Umbulwana towering over Ladysmith.