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Evening Post, Volume LXIII, Issue 87, 12 April 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

curtain of powdered stones, and the fragment.* which remained behind— bloody hunks of meat left to lie in the roasting mm, with a low rags attached, all that ■nan lelt of half a dozen strong fighting men. 'rho Boers suffered terribly up in this trench; the sea which they had hoped to reach — England's sea — bad come up to them instead. ' You want me/ it roared ; ' well, take my weapons first !' And the long guns swung on. their swivels, and cocked their snouts, and smothered this unhappy hill as their great mother smothers breakwaters and outlying rocks on her days of auger. And the jolly Bailors spat and swore and sweated around them: all one to them whether the gunnery lienteuant's telescope was levelled across rolling ground or water, so long as it looked towards the enemy, and, after all, a rocky mouutuin is easier to hit than a, dancing j&hjp. And very few shells went abtray. "Tihs thick wall, less cunningly placed th;ui usual, looked to the naval gunners like a low black superstructure running across the mighty fabric beneath it. They smote- it, they battered it ; they flung it high in air, and crushed it to the ground. They played tricks with it, inviting the little shrapnel guns to joint the sport; for after a salvo of lyddite on a particular spot, the latter would burst a hurricane of shrapnel over the same Bpot at exactly the right interval in which to dash to the ground any Dutchmen creeping to ,tne rear unnerved by the first cataclysm. . . . CARRYING THE CREST. " Somewhere near midday Barton's Fusiliers ran along the deep Tugela gorge towards the 'Eagle's Nest,' a loft monument of rock put up by God to commemorate the birth of His lovely handiwork all around, and, turning to their left, swarmed up over the cliff and acrost the grassy slopes above it on to Pietera Hill itself — a bare conical eminence somewhat wide of the main position, and to its right. . . . The big Boer trench shrieked at them and forgot all about the shells crashing into it at the rate of fifty a minute ; and a sound as of a waterfall rolled down from it towards the charging soldiers — a ceaseless roar of rifles and rush of bullets, with wild shout* , between, and sudden appearances and disappearances of faces and figures in the smoke and dust, sometimes from the very midst of an explosion of lyddite. For the big shells would not bo forgotten. Skimming buC a few feet over the heads of the British fighting line, , they burst upon the trenches and on tlie ground below them, when attackers were so close to attacked that the gush of oily smoke hid and blinded both, and both the deathyell and the yell of triumph and fury which broke- around every explosion were drowned by its own tremendous shout. What .words can paint the sounds and sight of that fighting — the great winds which seemed to spring up, the deadly calms of certain little retired spots in which perhaps a couple of corpses grovelied like rooting pigs, the mighty roar of voices, the single piercing cries, the iron nails upon the stones, the hot, dirty leather of the men's equipment, the smell of hands and feet and warm, steel, the smell of fresh blood and chemicals ! "Kitchener's men kept steadily upward. Never did an attack move straightor, nor was there ever one with less apparent order in its movement. Little groups and littlo wavy lines, even little tiles and single soldiers, poured like dream-figures up through the clamour and confusion, that rose and fell along that terrible hillside. From all sides they came, from behind trees, from dips in the ground, over the summits of low rises, along water runs. Most of the men seemed to bo without officers, mosfi of the officers without men — a curious concourse to watch, so apparently motiveless or spontaneous was the steady trot towards the top of the leaden waterfalls' The- shells blaring over them a'ul bursting a few yards in front seemed to be shouting ' Faugh* a' ballagh !' ' Clciir tho way!' for the strange stem figurey silently toiling behind them, heads ben I, eyes fixed for the most part on the ground. For it was impossible to look up at the great Boer trench. So terrible a fire was crashing from it, that to raise one's eyes towards it was an effort similar to that of gazing straight into a cutting winter wind or into the doors of a ship's furnaces. It seemed safer to look down ; and in any case there was not much to see— only a brown wall, with a few flat hats fwofcbling over it, dimlyseen through the great spouts of fire and whirlwinds of tawny dust leaping and playing along it. Men appeared from nowhere, and pressed forward to nowhere, seen and lost in a moment like figures in a fog. . . . The wounded usually began to undress, looking furtively from side to side; some moving thus were hit again and again, and they took the blows wincing, with patient faces,, which sank quietly to the ground when, a bullet came at last to end it all. And all the time the swarm' of living rolled: on and up until only a few yards separated them from the main Boer work. Tho broadside pulled itself together and hurled salvo after salvo into it,, the great wall danced and crumbled, vanished in parts, in parts grew higher, with suddenly born battlements and turrets as the boulders were flung in confusion along the parapet, grinding and splitting and shaving their cold blue inner surface. Not a shell went astray, the parapet received them all full in its rocky face, doing its best for the cause, 'and no bad symbol of it in its ugly stubborness. " Oh, that last five minutes' bombardment. Tho lovers of sober writing must not read of war, for the artist has not yet lived who can write of hell with , heavenly temperance; and if ever hell was let loose upon tho uncondemned, it was upon those farmers manning the wall upon the roof of Pieters Hill. In one . great explosion they stood and fired, in one atmosphere of blasted air and filthy fumes, in one terriblo greeu and brown darkness, in one continual earthquake. They seemed to go mad, as well they might. As the' trotting soldiers drow near, many of them actually leapt from behind their cover on to the top of the parapet itself, and .were seen against the sky wildly firing from tho very midst of the bursting shells down at tho advancing Britons, and the great cheer that tosq from all the army behind as they closed was not all for the maimikins waving helmets on bayonet ends, but in part also for those that could be seen fulling backwards with uplifted arms. The last stand was over. Had the Boer army never stood again, their name was made ; even now, two years after, the heart bouts faster and tllo eye dilates p.s those littlo figures on the parapet and those trotting towards them are conjured up. With the capture of the main trench on Pieter* Hill the position vms won, and the British Army swept up an<J over it as if no fortress would ever stop it again — and in that mood none ever

The Times (London) recently reported that Mr. S. W. Wallace has been appointed, at a salary of £1000 a year, Director of Agriculture to the State of Victoria. It is understood that his first work will be to orf iise an entirely new Department of Agriculture. And in connection with this it is said that his seven years experience in the service of tho Government of Egypt should prove useful, and, in particular, his practical acquaintance with Egyptian irrigation. At Tanvworth, Victoria, there is a great demand for land, 25,600 acres being taken up under annual lease since, the beginning of the year.