The Veldt in War Time.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume III, 1 October 1900, Page 50

The Veldt in War Time.

By Donald Macdonald

W^rr-s^ITH the introduction of long range / y* J magazine rifles and smokeless VA»| powder war has changed in many aspects. The aftermath of battle may be as horrible, as repellant as heretofore, but its impending presence is less manifest, and even on the eve of a great battle there is little sign of the coming strife. A few hoars before the Dublin Fusiliers went up the slopes of Talaua Hill in the first combat of the Natal campaign, the men had been out for running exercise, so certain were they that actual contact with the enemy was yet many days removed. It is with the solemn possibilities of battle ever in front of one that the quieter aspects of Nature come home the more impressively. The blue black faces of the men who had died with their heads down the slope of Waggon Hill — the waxen death masks of those who slept their last with their heads to the crest of it — the shell marks showing so plainly on the bare legs of the Highlanders, who look giants almost in death — were not the less impressive because on that quiet Sunday morning of January 7th skylarks were singing sweetly just over the thorn-decked plateau where the Kaffirs sweated, chattered and laughed as they digged the graves for the one hundred and twenty white men lying in a long gruesome row in the sunlight.

I had ever been a lover of Nature from those days when by the home paths of our old Southern farms, the honey parrots screamed and scrambled for the harvest of $he red gums, when the brush of the leaves, the yellow-dusted bees upon the Oape weed — realizing fully Shelley's fancy of a golden sundown — were the true bush symphonies,

and night with the soft coo of the Boobook owl or the shrill scream of the stone plover on the rocky hills only brought one closer to the heart of her mysteries.

The first thing that impressed one on the South African veldt was that clear, vivid atmosphere which so annihilates distance that the beetling crags of the Drackenbergs, on some days distant, and mist-hidden on others, seemed to loom over us until one almost saw the gleam of their mineral points. For a country so long settled, so much harried by Dutch and Englishmen with rifle and fowling piece, one was astonished to find so many deer, for when the wild game were threatened with complete extermination, the Natal authorities wisely brought into operation an old Act declaring all the scarcer kinds " Royal Game." So they have increased and multiplied, re-stocking their old pastures all the more readily because the lion who once lorded it over them has disappeared altogether, and the leopard is only occasionally found in the many kloofs and dongas which seam and cut that rocky land everywhere. I saw one day several hartebeeste, one of the largest of African buck, quietly feeding across the fire zone — the neutral territory which both Briton and Boer commanded with their fire, and upon which, accordingly, neither side cared to intrude. Right into our camps at times strayed the slim spindleshauked Bluebok or the cinnamon Reidbok, one of the handsomest of African antelopes. They were shot even in the heart of Crosar's Camp, where never, during the long four months' siege, were the lines of defenders at all relaxed. Marching over the veldt the troops constantly disturbed little red Spring-

bok, not much larger than a hare, which stole away at first with the crouching attitude of a hare suddenly disturbed from her form, and then varied their easy graceful gallops with three occasional bounds high in the air.

The Briton is always more or less a sportsman, and the traif became at times amazingly prominent even on the very threshold of battle. One day at Lombard's Kop — just before the siege of Ladysmith became complete — & line of skirmishers of the Liverpools were climbing a rocky kopje in skirmishing order when an antelope bounded away and ran down the whole length of the line. No one dared to fire, but every " Tommy " in the line covered that running deer with his rifle. The instinct of the idle Briton to go out and kill something was strong even in that fighting line of cockneys who had never shot pheasant or grouse in the Home preserves. Another day at Bester's Ridge when the nickel bullets whistled shrilly everywhere and the skirmish was at its fiercest, there suddenly appeared right between the fighting lines a startled buck clearly outlined on a kopje — its eyes wide open in alarm and astonishment, its large ears pricking forward constantly as though it would, with their subtle help, find its way out of the tumult. For an instant it stood thus, startled Nature personified, then bolted down the British line, helped on its way, not by a volley, but by a generous and sportsmanlike cheer.

In those last days of the siege when the craving for meat was always with us, a party of us rode out, as was the custom, in the eavly morning, for " a breath of unadulterate air — a glimpse of a green pasture," ere yet the Boers were out of bed, and ready to dust us off the voldt with their shell. Suddenly in a little depression, almost under our horses' legs, we saw crouching a little fawn, flat as only a fawn can lie when hiding, with its big ears stretched along its back and its great dark eyes, the most beautiful I had ever seen — in a quadruped at any rate — full of terror. We reined our horses for an instant, and one man, who carried his sentiment under the

lower buttons of his waistcoat, reachod stealthily for the revolver fastened to his saddle. " Ah, don't !" said another, "it would be infanticide." The revolver wns left in its case, and wo rode on.

Of birds the veldt about Ladysmith has not a great variety — though many brilliant finches darted amongst the river reeds, where the hippopotami once wallowed. Even the sea-cow of Africa has boon luckily preserved, and there are reservations both for elephant and hippopotami in Natal. The finches, scarlet and black, bluo and black, or yellow and black, afford perhaps the brightest bird studios on the veldt, though most characteristic of all is the sackabora — the name of which, it may bo as woll to explain is given here phonetically. It is black and red in plumage and rather longer than a thrush, but its distinctive featnre is a long sh'eaming tail, something like the birds of paradise of tropical North America. This tail, which has the bronze black sheen of a cock's plumage, is about twenty-four inches in length, and streaming loosely in the air, seems to help in wafting the bird quietly, though hampering it in anything like rapid flight. The Kaffir warriors delight in decking their war shields and assegais with the streaming sackabora tails, and the favourite plan of getting them is to run the birds down on foot, of a dewy morning when the long plumes trailing in the wet grass get so saturated and bedraggled with moisture that the bird is soon tired out and captured. It was with one of these plumes — the badge of the South African Light Horse — floating from his hat, giving him a breezy brigand look, that I first saw young Winston Churchill — on the day after Ladysmith was relieved.

If the natural fauna of the veldt is scarce, so, too, is the flora. The finest of the trees is the syringa, with it broad, flowing fernlike plumes — a great umbrageous shade tree standing high over the flat mimosa, which always looks as though some great weight had flattened it down in infancy and deformed its growth, It was of this thorn,

which has a small yellow blossom, even more richly scented than the Australian wattle, that the Boers used to build their laagers, both against the predatory lions and the more dangerous Zulus, in the days when Piet Retief and his Boers fought such gallant fights against Dingaan and his^black impis, as must ever be an answer to the foolish suggestion that there is any grain of cowardice in these stern South African fighters, The hai'd, black-pointed thorns of the mimosa, long as darning needles, were an unpleasant barrier to naked savages, and while the men served the rifles, Amazonian women walked up and down inside the laager, and clove the skull of any Zulu who sought to force his way through that hedge of thorn. These were brave, desperate deeds — incidents of colonization that must ever inspire the hope that one day Boer and Briton will, in spite of their centuries of antipathy, stand shoulder to shoulder instead of muzzle to muzzle. It was such a barrier of thorn that the Boers built round the foot of Lombard's Kop after we had once stormed the mountain by night assault — a laager some miles in length, which, when it had dried to tinder, our men went out and fired one dark night, drawing for an hour such a din of Mauser rifle fire as had never been heard at any other time without a single casualty to mark its effect.

Ladysmith had, at one time, a splendid avenue of syringa trees running the whole length of the main street, giving it such shade as it badly needs. But one day, some utilitarian householder started a theoiy that the drop of the rain from the sticky waxen blossoms spoiled the tank water, and this town, which accepts philosophically its enteric and other plagues as God-sent scourges for its sins, sacrificed its beautiful shade avenue without a pang. Some of them are indeed queer people. I knew one man who cut away a thirty-year-old climbing rose so that he might paint his verandah posts, an act of vandalism, the less excusable in that he painted the posts without first washing off the dust, so that in a week the paint had flaked off, and the denuded dwell-

ing seemed to be suffering from smallpox. As an act of grace they have filled in the spare spaces of the town with eucalyptus trees, which, in the rich alluvial soil of the valley, seemed to me to grow even faster than in their native ranges.

The weaver birds occasionally make sad havoc in the foliage — the large tough leaves of the gum serving them better than the indigenous trees for their nest building. These busy little brown fellows, exactly resembling a sparrow, build in companies, so that a tree is often completely stripped, and from its boughs the weaver birds' nests looking like so many lai'ge pears hang in scores. Under the shady mimosa grow long trails of the delicate asparagus fern, so much used by florists in Australia for decorative work ; and from amongst these little floral bowers at mid-day rise with the typical wild pigeon klip-klip of their wings two varieties of little grey ground doves. On the bare spaces there is another little ground bird much like a quail, known as the locust bird, and one of these was, strangely enough, the last victim to a shell from one of our 47 guns in Ladysmith. We found it near the Dutch redoubt on Mubulmana, on the morning after the relief, lying with shattered legs and wing just where one of our shells had burst.

The game birds of the veldt in Natal are the guinea fowl and the African partridge, and there are few English farmers thereabout who do not keep a brace of pointers. The guinea fowl, whose morning call always sounded so peaceful and typical of quiet farm life, fly in flocks, and must be scattered by dogs ere they lie close enough in the long grass to be shot over dogs. The partridge is an excellent game bird, and early one morning when riding out, I found a nest of their eggs, large for the bird and richly coloured. I thought how many collectors in Australia would prize a brace of eggs taken from a nest that must have more than once been enfiladed by rifle fire in the skirmishes around Ladysmith, but it was the time of scarcity when sentiment and science had alike to make way for

appetite, and the whole clutch found their way into an omelette.

No true flowers of the veldt are more typical of the rocky rugged kopjes than the cactus and the Natal lily. Most of the hills are crowned with the mottled cactus plants flowering red and yellow, and at a distance they look exactly like the figures of men standing up against the sky-line, and by the novice in warfare are invariably mistaken at first sight for the enemy. The Natal lily — as lovely as our white Christmas lilies and of much the same shape — comes up in early spring like the belladona, and the little bunch of fleshy leaf always appears to have blighted away, leaving only a black line above ground. Looking down into these floral chalices from the hill tops they seem half filled at times with a greenish golden liquid, which on a near view turns out to be a cluster of beetles. One of the queerest little bits of nature on the veldt, which always suggested to me the globe- walkers of a circus, is a large spider, which, moving on its hind legs, rolls everywhere in front of it a ball of earth as lai'ge as a boy's marble composed of rolled leaf mould and such material in which, pi'esumably, its eggs are being hatched.

As compared with the heath lands of Australia the veldt, amongst its manifold evils, has few deadly snakes. We met often the black Rinkalse or spitting snake, which has a nasty habit of ejecting its poison some ten or twenty feet, and with such deadly accuracy that it generally lodges in the eye

of an intruder, causing for a fow days frightful agony and very often loss of eyesight. As it threatens one with head raised a foot from the grass, curved neck, and six inches below the head two large air sacs, which give the motive power to carry the poison from the glands, it has a peculiarly cobra and deadly look. More deadly, however, is the short, gray, stumpy puff adder, which we killed one night in our bedroom after we had given ourselves every chance of standing on it in the dark. The two deadliest of (he Natal snakes are the green and black nioinba, which swing tendril-like from the low trees by the coast where the vegetation is tropical almost in its luxuriance, and strike the intruder suddenly as he passes underneath, A big harmless boa constrictor is often found round about the rooky kloofs, making life eventful for the dog apes and little Mozambique monkeys. When all has been said of the wild life of the veldt there is the one bird which first, last and always — but especially in war times — -seems typical of desolation and destruction, that is the assvo^el, or carrion vulture, ever wheeling in circles against the opaline African sky.. A revolting bird, gorging itself with carrion until it can only flap its broad wings drunkenly, without power of flight, and croak and threateu the intruder, it seems always the kindred spirit to death and cold mortality. Many features of the veldt, the garrison of Liidysmith may soon forget, but never, I think, the eternal

vulture