“None available. We were generously given written leave to commandeer any strays we might find, British or Boer. But we did the first twenty miles on foot. By this time, we had learned to soft-foot it around the countryside, and we were glad of our khaki uniform, which was exactly the colour of the burned-out veldt, and glad of our light loads. Little food to spare, we were told to ‘live off the land.’ Antelope? Lizard? Ostrich? We found it easier to kill a Boer or two and steal their biltong. We found out later that the Boer had mostly decamped—a tactical retreat—upcountry into a more defensible position they’d been preparing for months, but their outposts were still about. Not that we’d ever sighted one of them—not even when they were in battle formation and firing at our lines! There were miles of trenches dug, barbed wire brought in by the ton. Another wheeze our armchair generals had failed to anticipate, another failing of our intelligence system.” He groaned. “I think you know what was to follow, while we were enjoying our little jaunt into the backveldt.”

“Magersfontein,” Redfyre said quietly into the sudden silence. “The horrible business of Magersfontein.”

“The tenth of December. The column they’d sent out to the east, four thousand Highlanders, Black Watch and Seaforths, drenched to the bone and lost in the darkness, were ambushed. Walked straight into it. They fell by the hundred. Densely packed as they were, one Mauser bullet could go through several men, and there were hundreds of Mausers firing down on them. Many poor sods fleeing the massacre were caught up on the wire fences the Boers had rigged up around their trap. They found them next morning, strung up like crows on the wire. Target practice for the sharpshooters.”

“But these were Highlanders,” Redfyre prompted him gently.

“The bravest of us. And the most tenacious. Ordered into an impossible situation. By dawn, they’d reformed their companies, hunkered down wherever they could find shelter from the firing and taken stock. Without their officers, they still made an advance. A group of clansmen on the right wing made off for the nearest Boer trenches and returned with prisoners and bloodied bayonets. The Guards and the Yorkshires were sent up to relieve them, and after a day’s hard-fought engagement, they finally managed to extricate themselves and retreat back to base at the Modder River. We heard the din of the battle from our first bivouac camp, miles away by then.

“‘Cor! D’you ’ear that, Captain?’ young Fox said. ‘That’s the old man giving the buggers what-for! We should have been there! Shame we’ve missed it!’ He was a bloodthirsty little tyke, so long as it was someone else’s blood being spilled.