i fired my first shot at a fellow-creature within four days of my arrival. we rode out down the road to the south to search some hills, and found the boers in fair strength away to the east of us. we were dismounted and pushed up on foot through a wood to a grassy crest. there for the first time i saw the enemy, little respectable-looking unsoldierlike figures, mostly in black, dodging about upon a ridge perhaps a mile away. i took a shot at one of these figures just before it vanished into a gully. one or two bullets came overhead, and i tried to remember what i had picked up about cover. they made a sound, whiff-er-whiff, a kind of tearing whistle, and there was nothing but a distant crackling to give one a hint of their direction until they took effect. i remember the peculiar smell of the grass amidst which i crouched, my sudden disgust to realize i was lying, and had to lie now for an indefinite time, in the open sunlight and far from any shade, and how i wondered whether after all i had wanted to come to this war.
we lay shooting intermittently until the afternoon, i couldn't understand why; we went forward a little, and at last retired upon ladysmith. on the way down to the horses, i came upon my first dead man. he was lying in a crumpled heap not fifty yards from where i had been shooting. there he lay, the shattered mirror of a world. one side of his skull over the ear had been knocked away by a nearly spent bullet, and he was crumpled up and face upward as though he had struggled to his feet and fallen back. he looked rather horrible, with blue eyes wide open and glassily amazed, and the black flies clustering upon his clotted wound and round his open mouth....
i halted for a moment at the sight, and found the keen scrutiny of a fellow trooper upon me. "no good waiting for him," i said with an affectation of indifference. but all through the night i saw him again, and marvelled at the stupendous absurdity of such a death. i was a little feverish, i remember, and engaged in an interminable theological argument with myself, why when a man is dead he should leave so queer and irrelevant a thing as a body to decay....
i was already very far away from london and burnmore park. i doubt if i thought of mary at all for many days.
