The Sound of Thunder by Wilbur Smith

came on. The sound of their charge was low thunder; dust from the dew-damp earth rose reluctantly behind them; horses with wide mouths ffuming froth as they drove against the traces.
    “They’re in range now. They must stop, they must! ” groaned Sean.
    Then at last the column splayed open, alternate guns wheeling left and right still at full gallop. Swinging broadside to the waiting Boer rifles.
    “My God! My God!” Sean mouthed the blasphemy in agony as he watched. “They’ll be massacred. ” Gunners rising in the stirrups, leaning back to check the car rages The Gun-Captains jumping from their mounts, letting them gallop free as they ran to begin the unhitching and the pointing. In this helpless moment while men swarmed over the guns, man-handling them to train upon the heights; while the horses still reared and whinnied in hysterical excitement; before the shells could be unloaded and stacked beside their pieces-in that moment the Boer rifles opened together. It was a sound that lacked violence, strangely un warlike muted by distance to the popping of a hundred strings of fireworks, and at first there was no effect. The grass was thick enough to hide the strike of the bullets, the dust too lazy with dew to jump and mark their fall.
    Then a horse was hit and fell kicking, dragging its mate on to its knees also. TWo men ran to cut it loose, but one of them never reached it. He sat down suddenly in the grass with his head bowed. Two more horses dropped, another red and pawed wildly at the air with one front leg flapping loosely where a bullet had broken the bone above the knee.
    -Get out!” roared Sean. “Pull back while there’s still time,”
    but his voice did not carry to the gun crews, could not carry above the shouting and the screaming of wounded horses There was a new sound now which Sean could not identify, a sound like hail on a tin roof, isolated at first then more frequent until it was a hundred hammers clanging together in broken rhythm-and he knew it was the sound of bullets striking the metal of the guns.
    He saw: A gunner fall forward and jam the breech of the piece until he was dragged clear, A loader drop the shell he was carrying and stumble on with his legs fbi ding until he subsided and lay still; One of the horses break loose and gallop away across the plain dragging a tangle of torn traces behind it; A covey of wild pheasant rise together out of the grass near the batteries and curve away along the river before dropping on stiff wings back into cover; And behind the guns the infantry in neat lines advancing placidly towards the huddle of deserted cottages that was Colenso.
    Then, with a crash that made the earth jump, and with sixteen long spurts of blue smoke, the guns came into action.
    Sean focused his glasses on the ridge in time to see the first shells burst along the crest. The evil blossoms of greenish-yellow lyddite fumes bloomed quickly in the sunlight, then drifted oily thick on the wind.
    Again the guns crashed, and again–each salvo more ragged -than the last until it became a continuous stuttering, hammering roar.
    Until the stark outline of the ridge was blurred and indefinite in the dust and lyddite fumes. There was smoke also, a fine greyish mist of it banked along the heights-the smoke of thousands of rifles.
    Quickly Sean set the rear sight of his Lee-Metford at a thousand yards, wriggled forward on his elbows, hunched down over his rifle and began shooting blindly into the smoke on the heights. Beside him Saul was firing also.
    TWice Sean emptied his magazine before looking back at the guns.
    The tempo of their fire had slackened. Most of the horses were down in the grass. Dead men were dragged across the gun carriages, others badly wounded crouched for cover behind the mountings, and where six men had served each piece before, now four or only three carried shell and loaded and fired.
    “The fools, the bloody fools,” Sean whispered, and began to shoot again,