Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 9

thought was the northern crest of the summit, dug a series of shallow trenches, and waited for the night to end and the fog to lift. Then came the awful truth.
    "There cannot have been many battlefields where there was such an accumulation of horrors within so small a compass," commented Deneys Reitz, a young Boer soldier who fought at Spion Kop and who viewed the British dead afterwards. Against incredible odds, the Boers managed, in a single day, to wound or kill hundreds of British soldiers within a small area of ground – "an acre of massacre," as one war correspondent put it. The Boers would continue to hold out against the imperial might for many months, until finally surrendering to the British in 1902, bringing to an end the South African War, also called the Boer War or Anglo-Boer War.
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    A few notes on my sources, and on the alterations I've made to the original tale:
    As should be clear from what I've written above, I've transplanted a South African battle to a Maryland setting (though retaining the same time period). I've altered details of the battle, and of the fighting immediately before it, in order to fit the geography of and around Stone Quarry Ridge. (For example, at Spion Kop, the most deadly gunfire was endured by the right flank, rather than by the left flank.) However, the general outline of the battle remains as I've described it.
    Very little information is available on Washington County, Maryland, at the end of the nineteenth century. I've drawn most of my information from historical maps and from a visit to the area (though I've never climbed to the top of Stone Quarry Ridge). My best guess is that most of Stone Quarry Ridge was forested at the end of the nineteenth century (as it is now), but the historical maps leave this matter uncertain, so I've considered myself at liberty to imagine the hill as denuded of vegetation.
    A few homes did exist at the southern tip of the ridge. During the nineteenth century, two of the owners of these homes were named Tice and Roman. Tax records show that, in 1803, "Stone Quarry" in Washington County was owned by Richard Rook.
    Fairview is the name of the mountain to the northeast of Stone Quarry Ridge. It is also the name of a mountain near Spion Kop. In order to travel on a road that passed that mountain, on the way to relieve the besieged soldiers, the British army decided to make an attack upon Spion Kop.
    Spearman's was the name of a British encampment near Spion Kop. Most of the other Landsteader names in my story come from streets in Baltimore (i.e. "Balmer," the local pronunciation for that harbor city in Maryland).
    Because this story is historical fantasy rather than historical fiction, I've tried to capture the essential flavor of the Battle of Spion Kop, which has meant simplifying a complicated set of historical events and minimizing a lengthy cast of characters.
    All of the characters in my story are invented. Most of the incidents I mention in my story (such as the smashing of the heliograph at the very moment that the cry for help was being transmitted, the discovery of the paralyzed soldier with the reflecting water bottle, the plea by the head-wounded man to know whether the battle was won, and yes, the white spaniel) actually occurred at Spion Kop, though not always in the order or exact manner shown in my story. In cases where certain incidents are linked to historical figures, I've parcelled out those incidents in an indiscriminate fashion among my characters. Thus the Commander-in-Chief, Pentheusson, Tice, Fairview, and Rook take on the roles played by a variety of British officers. For example, my story has three colonels: one who led the charge on Spion Kop, one who held the hill during the middle of the day, and one who surrendered the hill. In historical fact, all of these actions were undertaken by a single man.
    The accidental burning of wounded men occurred four days before the Battle of Spion Kop, on January 20, according to eyewitness Maurice Harold Grant. (In that case, the wounded men were Boers, who were immolated in a fire unintentionally set by British guns.) Shell-fire is reported to have singed some of the grass at Spion Kop, but no wounded men were burnt there . . . so far as we know. One thing that comes through quite clearly in the accounts of Spion Kop is how chaotic the battle was, and how easy it was for important incidents to occur in one part of the battlefield, while soldiers fighting in another part of