Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/395

 crackled against the miserable shelter, whitened the ground, and froze the air. The reverberation of the thunder was incessant; one shock had barely begun to echo around the sky, when peal after peal, each stronger, louder, and more terrifying than its predecessors, blotted from our minds the sounds and flashes which had awakened our first astonishment, and made us forget in new frights our old alarms. The lightning darted from zenith to horizon, appeared in all quarters, played around all objects. In its glare the smallest bushes, stones, and shrubs stood out as plainly as under the noon sun of a bright summer's day; when it subsided, our spirits were oppressed with the weight of darkness. No stringing together of words can complete a description of what we saw, suffered, and feared during that awful tempest. The stoutest hearts, the oldest soldiers, quailed.

The last growl of thunder was heard, the last flash of lightning seen, between two and three in the morning, and then we turned out from our wretched, water-soaked couches, and gathering around the lakelet in whose midst our fire had been, tried by the smoke of sodden chips and twigs to warm our benumbed limbs and dry our saturated clothing. Not until the dawn of day did we feel the circulation quicken and our spirits revive. A comparison of opinion developed a coincidence of sentiment. Everybody agreed that while perhaps this was not the worst storm he had ever known, the circumstances of our complete exposure to its force had made it about the very worst any of the command had ever experienced. There was scarcely a day from that on for nearly a month that my note-books do not contain references to storms, some of them fully as severe as the one described in the above lines; the exposure began to tell upon officers, men, and animals, and I think the statement will be accepted without challenge that no one who followed Crook during those terrible days was benefited in any way.

I made out a rough list of the officers present on this expedition, and another of those who have died, been killed, died of wounds, or been retired for one reason or another, and I find that the first list had one hundred and sixteen names and the second sixty-nine; so it can be seen that of the officers who were considered to be physically able to enter upon that campaign in the early summer months of 1876, over fifty per cent, are not now answering to roll-call on the active list, after about sixteen