A MIDNIGHT SORTIE
MAFEKING, _October 28th, 1899_.
Last night there occurred one of those isolated instances of gallantry
by which the British sustain their high reputation. For some days, in
fact ever since the Boers secured their siege guns from Pretoria, the
enemy has been building a circlet of trenches around Mafeking. At the
least distance they are perhaps 2,500 yards, unhappily beyond the
reach of our rifle and Maxim fire. We have seen them lounging in their
breastworks, we have seen them gathered around their camp fires, and
the inability of Mafeking to shake off these unwelcome intruders has
been daily a source of irritation. We have not, of course, allowed
them to enjoy, undisturbed, the seclusion of their own earthworks,
and, as a continual goad in their side, little expeditions have been
despatched to make night fearsome to our besetting foe.
Another of these midnight sorties was undertaken last night, proving
in itself to be the most important move on our side since Captain
Fitzclarence and his men engaged the Boers two weeks ago. The same
officer, 55 men of D Squadron Protectorate Regiment, with Lieutenant
Murray and 25 men of the Cape Police, were the prime movers in an
attempt to rush the first line of earthworks of the Boer position.
Shortly after 11 o'clock Captain Fitzclarence, Lieutenant Swinburne
and their men started on the perilous undertaking. In the faint light
of the night we could see their figures from our own redans, silently
hurrying across the veldt. In the blue haze of the distance a black
blur betokened the position of the enemy, and it seemed that at any
moment the hoarse challenge of the Boer outpost would give the alarm.
The men crept on in slightly extended order, holding themselves in
readiness for the supreme moment. Nearer, and yet nearer, they drew to
the Boer entrenchments. The silence was intense. The heavy gloom, the
mysterious noises of the veldt at night, the shadowy patches in the
bush, all seemed to heighten the tension of one's nerves. In a little
while our men were within a few yards of the enemy; then furtively
each fixed his bayonet to his rifle, and as the blades rang home upon
their sockets the gallant band raised a ringing cheer. Instantly the
Boer position was galvanised into activity, figures showed everywhere,
shots rang out, men shouted, horses stampeded, and the confusion which
reigned supreme gave to our men one vital moment in which to hurl
themselves across the intervening space. Then there was a loud crash,
for, as it happened, many of our men were nearer the entrenchments
than had been anticipated, and their eager charge had precipitated
them upon some sheets of corrugated iron which the Boers had torn from
the grand stand of the racecourse for protection from the rain. With
our men upon the parapet of the trench, a few rapid volleys were fired
into the enemy, who, taken completely by surprise, were altogether
demoralised. Those in the first trenches seemed to have been petrified
by fright. Where they were, there they remained, stabbed with bayonet,
knocked senseless with the rifle's butt, or shot dead by the fire of
their own men. Captain Fitzclarence himself, with magnificent
gallantry and swordsmanship, killed four of the enemy with his sword,
his men plying their bayonets strenuously the while. This was the
first trench, and as the fight grew hotter, some little memory of
their earlier boasts, inspired the Boers to make a stand. They fought;
they fought well. Their vast superiority in numbers did not enter into
their minds, since Commandant Botha told Lieutenant Moncrieff, who had
charge of the flag party that arranged for an armistice upon the
following morning, that he thought that at least a thousand men had
been moved against his position. The long line of front held by the
enemy flashed fire from many hundred rifles. Houses in the town caught
the bullets, the low rises to the east of the position threw back the
echo of the rifle shots. Our men became the centre of a hail of
bullets. The Boers fired anywhere and everywhere, seeming content if
they could just load their rifles and release the trigger. Many
thousands of rounds of ammunition were expended in the confusion of
the moment, the enemy not even waiting to see at whom, or at what,
they were aiming.
After the first fury had been expended, our men charged at the bayonet
point right across the line of trenches. It was in this charge that
the Boers lost most heavily. So soon as the squadron reached the
extremity of the Boer position they retreated independently, their
movement covered by the flanking fire of the Cape Police, which added
still further to the perplexities of the enemy. The galling fire of
the Cape Police disturbed them for some time longer than was required
in the actual retirement of the force.
The Boers had been completely unnerved by the onslaught of the
Protectorate men, and a feature of the hours which elapsed between the
final withdrawal of our force from the scene of conflict, and the
advent of dawn, was the heavy firing of the enemy, who still continued
discharging useless volleys into space. The loss to us in this
encounter had been 6 killed, 11 wounded, and two of our men taken
prisoners, but the gravity of the loss which the enemy sustained can
be most surely measured by the fact that, until a late hour this
afternoon, they could not find the spirit to resume the bombardment.
It is said in camp here that one hundred Boers will have reason to
remember the charge of the Protectorate Regiment.
The way in which these respond to the duties asked of them is shown by
their conduct during this night attack. Nevertheless, when the
enrolment of the Protectorate Regiment began in August, 1899, any
practical opinion upon the future value of its individual units, as
upon its possible mobility, was the merest hazard. When Colonel Hore
accepted the command of the regiment, and endeavoured, by every means
in his power, to promote its development, there were many who
expressed, after witnessing the preliminary parade of the recruits at
Ramathlabama Camp, the verdict that the short space of time which was
allowed to the officers to knock the squadrons into shape would not
permit the men attaining any proficiency whatsoever. In those early
days of the war volunteers came from near and far, from Johannesburg
upon the one side, from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and East London
upon the other, to enlist in the service of her Majesty. Time-expired
men threw up their billets when the opportunity presented itself of
rejoining the colours, and while enlistment was proceeding, the
immediate vicinity of Ramathlabama and the roads from the Transvaal
into Mafeking presented the appearance of a district which has been
made the final destination of some mining rush. Pedestrians from the
Transvaal humping their swags, passengers by train from the south,
well-to-do youngsters from different parts of the Protectorate or from
the back-lying areas of the colony, all made their roads converge upon
Mafeking. At that time, however, when the work of enlisting was in its
infancy, and the services of able-bodied men were much required, the
Colonial Government, at the instigation of Mr. Schreiner, whose
dubious policy was cheerfully endorsed by his colleagues, refused to
allow her Majesty's soldiers, who were in process of enlistment for
that special purpose, to afford Mafeking the moral value of their
presence. No sooner had word reached the ears of the Colonial Cabinet
that the work of recruiting was proceeding around Mafeking, than the
recruiting officers were ordered to withdraw immediately from the
precincts of the colony so long as they continued to act in a way
which might give some possible offence to the dear friend, guardian,
and patron saint of Cape Colony, Paul Kruger. After a very decorous
and manly remonstrance, Colonel Hore withdrew his headquarters and his
men sixteen miles across the border to Ramathlabama Camp, from which
point the enlistment of the Protectorate Regiment was continued.
The Protectorate Regiment is strictly an irregular soldiery, composed
of men drawn from every rank of African life, many of whom are gentle
by birth and education and possessed of no little means. In the ranks
of the regiment there are those who have been at the university and
public schools; there are also mechanics, miners, farm hands, and men
who have known office life. The nationalities of the men are as varied
as their occupations in peace times are diffuse. There are a few
Americans, some Germans, and Norwegians, although for the most part
the regiment is British; as a whole, perhaps, it is an ill-assorted
assembly of adventurers, animated with the same love of fighting and
the glories of war, of lust and bloodshed which characterised the
lives of the buccaneers of old. In other days, and in other lands,
they would be sailing the sea for treasure, or combining in the quest
for gold in some hidden extremity of the world's surface. The prospect
of free rations, of uniform, and allowance of pocket money, was of
course sufficient to draw a few; but, as a body, the idler upon the
farm, the bar-loafer from the town, and the thoroughly incompetent are
as distinguished by their absence, as the general tone of the regiment
is suffused with martial ardour. It is quite impossible to treat these
men with the cast-iron regulations which enthral the Imperial soldier.
He does not understand the petty exactions, the never-ending restraint
which would be imposed upon him had he accepted the conditions which
govern and regulate life in our army. He experiences and gives voice
to a very genuine aversion to fatigues of every description, and it
has required the exercise of much tact and no little personal
persuasion to induce the men to become reconciled to the labours of
their calling. They have accepted with some diffidence the fact that
it is necessary for them to fulfil, at the present moment, many
irritating, but essentially important fatigues which may not have
entered into their original forecast of the duties which would be
allotted to them. They frequently indulge in outbursts of choice
expletives, at the expense of their non-commissioned officers, while
they do not hesitate to correct, or at least to argue about what they
imagine to be wrong in the execution of some order.
The conditions under which these men were enrolled were supposed to
admit those only who could ride as well as shoot, and before the
initial tests were applied the standard of the regiment upon paper was
exceptionally high. After the first parade, however, it was seen that
by far the great majority of the regiment was incapable of managing
their horses. Upon parade, when horses and men were put through
cavalry exercises, detached and riderless steeds would be seen
galloping and bucking in all directions. However, those who were
unproficient did not propose to allow their cattle to hold the mastery
for any longer than was absolutely necessary, and many was the tough
fight fought to a bitter end between the raw recruit and his unbroken,
unmanageable mount. After many days and an inordinate amount of hard
work, the troop officers managed to lick their men into a very
presentable appearance until, with the beginning of the war, the
squadrons of the Protectorate Regiment were as capable and efficient a
body of irregular mounted infantry as any that had been enrolled by
local movement in South Africa. During the siege there has been no
chance to continue those early exercises, and it is not at all
unlikely that when they become mounted once more the former
difficulties will again assert themselves and, bearing this in mind,
it is difficult to conclude that as a fighting force they will not be
more at home upon their feet than in the saddle, since they will find
their attentions occupied as much by the management of their steeds as
with the handling of their weapons.
If they be not quite so mobile in the field as more experienced
troops, there is no doubt that they present a determined front to the
fire of the enemy. They have a keen relish for any preparation which
appears to lead to some immediate collision, while they profess an
equally profound disgust at their enforced inactivity. How these men
might act if, through the smoke-filled air, they saw an array of
sparkling bayonets, or heard the serried ranks of hostile lines
advancing to the charge, it is impossible to say; but in the few
fights which we have had the personal element has been strong, and the
individual courage high. We have lacked the spectacle of the
many-coloured, steel-edged columns impelled forward by the impulse of
some dominant power, with the dusty faces of the men, the stumbling,
sore-stricken feet, the gasping breath of the stragglers who tired,
dead beat, and thirsty, limp to the rear; but the play of human
passion in our little fighting force has not been absent. We have had
the wager of life against life, the angry, turbulent crash of
fierce-blooded men, fighting under the shadow of death, with their
emotions strained as they struggled in the very atmosphere of passion.
And it has done us good to see how reliable the force has been about
which so much doubt existed. Unlike the Imperial service, these
irregular corps act as much for the unit as they do for the mass, as
animated by terror or by valour, by a fatal despair, or by a blooded
triumph, they fight for an individual supremacy. That is the moment
of their triumph, and it is these splendid qualities of savage and
physical animalism which makes it more easy to treat them with a wider
latitude than is usual. Their magnificent hardihood, their splendid
fighting gifts, their lurid blasphemy, their admiration for officers
who are men, their appalling debauchery, gives to them the ideal
setting of the rough but very gallant soldier of fortune, who,
scorning his enemy and hating a retreat, has played so omnipotent a
part in the history of the universe.