The Australians, after relieving Belmont from the Boer commando, suddenly
received orders to march upon Enslin, as the Boers had attacked that place,
which was held by two companies of the Northamptonshires under Captain
Godley; the latter had no artillery, whilst the enemy, who were over 1,000
strong, had one 12-pounder gun with them, but the sequel proved that the
Boer is a poor fighter in the open country. He is hard to beat in hilly and
rocky ground when acting on the defensive, but he is not over dangerous as
an attacking power. Let him choose his ground, and fight according to his
own traditions, and the best soldiers in the world will find it no sinecure
to oust him. As soon as the Boers put in an appearance at Enslin,
Lieutenant Brierly, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who is attached to the
Northamptons, made his way to a kopje, which had formerly been held by Boer
forces, and a mere handful of men fairly held the enemy in check at that
point for over seven hours. The enemy made frantic efforts to dislodge this
gallant little band, but failed dismally, and they had not the heart to try
to take the kopje by storm, though there were enough of them around the
hill to have eaten the little band of Britishers. In the meantime Captain
Godley and his men held the township. Again and again the enemy threatened
to rush the place, but their valour melted before the determined front of
the besieged, and they drew off, taking their gun with them, their scouts
having warned them that the Australians, with a section of the Royal Horse
Artillery and two guns, were coming upon them from the direction of
Belmont, whilst a body of the 12th Lancers and a battery of artillery were
dashing down from Modder River. The Australians, who are now 720 strong,
the New South Wales Company of 125 men having joined Colonel Head's forces,
remained at Enslin, and entrenched there in order to keep open the line of
communication between General Methuen's army and Orange River; a section of
Royal Horse Artillery and two guns is with them. On half a dozen occasions
the Boers have threatened to sweep down upon them from the hilly country
adjacent, but up to the time of writing nothing serious has occurred.
On Sunday last we heard the sound of heavy firing coming from the direction
of Modder River; scouts coming in informed us that an engagement between
General Methuen's force and the enemy, under the astute General Cronje, had
commenced. Seeing that Australia was liable to remain idle for the time
being, I determined to push on with my assistant, Mr. E. Monger, of
Coolgardie, West Australia. When we arrived at Modder River we found the
fight raging at a spot about four and a half miles beyond Modder River
bridge. Our forces were in possession of the river and the plain beyond;
but General Cronje had entrenched himself in a line of ranges stretching
for several miles across the veldt. So well had the Boer general chosen his
ground, and such good use had he made of the natural advantages of his
position, that the British found themselves face to face with an African
Gibraltar. The frowning rocks were bristling with rifles, which commanded
the plain below, trenches seamed the hillsides in all directions, and in
those trenches lay concealed the picked marksmen of the veldt--men who,
though they know but little of soldiering from a European point of view,
yet had been familiar with the rifle from earliest boyhood; rough and
uncouth in appearance, dressed in farmers' garb, still under those
conditions, fighting under a general they knew and trusted, amidst
surroundings familiar to them from infancy, they were foemen worthy of the
respect of the veteran troops of any nation under heaven.
At every post of vantage Cronje, with consummate generalship, had posted
his artillery so that it would be almost impossible for our guns to silence
them, whilst at the same time he could sweep the plains below should our
infantry attempt to storm the heights at the point of the bayonet. At the
bottom of the kopjes, right under the muzzle of his guns, he had excavated
trenches deep enough to hide his riflemen, but he had thrown up no
earthworks, so that our guns could not locate the exact spot where his
rifle trenches lay. All the earth from the trenches had been very carefully
removed, and the low blue bush which covers these plains completely
screened his trenches from view. In front of the trenches, and extending
some considerable distance out in front of the veldt, the clever Boer
leader had placed an immense amount of barbed wire entanglement, so
fashioned that no cavalry could live amongst it, whilst even the very
flower of our infantry would find it hard work to charge over it, even in
daylight. The Boer forces are variously estimated at from 12,000 to 15,000
men. The number and nature of their guns can only be guessed at, but that
the enemy's men are well supplied in that respect there can be no question.
Our forces I estimate at about 11,000 men of all arms, including the
never-to-be-forgotten section of the Naval Brigade, to whom England owes a
debt of gratitude too deep for words to portray; for their steadiness,
valour, and accuracy of shooting saved England from disaster on this the
blackest day that Scotland has known since the Crimea.
Our troops extended over many miles of country. Every move had to be made
in full view of the enemy upon a level plain where a collie dog could not
have moved unperceived by those foemen hidden so securely behind
impregnable ramparts. During the whole of Sunday our gunners played havoc
with the enemy, the shooting of the Naval Brigade being of such a nature
that even thus early in the fight the big gun of the bluejackets, with its
42-pound lyddite shell, struck terror into the hearts of the enemy. But the
Boers were not idle. Whenever our infantry, in manoeuvring, came within
range'of their rifles, our ranks began to thin out, and the blood of our
gallant fellows dyed the sun-baked veldt in richest crimson.
During the night that followed it was considered expedient that the
Highland Brigade, about 4,000 strong, under General Wauchope, should get
close enough to the lines of the foe to make it possible to charge the
heights. At midnight the gallant, but ill-fated, general moved cautiously
through the darkness towards the kopje where the Boers were most strongly
entrenched. They were led by a guide, who was supposed to know every inch
of the country, out into the darkness of an African night. The brigade
marched in line of quarter-column, each man stepping cautiously and slowly,
for they knew that any sound meant death. Every order was given in a hoarse
whisper, and in whispers it was passed along the ranks from man to man;
nothing was heard as they moved towards the gloomy, steel-fronted heights
but the brushing of their feet in the veldt grass and the deep-drawn
breaths of the marching men.
So, onward, until three of the clock on the morning of Monday. Then out of
the darkness a rifle rang, sharp and clear, a herald of disaster--a soldier
had tripped in the dark over the hidden wires laid down by the enemy. In a
second, in the twinkling of an eye, the searchlights of the Boers fell
broad and clear as the noonday sun on the ranks of the doomed Highlanders,
though it left the enemy concealed in the shadows of the frowning mass of
hills behind them. For one brief moment the Scots seemed paralysed by the
suddenness of their discovery, for they knew that they were huddled
together like sheep within fifty yards of the trenches of the foe. Then,
clear above the confusion, rolled the voice of the general--"Steady, men,
steady!"--and, like an echo to the veterans, out came the crash of nearly
a thousand rifles not fifty paces from them. The Highlanders reeled before
the shock like trees before the tempest. Their best, their bravest, fell in
that wild hail of lead. General Wauchope was down, riddled with bullets;
yet, gasping, dying, bleeding from every vein, the Highland chieftain
raised himself on his hands and knees, and cheered his men forward. Men and
officers fell in heaps together.
The Black Watch charged, and the Gordons and the Seaforths, with a yell
that stirred the British camp below, rushed onward--onward to death or
disaster. The accursed wires caught them round the legs until they
floundered, like trapped wolves, and all the time the rifles of the foe
sang the song of death in their ears. Then they fell back, broken and
beaten, leaving nearly 1,300 dead and wounded just where the broad breast
of the grassy veldt melts into the embrace of the rugged African hills, and
an hour later the dawning came of the dreariest day that Scotland has known
for a generation-past. Of her officers, the flower of her chivalry, the
pride of her breeding, but few remained to tell the tale--a sad tale truly,
but one untainted with dishonour or smirched with disgrace, for up those
heights under similar circumstances even a brigade of devils could scarce
have hoped to pass. All that mortal men could do the Scots did; they tried,
they failed, they fell. And there is nothing left us now but to mourn for
them, and avenge them; and I am no prophet if the day is distant when the
Highland bayonet will write the name of Wauchope large and deep in the best
blood of the Boers.
All that fateful day our wounded men lay close to the Boer lines under a
blazing sun; over their heads the shots of friends and foes passed without
ceasing. Many a gallant deed was done by comrades helping comrades; men who
were shot through the body lay without water, enduring all the agony of
thirst engendered by their wounds and the blistering heat of the day; to
them crawled Scots with shattered limbs, sharing the last drop of water in
their bottles, and taking messages to be delivered to mourning women in the
cottage home of far-off Scotland. Many a last farewell was whispered by
pain-drawn lips in between the ringing of the rifles, many a rough soldier
with tenderest care closed the eyes of a brother in arms amidst the tempest
and the stir of battle; and above it all, Cronje, the Boer general, must
have smiled grimly, for well he knew that where the Highland Brigade had
failed all the world might falter. All day long the battle raged; scarcely
could we see the foe--all that met our eyes was the rocky heights that
spoke with tongues of flame whenever our troops drew near. We could not
reach their lines; it was murder, grim and ghastly, to send the infantry
forward to fight a foe they could not see and could not reach. Once our
Guards made a brilliant dash at the trenches, and, like a torrent, their
resistless valour bore all before them, and for a few brief moments they
got within hitting distance of the foe. Well did they avenge the slaughter
of the Scots; the bayonets, like tongues of flame, passed above or below
the rifles' guard, and swept through brisket and breastbone. Out of their
trenches the Guardsmen tossed the Boers, as men in English harvest fields
toss the hay when the reapers' scythes have whitened the cornfields; and
the human sheaves were plentiful where the British Guardsmen stood. Then
they fell back, for the fire from the heights above them fell thick as the
spume of the surf on an Australian rock-ribbed coast. But the Guards had
proved to the Boers that, man to man, the Briton was his master.
In vain all that day Methuen tried by every rule he knew to draw the enemy;
vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to induce those human rock limpets to
come out and cut them off. Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic
laugh played round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native
fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners dropped the
lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along his lines, until the
trenches ran blood, and many of his guns were silenced. In the valley
behind his outer line of hills his dead lay piled in hundreds, and the
slope of the hill was a charnel-house where the wounded all writhed amidst
the masses of the dead; a ghastly tribute to British gunnery. For hours I
stood within speaking distance of the great naval gun as it spoke to the
enemy, and such a sight as their shooting the world has possibly never
witnessed. Not a shell was wasted; cool as if on the decks of a pleasure
yacht our tars moved through the fight, obeying orders with smiling
alacrity. Whenever the signal came from the balloon above us that the enemy
were moving behind their lines, the sailors sent a message from England
into their midst, and the name of the messenger was Destruction; and when,
at 1.30 p.m. of Tuesday, we drew off to Modder River to recuperate we left
a ghastly pile of dead and wounded of grim old Cronje's men as a token that
the lion of England had bared his teeth in earnest.
Three hundred yards to the rear of the little township of Modder River,
just as the sun was sinking in a blaze of African splendour on the evening
of Tuesday, the 13th of December, a long, shallow grave lay exposed in the
breast of the veldt. To the westward, the broad river, fringed with trees,
ran murmuringly, to the eastward, the heights still held by the enemy
scowled menacingly, north and south, the veldt undulated peacefully; a few
paces to the northward of that grave fifty dead Highlanders lay, dressed as
they had fallen on the field of battle; they had followed their chief to
the field, and they were to follow him to the grave. How grim and stern
those dead men looked as they lay face upward to the sky, with great hands
clenched in the last death agony, and brows still knitted with the stern
lust of the strife in which they had fallen. The plaids dear to every
Highland clan were represented there, and, as I looked, out of the distance
came the sound of the pipes; it was the General coming to join his men.
There, right under the eyes of the enemy, moved with slow and solemn tread
all that remained of the Highland Brigade. In front of them walked-the
chaplain, with bared head, dressed in his robes of office, then came the
pipers, with their pipes, sixteen in all, and behind them, with arms
reversed, moved the Highlanders, dressed in all the regalia of their
regiments, and in the midst the dead General, borne by four of his
comrades. Out swelled the pipes to the strains of "The Flowers of the
Forest," now ringing proud and high until the soldier's head went back in
haughty defiance, and eyes flashed through tears like sunlight on steel;
now sinking to a moaning wail, like a woman mourning for her first-born,
until the proud heads dropped forward till they rested on heaving chests,
and tears rolled down the wan and scarred faces, and the choking sobs broke
through the solemn rhythm of the march of death. Right up to the grave they
marched, then broke away in companies, until the General lay in the shallow
grave with a Scottish square of armed men around him, only the dead man's
son and a small remnant of his officers stood with the chaplain and the
pipers whilst the solemn service of the Church was spoken.
Then once again the pipes pealed out, and "Lochaber No More" cut through
the stillness like a cry of pain, until one could almost hear the widow in
her Highland home moaning for the soldier she would welcome back no more.
Then, as if touched by the magic of one thought, the soldiers turned their
tear-damp eyes from the still form in the shallow grave towards the heights
where Cronje, the "lion of Africa," and his soldiers stood. Then every
cheek flushed crimson, and the strong jaws set like steel, and the veins on
the hands that clasped the rifle barrels swelled almost to bursting with
the fervour of the grip, and that look from those silent, armed men spoke
more eloquently than ever spoke the tongues of orators. For on each
frowning face the spirit of vengeance sat, and each sparkling eye asked
silently for blood. God help the Boers when next the Highland pibroch
sounds! God rest the Boers' souls when the Highland bayonets charge, for
neither death, nor hell, nor things above, nor things below, will hold the
Scots back from their blood feud. At the head of the grave, at the point
nearest the enemy, the General was laid to sleep, his officers grouped
around him, whilst in line behind him his soldiers were laid in a double
row, wrapped in their blankets. No shots were fired over the dead men
resting so peacefully, only the salute was given, and then the men marched
campwards as the darkness of an African night rolled over the
far-stretching breadth of the veldt. To the gentlewoman who bears their
General's name the Highland Brigade sends its deepest sympathy. To the
mothers and the wives, the sisters and the sweethearts, in cottage home by
hillside and glen they send their love and good wishes--sad will their
Christmas be, sadder the new year. Yet, enshrined in every womanly heart,
from Queen Empress to cottage girl, let their memory lie, the memory of the
men of the Highland Brigade who died at Magersfontein.