I have a weakness for scouts. Good scouts seem to me to be of more
importance to an army in the field than all the tape-tied intelligence
officers out of Hades. They don't get on well with the regular officers as
a rule, because scouts are like poets--they are born, not manufactured.
They are people who do not feel as if God had forsaken them for ever if
they don't get a shave and a clean shirt every morning, they are just a
trifle rough in their appearance and manners; but they ride as straight as
they talk, and shoot straighter than they ride. They have to be built for
the business. All the training in the world won't make a scout unless
nature has commenced the job; mere pluck is not worth a dog's bark in this
line of life, though without pluck no scout is worth a wanton woman's
smile. A good scout wants any amount of courage; he wants a level head--a
head of ice, and a heart of fire. He wants to know by instinct when to rush
onward and chance his life to the heels of his horse and the goodness of
God, and he wants to know with unfailing certainty when to crawl into cover
and hide. He must understand how to ride with no other guide than the lay
of the country, the course of the sun, or the position of the stars. He
must have eyes that note every broken hill, every little hollow, every
footprint of man or horse on the veldt.
He must be an excellent judge of distance, of time, of numbers. He must be
able to tell at a glance whether a cloud of dust is caused by moving troops
or by the action of the elements. Above all, he must be truthful, not given
to exaggeration of his friends' strength or his enemy's weakness. When he
makes his report it should need no corroboration. If a scout is worth his
salt, his advice should be accepted and acted upon promptly.
I often go out with the scouts; they are the eyes of the army. A man who
knocks around with scouting parties knows more, sees more, hears more of
the real state of affairs than nine-tenths of the staff officers ever know,
hear, or see. Men fresh from the Old Country seldom make good scouts. Take
the Yeomanry, for instance. They are plucky enough, but not one in a
hundred of them has the making of a scout in him. All his fathers and his
grandfather's and his great-grandfather's breeding trends in other
directions, and there is an awful lot more in the breeding of men than most
folk imagine. The American makes a good scout. If he knows nothing of the
life, he soon picks it up. So does the Australian, and the Canadian, and
the Colonial-born South African. Something in the life appeals to them.
They get the "hang" of it with very little trouble. There are some
English-born men, however, who develop into rattling great scouts. These
men are mostly adventurous fellows, who have roamed about the world, and
had the corners knocked off them. I have two of them in my mind's eye just
at present. One of them is an Irishman named Driscoll, Captain of the
Scouts who are the eyes and ears of Rundle's army. The other is an
Englishman named Davies, a captain in the same gallant little band. The
first lieutenant is a Cape colonial of English extraction, named Brabant, a
gallant son of a gallant general. Captain Driscoll is a typical Irishman,
just such a man as the soul of Charles Lever would have revelled in, a man
of dauntless daring, with a heart of iron, and a face to match. Strangely
enough, the captain does not pride himself a bit on his pluck, but he
thinks a deuce of a lot of his beauty. As a matter of fact, he has the
courage of ten ordinary men, but he would not take a prize in a first-class
beauty show. (Lord send I may be far from the reach of his revolver when
this reaches his eye.) He has that dash of vanity in his composition which
I have found in all good Irishmen, and he prides himself far more on the
execution his eyes have done amidst the Dutch girls than of the work his
deadly rifle has wrought in the ranks of the Dutch mea Yet, if you want to
know if Driscoll can shoot, just go to Burmah, where for ten years he held
the position of captain in the Upper Burmah Volunteer Rifles. That was
where I heard of him first, as the most deadly rifle and revolver shot in
all the East.
The Boers know him now as the prince of rifle shots and the king of scouts.
He is standing in the wintry sunlight just in front of my tent as I am
writing, one hand on the bridle of his horse, rapping out Dutch oaths with
a strong Cork accent to a nigger who has not groomed his pet animal
properly. The nigger is very meek, for past experience has told him that
Irish blood is hot, and an Irishman's boot quick and heavy. He is a
picturesque figure, this Celtic scout leader, just such a picture as Phil
May could bring to life on a sheet of paper with a few strokes of his
master hand. He is about eleven stone in weight, and, roughly, five feet
eight, clean cut and strong, with a face which tells you he was born in
Cork, and had knocked about a lot in tropic lands; eight-and-thirty if he
is a day, though he swears at night around the camp fire that the pretty
Dutch girls have guessed his age as twenty-seven. He wears a slouch hat,
around which a green puggaree coils lovingly. In his right hand his rifle
rests as if it felt at home there. His coat is worn and shabby, khaki in
colour; riding pants of roughest yellow cords, patched in places
unspeakable, leggings around his sinewy calves, and feet planted in neat
boots make up the whole man. He is clean shaven except for a moustache,
dark brown in colour, which sprouts from his upper lip.
In his softer moments Driscoll tells us that it used to "cur-r-r-l" before
he had the "faver" in Burmah, and on such occasions we assure him that it
"cur-r-rls" even yet. It is more polite to agree with him than to cross
him--and a lot safer. He is as full of anecdote as heaven is of angels, and
I mean to use him in the sweet days of peace, unless some stay-at-home
journalist niches him from me in the meantime. Driscoll and Davies are fast
friends. The Englishman is not such a picturesque figure as the Irishman.
Englishmen seldom are, somehow; but he is a man, a real white man, all
over. He is rather a good-looking, well set-up young fellow, who always
looks as if he had just had a bath; not a dude by any manner of means, but
a fellow with a soft eye for a pretty ankle, and a hard fist for a foe--one
of those quiet chaps a man always likes to find close beside him in a row.
Driscoll almost weeps over him to me sometimes. "He's the devil's own at
close quarters," says the Irishman. "Never want a better chum when it comes
to bashing the enemy. If he could only shoot a bit 'straighther and talk a
bit sweether to the colleens he'd be perfect." All the same, I have, and
hold, my own opinion concerning the "talking." Many a smile which the
gallant Celt appropriated to himself as we rode out of a conquered town
seemed to me to belong of right to the rosy-faced Welsh lad on the
off-side. To hear these two men chatter over a glass of hot rum in my tent
at night one would think they had never faced danger. Yet never a day goes
by but one or the other of them has to run the gauntlet of Boer rifles;
whilst Jack Brabant, who is death on cigars or anything else that will emit
smoke, and who curls up and says little, has been near death so often that
it will be no stranger to him when it comes in all its finality.
Driscoll was in Burmah when the news came of the first disaster to the
Irish troops in South Africa. He threw up his business as lightly as a
coquette throws up a midsummer lover, and started for the war. At Bombay he
was stopped by a yard or two of red tape, and had to go back to Calcutta,
where he used his Irish tongue to such purpose that he got a permit to
leave India, and made his way to the scene of trouble. He first joined
General Gatacre as orderly officer. Later he was attached to the Border
Mounted Rifles as captain, and did splendid service at the battles of
Dordrecht and Labuschagne's Nek In the latter place he was the first man to
gallop into the Boer laager before the fight had ceased. Captain, then
Lieutenant, Davies was as close to his side as a shadow to a serpent, and
they only had fourteen men with them at the time. After this Driscoll,
whose skill as a scout had been remarked on all sides, was ordered to form
a body of fifty scouts to act as the very eyes of the rapidly moving
Colonial Division under General Brabant. This was promptly done, most of
the men picked being Colonial-born Britishers. Soon after the formation of
his band, Driscoll, with fifty men, attacked Rouxville from four sides at
once. Dashing in, he demanded surrender of the place, as if he had an army
at his back to enforce his demands, a piece of Irish impudent valour that
would have cost every man amongst the little band his life had the Boers
known that he was unbacked. But they did not know it, and consequently
surrendered, and he hoisted the British flag and disarmed the residents--a
really brilliant piece of work, for which Driscoll's Scouts have up to date
received no public credit.
The Scout and his men took a warm part in the, very warm fight at Wepener,
where many a good Briton fell. He had lost a good few fellows in the many
fights, but Driscoll's name soon charmed others to his little band. At
Jammersberg Drift the Scouts were so badly mauled that over a fourth of
their number were counted out, but the places of the fallen men were soon
filled, and to-day the number is almost complete. Driscoll has one
especially good quality. He never speaks slightingly of his enemy unless he
well deserves it. Few men have had so many hand-to-hand encounters with the
burghers as he has; few men have held their lives by virtue of their steady
hand on a rifle as frequently as this wild, good-natured, merry Irishman
has done. Yet of the Boer as a fighter he speaks most highly. "He don't
like cold steel, and shmall blame to'm," says Driscoll, "but for the clever
tactics he's a devil of a chap, 'nd the men who run him down are mostly the
men who run away from him. They're not all heroes, any more than all women
are angels. Some of 'em are fit only for a dog's death, but most of 'em are
good men; and if I wasn't an Irishman I wouldn't mind being a Boer, for
they've no call to hang their heads and blush when this war is over."
I asked him if he had ever of his own knowledge come into contact with
anything savouring of white flag treachery. "Once I did," said the great
scout, and for a while his eyes were filled with a sombre fire which spoke
of the volcano under the genial human crust. "Onct," and he lapsed into the
brogue as he spoke; "only onct, and there's a debt owin' on it yet which
has got to be paid. It was at Karronna Ridge. I was out wid me scouts, 'nd
I saw a farmhouse flying the white flag--a great flag it was, too, as big
as a bed sheet. I'm not sure that it was not wan, too. I rode towards it,
thinking the people wanted to surrender, and sent two of me men, two young
lads they were--good boys, eager for duty. I sent 'em forward to ask what
was the matther inside; and when they got within fifteen paces of the house
the Boers inside opened fire from twenty rifles, and blew 'em out of the
saddle. I had to ride with me little troop for dear life then, for the
rocks all around us were alive with rifles. That house still stands; but if
Driscoll's name is Driscoll it's going to burn, and the cur who flew the
white flag in it, if I can get him, for the sake of the dead boys out on
the veldt there. That's the only dirty trick I knew them play, and they
must have been a lot of wasters, not like the general run of their
fighters."
Three nights ago Driscoll, Davies, Brabant, and twenty men camped in a
farmhouse a long way from the British lines, for these men scour the
country for many miles in all directions. The night was cold and rough, a
bleak wind whistling amidst the kopjes half a mile away. Just as the scouts
were sitting down to supper, the farmer's wife rushed in, and said to
Driscoll, in a voice between a sob and a scream, "Do you know, sir, that
our burghers are in the kopjes, and are watching the farm?" and as she
spoke she wrung her hands wildly. The Irish scout rose from the table and
bowed, as only an Irish scout can bow, for the "vrow" was about thirty
years of age, and pleasing to the eye beyond the lot of most women. "I am
awfully glad to hear it, madam," he said in his execrable Dutch. "I've been
looking for that commando for a week past. As they have doubtless sent a
message by you, please send this back for me. Tell their officers, if they
will accept an offer to come and dine with Driscoll's Scouts here to-night,
they shall be made welcome to the best we have in the way of kindness. For
it must be cold waiting outside in the wind. Tell them they shall go as
they come, unmolested and unwatched, and in the morning we'll come out and
give 'em all the fight they want in this world." Then, sweeping the floor
with a graceful wave of his green puggareed soft slouch hat, Driscoll bowed
the astonished dame out of the dining-room, whilst his officers and men
nearly choked themselves with their hot soup, as they noticed him
surreptitiously drawing a pocket mirror from his breeches pocket. For well
they knew that the dare-devil leader was thinking far more of the effect
his looks had had on the Dutch housewife than of the effect of his message
on the enemy. Yet, at the first promise of dawn, he unrolled himself from
his blanket on the hard floor, and was the foremost man to show in the
open, where the enemy's rifles might reach him. But no rifles sounded, for
the Boers had declined the invitation both to supper and breakfast.