No. 10 Mountain Battery, four and a half companies of the
Gloucestershire Regiment, and six of the Royal Irish Fusiliers--some
1000 men in all--were sent out to seize a nek some seven miles
north-west of Ladysmith. At daybreak they were to operate on the enemy's
right flank--the parallel with Majuba is grimly obvious--in conjunction
with an attack from Ladysmith on his centre and right. They started. At
half-past ten they passed through a kind of defile, the Boers a
thousand feet above them following every movement by ear, if not by eye.
By some means--either by rocks rolled down on them or other hostile
agency, or by sheer bad luck--the small-arm ammunition mules were
stampeded. They dashed back on to the battery mules; there was alarm,
confusion, shots flying--and the battery mules stampeded also.
On that the officer in command appears to have resolved to occupy the
nearest hill. He did so, and the men spent the hours before dawn in
protecting themselves by _schanzes_ or breastworks of stones. At dawn,
about half-past four, they were attacked, at first lightly. There were
two companies of the Gloucesters in an advanced position; the rest, in
close order, occupied a high point on the kopje; to line the whole
summit, they say, would have needed 10,000 men. Behind the schanzes the
men, shooting sparely because of the loss of the reserve ammunition, at
first held their own with little loss.
But then, as our ill-luck or Boer good management would have it, there
appeared over a hill a new Boer commando, which a cool eye-witness put
at over 2000 strong. They divided and came into action, half in front,
half from the kopjes in rear, shooting at 1000 yards into the open rear
of the schanzes. Men began to fall. The two advanced companies were
ordered to fall back; up to now they had lost hardly a man, but once in
the open they suffered. The Boers in rear picked up the range with great
accuracy.
And then--and then again, that cursed white flag!
It is some sneaking consolation that for a long time the soldiers
refused to heed it. Careless now of life, they were sitting up well
behind their breastworks, altering their sights, aiming coolly by the
half-minute together. At the nadir of their humiliation they could still
sting--as that new-come Boer found who, desiring one Englishman to his
bag before the end, thrust up his incautious head to see where they
were, and got a bullet through it. Some of them said they lost their
whole firing-line; others no more than nine killed and sixteen wounded.
But what matters it whether they lost one or one million? The cursed
white flag was up again over a British force in South Africa. The best
part of a thousand British soldiers, with all their arms and equipment
and four mountain guns, were captured by the enemy. The Boers had their
revenge for Dundee and Elandslaagte in war; now they took it, full
measure, in kindness. As Atkins had tended their wounded and succoured
their prisoners there, so they tended and succoured him here. One
commandant wished to send the wounded to Pretoria; the others, more
prudent as well as more humane, decided to send them back into
Ladysmith. They gave the whole men the water out of their own bottles;
they gave the wounded the blankets off their own saddles and slept
themselves on the naked veldt. They were short of transport, and they
were mostly armed with Martinis; yet they gave captured mules for the
hospital panniers and captured Lee-Metfords for splints. A man was
rubbing a hot sore on his head with a half-crown; nobody offered to take
it from him. Some of them asked soldiers for their embroidered
waist-belts as mementoes of the day. "It's got my money in it," replied
Tommy--a little surly, small wonder--and the captor said no more.
Then they set to singing doleful hymns of praise under trees. Apparently
they were not especially elated. They believed that Sir George White was
a prisoner, and that we were flying in rout from Ladysmith. They said
that they had Rhodes shut up in Kimberley, and would hang him when they
caught him. That on their side--and on ours? We fought them all that
morning in a fight that for the moment may wait. At the end, when the
tardy truth could be withheld no more--what shame! What bitter shame for
all the camp! All ashamed for England! Not of her--never that!--but for
her. Once more she was a laughter to her enemies.
X.
THE GUNS AT RIETFONTEIN.
A COLUMN ON THE MOVE--THE NIMBLE GUNS--GARRISON GUNNERS AT
WORK--THE VELDT ON FIRE--EFFECTIVE SHRAPNEL--THE VALUE OF THE
ENGAGEMENT.
LADYSMITH, _Oct. 26._
The business of the last few days has been to secure the retreat of the
column from Dundee. On Monday, the 23rd, the whisper began to fly round
Ladysmith that Colonel Yule's force had left town and camp, and was
endeavouring to join us. On Tuesday it became certainty.
At four in the dim morning guns began to roll and rattle through the
mud-greased streets of Ladysmith. By six the whole northern road was
jammed tight with bearer company, field hospital, ammunition column,
supply column--all the stiff, unwieldy, crawling tail of an army.
Indians tottered and staggered under green-curtained doolies; Kaffir
boys guided spans of four and five and six mules drawing ambulances,
like bakers' vans; others walked beside waggons curling whips that would
dwarf the biggest salmon-rod round the flanks of small-bodied,
huge-horned oxen. This tail of the army alone covered three miles of
road. At length emerging in front of them you found two clanking
field-batteries, and sections of mountain guns jingling on mules. Ahead
of these again long khaki lines of infantry sat beside the road or
pounded it under their even tramp. Then the General himself and his
Staff; then best part of a regiment of infantry; then a company, the
reserve of the advanced-guard; then a half-company, the support; then a
broken group of men, the advanced party; then, in the very front, the
point, a sergeant and half-a-dozen privates trudging sturdily along the
road, the scenting nose of the column. Away out of sight were the
horsemen.
Altogether, two regiments of cavalry--5th Lancers and 19th Hussars--the
42nd and 53rd Field Batteries and 10th Mountain Battery, four infantry
battalions--Devons, Liverpools, Gloucesters, and 2nd King's Royal
Rifles--the Imperial Light Horse, and the Natal Volunteers. Once more,
it was fighting. The head of the column had come within three miles or
so of Modderspruit station. The valley there is broad and open. On the
left runs the wire-fenced railway; beyond it the land rises to a high
green mountain called Tinta Inyoni. On the left front is a yet higher
green mountain, double-peaked, called Matawana's Hoek. Some call the
place Jonono's, others Rietfontein; the last is perhaps the least
outlandish.
The force moved steadily on towards Modderspruit, one battalion in front
of the guns. "Tell Hamilton to watch his left flank," said one in
authority. "The enemy are on both those hills." Sure enough, there on
the crest, there dotted on the sides, were the moving black mannikins
that we have already come to know afar as Boers. Presently the dotted
head and open files of a battalion emerged from behind the guns,
changing direction half-left to cover their flank. The batteries pushed
on with the one battalion ahead of them. It was half-past eight, and
brilliant sunshine; the air was dead still; through the clefts of the
nearer hills the blue peaks of the Drakensberg looked as if you could
shout across to them.
Boom! The sound we knew well enough; the place it came from was the left
shoulder of Matawana's Hoek; the place it would arrive at we waited,
half anxious, half idly curious, to see. Whirr--whizz--e-e-e-e--phutt!
Heavens, on to the very top of a gun! For a second the gun was a whirl
of blue-white smoke, with grey-black figures struggling and plunging
inside it. Then the figures grew blacker and the smoke cleared--and in
the name of wonder the gun was still there. Only a subaltern had his
horse's blood on his boot, and his haversack ripped to rags.
But there was no time to look on that or anything else but the amazing
nimbleness of the guns. At the shell--even before it--they flew apart
like ants from a watering-can. From, crawling reptiles they leaped into
scurrying insects--the legs of the eight horses pattering as if they
belonged all to one creature, the deadly sting in the tail leaping and
twitching with every movement. One battery had wheeled about, and was
drawn back at wide intervals facing the Boer hill. Another was pattering
swiftly under cover of a ridge leftward; the leading gun had crossed the
railway; the last had followed; the battery had utterly disappeared.
Boom! Whirr--whizz--e-e-e-e--phutt! The second Boer shell fell stupidly,
and burst in the empty veldt. Then bang!--from across the
railway--e-e-e-e--whizz--whirr--silence--and then the little white
balloon just over the place the Boer shell came from. It was twenty-five
minutes to nine.
In a double chorus of bangs and booms the infantry began to deploy.
Gloucesters and Devons wheeled half left off the road, split into
firing line and supports in open order, trampled through the wire fences
over the railway. In front of the Boer position, slightly commanded on
the left flank by Tinta Inyoni, was a low, stony ridge; this the
Gloucesters lined on the left. The Devons, who led the column, fell
naturally on to the right of the line; Liverpools and Rifles backed up
right and left. But almost before they were there arrived the
irrepressible, ubiquitous guns. They had silenced the enemy's guns; they
had circled round the left till they came under cover of the ridge; now
they strolled up, unlimbered, and thrust their grim noses over the brow.
And then--whew! Their appearance was the signal for a cataract of
bullets that for the moment in places almost equalled the high-lead mark
of Elandslaagte. The air whistled and hummed with them--and then the
guns began.
The mountain guns came up on their mules--a drove of stupid,
uncontrolled creatures, you would have said, lumbered up with the odds
and ends of an ironworks and a waggon-factory. But the moment they were
in position the gunners swarmed upon them, and till you have seen the
garrison gunners working you do not know what work means. In a minute
the scrap-heaps had flow together into little guns, hugging the stones
with their low bellies, jumping at the enemy as the men lay on to the
ropes. The detachments all cuddled down to their guns; a man knelt by
the ammunition twenty paces in rear; the mules by now were snug under
cover. "Two thousand," sang out the major. The No. 1 of each gun held up
something like a cross, as if he were going through a religious rite,
altered the elevation delicately, then flung up his hand and head
stiffly, like a dog pointing. "Number 4"--and Number 4 gun hurled out
fire and filmy smoke, then leaped back, half frightened at its own fury,
half anxious to get a better view of what it had done. It was a little
over. "Nineteen hundred," cried the major. Same ritual, only a little
short. "Nineteen fifty"--and it was just right. Therewith field and
mountain guns, yard by yard, up and down, right and left, carefully,
methodically, though roughly, sowed the whole of Matawana's Hoek with
bullets.
It was almost magical the way the Boer fire dropped. The guns came into
action about a quarter-past nine, and for an hour you would hardly have
known they were there. Whenever a group put their heads over the
sky-line 1950 yards away there came a round of shrapnel to drive them to
earth again. Presently the hillside turned pale blue--blue with the
smoke of burning veldt. Then in the middle of the blue came a patch of
black, and spread and spread till the huge expanse was all black, pocked
with the khaki-coloured boulders and bordered with the blue of the
ever-extending fire. God help any wounded enemy who lay there!
Crushed into the face of the earth by the guns, the enemy tried to work
round our left from Tinta Inyoni. They tried first at about a
quarter-past ten, but the Natal Volunteers and some of the Imperial
Light Horse met them. We heard the rattle of their rifles; we heard the
rap-rap-rap-rap-rap of their Maxim knocking at the door, and the Boer
fire stilled again. The Boer gun had had another try at the Volunteers
before, but a round or two of shrapnel sent it to kennel again. So far
we had seemed to be losing nothing, and it was natural to suppose that
the Boers were losing a good deal. But at a quarter-past eleven the
Gloucesters pushed a little too far between the two hills, and learned
that the Boers, if their bark was silent for the moment, could still
bite. Suddenly there shot into them a cross-fire at a few hundred yards.
Down went the colonel dead; down went fifty men.
For a second a few of the rawer hands in the regiment wavered; it might
have been serious. But the rest clung doggedly to their position under
cover; the officers brought the flurried men up to the bit again. The
mountain guns turned vengeful towards the spot whence the fire came, and
in a few minutes there was another spreading, blackening patch of
veldt--and silence.
From then the action nickered on till half-past one. Time on time the
enemy tried to be at us, but the imperious guns rebuked him, and he was
still. At length the regiments withdrew. The hot guns limbered up and
left Rietfontein to burn itself out. The sweating gunners covered the
last retiring detachment, then lit their pipes. The Boers made a
half-hearted attempt to get in both on left and right; but the
Volunteers on the left, the cavalry on the right, a shell or two from
the centre, checked them as by machinery. We went back to camp
unhampered.
And at the end of it all we found that in those five hours of straggling
bursts of fighting we had lost, killed and wounded, 116 men. And what
was the good? asked doubting Thomas. Much. To begin with, the Boers must
have lost heavily; they confessed that aloud by the fact that, for all
their pluck in standing up to the guns, they made no attempt to follow
us home. Second, and more important, this commando was driven westward,
and others were drawn westward to aid it--and the Dundee force was
marching in from the east. Dragging sore feet along the miry roads they
heard the guns at Rietfontein and were glad. The seeming objectless
cannonade secured the unharassed home-coming of the 4000 way-weary
marchers from Dundee.
XI.
THE BOMBARDMENT.
LONG TOM--A FAMILY OF HARMLESS MONSTERS--OUR INFERIORITY IN
GUNS--THE SENSATIONS OF A BOMBARDMENT--A LITTLE CUSTOM BLUNTS
SENSIBILITY.
LADYSMITH, _Nov. 10._
"Good morning," banged four-point-seven; "have you used Long Tom?"
"Crack-k--whiz-z-z," came the riving answer, "we have."
"Whish-h--patter, patter," chimed in a cloud-high shrapnel from Bulwan.
It was half-past seven in the morning of November 7; the real
bombardment, the terrific symphony, had begun.
During the first movement the leading performer was Long Tom. He is a
friendly old gun, and for my part I have none but the kindest feelings
towards him. It was his duty to shell us, and he did; but he did it in
an open, manly way.
Behind the half-country of light red soil they had piled up round him
you could see his ugly phiz thrust up and look hungrily around. A jet of
flame and a spreading toad-stool of thick white smoke told us he had
fired. On the flash four-point-seven banged his punctilious reply. You
waited until you saw the black smoke jump behind the red mound, and then
Tom was due in a second or two. A red flash--a jump of red-brown dust
and smoke--a rending-crash: he had arrived. Then sang slowly through the
air his fragments, like wounded birds. You could hear them coming, and
they came with dignified slowness: there was plenty of time to get out
of the way.
Until we capture Long Tom--when he will be treated with the utmost
consideration--I am not able to tell you exactly what brand of gun he
may be. It is evident from his conservative use of black powder, and
the old-gentlemanly staidness of his movements, that he is an elderly
gun. His calibre appears to be six inches. From the plunging nature of
his fire, some have conjectured him a sort of howitzer, but it is next
to certain he is one of the sixteen 15-cm. Creusot guns bought for the
forts of Pretoria and Johannesburg. Anyhow, he conducted his enforced
task with all possible humanity.
On this same 7th a brother Long Tom, by the name of Fiddling Jimmy,
opened on the Manchesters and Cæsar's Camp from a flat-topped kopje
three or four miles south of them. This gun had been there certainly
since the 3rd, when it shelled our returning reconnaissance; but he,
too, was a gentle creature, and did little harm to anybody. Next day a
third brother, Puffing Billy, made a somewhat bashful first appearance
on Bulwan. Four rounds from the four-point-seven silenced him for the
day. Later came other brothers, of whom you will hear in due course.
[Illustration: THE COUNTRY ROUND LADYSMITH.]
In general you may say of the Long Tom family that their favourite
habitat is among loose soil on the tops of open hills; they are slow
and unwieldy, and very open in all their actions. They are good shooting
guns; Tom on the 7th made a day's lovely practice all round our battery.
They are impossible to disable behind their huge epaulements unless you
actually hit the gun, and they are so harmless as hardly to be worth
disabling.
The four 12-pounder field-guns on Bulwana--I say four, because one day
there were four; but the Boers continually shifted their lighter guns
from hill to hill--were very different. These creatures are stealthy in
their habits, lurking among woods, firing smokeless powder with very
little flash; consequently they are very difficult guns to locate. Their
favourite diet appeared to be balloons; or, failing them, the Devons in
the Helpmakaar Road or the Manchesters in Cæsar's Camp. Both of these
they enfiladed; also they peppered the roads whenever troops were
visible moving in or out.
Altogether they were very judiciously handled, though erring perhaps in
not firing persistently enough at any one target. But, despite their
great altitude, the range--at least 6000 yards--and the great height at
which they burst their time shrapnel made them also comparatively
harmless.
There were also one or two of their field-guns opposite the Manchesters
on the flat-topped hill, one, I fancy, with Long Tom on Pepworth's Hill,
and a few others on the northern part of Lombard's Kop and on Surprise
Hill to the north-westward.
Westward, on Telegraph Hill, was a gun which appeared to prey
exclusively on cattle. I am afraid it was one of our own mountain guns
turned cannibal. The cattle, during the siege, had of course to pasture
on any waste land inside the lines they could find, and gathered in
dense, distractingly noisy herds; but though this gun was never tired of
firing on the mobs, I do not think he ever got more than one calf.
There was a gun on Lombard's Kop called Silent Susan--so called because
the shell arrived before the report--a disgusting habit in a gun. The
menagerie was completed by the pompons, of which there were at least
three. This noisome beast always lurks in thick bush, whence it barks
chains of shell at the unsuspecting stranger. Fortunately its shell is
small, and it is as timid as it is poisonous.
Altogether, with three Long Toms, a 5-inch howitzer, Silent Susan, about
a dozen 12-pounders, four of our screw guns, and three Maxim automatics,
they had about two dozen guns on us. Against that we had two
47-inch--named respectively Lady Ann and Bloody Mary--four naval
12-pounders, thirty-six field-guns, the two remaining mountain guns, an
old 64-pounder, and a 3-inch quickfirer--these two on Cæsar's Camp in
charge of the Durban Naval Volunteers--two old howitzers, and two
Maxim-Nordenfeldts taken at Krugersdorp in the Jameson raid, and retaken
at Elandslaagte,--fifty pieces in all.
On paper, therefore, we had a great advantage. But we had to economise
ammunition, not knowing when we should get more, and also to keep a
reserve of field-guns to assist any threatened point. Also their guns,
being newer, better pieces, mounted on higher ground, outranged ours. We
had more guns, but they were as useless as catapults: only the six naval
guns could touch Pepworth's Hill or Bulwan.
For these reasons we only fired, I suppose, one shell to their twenty,
or thereabouts; so that though we actually had far more guns, we yet
enjoyed all the sensations of a true bombardment.
What were they? That bombardments were a hollow terror I had always
understood; but how hollow, not till I experienced the bombardment of
Ladysmith. Hollow things make the most noise, to be sure, and this
bombardment could at times be a monstrous symphony indeed.
The first heavy day was November 3: while the troops were moving in and
out on the Van Keenen's road the shells traced an aerial cobweb all over
us. After that was a lull till the 7th, which was another clattering
day. November 8 brought a tumultuous morning and a still afternoon. The
9th brought a very tumultuous morning indeed; the 10th was calm; the
11th patchy; the 12th, Sunday.
It must be said that the Boers made war like gentlemen of leisure; they
restricted their hours of work with trade-unionist punctuality. Sunday
was always a holiday; so was the day after any particularly busy
shooting. They seldom began before breakfast; knocked off regularly for
meals--the luncheon interval was 11.30 to 12 for riflemen, and 12 to
12.30 for gunners--hardly ever fired after tea-time, and never when it
rained. I believe that an enterprising enemy of the Boer strength--it
may have been anything from 10,000 to 20,000; and remember that their
mobility made one man of them equal to at least two of our reduced
11,000--could, if not have taken Ladysmith, at least have put us to
great loss and discomfort. But the Boers have the great defect of all
amateur soldiers: they love their ease, and do not mean to be killed.
Now, without toil and hazard they could not take Ladysmith.
To do them justice, they did not at first try to do wanton damage in
town. They fired almost exclusively on the batteries, the camps, the
balloon, and moving bodies of troops. In a day or two the troops were
far too snugly protected behind schanzes and reverse slopes, and grown
far too cunning to expose themselves to much loss.
The inhabitants were mostly underground, so that there was nothing
really to suffer except casual passengers, beasts, and empty buildings.
Few shells fell in town, and of the few many were half-charged with
coal-dust, and many never burst at all. The casualties in Ladysmith
during a fortnight were one white civilian, two natives, a horse, two
mules, a waggon, and about half-a-dozen houses. And of the last only one
was actually wrecked; one--of course the most desirable habitation in
Ladysmith--received no less than three shells, and remained habitable
and inhabited to the end.
And now what does it feel like to be bombarded?
At first, and especially as early as can be in the morning, it is quite
an uncomfortable sensation.