Chapter 4

The sodden tents hung dankly, black-grey in the gusty, rainy morning. At the entrance to the camp stood a sentry; half-a-dozen privates moved to and fro. Perhaps half-a-dozen were to be seen in all--the same hard, thick-set bodies that Ladysmith had cheered six days before as they marched in, square-shouldered through the mud, from Dundee. The same bodies--but the elastic was out of them and the brightness was not in their eyes. But for these few, though it was an hour after _reveillé_, the camp was cold and empty. It was the camp of the Royal Irish Fusiliers.

An officer appeared from the mess-tent--pale and pinched. I saw him when he came in from Dundee with four sleepless nights behind him; this morning he was far more haggard. Inside were one other officer, the doctor, and the quarter-master. That was all the mess, except a second lieutenant, a boy just green from Sandhurst. He had just arrived from England, aflame for his first regiment and his first campaign. And this was the regiment he found.

They had been busy half the night packing up the lost officers' kits to send down to Durban. Now they were packing their own; a regiment 220 strong could do with a smaller camp. The mess stores laid in at Ladysmith stood in open cases round the tent. All the small luxuries the careful mess-president had provided against the hard campaign had been lost at Dundee. Now it was the regiment was lost, and there was nobody to eat the tinned meats and pickles. The common words "Natal Field Force" on the boxes cut like a knife. In the middle of the tent, on a table of cases, so low that to reach it you must sit on the ground, were the japanned tin plates and mugs for five men's breakfast--five out of five-and-twenty. Tied up in a waterproof sheet were the officers' letters--the letters of their wives and mothers that had arrived that morning seven thousand miles from home. The men they wrote to were on their way to the prisoners' camp on Pretoria racecourse.

A miserable tale is best told badly. On the night of Sunday, October 29, 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.

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.