Part 4 (1/2)
LADYSMITH, _Oct. 27._
”Come to meet us!” cried the staff officer with amazement in his voice; ”what on earth for?”
It was on October 25, about five miles out on the Helpmakaar road, which runs east from Ladysmith. By the stream below the hill he had just trotted down, and choking the pa.s.s beyond, wriggled the familiar tail of waggons and water-carts, ambulances, and doolies, and spare teams of old mules in new harness. A couple of squadrons of Lancers had off-saddled by the roadside, a phalanx of horses topped with furled red and white pennons. Behind them stood a battery of artillery. Half a battalion of green-kilted Gordons sunned their bare knees a little lower down; a company or two of Manchesters back-boned the flabby convoy. The staff officer could not make out what in the world it meant.
He had pushed on from the Dundee column, but it was a childish superst.i.tion to imagine that the Dundee column could possibly need a.s.sistance. They had only marched thirty odd miles on Monday and Tuesday; starting at four in the morning, they would by two o'clock or so have covered the seventeen miles that would bring them into camp, fifteen miles outside Ladysmith. They were coming to help Ladysmith, if you like; but the idea of Ladysmith helping them!
At his urgency they sent the convoy back. I rode on miles through the openest country I had yet seen hereabouts--a basin of wave-like veldt, just growing thinly green under the spring rains, spangled with budding mimosa-thorn. Scarred here and there with the dry water-courses they call sluits, patched with heaves of wire-fenced down, livened with a verandah, blue cactus-hedged farmhouse or two, losing itself finally in a mazy fairyland of azure mountains--this valley was the nearest approach to what you would call a smiling country I had seen in Africa.
Eight miles or so along the road I came upon the Border Mounted Rifles, saddles off, and lolling on the gra.s.s. All farmers and transport riders from the northern frontier, lean, bearded, sun-dried, framed of steel and whipcord, sitting their horses like the riders of the Elgin marbles, swift and cunning as Boers, and far braver, they are the heaven-sent type of irregular troopers. It was they who had ridden out and made connection with the returning column an hour before.
Two miles on I dipped over a ridge--and here was the camp. Bugles sang cheerily; mules, linked in fives, were being zigzagged frowardly down to water. The Royal Irish Fusiliers had loosened their belts, but not their st.u.r.dy bearing. Under their horses' bellies lay the diminished 18th Hussars. Presently came up a subaltern of the regiment, who had been on leave and returned just too late to rejoin before the line was cut. They had put him in command of the advanced troop of the Lancers, and how he cursed the infantry and the convoy, and how he shoved the troop along when the drag was taken off! Now he was laughing and talking and listening all at once, like a long wanderer at his home-coming.
No use waiting for sensational stories among these men, going about their daily camp duties as if battles and sieges and forced marches with the enemy on your flank were the most ordinary business of life. No use waiting for fighting either; in open country the force could have knocked thousands of Boers to pieces, and there was not the least chance of the Boers coming to be knocked. So I rode back through the rolling veldt basin. As I pa.s.sed the stream and the nek beyond the battery of artillery, the Gordons and Manchesters were lighting their bivouac fires. This pa.s.s, crevicing under the solid feet of two great stony kopjes, was the only place the Boers would be likely to try their luck at. It was covered; already the Dundee column was all right.
Presently I met the rest of the Gordons, swinging along the road to crown the heights on either side the nek. Coming through I noticed--and the kilted Highlanders noticed, too, they were staying out all night--that the sky over Ladysmith was very black. The great inky stain of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole circ.u.mference. In five minutes it was night and rain-storm. It stung like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall. Ladysmith streets were ankle deep in half an hour; the camps were mora.s.s and pond.
And listening to the ever-fresh bursts hammering all the evening on to deepening pools, we learned that the Dundee men had not camped after all, had marched at six, and were coming on all night into Ladysmith.
Thirty-two miles without rest, through stinging cataract and spongy loam and gla.s.sy slime!
Before next morning was grey in came the 1st Rifles. They plashed uphill to their blue-roofed huts on the south-west side of the town. By the time the sun was up they were fed by their sister battalion, the 2nd, and had begun to unwind their putties. But what a sight! Their putties were not soaked and not caked; say, rather, that there may have been a core of puttie inside, but that the men's legs were embedded in a serpentine cast of clay. As for their boots, you could only infer them from the huge b.a.l.l.s of stratified mud men bore round their feet. Red mud, yellow mud, black mud, brown mud--they lifted their feet toilsomely; they were land plummets that had sucked up specimens of all the heavy, sticky soils for fifteen miles. Officers and men alike bristled stiff with a week's beard. Rents in their khaki showed white skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have judged them half red men, half soot-black. Eyelids hung fat and heavy over hollow cheeks and pointed cheek-bones. Only the eye remained--the sky-blue, steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English eye--to tell that thirty-two miles without rest, four days without a square meal, six nights--for many--without a stretch of sleep, still found them soldiers at the end.
That was the beginning of them; but they were not all in till the middle of the afternoon--which made thirty-six hours on their legs. The Irish Fusiliers tramped in at lunch-time, going a bit short some of them, nearly all a trifle stiff on the feet, but solid, square, and st.u.r.dy from the knees upward. They straightened up to the cheers that met them, and stepped out on scorching feet as if they were ready to go into action again on the instant. After them came the guns--not the sleek creatures of Laffan's Plain, rough with earth and spinning mud from their wheels, but war-worn and fresh from slaughter; you might imagine their damp muzzles were dripping blood. You could count the horses'
ribs; they looked as if you could break them in half before the quarters. But they, too, knew they were being cheered; they threw their ears up and flung all the weight left them into the traces.
Through fire, water, and earth, the Dundee column had come home again.
IX.
THE STORY OF NICHOLSON'S NEK.
AN ATTENUATED MESS--A REGIMENT 220 STRONG--A MISERABLE STORY--THE WHITE FLAG--BOER KINDNESS--ASHAMED FOR ENGLAND.
LADYSMITH, _Nov. 1_.
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 _reveille_, 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 n.o.body 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 j.a.panned 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 Gloucesters.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sed 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.