War's Brighter Side Part 4

CORRESPONDENCE.

CANADIANS ON MAJUBA DAY.

BY MAJOR-GENERAL SMITH-DORRIEN.

BLOEMFONTEIN, _March_ 17, 1900.

_To the Editor of_ "THE FRIEND."

DEAR SIR,--I have read your account of "The Canadians on Majuba Day"

in your issue of yesterday. It is correct up to a certain point, but the last part of it is quite erroneous.

In justice to this gallant corps, and to the Company of Royal Engineers who were with them, I trust you will publish this letter--which recounts what actually happened from the moment the Royal Canadians advanced from the trench, 550 yards from the enemy, until they established themselves and made a new trench within 93 yards of the Boer trenches.

At 2.15 a.m. (on the 27th February), the Royal Canadians with 240 men in the front rank, the latter with rifles slung and entrenching tools, and about 30 officers and men, Royal Engineers under Lieut.-Colonel Kincaid forming the right of the rear rank of the Canadians, moved steadily from the trench, shoulder to shoulder in the dark night, feeling their way through the bushes, and keeping touch by the right.

At 2.50 a.m. they were met by a terrific fire from the enemy's trench, now only 60 yards in front of them.

The line was forced to fall back, but only a very small distance, the right of it under Captains Stairs and Macdonell, Royal Canadians, some twenty yards, where they lay down in the open and returned a steady fire--mostly volleys--for the next one and a half hours; the left had had to fall back rather further.

Under cover of these two Captains, Lieutenant-Colonel Kincaid and his R.E. officer and men, and the Canadian working party in that part of the line constructed trenches in spite of the galling fire, and by daylight had completed a most admirable work which gave grand cover against fire in all threatened directions, and was so well traversed with banks and sand-bags that not a single casualty occurred after it was occupied.

As day dawned a ruined house was noticed on the opposite bank of the river, from which this work could be enfiladed, and a party from the reserve was sent up the left bank to occupy it.

To cover the early morning attack as soon as the fire opened at 2.50 a.m., the Shrops.h.i.+res, in order to hold the enemy in the main laager, engaged them with long-range volleys, whilst the Gordons remained partly in the open and partly in the most advanced flank trench, which latter they lengthened and enlarged, ready to move forward in support.

Shortly after daylight a white flag was flying in the Boer trench, which was 93 yards from our newly-constructed trench, and soon the Boers came trooping into our line. They stated that they had no orders from General Cronje to surrender, but that they heard he intended to give in on the 28th February.

The result, however, of this gallant operation was that General Cronje altered his date one day earlier.

Your account says that our losses were comparatively small; so they were for the results gained, and considering the heavy fire which continued for nearly two hours at 80 yards' range. They only amounted to 45 casualties in the Brigade--thus, 12 N.C.O.'s and men Royal Canadians killed, 30 N.C.O.'s and men Royal Canadians wounded, and 3 officers wounded, Major Pelletier and Lieut. Armstrong, Royal Canadians, and Lieut. Atchison, King's Shrops.h.i.+re Light Infantry--a fold in the ground exactly covered the spot where the party was working, hence the absence of casualties in the Royal Engineers, and the slight losses in the working party of Royal Canadians.

Yours faithfully, H. L. SMITH-DORRIEN, Major-General, Commanding 19th Brigade.

(We are glad to be able to supplement our contributor's account of the gallant action of the 27th by General Smith-Dorrien's categorical letter, which supplies details which could hardly be obtained accurately at second-hand.--EDS. FRIEND).

A COLONIAL HERO.

While scouting at Makouw's Drift, two troopers of Rimington's Guides were fired on from a small kopje at close range. One had his horse shot, and the other, young Ewan Christian, son of Mr. H. B. Christian, of Port Elizabeth, rode back to bring him away. As he was bending down to help his comrade up behind he was himself fatally shot, the bullet pa.s.sing through his back and out through his chest. He rolled off his horse and told his comrade to mount and ride away. Shortly afterwards Major Rimington and more men came up and heard the last words of the dying hero: "Tell my old governor I died game." On retiring the party were under a hot fire, several horses, including that of Major Rimington, being shot. Mr. Christian was buried with military honours.

CHAPTER IV

WE BEGIN TO FEEL AT HOME

_A Strange Editorial Adventure--Lord Roberts's New Government under Way--The Sin of Horse Theft._

Once, far along the Grand Ca.n.a.l in China, where the people were all afraid or hostile at the first sight of me, a beautiful girl of sixteen or seventeen ran along the bank of the ca.n.a.l after my boat, beckoning to me and to Mr. Weldon, the artist, who was with me, to disembark and visit her home. She was out walking with her mother.

There was no doubt when one considered how far from any big town she was, and the fact that she was large-footed and willing to be seen of men, that she was a poor peasant girl, a farmer's daughter, either curious to see us strange men, or anxious to prove herself a Christian convert and to repay the hospitality and kindness she had received at the hands of Christian missionaries.

That was what I thought, at any rate, and in that view I told of the happening in _Harper's Magazine_. At once a cry arose, in the companies of men I met and even in some newspapers as well, against my introducing so _risque_ a subject in my account of my adventures.

Until then I had no idea how p.r.o.ne to evil-thinking is the world, how anxious to twist impurity out of innocence even though it required violence to do it.

Once again, and here, I am going to tell of an incident equally sweet to memory and the reflection of wholesome minds; equally delicate in the perfume of innocence which it exhales. After the second issue of THE FRIEND, Sunday gave us a day of rest. We had known and seen no women for months. They were to us as our homes were, as civilisation itself was--mere memories, vague and shadowy, beside the substantial realities of fighting, marching, thirsting, and going hungry in the company of men--of men by the tens of thousands, but of no women.

There was in Bloemfontein a very blond young woman of sixteen who served behind the counter of a shop in the main street--a slight, sunny-haired, blue-eyed miss, sparkling with fun and excited by the novelty of waiting upon British soldiers and living in the middle of what had changed from a dead-and-alive Boer village to a great armed British camp. The soldiers had noticed her as well. Generals and colonels compared notes of what gossip she and they had exchanged, and sent their friends to the shop to see her. The appearance of a few unattractive women among the soldiers in the village streets had made a mild sensation; but the discovery of a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked girl of English blood was the talk of the camp.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Julian Ralph._]

Among the first men in Bloemfontein and the first to make the acquaintance of this maiden was Mr. Gwynne, of THE FRIEND. Foreseeing Sunday, and scenting a chance to revive the best memories of civilised life, he proposed to gather two army friends if she would invite two of her feminine friends for a drive and a luncheon on the veldt on Sunday. He invited James Barnes, the talented American correspondent, and myself. In two Cape carts we called for the young ladies at their homes. They proved to be the very blond young woman, a fourteen-year-old friend, and a little girl of ten or eleven years of age.

I confess that I never would have asked mere children upon such an outing; but it is equally true that I could not have experienced either the same or as great and peculiar pleasure with others of older growth. They were frank and free, and merry as grigs. They came as near to having us killed or captured by the Boers as I wanted to be, and from them we learned most interesting and valuable information about the enemy and about the town as it was before we captured it. We proposed to visit the home of one of the girls, a farm which the girls said was "quite close." It proved to be miles beyond the British outposts in a country that seemed to us to be uncomfortably peopled with Boers and which proved afterwards to have been alive with them.

Of the danger to us which lay in such a situation the girls took no account. They had been born there. They had seen nothing of war, and did not understand it. The Boers were their lifelong neighbours. And, in a word, they were going to visit friends and to have fun, and nothing else entered their minds.

When we were miles away and among some very suggestive little kopjes we discovered that our friends had lost their way and that we were adrift on the veldt. Boers dashed up to the crests of the hills, saw us and disappeared. Boers were on every hand. Why we were not gobbled up and sent to Pretoria none of us can explain. Eventually, with only one mishap--the overturning of one of the carts--which seemed for a moment more terrible than capture by the enemy--we reached the farm-house, and aided by several tiny boys and the farmer and his wife, spent a happy hour and a half. We made our way back to Bloemfontein in the evening, and within a day or two Colonels Crabbe and Codrington and Captain Trotter were wounded and the Honourable Edward Lygon was killed, at the Glen--a rifle shot from where we had picnicked!

The adventures and hairbreadth escapes in war are apt to take only three or four well-ordered forms. This adventure was in no way like those of the stereotyped kinds.

Monday came, and, with it, the third number of THE FRIEND. It was now of the enlarged size, which it retained to the end--a sheet 19 inches wide by 32 inches in length. We continued to do the editorial work in the old dustbin, as at first, but we had discovered that the _Express_ works were more modern and capable of turning out a paper of the size we preferred. The _Express_ works were two blocks away from our little den, in a side street behind the main thoroughfare of the town. They belonged to Frau Borckenhagen, but had been seized by order of Lord Roberts and sealed up. The printing office and engine and press rooms were afterward made over to us, the bindery was used by the military, and only the office of the departed editor, whence had proceeded the most mischievous reflections of Krugerism and the policy of the insidious Afrikander Bond, remained sealed. Frau Borckenhagen sent her agents to the military to ask leave to recover some of her husband's private papers. By this means she showed us that, like all other Boers, she put the very lowest valuation upon our intelligence.

But in this case she only succeeded in turning the attention of the military to her husband's papers without getting the shading of a degree nearer to the possession of what must have been--and I think I have heard, really proved--of the utmost interest to us.

However, we were able by using the commandeered property of the Boer frau, to produce a newspaper of pretentious size and considerable importance.

THE FRIEND now began to bristle with proclamations, and their number appeared to be doubled because each one was repeated in the Taal language under the heading "Proclamatie." In one "I, Frederick Sleigh Baron Roberts of Kandahar, K.P., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., V.C., Field Marshal and Commanding-in-Chief the British forces in South Africa, appoint George Anosi Falck Administrator of the Civil Posts and Telegraphs in such portions of the Orange Free State as have been or may hereafter be occupied by British troops."

Another proclamation related to bills of exchange and promissory notes; and a third, by General Pretyman, appointed James Allison Collins as "Landdrost of Bloemfontein to administer the ordinary civil and criminal laws." In this proclamation the landdrost's court was ordered to resume its work on Monday, March 19th. A district surgeon, clerk, receiver, and second clerk to the landdrost's court were also appointed.

General Pretyman extended his original market proclamation so that it established the ruling prices of cattle, meat, breadstuffs, and groceries. In the Field Marshal's proclamation as translated into the Taal, Lord Roberts was declared to be "Ik (I), Frederick Sleigh Baron Roberts van Kandahar, K.P., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., V.C., Veld-maarschalk, Opperbevelhebber van de Britsche Krijgsmachten in Zuid-Afrika."

In a notice to the Army we said that our chief aim was to make the paper welcome to and supported by all ranks, and we invited all in the Army to write for us. It is true that when, in the previous day's issue we published a poetic contribution by a kind friend, who was the first to come to our a.s.sistance; we did not precisely encourage others to follow his example. On the contrary, we accompanied the verses with the remark to the writer, "Your verses are execrable. See for yourself in print." But this was merely one of the many interesting peculiarities of the paper. We published the fact that Miss Elliott, daughter of the General Manager of the Cape Government Railways, arrived with her father by special train on the previous night, and was the first lady to cross the Free State border and to visit Bloemfontein. The editorial of the day was by Mr. Buxton, and was ent.i.tled "Uitlander or Rebel, Subject or Burgher."

The most notable article was called "The Confession of a Horse-stealer," and was written by one of the editors. In the same number another member of the editorial quartette wrote a strong little article calling attention to the prevalence and brazenness of horse thieves, and deploring the facts in earnest and indignant language. I was now at work at a desk in the editorial room, and was forced to act as judge between the outraged virtue of my colleague who detested horse-stealing and the pained surprise of my other colleague who (shall I say pretended or) confessed in writing that he was an expert at the crime.

"Surely you agree with me that this thing has got to stop?" said the one editor.

"Surely you will not allow such canting nonsense to go into the paper?" said the other, "especially where the entire army has become adept at the practice of looting Boer horses or exchanging worn-out steeds for the fresher ones of friends."

Being a born diplomat I agreed with both my colleagues, praised both their articles, and voted that both should ornament the columns of THE FRIEND.

I was in a position to behave with this impartiality. My character and reputation at home forced me to the side of the indignant moralist, and yet, on the other hand, certain episodes in my recent experience inclined me to view the confessions of the horse-stealer with leniency. More than once I had been forced to choose between walking for days in the enemy's country or utilising horses that had been abandoned by the Boers. If I were again placed in such a position I would surrender myself a prisoner to the Boers rather than touch even a little thing like a horse that did not belong to me. I have had time to reflect, and I see how weak I was; but at that time I was in the Boer country where stealing is called "commandeering," and seems a trifling thing, rather creditable if practised successfully and with a high hand. In justification of my course in commending the high, moral view of my other colleague, I could say with pride that the horses I had taken were both dead, and with them also disappeared the former stain upon my character.

The happy combination of these points in common with both my colleagues, enabled me to publish both their articles and bring them back to the friendliest terms. So successful was I that we allowed our feelings to carry us beyond the bounds of reason--that is to say, we agreed to go to the Club and take a drink. It was a thing which no intelligent man would lightly agree to do. The only liquid refreshments then obtainable at the Club were enteric germs in water, gin, vermouth, and port wine. It required an occasion of the first importance to induce any of us to go to the Club, which was always as crowded as an egg is with meat. All day, and until late in the evening, the princ.i.p.al apartment barely afforded standing room. The porch was equally well filled, and horses in dozens were tethered before the house. It was the social exchange and rendezvous of the officers of something like 80,000 men, and I can hardly believe that anywhere in the world was there a club-house so constantly crowded.