The Boers had been completely unnerved by the onslaught of the Protectorate men, and a feature of the hours which elapsed between the final withdrawal of our force from the scene of conflict, and the advent of dawn, was the heavy firing of the enemy, who still continued discharging useless volleys into space. The loss to us in this encounter had been 6 killed, 11 wounded, and two of our men taken prisoners, but the gravity of the loss which the enemy sustained can be most surely measured by the fact that, until a late hour this afternoon, they could not find the spirit to resume the bombardment. It is said in camp here that one hundred Boers will have reason to remember the charge of the Protectorate Regiment.
The way in which these respond to the duties asked of them is shown by their conduct during this night attack. Nevertheless, when the enrolment of the Protectorate Regiment began in August, 1899, any practical opinion upon the future value of its individual units, as upon its possible mobility, was the merest hazard. When Colonel Hore accepted the command of the regiment, and endeavoured, by every means in his power, to promote its development, there were many who expressed, after witnessing the preliminary parade of the recruits at Ramathlabama Camp, the verdict that the short space of time which was allowed to the officers to knock the squadrons into shape would not permit the men attaining any proficiency whatsoever. In those early days of the war volunteers came from near and far, from Johannesburg upon the one side, from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and East London upon the other, to enlist in the service of her Majesty. Time-expired men threw up their billets when the opportunity presented itself of rejoining the colours, and while enlistment was proceeding, the immediate vicinity of Ramathlabama and the roads from the Transvaal into Mafeking presented the appearance of a district which has been made the final destination of some mining rush. Pedestrians from the Transvaal humping their swags, passengers by train from the south, well-to-do youngsters from different parts of the Protectorate or from the back-lying areas of the colony, all made their roads converge upon Mafeking. At that time, however, when the work of enlisting was in its infancy, and the services of able-bodied men were much required, the Colonial Government, at the instigation of Mr. Schreiner, whose dubious policy was cheerfully endorsed by his colleagues, refused to allow her Majesty's soldiers, who were in process of enlistment for that special purpose, to afford Mafeking the moral value of their presence. No sooner had word reached the ears of the Colonial Cabinet that the work of recruiting was proceeding around Mafeking, than the recruiting officers were ordered to withdraw immediately from the precincts of the colony so long as they continued to act in a way which might give some possible offence to the dear friend, guardian, and patron saint of Cape Colony, Paul Kruger. After a very decorous and manly remonstrance, Colonel Hore withdrew his headquarters and his men sixteen miles across the border to Ramathlabama Camp, from which point the enlistment of the Protectorate Regiment was continued.
The Protectorate Regiment is strictly an irregular soldiery, composed of men drawn from every rank of African life, many of whom are gentle by birth and education and possessed of no little means. In the ranks of the regiment there are those who have been at the university and public schools; there are also mechanics, miners, farm hands, and men who have known office life. The nationalities of the men are as varied as their occupations in peace times are diffuse. There are a few Americans, some Germans, and Norwegians, although for the most part the regiment is British; as a whole, perhaps, it is an ill-assorted assembly of adventurers, animated with the same love of fighting and the glories of war, of lust and bloodshed which characterised the lives of the buccaneers of old. In other days, and in other lands, they would be sailing the sea for treasure, or combining in the quest for gold in some hidden extremity of the world's surface. The prospect of free rations, of uniform, and allowance of pocket money, was of course sufficient to draw a few; but, as a body, the idler upon the farm, the bar-loafer from the town, and the thoroughly incompetent are as distinguished by their absence, as the general tone of the regiment is suffused with martial ardour. It is quite impossible to treat these men with the cast-iron regulations which enthral the Imperial soldier. He does not understand the petty exactions, the never-ending restraint which would be imposed upon him had he accepted the conditions which govern and regulate life in our army. He experiences and gives voice to a very genuine aversion to fatigues of every description, and it has required the exercise of much tact and no little personal persuasion to induce the men to become reconciled to the labours of their calling. They have accepted with some diffidence the fact that it is necessary for them to fulfil, at the present moment, many irritating, but essentially important fatigues which may not have entered into their original forecast of the duties which would be allotted to them. They frequently indulge in outbursts of choice expletives, at the expense of their non-commissioned officers, while they do not hesitate to correct, or at least to argue about what they imagine to be wrong in the execution of some order.
The conditions under which these men were enrolled were supposed to admit those only who could ride as well as shoot, and before the initial tests were applied the standard of the regiment upon paper was exceptionally high. After the first parade, however, it was seen that by far the great majority of the regiment was incapable of managing their horses. Upon parade, when horses and men were put through cavalry exercises, detached and riderless steeds would be seen galloping and bucking in all directions. However, those who were unproficient did not propose to allow their cattle to hold the mastery for any longer than was absolutely necessary, and many was the tough fight fought to a bitter end between the raw recruit and his unbroken, unmanageable mount. After many days and an inordinate amount of hard work, the troop officers managed to lick their men into a very presentable appearance until, with the beginning of the war, the squadrons of the Protectorate Regiment were as capable and efficient a body of irregular mounted infantry as any that had been enrolled by local movement in South Africa. During the siege there has been no chance to continue those early exercises, and it is not at all unlikely that when they become mounted once more the former difficulties will again assert themselves and, bearing this in mind, it is difficult to conclude that as a fighting force they will not be more at home upon their feet than in the saddle, since they will find their attentions occupied as much by the management of their steeds as with the handling of their weapons.
If they be not quite so mobile in the field as more experienced troops, there is no doubt that they present a determined front to the fire of the enemy. They have a keen relish for any preparation which appears to lead to some immediate collision, while they profess an equally profound disgust at their enforced inactivity. How these men might act if, through the smoke-filled air, they saw an array of sparkling bayonets, or heard the serried ranks of hostile lines advancing to the charge, it is impossible to say; but in the few fights which we have had the personal element has been strong, and the individual courage high. We have lacked the spectacle of the many-coloured, steel-edged columns impelled forward by the impulse of some dominant power, with the dusty faces of the men, the stumbling, sore-stricken feet, the gasping breath of the stragglers who tired, dead beat, and thirsty, limp to the rear; but the play of human passion in our little fighting force has not been absent. We have had the wager of life against life, the angry, turbulent crash of fierce-blooded men, fighting under the shadow of death, with their emotions strained as they struggled in the very atmosphere of passion. And it has done us good to see how reliable the force has been about which so much doubt existed. Unlike the Imperial service, these irregular corps act as much for the unit as they do for the mass, as animated by terror or by valour, by a fatal despair, or by a blooded triumph, they fight for an individual supremacy. That is the moment of their triumph, and it is these splendid qualities of savage and physical animalism which makes it more easy to treat them with a wider latitude than is usual. Their magnificent hardihood, their splendid fighting gifts, their lurid blasphemy, their admiration for officers who are men, their appalling debauchery, gives to them the ideal setting of the rough but very gallant soldier of fortune, who, scorning his enemy and hating a retreat, has played so omnipotent a part in the history of the universe.
CHAPTER XI
CANNON KOPJE
Mafeking, October 31st, 1899.
Cannon Kopje is in itself a hideous cluster of stones, perched upon a rocky ridge, which commands the town, a mile across the veldt. It is impossible to conceive any more positive death-trap than that which was contained in this kopje, and whatever may have been the determining element in its original construction, it is infinitely to be regretted that the possibilities of its being under shell fire were never very seriously contemplated. It was thrown up during the Warren expedition, and much as these things go, was neither removed nor replaced until Monday's bombardment established its complete uselessness under shell fire, and the folly of which Colonel Baden-Powell was guilty in leaving it unprotected. It is too late to say much now, but we have paid a heavy price for our neglect and carelessness. We found it here when we came; we put men into it, we are maintaining men there, and it is essential to the safety of our town that we should still hold it. Since the action an effort has been made to improve it; a splinter-proof shelter has been thrown across the trench, and traverses have been thrown out, but the work of the past few days has perhaps prepared the kopje for further shelling at the enemy's convenience. As a pièce de résistance in the defence of Mafeking, Cannon Kopje is the most strategically important position near Mafeking, and we may reckon that, at the moment when these wretched shepherds who are besieging us, secure this fort, to Mafeking itself there remains but a few hours.
Colonel Walford had under his command at the fort forty-four men with a Maxim detachment from the Protectorate Regiment. The fairest estimate of the men against him would place the Boer forces at no less than eight hundred with four guns. Sunday night, the look-out from Cannon Kopje saw a body of Boers making their way to a point somewhat nearer the town than had hitherto been their custom, and our expectations having been aroused by this movement we were inclined to believe that the enemy might attack upon the following morning. Our anticipations were further grounded upon the fact that the Boers to the south-west of the town, had by no means despised the claims of Cannon Kopje upon their attentions, and to every three shells which their guns had thrown into the town during the days which the siege had lasted, one, in a proportion of one in three, had been fired at Cannon Kopje. It has gradually come to be considered, therefore, that Cannon Kopje was a point against which the Boers would, sooner or later, direct an attack, since its capture was necessary to the successful execution of any general movement against the town.