LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1920
| First Edition | July 1919 |
| Reprinted | January 1920 |
All Rights Reserved
FOREWORD
Captain Buchanan has done me the honour of asking me to write a short preface to a work which seems to me at all events of peculiar interest. To write a preface is a difficult task, unless one has some real raison d’être for the task; yet I find it difficult to refuse, if only for my intense admiration for the part played by the battalion with which the author was so long and honourably associated—the 25th Royal Fusiliers.
The author’s qualifications to write this work are undoubted, not only from his stout record as a soldier, but also through his previous experience as a traveller, explorer, and student of Natural History. When war broke out Captain Buchanan was engaged on behalf of the Provincial Government of Saskatchewan, Canada, in investigating the country in the far north, west of Hudson Bay, and studying and collecting the rarer flora and fauna. He had been for nearly a year many hundreds of miles out of touch with any other white man. The first rumour of war did not reach him until the end of October, when he at once struck south to a Hudson Bay Fort, which he reached at Christmas. Without delay he left to join up, and in but a month or two had changed his habitat from almost the Arctic Circle to the Equator.
Readers will be able to follow the fortunes of that wonderful unit, the 25th Royal Fusiliers, through the campaign, and will perhaps gain thereby an insight into this strangest of all side-shows more true and illuminating than a more comprehensive work. There was little that this old Legion of Frontiersmen missed. Comparisons are odious; yet I think it may safely be said that no other white unit took so full a part in the diverse stages of the campaign. They bore the long and arduous months of frontier and railway guarding in 1915. They took no mean share in the spectacular capture of Bukoba. Their mounted infantry as well as ordinary rank and file, took part in many of the small but intensely trying patrols through the thorny scrub along the Serengeti plains. General Smuts’s operations around Kilimanjaro saw them. Right to the fore were they in the long and tiring treks, varied by frequent and fierce rear-guard actions, which took place down the Pangani and southward through the bush and forests to the capture of Morogoro; and onwards again right down to the Rufiji. They bore that cruelly hard period through the rains of 1916, when they held the Mgeta line against a numerically superior foe, living literally in a swamp for months, riddled through and through with fever. In January, 1917, when General Smuts made his final effort to crush the opposition, Colonel Driscoll and his men were right in the van, and here among others they lost Captain Selous, that great hunter and greater English gentleman. After a brief period in the south we find them back in time for the final stages of the campaign. Here they went in from Lindi to take part in the fighting of 1917, fighting so bitter that all the previous work was but as child’s play in comparison. Lest it seem that I exaggerate, let me say that, with a force of about half the size, the casualties during these last four months were three times as great as those throughout the whole previous two years. There was indeed hardly an action in which the battalion did not take part, until that day on the 18th of October, 1917, when, while covering a temporary retirement, they were overwhelmed by immensely superior numbers and cut to pieces.
The author does not harp overmuch on the sickness and privations of his comrades—he has been through too many of them to do so; but I am reminded of the remark of one of them during the not infrequent periods of grousing which every respectable British soldier must have. “Ah, I wish to h⸺ I was in France! There one lives like a gentleman and dies like a man, here one lives like a pig and dies like a dog.” There may have been something in this remark, yet I have thought as I saw the 25th staggering on, absolutely in rags, many with fever actually on them, nearly all emaciated and staring-eyed, that they were living, if not like gentlemen, at all events like Men.