“Yet more! the billows and the depths have more!
High hearts and brave are gather’d to thy breast!
They hear not now the booming waters roar—
The battle-thunders will not break their rest.
Keep thy red gold and gems, thou stormy grave!
Give back the true and brave!”
In the last and most sanguinary war with the Kaffirs of South Africa, which desolated that valuable colony between 1850 and 1853, the Seventy-fourth was engaged, and fully sustained its illustrious character. The enemy, sensible of his weakness, avoided meeting our army in the field, and maintained a harassing series of skirmishes in the bush, which proved most annoying and destructive.
It is remarkable that, in the course of our sketch, we should so frequently have been pleasingly impressed with the duty of recording the heroism of the officers of the regiment; and, commanded by such distinguished chiefs, it is no wonder the corps, moulded in their image, should fitly follow the good and glorious examples which have rendered the Seventy-fourth so signally known to fame. In the African campaign, its commanding officers are mournfully conspicuous as amongst the lost and brave. Whilst employed in the operations against the Waterkloof Post in November, 1851, Lieutenant-Colonel Fordyce was killed.
“At the moment he was hit, he was giving directions to a company of his own well-loved corps, which was skirmishing in the bush, and the position of which he wished to alter a little. Whilst raising his arm to indicate the ground he alluded to, a huge Hottentot stepped rapidly from a thick clump close by, and delivered the fatal shot; observing, with characteristic cunning, the irreparable mischief he had done, he screeched out, in hellish accents, ‘Johnny, bring stretcher,’ and, turning on his heel, dived into the clump again before the infuriated Seventy-fourth could wreak their vengeance upon him.
“Simultaneously they madly rushed on, and, in their too eager haste to renew the carnage, they rendered themselves an easy prey to their savage foe, who struck down Lieutenants Carey and Gordon, and many brave men, before they observed the necessity of rallying, when the sad work of carnage was amply avenged. Such, however, was the number of the wounded, that a waggon had to be sent from the hill to the spot to carry off the sufferers to their bivouac.