Our Field Telegraph
The Engineer Corps (Volunteers) rigged a most effective and useful field telegraph between Buluwayo and field headquarters. The line was largely composed of ordinary fencing wire, and was reeled off from a home–made drum carried on an ordinary mule–waggon.
It was here that Brand’s patrol was attacked on the 10th April by overwhelming forces of rebels, and had a very tough fight of it before they succeeded in getting clear of their attackers and in making their way back to Buluwayo. Out of their party of a hundred and fifty, they had lost five killed and fifteen wounded, and some thirty horses killed; the dead had to be left on the ground, and there was only one two–wheeled cart and a Maxim gun on which the wounded could be carried. As no force had been out here since the fight, we halted for a space, and went over the ground, and buried the remains of the killed. It was very easy to follow the course of the fight by the footprints and wheel–marks of the Maxim, which still remained, and by the carcasses of the horses which were lying about the veldt. In the evening we made our way back along the road to Dawson’s Store (ten miles), where our pack–train had been joined by our waggons.
We have supped, and most of us are asleep, although it is not eight o’clock yet.
I have seen in the Fortnightly an article on “The Human Animal in Battle.”
It is interesting, but it doesn’t exactly tally with the impressions gleaned from experiences here. Allowance must be made, of course, for individual constitutions, but the author seems to imply that for the generality, “courage is a powerful exercise of will to overcome the more natural tendency to run away”; but it seems to me to be an exercise that is put into practice very promptly and automatically by some people.
He talks of the soldier as going into a fight with his mind full of the question as to whether he is going to be killed, and if so—why? That he then discovers that fighting is not pleasure, it is not sport; he merely gets dazed, and all his senses are blurred.