The fighting near Belfast.
On August 24th the tiny little town of Belfast was reached by General Pole Carew's division, including the Guards' Brigade; but though our advent was unopposed, there was heavy fighting on our right, where General Buller, newly arrived from Natal, had the day before approached the immensely strong Boer position at Bergendal. There the Johannesburg police, the most valorous of all the burgher forces, made their last heroic stand three days later, and were so completely wiped out, that Kruger is reported to have been moved to tears when the tidings reached him. It was the last stand the Boer still had nerve enough to make, and after Belfast their continuous retreat quickened into almost a rout. It was on Sunday, the 26th, the Guards moved out to take part in the general assault, and waited for hours behind the shelter of Monument Hill while General French developed his flanking movement on the left. Boer bullets fell freely among us while thus tarrying, and compelled our field hospital to retire further down the slope to a position of comparative safety. Late that afternoon the Guards marched over the brow to face what bade fair to be another serious Sunday battle, yet without any slightest sign of flinching. "How dear is life to all men," said dying Nelson. It may be so; but these men and their officers from first to last, when duty called, seemed never to count their lives dear unto them. A few casualties, caused by chance bullets, occurred among them before the day closed, but scarcely so much as a solitary Boer was seen by the clearest sighted of them. Once again outflanked, "the brother" once again had fled, and in the deepening darkness we groped our way to our next camping ground.
In our Napoleonic wars the favourite command alike on land and sea was, "Engage the enemy more closely." Each fleet or army kept well in sight of its antagonist, and the fighting was often at such close quarters that musket muzzle touched musket muzzle; but at Belfast Lord Roberts' front was thirty miles in width, and our generals could only guess where their foemen hid by watching for the fire-flash of their long range guns. In offensive warfare the visible contends with the invisible, and it is good generalship that conquers it. At Albuera Soult asserted there was no beating British troops in spite of their generals. But Lord Roberts' generalship seems never to have been at fault, however remote the foe, and thanks thereto Belfast proved to be about the last big fight of the whole campaign.
Feeding under fire.
Early next morning we were vigorously shelled by the still defiant Boers, but from the, for them, fairly safe distance of nearly five miles. Just as the Grenadier officers had finished their breakfast and retired a few yards further afield to get just beyond the reach of those impressive salutations, a shell plumped down precisely where we had been sitting. It made its mark, though fortunately only on the bare bosom of mother earth; but later on in the same day, while we were finishing lunch, another shrapnel burst, almost over our heads, so badly injured a doctor's horse tethered close by that it had to be killed, and compelled another somewhat rapid retirement on our part to the far side of a neighbouring bog. In war time all our feasts are movable!
A German Doctor's Confession.
Before leaving Belfast I called on a German doctor who had been in charge of a Boer military hospital planted in that hamlet, and who told me that for twelve months he had been in the compulsory employ of the Transvaal Government. Commandeered at Johannesburg, he had accompanied the burghers from place to place till he had grown utterly sick of the whole business; and all the more because he had received no payment for his services except in promissory notes—which were worthless. He also stated that over three hundred foreigners had been landed at Delagoa Bay as ambulance men, wearing the red cross armlet; as such they had proceeded to Pretoria for enrolment, and there he had seen every man of them strip off the red cross, shouldering instead the bandolier and rifle. Thus were fighting men and mercenaries smuggled through Portuguese territory to the Boer fighting lines; and in this as in many other ways was that red cross abused. He wastes his time who tries to teach the Boers some new trick. In this war they have amply proved that in that matter they have nought to learn, except the unwisdom of it all, and the sureness of the retribution it involves. Even in battle and battle times clean hands are best.
Friends in need are friends indeed.
On leaving the neighbourhood of Belfast we soon found ourselves marching through Helvetia, the Switzerland of South Africa, a region of insurmountable precipices and deep defiles, where scarcely any foliage was found, and in that winter season no verdure. There rose in all directions towering hills, which sometimes bore upon their brow a touch of real majesty; and when crowned, as we saw them, with fleecy mist, resembled not remotely the snow-clad Alps. Indeed, during that whole week the toils and travels of the Guards brought to the mind of many the familiar story of Hannibal and his vast army crossing the Alps; only the Carthaginian general had no heavy guns and long lines of ammunition waggons to add to his already enormous difficulties; his men had little to carry on their broad backs compared with what a modern Guardsman has to shoulder; nor did Hannibal take with him a small army corps of newspaper correspondents to chronicle all the petty disasters and delays met with by the way. Few commanders-in-chief are lovers of correspondents, whether of the professional or of the private type. Tell-tale tongues and pens may perchance do more mischief than machine guns and mausers!
At the latter end of the week our men had to climb over what seemed to be the backbone of that terrific region, with results almost disastrous to our long train of transport waggons. Botha, whose retreat towards Lydenberg our flanking movement had apparently prevented, we failed to find; so after fighting a mild rear-guard action, we scarce knew with whom, we encamped that night for the first and last time side by side with Buller's column.