CHAPTER IV THE KING'S OWN SCOTTISH BORDERERS
If legend may be believed, the Scottish Borderers came into existence with a strength of a thousand men in four hours of the 19th of March, 1689, a recruiting record which stands unbeaten in subsequent history. The regiment was raised by the followers of King William III, and within four months of the time of its formation was facing "Bonnie Dundee" at the pass of Killiecrankie. General Mackay, the officer commanding the King's troops, testified that only two regiments of his force bore themselves as they ought, and of these two one was the King's Own Scottish Borderers. When it is remembered that the regiment had only been formed four months, this fact will be seen in its true light; and for over two centuries the Borderers have maintained the reputation given them by Mackay.
Having settled the authority of King William in Scotland, the Borderers were sent over to Ireland, where they helped in driving out James and his Irish and French adherents from the United Kingdom, and consolidating the rule of the Orange king. Thence, in the service of William, the regiment went to Flanders, where they took part in the siege of Namur, and lost twenty officers and 500 men by the explosion of one of the mines of the enemy. It was here that the Borderers were first made acquainted with the practice of fixing the bayonet alongside the muzzle of the musket instead of into it, for up to that time fixing bayonets had involved thrusting the bayonet into the barrel, when the weapon could not be fired. Seeing a French regiment advancing with fixed bayonets, the Colonel of the Borderers ordered his men to fix theirs, and calmly awaited the result, confident in the superiority of his men over their opponents in this class of fighting. But at short range the French amazed the Scots by pouring in a volley, for they had their bayonets fixed round the muzzles of their muskets instead of in them. Recovering themselves, the Borderers charged and routed the enemy, and learned from one of the French muskets left on the field how this apparent miracle had been accomplished. Thenceforth British troops fixed their bayonets on instead of in their muskets.
When, in 1697, the treaty of Ryswick put an end to the campaign which included the taking of Namur, the Borderers returned home. Their next notable exploit was at Vigo, in 1719, where they destroyed the stores collected for an invasion of England. Thirteen years later the regiment was among the defending force at Gibraltar, and withstood the attacks of a force of 20,000 men, who were eventually obliged to retire, leaving the Rock in British hands. Then came Fontenoy, where the Borderers lost 206 officers and men; and later Minden, where sixty squadrons of French cavalry charged again and again, only to be broken against the defence of six British regiments, of which the Borderers formed one. Having thus accounted for the cavalry, the six regiments put to flight two French brigades of infantry, and virtually annihilated a body of Saxon infantry, being the whole time under heavy artillery fire. Returning in 1763 from the many Continental fields in which it had taken part, the regiment buried with full military honours at Newcastle-on-Tyne the fragments of the colours carried from victory to victory for twenty years.
There followed nineteen years of peace service, and then the Borderers were sent to Gibraltar as reinforcements, arriving in time to assist in the final discomfiture of the besieging force. In 1793 the Borderers were transformed into Marines, in which capacity they came in for a share of the prize money accruing from the capture of a ship valued at a million sterling, and then took part in the victory won by Lord Howe over the French fleet at Brest. There were Borderers, too, at the siege of Toulon, where Napoleon I, at that time only an artillery lieutenant, was wounded by a British soldier's bayonet.
In the Napoleonic wars the Borderers were faced with more hard work than chances of glory. They went to the campaign in Holland in 1799, and took part in the expedition to Egypt in 1801, while eight years later they were at the capture of Martinique, a name borne on their colours. But for the rest of the time up to Waterloo they were engaged mainly in inconspicuous garrison duty, with no chance of adding to their reputation. Their luck held to a similar course through the nineteenth century, up to the outbreak of the last South African war, for they were set to deal with a Boer insurrection at the Cape in 1842, sent to Canada at the time of the Fenian raid in 1866, and engaged in the Afghan campaign of 1878-80. They fought in the Egyptian war in 1888, and then went to work on the Indian frontier, where is much fighting and little glory for most regiments that take part. In the Tirah campaign alone the Borderers were in action twenty-three times—yet who remembers the Tirah campaign to-day?
As for the South African campaign, it has been placed on record that the Borderers "put in as much hard work in marching and fighting as any body of troops in the whole campaign." Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, and Karee Spruit were three notable actions of this war in which the Borderers took part, they having been allotted to the 7th Division of the Army of South Africa. At the last-named action eighty-three officers and men of the Borderers were killed or wounded. Later, at Vlakfontein, the Borderers and the Derbyshires shared the honour of saving General Dixon's column from utter disaster, and recapturing two British guns which had been taken by the Boers.
Now, as for the war in France, the record of the Borderers is fairly complete. It begins with the account of the adventures of a maxim-gun section during the first week of the war, as related by a man of the gun section who was invalided home very early in the campaign. He states that at Mons his gun section were located inside a house at Mons, firing from one of the windows, while Germans in considerable numbers were searching the surrounding houses. It took the Germans four hours to locate the maxim gun, and then, as they riddled the house with bullets, the plaster and laths began to come down on the heads of the Borderers' men, whereupon the latter thought the time had come to clear out. Under fire they dismounted their gun and scrambled out from the back of the house, whence they got under cover from the German fire, and, when night fell, they were able to make their way back to their own lines.