Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost Legion

by G. Hamilton-Browne

Of course ninety-nine out of every hundred old war dogs who have the misfortune to retain their pristine longing for hard work and an active life, when they are rapidly approaching the allotted threescore years and ten of their existence, and maybe, like the writer, are incapacitated by rheumatism, sciatica, tic-doloreux, housemaid’s knee, liver and the hump from ever participating again in such sports as their hearts yearn for but their age and infirmities render impracticable, sit down, and, instead of employing their remaining years in making their souls, grouse and grumble at their bad luck, blaming everyone except themselves (bien entendu) for their bad luck, and maybe poverty, entirely forgetting the glorious years they put in when they were able to lead a charge, rush a kopje, or back a bucking horse with the best. Yes, and they are prone to belittle, and perhaps to undervalue, the men who have shouldered them out and taken their places in the fighting line, and who are at present responsible for and are upholding the honour of our gracious King and glorious old flag on the frontiers of our splendid Empire. “Yes, by gad, sir,” growls one old war dog to another, “these present men are not worth their salt, sir. They should have been with us, sir, fifty years ago, then they would have known what privations and hand-to-hand fighting meant. Nowadays they are fitted out with flat trajectory magazine rifles, Maxim guns, pom-poms, and the Lord only knows what else, while we had to fight with old muzzle-loading rifles, sneiders or Martini-Henry’s that were always jamming, etc., etc., etc.” Grouse, grumble, grouse: and so they go on ad infinitum.

Yes, it is very true men who are approaching the age-limit of threescore years and ten had in their early manhood to fight with inferior rifles to those that our gallant troops are armed with at present, and, speaking from personal experience, deuced good weapons we thought them, and were always game and happy enough to use them when luck sent any fighting our way. Well, I have no doubt that in those days our seniors were making the same remarks and passing similar strictures on us, that we nowadays are passing on our successors, and as they in their turn will bestow on theirs. Still there is no doubt that, thanks to science and the enormous expenditure of cash, the lot of the present-day fighting-man is infinitely better than it was fifty years ago, while far more men and much better material were employed on a war of conquest during the sixties and the seventies of the last century than were deemed necessary fifty years previously; in fact you may say it has been so way back to the days of romance, when Samson used to play a lone hand against the Philistines, or even when Sir Galahad and his compeers used to start out holy-grailing, giant-killing, dragon-hunting or lovely-maiden-rescuing. True, there are nothing like the hardships in modern wars there were in those of the past, although I opine that the Turks have just had about as bad a time of it as ever men wanted to face; but then it has been sharp, quick and soon over, and entirely due to their rotten Government allowing them to be caught on the hop. (Please God the precious gang who at present misrule our country will not put us into a like hole.) Still I doubt very much at the present day if you could get troops of any nation to voluntarily face the hardships that Pizarro’s men had to undergo during the conquest of Peru, or any of our young sybaritic loungers to don aluminium waistcoats (much less steel ones) and go for a jaunt crusading as their hardy ancestors did. But, mark time, the majority of the progenitors of our nowadays gilded youths were in those times trading in old clo’s or doing a bit of stiff and not wearing metal vests and unmentionables at all at all.

However, we will pass over the good ould toimes, when a rale fighting-man had no need to insure himself with Lloyd George against unemployment, and comedown to the nineteenth century—in fact the years 1838-1839, when there were but few English in Natal, and the black fiend, Dingaan, who had murdered his brother Tshaka, ruled the roost in Zululand with his army of 50,000 bloodthirsty warriors. I am not writing a book on the history of Natal, but, as 999 out of every 1000 Englishmen have probably never heard of Tshaka or Dingaan, and are just as ignorant of the struggles of the early Settlers in the garden colony of South Africa, I may state that, although Natal was not officially occupied by British troops till 1842, when Captain Smith of the 27th Regiment marched there with a portion of his corps and a detachment of artillery and built a fort near Kongella, in which he was speedily surrounded and besieged by the trek Boers under Pretorius: yet small parties of Englishmen (good Lost Legionaries every one of them) had years previously taken root in the vicinity of where Durban now stands, where they carried on the usual pioneer pursuits, such as hunting and trading with the natives. Yes; they had taken root, and meant to hold their own and stick to their foothold in the country, notwithstanding the jealousy and secret enmity of large parties of trek Boers, who were crowding into Natal for the purpose of forming a Dutch republic there. Well, the year 1838 had been a hot one for the Boer trekkers, as in the early part of it Pieter Retief, a chief, one of their most influential commandants, together with seventy picked Boers and from thirty to forty picked Hottentots, having visited Dingaan’s kraal for the purpose of making a treaty, were inveigled, unarmed, into the cattle enclosure, overpowered and brutally murdered.

This act of treachery the savage monster quickly followed up with a lightning raid into Natal, during which over 600 Boers, men, women and children, were butchered with fiendish barbarity. This raid he continued down to Port Natal, where the aforementioned few Englishmen were forced to take refuge on board two ships that, providentially, happened to be in the harbour. Later on in the year the Boer War punitive expedition, under the celebrated commandant Piet Uys, were ambushed and badly worsted, having to fall back, with the loss of their O.C. and many men, so that the year 1838 is still regarded by the Dutch inhabitants of South Africa as a very black year indeed.

Now the Zulu raid to Port Natal had upset the equilibrium of the English settlers, who, being moreover very savage at the losses they had sustained, determined to pay back the Zulu potentate in his own coin. First of all they volunteered to join Piet Uys’ commando, but as he entered Zululand from the north they were left behind, and so determined to form a punitive column of their own.

And, now I have reeled off this prosy prelude, let me tell you how it was I first heard of the exploits of the first band of English Lost Legionaries, who, although fighting for their own hand, made the English pioneers in Natal respected and feared by both Boer and savage, while the story also convinced your humble servant that, no matter how good he fancied himself and his lambs to be, still, in the near past, there were better and more daring men tailing on to the halyards of the Old Rag than either he individually or all his flock collectively were. And now let me trek.

It was during the latter end of December 1878, just previous to the Zulu War, and forty years after the aforementioned incidents had occurred in Natal history, that I was trekking through the Thorn Country from Grey Town to Rourke’s Drift, together with the staff of the 3rd N.N.C., and we were camped for the day on the banks of the Tugela River, when there arrived, at the same outspan, an old interior trader, trekking out of Zululand. Now, as I was particularly anxious to gain all the information I could about that country, I entered into conversation with him, and eventually he accepted my invitation to come over to my waggon, have some lunch and a yarn. Tiffin having been discussed and pipes lit we were chatting on the probabilities of the coming war when he noticed my M.H. sporting carbine and heavy B.L. revolver that my servant had just cleaned, and at once requested permission to examine them. After he had done so, and I had explained to him the mechanism of the carbine and the flatness of its trajectory in comparison with the sneider with which he himself was armed, he heaved a sigh, and handing back the weapon said: “Ah, if the first English army that invaded Zululand had been provided with such guns, instead of old flint muskets, they might have won the day.”

Smelling a yarn I replied: “I thought no English army had ever invaded Zululand up to date.”

My guest smole the pitying smile that an old-timer usually employs when a new chum exhibits his ignorance or puts his foot into it and queried: “Did you ever hear of Cane?”

“Oh yes,” quoth I; “if you mean the cockatoo agriculturist who had the first row with the boss of the original sheep-raising industry, I have heard of him.”