Before daylight next morning the mounted troops dashed upon a ridge about a mile and a half from the bivouac, forestalling the burghers in its occupation. The Boers thereupon fell back in the direction of Bethlehem, leaving a rear-guard who first harassed the troops by long-range “sniping,” and then disputed the passage of a drift at the Zand river. In the course of this day’s skirmishing a private in the battalion was wounded.[297] After Paget and Clements joined hands they turned towards Bethlehem, thirty miles to the south-east of Lindley, and pushed through bodies of the enemy who, though they appeared unwilling to commit themselves to anything but a feeble skirmish, watched every movement with the eyes of a lynx, determined to lose no opportunity of punishing any carelessness on our part. Thanks to Clements’ vigilance, his column was very little harassed on the march, but a strong flank-guard on Paget’s left was very roughly handled: a battery was rushed, and for several minutes the guns passed into the hands of the burghers, from whom they were rescued only after a sharp fight.
Clements bivouacked on the 5th of July at Bontjeskraal, about eight miles north-west of Bethlehem, and with a column greatly reduced in numbers by the absence of the Malta mounted infantry[298] and the Bedfordshire, who by the order of the Commander-in-Chief had been sent back to garrison the village of Lindley, he advanced early next morning through scenery thoroughly characteristic of this part of South Africa. A broad valley, bounded by flat-topped, square-sided kopjes bare of vegetation and forbidding of aspect, descended by a gentle slope towards the belt of rolling downs by which Bethlehem is encircled and commanded on every side. As the Royal Irish, who were in advance-guard, cautiously made their way down this valley, they caught distant glimpses of the trees and scattered houses of the settlement, standing like an oasis of civilisation in a wilderness of veld, while far to the south the horizon was bounded by the mountains of the Brandwater Basin—range upon range of fantastically-shaped peaks white with freshly fallen snow, as yet unmelted by the morning sun. The troops had little time, however, to admire the weird beauty of the scene, for the burghers had revealed their presence by shelling the outposts at dawn, and as the advance-guard began to debouch it came under fire from the position, strong by nature and improved by fortification, where five thousand men with seven pieces of artillery awaited our attack. From Vogelsfontein, a farm three miles north-east of the town, their line curved outwards along the western rim of the depression in which Bethlehem stands, and then turning sharply to the east ended at Volhuter’s Kop, a grim pile of rocks dominating all the approaches from the south. Before Clements allowed the advance-guard to become seriously engaged, he sent a flag of truce to the officer in command of the burghers to demand the instant surrender of the town, but after receiving a laconic refusal from Christian De Wet[299] he began to carry out the scheme already concerted with General Paget. The enemy’s flanks were first to be turned by the mounted troops and then assaulted by the infantry; the 20th brigade was to carry Volhuter’s Kop on the south; the 12th brigade to make itself master of Vogelsfontein farm on the north. The plan was a simple one, but it miscarried, as owing to the great length of De Wet’s position, the difficulties of the ground, and the failure of the mounted men on our extreme left to make their way over a rocky watercourse, the movements of the infantry were greatly delayed, and though late in the afternoon Paget won a little ground, the 12th brigade made no material progress, and when night put an end to the engagement neither of the enemy’s flanks had been turned, or even threatened seriously.
When the 12th brigade deployed, the Royal Irish were on the right, the Worcestershire on the left, the Wiltshire in support. About 1 P.M. the XVIIIth advanced in column of double companies, widely extended, the leading companies each formed in two lines of skirmishers with ten paces interval between the men and two hundred yards’ distance between the lines. Very soon shells from guns scattered along a ridge about five thousand yards to the eastward began to fall among them, and for a time our artillery gave no great help, until a field-battery dashed through the ranks, caught up half a company to serve as escort, and pushed on to a ridge where it came into action. The burghers at once turned their pieces against the audacious battery, and thanks to this diversion the battalion had been able to move forward to within rifle-shot of the enemy’s trenches, when an order brought it to a halt. For the rest of the day the Royal Irish remained stationary, skirmishing with the enemy in their front, annoyed by marksmen concealed in the houses of the town, and enfiladed by rifle and maxim fire from a hill upon their right. So biting indeed was the musketry from this hill that to escape it one of the companies was forced to take cover in a donga, where it remained till nightfall, when the XVIIIth was ordered to withdraw and bivouac at a farm out of range of the enemy’s rifles. In the opinion of the rank and file the only good point in this weary day’s work was that though the battalion had been engaged for several hours it had only two men wounded, but the General knew that the time had not been wasted, for he had seen so much of De Wet’s position that he was able to recast his plans, and had now determined, while not relaxing his efforts to turn the flanks, to deliver a crushing blow at the centre of the Boer line, where it rested on a hill half a mile to the north-west of Bethlehem.
Long before daybreak on the 7th the troops began to take their places for the renewed attack; and the Royal Irish stumbled over the uneven surface of the veld until they were halted at daybreak by Colonel Guinness, who pointed out to his officers the dim outline of a kopje, just visible in the uncertain light. This hill, he said, General Clements considered the key of the position: it was to be taken at all cost; the Royal Irish had been selected to deliver the assault, and three companies of the Wiltshire regiment were to support them in second line. As the mists of dawn gradually cleared away the officers realised that their objective was the very hill from which their right had been harassed by musketry on the afternoon of the 6th; they knew that it was strongly held, for a patrol from one of their outposts, reconnoitring it during the night, had heard the voices of many burghers talking in the trenches; and they could see that a long slope, bare of cover and exposed throughout to the enemy’s fire, led up to its crest, where two guns had been posted within the last few hours. If our gunners succeeded in beating down the defence, the hill would be comparatively easy to carry; but if the stress of battle compelled them to turn their projectiles in another direction, many a good soldier would fall before the day was won. As soon as it was light enough for the artillerymen to see, the field and 5-in. guns opened a slow, well-aimed cross-fire upon the hill, and the Royal Irish prepared for the attack. Colonel Guinness formed his battalion in three lines: the first consisted of B company; the second (the supports) was composed of H, G, and C, in the order named from right to left; in the third (the reserve) were F, E, and D companies. One company, A, which had been on outpost all night, did not rejoin till the position was nearly won. The supports and reserve were in lines of columns of half companies, whose extensions were not to exceed three paces. Before 7 A.M. the scouts of B company became warmly engaged with the burghers, who could be seen in strength upon the hill; Captain Daniell reinforced them with half his company (H), and then for a long time a fierce fire-fight raged, the Boers trying to crush B company with musketry and shrapnel, while Daniell’s men kept up a vigorous fusilade to cover the supporting companies, which were gradually making their way into the front line. D company ranged up on the left, the volunteers on the right; while still farther to the right G company came into action, firing heavy volleys. The expenditure of cartridges was great, and during this phase of the combat the pouches of D company were replenished at least four times by the ammunition carriers, who, to quote from Captain Daniell’s diary, “walked about, backwards and forwards, up and down the firing line without the slightest fear. I specially noticed a lad named Hanrehan and Lance-Corporal Ryan, the company tailor.” Whenever the officer commanding a company considered it was possible to push on, the subaltern or sergeant in charge of each section selected two soldiers, who dashed forward for about thirty yards, and then dropping on the ground covered the advance of their comrades with their shots. Then followed another pair, and yet another, until the whole of the section was in its new position, when its commander, who had superintended the movement, in his turn dashed over the bullet-swept ground. Troops less highly trained, less perfectly disciplined than the Royal Irish, would have required an officer to head them in these rushes, but the men of the XVIIIth could be trusted to advance and to carry out their orders without such leading; the difficulty was not to get them to go on, but to prevent their going on too fast and too far. Whenever the ground was favourable the companies were “pulled together” and steadied, to prepare them for the next rush. A sergeant in the Royal Irish thus describes his impressions of
“the first fair stand-up fight the regiment had been in during the war. We advanced to a real attack such as you read about in textbooks, over comparatively level ground affording scarcely any cover, and with due attention to intervals between individuals and firing line, supports, and so forth. A very frosty morning, bright and bracing; a steady controlled fire to greet us as we deployed for attack; a G.O.C. implicitly believed in by every man in the battalion; a C.O. who possessed every one’s confidence; and officers in front (too much so indeed) to lead the way—such were our surroundings. In the ranks one cannot see much in a general engagement, but I have a distinct recollection of there being a total lack of confusion during the action: signals, words of command, were quickly responded to; the passing of orders was rapidly carried out; volunteers for every purpose were numerous; wounded men were instantly cared for and taken back to the dressing-station by the stretcher-bearers.”
The battalion gained ground, but not rapidly, for the opposition was considerable and the firing line had been again reinforced, when just as the leading men had reached a belt of burned grass, on which their khaki clothing was unpleasantly conspicuous, they were brought to a sudden halt by a donga—a natural moat protecting the part of the hill on which the enemy’s guns were posted. As this donga was impassable, the only thing to do was to turn it; and each company successively moved off to the right in perfect order, circled round the head of the obstacle, and then re-formed in the required direction as steadily as though on parade in a barrack square. At this moment our bombardment swelled into a violent cannonade. Our musketry had already made itself felt among the defenders of the hill, and when the shells began to rain upon them, the burghers, who, in the words of an artillery officer, “had hitherto stuck to their work like men,” lost heart, and gradually quitted their trenches, leaving to a few of their gunners the task of saving the guns. These gallant fellows succeeded in getting one away in safety, and did not cease their efforts to remove the other until a mass of Royal Irish, yelling like demons and with bayonets fixed, were within a couple of hundred yards of them. Then they turned and fled for their lives, and the gun, one of the 15-prs. lost by the 77th battery at Stormberg, once more passed into the hands of its lawful owners. While part of the battalion established itself on the crest of the hill, where a long line of trenches, cut deep into the rock, showed how diligently the Boers had fortified this part of the position, the remainder was held in readiness to push forward into the town. But with the capture of the hill the engagement virtually ended; Paget, with the help of two companies of the Royal Irish, made himself master of Volhuter’s Kop almost without loss: Vogelsfontein was occupied without resistance, and the burghers streamed away in full retreat, followed only by the shells of the artillery, for the mounted troops (chiefly Imperial Yeomen and Australian Rifles) were still too new to their work to be launched in pursuit of an enemy who never proved more formidable than in a rear-guard action. The comparative ease with which the Boers were driven out of Bethlehem was owing to the fact that De Wet had learned that a column of British under General Hunter was moving down on him from the north;[300] as he felt unable to make head against this reinforcement, he had only fought to gain time for his main body to join the large number of Free Staters, who from behind the Wittebergen range faced General Rundle and the 8th division. To this is due the small number of casualties on the 6th and 7th of July, together amounting only to a hundred and six killed and wounded—a total to which the Royal Irish contributed almost half. Among the officers Captain J. B. S. Alderson was mortally, and Captain T. Warwick-Williams (volunteer company) slightly, wounded; of the other ranks, two were killed, four died of their injuries, and forty-seven were wounded.[301]
As soon as the engagement was over the troops were allowed to fall out and cook their food; fires sprang up everywhere, and while some of the men made porridge from meal found in a neighbouring farm, others tried to convert the burghers’ pigs into pork. An officer thus describes the scene: “One of the volunteers pursued a very old beast with a field-telegraph pole poised above his head; when he got within striking distance he brought it down with a crash, but of course by the time it reached the ground the pig was well away. Then up galloped one of Brabant’s Horse, who with bayonet fixed tried to use his rifle as a hog-spear; he lunged at the pig, missed it, buried his bayonet in the ground, and came a lovely cropper off his horse. This old pig was a wary brute, and after running many risks, escaped unhurt.” In the course of the afternoon some of the officers of the battalion were allowed to visit Bethlehem, which they found no better and no worse than the other towns in the Free State. In this part of South Africa every settlement had the same general characteristics. In the middle of an unpaved, undrained, and evil-smelling market square was a large church, built at the expense of the congregation by an architect who apparently took a barn as his model of ecclesiastical architecture. The square was fringed with the most important buildings in the place—the government offices, the bank, the stores, and the hotels—not standing side by side, but apparently dropped down from the sky at random, with great gaps between them, where loose cattle roamed at will. The dwelling-houses were scattered along the roads leading from the church to the open veld. Those belonging to British traders and to burghers who had acquired a veneer of European civilisation stood in pretty gardens, gay with flowers and planted with trees, and looked like small “villa residences” transported from a London suburb to the wilds of South Africa. The abodes of the old-fashioned Boers, on the other hand, were nothing but cottages built of sun-dried bricks, without a tree, a flower, or a blade of grass to mitigate their hideousness.
A few hours after the occupation of Bethlehem General Clements issued this general order:—
“The G.O.C. wishes to congratulate the force under his command on the way in which it has acquitted itself during a trying time since it marched from Senekal. The mounted troops had very hard work, and have seen a good deal of fighting. The artillery have performed most excellent work and made excellent practice. The infantry have had hard work, continuous marching, and done excellently while in contact with the enemy. The Royal Irish regiment particularly distinguished itself to-day. To one and all the thanks of the G.O.C. are due, and he has the utmost confidence that the 12th brigade force as now constituted will continue to maintain the high reputation it has already won.”