The Campaigns and History of the Royal Irish Regiment, [v. 1,] from 1684 to 1902

by G. le M. Gretton

In a few days the detachment returned to the railway and rejoined the battalion, which now had been withdrawn from the garrison of Belfast to take part in active operations in the northern Transvaal. Early in the year the Intelligence department had become aware that the repeated attacks upon the railway were intended to divert attention from the preparations for a great raid to the southward, by which General Botha hoped to restore the shattered fortunes of the republican armies. Lord Kitchener, who on Lord Roberts’ departure for England in December, 1900, had succeeded to the supreme command of the British forces in South Africa, first sent General French with 22,000 combatants to harry Botha’s commandos south of the Pretoria-Delagoa Bay line, and then organised a body of nearly 10,000 men with whom Lieutenant-General Sir B. Blood was to sweep a huge piece of country, bounded on the south by the same railway, on the north by the 25th degree of latitude, on the east by the Stenkamps Berg, and on the west by the Oliphant river. The principal settlement in this district was Roos Senekal, on which Blood’s troops were to converge from various points. Three of the columns were commanded by Major-General F. W. Kitchener, the remainder by Major-General R. S. R. Fetherstonhaugh; the Royal Irish were allotted to that under the immediate orders of Colonel Park, who was one of Kitchener’s subordinate commanders. Leaving the railway on March 27, the battalion reached Lydenburg on April 11, where began six months of work as arduous, monotonous, and disagreeable as ever British soldiers were called upon to perform. On some occasions the Royal Irish formed part of an outer ring of troops whose business it was to block every Nek and every drift by which a commando could break from the net that was closing upon it; at other times, as part of the striking column, they made forced marches by day and night, too often to find that the burghers had taken the alarm and had fled, leaving behind them their womenkind, who they knew would be well treated by the British. They had to “round-up” great mobs of cattle, to remove women and children from farms used as headquarters by the local guerillas, to escort convoys, and to march incessantly “in a most difficult country over almost impossible roads.” For weeks together they never bivouacked twice in the same place, and whenever they found themselves for a few days at Lydenburg or at a station on the line, instead of resting, they had to build blockhouses. On one of these brief visits to the comparative civilisation of the railway the battalion was joined by Lieutenant W. G. Lindsey and thirty non-commissioned officers and men of the 5th (Irish volunteer battalion), the King’s (Liverpool) regiment, who on May 20, 1901 arrived to replace the volunteer company which on October 8, 1900, had started on its journey back to England.

A detailed account of the work of the regiment between April and October, 1901, would contain so little beyond a list of bivouacs at places with uncouth and unknown names, that no attempt will be made to follow the wanderings of the Royal Irish: the reader who desires to know their exact position on every day throughout this period will find the information in [Appendix 8]. At the end of September the battalion, to use the South African expression, “came off trek,” and as soon as it had been refitted, relieved the Manchester regiment at Lydenburg. An idea of the straits to which the men had been reduced by hard marching will be gathered from a report dated September 1: “many have no shirts at all, and others have no boots. All the boots and trousers are in a bad state and will not hold together much longer.”

Colonel Park took the opportunity of thanking the officers and men for their services in a farewell order dated October 1, 1901—

“It is with the greatest regret that the Officer Commanding the column has now to part with the first battalion, the Royal Irish regiment, the last remaining unit of the original force which started from Lydenburg under his command five and a half months ago.

“The splendid fighting qualities of the Royal Irish are well known to all, and their magnificent marching powers and the good spirit of all ranks under the hardships and privations of active service have been the admiration of the O.C. column, and of all ranks who have served with him. Colonel Park wishes them the best of good luck, and trusts that at some future time he may have again the honour of serving with this gallant and distinguished regiment.”

Though the war had already lasted for two years, the strenuous exertions of Botha, De Wet, and a few other Boer leaders prolonged the struggle, hopeless though it was, for nine months longer. During this time the battalion remained at Lydenburg, taking its share of duty in garrisoning the town, in escorting convoys, and in manning the fifty-five blockhouses by which the place was linked with the railway at Machadodorp, forty-five miles away. From the regimental point of view only two incidents worthy of record occurred in this phase of the war: the capture of B. Viljoen, the Boer general who had inflicted so heavy a loss upon the Royal Irish at Monument Hill, and the destruction by dynamite of a blockhouse held by a party of the Royal Irish.

At the beginning of the year 1902, Schalk Burger, the acting President of the Transvaal Republic, was in hiding near Dulstroom with the few adherents who formed his so-called government. Viljoen, the commander of the remnants of the commandos raised in the districts north of the Pretoria-Delagoa Bay railway, had been driven to Pilgrim’s Rest, whence Burger summoned him to a conference to arrange for the transfer of the “government” to the comparative safety of that remote settlement. The preliminaries being settled, Viljoen preceded Burger on the journey over the fifty miles of country between Dulstroom and Pilgrim’s Rest. This ride, writes the author of the Official History, “proved to be the last of the Boer leader’s many adventures. The British Intelligence Department was keenly watching the vagrant legislature; and ambuscades lay in many a likely spruit-bed and rail and river crossing. Into one of these traps—laid by a party of the Royal Irish regiment, sent out under Major A. S. Orr by Lieut.-Colonel H. Guinness—fell Viljoen as, having stolen past the outposts of Lydenburg, he made to ford the Spekboom river.” The details of the capture were as follows: at about 7 P.M. on January 25, 1902, Major Orr with five officers and a hundred and twenty of the other ranks was suddenly ordered to hasten to two drifts, where it was reported that a party of burghers would attempt to cross during the night.[317] Captain Farmer was sent with a detachment to block one of these drifts; near the other Major Orr hid the remainder of his force, posting twenty men in a ruined farmhouse a few hundred yards to his flank.

By 10 o’clock at night the trap was set, and the soldiers were resting after their long march over heavy mealie-fields and through spruits swollen by recent rain, when the detachment in the farm opened a sharp fusilade on a small number of Boers approaching from the south-west, and drove them towards the drift where Orr had established himself. So perfectly in hand were the Royal Irish that, though they could hear horses galloping towards them, they remained silent and motionless until the leading horsemen, who rode in pairs, were almost under the muzzles of their rifles. Then Colour-Sergeant J. Boulger, who was nearest the road, shouted “Hands up.” Disregarding this summons the Boers galloped on: Boulger realising that they meant to dash through the drift, opened fire on the horses of the two Boers in front: his men followed his example, and the animals, one pierced by nine, the other by three bullets, dropped dead, in their fall pinning to the ground their riders, Viljoen and Bester, one of the General’s staff. Then there was a short confused skirmish, in which Nel, another of Viljoen’s staff, and a Cape Boer lost their lives; the remainder of the party, which numbered ten in all, escaped, though not across the drift. As soon as Viljoen and Bester had been drawn from beneath their horses, they were recognised by one of the civilian scouts, who told Major Orr the names of the prisoners. Between men who have frequently faced each other in battle arises a curious feeling of quasi-friendship, and the Royal Irish and the commandos led by Viljoen had frequently met on many a hard-fought field: moreover, after Monument Hill Viljoen had treated his prisoners, both officers and men, with great kindness: therefore, as Orr hurried his captives to Lydenburg he assured them that they had fallen into good hands, and during the few days that Viljoen remained at Lydenburg awaiting an escort to the railway the regiment did its best to make his captivity agreeable. The burghers were very anxious to rescue him; and one night, writes an officer, “two or three of them stole into the town to see if it was possible to dig him out, but finding a sentry at his door and another at his window gave up the attempt, leaving behind them a clever cartoon of Lord Kitchener sitting in a zariba of barbed wire, surrounded by surrendered burghers whom he was imploring to go out and persuade the others to come in, while floating above him was the spirit of Joe Chamberlain! The drawing was signed, ‘Phil Jung, with apologies to Phil May.’” In his report Colonel Guinness specially mentioned Major Orr, to whose good dispositions of the force at his command was due the successful issue of the affair, and Colour-Sergeant Boulger,[318] who had been very favourably reported upon by Major Orr.

The dynamite episode occurred two months later. Among the blockhouses held by the Royal Irish was one, named by the troops Ben Tor, which stood on a kopje so thickly covered with big boulders that the sentries could not watch all the approaches to it. The building was of stone, roofed with sheets of galvanised iron; and on the night of the 18th of March it was held by a non-commissioned officer—Sergeant M‘Grath—and nine private soldiers. About two o’clock in the morning of the 19th, the two men on sentry outside the blockhouse heard sounds which they rightly interpreted to be those of approaching feet. While one remained on the look-out, the other crawled into the blockhouse and reported to Sergeant M‘Grath, who immediately stood to arms and manned his loopholes, but almost before the men were in their places a bomb was hurled on the roof, which unfortunately being flat, not sloping, afforded the missile a secure lodgment. In a second there was a tremendous explosion: the blockhouse was wrecked; one of the walls was thrown down, and every man of the garrison dangerously or severely wounded, except the sentry outside who escaped all injury. After capturing this man the Boers waited for some minutes to see if any one was still on foot; then, satisfied that no resistance was to be expected, they rapidly looted the blockhouse and decamped, fortunately without finding the boxes of reserve ammunition hidden under the sheets of galvanised iron which formed the beds of the garrison. Beyond stripping some of the wounded, the burghers did their victims no harm, and sent off the uninjured soldier to summon medical aid from Lydenburg. By dawn a detachment of troops, a doctor, and an ambulance were on the way to Ben Tor, where, says one of the officers, “the place was like a shambles—too horrible to describe.” As soon as the wounded men had been removed,[319] the blockhouse was rebuilt and greatly strengthened.

Nothing of note occurred in the battalion during the remainder of the campaign, which was brought to an end by the declaration of peace on May 31, 1902. This is not the place to discuss the terms upon which the Boer guerillas were allowed to surrender their arms and return to their homes; to enumerate the enormous sums spent by the Imperial Treasury in rebuilding and restocking the burghers farms, or to speculate on what may be the ultimate effect on South Africa and the Empire of the policy by which, little more than five years after the last shot was fired in the war, all the rights and privileges of self-government were granted to our former enemies. Whatever the future may have in store for England, the Royal Irish regiment will always have the satisfaction of remembering that throughout the long struggle with the Boer republics, all ranks worthily maintained the honour of their corps.