[Dec. 12, 1899
Among the few Boer prisoners taken in this engagement was a double-dyed traitor and thief named Greener. This man, a Sergeant-Major of the Royal Engineers, had been detected in wholesale theft at Aldershot. Deserting the colours and betraying the country which had given him birth, he fled to South Africa and took service with the Boers. So far as we can discover, the extraordinary leniency of the British suffered this rogue to retain his life. By any other nation he would have been summarily executed under the orders of a drum-head court martial.
After the action the chaplain of the Highland Brigade gave the dead Highlanders the solemn rites of Christian burial. He went to and fro among the enemy, who received him with an honourable regard when he came to inquire after the wounded and missing. "He told me," says Mr. Ralph, "that there were Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen among them, as well as the mercenary Germans and Scandinavians, serving for a gold krüger a day—which is to say, a pound sterling Dutch.... Everybody was courteous." And though they blindfolded the bearers and ambulance men, they did not fear his presence, open eyed, in their midst, nor did they put him under oath as to what he might reveal or hide. Their confidence, it need scarcely be said, was in no way abused.
Burial of General Wauchope.
With the men he had so valiantly led was buried the fallen General. The piper wailed "Lochaber no more" as they bore him and his stubborn countrymen from the battlefield to the fast-growing burial ground near Modder River town, where lie the bravest of the brave. "There," says the Daily News correspondent, "moved with slow and solemn tread all that remained of the Highland Brigade. In front of them walked the chaplain with bared head, dressed in his robes of office; then came the pipers with their pipes, sixteen in all, and behind them, with arms reversed, moved the Highlanders, dressed in all the regalia of their regiments, and in the midst the dead General borne by four of his comrades." The sad impressiveness of the funeral service was deepened by the circumstance that away to the north stood the defiant enemy—that round the grave were gathered, in battle-torn uniforms, the men who had faced the storm of bullets and borne the brunt of the fatal assault, only to win the bitterness of defeat. The bright hopes with which they had set out had been shattered and, it might be said, were buried in this grave with the fallen General. Man had proposed; God had disposed.
[After a Sketch by Mr. Fred Villiers.
This trench, which was in an advanced position, was stormed and captured by the Highlanders. All its defenders, forty-seven in number, fell to their bayonets.