With Rimington

by L. March Phillipps

I am turning over my diary with the idea of giving you a notion of the sort of life we lead, but find nothing remarkable.

"Last night, Vice, Dunkley, and I were on lookout on the kopje. There had been a heavy storm in the afternoon and another broke as we reached the hill. We crouched in our cloaks waiting for it to pass before climbing up, as the ironstone boulders are supposed to attract the lightning (I have heard it strike them; it makes a crack like a pistol-shot, and Colonials don't like staying on the hill tops during a storm). We passed all night on our airy perch among the rocks, half wet and the wind blowing strong. It was a darkish and cloudy night, rather cold. Watched the light die out of the stormy sky; the lightning flickering away to leeward; wet gleams from the plain where the water shone here and there; moaning and sighing of wind through rock and branch. We were relieved by Lancers in the morning and jogged back to Thornhill, where our little camp is, and I am writing this in the shade of a big mimosa close to the garden wall.

"I have seen prints in shop windows of farms and soldiers, bits of country life and war mixed, a party of Lancers or Uhlans calling at some old homestead, watering their horses or bivouacking in the garden. Often what I see now makes me think of these subjects. A large camp is hideous and depressing; dirty and worn, the ground trampled deep in dust; filth and refuse lying about; the entrails and skins of animals, flies, beastly smells, and no excitement or animation. But these outlying scenes, scouts, pickets, &c., have a peculiar interest. This garden, for instance, is itself pretty and wild, with its tangle of figs, its avenue of quinces (great golden fruit hanging), its aloes all down the side, with heavy, blue spikes and dead stems sticking thirty feet in air, branching and blackened like fire-scorched fir-trees, and its dark green oranges and other fruit and flower-trees all mixed in a kind of wilderness; and behind this the steep kopjes, with black boulders heaped to the sky, and soft grey mimosas in between. It is a pretty spot in itself, but what a different, strange interest is brought in by the two or three carbines leaning against the wall, the ponies, ready saddled, tethered at the corner, the hint of camp-fire smoke climbing up through a clump of trees, and now and then a khaki-clad figure or two passing between the trunks or lying under them asleep."

Here is another little extract, a bit of a night-spy by three of us on the west side, where we had heard that the Douglas commando was establishing a laager near a drift some thirteen miles below camp; a move forward of their right arm, if true.

"The night was dark as pitch, and very windy, just what we wanted. After missing our way several times, whispering, consulting, and feeling about in the dark, we came on the wattle fence and beehive huts of a Kaffir kraal. Up to this we crept, and Vice dived into the hole of an entrance, and after some underground rumblings emerged with an old nigger as you draw a badger from his earth. The old man was soon persuaded by a moderate bribe to be our guide to the spot we wished to reconnoitre. He told us that parties of Boers were pretty often round that way, and that one had passed the previous night at the kraal. Dunkley agreed to stay with the horses, and Vice and I went on with the Kaffir. The country was grassy, with plentiful belts and clumps of silvery bush. After a while the moon shone out and the clouds dispersed, which made us feel disagreeably conspicuous in the white patches between the bush."

Exmoor, as far as the contour of the ground is concerned, is a little like the more up-and-down parts of the veldt, and scouting there would be very much like scouting here. For instance, suppose your camp was at Minehead, the Boers being in strength at Winsford, and a report comes in that they have pushed on a strong picket to Simonsbath. This rumour it is your business to test. With two friends on a dark, windy night you set out. You leave the road and take to the moor. You ride slowly, listening, watching intently, keeping off the high ground, and as much as possible avoiding sky-lines. At some cottage or moorland farm you leave the horses and creep forward on foot, working along the hollows and studying every outline. If they are at Simonsbath, they will have a lookout on the hill this side. A British picket would show its helmets at a mile, but the Boers don't affect sky-lines. They will be on this side, with the hill for a background, and very likely right down on the flat; for though by day the higher you are the better for seeing, yet at night, when your only chance is to see people against the sky, the lower you are the better. These points and others you discuss in whispers, crouched in the dark hollows, and then creep forward again.

"Vice and I crawled to the top of our ridge at last just as morning was breaking. There were bushes and rocks to hide among, and the clouds had all gone, and day broke clear. The deep river ravine lay right below us, and as the light penetrated, the first thing we saw was a small shelter tent with a cart or waggon by the side of it. We grinned and nudged each other and wagged our heads at the discovery, but kept them carefully hidden. Farther west was a detached kopje, the site of a permanent Boer picket, according to the Kaffir; but there was no regular laager. There were no horses grazing about, no cattle, no smoke, none of the usual and inevitable signs. A picket! Yes. Pushed out from Koodoosberg, the big hill which rises abruptly from the plain three or four miles off, but no real occupation. After studying the country yard by yard with our glasses, and making a few notes about the lie of the land and the names and positions of farms, we creep off and get back to camp by mid-day."

The results of these exciting little prowls, when worth while, are sent in to the General, and from the mass of evidence thus placed before him he is supposed to be able to define the enemy's position and movements.

Chester Master and our little body were paid a pretty compliment by the General the other day; for the Major having written to ask if we might join him, Methuen replied that he was sorry to have to refuse, but that we were doing invaluable work, and he really couldn't spare us.

Well, fare you well. We hear of heavy reinforcements arriving. They will be very welcome. Magersfontein, Colenso, Stormberg; we could do with a change. But what a revelation, is it not? Are these the prisoners that we played at dice for? One thing in it all pleases me, and that is the temper and attitude of England. I like the gravity, the quiet, dogged rolling up of the shirt-sleeves much better than the blustering, wipe-something-off-a-slate style which the papers made so familiar to us at the beginning.