Our half battalion was on baggage and rear guard that day, H company bringing up the rear of all; a couple of miles from camp the road opened on to a great expanse of rolling veldt, which stretched away in front of us for some miles, to a kopje covered with low trees standing near a drift.
After crossing the drift, there was a farm on the left with several houses, which had been burnt by the Highland Brigade, but in which some women and children were living, temporary roofs of corrugated iron having been erected. Rounding the end of the kopje, which was called Doornkop, we saw, shut away in a recess, another farm house which had been similarly treated: H company had reason afterwards to remember this farm house.
The advanced guard passed over Doornkop, and the remainder of the troops followed along the road and proceeded some distance, halting for the usual ten minutes about a mile and a half beyond Doornkop, where the veldt was level and open like that which we had left behind us.
Whilst the main body was sitting about, resting, Colonel Kennedy, of the Camerons, came up to me and said he thought he heard firing in the direction of the rear guard. We listened, and I distinctly heard our old friend the Mauser; so I rode back to see what was going on. Meeting a breathless man with an incoherent message about Captain Wisden being surrounded (which we found that officer had never sent), I shouted for another company to come back, and rode on until Doornkop and the Valley in which it stood came into view.
The Volunteer company, under Captain Blake, came up in extended order and opened fire on the kopje at a range of 2,000 yards, afterwards advancing somewhat down the slope so as to get within closer range. Captain Gilbert, whose company was marching just in front of Captain Wisden's, had already sent one half-company off to rising ground on the right, and had taken the other to a similar position on the left, so that I had no apprehension as regarded our flanks.
The kopje being rather beyond effective rifle fire, I sent Coleman, my groom, riding back to the column to ask the senior officer to send me a gun from the battery. Evidently not caring to assume the responsibility of so weighty a matter, he sent Coleman on to the General, who was quite two miles away, so that by the time the gun had arrived the opportunity for its use had gone; as the Boers disappeared directly we showed that we meant business.
It might be as well to state here that after this little episode, and to avoid the chance of any similar useless delays on future occasions, the General invariably ordered one gun to accompany the rear guard so as to be handy in case it was wanted.
Advancing down the slope, and still keeping up a fire to keep the enemy under his cover, we came shortly into view of H company. They had, upon being suddenly greeted with a shower of bullets from their rear, discreetly dropped into a donga which, fortunately, lay almost at their feet, and, safe in the security of this cover, had opened a smart fire upon the trees and rocks of the kopje. Not a man of the enemy could be seen, but they could see our men, as a poor fellow of H company, moving from one part of the donga to another, received a bullet in his head and dropped immediately.[12] The Cape cart which carried the officers' mess property stuck in the drift across the small donga, the ponies jibbed, and no persuasion would induce them to move, so the cart was emptied, the harness cut up, and the ponies turned loose—all this being done under a dropping fire from the enemy.
As soon as the shelling was over, H company withdrew, bringing their dead with them, the companies resumed their former positions, and the march was continued. We halted that night at Welgevreden, where the Camerons, being on duty, threw out the usual pickets.