The task which the First Division had before it was to force a passage into the Uluguru Mountains, the main entrances to which the enemy was preparing stoutly to defend. The principal highway lay some distance to the east of the Matomba mission-station, and here the main battle was in progress; but commanding the road, along which the Gold Coast Regiment marched when it moved out of its camp at Matomba, the enemy had occupied a very strong position, and was using Kikirunga Hill—a sugar-loaf-shaped mountain crowned with a clump of trees and underwood, rising clear above its fellows to a height of perhaps 3000 feet—as an observation point. The Regiment was ordered to expel him, if possible, from this hill.[hill.]
At 7 a.m. on the 4th September the Regiment moved out of camp, and about two hours later the enemy opened fire with a couple of howitzers, upon the road a little ahead of the marching troops. No casualties were inflicted, but the Regiment was halted, moved off the road, and took up a sheltered position on the right side of it, in a gut between two hills.
Captain Jack Butler, V.C., D.S.O.—who had won both these distinctions while serving with the Gold Coast Regiment in the Kameruns—was then sent forward with the Pioneer Company to reconnoitre the enemy’s position.
Captain Butler and his men advanced up the road, which climbed steeply, with many windings and sinuosities, towards the head of the pass—leading into the Uluguru Mountains—which was situated near the foot of the hills of which, on the left side of the road, Kikirunga is the culminating point. This road ran, from the spot where the Regiment was halted, up a sharp ascent and along a narrow valley, on either side of which kopjes of gradually increasing height rose at frequent intervals. The first of these, situated about a mile and a half from his starting-point, and lying to the left of the road, was occupied by Captain Butler and the Pioneer Company, and a picket was sent out to take up a position at a spot where, a little further on, the road took a deep U-shaped bend toward the left.
KIKIRUNGA HILL
From the kopje occupied by the Pioneers a general view of the enemy’s position could be obtained. On the left front, about a mile away as the crow flies, Kikirunga arose skyward from the huddle of lower hills in which it has its base, and from one of the slopes of these, somewhat to the right of the peak, an enemy machine-gun opened fire upon the position which Butler had occupied. The beginning of the U-shaped bend which the road took to the left lay beneath and slightly to the right of Butler’s kopje; and on the far side of this loop, where the road, which throughout ran between an avenue of mango trees, wound back towards the right, another kopje, about a hundred feet higher than that upon which the Pioneers were posted, ran steeply upward to a crest which was held by the enemy, and from which presently another machine-gun also opened fire.
| Bassano, Ld. | ||
| CAPT. J. F. P. BUTLER, V.C., D.S.O. | ||
| 60th Rifles. | ||
| To face p. 28. |
The road, still climbing steeply, wound round the foot of this kopje, and between a succession of similar hills; and from the right of it a big clump of mountains, some 2500 feet above valley-level, rose in a great mass of grassy and boulder-strewn slopes. All these hillsides were covered with shaggy, sun-dried grass about two feet in height, broken by many outcrops of rock, a few trees and patches of scrub, with little copses and spinneys in the valley-hollows between hill and hill. In the middle distance a great dome-shaped peak, some miles further away than Kikirunga, rose majestically, dominating the landscape and presenting a wide facet of precipitous grey cliff to the eye of the observer. The view obtained from the kopje which Butler had occupied was a splendid example of tropical mountain scenery; but from the standpoint of the leader of an attacking force its strength was even more impressive than its beauty. The enemy had had ample time in which to choose his ground, and he had availed himself to the full of his opportunity.