CHAPTER VI
BY RAIL AND ROUTE MARCH TO BLOEMFONTEIN

A week was more than enough in which to exhaust all the charms that A Company could find round about its dusty camp at Maitland. The fragrance from woodland belts of pine and eucalyptus trees soon began to pall; there was little to refresh the eye in that changeless view across unbroken flats, where a grey haze hung morning, noon, and eve, veiling the distant mountains northward; the beauty of Table Mountain, as seen from there, with kloof-fretted steeps towering up to the clouds, is not a joy for ever; and Cape Town shows its least attractive side towards Maitland, which in itself is the embodiment of suburban dreariness, having but two places of entertainment—a swimming bath and an observatory. As admission to the latter can only be gained by a special permit from the Astronomer Royal, Lumsden’s Horse had few opportunities to appreciate the wild dissipation of ascending its quaint old tower, which, indeed, most of them mistook for a dismantled windmill. And the amusements that Cape Town offers to soldiers of less than commissioned rank had few temptations for troopers of Lumsden’s Horse. Mount Nelson, with its gay crowd of fair women and maimed heroes, was to them but a vision of the life that had been. How those dainty damsels would have been shocked to see a trooper in weather-stained khaki and ammunition boots treading the glades and terraced heights of that South African Olympus! But not more shocked than a man of Lumsden’s Horse would have felt at finding himself in such a situation. Ridiculous prejudice, of course, and to be condemned by all right-thinking people in whose opinion the soldier’s uniform is a badge of honour. Yes! but like many other badges it has to be worn with a difference; and nobody knows better than those who have tried the experiment of putting it on that a private soldier’s service kit is not the garb in which one would choose to appear where fashion and beauty congregate. A man may have served through a whole campaign in the lowest ranks, obedient to every command, however humiliating or distasteful, and not have felt the yoke gall him half so sorely as it does when he first realises the social inferiority that it implies. Let us have done with cant and confess at once that a man who puts on the common soldier’s uniform for active service, whether he be Volunteer or Regular, thereby renounces all claims to the rights and privileges of a gentleman. The gay haunts of a city are not for him then, if he cherishes his self-respect, and the troopers of Lumsden’s Horse had that truth impressed upon them long before their week of rest at Cape Town came to an end. They were no more squeamish than others, and their experiences in this direction have been shared by every Yeomanry corps and Volunteer detachment, after the first burst of enthusiasm on their account exhausted itself. Cheerful endurance of these things may be counted not least among the merits of men who gave up much to serve their country in her hour of need, and to ignore them would be to misunderstand the nature of many sacrifices made by the rank-and-file of a regiment like Lumsden’s Horse. In times more propitious they would have appreciated fully all the charms that Cape Town can offer; but, as it was, the parting had no great pang for them, and A Company hailed with unalloyed delight the order for an advance northward into the land of infinite possibilities. There was to be no route marching for that detachment, the Cape Colony lines being comparatively clear of troop traffic; so that the prospect of reaching Bloemfontein by rail without serious interruption seemed almost a certainty. It was on Friday, March 30, that Colonel Lumsden received, direct from headquarters, the welcome intimation that he and his two companies were wanted at the front. Colonel Lumsden naturally felt himself very fortunate in receiving orders by which his corps was chosen for active service while Regular regiments and Yeomanry companies waited impatiently at the base in Cape Town; but Lord Roberts needed mounted troops more than infantry just then. Everybody accepted this as the first real step of the great march on which their hearts were set, and its crowning triumph at Pretoria. They were not to be out of it after all. And we may be sure that they wanted no second call when the warning came for them to get their kits packed and be ready for a start by train the next morning. This was glad news for all except four unfortunate troopers who, much to their sorrow, had to be left in hospital at Cape Town. These were James Lee-Stewart, of whose case Colonel Lumsden wrote a week or so earlier; Knyvitt Boileau, of Tyrhoot; Hubert Noel Shaw, of Palumpur; and John Canute Doyle, of the Transport Detachment. Of others, who were invalids on the voyage, Howard Hickley had quite recovered, and Clayton-Daubeny, pleading hard that he was quite fit to ride and shoot, in spite of a broken collar-bone, got permission to rejoin his section for duty. So keen were the men to be near the fighting line that they have hardly recorded their impressions of the strange country through which they passed; and but for an incidental note here and there, like the opening paragraph of the following letter, we might almost imagine that profound peace reigned throughout the country. Yet the letter was dated only three days after our troops had suffered so heavily at Sanna’s Post. Writing on the morning of April 3, a trooper whose letters were sent to the ‘Englishman’ said:—

It is wonderful to think that this very afternoon we shall be in Bloemfontein, and may see the great old man whose masterly tactics have so completely turned the tide of war.

On Friday we heard the line was clear, and this news was quickly followed by a warning to hold ourselves in readiness. Immediately on top came the order to be at the railway station the following day by 1 o’clock. A mighty packing up of kit and piling up of supplies resulted in a successful transference of our goods and chattels to the station by the appointed time, and at 6 o’clock we steamed out of Cape Town in two trains, one following the other. When we left camp ammunition was served out, fifty rounds a man, and the weight of it has not added to our comfort.

The railway journey has proved very pleasant so far. However, some slight description of how we are packed aboard may be interesting. We heard, with no little misgiving, that we were to be eight in a compartment, for we expected nothing but the ordinary straight-backed wooden carriage, and no chance of lying down at all during the three days to be occupied in journeying to the Free State capital. So it was a pleasant surprise to find first-class corridor carriages comfortably upholstered in leather, with sleeping accommodation in each compartment for four men at a time. There were one or two second-class carriages equally comfortable, with the additional advantage of an extra tier of berths, accommodating six sleepers, one on the floor and one in the passage, and the whole boiling of us slept the sleep of the just the whole night through. Rations consisted of tinned corned beef and biscuits, suspiciously like dog biscuits, but good to eat nevertheless—for people with sharks’ teeth and stomachs of brass. But nearly everywhere we stopped there were coffee-shops, where you paid sixpence for everything, and an ordinary chota hazri sort of meal ran up to about half-a-crown. As we travel up country we find everything very dear, and we wonder Government does not make some effort to arrange that the troops should be supplied with tinned goods at reasonable prices. If private contractors can get stuff up, certainly Government, which has first call on the railways, can too.

The horses—poor devils!—are packed ten, eleven, and twelve in a cattle-truck, and the way they kick at times is a caution. All along the train the trucks are broken and splintered. Oh! for the luxury of our Indian horseboxes. However, three times a day we manage to feed and water the poor brutes, and though their meals are somewhat scratch they don’t do so badly. Forage is of the best—splendid compressed hay, and English oats and bran.

De Aar was the first place of real interest we came to, and there we beheld a battered armoured train, covered with bullet marks. Then we touched at Naauwpoort, which was crowded with soldiers. The train stopped just opposite Rensburg, so we got out and had a game of football, with an empty tin for ball and broken saddles for goal-posts, right on the place where the battle of Rensburg had been fought a few months previously. From there we could see the flat-topped broken cone of Cole’s Kop rising from a rock-roughened plain like a huge step-pyramid, with sheer escarpments, up which the Naval Brigade hauled two fifteen-pounders by means of a wire rope, and struck terror into the Boers at Colesberg when those guns opened fire from that apparently inaccessible height. Afterwards came Norval’s Pont, where we prepared to cross the Orange River. Unluckily, we crossed at 1 in the morning, when very little could be seen. It is wonderful how the Sappers have repaired the bridge. We spun across in pontoons with the water swirling within two feet of us. Shortly after crossing the river we were halted and ordered to draw another fifty rounds of ammunition per man, and to post two sentries to each carriage; every man to wear his bandolier, have his rifle handy, and be ready to turn out at a moment’s notice. Firing had been heard that evening, and there was no doubt Boers were in the vicinity. Later, some thirty miles south of Bloemfontein, we heard that the troops stationed to protect the railway line had been out in the surrounding kopjes during the night, and that a Boer commando, 600 strong, had been seen travelling south. So we are bang in the thick of it now, and ere many more hours have passed we shall be within sound of the firing, for we hear fighting is going on steadily to the north of Bloemfontein. The men are in splendid spirits and health, and wild to get a turn at the enemy. Altogether we have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the comfortable and speedy journey we have made to the front.

The man who could regard De Aar—sun-scorched, arid, dust-stifled De Aar—as the first place of interest on that long railway journey, simply because an armoured train ‘covered with bullet marks’ was standing in the station, must have been in a very warlike frame of mind indeed. But perhaps the comfortable railway travelling, so conducive to the ‘sleep of the just,’ may account for much. Probably the slumberous heat of afternoon had caused him to doze before the train slowed down at Stellenbosch, which was a place of much notoriety at the time; and picturesque, too, with its great oak avenues, dating from a day when Commandant Van der Stel, the planter of them, was there with his young wife in the very foreposts of Dutch civilisation, not much more than thirty miles from Cape Town; and more picturesque still because of its quaint thatched houses as old as the oaks. Stellenbosch is a great centre of education, and, according to the guide-books, it has a home for the training of a limited number of poor whites. We know the ‘poor whites’ for whose training a home was provided at Stellenbosch about the time when A Company of Lumsden’s Horse passed that way and afterwards. They were mostly officers of high rank who had not distinguished themselves, and for whom a refuge had to be found where they could do no greater mischief than send useless remounts from that depôt to the front. So Stellenbosch grew in repute, and visits to it (without return tickets) were so frequent, that an expressive verb had to be coined for use in everyday conversation. The phrase ‘I’ll be Stellenbosched if I do,’ became quite familiar, and many a gallant officer knew to his cost what it meant. Rustication in that old Dutch settlement under leafy arcades, where, in ordinary times, ‘the stillness of the cloisters reigns,’ was not the only penalty. These, however, were things not known to recent arrivals like Lumsden’s Horse, who might have met and hobnobbed with the latest candidate for Stellenbosch and have been none the wiser. So they went on their way thinking nothing of the old Dutch town and its new notoriety, and in the darkness of night, when the new moon showed no more than a crescent thread of silver, were winding by sharp curves and steep gradients up the kloofs of Hex River Mountains towards the Great Karroo. Lumsden’s troopers saw little of the glorious landscape that is opened up at that height. Those who were not asleep had no light to see it by but the cold light of the stars, and that seemed to be swallowed up in the depths of impenetrable shadow, except where the lamps of Worcester Town, in the plains 2,500 feet below, twinkled like feeble reflections on a wine-dark sea. Then the swift dawn came, and when the sun rose they were crossing the Great Karroo, which at that time of year—the true winter of Cape Colony—wore its least attractive garb. Bare patches of sandy soil gaped between scattered clumps of blue-green scrub, where a month or so later it would be glowing with the purple and gold and scarlet flowers of lilies and asters innumerable, and the gorgeous crowns of mesembryanthemums of every conceivable shade, from white through primrose and orange to the deepest crimson. In its winter state the Great Karroo brings back to travellers of wide African experience clear memories of the Northern Soudan. In all chief physical features the two regions, so widely separated, are curiously alike. Here are pyramidal mountains with flat-topped crowns rising wall-like above the conical base exactly resembling the ‘Jebels’ on which one has looked with weary eyes, day after day, through the rippling heat of the Soudan deserts. In some parts of the Karroo these mountains close upon narrow gorges, along which the railway winds, and its sudden turns round rocky buttresses seem so familiar to one who knows the old military line above Wady Halfa that he can imagine himself travelling once more through the desolate Batn el Hagar towards Khartoum. To men for whom the rugged Karroo had no such associations with the land of mysterious fascination, there may well have been a wearisome monotony in the unvarying repetition of similar forms—the vast plains whereon no tree bigger than the Acacia horrida grows, and where the houses, if any, are so widely separated that they only serve to deepen the impression of melancholy solitude; the waterless rivers, the bare brown kops. For full appreciation of the Karroo one must have breathed its invigorating air from childhood, and seen it in seasons of beauty with all the glory of its summer raiment on. De Aar Junction is no more than a huge collection of railway sheds and equally hideous houses set in the most barren plain of the Great Karroo; but Lumsden’s Horse saw it busy with many signs of military preparation for a forward movement, and so it seemed to them the very gateway of the fateful future, in the shaping of which they were to have a hand. That night they crossed the Orange River at Norval’s Pont, where Railway Pioneers, mostly skilled artificers from the Johannesburg mines, under Major Seymour—‘the greatest of mechanical engineers,’ as Colonel Girouard styled him—were hard at work, night and day, repairing the broken bridge, while baggage was being transferred by the wire trolly high overhead. Lumsden’s Horse crossed the pontoon ‘deviation’ to a train on the farther side, and when morning dawned they were journeying slowly—with many precautions against possible surprises by marauding Boers—to the goal of their hopes. Bloemfontein was reached by A Company in the afternoon of April 3, when they went into camp at Rustfontein, two miles from the town, and became part of the 8th M.I. Regiment, under the command of that very able leader, Colonel ‘Watty’ Ross, whose portrait appears on the opposite page. Of him Colonel Lumsden writes: ‘No better man could have been chosen to command a body of Irregular Horse. Capable, tactful, with a keen eye for a country, and a man hard to beat in the saddle, he was in fact an ideal leader at the game he had to play. We were under his command from the time the 8th M.I. was formed at Bloemfontein, early in April 1900, taking part in every action of that eventful march to Pretoria, and the 8th M.I. had the honour of scouting in front of headquarters throughout.’ After the memorable June 5, when the capital of the South African Republic fell into our hands, Lumsden’s Horse were placed for some time on communications at Irene and Kalfontein, but their Colonel, tiring of this inaction, applied to General Smith-Dorrien for more congenial employment. His wish was shortly afterwards gratified, and Lumsden’s Horse, with mutual regrets on both sides, were transferred to another column, thus severing their connection with the 8th M.I. and the leader whose soldierly qualities had endeared him to all ranks. Their respect for him found appropriate expression long afterwards, when every man of the corps, from Colonel Lumsden downwards, subscribed for a badge, the regimental ‘LH’ in diamonds, and this they presented to Mrs. Ross in token of their admiration for her husband as a commander and in appreciation of the considerate kindness he had shown to all ranks while they served under him. That the admiration was not all on one side may be gathered from an incident that occurred some time after Lumsden’s Horse were embodied with the 8th Mounted Infantry Corps, and Colonel Lumsden thinks justly that no better proof could be given of the able and smart class of men he had in his command than the following remark from Colonel Ross: ‘Lumsden, whenever I ask you to send me an A.D.C. or galloper, never mind sending me one of your officers; your troopers are just the class I want.’

Photo: Dickinson
MAJOR (LOCAL COLONEL) W.C. ROSS, C.B.