Of these Sergeant-Major Marsham, Lance-Sergeant Elliott, and Private Burn-Murdoch are in hospital at Karree Siding, and Sergeant McNamara rejoined for duty at Kroonstad.
Though General Tucker was constrained, by the wisest military considerations, to rebuke men who, while displaying magnificent qualities of courage and self-sacrifice in attempts to save their wounded comrades, might have endangered the lives of others, we may be sure that he made a mental reservation and wished in his heart that he might have regiments of such men to lead. If the records of his own gallant career have been truthfully kept, he won promotion in the Bhootan expedition of 1866 and in fights against the Zulus twelve years later, and paved the way to a Knight Commandership of the Bath, not so much by obeying the dictates of caution as by brilliant leadership and by conspicuous valour that was almost reckless in its disregard of personal danger. But he knew, with the intuition of a soldier’s quick sympathies, that the corps to whose Colonel his words were addressed wanted no incentive to boldness, but rather a lesson in self-restraint. He had seen a great deal of their gallantry in that action for himself, and his brigadiers had told him more. Lumsden’s Horse, at any rate, had no reason to be ashamed of the way in which they had taken their ‘baptism of fire.’
The devotion of Corporal Firth in sticking to his wounded officer, Lieutenant Crane, under a withering fire was a deed of valour that should be famous throughout the Empire.
LIEUTENANT C.E. CRANE
All the men with Lieutenant Crane behaved very well. Two non-commissioned officers and eleven troopers went with him to hold the isolated kopje on the right flank. Of this gallant party of fourteen, three were killed, four were wounded and taken prisoners, four escaped with their clothes riddled with bullet-holes but otherwise unhurt; one, Corporal Firth, could have escaped, but preferred to remain with his wounded officer, to bind up his wounds if possible, to go with him into captivity perhaps, to share death with him if need be. Troopers Reginald Macdonald and Leslie Gwatkin Williams also performed deeds of splendid self-sacrifice. Of those who escaped, Sergeant-Major Marsham (wounded), Bugler McKenzie, Sergeant Walker, Lance-Sergeant J.S. Elliott (wounded), and Trooper Radford, whose parting shot while he sat in the saddle brought a Boer down, are deserving of the highest praise for the way in which they stuck to the led horses and rode off with them under heavy fire.
These men were not tried veterans; they were taking their parts in the first battle of their first campaign. But several of them had been friends from their youth up, and all of them were Anglo-Indians—men whose exile from the land of their birth serves but to intensify their love for England and her greatness. Loyalty to friend and country! This is the magic touchstone of the soldier’s discipline and heroism.
Photo: J. Charlesworth
J.H. BURN-MURDOCH
Should any cynic dare to say that the men who did these deeds were thirsting for glory, or inspired by a hope of winning the Cross for Valour, or even conscious of doing more than a common soldier’s duty demanded, let him read the narrative of their actions, as told by themselves or their comrades, and be answered! In the whole literature of war I know nothing more realistic than Trooper Burn-Murdoch’s description of the incident in which he was a half-unconscious participator; when lying wounded he was taken from under fire by Captain Chamney, and finally carried out of action on horseback in that officer’s arms. The story is too characteristic of the battlefield to bear mutilation. For the sake of space, though with reluctance, some picturesque passages must be sacrificed; but, for the rest, as Trooper Burn-Murdoch told it originally in his letters to the ‘Englishman,’ he shall tell it again here: