Book: Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899 1900)

A >> A. G. Hales >> Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899 1900)




Then once again the pipes pealed out, and "Lochaber No More" cut through
the stillness like a cry of pain, until one could almost hear the widow in
her Highland home moaning for the soldier she would welcome back no more.
Then, as if touched by the magic of one thought, the soldiers turned their
tear-damp eyes from the still form in the shallow grave towards the heights
where Cronje, the "lion of Africa," and his soldiers stood. Then every
cheek flushed crimson, and the strong jaws set like steel, and the veins on
the hands that clasped the rifle barrels swelled almost to bursting with
the fervour of the grip, and that look from those silent, armed men spoke
more eloquently than ever spoke the tongues of orators. For on each
frowning face the spirit of vengeance sat, and each sparkling eye asked
silently for blood. God help the Boers when next the Highland pibroch
sounds! God rest the Boers' souls when the Highland bayonets charge, for
neither death, nor hell, nor things above, nor things below, will hold the
Scots back from their blood feud. At the head of the grave, at the point
nearest the enemy, the General was laid to sleep, his officers grouped
around him, whilst in line behind him his soldiers were laid in a double
row, wrapped in their blankets. No shots were fired over the dead men
resting so peacefully, only the salute was given, and then the men marched
campwards as the darkness of an African night rolled over the
far-stretching breadth of the veldt. To the gentlewoman who bears their
General's name the Highland Brigade sends its deepest sympathy. To the
mothers and the wives, the sisters and the sweethearts, in cottage home by
hillside and glen they send their love and good wishes--sad will their
Christmas be, sadder the new year. Yet, enshrined in every womanly heart,
from Queen Empress to cottage girl, let their memory lie, the memory of the
men of the Highland Brigade who died at Magersfontein.





SCOUTS AND SCOUTING.

DRISCOLL, KING OF SCOUTS.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.


I have a weakness for scouts. Good scouts seem to me to be of more
importance to an army in the field than all the tape-tied intelligence
officers out of Hades. They don't get on well with the regular officers as
a rule, because scouts are like poets--they are born, not manufactured.
They are people who do not feel as if God had forsaken them for ever if
they don't get a shave and a clean shirt every morning, they are just a
trifle rough in their appearance and manners; but they ride as straight as
they talk, and shoot straighter than they ride. They have to be built for
the business. All the training in the world won't make a scout unless
nature has commenced the job; mere pluck is not worth a dog's bark in this
line of life, though without pluck no scout is worth a wanton woman's
smile. A good scout wants any amount of courage; he wants a level head--a
head of ice, and a heart of fire. He wants to know by instinct when to rush
onward and chance his life to the heels of his horse and the goodness of
God, and he wants to know with unfailing certainty when to crawl into cover
and hide. He must understand how to ride with no other guide than the lay
of the country, the course of the sun, or the position of the stars. He
must have eyes that note every broken hill, every little hollow, every
footprint of man or horse on the veldt.

He must be an excellent judge of distance, of time, of numbers. He must be
able to tell at a glance whether a cloud of dust is caused by moving troops
or by the action of the elements. Above all, he must be truthful, not given
to exaggeration of his friends' strength or his enemy's weakness. When he
makes his report it should need no corroboration. If a scout is worth his
salt, his advice should be accepted and acted upon promptly.

I often go out with the scouts; they are the eyes of the army. A man who
knocks around with scouting parties knows more, sees more, hears more of
the real state of affairs than nine-tenths of the staff officers ever know,
hear, or see. Men fresh from the Old Country seldom make good scouts. Take
the Yeomanry, for instance. They are plucky enough, but not one in a
hundred of them has the making of a scout in him. All his fathers and his
grandfather's and his great-grandfather's breeding trends in other
directions, and there is an awful lot more in the breeding of men than most
folk imagine. The American makes a good scout. If he knows nothing of the
life, he soon picks it up. So does the Australian, and the Canadian, and
the Colonial-born South African. Something in the life appeals to them.
They get the "hang" of it with very little trouble. There are some
English-born men, however, who develop into rattling great scouts. These
men are mostly adventurous fellows, who have roamed about the world, and
had the corners knocked off them. I have two of them in my mind's eye just
at present. One of them is an Irishman named Driscoll, Captain of the
Scouts who are the eyes and ears of Rundle's army. The other is an
Englishman named Davies, a captain in the same gallant little band. The
first lieutenant is a Cape colonial of English extraction, named Brabant, a
gallant son of a gallant general. Captain Driscoll is a typical Irishman,
just such a man as the soul of Charles Lever would have revelled in, a man
of dauntless daring, with a heart of iron, and a face to match. Strangely
enough, the captain does not pride himself a bit on his pluck, but he
thinks a deuce of a lot of his beauty. As a matter of fact, he has the
courage of ten ordinary men, but he would not take a prize in a first-class
beauty show. (Lord send I may be far from the reach of his revolver when
this reaches his eye.) He has that dash of vanity in his composition which
I have found in all good Irishmen, and he prides himself far more on the
execution his eyes have done amidst the Dutch girls than of the work his
deadly rifle has wrought in the ranks of the Dutch mea Yet, if you want to
know if Driscoll can shoot, just go to Burmah, where for ten years he held
the position of captain in the Upper Burmah Volunteer Rifles. That was
where I heard of him first, as the most deadly rifle and revolver shot in
all the East.

The Boers know him now as the prince of rifle shots and the king of scouts.
He is standing in the wintry sunlight just in front of my tent as I am
writing, one hand on the bridle of his horse, rapping out Dutch oaths with
a strong Cork accent to a nigger who has not groomed his pet animal
properly. The nigger is very meek, for past experience has told him that
Irish blood is hot, and an Irishman's boot quick and heavy. He is a
picturesque figure, this Celtic scout leader, just such a picture as Phil
May could bring to life on a sheet of paper with a few strokes of his
master hand. He is about eleven stone in weight, and, roughly, five feet
eight, clean cut and strong, with a face which tells you he was born in
Cork, and had knocked about a lot in tropic lands; eight-and-thirty if he
is a day, though he swears at night around the camp fire that the pretty
Dutch girls have guessed his age as twenty-seven. He wears a slouch hat,
around which a green puggaree coils lovingly. In his right hand his rifle
rests as if it felt at home there. His coat is worn and shabby, khaki in
colour; riding pants of roughest yellow cords, patched in places
unspeakable, leggings around his sinewy calves, and feet planted in neat
boots make up the whole man. He is clean shaven except for a moustache,
dark brown in colour, which sprouts from his upper lip.

In his softer moments Driscoll tells us that it used to "cur-r-r-l" before
he had the "faver" in Burmah, and on such occasions we assure him that it
"cur-r-rls" even yet. It is more polite to agree with him than to cross
him--and a lot safer. He is as full of anecdote as heaven is of angels, and
I mean to use him in the sweet days of peace, unless some stay-at-home
journalist niches him from me in the meantime. Driscoll and Davies are fast
friends. The Englishman is not such a picturesque figure as the Irishman.
Englishmen seldom are, somehow; but he is a man, a real white man, all
over. He is rather a good-looking, well set-up young fellow, who always
looks as if he had just had a bath; not a dude by any manner of means, but
a fellow with a soft eye for a pretty ankle, and a hard fist for a foe--one
of those quiet chaps a man always likes to find close beside him in a row.
Driscoll almost weeps over him to me sometimes. "He's the devil's own at
close quarters," says the Irishman. "Never want a better chum when it comes
to bashing the enemy. If he could only shoot a bit 'straighther and talk a
bit sweether to the colleens he'd be perfect." All the same, I have, and
hold, my own opinion concerning the "talking." Many a smile which the
gallant Celt appropriated to himself as we rode out of a conquered town
seemed to me to belong of right to the rosy-faced Welsh lad on the
off-side. To hear these two men chatter over a glass of hot rum in my tent
at night one would think they had never faced danger. Yet never a day goes
by but one or the other of them has to run the gauntlet of Boer rifles;
whilst Jack Brabant, who is death on cigars or anything else that will emit
smoke, and who curls up and says little, has been near death so often that
it will be no stranger to him when it comes in all its finality.

Driscoll was in Burmah when the news came of the first disaster to the
Irish troops in South Africa. He threw up his business as lightly as a
coquette throws up a midsummer lover, and started for the war. At Bombay he
was stopped by a yard or two of red tape, and had to go back to Calcutta,
where he used his Irish tongue to such purpose that he got a permit to
leave India, and made his way to the scene of trouble. He first joined
General Gatacre as orderly officer. Later he was attached to the Border
Mounted Rifles as captain, and did splendid service at the battles of
Dordrecht and Labuschagne's Nek In the latter place he was the first man to
gallop into the Boer laager before the fight had ceased. Captain, then
Lieutenant, Davies was as close to his side as a shadow to a serpent, and
they only had fourteen men with them at the time. After this Driscoll,
whose skill as a scout had been remarked on all sides, was ordered to form
a body of fifty scouts to act as the very eyes of the rapidly moving
Colonial Division under General Brabant. This was promptly done, most of
the men picked being Colonial-born Britishers. Soon after the formation of
his band, Driscoll, with fifty men, attacked Rouxville from four sides at
once. Dashing in, he demanded surrender of the place, as if he had an army
at his back to enforce his demands, a piece of Irish impudent valour that
would have cost every man amongst the little band his life had the Boers
known that he was unbacked. But they did not know it, and consequently
surrendered, and he hoisted the British flag and disarmed the residents--a
really brilliant piece of work, for which Driscoll's Scouts have up to date
received no public credit.

The Scout and his men took a warm part in the, very warm fight at Wepener,
where many a good Briton fell. He had lost a good few fellows in the many
fights, but Driscoll's name soon charmed others to his little band. At
Jammersberg Drift the Scouts were so badly mauled that over a fourth of
their number were counted out, but the places of the fallen men were soon
filled, and to-day the number is almost complete. Driscoll has one
especially good quality. He never speaks slightingly of his enemy unless he
well deserves it. Few men have had so many hand-to-hand encounters with the
burghers as he has; few men have held their lives by virtue of their steady
hand on a rifle as frequently as this wild, good-natured, merry Irishman
has done. Yet of the Boer as a fighter he speaks most highly. "He don't
like cold steel, and shmall blame to'm," says Driscoll, "but for the clever
tactics he's a devil of a chap, 'nd the men who run him down are mostly the
men who run away from him. They're not all heroes, any more than all women
are angels. Some of 'em are fit only for a dog's death, but most of 'em are
good men; and if I wasn't an Irishman I wouldn't mind being a Boer, for
they've no call to hang their heads and blush when this war is over."

I asked him if he had ever of his own knowledge come into contact with
anything savouring of white flag treachery. "Once I did," said the great
scout, and for a while his eyes were filled with a sombre fire which spoke
of the volcano under the genial human crust. "Onct," and he lapsed into the
brogue as he spoke; "only onct, and there's a debt owin' on it yet which
has got to be paid. It was at Karronna Ridge. I was out wid me scouts, 'nd
I saw a farmhouse flying the white flag--a great flag it was, too, as big
as a bed sheet. I'm not sure that it was not wan, too. I rode towards it,
thinking the people wanted to surrender, and sent two of me men, two young
lads they were--good boys, eager for duty. I sent 'em forward to ask what
was the matther inside; and when they got within fifteen paces of the house
the Boers inside opened fire from twenty rifles, and blew 'em out of the
saddle. I had to ride with me little troop for dear life then, for the
rocks all around us were alive with rifles. That house still stands; but if
Driscoll's name is Driscoll it's going to burn, and the cur who flew the
white flag in it, if I can get him, for the sake of the dead boys out on
the veldt there. That's the only dirty trick I knew them play, and they
must have been a lot of wasters, not like the general run of their
fighters."

Three nights ago Driscoll, Davies, Brabant, and twenty men camped in a
farmhouse a long way from the British lines, for these men scour the
country for many miles in all directions. The night was cold and rough, a
bleak wind whistling amidst the kopjes half a mile away. Just as the scouts
were sitting down to supper, the farmer's wife rushed in, and said to
Driscoll, in a voice between a sob and a scream, "Do you know, sir, that
our burghers are in the kopjes, and are watching the farm?" and as she
spoke she wrung her hands wildly. The Irish scout rose from the table and
bowed, as only an Irish scout can bow, for the "vrow" was about thirty
years of age, and pleasing to the eye beyond the lot of most women. "I am
awfully glad to hear it, madam," he said in his execrable Dutch. "I've been
looking for that commando for a week past. As they have doubtless sent a
message by you, please send this back for me. Tell their officers, if they
will accept an offer to come and dine with Driscoll's Scouts here to-night,
they shall be made welcome to the best we have in the way of kindness. For
it must be cold waiting outside in the wind. Tell them they shall go as
they come, unmolested and unwatched, and in the morning we'll come out and
give 'em all the fight they want in this world." Then, sweeping the floor
with a graceful wave of his green puggareed soft slouch hat, Driscoll bowed
the astonished dame out of the dining-room, whilst his officers and men
nearly choked themselves with their hot soup, as they noticed him
surreptitiously drawing a pocket mirror from his breeches pocket. For well
they knew that the dare-devil leader was thinking far more of the effect
his looks had had on the Dutch housewife than of the effect of his message
on the enemy. Yet, at the first promise of dawn, he unrolled himself from
his blanket on the hard floor, and was the foremost man to show in the
open, where the enemy's rifles might reach him. But no rifles sounded, for
the Boers had declined the invitation both to supper and breakfast.





HUNTING AND HUNTED.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.


There is a funny side to pretty nearly every kind of tragedy if one only
has the humorous edge of his nature sufficiently well developed to see it.
Not that the humour is always apparent at the time--that comes later. I am
led to these reflections as I watch Lieutenant "Jack" Brabant, of the
Scouts, dancing a wild war dance round our little camp fire. He is a
picturesque figure in the firelight, this thirty-year-old son of the
renowned General Brabant, ten stone weight I should say, all whipcord and
fencing wire, rather a hard-faced man; no feather-bed frontiersman this,
but a tough, hard-grained bit of humanity, who has fought niggers and
hunted for big game at an age when most young fellows are thinking more of
poetry and pretty faces than of hard knocks and harder sport. I know him
for a rattling good shot at either man or beast, a fine bushman, and a
dandy horseman. He is a rather quiet fellow, as a rule, but all the
quietness is out of him to-night, and he only wants to be stripped of his
tight yellow jacket, cord breeches, leather gaiters, soft slouch hat with
green puggaree, and then, given a coat of black paint, he would pass well
for some warrior chief doing a death dance in the smoke. He is boiling with
passion, his left fist, clenched hard as the head of an axe, moves up and
down, in and out, like the legs of a kicking mule midst a crowd of
cart-horses. In his right he swings his Mauser carbine, and a man don't
need to be a descendant of a race of prophets to know that something has
gone gravely wrong with the lieutenant, otherwise he would not be making a
circus of himself in this fantastic fashion.

I lay my pencil aside for a minute or two to catch what he is saying, and
when I have got the hang of the story I don't wonder he feels as mad as a
wooden-legged man on a wet mud-bank. He had been out all day since the very
break of dawn with a couple of scouts, searching the kopjes for a notorious
Boer spy, whose cleverness and audacity had made him a thorn in our side.
If there was a man in the British lines capable of running the "slim" Boer
to earth, that man was Lieutenant Jack Brabant. It had been a grim hunt,
for the spy was worthy of his reputation, and the pursuers had to move with
their fingers on their triggers, and a rash move would have meant death.
All the forenoon he dodged them, in and out of the kopjes, along the
sluits, up and down the dongas; sometimes they pelted him at long range
with flying bullets, sometimes he sent them a reminder of the same sort.
And so the day wore on; but at last, towards evening, they fixed him so
that he had to make a dash out across the veldt. He was splendidly mounted,
and when the time came for a dash he did not waste any time making poetry.
Neither did Brabant and his two men; they galloped at full speed after the
fleetly flying figure, and when they saw that a broad and deep donga ran
right across his track, cutting him off from the long line of kopjes for
which he was making, they counted him as theirs. He only had one chance, to
gallop into the donga, jump out of the saddle and fire at them as they
closed in on him; and, as they rode far apart, it was a million to one on
missing in his hurry in the fading light. But the gods had decided
otherwise, for the whiplike crack of rifles suddenly cut the air, and the
bullets fell so thick around the pursuers that the three men could almost
breathe lead. Half a mile away, on the far side of the donga, appeared a
squad of Yeomanry, blazing away like veritable seraphs at Brabant and his
men, whilst they let the flying Boer go free. Brabant whipped out his
handkerchief, and waved it frantically; but the lead only whistled the
faster, and he had only one chance for his life, and that was to wheel and
ride at full speed for the nearest cover, where he and his men hid until
the Yeomen rode up. Then Brabant hailed them, and asked them what the devil
they meant by trying to blow him and his men out of the saddle.

There was a pause in the ranks of the Yeomen, then a voice lisped through
the gathering gloom, "Are you fellahs British?"

"Yes, d--n you; did you think we were springbok?"

"No, by Jove, but we thought you were beastly Booahs. Awfully sorry if
we've caused you any inconvenience. What were you chasing the other fellah
foah, eh?"

"Oh!" howled the disgusted backwoodsman with a snort of wrath, "we only
wanted to know if he'd cut his eye tooth yet."

"Bah Jove," quoth the Yeoman, "you fellahs are awfully sporting, don't yer
know."

"Yes," snarled the angry South African, "and the next time you Johnnies
mistake me for a Booah and plug at me, I'll just take cover and send you
back a bit of lead to teach you to look before you tighten your finger on a
trigger."

Talking of the Yeomen brings back a good yarn that is going round the camps
at their expense. They are notorious for two things--their pluck and their
awful bad bushcraft. They would ride up to the mouth of a foeman's guns
coolly and gamely enough, but they can't find their way home on the veldt
after dark to save their souls, and so fall into Boer traps with a
regularity that is becoming monotonous. Recently a British officer who had
business in a Boer laager asked a commander why they set the Yeomen free
when they made them prisoners. "Oh!" quoth the Boer, with a merry twinkle
in his eye, "those poor Yeomen of yours, we can always capture them when we
want them." This is not a good story to tell if you want an _encore_,
if you happen to be sitting round a Yeoman table or camp fire.

But it is time I got back to the subject which lay in my mind when I sat
down to write this epistle. The lieutenant's war dance took me off the
track for a while, but I thought his story would come in nicely under the
heading of "Hunting and Hunted." Camp life gets dull at times, so does camp
food, the eternal round of fried flour cakes and mutton makes a man long
for something which will remind him that he has still a palate, so when one
of the scouts came in and told me that he had seen three herds of
vildebeestes, numbering over a hundred each, and dozens of little mobs of
springbok and blesbok, within ten miles of camp, away towards Doornberg, I
made up my mind to ride out next day, and have a shot for luck. My friend
Driscoll, captain of the Scouts, rammed a lot of sage advice into me
concerning Boers known to be in force at Doornberg. I assured him that I
had no intention of allowing myself to drift within range of any of the
veldtsmen, so taking a sporting Martini I mounted my horse and set forth,
intending to have a real good time among the "buck." At a Kaffir kraal I
picked up a half-caste "boy," who assured me that he knew just where to
pick up the "spoor" of the vildebeeste, and he was as good as his boast,
for within a couple of hours he brought me within sight of a mob of about
fifty of the animals, calmly grazing. I worked my way towards them as well
as I could, leaving the "boy" to hold my horse; but, though I was careful
according to my lights, I was not sufficiently good as a veldtsman to get
within shooting distance before they saw me or scented me. Suddenly I saw a
fine-looking fellow, about as big as a year-and-a-half-old steer, trot out
from the herd. He came about twenty yards in my direction, and I had a
grand chance to watch him through my strong military glasses. He looked for
all the world like a miniature buffalo bull, the same ungainly head and
fore-quarters, big, heavy shoulders, neat legs, shapely barrel, light loin,
and hindquarters, the same proppy, ungainly gait. I unslung my rifle to
have a shot at him, when he wheeled and blundered back to the herd, and the
lot streamed off at a pace which the best hunter in England would have
found trying, in spite of the clumsiness of their movements. The half-caste
grinned as he came towards me with the horses, grinned with such a glorious
breadth of mouth that I could see far enough down his black and tan throat
to tell pretty well what he had for breakfast. This annoyed me. I like an
open countenance in a servant, but I detest a mouth that looks like a mere
burial ground for cold chicken. We rode on for a mile or two, and then saw
a pretty little herd of springbok about eighteen hundred yards away on the
left. Slipping down into a donga, I left the horse and crawled forward,
getting within nice, easy range. I dropped one of the pretty little
beauties. I tried a flying shot at the others as they raced away like magic
things through the grass, which climbed half-way up their flanks, but it
was lead wasted that time.

My coffee-coloured retainer gathered up the spoil, and paid me a compliment
concerning my shooting, though well I knew he had sized me up as a
"wastrel" with a rifle, for his shy eyes gave the lie to his oily tongue.
We hunted round for awhile, and then from the top of a little kopje I saw a
beautiful herd of vildebeestes one hundred and sixteen in number, lumbering
slowly towards where we stood. The wind blew straight from them towards us,
so that I had no fear on the score of scent. Climbing swiftly down until
almost level with the veldt, I lay cosily coiled up behind a rock, and
waited for the quarry. They came at last, Indian file, about a yard and a
half separating one from the other, not a hundred and twenty yards from
where I lay. I had plenty of time to pick and choose, and plenty of time to
take aim, so did not hurry myself. Sighting for a spot just behind the
shoulder, I sent a bit of lead fair through a fine beast, and expected to
see him drop, but he did nothing of the kind. For one brief second the
animal stood as if paralysed; then, with a leap and a lurch, he dashed on
with his fellows. I fired again, straight into the shoulder this time, and
brought him down; but he took a third bullet before he cried
_peccavi_. I had a good time for pretty near the whole of that day,
and was lamenting that I had not brought a Cape cart and pair of horses
with me to bring home the spoil, when, happening to look into the face of
my brown guide, I saw that his complexion had turned the colour of blighted
sandalwood. He did not speak, but swift as thought ripped out his knife,
and cut the thongs which bound the springbok and other trophies of the
day's sport to his saddle, letting everything fall in an undignified heap
on to the veldt. Then, without a word of farewell, or any other kind of
word for that matter, he drove his one spur into the flank of his wretched
nag, and fled round the bend of a kopje, which, thank Providence, was close
handy, and as he went I saw something splash against a rock a dozen yards
behind him. I had glanced hurriedly over the veldt the moment I caught that
queer expression on the saffron face of my assistant, but as far as the eye
could reach I could see nothing. Now, however, looking backwards, I saw
three or four men riding out of a donga two thousand five hundred yards
away.

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