CHAPTER XIX

BATTLE OF MAAGHERSFONTEIN

IT was the morning of December 11th.

We had pushed on one hundred and twenty miles from the advanced base at De Aar, and marched more than forty miles into the enemy's field, though all of it was within one of the Crown colonies.

Three times the enemy had opposed us, each time teaching us more and more about their methods, their stubbornness, and the queer game they play of facing us as long as they can damage us, and retiring as we reach the moment when we expect to demolish them. But each time the fact remained that we had forced them out of their superb and shrewdly-chosen positions.

They learned a great deal in these reverses. They discovered that, sprinkle themselves as they would over the sheer face of a rock-strewn hill, and hide as they might among the rocks to shoot us in the open, or while we exposed ourselves on their hills, our valour would still lead us to storm their eyries and rush upon their soldiers regardless of their superior

numbers, their torrents of bullets, and their almost unbroken cover.

Our officers had been taught at Sandhurst that to attack an intrenched foe successfully requires a force three times as strong as the defenders. But we

forged ahead, as indifferent to such maxims as to the odds heaped high against us.

The profit the Boer took from this lesson he applied at Modder River for the first time in his history. Our shells had searched behind and between his adamantine shelters, and our soldiers had climbed up and into them, like lions which seek their prey in its most secret lairs.

Therefore the Boer, at Modder River, abandoned his rocks from behind which he had thought to blow the British into the sea, and ensconced himself in a line of trenches on the open veldt-trenches fringed with boughs and branches, which melted into the line of riverside trees behind them.

When we advanced to the next battle, near here, at Maaghersfontein, we had seen a great kopje swarming with the foe, and imagined it the place where we were to fight them-but this exhibition of their surplus numbers proved a mere blind. Their mass was in trenches on the veldt; the hill was merely where they placed their guns and kept their reinforcements.

After the Modder River fight, on November 28th, Lord Methuen halted us in camp until December 10th,

waiting, we believe, for the battalions of the Highland Brigade, for the great naval gun and the howitzer battery, which use lyddite, and for the sorely-needed cavalry, which came to us in the form of the 12th Lancers. The valiant Ninth Brigade of Yorkshire Light Infantry, 5th Northumberlands, Loyal North Lancashires, Northamptonshires, 9th Lancers, and Mounted Infantry, which had done such gallant work in the previous battles, were now to be scattered, and in some measure supplanted, by the Argylls, Seaforths, Gordons, Black Watch, and Highland Light Infantry of the fresher brigade. They were to take the centre, and form the bulk of the attacking line with the Guards' Brigade.

The King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Mounted Infantry, and the 5th Fusiliers were to form the extreme right, and part of the Northampton Regiment was down at Graspan, where it had so bravely resisted those Boers who had cut our railway line and telegraph only a few days before; but the bulk of the hardened brigade were to remain in the Modder River camp, and hold this position against a rear attack during the Maaghersfontein combat.

On the afternoon of Sunday, the 10th, the great 4'7 gun, with its crew of short and stocky sailormen in broad-rimmed straw hats covered with khaki, was dragged by thirty-six oxen, and escorted by men of the 5th Fusiliers, to a ridge three miles north of this

camp, overlooking the kopje infested by the Boers. The great gun shelled the hill wherever it was thought that the Boers could be seen, at ranges varying between six thousand and eight thousand yards.

Shells tore through the air with precisely the noise of an express train rushing at full speed, and when they burst they seemed to envelope an acre of ground in heavy brown smoke, which lifted and floated over the kopje as if it were a mass of the pulverised earth. It was said that windows three and a half miles away were rattled by each discharge. The noise was like the bark of a monster bull-dog, and the bursting of each shell sounded like the cough of a giant.

The Tommies dubbed the gun "Joey," and thus introduced humour into a campaign that had been strangely deficient in that helpful element, as well as placed a nickname where it must stick while this war should last.

It is believed that our shells fell among the Boers several times during the afternoon. The gun remained on the ridge all night, and defined the extreme left of the next day's battle-ground. This ground extended from the railway where the gun stood, along the ridge facing the Boer kopje, and then, when the ridge ended, straight over the veldt to the river, and along the river two miles, to the southernmost of two bridle fords to the Free State side of the stream.

This position was four miles long from railway to

river, and two miles longer beside the river. The ground was different from any on which we had fought before. It was all littered-ridges and veldt alikewith what the Boers call Vaal bushes, shapely little trees from four to seven feet high, of round, full, generous outline and dense foliage, every leaf in which is a silvery green.

In such a veldt before their hill the Boers had two miles of trenches full of men. Beyond this, still to the right, their trenches continued across the more level and open plain, and then bent at right angles, and followed the river on our side, keeping between us and it.

Thus the trenches protected the kopje first, and gave the Boers freedom to move behind those on the level veldt, in full exposure, yet out of range of our fire, so that they could get to a waggon ford within their lines, and across the river, and down it towards Jacobsdal.

It was not two o'clock in the morning when the last troops to leave the camp moved forward to the edge of the next scene of battle three miles away. The Highland Brigade was ordered to the main position, roughly speaking from the left to the centre. The Guards' Brigade was to continue the line to the river on the right, and the Yorkshires held the drift on the extreme right, with a small break between them and the Guards. A small force of the Mounted Infantry