United States or Tuvalu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The first sign of mortality on the Boer side I encountered was a hairy little black pig lying on his side bleeding proverbially then a tall Boer lying headlong down the rocks. On the top what confusion! Tommy, drunk with delight of battle. Prisoners, wounded, Gordons, Manchesters, Devons all mixed inexplicably. A Boer gun still in position was a centre for gathering.
Devons and Gordons had volunteered weeks before to take the Boer guns from which the defenders suffered most annoyance, any night the General might give them permission; but those fine battalions were wanted for important duties in the purely defensive scheme, and so they had to lie behind earthworks or in bomb-proof structures, half tent, half cave, shelled when they ventured to move out by day, kept on the alert through many hours of weary night, and called to arms again an hour before dawn.
Altogether the Glencoe camp contained some four thousand men. The main body of the army remained at Ladysmith. These consisted of the 1st Devons, the 1st Liverpools, and the 2nd Gordon Highlanders, with the 1st Gloucesters, the 2nd King's Royal Rifles, and the 2nd Rifle Brigade, reinforced later by the Manchesters.
From half-past eleven last night there was heavy musketry fire near the north-eastern line of our defensive works, and we thought the Devons were being attacked hotly, but it turned out to be nothing more than a fusilade from Boer rifles at some unknown objects. Our foes are evidently getting a little jumpy and apprehensive of a surprise by night.
In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the hotel paid a rental of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the morning, you might see richly-gowned white women drinking.
These creatures are stealthy in their habits, lurking among woods, firing smokeless powder with very little flash; consequently they are very difficult guns to locate. Their favourite diet appeared to be balloons; or, failing them, the Devons in the Helpmakaar Road or the Manchesters in Cæsar's Camp.
The Boers, unable to withstand any longer the sight of that fine front sweeping like fate upon them, fired a few hundred shots and fled down hill, followed by shots from the victorious Devons, who in a few minutes more had cleared the position of every Boer.
However this may have been, they very soon spread among the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, and have undoubtedly left their marks on the stock of the New England and the Middle States, which exist to some extent even to the present day, mixed in with an infinite multitude of crosses with the Devons, the Dutch cattle already alluded to, the black cattle of Spain and Wales, and the long horn and the short horn most of which crosses were accidental, or due to local circumstances or individual convenience.
In Ladysmith too there are days to be marked in red when the gunner shot better than he knew. The grisly fact has been recorded that five separate human legs lay upon the ground. On December 22nd another tragic shot killed five and wounded twelve of the Devons. A little later it was again the turn of the Devons, who lost one officer killed and ten wounded.
The reply was that by road and by rail as many men as could be spared were on their way to join him. Soon they began to drop in, those useful reinforcements first the Devons, quiet, business-like, reliable; then the Gordons, dashing, fiery, brilliant.
Word Of The Day