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Here lay the plain of Enslin, bounded by a formidable line of kopjes as dangerous as those of Belmont. Lancers and Rimington's Scouts, the feeble but very capable cavalry of the Army, came in with the report that the hills were strongly held. Some more hard slogging was in front of the relievers of Kimberley.
I left General Fourie behind me with a horse-commando, with orders to remain there for two days, and to carry on manoeuvres in the direction of Odendaalsstroom. I crossed the railway line that evening without any mishap to my force, but to my great sorrow the valiant Lieutenant Banie Enslin, one of the best of my scouts, was severely wounded the same night, and fell into the hands of the English.
The "ringhals" in the veldt are very deadly. I remember speaking to a Kaffir about them and asking him if he had known of any fatal bites. He replied, pathetically enough: "Yes, sah, a brudder of me two hours, he was dead mudder and sister and me was there". Near Enslin a most unhappy accident had occurred.
The Boer hill was four or five miles distant, north across the plain. All along its purple sides we ranged with our glasses, seeing nothing; but after dark several little points of light showed where their laager was. We sat all night among the rocks (I thought of you and the roast-turkey and holly), occasional heavy drops of rain falling, and a flicker of lightning now and then. Heavy clouds rolled up, and the night set in as dark as pitch. The level plain below us lay flat as a pancake from their hill to ours. So passed our '99 Christmas, picturesque possibly, but not very comfortable. Dark hillside; rain in large warm drops; night dark, with a star or two and struggling moon. In front, a distant hillside, with points of camp-fire twinkling, where the Boers, indifferent to our little party, were carousing and drinking their dop. Now and then a yawn or groan as a man stretches his cramped limbs. Down below under us an expanse of dark plain, like a murky sea, reaching to our feet, which we peer across, but can make out nothing. Peep-of-day time is the Boer's favourite hour for a call, and we were all very much on the qui vive when the white line showed along the east. No doubt, however, they all had such heads after their Christmas drink that they were in no humour for such a diversion. At any rate, they let us alone. Very stiff and weary and wet, we crept down the hill soon after daybreak and started on our twenty-mile homeward march. It was 5 P.M. before we reached camp, and we had had nothing to eat all day. I don't know if we were most tired or hungry. Take that three days as a sample of work. We start at 6 A.M. on Sunday; do a full day's riding and scouting, and get three hours' sleep that night at Enslin. Then we saddle up and pass the rest of the night and all the next day riding, except when we are climbing hills on foot to look out. The second night we sit among the hills expecting an attack, and next day till one o'clock are in the saddle again. À la guerre comme
It was well that this was so, for on the 8th of December Commandant Prinsloo, of the Orange Free State, with a thousand horsemen and two light seven-pounder guns, appeared suddenly at Enslin and vigorously attacked the two companies of the Northampton Regiment who held the station. At the same time they destroyed a couple of culverts and tore up three hundred yards of the permanent way.
The battle of Enslin had cost us some two hundred of killed and wounded, and beyond the mere fact that we had cleared our way by another stage towards Kimberley it is difficult to say what advantage we had from it. We won the kopjes, but we lost our men.
In one of our engagements a Boer boy of seventeen was struck down by a bullet; the father, a man of sixty, left his cover and went to the succour of his son, when he himself was shot, and the two lay dead, one beside the other. A little to the north of the kopjes which formed the scene of the Graspan engagement lies the station of Enslin.
It seems that the conditions gave him little or no opportunity to do that, and he has had three times to assault and drive back a well-posted enemy. At Belmont, on the 23rd, and at Enslin, on the 25th, Lord Methuen had a numerical superiority large enough to justify an attack in which heavy loss was to be expected.
At one moment they may be hovering in the kopjes around us at Enslin, waiting to get a chance to sneak into the kopjes that immediately overlook our camp, but thanks to the magnificent scouting qualities of the Victorian Mounted Rifles, they have never been able to do so. During the night they disperse, and take up their abode on surrounding farms as peaceful tillers of the soil.
Some other method of artillery fire than the curving bullet from an exploding shrapnel shell must be devised for dealing with men who lie close among boulders and behind cover. These remarks upon shrapnel might be included in the account of half the battles of the war, but they are particularly apposite to the action at Enslin.
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