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Updated: May 19, 2025
One of these had been shot through the wrist of his left hand at Magersfontein, and he was now returning shot through the wrist of his right hand. The next, said he, with gruesome playfulness, will be through the head. Corporal Evans, of the Gloucesters one of two brothers whose name is much honoured at Aldershot I found in the midst of this huge convoy stricken with dysentery.
Our troops did not fire a shot, but still the fusillade continued for half an hour. The Boers were evidently in a state of nervous excitement, brought on by nothing more formidable than twelve men of the Gloucesters who, under Lieutenant Thesbit, had gone out to destroy a laager at the foot of Limit Hill.
Riding along the valleys, dismounting, and creeping from kopje to kopje among the stones, a large body of them came up to Brooks Farm, and began firing at our sangars and outposts at ranges of 800 to 1,000 yards, the bullets coming very thick over our heads, even after we had reached the protection of the Gloucesters' walls and earthworks.
Gloucesters and Oxfords fell back to join the garrison of the Beauvoir Line, all parts of which were heavily engaged by evening. A gallant resistance, in which the Gloucesters under Colonel Lawson were specially distinguished, was made by the 184th Infantry Brigade. The General encouraged the defence in person.
If you walked south you passed the Puisieux road, opposite which and some 500 yards away was a clump of tall poplars between the lines generally known as the Seven Sisters. There was a superstition that this was held by the enemy, but when explored by a daylight patrol of the 5th Gloucesters nothing was discovered in the nature of defences.
He did so, and the men spent the hours before dawn in protecting themselves by schanzes or breastworks of stones. At dawn, about half-past four, they were attacked, at first lightly. There were two companies of the Gloucesters in an advanced position; the rest, in close order, occupied a high point on the kopje; to line the whole summit, they say, would have needed 10,000 men.
However that may be, they advanced against our Division with considerable energy at the outset. The two Battalions of the 145th Brigade in the line were from right to left, the 1st/4th Oxfords and 1st/5th Gloucesters. The enemy succeeded in driving in the outer flanks of both Battalions, and also in pushing a wedge between them to a maximum depth of about 1,000 yards.
At 10 a.m. on March 28 the forlorn enterprise, in which the 183rd Brigade, the Gloucesters, and the Berks shared, was launched from the station yard. The troops were footsore, sleepless, and unfed. They were mostly men from regimental employ pioneers, clerks, storemen to send whom forward across strange country to drive the enemy from the village he had seized on the important Amiens-St.
During the previous day C Company had been already engaged in stopping the gap between the Oxfords and Gloucesters. The latter, who had been isolated on both flanks, were in danger of complete encirclement during the morning and early afternoon, but extricated themselves and joined hands with C Company at 5.30 p.m.
Their central position was on a hill afterwards known as Signal Hill, and on this they had already planted a forty-pounder gun. A force composed of six companies of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, four and a half of the Gloucesters, a mountain battery and a troop of Hussars started at midnight towards a hill known as Nicholson's Nek, occupied by the Free Staters.
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