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Updated: June 14, 2025
The Sherwood Foresters were at present holding the Divisional front, and our chief task in the new area was digging cable trenches from back Headquarter positions to forward batteries and observation posts, building and stocking ammunition and bomb stores, and assisting in the construction of numerous gun pits.
This is a real ranch; small, as compared to others, but modeled as a farm in the East, for Gillis is a real farmer. I make the guess that when you grow homesick and tired of the loneliness at my place you will headquarter at the Gillis place, in fact I have made that kind of arrangement with them.
Every Kaffir has a dagger, some of them very good ones, but roughly finished. After we had been some days in Chitral, some of the 3rd Brigade under General Gatacre arrived, followed by General Low and the headquarter staff. There was a parade of all the troops in Chitral, with the usual tomasha of salutes and inspection.
I know that by the time I had been along the whole lot, round several hundred traverses, and up dozens of communication trenches and saps, all my mariner-like ability for finding my way back to Neuve Eglise had deserted me. Those guides were absolutely necessary in order to get us back to the headquarter farm.
Curiously enough, months after this was written the author was wounded by shrapnel. We left Serches at dusk with little regret and pushed on over the hill past Ferme d'Epitaphe of gluttonous memory, past the Headquarter clerks, who were jogging peacefully along on bicycles, down the other side of the hill, and on to the village of Maast. Headquarters were in a curious farm.
These were supplemented by dynamite mines, the fame of which had frightened the Boers more than anything else, all connected with Headquarter Staff Office by electric wires. In addition there was barbed-wire fencing round the larger earthworks, and massive barricades of waggons and sandbags across the principal streets.
Now the long wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze. Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled.
Lydenburg, being seventy miles off the railway line, had a chain of posts connecting it with the junction at Machadodorp. These posts were seven in number, ten miles apart, each defended by 250 men. Of these Helvetia was the second. The key of the position was a strongly fortified hill about three-quarters of a mile from the headquarter camp, and commanding it.
Sir Arthur Wellesley, on succeeding Sir John Craddock in the supreme command, still kept my name on the headquarter staff, thereby adding greatly to my authority; and continued me in the independent command of my regiment.
I made a long detour round by the headquarter farmhouse towards which the black mass of the Ninth Division was advancing across the plain too late, as it turned out, to join in the action. Seeing a kopje on our extreme right from which our artillery seemed to be firing, I rode in that direction.
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