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Updated: June 12, 2025
Grenville greeted them with eager warmth, and, the afternoon sun having sunk behind some trees, tea was spread outside the huts, so that they could drink it while admiring the view. Carew, though silent as ever, was less rigid, and Meryl saw how insistently his eyes strayed back to the blue vista of kopjes.
Lord Methuen then developed his attack, which, as the kopje was isolated, was on the simple plan of a centre with two extending wings. The enemy opened fire without delay, so the Yeomanry had to make a wide detour. Meanwhile the centre was held back while the Kimberley Mounted Corps, under Colonel Peakman, were sent to the right, where they found cover in a ridge of very low kopjes.
Since eight in the morning he had wandered among long grasses, and ironstone kopjes, and stunted bush, and had come upon no sign of human habitation, but the remains of a burnt kraal, and a down-trampled and now uncultivated mealie field, where a month before the Chartered Company's forces had destroyed a native settlement.
Then the day came only a month or so after that our troops marched into Muanza. The main body of its German defenders had steamed away down that land-locked sound of theirs a little while before. We had not stormed the place from the lake after all, we had arrived by a back-door road among the kopjes. Yet there we were at last.
For the first three hours it was Riet-Salem country with extensions and additions. Vast gorges, black and brown kopjes, boulders, sand stretches, clumps of bush, minute trees. It was grass.
There were also some particulars of the Modder River fight; the Boers had been driven from their kopjes; hundreds had been shot; thousands made prisoners; and whips of guns captured.
I have no idea what their future movements will be, nor do I think anyone else connected with the regiment has; but one thing seems certain, that sooner or later they will fall foul of the enemy in small skirmishing parties, as the kopjes for a length of twenty miles are infested by little bands of Boers, who have a knack of disappearing as soon as a British force draws near them, only, however, to crop up again in a fresh place, a short distance away.
The guns shelling Pepworth Hill there were two batteries of them now were still at their work, just in front of our left now and about half a mile away. Away to our right and further advanced, but quite exposed in the open, were two other batteries, shelling some distant kopjes on our right at the foot of the great mountain lump of Lombard's Kop.
The cleverness of Cronje's disposition of his trenches some hundred yards ahead of the kopjes is accentuated by the fascination which any rising object has for a gunner. Prince Kraft tells the story of how at Sadowa he unlimbered his guns two hundred yards in front of the church of Chlum, and how the Austrian reply fire almost invariably pitched upon the steeple.
We marched out again in the grey of the morning, and at about ten o'clock a.m. we saw dense clouds of dust rising away in the distance to our extreme right, and shortly afterwards saw horsemen galloping towards us, whom we vainly hoped might be our own cavalry, sent to our relief by Lord Roberts at Bloemfontein; but in a few minutes all our hopes were shattered, when we heard firing and saw our men engaging the enemy and retiring upon the adjacent kopjes, which we at once took possession of, and arranged our hospital, planting the Red Cross flag immediately in front of our ambulance wagons and hospital tents.
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