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But General Hunter will not allow any one to visit the camp, and it is no good repeating secondhand reports. December 27, 1899. The side of Tunnel Hill, at the angle of the Helpmakaar road, where Liverpools and Gloucesters have suffered in turn, was to-day the scene of an exactly similar disaster to the Devons. The great Bulwan gun began shelling us later than usual. It must have been past eight.
One was a fine sergeant of the Liverpools, who held the base of the Helpmakaar road where it leaves the town eastward. Sergeant Macdonald was his name, a man full of zeal, and always tempted into danger by curiosity, as most people are. Instead of keeping under shelter of the sangar when the guns on Bulwan were shelling the position, he must needs go outside "to have a look."
One of the privates in the Liverpools showed me a diary he is keeping of the war. From first to last he makes but one comment, and that is: "There is no peace for the wicked." The Boers were engaged in putting up a new 6 in. gun on the hills beyond Range Post, and the first number of the Ladysmith Lyre was published. November 27, 1899.
With him was Major Adye of the staff. On the right British flank Colonel Grimwood commanded a brigade composed of the 1st and 2nd battalions of the King's Royal Rifles, the Leicesters, the Liverpools, and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
Altogether, two regiments of cavalry 5th Lancers and 19th Hussars the 42nd and 53rd Field Batteries and 10th Mountain Battery, four infantry battalions Devons, Liverpools, Gloucesters, and 2nd King's Royal Rifles the Imperial Light Horse, and the Natal Volunteers. Once more, it was fighting. The head of the column had come within three miles or so of Modderspruit station.
After our digging in at Verst 445 in early November, a Company of Liverpools came from Economia to aid the French infantry and American and French machine gunners, supported by French artillery, to hold that winter front. The American units who had fought on the railroad in the fall were all given ten days rest in Archangel. Soon the Americans were once more back on the front.
They had the Allied warriors now ill at ease and nervous. The trench mortar men and the machine gun men can tell many an interesting story of those January days on the Kodish Front serving there with the mixed command of Canadians and King's Liverpools and Dyer's Battalion of Russians.
The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, but were terrible in their onslaught.
Ladysmith breathes freely to-day, but a week ago she seemed likely to become another Lucknow. Of line battalions only the Liverpools were here, besides two batteries of field artillery, some of the 18th Hussars, and the 5th Lancers. If Kruger or Joubert had then allowed the Boers encamped on the Free State border to have their own way, no one can say what might have happened.
Among his infantry were the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Dublin Fusiliers, and the King's Royal Rifles, fresh from the ascent of Talana Hill, the Gordons, the Manchesters, and the Devons who had been blooded at Elandslaagte, the Leicesters, the Liverpools, the 2nd battalion of the King's Royal Rifles, the 2nd Rifle Brigade, and the Gloucesters, who had been so roughly treated at Rietfontein.
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