A hundred and forty of the men were
down, many of them suffering from the horrible wounds which shell
inflicts.
The place was a shambles. Then the flag went up and the
Boers at last became visible. Outnumbered, outgeneralled, and
without guns, there is no shadow of stain upon the good name of the
one militia regiment which was ever seriously engaged during the
war. Their position was hopeless from the first, and they came out
of it with death, mutilation, and honour.
Two miles south of the Rhenoster kopje stands Roodeval station, in
which, on that June morning, there stood a train containing the
mails for the army, a supply of great-coats, and a truck full of
enormous shells. A number of details of various sorts, a hundred or
more, had alighted from the train, twenty of them Post-office
volunteers, some of the Pioneer Railway corps, a few Shropshires,
and other waifs and strays. To them in the early morning came the
gentleman with the tinted glasses, his hands still red with the
blood of the Derbies. 'I have fourteen hundred men and four guns.
Surrender!' said the messenger. But it is not in nature for a
postman to give up his postbag without a struggle. 'Never!' cried
the valiant postmen. But shell after shell battered the
corrugated-iron buildings about their ears, and it was not possible
for them to answer the guns which were smashing the life out of
them. There was no help for it but to surrender. De Wet added
samples of the British volunteer and of the British regular to his
bag of militia. The station and train were burned down, the
great-coats looted, the big shells exploded, and the mails burned.
The latter was the one unsportsmanlike action which can up to that
date be laid to De Wet's charge. Forty thousand men to the north of
him could forego their coats and their food, but they yearned
greatly for those home letters, charred fragments of which are
still blowing about the veld. [Footnote: Fragments continually met
the eye which must have afforded curious reading for the victors.
'I hope you have killed all those Boers by now,' was the beginning
of one letter which I could not help observing.]
For three days De Wet held the line, and during all that time he
worked his wicked will upon it. For miles and miles it was wrecked
with most scientific completeness. The Rhenoster bridge was
destroyed. So, for the second time, was the Roodeval bridge. The
rails were blown upwards with dynamite until they looked like an
unfinished line to heaven. De Wet's heavy hand was everywhere. Not
a telegraph-post remained standing within ten miles. His
headquarters continued to be the kopje at Roodeval.
On June 10th two British forces were converging upon the point of
danger. One was Methuen's, from Heilbron. The other was a small
force consisting of the Shropshires, the South Wales Borderers, and
a battery which had come south with Lord Kitchener. The energetic
Chief of the Staff was always sent by Lord Roberts to the point
where a strong man was needed, and it was seldom that he failed to
justify his mission. Lord Methuen, however, was the first to
arrive, and at once attacked De Wet, who moved swiftly away to the
eastward. With a tendency to exaggeration, which has been too
common during the war, the affair was described as a victory. It
was really a strategic and almost bloodless move upon the part of
the Boers. It is not the business of guerillas to fight pitched
battles. Methuen pushed for the south, having been informed that
Kroonstad had been captured. Finding this to be untrue, he turned
again to the eastward in search of De Wet.
That wily and indefatigable man was not long out of our ken. On
June 14th he appeared once more at Rhenoster, where the
construction trains, under the famous Girouard, were working
furiously at the repair of the damage which he had already done.
This time the guard was sufficient to beat him off, and he vanished
again to the eastward. He succeeded, however, in doing some harm,
and very nearly captured Lord Kitchener himself. A permanent post
had been established at Rhenoster under the charge of Colonel Spens
of the Shropshires, with his own regiment and several guns.
Smith-Dorrien, one of the youngest and most energetic of the
divisional commanders, had at the same time undertaken the
supervision and patrolling of the line.
An attack had at this period been made by a commando of some
hundred Boers at the Sand River to the south of Kroonstad, where
there is a most important bridge. The attempt was frustrated by the
Royal Lancaster regiment and the Railway Pioneer regiment, helped
by some mounted infantry and Yeomanry. The fight was for a time a
brisk one, and the Pioneers, upon whom the brunt of it fell,
behaved with great steadiness. The skirmish is principally
remarkable for the death of Major Seymour of the Pioneers, a noble
American, who gave his services and at last his life for what, in
the face of all slander and misrepresentation, he knew to be the
cause of justice and of liberty.
It was hoped now, after all these precautions, that the last had
been seen of the gentleman with the tinted glasses, but on June
21st he was back in his old haunts once more. Honing Spruit
Station, about midway between Kroonstad and Roodeval, was the scene
of his new raid. On that date his men appeared suddenly as a train
waited in the station, and ripped up the rails on either side of
it. There were no guns at this point, and the only available troops
were three hundred of the prisoners from Pretoria, armed with
Martini-Henry rifles and obsolete ammunition. A good man was in
command, however - the same Colonel Bullock of the Devons who had
distinguished himself at Colenso - and every tattered, half-starved
wastrel was nerved by a recollection of the humiliations which he
had already endured.
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