The
Highlanders Were Dead-Beat; The Coldstreams Had Had Enough; The
Mounted Infantry Was Badly Mauled.
There remained the Grenadiers,
the Scots Guards, and two or three line regiments who were
available for a new attack.
There are occasions, such as Sadowa,
where a General must play his last card. There are others where
with reinforcements in his rear, he can do better by saving his
force and trying once again. General Grant had an axiom that the
best time for an advance was when you were utterly exhausted, for
that was the moment when your enemy was probably utterly exhausted
too, and of two such forces the attacker has the moral advantage.
Lord Methuen determined - and no doubt wisely - that it was no
occasion for counsels of desperation. His men were withdrawn - in
some cases withdrew themselves - outside the range of the Boer guns,
and next morning saw the whole force with bitter and humiliated
hearts on their way back to their camp at Modder River.
The repulse of Magersfontein cost the British nearly a thousand
men, killed, wounded, and missing, of which over seven hundred
belonged to the Highlanders. Fifty-seven officers had fallen in
that brigade alone, including their Brigadier and Colonel Downman
of the Gordons. Colonel Codrington of the Coldstreams was wounded
early, fought through the action, and came back in the evening on a
Maxim gun. Lord Winchester of the same battalion was killed, after
injudiciously but heroically exposing himself all day. The Black
Watch alone had lost nineteen officers and over three hundred men
killed and wounded, a catastrophe which can only be matched in all
the bloody and glorious annals of that splendid regiment by their
slaughter at Ticonderoga in 1757, when no fewer than five hundred
fell before Montcalm's muskets.
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