The Men Were Miners And
Agricultural Labourers, Who Had Never Seen More Bloodshed Than A
Cut Finger In Their Lives.
They had been four months in the
country, but their life had been a picnic, as the luxury of their
baggage shows.
Now in an instant the picnic was ended, and in the
grey cold dawn war was upon them - grim war with the whine of
bullets, the screams of pain, the crash of shell, the horrible
rending and riving of body and limb. In desperate straits, which
would have tried the oldest soldiers, the brave miners did well.
They never from the beginning had a chance save to show how gamely
they could take punishment, but that at least they did. Bullets
were coming from all sides at once and yet no enemy was visible.
They lined one side of the embankment, and they were shot in the
back. They lined the other, and were again shot in the back.
Baird-Douglas, the Colonel, vowed to shoot the man who should raise
the white flag, and he fell dead himself before he saw the hated
emblem. But it had to come. 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.
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