In This Infernal Fire, Which
Left The Rocks Yellow With Lyddite, The Survivors Still Waited
Grimly For The Advance Of The Infantry.
No finer defence was made
in the war.
The attack was carried out across an open glacis by the
2nd Rifle Brigade and by the Inniskilling Fusiliers, the men of
Pieter's Hill. Through a deadly fire the gallant infantry swept
over the position, though Metcalfe, the brave colonel of the
Rifles, with eight other officers, and seventy men were killed or
wounded. Lysley, Steward, and Campbell were all killed in leading
their companies, but they could not have met their deaths upon an
occasion more honourable to their battalion. Great credit must also
be given to A and B companies of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, who
were actually the first over the Boer position. The cessation of
the artillery fire was admirably timed. It was sustained up to the
last possible instant. 'As it was,' said the captain of the leading
company, 'a 94-pound shell burst about thirty yards in front of the
right of our lot. The smell of the lyddite was awful.' A pom-pom
and twenty prisoners, including the commander of the police, were
the trophies of the day. An outwork of the Boer position had been
carried, and the rumour of defeat and disaster had already spread
through their ranks. Braver men than the burghers have never lived,
but they had reached the limits of human endurance, and a long
experience of defeat in the field had weakened their nerve and
lessened their morale. They were no longer men of the same fibre as
those who had crept up to the trenches of Spion Kop, or faced the
lean warriors of Ladysmith on that grim January morning at Caesar's
Camp. Dutch tenacity would not allow them to surrender, and yet
they realised how hopeless was the fight in which they were
engaged. Nearly fifteen thousand of their best men were prisoners,
ten thousand at the least had returned to their farms and taken the
oath. Another ten had been killed, wounded, or incapacitated. Most
of the European mercenaries had left; they held only the ultimate
corner of their own country, they had lost their grip upon the
railway line, and their supply of stores and of ammunition was
dwindling. To such a pass had eleven months of war reduced that
formidable army who had so confidently advanced to the conquest of
South Africa.
While Buller had established himself firmly upon the left of the
Boer position, Pole-Carew had moved forward to the north of the
railway line, and French had advanced as far as Swart Kopjes upon
the Boer right. These operations on August 26th and 27th were met
with some resistance, and entailed a loss of forty or fifty killed
and wounded; but it soon became evident that the punishment which
they had received at Bergendal had taken the fight out of the
Boers, and that this formidable position was to be abandoned as the
others had been.
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