The History of Lumsden's Horse. Various
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and he also is on duty for twenty-four hours until relieved when the guard is changed next evening. He is expected to go round the pickets two or three times during the night, and see that the sentries are at their posts all right. The orderly officer also visits the pickets twice during the night. The duties of each sentry are to see that the horses do not get loose, or injure themselves, or ‘savage’ each other, and that they are fed properly.
After breakfast, at 8 o’clock, the men’s time is generally taken up in cleaning rifles and accoutrements, and washing and dressing themselves for a general parade at half-past 10.
The men are then kept busy at the manual and firing exercise for about an hour, and also bayonet exercise occasionally. The inspection of the steamer by the Captain, accompanied by Major Showers and officers, including the doctor and veterinary officer, also takes place at this hour, and Major Showers afterwards inspects the company. For the next hour or two we have little to do bar fatigues until the time comes for watering and feeding horses at midday stables.
During the afternoon the men usually employ themselves in playing cricket, boxing, wrestling, football, and tugs-of-war, until the bugles sound for evening stables at 5.30. Sunday is a day of rest, as far as possible, only necessary work, such as ‘stables,’ being done, and church parade is held at 10.30, the service lasting about half an hour. There are almost daily calls for fatigue parties, a few men being taken from each section to bring up stores or forage from the hold, and this is pretty hot and dirty work. At 9 o’clock every night the ‘last post’ sounds, and half an hour later ‘lights out.’ After that ‘there is naught but the sound of the lone sentry’s tread’ or the squeal of an angry horse to disturb the peaceful slumbers of snoring troopers on board the ‘Ujina,’ until the notes of reveillé, shrill if not always clear, wake them at dawn to another day of similar routine.
CHAPTER IV
NEARING THE GOAL—DISEMBARKATION AT CAPE TOWN AND
EAST LONDON
Though something went wrong with the ‘Ujina’s’ engines, which had to be stopped twice for repairs in the Bay of Bengal, she covered the remaining fifteen hundred leagues or so in very good time, and, passing Madagascar during the misty night of March 18, was within sight of the South African coast by daybreak of the 24th, and at midday she anchored off Durban, being unable to get nearer that port than the troubled roadstead two miles from shore. Thus her time from the Hugli to Port Natal was just three weeks, and those on board had the satisfaction of hearing that the ‘Lindula,’ with A Company, must be still at sea, having left Durban for Cape Town only three days before the ‘Ujina’s’ arrival. The man who brought that good news had evidently acquired a Kaffir or Oriental habit of saying the things that are pleasant whether true or not. In sober fact, the ‘Lindula’ had gone a week earlier, and was by that time landing her troops at Cape Town. As nobody was allowed to land, Lumsden’s Horse did not get the exciting experience of being lowered in a cage from the troopship’s gangway to a tug plunging and tossing and wriggling among the ‘rollers’ twenty feet below. But they had an opportunity of seeing how the thing was done when a Transport officer came on board that way with an order for the troops under Major Showers’s command to disembark at East London. This officer was accompanied by three of the Natal Carbineers, who had been with Sir Redvers Buller’s force to the relief of Ladysmith, and whose thrilling tales of adventure were as welcome as a newly-discovered series of Arabian Nights’ stories might have been to men who had heard no news for twenty-one days. The general situation was not quite as those Carbineers described it, but their account of Boer resistance in Natal did not by any means convey the idea that war was nearly at an end, although rumour magnified Lord Roberts’s successes to the extent of placing him within a march or so of Kroonstadt at a time when his troops were still hung up at Bloemfontein waiting for food and transport. As B Company had heard of Cronjé’s surrender and the relief of Ladysmith before leaving Calcutta, it would hardly have surprised them to learn that the Union Jack was floating over Pretoria. To them the mere occupation of Bloemfontein seemed a comparatively small matter, so they at once turned and began to rend with keen sarcasm the croakers who had predicted that B Company at least would be too late for anything. Too late! Why, their orders were to disembark at East London, and did not that mean an immediate start for the front? One sanguine trooper in the gladness of his heart wrote, ‘We go on shore at 11.30 to-day, leaving for Bloemfontein by train about the same hour to-night, and expect to arrive in forty-eight hours. We shall probably train to Bethulie and march from there to Bloemfontein, about 120 miles.’ His faith in the marching powers of Lumsden’s Horse must have been great indeed if he thought they could trek 120 miles across unknown veldt after travelling from East London to Bethulie by rail, and all in the space of forty-eight hours. There is something very fascinating about that picture of troopers so eager to be at the taking of Kroonstadt (‘which, it would seem, will be a big affair’) that they would perform superhuman feats to be there in time. No admirer of Lumsden’s Horse would venture to suggest that a march of forty leagues in less than two days was beyond the compass of their powers, but the man must be brimful of hope who could believe that there would be any time left for marching, or any inclination to march left in the men, after a South African railway, working under war pressure, had done with them. But in fact there was no such need for haste. B Company was quite in time for the ‘big affair’ at Kroonstadt, though it took more than twenty times forty-eight hours in the getting there. Colonel Lumsden, going ahead with A Company to land in Cape Town, had still more reason for entertaining sanguine views, though in his case they were modified by a fuller knowledge of events. When in sight of Table Mountain he added a postscript to his letter: ‘Off Cape. Just got orders. May be in for Pretoria. Hope so.’ The two companies, however, were not fortunate enough to come together under one command until nearly a month later. Their fortunes as separated units must therefore be dealt with in somewhat disjointed form still. How A Company fared after casting anchor off Durban may be told in the words of a special correspondent pf the ‘Englishman’ who had joined the corps for active service:
As we came in sight of Durban everybody was expecting that some official would dash on board directly he knew it was Lumsden’s Horse, to order us off down the coast, and that in a minute we should be steaming hard for our destination. But it happened otherwise. When fairly close in we signalled to the Coastguard station what ship we were and what she contained. Then a deep silence settled over things. Lots of shipping lay at anchor there, and every ship except ours had a steam launch calling upon it. But we, waiting with beating hearts, had no one to pay us a visit until a great puffing, rolling, important-looking tug bore alongside, churned up the blue water into white foam, dropped a tiny boat, and in a jiffy a blue-suited, gold-braided gentleman was on board and the tug had gone away over the waters. So we thought that meant orders to bring us ashore. But, alas! it was only a pilot come aboard to have a buck with the captain. Then, while we waited and waited, our signalling class set to work, and an energetic waving of arms and little flags elicited the reply from neighbouring ships that Ladysmith had been relieved. They also confirmed the news, which we had received at the Sandheads, of Cronjé’s surrender. Close by lay H.M.S. ‘Terrible,’ from which a naval contingent had been sent with her big guns to reinforce Sir Redvers Buller on the Tugela, and our first sight of one of the consequences of war was a launch full of wounded Bluejackets returning to their ship after relieving Ladysmith. While we lay peacefully swinging at anchor a great white ship flying the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack steamed slowly out of the harbour, and swung off to the left. As she passed a big transport the troops on board broke into ringing cheers, and when she neared us those with glasses read her name. It was the ‘Maine’ full of wounded soldiers from Sir George White’s gallant garrison. She went right round the harbour, visiting all the ships with troops. Last of all she came to us, and as she passed by, and we could see the white-aproned nurses and the bandaged figures with pale faces we gave them three times three, and still cheered again for the plucky ladies who had come all the way from America to care for our wounded. The poor chaps aboard did their best to answer our cheers, and then the ‘Maine’ steamed away down the coast on her way home to England.
However, the long-delayed hookum[3]