The town stands where the railway from the Orange Free State
and the one from the Transvaal join and then go on to Maritzburg and Durban.
The holding of Ladysmith denied to the Boers the use of these two lines in any
further advance into Natal and it looked to me that it was very necessary for
our force to get back from Dundee for Sir George White to have a sufficient
force to defend the place, for the force in there was very little stronger than
ours.
After two days rest we again fell in at night to attack the
main force of Boers which was closing in on Ladysmith, and we got into position
just before dawn. When the day broke we
were found to be in the wrong position and we had to move over some open ground
to fetch up in the right place. We
opened out in extended order, which was lucky for us for going across we came
under some accurate gun fire. Being
extended we had light casualties and we reached our new position in quite good
order. We stormed up to the top of this
ridge with the Mauser bullets zipping around like high velocity bees and we
held that position until late in the afternoon when the order came to retire on
the town. This was done in an orderly
fashion, one Company retiring leaving the other Company holding the
position. The retiring company took up a
position in the rear then the holding company retired through it and this was
carried out in an extended line of men roughly eight paces apart and although
the Boer artillery kept firing at us we presented a very small target. The lads were as steady as rocks and as I
looked about I could see the other battalions retiring in the same orderly
manner.
Entering the town we closed ranks and marched to our Station
of Defence. Again we had been
outnumbered and outgunned but by no means beaten. That ended the battle of Nicholson’s Nek and
the siege of Ladysmith had commenced.
Now we had to build protective positions around the
town. Our battalion was allotted a ridge
to the west called Observation West. We
could not dig trenches because of the rocks so we built Sangars. As these were built to give us as wide a
field of fire as possible they were sited on the ridge or just over it on the
enemy side so the work had to be done at night for we were within rifle range
of the Boer positions opposite. What we
did was retire over the ridge during daylight and return to work as darkness fell. While we were doing this the Naval Contingent
was building an emplacement for one of the two 4.7 naval guns behind us, so we
were building our own protection and providing a protective screen for
them. How lucky we were that these two
4.7 guns got in to us before the Boers had completed the encirclement. They were one answer to the big Boer
guns. At least one answer – I will tell
you of another answer later on. These
Sangars were our home for nearly five months and from them all but five of us
went to hospital with Enteric Fever or Dysentery or the grave.
There was a Roman Catholic convent on our side of the town
which the Boers shelled. It was being
used as a hospital so the Boers agreed to the British command having a hospital
sited five miles down the railway and to have our sick and wounded taken
there. They allowed one train per day
each way. The morning train took the
sick and wounded down, the same train returned empty in the late afternoon. As the hospital, named Intombi, was in the
Boer occupied territory they were able to see that the conditions were
kept. However I reckon that it was a
decent humane agreement and reflected great credit on the Boer command.
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