Grandad Williamson on night patrol

As the strength of the section got lower and as we had to find a double sentry and a one man patrol during the night this meant one hour on and one hour off for the sentries and an all night patrol, usually me, when our number dropped down to five privates.  In Natal darkness there quickly follows dusk so I used to get out as soon as the Boer positions were not visible.

The railway from the Orange Free State ran about midway between the two opposing positions and for the first two hours out I used to find cover and watch, then I would move along parallel with the track but not on it, sometimes only a few yards between stops.  Out there between the two lines on your own with good hearing and sharp eyes you do not miss much and that is how it was with me. 

Sometimes but not very often, I would meet the patrol from the company on our left.  At the beginning of the meetings the one who saw the other first would wait doggo until by some move or sound he would decide that the other man was on his side and whisper, then he would join up and have a whispered conversation.  He would do most of the whispering, I used to do the listening and grinning.  He told me of one escapade he had had:-

The level crossing gates were on his patrol and being a little mischievous and having a windy officer in charge of the company he belonged to, he went in very early one morning and reported the Boers massing near the crossing gates.  The Officer stood the Company to arms until daybreak but there was no attack because there had been no Boers there.  The patrol got out of it by saying that it must have been a strong Boer patrol but the lads of the Company were not at all pleased – they knew Dag the scout.

I personally never saw a Boer on one of those night patrols but there were some about because one morning I was late getting back to the safety of our own lines and didn’t I get a peppering – fortunately it was long range shooting.

Grandad Williamson on short rations

On the fourth day of January 1900, the Boers made the only real attempt to take the town by assault.  Their main attack was against our positions on Wagon Hill to the south of the defence perimeter.  It was sustained for two days then they called it off.  They would know we were getting short of food by the condition of the sick men going down to the Intombi hospital.  We were contained so why throw a lot of good men away attacking the place, sooner or later the British would have to surrender or die of hunger.

By this time our rations were cut down to one biscuit three inches square and about one third of an inch thick, a quarter pound of boiled horse flesh, about 46 men shared an ounce of tea, 16 men to an ounce of sugar and a concoction we called “Chevral”, which was the water in which horse flesh had been boiled.  Often when it reached us the surface was covered in flies.  That was our daily ration and that was all we got.  There were a few vegetables for sale in the Town but we could not leave the defences.  We were not supposed to and we had no money as we had had no pay for months.  There was no tobacco or cigarettes and the lads who must smoke collected the leaves from the stunted bushes that grew around, they sun dried them and they called the result “Observation Twist”.

One of my comrades risked a Court Martial by going into the town, breaking into a shop and stealing a whitish floury stuff he took to be a mealy Meal.  He got back safely and we scouted around for material to make a fire.  We had left our mess tins at Dundee when we had to leave the town in a hurry, so that we made do with Bully tins.  So as a boiler we used one of these, mixed the stuff with water and waited for it to boil.  The robber stirred, but long before the water boiled the mixture had stiffened.  It was Plaster of Paris he had stolen.  We had all reckoned it was Mealy and had never thought to taste it.  The water we had to drink came out of the Klip River and it being the rainy season it was often the colour of clay.

Grandad Williamson about Long Tom

Now to the shooting.  The enemy had on Gun Hill, among other guns, a very high velocity Creusot throwing something like a six inch shell.  So good was this gun that Sir George White decided to risk a sortie on it in order to destroy it and he sent Colonel Ian Hamilton with a party of Imperial Light Horsemen and some Royal Engineers for that purpose.  Now the Light Horsemen were mostly Britishers from Johannesburg and some of them could speak Dutch fluently.  They were able to answer a Boer sentry’s challenge in his own language; it being night he might see that their headgear was like his own and he was overpowered before he could give the alarm.  Anyway, they got in among the guns and destroyed the Creusot and several more, getting back without a casualty.

Then there was Long Tom on Umbulwana.  He was a gun of long range, but not a high velocity gun.  His objectives seemed to have been the destruction of military installations in the worn, one of which, the Observation Balloon, he had many a go at.  I never got to know if he destroyed it.  We used to watch his performance but never saw him get near.  It disappeared perhaps through the shortage of gas or more likely getting away in the darkness to join the forces of General Buller.

There was this about Long Tom, he did not use smokeless powder.  When he fired it warned the civilian people that a shell was on the way.  They had organised a watch and the sentries of this had whistles which, immediately they saw the smoke, they blew.  The inhabitants living near the Klip river had dug shelters in the steep banks and to these shelters they made a beeline on hearing the whistles.  Tom, too, had a terrible opponent, that was the 4.7 naval Gun behind us.  While the Navy had ammunition, Tom would fire once, and there would be five 4.7 shells coming for him, all in the air at the same time, from our quick-firing gun.

The main Boer position in front of us was on Surprise Hill, just beyond rifle shot range from our Sangars.  At the bottom of this hill we observed the night work the Boers were putting in.  They were building an emplacement and into this they brought an old mortar and one morning they opened fire.  Our artillery had been observing the operation too.  They allowed the old lad one shot then they blasted him.  The next shot it fired some days later was from the top of the hill.  It continued firing from there spasmodically.  It threw a round shell high up in the air.  When at its culminating point you could see the fuse burning.  It looked as if the thing would drop slap on top of you but it never did, scarcely ever did it come nearer than a hundred yards of us.  When the shell burst, sometimes in the air sometimes on the ground, it made an enormous noise but it proved harmless so the Artillery left it alone.