January—February, 1900
On January 9 the men enrolled were assembled in St. John’s Wood Barracks for three weeks' preliminary training. Who, of those who made it, will forget that sudden plunge from civilian ease to rigorous and sordid labour ? Of all the contrasts life presents there is probably none so sharp and chilling, and none so stimulating, if the men have grit and ardour. We had our fair share of both, and needed every ounce of it, for there was an immense amount to learn, and none too long a time in which to learn it. Nobody familiar with the subject will question that, or point in depreciation to the fact that our other detachments were able to embark a fortnight before us. Artillery is a highly specialised branch of the military art, and under the present conditions of life and work in a great city, it is flatly impossible for an Auxiliary battery, be the evening drills, odd field days, and annual camp ever so well attended, to reach such a pitch of efficiency as to be fit to take the field without some weeks of prior training. We were a heterogeneous body, and had to shake down into coherence. We had a new gun, involving a new gun drill. Our riding and driving were far from perfect; and few of us had the requisite experience of those essential matters, the care of horses and harness. Happily we were stiffened by a strong leaven of old hands, N.C.O.’s and men, who fell into their duties easily, and gave an example to the weaker brethren. Marching drills and gun drills began at once, and in a day or two, when the horses began to arrive, riding drills and the business of ‘stables,’ three times daily. Concurrently with all this, we had to carry on the ordinary routine of barrack life, providing our own guards, stable- pickets, orderlies, postmen, etc., and doing our own cooking, scullery work, coal heaving, window cleaning, and charing. Most of us also—how incongruous it all seems now—had more or less important business matters or family affairs to arrange before starting on this distant enterprise, so that fragments of leisure—a Sunday out or an evening free—had to be schemed or bargained for amid the stress of work. It was a crowded, careless time, and nothing in it was stranger than the complete effacement of that painful anxiety about the progress of the war which most of us had felt before enlistment, in common with the whole nation at that trying time.
Driving drills, we should say, were never attempted ; for it was only towards the end of our stay in barracks that the number of horses was complete, and their branding and final distribution among the sub-divisions and individuals effected. Then it was that the novice in horse-tending entered on his full responsibilities. One of the Editors, if he may be forgiven a personal touch, vividly remembers the moment when he was first confronted with the pair allotted to him. One of them was of a meek and colourless disposition, save for the trait of ungovernable greed. The other—a sour and sullen roan—was introduced as follows by the callous Gallio who allotted him: ‘He can’t be groomed and he can’t be ridden, and you’ve got to drive him in the water-cart’; the merits of which terse address the Editor began to appreciate at evening stables, when, in bringing him his food, with many tactful blandishments, he was received with a pretty specimen of a remarkable screwing cow-kick, for which he afterwards became infamous, and which only prolonged study and experience enabled his groom to avoid. Apropos of that humble vehicle, the water-cart, it should be explained that hitherto the intention was that we should horse some of our own auxiliary carriages, such as the forge-waggon, reserve-ammunition waggon, etc. The idea was abandoned, however; and in South Africa everything in the nature of transport was drawn by mules, and driven by natives. And, as it turned out, there were none too many drivers, with a due allowance of spare men, for the four guns and five ammunition waggons.
Meanwhile, uniforms were fitted, kit gradually served out, and the thousand and one details of mobilisation attended to. Few of us probably realise the enormous amount of labour that the completeness of our personal equipment, harness and stores, entailed on Lord Denbigh, the Adjutant and others. At length, everything was ready; all heavy material, including the guns themselves, had been packed and sent down to the Albert Docks, whence our ship the * Montfort’ was to sail; and, on the evening of February 2, all that remained was for the men and horses to follow. Helpful to the last, the H.A.C. comrades we were leaving behind assisted us in many ways on that busy and memorable night; which remains in the memory as a medley of riotous merry-making and feverish activity. They kept our guards and pickets, aided us to pack our kits and persons, and finally satisfied the extreme demands of friendship by helping us to ride the horses to the Docks—a really noble service, seeing that it meant no proud progress through acclaiming crowds, but an obscure night-march of thirteen miles in a driving snow-storm. At 2 A.M. on the 3rd we filed silently out into the slushy streets from under the dim lamps of the barrack gateway, threaded the deserted highways of London from West to East, slipped and splashed down the interminable vistas of the Commercial Road and the Dock roads, and in the first ghastly dawn clattered, sodden, frozen, and muddy, into the sheds which bordered the ‘Montfort’s’ berth. Early as it came in our career, this march, made by unseasoned men on strange horses, and ending without a hitch or casualty, was a real test of steadiness and discipline. ‘Unpleasant, but of course nothing to what is coming,’ was our stoical thought, even though we hummed instinctively the music of 'Die zwei Grenadieren’ between chattering teeth; but, as a matter of fact, it was many months before any hardship befell us in the least similar to this one.
For an ordinary private soldier, life on a horse-carrying transport, during a slow tropical voyage, would be pronounced by the dispassionate critic as the most wretched of all lots. That only shows how little he knows about human nature. He forgets that the keenest pleasures are those that are paid for the dearest, that all happiness is relative, and that its essence is contrast. Such, at any rate, was the philosophy wrung by the Editors from the three toilsome weeks that followed our departure from the dismal, sleet-swept quays of the Albert Docks. It was toil well and wisely spent, for the horses —which, of course, were the objects of nearly all of it—were landed in consequence in good condition, with a loss of only four. No doubt we ‘groused’ over the measures enforced to gain this end—the daily round of exercise and stall-cleaning; the tread-mill trampings over iron decks in the steaming bowels' of the ship; the Augean squalors of ‘mucking-out’ in the tropics, and the giddy descents into Tartarean gloom after forage from the hold. But ‘grousing’ is a valued privilege of all soldiers, and at heart we did not grudge the labour, severe and repulsive though much of it was. Indeed, we were as merry a ship as you could wish. We shared it with the Oxfordshire Yeomanry and the Irish Hospital, and made firm friends with both these Corps, holding joint concerts, athletic sports, and other amusements. By the fortune of war, we drifted apart from the Oxfordshire Yeomanry at the very outset, and never met them again, though we retained, as a pledge of their good will, a little four*footed recruit, in the shape of a monkey, obtained at Las Palmas, and solemnly presented on board, which followed all our fortunes thereafter, survived unscathed, and is now to be seen in the Zoo. The Irish Hospital we met again both at Bloemfontein and Pretoria, as many of our sick men have good cause to remember, having always received the utmost care and kindness from Dr. Stoker and his staff, in one of the best of the several very good volunteer hospitals which took part in the war.
All of us were inoculated for enteric fever during the voyage. It was a painful and irksome operation, and, admittedly, at the time, of doubtful efficacy; but it was cheerfully undergone, and, from a layman’s point of view, appears to have been justified by results.
The thing which gave us most concern during this voyage was the fear—ridiculous as it seems now—that the war would be over before we had time to engage in it. A passing vessel signalled to us that Kimberley was relieved, and the day after we arrived in port, Paardeberg was blazoned abroad. The tide had indeed turned; but there was plenty of time for us before it came to the flood.