The History of Lumsden's Horse. Various

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      Photo: Bourne & Shepherd. SURMA VALLEY LIGHT HORSE. CONTINGENT OF LUMSDEN’S B COMPANY

      Hard work and plenty of it has been the order of the day ever since we came on board. The greater part of this is in connection with the horses. It is, of course, of very great importance that we should be in a position to move forward as soon as possible after landing, and, bearing this in mind, Major Showers and his officers are doing their utmost to keep the animals fit. For the first day or two bran mashes were given the horses, with as much hay as they could eat. This has been gradually augmented, until they are now getting a mixture of bran and gram or linseed three times a day. The watering and feeding are carried out with the greatest regularity, each section officer personally superintending the work. Our daily routine may prove interesting to the uninitiated in these matters. Awakened by reveillé at 4.30, we have time to put our kits in order before getting a cup of tea at 5.30. Half an hour later the bugle sounds ‘stables,’ and the men immediately assemble on the lower deck, each section separately, to answer the roll. Absentees who are not on the sick-list, or engaged in fatigue or other duties, have their names noted down, and are dealt with afterwards. Each horse is taken out of his stall and thoroughly groomed, and the stall itself cleaned and disinfected daily. The horses are then watered, a certain number of men being told off for this duty; the rest are occupied in drawing and mixing the feeds, which they place in tin troughs, one in front of each horse. As soon as word is passed that watering is completed, the command ‘Feed’ is given, and the troughs are immediately lifted and fixed on the breast-boards attached to each stall. The hay is then served out in bundles, each horse getting six. These are opened and put in the bags hung over the horses’ heads.

      The stable picket, consisting of three men from each section, is posted at 7 o’clock in the evening, and is on duty for twenty-four hours—till seven the following evening. Each man takes his turn as stable sentry for eight hours altogether out of the twenty-four—two hours on and four hours off. A non-commissioned officer is in charge of all four section pickets, 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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ