memoir

Yeoman service

Maud Brooke Rolleston, 1901

Named on the page for Battle of Magersfontein.

machine-read Machine-read (OCR) from a scanned book at the Internet Archive: expect misread words and names. The scan itself is at the library.

draft Matched to the battle automatically; not yet reviewed.

Passages that name the battle; the whole book is at Internet Archive.

10–11 December 1899

Battle of Magersfontein

WELLINGTON 63
An order came the next day that Colonel Meyrick's battalion was to go to Matjesfontein. There was much rejoicing at first amongst them, as they and we all thought it was Magersfontein near Kimberley, to which they were to be sent, and there was considerable annoyance when they found it was only about 100 miles farther north. More invalids came

WELLINGTON 77
cutting puffing and snorting for some time, and afterwards we went slower than ever ; not that we minded as long as there was day- light, for we began almost at once to cross the battlefield of Magersfontein with its terrible associations, but first we stopped at the station of Modder River, which is not a cheerful place. It is surrounded by red sand, with hardly a scrap of vegetation of any kind left.

WELLINGTON 79
From here we seemed to enter the valley of the shadow of death, although one saw nothing very horrible, only a few dead horses lying scattered about ; but Magersfontein will always recall the saddest possible thoughts. A long low kopje, with its intersecting entrenchments, can be seen very plainly from the railway, and one can easily understand why this place became such a scene of slaughter. It is said that it was useless to have attacked such a place without the aid of stronger artillery and plenty of mounted men, though, to render these latter useless, some people say the ground was covered with fences of barbed wire a foot high. Others say this was not the case. Perhaps the truth is that it was so here and there.

KIMBERLEY 105
One afternoon Nan and I and Major Burchell had a very interesting talk with Major Pollock, chiefly about the battlefield at Magersfontein, which Major Burchell had visited the day after the battle. He described the high, close, barbed wire fence which the Highlanders came upon close to the trenches, and which prevented them getting over in face of that deadly fire. I have heard that some mistake was made in approaching the kopje, and in the darkness it was thought that this fence was more to the left, but in the early dawn they came upon it, an unsurmountable obstacle, with guns and rifles so near pouring in a terrible fire. Notwith- standing this, two Highlanders did get through,

Public domain. Text from Internet Archive.