Battle of Belmont

“ From a Sketch by a British Officer.
THE BATTLE OF BELMONT.
The line of infantry reached the foot of the kopjes and began the ascent, each man four paces from his neighbour, without supports or reserves. At this instant the slopes burst into flame, and a strange, unearthly crackling and sputtering ran along the front of the advancing soldiers. "You could see nothing but men dropping all round you," writes a private in the Scots Guards. ”

“ While we were stationed at Bird's Point, shortly before the battle of Belmont, Harvey R. James, who enlisted from Oregon, was detailed in the secret service for this purpose. James was a reticent, determined, clear-headed, resourceful young man of exceptional physical strength and endurance and as fearless as he was strong. Being supplied with an excellent horse, he started early in the morning and rode towards Belmont on the west bank of the Mississippi, about fifteen miles below Bird's Point. The country is low and swampy and covered in places with a thick growth of timber. ”

“ Grant has always been generous to his subordinates. His careful consideration of the interests of his staff and general officers is proverbial, while his generous treatment of inefficient officers, whom he has been compelled to relieve, is well known. In the first action in which he commanded, the battle of Belmont, his troops at first [Pg 124] gained an advantage over the rebels. They began to plunder the rebel camp in spite of all that the general could do to stop them. ”

“ Who was severely wounded through the shoulder at Belmont, was in command of the 9th Brigade at that battle, having been transferred from Lieut.-Colonel (half pay) of the King's Royal Rifles. He went through the Zulu War of 1879, and was in the Nile Expedition of 1884-5. He joined the service in 1867, and was appointed to the 31st Regiment. In 1863 he joined the 60th Rifles, and eventually commanded that regiment. After his wound at Belmont, his command was transferred to General Pole-Carew. ”

“ Fig. 10.—P. & O. Hospital Ship 'Simla' in Durban Harbour
To give some idea of the amount of work contingent on the transport of wounded men from an army of some 15,000, fighting its way against continued opposition, I will quote the approximate number of men moved during Lord Methuen's advance from Orange River to Magersfontein. (The number [Pg 26] of men actually present at each battle is shown in Table I., p. 12.)
Belmont, the first battle, was fought on November 23. ”

“ Thursday came; but not so Methuen. It was allowed that the Noble Lord could hardly be expected to gauge accurately the violence of our hurry; nor to conceive, however noble his imagination, that our hens laid eggs at eighteen pence apiece. We got another glimpse of the balloon to cheer us, and were also edified in the course of the day with news of the Belmont battle. The Belmont battle was a stale story when the Modder River fight was fresh, and the latter was now in all conscience stale enough. Of Magersfontein, not a word. This reticence in regard to Magersfontein intensified our curiosity ”

“ We were very soon out of range and went peacefully on our way to Cairo, every man feeling that Belmont was a great victory and that he had contributed his share to it.
Our loss at Belmont was 485 in killed, wounded and missing. About 125 of our wounded fell into the hands of the enemy. We returned with 175 prisoners and two guns, and spiked four other pieces. The loss of the enemy, as officially reported, was 642 men, killed, wounded and missing. We had engaged about 2,500 men, exclusive of the guard left with the transports. The enemy had about 7,000 ”

“ This continued, growing fiercer and fiercer, for about four hours, the enemy being forced back gradually until he was driven into his camp. Early in this engagement my horse was shot under me, but I got another from one of my staff and kept well up with the advance until the river was reached.
The officers and men engaged at Belmont were then under fire for the first time. Veterans could not have behaved better than they did up to the moment of reaching the rebel camp. At this point they became demoralized from their victory and failed to reap its full reward. ”

“ Gun-boats were hastily improvised and added to the efficiency of the blockade, and in the autumn of 1861 General Grant, who had been placed in command at Cairo, led an expedition for the capture of Belmont, a small town opposite Columbus. The Confederate camp at that point was captured and destroyed, but the Union forces were compelled to retreat owing to the fire of the heavy guns from the heights of Columbus, and the overwhelming number of troops that were sent across the river to reinforce the feeble garrison of Belmont. ”

“ It is said, however, that they made the mistake, in the scaling of the hill, of closing together, and so offering a more compact mass to the enemy's fire. We came on behind the infantry with our friends the Lancers, and passed through a gap in the range and on across some open ground and through a few more kopjes as fast as we could go. Then we came in sight of the enemy, and the same thing happened as at Belmont. A lot of horsemen, enough to have eaten us up, that were hanging about the rear of the Boer column, came wheeling out against us, and as we continued to approach, opened fire. ”

“ The soldier next them had sat down abruptly, and leaned forward over his knees. His movement and attitude were so natural that it was hard to realise that he had been shot through the head. He neither stirred nor groaned. His comrades bent over him for a moment, and then, shrugging their shoulders, they turned their dark faces to the Arabs once more. Belmont picked up the dead man's Martini and his ammunition-pouch.
“Only three more rounds, Cochrane,” said he, with the little brass cylinders upon the palm of his hand. “We've let them shoot too soon, and too often. ”

“ Near Belmont the Canadians and Queenslanders fell on a raiding or reckless commando, took them on at their own game, hunted them and shot them among the rocks until the white flag was upon the right side for once and hoisted in honest surrender. ”

“ But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty. Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full of the rich Dauphiné valley, with its great river and its eastern horizon of the Alps. ”

“ I rode down to Belmont a couple of days ago, and had a look at the Canadians and Queenslanders, who are quartered there. They are all in excellent health and spirits, and seem to be just about hungry for a fight. The Munsters, who are quartered there, are simply spoiling for a brush with the enemy, and seem to be as full of ginger as any men I have ever seen.
And every one of them with whom I conversed—and I chatted with a good many of the burly young Irishmen—expressed a keen desire to meet in open fight the Irish brigade now fighting on the side of the Boers. ”

“ No more pity or regard was shown to my agony of heart and mind than the cattle drover manifests in driving innocent dumb horned creatures from quiet clover meadows where they browsed in peace, to the reeking public shambles. Even a parting interview was denied me; but clandestinely I found an opportunity to renew my vows, to assure Belmont that no power on earth should compel me to renounce him, and that if necessary I would wait twenty years for him to claim me. ”

“ Marlborough’s cavalry managed to form, struggling beyond the brook, and the last final phase of the action was at hand—for Marlborough’s cavalry would reiterate that general lesson which the whole battle teaches, to wit, that the horse of the allies was not only far stronger numerically, but far better trained than the French cavalry before them, and, with equal chances, must destroy it. Tallard, by missing his moment, had permitted those equal chances to be restored. ”

“ Every French eye-witness bears record to the low spirits of the troops who were compelled to fight in the long series of explosions and assaults which filled the early weeks of February. The engineer Belmas, the most matter-of-fact of all the historians of the siege, turns aside for a moment from his traverses and mining-galleries, to describe the murmurs of the weary infantry of the 3rd Corps. ‘Who ever heard before,’ they asked, ‘of an army of 20,000 men being set to take a town defended by 50,000 madmen? We have conquered a quarter of it, and now we are completely fought out. ”

“ Very well; there is the subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by any lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself misinformed, and attend your last moments on the scaffold.
Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John Belmont hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this antagonism was a button.
It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of prosperity. ”

“ The greater part of this force was distributed in strong posts at Honey Nest Kloof, Enslin, Belmont, Witteputs, Orange River bridge, and De Aar. The garrison of Belmont was under command of Lt.-Colonel T. D. Pilcher, and consisted of two guns of P. battery, R.H.A., a half company of the Munster Fusiliers mounted infantry, 250 Queensland M.I., two companies of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and the Royal Canadian regiment, amounting in all to about 1,600 men. General Wood determined to use a portion of this garrison to brush away the hostile gathering on the left flank. ”

“ They lay in heaps of dead or wounded, cut down with the sword, for the most part unbroken in formation, their feet eastward whence the charge had come, and their faces to the sky. Over and beyond those corpses rode the full weight of Marlborough’s cavalry, right through Tallard’s left, which was the centre of the French line, while Tallard vainly called for troops to come out of Blenheim and check the fury, and as vainly sent for reinforcements to come from Marcin on the left, which should try and dam the flood that was now pouring through the bulwark of his ranks. ”

“ Such was the scheme of the march to the Danube which we are now about to follow; but before undertaking a description of the great and successful enterprise, the reader must permit me a word of distinction between a strategic move and that tactical accident which we call a battle. In the absence of such a distinction, the campaign of Blenheim and the battle which gives it its name would be wholly misread.
A great battle, especially if it be of a decisive character, not only changes history, but has a dramatic quality about it which fixes the attention of mankind. ”

“ Of the fifty odd thousand men and ninety guns that had marshalled twelve hours before along the bank of the Nebel, 12,000 men had fallen, 11,000 had surrendered, and one-third of the pieces were in the hands of the enemy.
The political consequences of this great day were more considerable by far than was even its character of a military success. It was the first great defeat which marked the turn of the tide against Louis XIV. It was the first great victory which stamped upon the conscience of Europe the genius of [Pg 144] Marlborough. ”

“ To direct a war from the other side of the Atlantic in days when letters between the secretary at war and the commander-in-chief seem often to have been nearly two months on their way, was to court failure.
At the outset of the war the enemy was unduly despised both by ministers at home and soldiers in the field. As the British general in command at Belmont is said to have rejected a proposal for turning the Boers' position, declaring that he would "put the fear of God into them," so Howe at Bunker hill delivered a frontal attack on the enemy's entrenchments which cost him over 1,000 men. ”

“ And Beltane, watching him thus, came to understand why this man had withstood the powers of Duke Ivo all these years, and why all men trusted to his judgment.
Thus, all day was rage of battle, but with the night peace came, since in the dark men might not see to aim and slay each other. And by night the folk of Belsaye made good their battered walls what time the besiegers prepared fresh devices of attack. Every morning at sunrise it was Beltane's custom to steal to the great minster and, soft-treading despite his armour, come to his mother's grave to hold communion with her in his prayers. ”

“ Blenheim, in the issue, turned out to be a cavalry battle—a battle won by cavalry, and its effect clinched by cavalry. The poor rôle played by the guns and the inability of the French to make use of their numerical superiority in this arm was a characteristic of the time, which had not yet learnt to use the cannon as a mobile weapon.
A general action is best understood if the reader is first told the main event, and later observes how the details of its progress fit in with that chief character of it. ”

“ The hill buzzed like a bee-hive, and the bullets made a sharp crackling as they struck against the rocks.
"You do no good by exposing yourself," said Belmont, drawing Colonel Cochrane behind a large jagged boulder, which already furnished a shelter for three of the Soudanese. "A bullet is the best we have to hope for," said Cochrane grimly. "What an infernal fool I have been, Belmont, not to protest more energetically against this ridiculous expedition! I deserve whatever I get, but it is hard on these poor souls who never knew the danger." ”