Tommy Cornstalk Being Some Account of the Less Notable Features of the South African War From the Point of View of the Australian Ranks Abbott, J. H. M. (John Henry McCartney) (1874-1953) A digital text sponsored by Australian Literature Gateway University of Sydney Library Sydney 2003 http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/abbtomm © University of Sydney Library. The texts and images are not to be used for commercial purposes without permission Source Text: Prepared from the print edition published by Longmans, Green and Co. London, New York, Bombay 1902 264pp. All quotation marks are retained as data. First Published: 1902 A828.91 Australian Etext Collections at essays 1890-1909 Tommy Cornstalk Being Some Account of the Less Notable Features of the South African War From the Point of View of the Australian Ranks London, New York, Bombay Longmans, Green and Co. 1902 The Song of the Dead Oh, Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you— Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring— Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories, Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing. For we lie quietly, underneath the stony kops, Where the Veldt is silent, where the guns have ceased to boom. Here we are waiting, and shall wait to Eternity— Here on the battle-fields, where we have found our doom. Spare not thy pity—Life is strong and fair for you— City by the waterside, homestead on the plain. Keep ye remembrance, keep ye a place for us— So all the bitterness of dying be not vain. Oh, be ye mindful, mindful of our honour's name; Oh, be ye careful of the word ye speak in jest— For we have bled for you; for we have died for you— Yea, we have given, we have given of our best. Life that we might have lived, love that we might have loved, Sorrow of all sorrows, we have drunk thy bitter lees. Speak thou a word to us, here in our narrow beds— Word of thy mourning in lands beyond the Seas. Lo, we have paid the price, paid the cost of Victory. Do not forget, when the rest shall homeward come— Mother of our childhood, sister of our manhood's days, Loved of our heavy hearts, whom we have left alone. Hark to the guns—pause, and turn, and think of us— Red was our life's blood, and heavy was the cost. But ye have Nationhood, but ye are a people strong— Oh, have ye love for the brothers ye have lost? Oh,—by the blue skies, clear beyond the mountain tops, Oh, by the dear, dun plains where we were bred,— What be your tokens, tokens that ye grieve for us, Tokens of your Sorrowing for me that be Dead? TO THE MEMORY OF W. R. H. KILLED IN ACTION AT DIAMOND HILL JUNE 12, 1900 This book is affectionately dedicated Preface To so great an extent has the market been flooded with all sorts and conditions of books relative to the war in South Africa that the author feels constrained to introduce his with a few words of apology and explanation, in the hope that he may perhaps justify himself for seeking to inflict yet another upon a long-suffering public. War Correspondents, Doctors, Members of Parliament, Lords and Lookers-on have, all and sundry, had their say in book form as to what they have seen and what they have thought about it. Battles, strategy, transport, hospitals—all the varied features of both campaigns have been most thoroughly discussed and debated in their diversity of light and shade from almost every possible point of view. So that there would seem at first very little left to write about. But the Australian soldier, though frequently the subject of much literary effort, has not yet had his say. Therefore, in these pages the author has striven to show other Australians, who had not the good fortune to serve in Africa, what some phases of campaigning were like, as viewed from the standpoint of the Australian ranks, and has occasionally ventured to say, as an Australian, how things have impressed him. With regard to the two “Battle” chapters, it is perhaps necessary to explain that, though the incidents and setting are actual facts, the whole is not intended to represent any particular engagement, but is rather a kind of composite portrait of half a dozen or more. In conclusion, the author wishes to acknowledge the kindly assistance and advice for which he is indebted to Mr. John Arthur Barry in the making of this book. SYDNEY, 1902. Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. THE CORNSTALK 1 II. THE VELDT 14 III. THE MARCH 27 IV. THE KOPJE 43 V. THE OUTPOST 61 VI. THE BIVOUAC 80 VII. THE BATTLE 99 VIII. THE BATTLE—(continued) 118 IX. THE HOSPITAL 137 X. THE HOSPITAL—(continued) 157 XI. THE HOSPITAL—(continued) 174 XII. THE MAN 190 XIII. THE ARMY 209 XIV. THE BOER 233 XV. THE END 252 Tommy Cornstalk Chapter I The Cornstalk THERE was a story sent from the Front by the Correspondent of a Sydney daily newspaper, concerning a Great General, a Field Hospital and Geography. New South Wales had a very well-equipped and well-served Army Medical Corps, which, when troops were offered for service in South Africa by the Australasian Colonies, had despatched two field ambulances to the Cape. One of them was at Paardeberg whilst Cronje sullenly stood at bay in the Modder. The Great General came to see it. Everything was good, and complete, and well done, and of an excellence that does not show through a binding of red tape; and the Great General had never before seen anything quite so good, or complete, or so well done, and was pleased and interested in all he saw. “Who are you?” he asked, “and where do you come from?” To which the P.M.O. made answer: “We are part of the New South Wales Army Medical Corps”. “Ah, yes,” returned the Great General; “yes, New South Wales! That's Adelaide, isn't it?” Now the application of this little tale is, that if Great Generals do not know that New South Wales is not a suburb of Adelaide, how much less will the average un- Australian reader comprehend the meaning of the term ‘Cornstalk’? In Gippsland grow the big gum trees. It is a matter of some pride, perhaps, to Victorians that their province should grow the largest gum trees in all the Australias. Jealous of Victorian prowess in eucalyptus cultivation, so to speak, the other Australians refer to the Victorian people collectively as ‘Gum-suckers’! Because the popular banana finds the climate of Queensland suitable to its healthy being, the inhabitants of that Colony are dubbed ‘Banana-landers’. It may have been that, to the early South Australians, means of subsistence came not easily. At any rate they are called ‘Crow-eaters’. In delicate reference to the nature of their country the West Australians are ‘Sand- gropers’. Finally, the people of New South Wales, having acquired a reputation for lankiness and wiriness, have been named ‘Cornstalks’. That a native of the mother colony differs very greatly from the human product of any other part of Australia is possibly doubtful, but that, in the days of his youth at any rate, he is usually slimly built and long of limb is a fact fairly well established. See him in his own country—along the creeks and rivers of the eastern ranges, on the New England and Monaro tablelands, or out in the sun-baked West—and you will find that there is something about him peculiarly characteristic, something of his own that marks him slightly, but still unmistakably, as himself and no one else. Place the average bush-bred boy of eighteen beside the same aged English lad and note the difference. The Cornstalk is the almost immediate successor of the Hawkesbury native—is indeed symbolical of the evolution of that physically perfect being. Years ago, we of the present generation are told, if you should see anywhere a particularly tall, brawny, well-made, big man, you might be morally certain that he hailed from the farms upon the Hawkesbury River flats. The first of the free settlers who commenced the march westwards ‘squatted’ there, and owned the land by right of occupation. If they could obtain them, they took wives unto themselves, and reared up families. And the families subsisted principally upon pumpkin and ground maize, and wore no boots in their childhood, and led a free, wild, untrammelled sort of life. So they grew into tall, clean-limbed, deep-chested men, and sturdy, comely women, and spread North and West and South over the land—and their offspring were the fathers and mothers of the Cornstalks of to-day. There were, of course, other places besides the banks of the Hawkesbury where the pioneers tilled the land and grazed their flocks, but the Hawkesbury native is typical of the best men and women of that time. Big and large, the Cornstalk is a good man. Like most other good men, he has his faults—even his vices—but they are not yet the faults and vices that bring a people to the gutter. His is not a new race—it is rather the renewed, reinvigorated reproduction of an older one. He has the blemishes of his forebears, the transmitted characteristics of a not too perfect ancestry. He has developed little traits, and big traits, of his own; and many of his leanings look alarming.