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  Chapter 8

  Captain Willie MacDonald, South Africa, 1900

  The war came at the right time for me. My brother Jack and I couldn’t work together at the distillery any more, and he was the eldest. We had begun to argue, so the letter from Lovat asking me to join him was, I suppose, opportune.

  I was glad to be back serving with my brother officers, almost all of whom had transferred from the Camerons and were great friends. Our seven weeks’ training at Beaufort Castle had been hard work but tremendously exciting, and the officers’ mess in the castle was like being back at boarding school. All the big houses in the area hosted parties and Dochfour even had a shoot that several of us attended. The jovial lead-up made our forthcoming trip to South Africa seem like a jolly holiday for a few months.

  When we sailed in, the excitement of Cape Town itself and the impending action in the north was intoxicating. We Scouts really believed that we were the crack troops of the Imperial Army, with a role that no other regiment could do – perfectly suited for the ‘shoot, run and hide’ war that the Boer were carrying out.

  We were told that the Boer were great horsemen and widely believed to be excellent shots. One particular skill they possessed was to shoot accurately from horseback. I was determined to master this, so I would saddle up a good horse and canter back and forth, firing at rocks for what seemed like hours. However, no amount of practice helped. I always needed at least one hand on the reins otherwise the horse sensed I was out of control and played up.

  The president of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger, had anticipated the war and used the huge funds from the goldmines to buy arms from France, Germany and even Britain. They had Maxim machine guns, as did we – fantastic artillery – including four huge French guns called Long Toms that could fire accurately at a distance of five miles and land shells with great accuracy on our encampments or on besieged towns, as they had done at Ladysmith and Kimberley. The Boer snipers used German Mausers that were considerably better than our Lee-Metfords and allowed them to sit out of range and pick us off. We had been promised new Lee-Enfields which would even things up. Meanwhile, we concentrated on our horsemanship and trained for our new role as cavalry rather than infantry.

  We were keen to get up to the war in the north. The Highland Brigade was commanded by General Hector MacDonald, known as ‘Fighting Mac’, and they’d been having an active time prior to our arrival. They lost a lot of men at Magersfontein and Paardeberg. We knew a lot of the officers there, in the Black Watch, the Gordon Highlanders, the Argyll and Sutherland, the Seaforth Highlanders and others. They didn’t have a cavalry unit and they needed one urgently.

  The army commander was Lord Roberts who, after a difficult start, was beginning to make headway in the campaign. Hundreds of thousands of troops were now pouring into the Cape from across the Empire. The sieges of Ladysmith and Kimberley had been relieved and our men were also moving north to capture Pretoria, where Kruger was headquartered. By the time I left for South Africa we were gaining momentum and it was widely believed that the war was being won.

  However, the consensus amongst the officers in the mess was that the army had too many generals who were constantly in-fighting. They appeared incapable of agreeing on a plan, with the result that mistakes were being made – mistakes that were costing many lives. The British newspapers were attacking the prime minister and the generals with critical headlines such as ‘400,000 of the finest troops from across the Empire unable to beat 60,000 Boer farmers’.

  Paradoxically, there was a real concern amongst us, the rank and file, that the Boer were about to capitulate. Having come all this way and having had such a fuss made over us as we left, we were desperate to have a taste of battle before the war was over, which it seemed likely would be by July, only four months away. A lot had been promised about our skill at reconnaissance and we were eager to show it was justified.

  We were fortunate in that we had an excellent bunch of officers. Our Commanding Officer, Andrew Murray, was the younger brother of the Earl of Mansfield and a regular soldier in the Camerons, as I had been. He knew exactly what he was doing and the role he wanted the Scouts to play. The officers were lairds from across the Highlands and the men either stalkers on their estates or otherwise well known to them (some even as poachers). There was a strong camaraderie and respect among all the ranks. In fact, my old friend Kenny Macdonald from Skeabost on Skye was one of my officers. I was adjutant but was later appointed as the commander of One Company for a while as Simon Lovat became sick and was invalided off.

  I tried to visit Simon in hospital but wasn’t allowed in. The place was full, although not a single man was there from an injury sustained in battle. Enteric fever was raging at the time, and I learned that far more men were dying from disease than from gunshot. We lost one man to it early: Sergeant Morrison, a fine soldier and a real loss to the regiment.

  Cape Town was bustling. Every hotel and guesthouse was crammed with journalists, politicians and civil servants out from Britain. Salesmen, too, desperate to secure contracts for the supply of food, ammunition, train tracks, tents and all sorts of essential goods were everywhere. They would queue outside the Military Supplies Office every morning to tout for trade. It was understandable, of course; the sums of money involved were vast and the army, at that time, profligate. This war would make the lucky few amongst the richest men in Britain.

  A number of hospital ships were tied up off Cape Town, one of which was Rhouma, George Bullough’s yacht from the Isle of Rum. I’d met Bullough eighteen months before when Kenny Macdonald and I were deer stalking with the Frasers at Morar Lodge. It was hard to imagine him being in South Africa now. Rumours of his decadent lifestyle had been rife for years on the West Coast. His yacht was built to be exactly the same length as Kinloch Castle, the huge new home which he was just completing on Rum. I had heard from one of the builders how his ballroom was built with windows placed deliberately high up so that no one could see in and how it had a revolving service cupboard whereby guests would receive their drinks without any of the staff being able to witness what was going on in the room.

  I was keen to reacquaint myself with the man. He was about the same age as me and I was curious. I sent a message to him asking if Kenny and I could come over for a visit. We got in a tender and set off to find Rhouma, eventually locating it over towards Green Point. Keen to impress, Bullough showed us around. He had had it refitted as a hospital ship, equipped for six invalid officers, twenty soldiers plus a doctor and nurses, all paid for out of his own pocket. Bullough was one of the wealthiest men in Britain and the vessel had been furnished luxuriously throughout with crystal chandeliers, beautiful paintings and mahogany furniture.

  I recall Kenny teasing him. ‘George, how do you expect the patients to get better now you’ve dismissed the brass band you normally have aboard?’ We had sherry and cake with him before we left. He was about to take a ship back to England, leaving Rhouma in the Cape. He was delighted when we told him that if we were hit by a bullet, this was where we wanted to be – survival rates in the field hospitals being so notoriously low.

  George Bullough hadn’t been aware that so many of the troops in South Africa were volunteers, newly recruited for the war. He’d assumed they were all regular soldiers. ‘Ah, but we’re the crack forces,’ I pointed out to him. ‘Did you know that for every six men who applied to join the Lovat Scouts in January, only one was accepted?’

  We were told that the Boer snipers specifically targeted officers. At Hart Hill, almost all the officers of the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards had been shot at, long range, before the attack had properly got going, so we removed the epaulettes that signified our rank from our shoulders and painted our buttons black. We also began to carry rifles like the men, with our pistols hidden away inside our jackets or in the baggage carts.

  I was fortunate that Donald John Gillies was one of my men. He was a man of the best sort, like an older brother to me in many ways. Whe
n we set off together for Beauly from Fort William in January, my mother came to wave us off. When she saw Donald John, she shook his hand and asked him to look after me. I never forgot his reply to her: ‘I will put his life before mine.’

  Our families have known each other for a century or more. His great-grandfather was the famous bard Ronald MacDonald of Ardnish, and he and an ancestor of mine worked for the cattle drover Corriechoillie. Both families are closely involved with the Catholic Church. My brother is a monk at Fort Augustus Abbey and has long been a great friend of Donald John and his family.

  The Gillies men from Ardnish were renowned bagpipers, descended from the hereditary pipers of Clan Macdonald of Clanranald at Castle Tioram. Ten years before the war, Donald John, at my father’s funeral, led the pipers down Fort William’s High Street ahead of the hearse and procession, and then at the graveside at Cille Choirill in Glen Spean as my father was laid to rest. He told me that his sons, Angus and young Donald Peter, were excellent pipers, too, already competing. I was not in the least surprised.

  If anyone were to ask me what the epitome of a Highland gentleman is, I wouldn’t mention the lairds or the aristocracy. I would answer: Donald John. Understated, polite, intelligent, kind and brave. He would give his last drop of water to an injured enemy soldier and his last penny to a beggar. I couldn’t have had a better man at my side in war.

  The family’s whisky business was in a state of flux and there was no one in the regiment with whom I could discuss my concerns other than Donald John. His opinion was always carefully considered and, invariably, correct. I remember meeting him at the auction mart in Fort William four years ago when I told him we were intending to build a second distillery. True to form, after a few well directed questions he wondered if we might hold off for a few years until the existing business was stronger. However, when businesses are thriving and the outlook seems excellent, it’s easy to brush aside talk of over-capacity and ignore the dark clouds on the horizon. We raised the money we needed to fund our massive expansion.

  My good cheer during our first week in South Africa was brought to an abrupt end with the arrival of a letter from my older brother Jack. He was living at the lovely old Macdonald chieftain’s house at Keppoch in Roybridge. He had wanted to buy the property from Mackintosh of Mackintosh, but he wouldn’t sell, which turned out to be fortunate given the news brought by his letter. He began cheerfully enough, very keen to hear my news, and wrote that if it wasn’t for the need for him to try to keep the business afloat, he would have been across like a shot. It sounded to me like he wanted to escape.

  He told me that the work on the extension to my new house, Blarour, was almost finished and that the bills were mounting for my return. I was desperate for news of the farm, how the livestock were faring and whether the bull I’d bought was proving a success, but knowing that my brother wouldn’t be interested and had his hands full with the business, I decided to write instead to my mother and ask her to speak to the farm manager.

  Jack finally got to the crux of his letter. The distillery business was not going well. There had been a collapse in the malt whisky market due to massive over-production across the industry and the crash of Pattisons in 1898. He feared it might become necessary to close the Nevis distillery. I read this with horror. It looked as though we had succumbed to the lure of the whisky bubble. We’d built the new distillery only recently and at massive expense. Despite its having the biggest production capacity in Scotland, now, it seemed, it was in serious jeopardy.

  Jack enclosed several cuttings from the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and The Times. I read that the rogue Pattison brothers, Robert and Walter, who had in recent years got involved in all aspects of the whisky trade, were likely to be convicted of fraud and embezzlement and imprisoned. They had mixed bad whisky with good, inflated the quantity and value of their stock, borrowed far and wide, and then when the business failed, taken many companies down with them. One columnist wrote that he believed no new distillery would now be built in Scotland for fifty years.

  The papers were full of tales of the brothers’ extravagances: private trains, lavishly appointed houses in the Scottish Borders and even having five hundred African Grey parrots trained to say ‘Buy Pattisons whisky’, which they then gifted to publicans.

  Our entire family business, Long John, was teetering. Pattisons had bought over a thousand hogsheads of our whisky and not paid for them. We had far too much unsold whisky stock, much of which was in the Pattisons warehouses, and whisky prices were plummeting. We also had substantial borrowings and were heading for massive losses, from which the business would take years to recover – if it ever did.

  ‘What else could possibly go wrong?’ Jack wrote. ‘I need you back here. I can manage the distilleries in the Fort and you could go to Edinburgh and London, track down our casks and get them into warehouses we control, then calm down the banks we owe money to. With a full day of travel to get anywhere I am struggling and can’t be in two places at once. The Scouts are a volunteer force – surely you can resign and head back?’

  I laid down the letter, feeling sick in the stomach. We’d followed the herd and were suffering the consequences. What would our canny father be thinking from up above?

  Jack reported that our mother was well though she never ceased worrying about her son at the Front, like mothers all across Britain. She considerately arranged for both the Oban Times and the London Times to be mailed to me during the campaign, and both were fought over in the officers’ mess. I wondered how much Jack told her about the worrying state of the business. She was bound to have read about Pattisons as it had been listed on the Stock Exchange and its collapse had been a front-page story, but I was sure Jack would have done what he could to shield her from the worst.

  The odd thing about being away at war was how much one craved news from home. Even though one may have just seen an hour-old impala being nursed by its mother, or a rainbow of remarkable clarity, neither miracle would stop the troopers’ stampede towards the wagon bearing the weekly post. I felt guilty being out here in this sunlit wide-open land, having the time of my life and leaving poor Jack alone to fight to save the business.

  Donald John came in with a message that the officers were to meet at the mess tent at 5 p.m. for orders.

  ‘Do you have a minute, Gillies?’ I asked, pointing to the canvas stool opposite me. He sat down and I explained my dilemma. ‘The whisky industry is in turmoil. We have a large number of whisky casks stored in warehouses owned by crooks, whisky prices are collapsing and the British Linen Bank is putting pressure on us to repay their loans. Jack wants me to go back home. Yet on the other hand, Lovat is in hospital, we’re short of experienced officers, I’m both adjutant and squadron commander, and we’re about to go into battle. If I leave, Major Murray will have a real problem and I fear that men could die if an officer with no experience in action were to lead them.’

  We discussed the pros and cons of the situation but came to no firm conclusion. Donald John urged me to write a letter of support to Jack to reassure him that I had complete trust in him.

  I proceeded to the mess tent feeling better for having shared my problems. There, I was instructed to lead half our battalion to Bloemfontein with instructions to go to the help of General MacDonald. I had no choice. I had to stay here, at least for a few months. Our campaign was expected to be short and lives were at risk. The commanding officer depended on me. My mind was made up.

  I sat down to write a short note to Jack immediately so as to catch the mail before we left Cape Town.

  My dear Jack,

  You paint a bleak picture with your news of the collapse at Pattisons and the resulting problems faced by us and the other distilleries. There can be few more capable people than you, and I can think of no one I would have more confidence in to manage the business in difficult times.

  It is with regret, however, that I must inform you that I cannot come back, I’m afraid, much though I would like to. W
e are short of experienced officers due to sickness, and the Scouts are now being sent to the aid of the Highland Brigade, who are in a tight spot. I went to see our friend Simon Lovat, who is in hospital, but was stopped from going in to the ward due to the risk of infection. He is in a bad way, and I beseech you to pray for his recovery.

  Give my love to Mother.

  Your loving brother,

  Willie

  Chapter 9

  Donald John, South Africa, May 1900

  We had been in Cape Town for a month. Winter was approaching, and finally we were off to war. Our squadron boarded a train and we headed six hundred and fifty miles north to Bloemfontein. This journey, which apparently took less than a day and night for civilian trains before the war, somehow took us three days. We were shunted into sidings from time to time, and we would take the opportunity to feed and exercise the horses that were tethered in the accompanying freight wagons and get a brew going. In the evenings, the squadron cook made us a proper meal while the train was refuelled with coal in a freight yard. The Africans who had been captured alongside the Boer were being set up in camps alongside the railways and they were employed to lug the coal, repair the train tracks and so on. With trains going through at a rate of four every hour each way, these railway networks were the arteries of South Africa and essential to the war effort. The Boer Commando frequently blew up the track and so all the bridges had army pickets guarding them. The trains had Maxim machine guns mounted front and back, and we had our rifles to hand.

  The trains were impressive. They were manufactured in Glasgow and York, and were twice as long as any of the ones we had at home. The coal for the engines was mined in a town called Glencoe, in Natal, which was near another town called Dundee. I discovered connections to Scotland everywhere. I even saw two of A. & J. Main’s tin tabernacles. In many ways we felt quite at home, especially during the cold nights as we shivered under our single-issue blankets.