Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (25 page)

The Birkenhead Drill

In the late January of 1917 a troopship left the port of Cape Town in South Africa bound for an undisclosed location in France. She was the SS
Mendi,
a steamship normally used for transporting mail but now chartered by the British government. Aboard were more than 800 black soldiers of the South African Native Labor Corps (SANLC). They had been recruited from among the great tribes of South Africa—Xhosa, Pondo, Swazi, Basutho, Zulu—and were on their way to the Great War. But instead of fighting in the trenches they would be expected to fell trees, quarry stone, make roads, or work at the docks unloading cargoes of hay, coal, ammunition and other essential supplies. Many of the men had never been to sea before and were on their way to a world that was utterly foreign to them.

The
Mendi
was crewed by 33 British sailors and the trip north was uneventful for the first few weeks. By the early hours of the morning of February 21 they were in the English Channel, 11 nautical miles off the southernmost tip of the Isle of Wight. Their last berth had been in Plymouth and since leaving there on the 19th they had been escorted by the British destroyer HMS
Brisk.
The Channel is and was a body of water that demands respect from mariners and, at the height of the war, was being made even more dangerous by the lurking presence of German U-boats. It was bitterly cold and a heavy fog had settled upon the water, making navigation even more problematic than usual. The
Brisk
and the
Mendi
had cut their speed to a crawl.

Some time before dawn the troopship was involved in a collision with the SS
Darro,
a British steamship twice her size. “Collision” makes it sound like a knock-for-knock accident. In fact, the
Darro
was traveling at full speed and struck the starboard side of the
Mendi
so hard she almost cut the smaller vessel in two. Freezing water rushed into the jagged tear, filling the hold and instantly
drowning hundreds of men as they lay sleeping in their hammocks and bunks below decks. Almost at once the ship began to keel over.

Those men still alive and able to move either threw themselves out into the water or scrambled up onto the open deck. The catastrophic damage to starboard had put all the lifeboats on that side of the ship out of action. Boats were lowered from the port side, carrying away handfuls of men, while others put on whatever lifejackets they could find and awaited the inevitable. The ship continued to roll slowly over into the cold, black water.

The crew of HMS
Brisk
did all they could to help—putting boats into the water and rowing into the fog to pick up survivors—but for reasons no one fully understands to this day, nothing was done by the crew of the
Darro.
Her captain, Henry Winchester Stump, issued no orders and simply held off while a tragedy unfolded in front of him. The cries of the men in the water, though muffled by the fog and weakened by the cold, filled the night. At a subsequent official inquiry Stump would lose his Master’s ticket for a year, which hardly seems like any punishment at all.

But as the panicked men of the SANLC gathered in knots upon the deck of the
Mendi
a familiar figure appeared among them, walking tall and with arms upraised. He was the Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha and he had words to say to his fellow Africans.

“Be quiet and calm, my countrymen,” he told them, “for what is taking place is exactly what you came to do. You are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death drill! I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers. Swazis, Pondos, Basuthos, we die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our
assegais
in the kraals, our voices are left with our bodies!”

And there on that sloping deck, as the waters rose to receive them, those sons of Africa kicked off their Army boots and stamped the steps of their death dance and let their voices rise high into the night sky to fly far away from that awful place.

Within 25 minutes the
Mendi
was gone, sunk to the bottom of the English Channel. Nearly 650 soldiers and crew were lost along with her, drowned or dying
where they floated in their lifejackets—killed by the effects of hypothermia. The Reverend Dyobha was among them, of course. It is still one of the worst disasters to have taken place in British waters.

The loss of the
Mendi
has been remembered longest in the oral histories of the South African tribes. It was reported in some newspapers at the time, but is a story largely lost to the world. Among the tribes they still say that news of what had happened reached Africa before the white men had time to write it down. The men’s voices had been carried home with their spirits. Much later, there were commemorations and memorials. In life, the men of the SANLC had been thought inferior to white soldiers—unfit to fight and die alongside them. Only in death were they accorded any respect.

The sea is the graveyard for countless brave men. It has neither memory nor malice and yet time and again it has demanded unimaginable valor and courage from those who would ride upon it.

Some 65 years before the tragedy of the SS
Mendi
another troopship had sailed between England and South Africa—in the opposite direction. For the events of 1914–18 were not the first to bring the white man together with the Xhosa, the Basutho, the Pondo, the Swazi or the Zulu for the atrocity of war; far from it.

This time there were around 700 souls aboard—officers and men bound for the Cape Frontier War. There were also women and children, families of some of the officers. She was the HMS
Birkenhead.

By the 1850s the armies of the British and of the Boers had been at war, off and on, with the people of the Xhosa tribe in the Eastern Cape of South Africa for as long as anyone could remember. Squabbles about rights to land had begun in the late 1770s between the Dutch and the amaXhosa, and then gradually escalated into full-blown battles. The British allowed themselves to be swept up into the fight—as the British invariably do—and now after several decades there was still no end in sight. Historians have given numbers to these wars and by 1852 the British forces in the Cape needed reinforcements for their continuing efforts to secure victory in the eighth round.

In January 1852 the iron-hulled, ocean-going paddle steamer HMS
Birkenhead
—one of the first of her kind—left Portsmouth with fresh soldiers bound for what they called in those days “the Kaffir Wars.” The ship was something of an oddity, fully rigged for sail but gaining most of her forward propulsion from two huge paddle wheels mounted amidships. She’d been launched in 1845 in Birkenhead on Merseyside from the famous shipyard operated by the Laird family and, at just over 200 feet long and weighing 1,400 tons, was originally designed to be a powerfully armed frigate. But the Admiralty saw her as something between a ship of sail and a ship of steam, and since they couldn’t quite decide what to do with her, simply consigned her to service as a troop carrier. Her captain was Robert Salmond, and his family had been sending its sons to the sea since the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

She journeyed first to Cove of Cork, in southern Ireland, where she collected more soldiers and horses. As far as fighting men went, these were as green as could be. Most had signed up just weeks before, to escape the long-drawn-out horror of the potato famine that had blighted Ireland throughout the 1840s, and had had precious little in the way of training by the time they clumped awkwardly up the gangplanks and onto the deck of the
Birkenhead
. Perhaps they had notions of finding adventurous new lives in far-flung places; more likely they were just attracted by the prospect of three square meals a day.

From Ireland they headed south, and to war. The largest single draft aboard consisted of 66 men of the 74th Regiment, later to become part of the Highland Light Infantry. They were commanded by the strapping six-foot-three-inch figure of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Seton, a 38-year-old Scotsman. As it turned out, he was imbued with more than enough sense of discipline to provide a share for every man aboard. He had been ordered to South Africa to replace Lieutenant Colonel Fordyce, who had been killed in action, and as
the senior military figure aboard the
Birkenhead
it would be his job to whip those raw recruits he had inherited into some sort of recognizable shape.

It is hard to come up with accurate figures but it seems likely that well over 600 men had filed up the gangplanks by the time the
Birkenhead
departed for South Africa. There were also women and children aboard, though again the loss of muster rolls makes it impossible to say how many. It wasn’t unusual for officers to take their families on campaign with them at that time—and perhaps the presence of women and children improved the atmosphere aboard the ship for the several weeks of the journey.

Seton made good use of the time afforded him as the ship headed south. On deck the men were put through their paces—drilling, exercising and learning what it was to be a soldier in the Army of Queen Victoria. He also worked at overcoming the divisions between the different regiments aboard and sought to establish something amounting to
esprit de corps
.

The
Birkenhead
made stops at several African ports along the way, and during the last week in February they arrived in the port of Simon’s Bay, near Cape Town. They were just two days from their final destination of Port Elizabeth, in Algoa Bay. Some time in the afternoon of the 25th, fully loaded with fresh water and other supplies, they set out on the final leg of the trip. Captain Salmond was now under orders to cover the last few miles as quickly as possible, but still he was relaxed and unconcerned. The sky was of the clearest blue when they departed and there was only a light wind. The conditions were perfect. He was as experienced as any man of his rank in the Royal Navy and he expected the next two days to go off without incident of any kind.

The
Birkenhead
was making about eight or nine knots, her steam-powered paddle wheels pounding rhythmically upon the waves and driving her steadily southeast. To make the fastest time possible, she
was hugging a line just three miles out from the South African shore. So close in, there was always a possibility of grounding on some or other uncharted sandbank, and so an experienced sailor was using a lead weight, on the end of a long line, to measure the clearance between the hull and the seabed. There were lookouts stationed fore and aft, officers on the bridge and sailors on watch all around. Captain Salmond was so reassured by his own precautions, he had gone below to sleep.

Just before two o’clock in the morning of February 26 a sailor’s voice broke the silence of the night. It was the leadsman, reporting the depth as he had been doing for the past many miles: “Sounding 12 fathoms,” he said. There was nothing to worry about and all was well.

Minutes later there came another reassuring voice, another part of the night-time routine aboard ship: “Four bells, sir,” said the sailor, telling the duty officer it was the halfway mark of the Middle Watch.

No sooner had that officer given his reply of “Strike them,” than the
Birkenhead
ran full-tilt onto a submerged reef of rock. They were in an area known generally as Danger Point, but the rocks with which they had collided were not marked on any chart. It was just bad luck.

All of that was meaningless detail now. The ship had grounded so hard—her paddle wheels continuing to push her forward even after the initial impact—that her bow had been ripped wide open between the forepeak and the engine room. The sea poured into the hull, instantly flooding the sleeping quarters of scores of the men. Most of them were drowned where they lay.

Captain Salmond, thrown from his bed by the impact, appeared on deck moments later, half-dressed. Shocked he may have been, but he was also an old Navy hand and jumped quickly into action for the sake of his ship, his crew and his passengers. He was barking orders
left and right—ordering his men to assess the damage and report back to him. He dispatched others to round up the women and children and bring them up on deck at once. Distress rockets arced across the night sky. They’d been loosed out of force of habit, but there was no help to be had within miles.