Regimental Badges

Tit-Bit, Fort Stagnation and a bored army's stonework

Nobody knows for certain what Tit-Bit was. When Bryan Cooke followed the railway east of Swakopmund for the SWA Annual in 1975, the word lay in letters four feet high between the two badges on this ridge, and neither the military archives in Pretoria nor the war museum in Johannesburg could tell him what it meant. The regimental associations eventually produced one old soldier of the 2nd Kimberley Regiment. He half remembered a mascot, “either a goat or a horse”, that begged scraps from the men. It died, or it was eaten when rations ran thin. Cooke could not say which. That is all the evidence there is: one veteran’s memory at sixty years’ distance.

Cooke also read the smaller badge as the work of D Company of the 2nd Durban Light Infantry, not of the battalion as a whole.

A battalion that had just been shelled

On 26 April 1915 the 2nd Kimberleys held the centre of the trench line at Trekkopjes siding, further up the same railway, when a German column under Major Ritter shelled the camp from about twenty to eight until late morning. A Transvaal Scottish captain in the next trench, D R Hunt, watched the Kimberleys’ built-up wall draw the German guns and wrote that they “stuck well to their position”. The Kimberley Regiment lost more dead than any other unit there. The heritage council dates the badges on this ridge to May 1915. If that is right, the stonework came within weeks of that morning.

Warm water and a German aeroplane

Guarding the line was the dullest job in Botha’s army. South African engineers were relaying the narrow German track in the wider Cape gauge as the infantry moved inland, and behind them blockhouses and water tanks went up roughly every 10 km, with every culvert and cutting patrolled day and night. The route is waterless, so a train hauled water up from the coast every day until the advance reached supplies from Usakos, and what came out of the corrugated iron tanks was brackish and tepid. Bully beef and biscuit, flies at every meal.

The best diversion was the German pilot who came over now and then to drop bombs, all of which missed. A 1916 history of the campaign by Rayner and O’Shaughnessy says nobody took cover: everyone, cooks included, grabbed a rifle and had a shot at him. The Kimberleys had already gone further, according to their colonel’s diary, and mounted a Maxim gun on a cart.

What Cooke found further up the line

Whoever started it, the craze turned into a contest, and it did not stop at badges. Below a sangar near Rössing Mountain Cooke recorded a soldier’s name, G. C. JACOBS, set out beside a metre-wide path. Under the heliograph station on the mountain the signallers of the South African Mounted Rifles had made a badge entirely in white quartz, which some well-meaning campers had since “tidied”, turning an S into an R. At kilometre 56, below one of two hilltop forts, a name was set out in framed letters up to five feet high: FORT STAGNATION. By the path to the other fort somebody had laid a heart ten feet tall in brown stone.

That was half a century ago and I have not found a later survey of those smaller pieces, so do not count on all of it still being there. Cooke closed his article hoping the monuments council would keep a promise to protect the best of the insignia. Three years later it proclaimed two sites: this ridge, and the one with the big Durban Light Infantry badge at kilometre 46.