[Footnote 36: It is stated on the authority of the United States Military attach that Kitchener said next day that if he had known the power of the Mauser behind entrenchments, he would not have attempted to assault the laager.]

[Footnote 37: They were originally granted as a counterpoise to the irregularities of the system of promotion by purchase.]

[Footnote 38: See Colonel du Cane's translation of Vol. II. of the German Official Account, p. 52.]



CHAPTER IX

Alarms and Excursions

The occupation of Bloemfontein by the British Army in March, 1900, ushered in the second or guerilla period of the war. Hitherto the struggle had been mainly, though not entirely, maintained against considerable bodies of Boers, who though widely dispersed acted more or less under a common direction; but after the capture of the Free State capital, a system of partisan and irregular warfare was adopted by the enemy.

The change was not suddenly effected. It was an instinctive, almost an imperceptible, development rendered necessary by circumstances. The reverses on the Modder, the failure at Ladysmith, the ill success which attended the attempts to raise the fiery cross in the northern districts of Cape Colony, indicated to the burghers the cause of the instability of their military machine. They discovered, in time, that its centre of gravity was too highly pitched and must be brought nearer the earth. For five months the war had been carried on under the orders of a federal syndicate composed of the two Presidents sitting with casual military assessors, scarcely one of whom was a strategist or capable of viewing the Boer cause synoptically. Cronje was gone into captivity; Joubert was suspected to be half-hearted; and Botha, who had begun so well in Natal, was a disappointment.

The Boers recognized that the British strategy had been astonishingly successful, and that they could not hope to compete with it. But they believed, not without justification, that in minor tactics and the smaller operations of war they were the equals of their enemy and in war-craft his superior. The power of a slender, well-led, and resolute force was shown at Nicholson's Nek, Waterval Drift, and elsewhere, and it began to dawn upon their lethargic minds that the individual efforts of handy commandos acting to a great extent independently offered them the best chance of resisting the invader.[39] The new method was almost immediately put on trial and, with certain notable exceptions, continued throughout the war, which mainly by its use was prolonged for twenty-six months against an enemy daily increasing in numbers. Not that the Boers were not at first greatly discouraged by the victories on the Modder, which admitted Lord Roberts to Bloemfontein, and by the tranquillity which suddenly brooded upon the arena of war. Even the Prieska rebellion, from which so much was hoped owing to its proximity to the line of communication with Capetown, was dying away under the vigorous hands of Kitchener, who had been detached from Head Quarters to deal with it.

Many of the burghers availed themselves of a proclamation issued by Lord Roberts on March 15, under which, after taking an oath of neutrality, they were allowed to return to their farms, and there remain during good behaviour. Others took furlough, with or without permission, or fled to Kroonstad. When Joubert remonstrated with De Wet for acquiescing in the exodus, the latter replied that he could not help it. The burghers were not accustomed to discipline and could not be coerced, but they would return with renewed courage by and by.

The demoralization was, however, confined to the burghers who had been fighting on the Modder River. The commandos which had been opposed to Gatacre, Clements, and Brabant in the Cape Colony retired across the Orange in good order under Olivier, Lemmer, and E.R. Grobler; and although encumbered by lengthy trains of ox-wagons, marched up the right bank of the Caledon along the Basuto Border, and established themselves with a strength of 6,000 burghers on Lord Roberts' right flank near Ladybrand and Clocolan: a daring exploit which was justified by its success, as the left flank throughout the trek was exposed to a raid from Bloemfontein or Edenburg. A mounted force 1,800 strong under French was indeed sent eastward to show the flag, detach the waverers, and if possible, intercept the retreat; but the information at Head Quarters was imperfect and the strength of the commandos was greatly underestimated. It was assumed that they had been subject to the disintegration which obliterated the Modder River commandos; but a small reconnoitring column, detached under Pilcher by French from Thabanchu, found itself in presence of a force which outnumbered it thirty times, and was recalled.

The presence of a considerable body of the enemy organized on the flank, the necessity of accumulating a large stock of supplies and stores, and a serious epidemic of fever among the troops, postponed the advance on the Transvaal many weeks beyond the end of March, when Lord Roberts had hoped to set out for the north. The apparent pacification of the country and the alacrity displayed by the burghers in submitting to the generous conditions of the proclamation of neutrality, had encouraged him in the belief that prompt action before the enemy had time to take breath would finally crush the dwindling opposition; but he soon became aware that it was but a lull in the storm, of which the mutterings were almost immediately renewed.

Pole-Carew, who shortly after the occupation was sent south with a brigade to establish touch with Gatacre and Clements and open up the railway, heard of the Boer movement along the Basuto Border and at once reported it to Lord Roberts, whom he rejoined at Bloemfontein on March 17. Before the end of the month the line was cleared and trains were passing to and fro between Capetown and the capital of the Free State, which had lately been renamed the Orange River Colony. From that time forward the enemy succeeded on one occasion only, and then but for a few hours, in cutting the Springfontein-Bloemfontein railway; and the hazardous advance along the Modder River, which involved the possibility of the Army being left in the air at Bloemfontein, was fully justified.

The Boers, who were supposed to be hypnotized, soon began to show signs of returning animation. At a Krijgsraad which assembled at Kroonstad on March 17, and at which Steyn and Kruger were present, plans for the renewal of the struggle were discussed and measures for enforcing discipline on the burghers were taken. Steyn professed to have information that a Russian advance on India was imminent. The idea of resistance en masse was abandoned, and a policy of flying columns unencumbered with wagons and acting aggressively against the British lines of communication was adopted. It was hoped that a timely demonstration would lure the enemy out of his hold, and that a little encouragement would revive the Prieska rebellion. The determination to continue hostilities in which even Joubert, who after the fall of Ladysmith joined the commandos operating in the Free State, acquiesced, was a proof of the courage and the steady patriotism of the Boer leaders, and the events of the next two years justified their resolution. Joubert, who had attended the Krijgsraad in feeble health, died a few days after its adjournment, and L. Botha was appointed to the thankless office of Commandant-General.

The only direction from which Bloemfontein appeared to be vulnerable was the north, which also was the direction in which Lord Roberts hoped soon to be leading his troops. At a distance of a day's march from the capital, the railway to Pretoria crosses the Modder at Glen, and again the river which had recently figured so prominently in the campaign came upon the stage of war, and not as a last appearance. The railway bridge had been destroyed by the Boers, who thus excluded themselves from action on the left bank. A considerable force was sent out from Bloemfontein to hold the position while the bridge was being rebuilt, and to keep at arm's length the enemy skirmishing on the right bank. It was soon found necessary to hold a more advanced post at Karee Siding, north of Glen, and a force which seems out of proportion to the resistance which, according to the ideas then prevalent at Head Quarters, might be expected, was assembled at Glen on March 28. The VIIth Division under Tucker was brought up from Bloemfontein, and French was recalled from Thabanchu to lead the cavalry. With him, in command of the mounted infantry, was Le Gallais, a remarkable association of two soldiers whose names, though in different languages, were identical. Bloemfontein was denuded of cavalry, but the combined strength of the two cavalry brigades was much under 1,000. The force under Tucker and French, which judging from its strength Lord Roberts seems to have detailed rather as the advanced guard of an immediate march on Pretoria than as the minimum with which the opposition could be safely encountered, numbered about 9,000 men with thirty guns. At Karee Siding were 3,500 burghers under T. Smuts, who had come up to carry out the Krijgsraad idea of enticing the British out of Bloemfontein.

Next day a battle of the usual type was fought. The mounted troops worked upon the flanks of the enemy, who was posted on a line of kopjes on each side of the railway, while the infantry attacked frontally with success and drove back the burghers, who retired in good order towards Brandfort unmolested by the cavalry, which was as before too much exhausted for effective pursuit. Thus, at a cost of less than 200 casualties, Lord Roberts made good the first stage on the road to the north.

Soon after his entry into Bloemfontein Lord Roberts sent out a small mounted column under Amphlett to Sannah's Post, where the water which supplied the capital was drawn from the Modder River. This had been cut off by the enemy, and the Army was dependent upon the disused and tainted wells within the city. The Boer commandos, which under the command of Olivier had retreated from the Cape Colony to Ladybrand and Clocolan, now began to threaten Broadwood, who, when French was sent to Glen, succeeded to the command of the mounted column. Broadwood was compelled to retire from Thabanchu on March 30. Early on the following morning he bivouacked at the Waterworks, whither his convoy under Pilcher had already preceded him; and simultaneously the IXth Division under Colvile and a brigade of Mounted Infantry under Martyr were ordered out from Bloemfontein to help him in.

Meanwhile De Wet at Brandfort was watching his opportunity of working at the task assigned to him under the Krijgsraad scheme, of attacking the British lines of communication. His anticipation that the burghers would return with renewed vigour from the furlough which they had granted to themselves proved to be accurate. While Smuts was standing up to Tucker and French at Karee Siding, 1,600 men with five field guns under C. De Wet, whose second in command was his brother Piet, were circling to the Waterworks. The initial direction of the march was N.E., in order to conceal the real objective of the raid even from his own men. His intention was to seize Amphlett at the Waterworks, and there lie in wait for Broadwood's convoy. Before reaching his destination he handed over two-thirds of his force to his brother, who early in the morning took up a position on the right bank of the Modder east and north of the Waterworks, while he himself went to the Wagon Drift on the Korn Spruit, where the bed is deep enough to afford perfect concealment to a large body of men in ambush. He occupied it at 4 a.m. on March 31.

A farmer, brought in by a patrol from Amphlett's post, reported to the officer in command of the connecting post at Boesman's Kop that the enemy had been seen; but the officer did not pay much attention to the report, though he communicated it to the connecting post at Springfield in the direction of Bloemfontein; at the same time sending back the patrol to Amphlett at the Waterworks with a reinforcement of his own men. The patrol was fired on while attempting to return to the Waterworks, and retired to Boesman's Kop.



Broadwood, whose column had already been in bivouac near the Waterworks for some hours with the convoy which had preceded it, was at sunrise shelled by Piet De Wet, of whose presence on the right bank of the Modder he had only a few minutes previously been made aware, and in the belief that his front was clear, he at once determined to take up a position on Boesman's Kop.

Rarely had two leaders about to meet in battle been more strangely deceived by the Fog of War. C. De Wet, although cut off from his guns and the main body of his command by an unfordable river, was confident in his lurking place in the Korn Spruit that he could easily repeat his exploit of February 15 and annex another British convoy; yet he suddenly discovered that he had to deal not with a mere escort, but with a strong mounted force and two batteries of Horse Artillery, and he was equal to the occasion.

Broadwood, equally confident that the whole force of the enemy was on his flank on the right bank of the Modder, marched heedlessly into the ambush which De Wet had laid for him in the Korn Spruit, on the direct line between two adjacent British posts, and which neither of them had discovered, although the usual patrols had been sent out. When the patrol from the Waterworks to Boesman's Kop did not return in due course on the morning of March 31, its absence seems to have caused no anxiety to Amphlett.

Broadwood, groping in the Fog of War, believed that the force on his flank was Olivier's, who had driven him out of Thabanchu, and who now, as he thought, had overtaken him. The possibility of a raid from the north did not occur to him. He pressed on towards Boesman's Kop and carelessly approached the sunken and treacherous cutting through which the Korn Spruit trickles to the Modder, between banks of even height which almost up to the brink make no perceptible break in the surface of the veld. His ground scouts and advanced guard were Cape carts full of refugees followed by the wagons of his convoy. Next in succession came U Battery of Horse Artillery with its mounted escort of colonial troops.

Preceded by the Cape carts, which De Wet, in order to disarm suspicion, allowed to cross to the left bank, the column lumbered down the slope into the spruit and was quickly sucked into the trap. In silence broken only by the rumble of the wheels and the Kaffir cries of the drivers, and unseen by the gunners close behind the leading wagons were seized by quiet, determined burghers and placed under guard. The approach to the drift was soon blocked, and in the heart of the entanglement was U Battery. When it reached the incline, men sprang up out of the spruit and lined the bank, and without firing a shot made prisoners of the gunners, who, jammed by the transport, could neither fight nor retire, and were easily taken from their teams and guns, and conducted by their captors down to the bed of the spruit. Only the Major commanding the Battery and the Serjeant-Major got away. Q Battery and its mounted escort narrowly escaped being drawn into the ambush, but were warned in time and galloped back to the railway station buildings.

Up to that moment not a shot had been fired, but as Q Battery wheeled the Boers lining the bank opened upon it, and in the scrimmage another gun was lost.

The derelict and riderless teams of U Battery at the spruit were shot down by the Boers to prevent the escape of the guns, but not before one gallant team had wrenched its gun out of the enemy's grasp and had broken away. The Boers were now in possession of five guns of U Battery and of one gun of Q Battery. The spruit was shelled with little effect by Q Battery, which unlimbered near the station buildings. Only a plunging fire could have harmed the enemy hidden in it.

It is hard to say whether De Wet or Broadwood was in the greater danger at 9 a.m. on March 31. The former had, it is true, just obtained a dramatic and most encouraging success. He laid a trap for a convoy and found himself in action with a force numerically equal to his own. He had made many prisoners, and almost without striking a blow had captured not only Broadwood's convoy but also six of Broadwood's guns. His force, however, was divided. The portion of it under his own command could not be effectively supported by his brother's command, and was confined in a spruit out of which he could not move, and which was commanded in rear by higher ground.

Broadwood had been outwitted by De Wet and very roughly handled. With a crippled and maimed force he was lying between the jaws of a vice which might at any moment close and crush him. The loss of the convoy was, from a tactical point of view, not an unmixed evil, as he gained thereby greater freedom of action, but the loss of half his guns was for the time being irremediable. The careless and haphazard scouting from the Waterworks and Boesman's Kop, in which he complacently trusted, had lured him on.[40] When it was reported to him that the spruit was in possession of the enemy, he could scarcely believe it possible. Whether he or the officers in command of the artillery and the mounted escort were responsible for the extraordinary omission to send out ground scouts in advance of the column is not known, but the guns and wagons would not have been lost had this simple and customary precaution been taken.

Broadwood, who had no information that Colvile and Martyr were approaching from the west, and that the latter was actually at Boesman's Kop, acted in the belief that he would have to deal with the situation unaided. He ordered the mounted infantry under Alderson to hold P. De Wet's force on the Modder, while the cavalry, supported by fire from Q Battery at the station buildings and working south and west of the Korn Spruit Drift, endeavoured to turn C. De Wet's precarious position. Neither of these operations was successful. Alderson could barely hold his own; the turning movement, although aided by a few companies of Martyr's force, was frustrated by small parties of marksmen whom C. De Wet had posted on the ridge in rear; and Q Battery was losing heavily.

At 10 a.m. Broadwood ordered a general retirement. No attempt seems to have been made to communicate with him by heliograph, and he was still unaware that Martyr had been on Boesman's Kop for three hours, and was actually assisting in the turning movement; and that Colvile was hurrying forward to the sound of the firing with the IXth Division. As the battle had begun in the Fog of War, so also therein did it end.

With the utmost difficulty Q Battery, which had been fighting in the open until only Phipps-Hornby and less than a dozen gunners were left to work five guns, was withdrawn. The enemy's fire was so heavy that the teams could not be brought up to the guns, four of which were run back by hand to the station buildings, which afforded some cover. The fifth gun was abandoned, but by the heroic efforts of Phipps-Hornby and a handful of gunners and volunteers from the mounted infantry escort, four guns were brought away.

Meanwhile Alderson was fighting a rearguard action against P. De Wet, to cover the retirement of the guns, and when this was effected, he followed them, closely pursued as far as the Korn Spruit by P. De Wet's burghers, who crossed the Modder at the Waterworks. Before noon the remains of Broadwood's column were formed up near Boesman's Kop. He had lost seven[41] guns, seventy-three wagons and nearly a third of his strength in killed, wounded, and prisoners.

Broadwood's withdrawal gave C. De Wet the opportunity which he could hardly have dared hope would ever be offered to him. He was reinforced by his brother, and at once drew his spoils out of the spruit and easily got away with them to the right bank of the Modder, where at noon he met the advanced guard of Olivier's force. Although he was in presence not only of Broadwood's force, but also almost in touch with a division of infantry and a brigade of mounted infantry his movements were so little impeded that he was able to bring two of the captured guns back to the left bank, and to bring them into action against a detachment of mounted infantry which was holding Waterval Drift.

Martyr reached Boesman's Kop at 7 a.m., where in the course of the morning he was joined by Colvile, whose Division was also on its way to Waterval Drift. Broadwood, who was about two miles away, was ordered by Colvile to come to him, but he refused to leave his command so long as there was any chance of recovering the guns. He technically committed a breach of discipline, but Lord Roberts subsequently approved of his action. He requested Colvile to advance against the spruit, but the message was not delivered; and Colvile said that it would not have modified his dispositions. He had already refused to listen to the obvious suggestion made by his staff that he should go to Broadwood, who after waiting for two hours in the expectation that something would be done by the infantry division, gave up hope and retired towards Springfield.

Colvile's appreciation of the situation was that it would have been useless to pursue De Wet's mounted troops with infantry. He therefore carried out the letter of his instructions from Lord Roberts, and, seeing that Broadwood's column was apparently safe, went on towards Waterval Drift: whither also Martyr had already sent the greater portion of the mounted infantry. Thus the brothers De Wet gained not only an actual, but also a moral success of the greatest importance to their cause, and took away the prizes they had so unexpectedly won, under the eyes of a strong British force helplessly watching the commandos trailing away across the veld.

Waterval Drift had been indicated to Colvile and Martyr as their objective by Lord Roberts, and they considered that it was their duty to make for it. They did not, however, recognize that instructions must be read in the light of the information at the disposal of the superior officer at the moment of issue, and they adhered to them pedantically.[42] Lord Roberts could not have anticipated Broadwood's plight when he ordered Colvile and Martyr to Waterval Drift.

Meanwhile, the news of the disaster had reached Bloemfontein. French's attenuated cavalry brigade, still panting with the fatigue of the Karee Siding affair, was ordered out, and Colvile was instructed to endeavour to make a turning movement, and with French's assistance to act on the Boer line of retreat. By sunset Colvile, after some opposition, was in possession of the Waterval Drift; the enemy having despatched the prisoners, the loot, and the captured guns to the north, was still in occupation of the Waterworks; Broadwood's mangled column was on its way back to Bloemfontein; and French was expected to appear upon the stage at sunrise next morning. The approach of the cavalry, which had picked up Broadwood at Springfield, was delayed by a report, which proved to be unfounded, that a body of the enemy was on the right flank marching on Bloemfontein, and French did not come into touch with Colvile until nearly midday on April 1. After reconnoitring the Waterworks and the Boer positions on the right bank of the Modder, Colvile came to the conclusion that he was not strong enough to attack them. Next day all the troops were ordered by Lord Roberts to fall back upon Bloemfontein.

Broadwood was not wholly, not even mainly, responsible for the Sannah's Post disaster. He was unable to retrace that unlucky first false step when, rashly assuming that the ground had been properly reconnoitred and patrolled, he pushed into the angle between the Modder and its tributary; and there can be no excuse for the negligence which tossed the convoy and the guns into the abyss. But he received neither support nor information until it was too late. No serious attempt was made to let him know that a strong force was on its way from Bloemfontein. Martyr failed to report himself, and Colvile was content to be an interested spectator of the closing scene of the drama. Each leader assumed that the moves of the Kriegspiel had been correctly played and that there was nothing more to be done.

After the occupation of Bloemfontein, the columns operating south of the Orange River were drawn into the Free State. Clements crossed at Norval's Pont, and Gatacre at Bethulie on March 15; Brabant, who commanded the colonial troops of the latter's Division, having reached Aliwal North four days previously. Clements' force advanced in a peaceful procession through the districts west of the railway, meeting with no opposition, and receiving what, under the circumstances, was almost a welcome from the inhabitants. Early in April he joined Lord Roberts at Bloemfontein.

Not so with Gatacre and Brabant, who were soon seriously involved. Lord Roberts' view of the situation, which although mistaken was not unwarranted, was that the majority of the Boers were inclined to submit, and would do so but for the malign influence of a small belligerent party; and in order to encourage the waverers to assert themselves, and to give protection to them when they took the oath of neutrality and returned to their homes, he sent out flying columns in various directions to register names, take over arms, and make known the conditions on which surrenders would be accepted.

The story of the Thabanchu column has already been told. Other columns were detached from Gatacre's and Brabant's commands, and Smithfield, Wepener, and Dewetsdorp, and smaller towns were occupied. Lord Roberts' orders for the occupation of Dewetsdorp were conditional on Gatacre's having enough troops for the purpose at his disposal. So little was it expected that the columns would meet with serious resistance that they were unaccompanied by guns, and all Gatacre's artillery was sent to Bloemfontein.

De Wet, a soldier possessed of more power of initiative than many of his opponents, took "upon himself the responsibility of varying the instructions" he had received from the Kroonstad Krijgsraad. The chance of snapping up isolated garrisons allured him from the less brilliant but more practically useful work of hacking at the railway upon which Lord Roberts depended for his communications, and his wonderful and unexpected success at Sannah's Post encouraged him to persevere. He became aware that small columns were scouring the country, administering lightly taken oaths and giving receipts for arms handed in by burghers who protested that they were "sick of the war"; and he determined to deal promptly with these ominous signs.

Between Sannah's Post and Reddersburg he in one day persuaded more than a hundred sworn burghers to break their oaths of neutrality and join him. Whether the energy and resource which he displayed would not have been more profitably expended in a vigorous effort to shrivel up the line between Bloemfontein and the Orange is a matter for speculation. Kruger watched his proceedings with misgiving, and proposed that he should retire northwards, as soon as he had cut the railway, or even without doing so.

Korn Spruit opened Lord Roberts' eyes. He became alarmed for the safety of the railway, and ordered Gatacre to evacuate Dewetsdorp and to concentrate the weak pacificatory columns wandering helplessly over the country. The column of 550 men without guns, sent by Gatacre to garrison Dewetsdorp, had not been there many hours before it was ordered to retire on Reddersburg, and at daybreak on April 2 was again on the march, and soon De Wet was in touch with it. On the following morning he was close to it. In his own account of the affair he says that there was a sort of a race, which was won by the British column, for a ridge near Reddersburg, named Mostert's Hoek. He had with him 2,000 men with four guns, but an invitation to surrender was promptly declined by the defenders, who all that day were beaten on by bullet and by shell. After sunset the last drop of water was served out. Next morning De Wet rushed the western spur of the ridge, which now became untenable, and at 9 a.m. on April 4 the column surrendered and was swept into his net.

Another hour of resistance would probably have saved it. On the previous evening Gatacre and Lord Roberts received the news that it was in trouble, and a relieving force was hurriedly collected at Bethany from Springfontein and Bloemfontein, and sent out under Gatacre's command. His scouts heard the last shot fired, and the silence which followed seemed to show that all was over. When reports of the surrender reached him near Reddersburg, and before De Wet, only six miles away, had cleared out of Mostert's Hoek, he abandoned the attempt; although some of his advanced mounted troops did indeed come into touch with the rearguard of De Wet hurrying away with his prisoners.

Next day he was recalled to Bloemfontein by Lord Roberts, who held him responsible for the disaster. He had occupied Dewetsdorp, an exposed and isolated position, with an inadequate force, although expressly instructed to leave it alone if he had not sufficient troops for the purpose. Mostert's Hoek supervening on Stormberg ended the career of a most gallant, energetic, and enthusiastic soldier. Bic peccare in bello non licet. He was removed from his command and sent back to England.

After leaving Sannah's Post, De Wet seems to have recognized that he was not exactly carrying out the Krijgsraad policy, for he informed Steyn that he was going to Dewetsdorp to "collect the burghers and to obtain dynamite for our operations" against the railway between Bloemfontein and Bethany. Next day he heard that the British had occupied Dewetsdorp, and soon after that the garrison was retiring on Reddersburg, and the attack on the line, which perhaps he never seriously intended to make, was indefinitely postponed.

For as soon as he had disposed of the prisoners of Mostert's Hoek, he cast his eye round the horizon and descried two other isolated garrisons, at Smithfield and Wepener. Against the former he sent one of his lieutenants, who, however, found the little town evacuated, while he himself made for Wepener, and longing to teach a lesson to Brabant's loyal colonials, sat down before it on April 9 with ten guns and 6,000 men. In the course of the northward advance from the Orange it had been occupied by a detachment from Brabant's force, which was increased by subsequent reinforcements to a strength of nearly 1,900 men under Dalgety, of whom little more than 100 were regular troops, with seven guns. The town itself was not held, but a circular position outside it with a perimeter of seven miles was taken up on the right bank of the Caledon.

De Wet maintained the siege for sixteen days. The failure of an attempt by night on April 10 to storm a post on the southern section of the perimeter deterred the Boers, as at Ladysmith after the abortive attack on Caesar's Camp two months before, from further offensive action; but the position was vigorously bombarded from time to time, and an almost unceasing hail of Mauser bullets fell upon it. De Wet did his best to add Wepener to the scalps of Sannah's Post and Mostert's Hoek; but when two columns detailed for the relief by Lord Roberts under the command of Brabant and Hart, who had come round from Natal with his brigade, reached Wepener from Aliwal North on April 25, they found that the siege had been raised, and that De Wet had trekked away to the north.

At Waterval Drift, Kitchener's Kopje, Sannah's Post, and Mostert's Hoek, De Wet showed himself to be a daring and successful partisan leader. He was instinctively drawn towards helpless or unwary detachments. He played his own hand without reference to his partner's, and seemed to be incapable of co-operating in a general scheme of strategy. Perhaps he had not much confidence in those who directed the campaign of defence. He did not act in accordance with the instructions he had received from the Krijgsraad; but who could find fault with a leader who was ever sending in batches of prisoners of war? Many critics say that he was wanting in the true military instinct and spirit, and that he lost the greatest opportunity in his career when he allowed himself to be attracted away from the British lines of communication by the feeble, peregrinating columns. He says that his reason, or it may be his excuse, for not raiding vigorously towards the south, instead of sitting down before Wepener, was the fear lest the Transvaalers should think that the Free Staters had abandoned them to their fate. If his action is open to criticism when judged by the generally accepted principles of warfare, it should be remembered that these are framed from experience only, and are subject to accommodation. By all the rules of the game, the Boers must have been beaten in six months: yet when, after the occupation of Bloemfontein, the cause seemed to be hopeless, the De Wet revival prolonged the contest for two years and more. It is almost certain that, but for De Wet, the war would have been brought to a close in 1900. One man only, and he was Napoleon, added a greater sum to the British National Debt.

The fortune which proverbially attends the bold never deserted him. To the Boer forces at large he was what the pirate adventurers and buccaneers of the Elizabethan period, and the privateersmen of the eighteenth century, were to the National Navy. He sailed where he would under letters of marque from the Presidents. He is the most interesting and the most original personage of the South African War: and when its history is mellowed by time, and its epic is written by some Walter Scott or Homer of the future, De Wet will be the central figure, and his exploits will be sung.

Five years later, having thrown aside his sword, he became a controller of ploughshares as Minister of Agriculture in the Government of the Orange River Colony, and the father-in-law of a British officer who had fought against him.

Notes:

[Footnote 39: At the Krijgsraad at Kroonstad Delarey maintained that the commandos were too large and must be subdivided.]

[Footnote 40: The scouting of the British Army in South Africa has been compared to a housemaid searching for an escape of gas with a lighted candle.]

[Footnote 41: A The gun of U Battery, which had broken away at the Drift, was recovered.]

[Footnote 42: In the official handbook on Combined Training issued after the war, it was expressly laid down that "officers, must take upon themselves, whenever it may be necessary, the responsibility of departing from or varying the orders they may have received." This responsibility had been laid by Napoleon upon his officers nearly a century before. Seep. 251.]



CHAPTER X

Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking

Mafeking is a dull, unimportant town in the veld with a history that attracted the Boers to it.

They considered that, like Natal and Kimberley, it did not rightfully belong to Great Britain. They were a community of trekking and centrifugal atoms, especially in the direction of territories in the possession of native tribes, and their own country, though sparsely inhabited, was not spacious enough for them. The bucolic ambition of the Boer, which is to dwell in a house from which he cannot see the smoke of his nearest neighbour's chimney, can be satisfied in a flat country only when the house stands in the midst of a farm many thousand morgen in extent.

For a generation or two before the war, the Transvaalers had been encroaching upon Bechuanaland. A Baralong chief named Montsioa was dispossessed of Mafeking and could obtain no redress from the British Government, which at that time was in an intermediate frame of mind, and did not necessarily act on the assumption that in every dispute between white man and native the latter was in the right.

Thus encouraged, the Transvaalers annexed Bechuanaland in 1868, but three years later it was taken away from them under the Keate award, in an arbitration to determine the respective rights of Boer and native over the debateable territory.

After the war of 1881, the Transvaalers supposed that the British Government would be unlikely to assert itself, and two little impudent republics of adventurers were set up in territory which the award had declared to be within the British sphere of influence. Montsioa fought for his rights, but the British Government lay torpid for some time. Finally it was goaded into action by a proclamation issued by Kruger annexing the territory to the Transvaal. He soon found it advisable to cancel the proclamation, and in 1885 the Republics of Goshen at Mafeking and of Stellaland at Vryburg were effaced by an expedition led by Sir Charles Warren. Bechuanaland was again annexed by proclamation, but on this occasion to the British Empire.

The resentment of the Transvaalers against Mafeking, which originated in the conviction that they had been wrongfully deprived of it, was aggravated by the fact that it was the starting place of the Jameson Raid.

On October 13 nearly 7,000 burghers, with six guns, under P. Cronje, sat down before it. He expected to have little difficulty in recovering it. Appearances were encouraging; the town was open and defenceless, and he was probably aware that it was held by a weak garrison. Why the British should have occupied such an out-of-the-way place as part of their plan of campaign, he could not understand, but there it was, inviting attack.

Of the half-hearted measures taken by the War and Colonial Offices in 1899, when a war with the Transvaal seemed to be more probable every day, one of the most intelligent was the commissioning of R. Baden-Powell, who had formerly served in Bechuanaland and had recently commanded the 5th Dragoon Guards, to "organize the defence of the Bechuanaland and Rhodesia frontiers." It would neither involve a great expenditure of money, nor be likely to wound the susceptibilities of the Transvaalers, who might be provoked by more vigorous and minatory measures: and thus little harm would be done if after all it were found to be an unnecessary precaution.

For these reasons it commended itself to Pall Mall, but its chief merit was that it sent to South Africa a capable, versatile and zealous soldier, whose mind did not run in the grooves. Yet if Baden-Powell had been sent to Kimberley instead of to Mafeking, Kimberley would probably have fallen—after an outbreak of civil war within the lines between him and Rhodes. It would have been impossible to insulate the personal electricity with which each of them was so highly charged, and short circuiting must have occurred.

The object of the contemplated display upon the Bechuanaland and Rhodesia frontiers was twofold. They ran through the indefinite border belt which separated black from white territory, and activity on them would not only be witnessed by the tribes and exert an impressive influence on the native mind, but would also draw away the Boers and prevent them concentrating their forces. The central position of Mafeking on the Western line, and the stores and supplies which had been collected in the town, attracted Baden-Powell to it. It was singularly ill-adapted to hold defensively against an active enemy.

In spite of recruiting difficulties raised by the Facing-both-Ways Ministry at Capetown, which in a less tolerant and philosophic age would at once have been swept away by a storm of indignation, he raised two irregular regiments: the Rhodesian Regiment, which was sent into Rhodesia under Plumer, and the Protectorate Regiment under Hore.

The Cape Ministry did what it could to prevent the Protectorate Regiment going to Mafeking, and the corps was in fact mustered outside the Cape Colony, and only entered the town a few days before war was declared. As at Kimberley, so also at Mafeking, the Schreiner sect set itself placidly to thwart the gentle and tentative early efforts of the British Government to deal with the situation.

When P. Cronje appeared before Mafeking, Baden-Powell had a force of less than 1,200 men, none of whom were regular soldiers and less than half of whom were efficiently armed, with which to sustain the siege of an open town by 7,000 Boers. He had also four small field guns of obsolete pattern, to which were added later on a home-made howitzer and an ancient man-of-war's smoothbore, which had left the foundry during the Napoleonic wars. In its youth it had probably fought the French through a porthole, and now having in the interval trekked across the South African veld into the possession of a native tribe, was discovered in a Baralong kraal, restored to active service, and, mounted on a Dutch wagon, aided in the defence of a little settlement 400 miles away from the sound of the sea.

In one respect only Baden-Powell had the advantage over Kekewich at Kimberley. His burden was not increased by discord within the lines. The civilians behaved with exemplary composure and put themselves unreservedly into his hands.

An archaic but effective simplicity characterized the methods of the defence. Baden-Powell eked out his slender stock of men and instruments with tricks and devices that might have been employed at the siege of Troy, but which none the less deceived and confounded the slow-witted besiegers, whom he scandalized with gibes and taunting messages. When asked to surrender to avoid further bloodshed, he replied that the only blood hitherto shed was the blood of a chicken in a compound; and on another occasion he reproved Cronje for inactivity. Many of the incidents read like passages from the Iliad. The besiegers were allured into determined attacks upon dummy trenches; deceived by bogus orders shouted for their information through a megaphone; alarmed by the sudden appearance of cavalry within the lines, for did they not see the glint of lances? The lances were weapons that had been forged in the railway workshops, and carried round, as it were in a parade before the footlights by a body of supers making a gallant show upon the stage.

What should be done in a besieged place with such an embarrassing asset as ten tons of dynamite? Buller would have handed them over to his second in command for disposal, and then if any accident occurred would have disclaimed responsibility for it. Gatacre would have taken the chances, but would not have hesitated to pitch his tent if necessary beside them. Colvile would have searched his orders for instructions. Baden-Powell, not being able to rid himself of the explosive by firing it, arranged that it should be fired by the enemy. He loaded it on railway trucks, which he propelled a few miles out of the town and then abandoned. There was no Laocoon to warn the Boers, and they rushed at what they thought was an armoured train in trouble. In the skirmish the dynamite exploded, and although no one was hurt the enemy was terribly scared, and the resisting powers of the garrison virtually augmented.

Baden-Powell thoroughly understood the Boer temperament. Many generations' isolation from the progressive European world had rendered it peculiarly liable to be ensnared by simple expedients. It was not wanting in "slimness," but it was the "slimness" or cunning of a primitive race, and was easily gulled by wiles that might have been employed against a tribe of Red Indians. Baden-Powell alone of all the British leaders was aware of this, and he owed much of his success to the knowledge. With but one man to defend each ten yards of his perimeter of seven miles he hypnotized Cronje, a dull man bewildered by a resourceful. His versatility instantly found a way out of each difficulty that beset him. Before he sent out a party detailed for a night attack that might easily go astray, he bethought himself of the device by which a ship is often guided into her haven, and hung up two lamps in the town as leading lights across the veld.

Cronje soon found that Mafeking was not an easy prey. Although in all probability he might at any time have overwhelmed it by sheer weight of numbers, he refrained from making the attempt. It hit out so vigorously and was believed to be so well protected by mines that he requisitioned a big gun from Pretoria, which was mounted south of the town and came into action on October 23. With a weapon throwing a shell more than three times heavier than all the shells that could be fired in salvo by the artillery of the defence, there was no doubt in his mind that the place must fall before the end of the month.

The arrival of the gun quickened the attack for a time. The native location S.W. of the town was made the object of a feint on October 25 to be immediately followed by a real attack elsewhere, but the Baralongs, who had been armed, resisted so stoutly that the operation failed. By the beginning of November the Boers had been cleared out of a newly made advanced trench on the east side; and Cannon Kopje on the south, the possession of which by them would have made a considerable section of the defence works and perhaps even the town itself untenable, was held under a converging fire of artillery by fifty troopers of the British South African Police against a thousand Boers.

Five weeks of Baden-Powell were enough for Cronje, who on November 19 trekked away to the south, leaving Snyman and 3,000 burghers to continue the siege. His self-esteem had been wounded because the walls had not immediately fallen to the sound of the big gun, and by Baden-Powell's refusal to take a serious view of the situation in the frequent communications that passed between them. It may be said that Cronje was "chaffed" away from Mafeking; the gibes put him out of conceit with himself, and instead of stimulating him into activity only made him more dull-spirited than he was by nature. He had none of the instinctive military genius which showed itself so notably in most of his colleagues, who, having turned their ploughshares into swords at a moment's notice, were generally more than a match for the professional soldiers against whom they were pitted. He had the misfortune of meeting almost the only British leader then in South Africa capable of instinctively assessing him on the spot at his true valuation; and like a timid poker-player with a good hand, he allowed himself to be bluffed by the flourishes of his opponent. He held good cards, but he feebly threw them down. At Magersfontein he played his hand with skill, but lost the deciding game at Paardeberg.

Baden-Powell was too zealous a soldier to conform to the schism that the operations of war were akin to athletics or sport. Externally his predilections were for the drama. He was a competent actor and manager, and he rejoiced in Mafeking as in a stage play.

Many of his devices were as unsubstantial as stage scenery; the besiegers were the villains of the piece who would meet with their deserts before the curtain fell; there was comic by-play in his ways of beguiling the tedium and the lassitude of the siege, in the bantering messages he sent out to the besiegers, and now and then even in his garrison orders. The little garrison was permeated by the exosmose action of his cheery optimism and humour during seven weary months of waiting; and while it might seem to some that he was treating the serious situation with unbecoming levity, he wisely kept the tragedy of it, of which he was fully conscious, in the background.

His methods were so far successful that in a few weeks he had driven away two-thirds of the force originally opposed to him, and had firmly gripped the place. The enemy's superiority in artillery was neutralized by the construction of underground shelters and warrens in which the women and children took refuge during the daytime, leaving an apparently deserted town to be bombarded. Thus Baden-Powell was relieved from the moral pressure which a large number of casualties among them would have caused; and the garrison suffered but little in the redoubts and trenches. Supplies were plentiful and the water supply secure.

What Cronje had failed to do, Snyman could hardly be expected to accomplish with a considerably reduced force, and the attack became more faint-hearted. He carried out the Cronje policy of comfortable, lethargic squatting, doubting not that the place must fall into his hands sooner or later. Friends and relations tripped over from Johannesburg to admire and encourage his brave burghers at their posts, and some were even allowed as a treat to fire a shot at the Khakis.

No serious operation occurred until the end of the year. On the morrow of Christmas Day, Baden-Powell made an unsuccessful attempt to carry a fort on Game Tree Hill, which commanded the approach to the town from the north. He was unaware of its strength, and the casualties amounted to nearly one-fifth of the force engaged, a loss which he could ill afford; but early in January he compelled the big gun, which could neither face the shells of his little battery of 7-pounders nor the rifles of his marksmen, to withdraw to a more distant emplacement east of the town. Towards the end of the month an encouraging message was received from Lord Roberts at Capetown.

The Boer line of circumvallation was in plan an irregular hexagon, of which the north-east face was pushed inwards and a re-entrant angle formed at the Brickfields; where a fort was built nearer to the town than any other post of the attack, and the operations during February and March were mainly a struggle for the possession of it. After several weeks of sapping and counter sapping, the Boers, though supported by the fire of the big gun in its new emplacement, were expelled from the Brickfields on March 23.

April was marked by the final withdrawal of the big gun, which, after a heavy bombardment on the 11th, was sent away to Pretoria; and by the appearance of young Eloff, fresh from the capital, with instructions to do what he could to stimulate the attack, for once in a way, into real activity. More than a fortnight elapsed before he succeeded. Snyman gave him little encouragement, but could not oppose a mandate from Kruger, Eloff's grandfather.

The Molopo River, after passing south of the town, runs through the only weak place in the defence, the native location, which during the first few days of the siege had been attacked without result by Cronje. Westward of it the steep banks of the river afford a covered way of access to the thickly clustered huts lying within the perimeter of the defence, which Eloff saw might be turned if he got a footing among them.

Early in the morning of May 12 a heavy fire was opened upon the town from the east, but was soon discontinued; and then an alarm came from the S.W. It was Eloff, who, with 300 burghers, had wriggled up the river bed through the outposts and had set fire to the native huts: a signal for the reinforcements which Snyman had promised in writing. It also warned the garrison. The natives were too much terrified to offer resistance, and Eloff, leaving the greater part of his force to hold the location, advanced upon the town. The police building in the open was surrounded and the detachment holding it taken prisoners. A pause was now made to allow the promised reinforcements to come up.

Eloff's gallant thrust gave the garrison the opportunity for which it had long been hoping. The troops of the western section of the defence closed in and were manoeuvred by Baden-Powell through the telephone. The door by which Eloff came in was shut, not only to a retreat but also to the reinforcements which timidly knocked at it; the burghers holding the location were overpowered, and Eloff's party was penned up in the police building with its prisoners, whose condition was suddenly dramatically reversed. Eloff, seeing that Snyman had failed him, surrendered to the men he had captured a few hours before, within the walls of the prison in which he had confined them.

The ordeal of Mafeking soon came to an end. On May 15 it was reported that the relief column under Mahon, who on that day joined Plumer at Massibi on the Molopo twenty miles from Mafeking, was approaching. The combined forces, though vigorously opposed by Delarey, whom L. Botha had sent when the news of the advance reached him, entered the town on May 17 and ended a siege of 213 days.

Mafeking, the last and most instructive of the sieges, proved that there was hardly any disparity of numbers or preponderance of available military resources that could not be neutralized by good leadership opposed to bad. Baden-Powell had not only detained a considerable Boer force on the edge of the storm, but with a body of irregular troops had beaten the men of Magersfontein, Colenso, and Spion Kop.

The relief of Mafeking, however, did not vitally affect the general situation. The capture of the town during Lord Robert's advance would no doubt have caused annoyance and trouble, but if necessary it could have been retaken without much difficulty. Nor would its fall have greatly benefited the enemy, who probably would have been tempted by the success to hold an unsound position and detain in it commandos urgently required elsewhere.

Kimberley, Mafeking, and Wepener, more than the operations at large, demonstrated the anomalous character of the war. Hitherto, invaders had been accustomed to besiege the invaded, in South Africa the invaded besieged the invaders. Such a reversal of the order of things military had rarely before occurred. The sieges of the Peninsular War are not an exception, for Wellington was from a military, though not from a political point of view, as much an invader as the lieutenants of Napoleon.

Baden-Powell is a suppressed personality whose merit was not fully recognized. With scarcely an exception, no individual leader was more self-reliant, or handled imperfect tools with greater skill. For seven months he kept the flag flying over the lonely Baralong kraal in the veld. His unconventional even theatrical methods were not to the taste of his serious superiors, who underestimated his success. His only reward was the Companionship of the Bath, which was also bestowed upon the militia colonels, most of whom, from no fault or no want of zeal on their part, but from lack of opportunity, never met the enemy except in some casual paltry skirmish.

The junction of the two columns advancing to the relief of Mafeking—Plumer's from the north and Mahon's from the south—was effected at the right moment, for it is doubtful whether either of them acting alone would have been able to deal with Delarey.

Plumer with the Rhodesian Regiment had been trekking here and there and skirmishing with the enemy for seven months. On the eve of the war he was sent by Baden-Powell to Tuli, a village in Rhodesia not far from the right bank of the Limpopo, which is the northern boundary of the Transvaal. His instructions were "to defend the border, to attract the enemy away towards the north, and then in due time to co-operate with the British force," which it was expected would soon be invading the Transvaal from the south, and also to overawe the doubtful native tribes between Tuli and Mafeking, a distance of 500 miles; and he had under his immediate command at Tuli one irregular regiment 500 strong.

He remained for some weeks seeing to the drifts, which were now in his possession and now in that of the enemy. A Boer raid into Rhodesia on November 2 forced the outlying detachments back upon Tuli, which was seriously threatened by some commandos under F.A. Grobler of Marico. The Government of Pretoria, however, growing anxious at the presence of British troops elsewhere, vetoed a promising enterprise and recalled him. The raid of November 2 was answered a few weeks later by Plumer, who, finding the drifts unoccupied, reconnoitred thirty miles towards the south. Nearly six months elapsed before another British soldier set foot in the Transvaal. A subsequent reconnaissance again found no trace of the enemy on the left bank of the Limpopo, and showed that it was unnecessary for him to remain on the river. He had the advantage of being cut off from communication with superior officers ignorant of local conditions, and was able to act freely upon his own responsibility.

He soon heard news which clearly indicated the way he should go. The railway from Buluwayo to Mafeking was held as far as possible towards the south by patrols of police under Nicholson, and the Rhodesian Volunteers under Holdsworth were also on the line. In the gap between the railhead and Mafeking, a Boer commando, said to have been detached from Mafeking by Cronje, was at Sekwani on the N.W. border of the Transvaal and within striking distance of the Western line. It was face to face with the border tribes and was soon in trouble with them. Although they were not allowed to attack Sekwani independently, they were permitted to co-operate as non-combatants in an attack which Holdsworth was about to make on it, but only on the condition that they did not cross the Transvaal border. This was a refinement of policy which they could hardly be expected to understand, and they precipitated Holdsworth's action by attacking the Boer laager, which lay but a mile or two across the border, on their own account, and the operation had therefore to be abandoned. To avenge this native attack, in which several burghers had been killed, reinforcements were brought over by the Boers from the Pietersburg line, and Holdsworth's position at Mochudi on the Western line, whither he had retired after the Sekwani failure, was endangered.

This was the news which reached Plumer at the end of the year. His original instructions were obsolescent and he readily adapted himself to the altered situation. He saw that it was more important to clear the railway north of Mafeking than to remain where he was on the chance of a Boer invasion of Rhodesia, of which his reconnaissances south of the Limpopo saw no sign. The nearest station on the Western line was Palapye, and on December 27 he set out on his midsummer march of 170 miles to it. Within a fortnight, his little force of irregulars, which three months before had been sent out into the South African wilderness to perform duties that might have engrossed a division, passed away from Tuli beyond the Limpopo on to the visible stage of war near Mochudi.

In the middle of January, 1900, he reached Gaberones. On his left flank Sekwani was still occupied by the enemy, though in reduced numbers; in front of him the Boers were not only strongly posted on the railway at Crocodile Pools, but able to draw upon Mafeking for reinforcements, by the help of which they successfully resisted an attack on February 11. Plumer's force, though augmented by detachments he had picked up on the line, was unequal to the task of advancing along it. He therefore decided to diverge from the railway and advance by way of Kanya, a native town lying twenty miles west of the line.

On March 6 he reached Lobatsi, where he was forty-five miles from Mafeking. He found, however, that it was an awkward place to defend and soon quitted it, as Baden-Powell seemed to be in no immediate need, and was in fact averse to Plumer's small force throwing itself upon the besiegers. With the greater part of his command, the rest being sent back to hold the railway at Crocodile Pools, he withdrew to the base which he had established at Kanya; afterwards advancing to Sefetili, thirty miles from Mafeking, where he awaited the approach of Mahon's relieving column from the south. Baden-Powell, rejoicing in his siege, was not anxious that the game which he was playing so well should be brought to a premature conclusion, and was more afraid for Plumer than for himself.

Plumer filled in his two months at Kanya and Sefetili by occasional raids in the direction of Mafeking and by an expedition towards Zeerust. The column in the south, of whose movements many false reports reached him from time to time, seemed to be tarrying by the way, and it was not until May 12 that he received a message from Lord Roberts that it was nearing its destination.

For some weeks after his entry into Bloemfontein, Lord Roberts was unable to arrange for the direct relief of Mafeking by a column specially detailed for the purpose. He had originally intended that this should be done by Methuen, but subsequently ordered him to operate in the Free State on the left flank of the advance on the Transvaal. He hoped to apply his favourite method of an automatic relief, brought about by external pressure elsewhere. At the end of April, however, when it had become an urgent matter, he ordered Hunter, who had recently arrived at Kimberley from Natal, to send out a mounted force under Mahon, following it himself with the rest of the Xth Division.

He left Kimberley on May 3, and on the following day Mahon set out from Barkly West on his 230 miles' march to Mafeking. Mahon advanced wide of the railway up the Hart's River, which joins the Vaal at Barkly West, his right flank being covered by Hunter, who kept close to the Vaal. Mahon met with no serious resistance until he had covered 200 miles of his journey, when he found a, force which had been sent down from Mafeking across his path, and which diverted him to Massibi; where he joined Plumer on May 15.

The advance of the main and less mobile body under Hunter was aided by demonstrations made by Methuen from Boshof. With three columns claiming their attention the bewildered Boers were unable to do more than offer a stout but ineffectual resistance to Hunter on the Vaal on May 5. Two days later he occupied Fourteen Streams and restored the railway communication across the Vaal, having during his halt taken possession of Christiana, a village in the Transvaal a few miles up the river. It was now no longer necessary for him to hurry after Mahon, and his advance northwards was made at leisure. Early in June he occupied Lichtenburg, where Mahon rejoined him.

Mafeking as well as Kimberley were now in the hands of Lord Roberts, but the Western line joining them to Capetown was not yet secure. The districts of Cape Colony west of De Aar and Hopetown were remote and backward, and sparsely inhabited by discontented and unprosperous Dutch farmers. Nearly a year before, while the Cape Government was placidly blinking under the shadow of Table Mountain and only taking action that thwarted the attempts of the Imperial Government to prepare for war, and like the unjust steward intriguing for reception in Boer houses if the Empire should fail, arms had been sent into these districts by the Boers of the Republics, and courses of instruction in the use of them were actually being held.

To stir up the discontented and set the veld on fire, a party of Transvaalers swooped down from Vryburg before the war was many days old. Rebel commandos were raised, and most of the districts lying between the Orange and the Molopo were involved, some of them being annexed by proclamation to the Republics. For several months the trouble was confined to the right bank of the Orange, but during February it passed over to the left bank.

In pursuance of his policy of striking swiftly and strongly at the centres of population, and not from neglect, Lord Roberts had left the rebellious and disaffected districts more or less to themselves, in the belief that indirect action would retrieve the situation and that his advance would take the heart out of the rebels and deter them from crossing the river; and for some months there had been no British troops south of the Orange except at De Aar and Hopetown.

Now, however, the railway, which until his arrival at Bloemfontein was his only line of communication, was threatened. The Prieska and Herbert districts on the left bank of the Orange, and even the remote Gordonia district lying in the angle between the Orange and the Molopo, which was too far away to be included in the first batch of proclamations, were annexed by the Boers. There was much danger of the advancing army not only finding its communications broken, but also a formidable rebellion springing up behind it.

The troops on the line were insufficient to deal with the situation, and Lord Roberts was obliged to draw upon Clements, who was acting in the other disturbed districts of the Cape Colony south of the Free State. Lord Kitchener, who chanced to be passing through De Aar on his way back from Naauwpoort, where he had been sent to look after the central advance, made arrangements for the Prieska operations and rejoined Lord Roberts at Kimberley; but his presence was soon required again at De Aar. Three columns had started westward from the line, but the centre column, which was composed of the troops withdrawn from Clement's command, met with opposition in the Prieska district, and was compelled to retire on March 6. When the news reached Lord Roberts he sent Kitchener to take charge of the operations, which from that time was successful. The rebellion south of the Orange was suppressed; the leaders disappeared; and by the end of the month Kitchener was free to return to Head Quarters at Bloemfontein.

Not many weeks, however, elapsed before there was trouble in Griqualand, a considerable portion of which was in the hands of rebel descendants of the burghers of the Great Trek, who were joined by rebels expelled from the districts south of the Orange during the late operations. A column had been sent out against them from Kimberley by Methuen in March, but Lord Roberts disapproved of the expedition and it was recalled. At the request of Sir A. Milner, who from the first had been of the opinion that the British hold on South Africa was in greater danger from rebellion in the Colony than from the commandos of the two Republics, Lord Roberts consented to send a force into Griqualand under the command of Warren, who was brought round from Natal, and returned to the country through which he had worked in the Bechuanaland Expedition of 1885. In the middle of May, Warren set out from Belmont. The only regular troops in his column were a few Irish mounted infantry. Douglas was easily taken on May 21, and on his way to Campbell he was compelled by supply and transport difficulties to halt at Faber's Put, where at dawn on May 30 he was surprised by the rebels, who, knowing that they had not to face regular troops, anticipated an easy victory. They succeeded in almost surrounding the camp before the alarm was given, but after a brief struggle were driven off.

Early in June Campbell and Griquatown were occupied; and on the 24th Kuruman, which had been in the hands of the rebels for nearly six months, was recovered. Near Khies, lower down the Orange, the force which had been left to watch the banks after the suppression of the Prieska rebellion, some of the fugitives from which had returned to the river under the leadership of a Jew, attacked and carried their laager. This and the Faber's Put affair were the only serious fights in the clearing of the Colony north of the Orange.

Thus by the end of June Lord Roberts had secured the railway from Mafeking and Kimberley to the south.



CHAPTER XI

Bloemfontein to Pretoria

[Sidenote: Map, p. 260.]

The agile mind of Lord Roberts rather than the heavy hand of his Chief of the Staff is discernible in the method of the advance on the Transvaal.

There were two courses open to the British Army. It might have deliberately pulverized and extinguished each atom of opposition within reach in the Free State, and have taken no step to the front until the rear and the flanks were absolutely and finally clear of the enemy; or it might have advanced boldly towards the Transvaal with the ordinary precautions for the protection of the lines of communication and of the flanks.

Lord Roberts adopted the latter course. He had tried it with success in the Afghan War twenty years before, when he marched even more "in the air" from Kabul to Kandahar. The tedious process of "steam-rollering" the Free State was not to his taste, nor would the expectant British public at home have understood it; and it would have been severely criticized by the military experts. It would have concentrated before him north of the Vaal all the Boer forces which could not be crushed on the spot, and have left the resources of the Transvaal for some time untouched: free communication with the outer world by way of the neutral port of Lorenzo Marques, the treasury of the Johannesburg gold mines upon which the enemy could draw, and the railway and mining workshops in which munitions of war could be manufactured.

Lord Roberts therefore determined upon a swift advance from Bloemfontein. He was confident that the occupation of places would bring the war to an end without an excessive loss of life; and he would probably have been right if he had been engaged in a European war. He did not see, however, that the Boers derived little or no strength from their towns, which were rather a source of weakness; they were men of the veld and the veld was their strength.

De Wet's guerilla advanced Chermside to the command of the IIIrd Division, in place of Gatacre sent home. A new Division, numbered the VIIIth, under a new commander, Sir Leslie Rundle, a general with an Egyptian reputation, was assembled south of Bloemfontein in April.

The siege of Wepener called for activity from Bloemfontein as well as from the Orange, and Lord Roberts sent Rundle to Dewetsdorp, where his presence would, it was hoped, not only draw the Boers away from Wepener, but deny them a retreat to the north. Pole-Carew with the XIth Division and French followed Rundle, but De Wet abandoned the siege on the approach of Hart and Brabant from the south, and his brother P. De Wet scuttled away from Dewetsdorp on the approach of Rundle; and the commandos ran the gauntlet successfully. Their hereditary trekking instincts told them when to move and how to move, and their mobility had not at that period been recognized by the British Staff. Wepener was indeed relieved, though not from Bloemfontein, but the subsequent divagations of the Boers baffled three British divisions which were endeavouring to squeeze them northwards and head them off. A strong rearguard was left by the Boers at Houtnek, ten miles north of Thabanchu.

Lord Roberts' position at Bloemfontein, and on the line of communication, had never been seriously endangered. The brilliant affairs of Sannah's Post and Mostert's Hoek were no doubt annoying to the British Army and encouraging to the enemy. At home the importance of them was greatly exaggerated. If the advance on the Transvaal was delayed by them and the subsequent operations arising out of the siege of Wepener, more time was given to prepare for it; and the British Army was usefully informed of a fact which hitherto had hardly been suspected, namely, that the enemy derived much of his power from mobility, resourcefulness, and aptitude for guerilla.

Lord Roberts' plan for the movement on the Transvaal was an advance in line, on a front which extended from Ladysmith to Kimberley. It soon became an echelon owing to the slow movements of Buller in Natal. In the centre at Bloemfontein were the troops under the immediate orders of the Commander-in-Chief; on the left at Kimberley were Methuen, and Hunter with the Xth Division which had been brought round from Ladysmith. Between the centre and the right the intervention of Basutoland and the Drakensberg prevented the effective co-operation of the Natal Army with Lord Roberts; and a portion of the interval was occupied by the enemy.

The centre columns under Lord Roberts were about 43,000 strong. Hunter and Methuen in the west had each under his command about 10,000 troops, while Buller's force, which was much nearer to the Transvaal objective than the centre, and which was still lingering on the banks of the Klip River two months after the relief of Ladysmith, numbered about 45,000. Ian Hamilton, who had done so well in the Elandslaagte and Caesar's Camp affairs, was not allowed to waste himself in the Natal lethargy. He was recalled from Ladysmith, and after taking part from the Bloemfontein side in the Wepener operations, was given command of a column which was sent on, a few days before the general movement, in the direction of Winburg to protect the right flank of the central advance and to fend off from it the hovering Boer commandos which had been pressed northwards by the April operations. He started from Thabanchu on April 30 and was soon in action with the Boer force a Houtnek under P. Botha. The battle lasted until nightfall and was renewed next day, when, with the help of reinforcements from French and Colvile, Ian Hamilton forced the Boers to retire on Clocolan.

Meanwhile there was energy on the left. Methuen had been for some time in occupation of the Boshof district, where he was in a position to threaten Kroonstad as well as the commandos at the Vaal bridge at Fourteen Streams between Kimberley and Mafeking. The relief of the latter was to be undertaken by a flying column under Mahon supported by Hunter's division. On May 3 Lord Roberts left Bloemfontein for the north. Kelly-Kenny's Division remained in charge of the Free State capital, while Chermside's policed the railway and the country in rear. Rundle at Thabanchu was instructed to prevent the enemy from regaining a footing in the districts east and south of Bloemfontein, and Methuen to push on towards the left bank of the Vaal beyond Hoopstad. No definite orders were sent to Buller, but for two months there had been a constant interchange of suggestions, counter-suggestions, plans, and projects for co-ordinate action.

Lord Roberts' objective was now Pretoria. The country in front of him was not difficult and he had a railway behind him. The line of communication with the south was fairly safe, and it was estimated that not more than 12,000 Boers with twenty-eight guns, under Delarey and L. Botha, who had been brought round from Natal to take chief command during the crisis, barred the way into the Transvaal; not including the loosely associated commandos operating on the right flank under the general control of De Wet, the Prince Rupert of the Boer War.

The nearest Boer post was at Brandfort, a few miles north of Karee Siding. On the right was the Winburg intervening column, 14,000 strong, under Ian Hamilton, who dragged in his train a weak supporting Division under Colvile, his superior officer in an anomalous position obliged to conform to his movements, and without authority to direct them. Brandfort was occupied that evening by Lord Roberts at the cost of six men killed. Vet River, the next obstacle, was secured on May 5, and crossed on the following day by the greater part of the main column. Ian Hamilton went into bivouac eight miles north of Winburg, which was occupied by his henchman Colvile.

Up to this time, Lord Roberts was acting without the cavalry under French, who since the Sannah's Post affair had been working in the Thabanchu district, and who joined the main column on May 9. Though his horses were not in good condition, his arrival increased the power of the centre to strike rapidly at the next obstacles, the Zand River and the town of Kroonstad forty miles beyond, which was now the seat of the Free State Government. The drifts on a section of the river nearly twenty miles in length were seized, the most easterly being taken by Ian Hamilton, who had gradually converged on the centre column and was now on the right of the line. Next day the passage of the river was effected; but Lord Roberts' hope of getting round and grappling each flank of the enemy, who numbered about 3,000 Transvaalers and 5,000 Free Staters, was not realized, and Botha withdrew without serious loss. That night the Army went into bivouac astride the railway between Zand River and Kroonstad.

On the left was the cavalry under French, who next morning raided northwards; but although he was unable, owing to the opposition of a force which came out of Kroonstad, to reach the railway north of the town, a small party of pioneers whom he had sent on succeeded during the night in blowing up the line at America Siding within a few yards of the high-road by which the enemy was retreating. This daring exploit, which although it had not much effect on the situation was not the less meritorious, was carried out by Hunter-Weston, who, just two months previously, had similarly cut the line north of Bloemfontein. The Boers had taken up a position at Boschrand to defend Kroonstad on the south, but French's turning movement scared them, and the position as well as the town was abandoned, in spite of efforts made by Steyn and Botha to arrest the flight. The seat of Government was transferred to Lindley.

The Zand River affair was an incident in the advance rather than a battle. Lord Roberts suffered but 115 casualties. Its effect on the enemy was chiefly moral. The Transvaalers, whose country had not yet heard the sounds of war, were alarmed, but the Free Staters were dismayed. The ties of race and kindred had engulfed them in a war which was not for their own cause, and the brunt of which they had borne for ten weeks. They thought that they had done all that could be expected of them and that the Transvaal must now look after itself. From that time there was no organized co-operation between the allies.

On May 12 Lord Roberts entered Kroonstad. In his advance, averaging thirteen miles per day, he had outstripped the reconstruction of the railway, of which almost every bridge and culvert had been blown up by the retreating Boers, and many miles of the permanent way had been destroyed. A halt was therefore necessary until the railhead could be brought nearer, and to give the Army an opportunity of pulling itself together, which was especially required by the cavalry. Little more than one-half of the 6,000 horses with which French marched out of Bloemfontein on May 6 were fit for service at Kroonstad seven days later.

Ian Hamilton was sent out in chase of the flitting Free State Government. He found it not at Lindley, nor at Heilbron, for it had trekked away to Frankfort. Between Lindley and Heilbron he was attacked in rear by a body of Boers, who emerged from the presumed vacuum behind him, but they were beaten off.

The bulk of the enemy's force which had evacuated Kroonstad, was now in the triangle formed by the railway, the Vaal and the Rhenoster. On its left flank was Ian Hamilton; and French was ordered out to hook the right flank, a repetition of the movement which had failed at Zand River. On May 22 Lord Roberts left Kroonstad.

The enemy, however, again evaded the net. Reconnaissances by French on May 23 showed that Botha had been frightened by the appearance of Ian Hamilton at Heilbron, and had crossed into the Transvaal. The discovery necessitated the recasting of Lord Roberts' plan, and brought about an interesting and entirely successful strategic movement. It was evident from Botha's dispositions that he expected Ian Hamilton to march straight to his front and endeavour to cross the Vaal above the railway bridge at Vereeniging. The difficult drifts and country below it were considered to be a sufficient protection, and were not strongly held by Botha, who on this occasion was completely out-generalled by his opponent.

Lord Roberts ordered Ian Hamilton to march from the right flank to the left, across the front of the main Army, and then in conjunction with French to wheel round to Meyerton on the line between Johannesburg and Vereeniging. On the evening of May 26 he entered the Transvaal at Wonderwater Drift. But Ian Hamilton's column had not the honour of being the first troops of the main body to enter the Transvaal, for he found the cavalry in front of him. French,[43] who had been sent out from Kroonstad on May 20, reached the Vaal at Paris on the 24th, and at once threw part of his force into the Transvaal, the rest crossing higher up at Old Viljoen's Drift. He thus fittingly celebrated the last birthday festival of Queen Victoria, which was also appropriately honoured by a proclamation issued on the same day by Lord Roberts, by which the Orange Free State was annexed to the dominions of Her Majesty under the designation of the Orange River Colony—a suitable birthday offering from a distinguished soldier to his Sovereign.

The main body of the Army with the Commander-in-Chief at its head entered the Transvaal at Viljoen's Drift on May 27, and, like the pioneer columns of French and Ian Hamilton, met with no opposition. It was of good augury for the speedy subjugation of the South African Republic. The expected firm stand of the enemy along the right bank of the Vaal, where the great battle of the war was to be fought, was not made. Vereeniging and subsequently Meyerton were abandoned in spite of all Botha's efforts to keep his burghers' faces to the front. He held a strong line enclosing Vereeniging and the drifts and extending from near Heidelberg to Potchefstroom, but it impotently watched the British troops crossing the river. Some opposition was indeed offered to French when he was a day's march from the drift by which he had crossed into the Transvaal, but the bulk of the commandos fell away to the north and took up positions between Johannesburg and Krugersdorp. By arrangement between the Governments, none of the Free Staters accompanied Botha into the Transvaal; but he was in communication with De Wet at Frankfort, and was urging him to act against the railway in the Free State. He must have regretted that the strong hand and will of the man of Waterval Drift, Kitchener's Kopje, Sannah's Post, and Mostert's Hoek, were not with him on the right bank of the Vaal to animate the shrinking burghers of the South African Republic.

The immediate purpose of Lord Roberts was now the capture of Johannesburg, the relations of some of whose inhabitants towards Pretoria had brought on, not only the Jameson raid, but also the war. Although it was not defended by permanent military works, the burghers had taken up a position before it which might be very hard to capture, and there was another and greater cause for anxiety. The task before Lord Roberts may be likened to an attack on a ship manned by pirates, who threaten to fire the magazine as soon as a hand is laid upon the bulwarks. It was seriously proposed by certain persons in authority under Kruger, that on the appearance of the British Army before the city, the mines in which so many millions of British capital were invested should be wrecked; and it is probable that the threat would have been carried out with official sanction if Botha had not set his face resolutely against such a piratical act.

[Sidenote: Map, p. 240.]

Lord Roberts proposed to effect the capture of Johannesburg by surrounding it. While with the main body of his Army he occupied Elandsfontein on the east, French and Ian Hamilton, the pioneers of the advance from Bloemfontein, would deal with the enemy posted south of the city and then establish themselves, the former near Klipfontein, north of it, and the latter near Florida, west of it. The right and the most vulnerable part of the Boer line was posted on Doornkop near the scene of the surrender of Jameson, the enthusiast, who, a few years before, had endeavoured with a few hundred adventurers and soldiers of fortune to solve the South African question which Great Britain was now tackling with a quarter of a million of trained soldiers.

On May 29 Ian Hamilton attacked the Doornkop position and won it after some hard infantry fighting; French, reinforced by the loan of Hamilton's mounted troops, having thrown a grappling iron round it, thereby rendering it untenable. At nightfall the two leaders were firmly planted west of the city. The movement deceived the enemy, to whom the advance of the main body under Lord Roberts on Elandsfontein came as an unwelcome surprise, though Botha had to some extent prepared for it. The detachments posted by him at various places east of the city offered no effectual resistance, and Lord Roberts went into bivouac that night at Elandsfontein. Johannesburg was entrapped between him on the east, and French and Hamilton on the north and west.

On May 30 the city agreed not unwillingly to surrender, but having regard to the presence in it of splinters of the lately shattered commandos, to the probability of street fighting, and to the risk of injury to the mines, Lord Roberts consented to postpone his formal entry until the following day; by which time the judicious action of the representatives of the Boer Government had averted the impending danger, and the troops took peaceful possession of Johannesburg.

In spite of disquieting news from the Free State, Lord Roberts remained firm in his purpose of advancing on Pretoria without delay. Not only was it the head quarters of Krugerism, but also the place in which the Boer harvest of war—more than 4,000 British prisoners, some of whom had been in captivity since the day of Talana Hill—was garnered.

On June 3 the advance on Pretoria, which it was hoped would be the last important movement of the war, was resumed; Wavell, with a brigade of Tucker's Division, being left behind as Bank Guard over the treasure in the mines. Botha had retired on the capital, but no one knew whether he would endeavour to defend it, or whether the vaunted forts would imperiously address the invader. In view of possible eventualities, however, a siege train, in which were included two 9.45" howitzers which had been hastily acquired in Austria, was taken up to answer Forts Schanzkop, Klapperkop, Wonderboom, and Daspoort if they should speak.

Throughout the month of May there had been alarms and excursions in the capital of the South African Republic. The sound of the plon-plon of the British Army was daily growing more distinct. The house of Ucalegon was on fire. The Volksraad met on May 7, and after a session of three days handed over the situation to the wavering executive Government, which had already made arrangements for an eastward retirement. Kruger, fearing lest his retreat by the Delagoa Bay railway should be cut off, slipped away to Machadodorp on May 29; the forts were emptied and abandoned, and Botha was bidden to do the best he could with the remnants of the Transvaal forces. On June 3 he took up a position on a ridge a few miles south of the city and prepared for the worst.

French, on the left front of the advance, was ambushed in a defile by a commando which had come up out of the west, but cleared himself with slight loss. The forts were dumb. Only the ridges between the city and Six-Mile Spruit were found to be held. The southern ridge was taken, and when the northern ridge was turned by Ian Hamilton, who was recalled from acting at large in support of French, the Boers retired. French passed through Zilikat's Nek and marched on Pretoria north of the Magaliesberg. On June 5 the capital of the South African Republic surrendered to Lord Roberts.

The Boers streamed away towards the east. An attempt made a few days before to cut the Delagoa Bay railway failed, not, however, through the fault of Hunter-Weston, who led the enterprise. The force given to him was insufficient for the purpose, and he was unable to repeat the exploits of Bloemfontein and Kroonstad.

The prisoners of war, whom to the number of 3,000 the Boers had not been able to drag away with them in their hurried flight, and who were in confinement at Waterval twelve miles north of the city, were brilliantly liberated on June 4 by some squadrons of cavalry; which not only ran the gauntlet of the Wonderboom defile, but passed through the Boer posts at the further Poort and snatched away the prize from under the eyes of Delarey, who was covering Waterval with 2,000 burghers and some guns.

On the day of Lord Robert's entry into Pretoria, Buller was still in Natal. They had started simultaneously, and in thirty-four days the main body had marched 300 miles, but the tardigrade Natal Army was now on Lord Roberts' right rear. It had been his hope that Buller would advance step by step with him, and having reached the Transvaal, would strike northwards and establish himself on the Delagoa Bay railway and deny it to Kruger. At Kroonstad, Lord Roberts, seeing that he could not expect assistance from Buller, contemplated detaching Ian Hamilton and sending him into the Eastern Transvaal, but the fear of unduly weakening the main body in view of probable opposition at the Vaal, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, caused him to give up the project. As events turned out, it would in all probability have been successful.

Pretoria was in the hands of the British Army, Kruger was in flight, the war was over said the experts. Without having fought a single action that could be termed a battle, and at a cost of less than 500 casualties, of which but sixty-one men were killed, Lord Roberts had passed from Bloemfontein and had seized the perverse city in which most of the South African troubles of the past twenty-five years had been brewed. The Free State, though kicking, was apparently helpless. There were, however, not a few observers on the spot to whom the easy success and the few casualties were of ominous import. A change in the method of the opposition to be offered in the future to the invader was indicated. The Boers were discovering that they were incapable of waging systematic warfare and were on the point of resorting to guerilla, for which they, as well as the arena, were by nature particularly well adapted.



On the Boer side there was a transitory interval of weakness. Even before Lord Roberts' occupation of Pretoria Kruger wrote doubtfully to Steyn; and after it Botha was inclined to negotiate with the invader. He was with his commandos at Hatherley, a few miles east of Pretoria. A Council of War was held in the office of a Russian Jew, who was a distiller of whisky. The leaders complained that they had been deserted by Kruger, who had slunk away with the civil government and all the money he could lay his hands on, and the general opinion was in favour of abandoning the struggle. A meeting between Lord Roberts and Botha was even arranged, when suddenly De Wet intervened. The news of his successful raids on the line of communication in the Free State relaxed the tension of the minds of the despondent commandants. Easily disheartened and easily reassured, they leapt in an instant from one psychological pole to the other. Botha announced that he was ready to meet Lord Roberts, not only in conference, but in battle. The negotiations were, however, not definitely broken off until after the Battle of Diamond Hill.

Lord Roberts had sent Kitchener with a column to see to the trouble in the Free State, and could not put more than about 16,000 men into the field against Botha, who, with 6,000 men, had taken up a strong position astride the Delagoa Bay railway sixteen miles east of Pretoria. His centre was at Pienaar's Poort, where the railway passes through a defile, and his front, which his former experience of Lord Roberts' tactics led him to extend greatly, was nearly twenty-five miles in length, and ran along an irregular chain of hills, kopjes, and ridges. Facing the Diamond Hill and Donkerhoek range, south of the centre, is another range of heights through which the two poorts Tyger and Zwavel pass, and which circles round the source of Pienaar's River towards the Diamond Hill range. North of the centre runs a broken range ending abruptly at the Kameelfontein ridge, which overlooks the broad Kameelfontein valley leading to the Krokodil Spruit; and across the valley rises the Boekenhoutskloof ridge, a detached feature with triangular contours, which, being somewhat in advance, commands the approaches to Kameelfontein ridge, where the Boer right flank under Delarey was posted.