Great Boer War

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Great Boer War Page 9

by Farwell, Byron,,


  First published in the Daily Mail on 31 October 1899, it was an instant success; Mark Twain said that the “clarion-peal” of its lines “thrilled the world.” The celebrated actress Mrs. Beerbohm Tree recited the poem daily for fourteen weeks from the stage of the Palace Theatre; each time she reached the lines “pay—pay—pay!” the stage was showered with coins, and she raised £70,000 for the Fund. Lines from the poem were reproduced on cigarette packages, ashtrays, tobacco jars, plates, and even pillowcases; Sir Arthur Sullivan set the words to music, and the song swept the country.

  Badly prepared and poorly equipped as the British army was, its officers and men were eager to fight; everyone was wild to go. Sergeants even gave up their stripes to be included in units scheduled to leave for the front. Orders for South Africa were a cause for celebration, and some regiments celebrated almost to the moment of departure: when the 1st Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders left Edinburgh for South Africa one officer commented on the fact that “the battalion was sober with the exception of the grooms, who were nearly all drunk, my man being the most so.”5 The Oxfordshire Light Infantry was showered with letters and telegrams of congratulations when its orders came. Retired officers sent gifts; one former private sent the magnificent sum of twenty guineas, and a telegram signed “Rothschild” was received: “Hope you will kindly inform me when regiment starts for seat of war, as I shall like to send men pipes and tobacco. . . .”

  When in the early morning hours the Guards marched from their barracks to the railway station on their way to war there was such a crowd of cheering men and women that they could hardly make their way through it. Lieutenant George Cornwallis-West, Lady Randolph Churchill’s young lover, wrote: “Over Westminster Bridge, our ranks almost degenerated into a rabble, so great was the crush of civilians.”6 And the Daily Mail (23 October 1899) reported that “even total strangers, carried away by the enthusiasm, broke into the ranks and insisted on carrying rifles, kit bags . . . and at Waterloo all semblance of military order had disappeared. The police were swept aside and the men were borne, in many cases, shoulder high to the entraining platform, while others struggled through in single file.”

  Three months later when the first contingent of the CIV (City of London Imperial Volunteers—the most famous of the volunteer units) marched to the station, Colonel W. H. Mackinnon, their commanding officer, recorded their difficulties in his diary: “January 13—The detachment marched out of Bunhill Row at 7 A.M., but, owing to the enormous crowds lining the streets, it took three hours and twenty minutes to get to Nine Elms. Several men were exhausted, and many articles of equipment were lost.”7

  Departing officers were loaded with gifts from friends and relations: bars of chocolate, bottles of meat tabloids, field glasses, compasses, Mappin and Webb’s wrist watches, Kodak cameras, stomach bands, sparklet squeezers, and copies of Colonel R. S. S. Baden-Powell’s Aids to Scouting. Fortnum and Mason offered a “South African War Service” to provide officers with luxuries. Included in the piles of officers’ baggage were cases of wines and spirits, tinned foods, sporting guns, expensive saddles, and dressing cases with silver fittings.

  Khaki was all the rage, the day’s most popular colour, and officers were even given khaki pajamas. There was a song called “Khaki.” Bonds floated to finance the war were called khakis, and the general election of 1900 was known as the khaki election. The Royal Marines dyed their white belts with tea, and the Scots Greys even coloured their horses khaki. “Kakies” was the name the Boers were soon to give to all British soldiers.

  On 2 October 1899 The Times reported on the scene in Johannesburg as the Boers prepared for war:

  Since yesterday afternoon the officials have been busy commandeering men, horses, and supplies. Several hundred men have been despatched from here to the Natal border, and a considerable number of special trains, heavily laden with men and munitions, have passed through bound for the same destination.... All the horses belonging to individuals, including many British Uitlanders, have been indiscriminately commandeered.

  Margret Broadfoot, an English actress and singer with a theatrical troupe, was in Johannesburg in early October and wrote home to a friend: “I was driving home from the theatre on Friday when two soldiers on horseback rode up and stopped the carriage; of course I got rather a start, and most certainly looked for a bullet through me. However, it was the horses they wanted. We were allowed to drive to the hotel, but they took the cabman’s horses after that.”8

  British intelligence had estimated that 5,000 Boers would be needed to control the uitlanders when war broke out, but in fact none was required, for the uitlanders who had clamoured loudest for war were now in a panic at the thought of it; their one desire was to flee to the safety of Durban or Cape Town. An ex-Londoner described the crowds at the railway station in Johannesburg as being “as bad as the Underground at six o’clock,” and another witness to the scene wrote:

  The departure platform . . . is crowded every night with eager, excited masses. All are rushing hither and thither jostling and pushing. Faces already pale from excitement are rendered ghastly by the glare of the lamps and the rays of the electric light. Standing upright in open cattle-trucks, penned like sheep, exposed to the glaring sun, the biting winds, the soaking rains, they leave Johannesburg. Fortunate are they who have secured the shelter of covered carriages for their womenfolk and little ones.

  The plight of the women and children standing in the open cattle and coal trucks on the long journey to Cape Town was sad indeed. At least once, at the Vereeniging station Boer railway officials, with the help of other passengers and some bystanders, ejected all the men from the first-class carriages and gave their places to women and children.

  In Johannesburg, houses were abandoned with all their furniture in place, whole streets were deserted, and all major buildings were barricaded with corrugated iron and wooden slats. It was estimated that 45,000 uitlanders and British sympathisers fled from the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Cape Town was flooded with refugees, and accommodation for them became a problem. Some of the wealthy uitlanders who had left early holed up in the Mount Nelson, Cape Town’s most luxurious hotel, which became known as Helots Rest.

  The refugees were happy to provide the Natal and Cape newspapers with a steady supply of atrocity stories. There were tales of English women being clubbed with rifle butts and whipped with sjamboks (a rawhide whip or riding crop), of babies torn from their mothers’ arms, of men and women “robbed and reviled with brutal oaths and jeers.” One Englishman was said to have been kicked to death. A young correspondent for the Morning Post, Winston Churchill, wrote on 5 November 1899 from East London:

  I ... heard the first confirmation of the horrible barbarities perpetrated by the Boers on the trainloads of refugees. A British officer on special service was also explicit.... The Boers plundered the flying folk mercilessly, and had insulted or assaulted men and women.... “One woman,” said the officer, “had been flogged across the breasts, and was much lacerated.”9

  There were a number of accounts of passengers who had been dragged from railway carriages and forced to shout “Long live Kruger!” There was not much truth in any of this, although there was indeed a fracas at one railway station when a group of miners from the Rand stood on the platform and insisted on singing “Rule Britannia.” Cape Town newspapers carried for days a running story of abuses suffered by one well-known uitlander in Boer hands and finally a sensational story of his death. It was embarrassing when soon after he turned up alive and well.

  The Boers also had their anxieties. In 1899 a successful lighter-than-air airship had not yet been built, but the internal combustion engine had been invented and airships were technically possible; Alberto Santos-Dumont in France and Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Germany were working furiously to create one. There was much talk of this fantastic marvel, and in South Africa the most widespread rumour among the Boers was that the British planned to attack them from the air. Even the Tra
nsvaal government accepted the notion, and orders were sent out to all telegraph offices to report any airships that might be sighted. Plenty were. There was hardly a locality that did not report seeing at least one, often with “a powerful light,” and a considerable amount of ammunition was expended on inoffensive stars. Pretoria was bombarded with telegrams; typical was this from Vryheid: “Airship with powerful light plainly visible from here in far off distance towards Dundee. Telegraphist at Paulpietersburg also spied one, and at Amsterdam three in the direction of Zambaansland to the south-east.”10

  By 12 October some 38,000 burghers (23,000 Transvaalers and 15,000 Free Staters) were in the field and ready to fight. The general plan of the campaign was to attack on two fronts: to invade northwestern Natal, defeat the only field army the British possessed in South Africa at Dundee or Ladysmith, and then to sweep through Natal to Durban; on the western front to move across the Orange Free State frontiers into Cape Colony and Bechuanaland, capturing Kimberley, Vryburg, and Mafeking, and then to march south, where it was expected that thousands of Cape Afrikaners would rise in revolt and join the republican forces. With Natal and most of Cape Colony in Boer hands, it was believed that the British would sue for peace or that European powers would intervene.

  The first action of the war took place on the western front when a small force led by Koos de la Rey, a part of the larger force under Piet Cronjé, moved across the Transvaal border and, halfway between Vryburg and Mafeking, stumbled upon an armoured train carrying artillery destined for the defence of Mafeking. Without the loss of a single man, De la Rey captured the train and took thirty prisoners.

  Although Cronje’s main force soon crossed the frontier and laid siege to Kimberley and Mafeking, the main theatre of action at the beginning of the war was not on the western front but on the Natal-Transvaal frontier where Commandant-General Piet Joubert had 14,000 Transvaalers under his command; in addition, 6,000 Free Staters under Marthinus Prinsloo were moving up along the Drakensberg range. Only 12,000 South African volunteers and British regulars under Sir George White were ahead to oppose them.

  THE DRIVERS MANAGED SOMEHOW TO GET THEIR GUNS OVER THE ROCKY

  BED OF A STREAM TO A FAVORABLE POSITION.

  The Transvaal army on the Natal front was divided into four parts: Lucas Meyer was on the far left, then S. P. Erasmus, then Joubert with the main force, and J. H. M. Kock on his right. Joubert’s main laager was jammed with armed men and the wives of many of them, including, of course, the commandant-general’s wife, Hendrina. (One determined young woman was there dressed as a boy and carrying a Mauser; discovered, she was sent back to Johannesburg.) Men and women shared the space with cattle, oxen, horses, ponies, and a mad array of vehicles: ox carts, spiders, laundry wagons, trollies, and butchers’ carts, many of which had been commandeered and bore the names of the companies or individuals who had owned them. The burghers themselves were amused by the incongruity of a cart painted “P. Amm & Sons Tea Merchants” beside one of the Krupp guns. There was nothing formal about this army of farmers. Joubert’s tent was open to all, and one burgher came in to ask the commandant-general for the loan of a shoe lace.

  Joubert’s invasion was slow off the mark, and he moved cautiously. He need not have done so, for the British did not defend a single pass; they did not blow up a single bridge or tunnel, nor did they destroy the railway. This was not negligence on the part of the British, but economy. Bridges and tunnels were expensive, and the British had the curious notion that if they left these valuable structures for the Boers that the Boers would do the same for them.

  Seventeen-year-old Deneys Reitz, a son of the Transvaal’s state secretary, was with the forces under S. P. Erasmus, and he was stirred as he moved forward with the invading host: “As far as the eye could see the plain was alive with horsemen, guns and cattle, all steadily going forward to the frontier.”11 At the Buffalo River near Newcastle the lines of horsemen reined in and looked across at the land they were about to invade. Erasmus, tall and dark, dressed in the top hat and frock coat in which he went to war, rode up and spoke to them: Natal was a land taken from their forefathers by the British, he said; now they would win it back. Then, “amid enthusiastic cries we began to ford the stream. . . . the cheering and the singing of the ‘Volkslied’ [national anthem] were continuous, and we rode into the smiling land of Natal full of hope and courage.”12

  Roland Schikkerling, nineteen years old, was with the Johannesburg Commando, a part of the force that entered Natal over Botha’s Pass and bivouacked on the upper Ingogo River. At the frontier the border police had fled so hastily that he found a spread table of still-warm food. His first sight of British soldiers was a group of prisoners:

  How I was disillusioned by the appearance of these men! They were small, and some had the naked bully beef slapped in their pockets, so that the grease oozed through. They had neither, it seemed, the accent nor the gait of Christians. I saw none of the sullen haughtiness I had pictured.... They had, it appeared, lost their way in the vicinity of Dundee.13

  “We have lost time, a misfortune in war, and in preparing for war, which is deplorable,” Wolseley told Lansdowne. “We have committed one of the very greatest blunders in war, namely, we have given our enemy the initiative.” However, some of the 5,700 British troops from India had already landed and others were on the water only a few days out of Durban; a battalion each had been ordered to South Africa from Malta, Crete, Egypt, and Gibraltar. In England, mobilization of the reserves was ordered, and Britain was hurriedly assembling an army corps of 47,000 men under General Sir Redvers Buller, V.C. The most famous regiments in the British army were alerted for active service: fusiliers, Highlanders, and Guards; hussars, dragoons, and lancers. Once this giant force reached South Africa these arrogant farmers would be easily and quickly crushed. Or so it was believed.

  8

  TALANA: THE FIRST BATTLE

  When Lieutenant General George White arrived to take command of the army in Natal just six days before war was declared, it seemed to him that when the Boers invaded, as they were expected to, the best place to make a stand would be Ladysmith: it was a British cantonment, strategically located, and the most important town in northern Natal. But Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, governor of Natal, protested. Ladysmith, he maintained, was too far back from the border, too far south on the railway line leading to the Transvaal; the British must hold Dundee, a small mining town 40 miles further north, otherwise its valuable coal fields would be lost and the colonists in Natal and the Cape would lose all confidence in the British army; to allow the Boers to penetrate as far as Ladysmith would be an exhibition of weakness and would lead to a native uprising. Sir Walter was warmly supported by Major General Sir William Penn Symons, whom White superseded as commanding general in Natal but who was to remain under White’s command. He was certain that Dundee could easily be held against what he saw as an attack by simple farmers armed with rifles who would certainly crumble before British regulars. Four months earlier he had discussed the possibility of war with the Bishop of Natal: “It would be indeed a grievous thing,” he told the bishop. “We none of us want to be sent to kill the ignorant Boer farmers.” His sentiments were less pious when told later that the Boers were gathering at Laing’s Nek: “I wish every commando in the Transvaal was collected there so that I could make one sweep of the lot of them.”

  Doubtless Penn Symons’s reputation and experience, if not his reasoning, counted much with White, for Penn Symons had seen a great deal of active service in Burma and on India’s Northwest Frontier; besides, many years before he had fought in two campaigns in South Africa: the war against the Gaika in 1877-1878 and the Zulu War of 1879. It was a fault in White’s character that he lacked the faith in his own ideas and convictions which they often deserved. He allowed himself to be persuaded to maintain the dispositions already made by Penn Symons: about 8,000 troops remained in Ladysmith under White’s immediate control, and a brigade of 4,000 men stayed in Dundee under Pe
nn Symons. But White remained uneasy about this isolated brigade and at the last minute changed his mind and instructed Penn Symons to fall back on Ladysmith, an order Penn Symons chose to ignore; he told his officers: “I feel perfectly safe, and I am dead against retreating.”

  On 13 October Joubert occupied Laing’s Nek and was pleased to find the railway tunnel there intact; the force under Erasmus roamed ahead and on the afternoon of the 18th skirmished with a British patrol out of Dundee. Penn Symons found it impossible to believe that a Boer force, whatever its size, would be so rash as to attack a British brigade; certain that he was in no danger, he neglected the most elementary precautions.

  Dundee was surrounded by hills, the most dominant being Impati, 1,500 feet high, rising north of the town, and Talana and Lennox, a pair of kopjes about 2 miles east, 800 feet high and, like most South African hills, relatively flat on top. There was not even a picket posted on any of these heights, although Impati held the town’s water supply. The British camp was about three-quarters of a mile west of the town, almost in the centre of a topographical saucer, in the bottom of what a former French officer, Georges Villebois de Mareuil, described as a chamber pot.

  At six o’clock on the evening of 19 October some 4,000 of the Boers east of the Buffalo River assembled in a pelting rain. Predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church led them in prayer and urged them to fight like men and to trust in God. Their devotions over, the commandos rode off through the mud towards Dundee, dragging with them four field pieces and two pompoms. At two thirty the next morning some of their scouts stumbled upon a picket of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and young Lieutenant Cecil Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw, in charge of the picket, heard bullets fired in anger for the first time. He wisely fell back to a better defensive position and sent a sergeant hurrying back to camp with the news. But it was not until he had sent a second message, reporting that he was in danger of being surrounded, that Penn Symons sent out two companies of infantry to support him.

 

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