Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  Dawn found the weary infantry stumbling along in column of fours, the artillery and mounted troops behind, following a rough track across Louis Jacobus van Zyl’s farm. Not a single scout had been sent out. The unsuspecting Boers were only a few hundred yards away, and the unsuspecting British were marching straight for the laager of Commandant Jan Hendrick Olivier.

  In the column’s wake were a number of exhausted soldiers who had dropped behind, and some of these were tempted by the sight of Mr. Van Zyl’s sheep. The prospect of roast mutton seemed infinitely more appealing than trying to keep up with General Back-acher, who hardly seemed to know where he was going anyway. Van Zyl, astonished to see soldiers tramping across his fields so early in the morning, strolled out to see what they were doing and found, to his horror, that they were killing his pregnant ewes. He went to get his gun.

  On the other side of the kopje on Gatacre’s right lay a Boer outpost, 60 men and a Krupp gun under Hans Swanepoel. At about 4:30 A.M. one of the burghers, yielding to his bowels’ commands, stumbled sleepily away from camp to the other side of the hill. His trousers were lowered and he was about to squat when he saw below him in the early morning light the glint of Gatacre’s bayonets. Grabbing up his trousers, he ran for camp yelling, “Die kakies! Die kakies!” Each man seized his rifle and ran to the top of the hill. The young were fastest, and Hendrik Coetzee, a teen-aged boy who had left his school at Wellington in Cape Colony to join a commando, fired the first shot. He was quickly joined by the others and, 60 against 2,000, they poured a hot fire into Gatacre’s column. The sound of their musketry gave the alarm to all the other Boers in the area.

  At the first shot Gatacre ordered the Irish Rifles to deploy and seize a detached kopje on the left. Three companies got the order right; the rest, together with the Northumberland Fusiliers, went storming up the steepest and most rugged side of a mountain on the left. Gatacre was left sitting on his horse with no more infantry to command, the battle already almost out of his hands. There was still the artillery, of course, and he directed that the guns come up and into action. By the time Lieutenant Colonel Henry Eagar and a handful of the Irish Rifles had arduously scrambled up almost to the crest of the mountain, Gatacre’s gunners, the rising sun in their eyes, shelled them. Several rounds of shrapnel burst directly over their heads: Eagar and six others were wounded and the rest were effectively driven back down the slopes.

  Meanwhile, in the rear, an angry farmer Van Zyl started his own battle: he opened fire on the soldiers slaughtering his ewes.

  Gatacre’s men, subjected to a galling fire from several points, bewildered by an almost invisible enemy sheltering behind rocks, nevertheless returned the fire, and some of their bullets took effect. Field Cornet Harm Olivier, father of twenty children and a prosperous farmer from the Burgersdorp district, was there in the fight with three of his sons. A British bullet pierced his eye.

  The entire battle lasted scarcely an hour and a half. Gatacre, having clumsily stuck his hand into a hornets’ nest and been badly stung, then tried to withdraw it and flee. He ordered his remaining men recalled and began his retreat. No longer in formations, the infantry, exhausted and demoralised, staggered away. One of the guns became inextricably stuck in the mud on Van Zyl’s farm and was abandoned. Its breech block was first removed, a piece of foresight which should have rendered the gun useless to its captors, but it was tossed into an ammunition wagon which in turn bogged down and the Boers were able to assemble a fine British gun.

  Now was certainly the time for a Boer counterattack on Gatacre’s exhausted and disheartened men. Probably 300 stout burghers could have swept up the lot. In fact, their leaders had a quarrel about this, but it was, after all, Sunday, and besides, the burghers were impatient to collect the loot on the battlefield; Gatacre was allowed to limp back unmolested to Molteno.

  The British gone, the Boers came down onto the battlefield to collect prisoners and loot, to bury the dead and tend the wounded. When Jacobus Petrus Bosman, a young schoolteacher, found one soldier, both legs shattered, sitting with his back to an anthill smoking a cigarette, he was struck with the feeling of comradeship that so often takes over after a battle: “Suddenly we were enemies no more, but friends, human beings in the fullest sense. Would I have been so calm and collected in such a maimed condition?”3

  In one part of the field men were startled to hear a single shot ring out. A soldier had ended the agony of a friend shot through the kidney by putting a bullet through his head.

  About eleven o’clock in the morning the wreck of Gatacre’s little army began to stumble, footsore, hot, thirsty, hungry, and dispirited into Molteno; it was not until late in the day that the last stragglers arrived.

  Gatacre was disheartened. But he had yet to learn the worst: the casualty report was a stunning blow. He was seen sobbing in the waiting room of the Molteno railway station after it was delivered to him: more than 700 casualties, about one-third of his entire force. What had become of all these men? Had it really been such a ferocious battle? Hardly. Only later did he learn the embarrassing, shameful, the near-incredible truth: only 29 of his men had been killed and 57 wounded; the rest—633 officers and men—had been left behind.4 Forgotten. Receiving no order to retreat, they had stayed and had been abandoned on the sides of the kopjes —and Gatacre had not missed them.

  Sometime that morning, when the abandoned men discovered that they were alone, that their general had marched off and left them, they raised white flags and quietly surrendered; Commandant Floris du Plooy and his Bethulie burghers rounded them up.

  The Boer force that routed Gatacre numbered no more than 800 men. Their losses were 6 killed and 27 wounded. After spending the morning burying, bandaging, looting, and rounding up prisoners, they held a thanksgiving service. Then, to commemorate their victory, each man took a stone and put it on a pile, topping it with a sign reading MET GOD VOOR VRYHEID (With God for Freedom). It had been the first battle for most; some resolved it would be their last. As battles go, it had not been particularly bloody, but there were those who, seeing the dead and wounded, found that war was not to their taste and decided to go back to their farms and families.

  Three days after the battle Gatacre brought himself to tell his wife about it. It was, he said,

  a most lamentable failure, and yet within an ace of being the success I anticipated. ... The fault was mine, and I was responsible of course. I went rather against my better judgement in not resting the night at Molteno, but I was tempted by the shortness of the distance and the certainty of success. It was so near being a brilliant success.5

  He had to tell Buller, of course, and he telegraphed a report. Buller replied: “I think you were quite right to try the night attack and hope better luck next time.”

  It was three months before the British occupied Stormberg, and by that time the Boers had simply abandoned it.

  One of Louis van Zyl’s Coloured workers informed on him, and he was arrested, tried, and acquitted. In a farming community no one was willing to condemn a man for defending his sheep. Van Zyl’s reputation among his Afrikaner neighbours as the man who had defied the might of the British Empire to save his pregnant ewes grew with the years, the story losing nothing in the telling and the number of soldiers he was said to have shot rising to seven.

  15

  BEFORE COLENSO

  Buller did not remain long in Cape Town. He diverted more and more troops to Natal, then decided that this sector required his personal attention. Leaving most of his staff behind, and without bothering to tell Milner, he set off with only his military secretary and a few aides-de-camp, arriving at Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the colony, on 25 November.

  Buller had no intention of assuming personal command of the forces in Natal. He merely wanted to inspect the situation, give some advice, and straighten out a few matters; he intended to return to Cape Town in two or three weeks. At this time Methuen appeared to be progressing well: he had won the battle of Belmont and that very day
he had won another victory at Enslin; he was expected to relieve Kimberley within a few days. General French in north central Cape Colony was pushing out cavalry patrols from Naauwpoort; Gatacre too was moving troops north from Queenstown and was planning his attack on Stormberg. Buller could feel confident that he had done the right thing in coming, for it was important, he thought, that Ladysmith be relieved before he could revert to his original plan of a triumphal march north from Cape Colony through the Orange Free State into the Transvaal. He anticipated some hard fighting in Natal, but with the large force now at hand success seemed certain.

  The army for the relief of Ladysmith was assembling at Frere and Estcourt, and John Atkins watched as “along all the road north towards Frere moved one long, slow line of cavalry, troops, guns, waggons, teams of sixteen oxen, teams of mules ten-in-hand (often enough ten-out-of hand), equipment, the pantries and the kitchens of an army, bakers, cooks, farriers, followers of all sorts, doctors, bearers, ambulance waggons—the wonderful dusty spectacle of an army moving.”1 It was an army which was said to be, and probably was, the finest force Britain had put in the field since the Crimean War nearly fifty years before.

  General Cornelius Francis Clery (1838-1926) was in command in Natal. The son of an Irish wine merchant, Clery was a graduate of Sandhurst and the Staff College, and although he had seen action in the Zulu War and in Egypt and the Sudan, he had always been on the staff and had never before held a command. More of a student of war than a warrior, he had been a professor of tactics at Sandhurst and had served as commandant of the Staff College. For thirty years his book Minor Tactics had been a text in the British army. He was a bachelor and a dandy, dressing with fastidious care, his clothes well cut, his figure elegant. In the Sudan campaign, when the other officers adopted the new-fashioned, drab khaki, he habitually wore scarlet jackets and soft boots with gold spurs, although he forwent the traditional tight cavalry breeches; they galled his varicose veins. His whiskers were elaborate and he dyed them. Bennett Burleigh once heard a soldier describe him: “Oh, you can’t mistake him at all-thin, queer-looking bloke with a puzzle beard and blue whiskers.”

  While Clery took charge of the troops assembling at Frere, Buller busied himself for the next ten days with the supply, transport, and medical arrangements at Pietermaritzburg. He was very good at this work. No Victorian general was more solicitous for the welfare of his troops than Buller. Unlike most, he personally assured himself that the facilities for the care of the sick and wounded were the best that could be had, and he took a special interest in the medical arrangements for hospital trains (then an innovation) and hospital ships. Dr. Frederick Treves, a consulting surgeon, later testified to his solicitude: “No engagement was commenced without the medical staff getting a message from Headquarters to prepare for the number of cases expected, and General Buller was full of anxiety as to how the sick were to be accommodated.”2

  He tried to give every soldier at least one hot meal a day, and he made an effort to see that they had fresh meat and vegetables. He established Field Force Canteens, the first attempt to make available to soldiers in the field small necessities and luxuries. Some felt that Buller coddled his men and that too much emphasis was placed on supplies. Major W. R. Birdwood said: “It is the exact opposite of the Crimea where they starved. Here troops are if anything overfed and the generals are bound hand and foot by their supply columns.”3

  Buller was, however, the best-liked general in South Africa. John Atkins noted the magical effect of his presence on the morale of the troops when on 5 December he moved up to Frere:

  The notion of advancing is no doubt something, but the arrival of Sir Redvers Buller is almost everything. I have never seen troops re-tempered like this by one man since I saw the extraordinary change which came over the American army on the sudden arrival of General Miles before Santiago.4

  Three days after Buller’s arrival at Frere the railway bridge there, which had been damaged, was repaired and all was ready for the advance to Ladysmith. There were now 18,000 men assembled—four brigades of infantry, a brigade of mounted troops, five batteries of field artillery, and some large naval guns-besides about 2,500 men on the line of communications. Buller, unable to confine himself to the role of adviser, now took direct personal charge, although Clery was not superseded and the curious fiction was maintained that Buller was merely visiting the front; all orders were issued over Clery’s signature even though all knew that Buller was actually in command.

  Between Buller’s army and White’s beleaguered men were the Boers led by Louis Botha, entrenched in unknown strength along 7 miles of kopjes north of the Tugela River 12 miles south of Ladysmith. The small settlement of Colenso—a dozen tin-roofed houses, a railway station, and a goods shed—was on the south side of the Tugela (the name means “the terrible one”), where lay open plain with only slight folds in the terrain. It was over this flat, open grassland that Buller now began to manoeuvre his army, watched by the hidden Boers on their kopjes across the river. It was not clear what Buller intended to do, and probably he himself was not entirely certain. Originally he had planned to make a wide flanking movement around the Colenso kopjes. On 12 December he telegraphed Lansdowne that “a direct assault upon the enemy’s position at Colenso and north of it would be too costly,” but on the same day he ordered a brigade of infantry under Major General Geoffrey Barton with six 12-pounders and two 4.7-inch naval guns to move up to within 7,000 yards of Colenso. The next day two infantry brigades moved up and the naval guns opened fire on the Boer positions, first from 10,000 yards and then from 7,000 yards. The Boers, under strict orders to conceal their positions until the British infantry advanced to the river, did not reply.

  By heliograph Buller informed White that he would attack on the 17th, and White accordingly began preparations for a sally in some force to assist him. On the morning of 14 December Buller’s guns moved to within 4,000 yards of Colenso and began a day-long bombardment of the kopjes across the river and of Hlangwane (pronounced shlang-wahn-ee), a dominant height south and east of the river. Clouds of green-yellow lyddite smoke hung over the hills, spurts of red dust rising where shells struck, but of the enemy there was not a sign. Watching intently through their glasses, Buller and his officers were unable to see what effect, if any, the bombardment was producing. They seemed to be shelling an empty landscape. Some began to wonder if there were any Boers there at all. Buller, too, may have had some doubts, but that evening he called together his brigade commanders to announce that they would attack the Boer positions at Colenso in the morning.

  Why Buller told the secretary for war that an attack on Colenso would be too costly to be considered, then reversed himself and helioed White that he would attack on the 17th, and finally and abruptly, without informing either Lansdowne or White of his change in plans, decided to attack on the 15th is an enigma—one among several connected with Buller’s strategy. He had received no new intelligence of the enemy that could have accounted for such drastic changes. The news of the defeats of Gatacre and then Methuen had come to him, stunning blows which may have made a quick, decisive victory seem more desirable than a time-consuming flanking movement, and perhaps the studied silence of the Boers under his bombardment changed his estimate of their strength. The plan of battle which he set before his brigade commanders was essentially a three-pronged frontal attack. Major General Arthur Fitzroy Hart was to lead his brigade in an attack on the left, where there was believed to be a drift; Major General Henry Hildyard’s brigade was to attack the centre of the line, straight down the railway tracks through Colenso; the brigades of Generals N. G. Lyttelton and Geoffrey Barton, were to be held in reserve. Hlangwane was to be attacked by Lord Dundonald’s mounted brigade.

  The orders for the attack, signed by Clery, were not issued until 10 P.M. and could not have been digested by the brigade commanders and their staffs before midnight. The orders were far from clear, and the objectives of the attacking brigades were vague. As to where the
Boers were located, the brigade commanders were told only that “the enemy is entrenched in the kopjes north of Colenso bridge.” Hart was ordered to cross the “bridle drift immediately to the west of the junction of the Doornkop spruit and the Tugela,” but there were two spruits (streams) here, and both were incorrectly marked on the map. Hildyard was ordered to march on “the iron bridge,” but there were two iron bridges, one for the road to the west of the village and another for the railway north of Colenso.

  General Lyttelton, one of the brigade commanders, later complained that there had been “no proper reconnoitering of the ground, no certain information as to any ford by which to cross the river, no proper artillery preparation, no satisfactory targets for the artillery, no realization of the importance of Hlangwane.”

  Of all Lyttelton’s list, the last, the failure of Buller and his staff to grasp the importance of Hlangwane, is by far the most baffling. Standing 3,616 feet high, the most prominent feature in the landscape, it so clearly controlled the surrounding terrain that the youngest lieutenant from Sandhurst ought to have easily seen that wherever in the vicinity the Boers were entrenched it was vital to seize Hlangwane if they were to be dislodged. And it was south of the Tugela, so that it was not even necessary to cross the river to reach it. Buller seems to have known what ought to have been done once the hill was captured, for he told Dundonald to try to take a position on it from which he could “enfilade the kopjes north of the iron bridge,” yet he had told Lansdowne that “its possession did not in any way assist the crossing.” It would appear that in Buller’s mind Dundonald’s part in the battle was simply to create a diversion from the main attacks of Hart and Hildyard, although why mounted troops were used to attack a precipitous hill when two spare infantry brigades were available is unfathomable.