On 3 March 1900 Buller’s army made its formal entrance into Ladysmith, and an exuberant Churchill was on hand to describe it:
The scene was solemn and stirring. The streets were lined with the brave defenders, looking very smart and clean in their best clothes, but pale, thin, and wasp-waisted-their belts several holes tighter than was satisfactory.... All through the morning and on into the afternoon the long stream of men and guns flowed through the streets of Ladysmith, and all marvelled to see what manner of men these were—dirty, war-worn, travel-stained, tanned, their uniforms in tatters, their boots falling to pieces, their helmets dinted and broken, but nevertheless magnificent soldiers, striding along, deep-chested and broad-shouldered, with the light of triumph in their eyes and the blood of fighting ancestors in their veins. It was a procession of lions.... I waved my feathered hat, and cheered and cheered until I could cheer no longer for joy that I had lived to see the day.41
The following day was a Sunday, and there was a thanksgiving service at the church in Ladysmith. “It was very impressive,” said Isabella Craw, “and the way the congregation sang ‘God Save the Queen’ alone was worth going for.”42
On the evening of his arrival Buller sat down and wrote to his wife:
Here I am at last. I thought I was never going to get here....
Now it is all over and well over thank God.... It has all seemed to me like a dream. Every day there were complications to meet and every day the same roar of gun and rattle of musketry, with alas, every day the long list of killed and wounded, which is what I cannot bear....
As for me I am filled with admiration for the British soldier; really the manner in which the men have worked, fought and endured during the last fortnight has been something more than human....
There was a moment when I thought it was touch and go, but it was only a moment.43
It had seemed like a bad dream to the victorious soldiers and the fleeing burghers too. The war had now been in progress for only four and a half months, but for many of the participants its glory was fast fading.
Ladysmith, having had its brief moment in history, sank back again into a sleepy provincial town. The war moved on. A week after the lifting of the siege Isabella Craw wrote in her diary: “Nothing to write tonight. It seems an awful thing to say, but I quite miss ‘Long Tom’; every day seems alike now, no excitement of any kind.”
26
BLOEMFONTEIN
When Roberts sent Kitchener from Paardeberg to look after the railway line, he had more in mind than simply removing Kitchener from the scene, for the railway line was, and was long to remain, a worry. Among other calculated risks he had taken was his decision to leave this lifeline inadequately protected. It was a dangerous proceeding, for the Boers had some 8,000 men on the Orange River, while opposed to them along a 35-mile front in the Colesburg area after the withdrawal of French and his cavalry there were only half as many British soldiers. In command of this sector and charged with the delicate task of concealing its weakness from the enemy and protecting the railway junctions was Major General Ralph Clements, an able and experienced soldier with more than twenty-five years’ service.
On 6—7-8 February 1900 Koos de la Rey, commanding the left wing of the Boer line, skirmished with the British and took a few prisoners; on 12 February he launched an attack on some of the main British positions and achieved considerable success. Had he pressed forward there is little doubt that he could have overwhelmed Clements’s forces, captured the vital railway junctions of De Aar and Naauwpoort, and left Roberts’s army stranded on the veld without supplies or reinforcements. But Roberts’s great flank march had produced the desired effect of drawing off the Boer forces engaged in offensive operations on the borders. When news of Cronjé’s entrapment at Paardeberg reached the Boers on the Orange, nearly half of the commandos there scurried back to defend Bloemfontein; a few days later De la Rey himself with most of his force also withdrew towards Bloemfontein. Clements, with the help of some reinforcements, was able to advance and reoccupy Colesburg.
The tide of war had now turned against the Boers; their days of victories were over. Everywhere the republican forces were in retreat. Only little Mafeking was still surrounded, but it showed no signs of capitulating and it was militarily unimportant. Buller’s army, joined now by White’s force, was larger than the combined armies of the Boers, and Roberts with another army threatened Bloemfontein. But the burghers, although badly shaken, were not palsied. Between Roberts and the capital of the Orange Free State was Christiaan de Wet with 6,000 men; he had been reinforced by A. P. Cronjé’s force from Natal, and others were hurrying to join him. They were busily entrenching on kopjes around a place called Poplar Grove (also called Modderrivierpoort) 10 miles east of Paardeberg, and both Kruger and Steyn were on their way to inspire their men.
Roberts moved his army a short distance away from contaminated Paardeberg to a place called Stinkfontein. From here on 21 February he issued orders with explicit instructions governing the construction and use of latrines, the disposal of dead horses, collection of rubbish, and similar matters. Such orders ought to have been given and enforced much earlier. It was too late now.
For the moment all seemed well and Roberts was free to fix his attention on his next move. He whistled up reinforcements and worked out a plan of attack on De Wet at Poplar Grove. His scheme called for an enveloping movement with two infantry divisions moving in from the south and southwest while the cavalry made a 17-mile swing south of the Boer positions to cut off their line of retreat. It was a good plan. Had it succeeded he would have dealt the Boers a resounding defeat which might just possibly have ended the war. But all depended upon French and his cavalry—and French, whom Conan Doyle called “the stormy petrel of the war,” was erratic. In fact, the temperamental French was sulking and had already gone broody. The cause was horse fodder.
The long-suffering, overworked horses might have had an opportunity to recover somewhat at Paardeberg had there been enough fodder for them, but this was in short supply, and many of the horses, unaccustomed to grazing, were unable to forage for themselves on the herbage of the veld. When one battery turned its horses out to graze the puzzled beasts simply wandered about until they heard the familiar bugle call that announced feeding time, then rushed back to their lines and waited expectantly for their nosebags.
Roberts had issued strict orders that horse rations were to be limited to three pounds of fodder per horse. When, therefore, Colonel Richardson, his chief supply officer, reported to him that the horse rations drawn far exceeded this limit, he summoned the brigade and division commanders and dressed them down. French, of course, had to bear the brunt of this reprimand. Richardson’s calculations were actually faulty; he had divided the issue of horse rations by the number of fit horses, forgetting that there were great numbers of unfit horses who also had to be fed. But this was discovered only later, and it was no help at the moment to French, who rode out in the darkness of the early morning of 7 March to the battle of Poplar Grove burning with a sense of injustice.
To succeed in getting across the Boers’ line of retreat it was necessary that French move rapidly, but he had been an hour late starting, then just two hours later he halted for forty-five minutes to wait for daylight. Moving on, he came upon a large dam, and as this seemed to be a good place to water his horses—since Roberts was so damned concerned about them—he decided to make another halt and another hour was lost.
About eight o’clock in the morning Kruger arrived in De Wet’s camp escorted by some of the Pretoria mounted police. He had prepared a speech, but there was no time to give it, for scarcely had he stepped down from his wagon than word arrived that the British were coming. Roberts’s infantry was moving to the attack. De Wet hustled the old president back onto his wagon and away, then quickly mounted and rode out to do battle. But there was not to be a battle—or not much of one. At the first sign of the enemy the burghers fled. De Wet wrote later:
Again I
was confronted by the baleful influence of Cronje’s surrender. A panic had seized my men. Before the English had even got near enough to shell our positions to any purpose, the wild flight began. Soon every position was evacuated. There was not even an attempt to hold them, though some of them would have been impregnable. It was a flight such as I had never seen before, and shall never see again.
I did all that I could, but neither I nor my officers were able to prevent the burghers from following whither the waggons and guns had preceded them. ... It was fortunate for us that the advance of the English was not very rapid. Had it been so, everything must have fallen into their hands.1
Probably the instincts of the burghers were sounder than De Wet’s reasonings. Instant flight undoubtedly saved them from annihilation or from another, greater Paardeberg. They fled along the route Roberts had thought they would take, but the dilatory French arrived at his appointed place only in time to skirmish with the rear guard De Wet had skilfully managed to organise. Even then he dithered, withdrawing from one kopje and then ordering it to be retaken while the major portion of the Boer force streamed away to the east. By the time he was ready to launch a formal attack, the Boer rear guard had mounted their ponies and cantered off, leaving French and his cavalry sitting on their exhausted horses with nothing to attack.
The Boers had been successfully turned out of their positions, and this was satisfying, but they had not been defeated in the field in what could have been a major British victory. The British official history excused French on the grounds that his horses were in poor condition, which they were, but the fact is that the horses actually covered more ground this day and were worked harder than they would have been had French carried out the operation with the speed required. An apologist for French has said that he was “off his game”; the anonymous writer of this portion of The Times History said that French “never really seems to have had his heart in the business.” Indeed he had not. Ian Hamilton, more than thirty years later, spoke of “the strange reaction of French,” who at Klip Drift had gone “slap-bang like the Valkyrie Ritt” while at Poplar Grove “the pursuit was like ‘Peace, Perfect Peace’ played on a bad organ whilst the whole Boer army was allowed to escape to the sounds of the Te Deum being sung by the British mounted troops.”2
Outwardly at least Roberts took French’s ruination of his plan calmly and only remarked, “In war you can’t expect everything to come out right.” But in his report he wrote: “Had the Cavalry, Horse Artillery, and Mounted Infantry been able to move rapidly, they would undoubtedly have intercepted the enemy’s line of retreat, and I should have had the satisfaction of capturing their guns, waggons, and supplies, as well as a large number of prisoners.” He might also have captured Kruger.
Casualties on both sides were light. Still, every casualty is its own tragedy. A subaltern with Rimington’s Guides wrote to his wife:
We saw many awful sights.... Sitting propped up against an ant-heap was a thing; it was no longer a man. Silent it sat, and immovable, with glassy eyes fixed staring into vacancy. The mouth was torn to twice its natural size by a Martini bullet; blood froze the chin to the tunic; the cheeks were purple and swollen. In the back of the neck a great wound showed where the bullet had entered. The poor creature was not dead, but he could make no sign. We could do nothing for him, and we left him sitting staring across the sunny plain.3
Eighteen miles away from Poplar Grove on the road to Bloemfontein, at a place called Abraham’s Kraal, Kruger halted his wagon and attempted to stay the flight of De Wet’s men streaming past him. Standing by the side of the road he pleaded with them to save Bloemfontein; he tried appealing to their patriotism; he called them cowards. They simply shook their heads and rode on. The old man lifted his stick and rushed at them. In his rage he ordered the mounted police to shoot every man that passed. They ignored him. But eventually a few stopped; then some more; and finally enough were assembled to make another stand. On 10 March, at a place near Abraham’s Kraal called Driefontein, there was another battle. De la Rey with only 1,500 men successfully held off 10,000 British soldiers for a day—a remarkable feat of arms—but in the end he had to give way.
The fighting ranged over a wide area and lasted until after sunset. The British lost 82 killed and 342 wounded; they buried 102 Boer dead and took 22 prisoners.
There were also some innocent casualties in this fight: a herd of some 200 springbok found themselves in no-man’s-land and “within the area of a square mile they galloped, and jumped, and stood to gaze.” When the shooting started they circled frantically, seeking escape. An officer with Rimington’s Guides was a witness: “Pitiable was their terror as shells hurtled over them, and bullets sang about their ears. Two, if not more, received the missiles meant for the lords of creation, for I saw their mangled bodies slung on two troopers’ saddles. One poor wounded beast ... came limping up alone to within a hundred yards of where I lay.”4
The British were now but a few miles from Bloemfontein, and the disheartened Boers were ready to make peace. In fact, Presidents Steyn and Kruger had already sent off futile pleas to the governments of France, Germany, Russia, and the United States asking for their help in ending the war. They also dispatched a letter to Lord Salisbury, an offer to make peace if the British would only allow the republics to keep their independence and promise not to punish the rebel Afrikaners from the Cape who had joined them.
But the war was not to be stopped. As Richard Cobden once said, “You might as well reason with mad dogs as with men when they have begun to spill each other’s blood.” Not even half the blood and tears that would be shed had soaked the South African veld. The presidents were appalled by the misery and destruction thus far, but they had not seen a fraction of the total. The worst was yet to come.
The timing of this first peace offer was certainly unfortunate. After all their humiliating defeats in the first four months of the war the British were now tasting the sweets of victory; the tide had turned in their favour, and they were exaltingly running with it. They had tasted Boer blood and wanted more. To them it seemed that the war was almost won. They saw no need to grant any concessions at all. Six days after the peace offer—after Poplar Grove and Driefontein, after Gatacre had occupied Burgersdorp, Clements had pushed up to Norval’s Pont, General E. Y. Brabant had occupied Jamestown, and Brigadier H. C. O. Plumer had captured a Boer laager in the north near Gopani—Salisbury gave the Boer presidents his answer in a long letter in which he reminded them that it was they who had started the hostilities by invading Her Majesty’s colonies. “This great calamity has been the penalty which Great Britain has suffered for having in recent years acquiesced in the existence of the two republics.” Salisbury unequivocally told the presidents that “Her Majesty’s Government ... are not prepared to assent to the independence either of the South African Republic or of the Orange Free State.”5
The Boer leaders called a krygsraad and decided to make a last-ditch stand at Btoemfontein—to the horror of the townspeople, who had visions of their houses and other property destroyed. De Wet was certainly willing to fight: “For myself, I believed that the 13th of March should see a fight to the finish, cost what it might! for if Bloemfontein was to be taken, it would only be over our dead bodies.” But the burghers were not so resolute. They had lost heart and would not stand. They continued their retreat northward. There was nothing to be done. President Steyn and his cabinet and such state papers as could be carried took a train for Kroonstad, 100 miles northeast of Bloemfontein. Roberts threw French forward as fast as he could go, and one of his cavalry officers, Major E. H. H. Allenby, who was to win fame in World War I in the Middle East, seized a key ridge outside Bloemfontein just at dusk on 12 March. The next day the town was captured by three newspaper correspondents.
Roberts had sent a captured burgher into the town to deliver a proclamation promising protection to all the inhabitants if his entry was unopposed while warning that any resistance would result in loss of life and des
truction of property. On the morning of 13 March three enterprising newspaper correspondents entered the town and found the mayor and a group of prominent citizens assembled at the Bloemfontein Club debating what they should do. Appealed to for their opinion, the correspondents advised them to surrender. They did.
That afternoon Roberts formally entered the capital of the Orange Free State. There were citizens on hand to cheer and even a few Union Jacks displayed, for among the inhabitants who stayed were a number of Boer moderates who had opposed the war and also a number of British subjects. It was with considerable satisfaction that “Little Bobs” rode down the streets of Bloemfontein, for it was less than nine months since he had stepped off the ship at Cape Town and only a month after the beginning of his campaign.
On the flagstaff outside the Presidency the Union Jack was run up: it was a silk flag made by Lady Roberts herself, and she had worked a small shamrock into one corner. Then Roberts sent off a telegram to the Queen, telling her that “the British flag now flies over the Presidency vacated last evening by Mr. Steyn, late President of the Orange Free State. ”6
No one imagined that Roberts would remain long in Bloemfontein; all expected a rapid, victorious march to Pretoria and a speedy end to the war. H. S. Gaskell of the 10th Imperial Yeomanry expressed the expectations of most when he wrote: “I think the back of the war is broken and I give it another month at most.”7 Many Boers also thought the war was almost over. President Steyn later wrote in his memoirs:
No one who had not personally witnessed the despondency that existed after the taking of Bloemfontein can realise how great and deep it was. There was no courage and no wish to carry on the fight by the burghers. The Transvaalers left in great numbers, and the Free Staters had turned their faces to their homes. ... The road to Pretoria was practically open for Lord Roberts.8
Great Boer War Page 35