Lieutenant Thomas Henry Eyre Lloyd of the Coldstream Guards, Benson’s assistant staff officer, was in camp when he heard the sounds of the fighting. He galloped to Gun Hill, drew up at the rear of the guns, and tossed his reins to a trooper. Trooper and horse were instantly shot dead. Upright and unarmed, he coolly walked towards Benson. A few paces from his chief he fell mortally wounded.
Quartermaster Sergeant Warnock of the Scottish Horse was an old soldier who had served twenty-one years in the Scottish Borderers. His place was with the convoy, but like the old fire-horse who hears the alarm he could not resist the sounds of battle so near. Loading himself and two others with boxes of ammunition, he made for Gun Hill. There they crawled forward until they could throw cartridges to the hard-pressed men on the firing line. One of his men was killed, but Warnock kept at the work until the boxes were all but empty, then he picked up a dead man’s rifle and joined the fight, keeping up a cool fire until he collapsed, wounded in three places.
Although badly outnumbered, the British refused to give up. When a burgher called out to the Scottish Horse to surrender, the only reply he got was a laconic “We’re Scots.” Some Boers got to their feet as if to rush the position, but a ragged volley greeted them and they sank to earth again. Benson received a second wound, in the arm this time. Worried about his guns, he called for a volunteer to take a message to the camp: an order not to send out ambulances, as the Boers might use the mules to carry away the guns. The trooper who rose to take the message was immediately shot in the foot; the same bullet hit Benson in the abdomen.
Suddenly the entire line of Boers rose up and directed a fierce, indiscriminate fire on everything that moved. Then they ran forward to claim the hill and the guns. “So ended,” said The Times History, “a fight unique in the annals of war.” But it was not quite ended. The British guns in the camp opened fire on the hill—on both the Boers and their own wounded. Conan Doyle said it was Benson who had signalled for this fire to be laid down on his own position, but this is doubtful. The Boers withdrew, but the British made no attempt to counterattack, and under cover of night the Boers carried off the two guns.
Only 6 of the Scottish Horse out of 79 on the hill came out unscathed; of the 32 gunners, only 3 escaped; of the 20 men of the Rifle Corps, but 3 were untouched; and among the Yorkshiremen, only 5 out of 40 were unhit. Every officer was killed or wounded. All in all, the column on this day lost nearly a third of its strength: 238 men killed or wounded; about 120 taken prisoner. The Boers lost about 100 of their best men, but they had destroyed Benson’s column. Benson too. The gallant commander was brought into camp about 9 P.M. and died early the next morning. His last words were: “No more night marching.”
This disaster to Benson’s column reverberated through the army in South Africa, and shock waves were felt by those at home. Kitchener, as usual, reacted emotionally. In his dispatch to London he averred that if his best column could be scuppered in this fashion he did not know how he would be able to go on unless he received “a large addition to our forces to carry on the war.” This unfortunate phrase caused head shaking in England. It had been difficult enough to understand why with so many soldiers in South Africa and so few Boers in the field the war had dragged on for so long, and now Kitchener wanted even more men. It had been nearly a year since Roberts, thinking the war ended, had turned over his command and gone home. Was Kitchener losing his grip? Ian Hamilton, who had gone home with Roberts, was sent back to be Kitchener’s chief of staff and was asked privately to report when he got to South Africa on “Kitchener’s health and general conditions.”
Search-and-destroy columns such as Benson’s, which operated independently, were rare. Most of the columns worked together on coordinated schemes devised by Kitchener. Sometimes these were hunts for a particular body of Boers, often futile pursuits of the wily De Wet, but Kitchener favoured drives, particularly after the Benson catastrophe. At first these were simply great sweeps of areas by troops acting as beaters to flush Boers. Then he developed what were called “new model drives,” employing large bodies of troops sweeping through large areas and using blockhouse lines as walls against which the enemy were pushed. David Miller, now a staff officer with Colonel James Spens’s column, described in a letter home how Kitchener’s new model drives worked:
We are “driving” now, and it is curious work, and shows what an extraordinary stage the war is now in—if, indeed, you can call it war at all. We “drive” as follows. Two points are selected by the chief—one probably on a blockhouse, and another on the railway, thus—A, B, C, D, E are columns, and they drive down to the point Q and the Boers cannot get out. The columns at starting point probably cover a front of about sixty miles which gradually lessens.
At night we form a chain of outposts at about 150 yards’ interval, and a hasty wire entanglement is put up in front of each regiment. We march about twenty-five miles a day. Sometimes the Boers try to get out, generally by rushing the picquet line at night, but they frequently make no effort, running along in front like sheep until caught in the cover.19
The first of the new model drives, 5-8 February 1902, involved (in round numbers) 300 blockhouses, 7 armoured trains, and 17,000 men, and it ranged over the area between Liebenberg’s Vlei and the railway in the Free State. De Wet was known to be in this area, and Kitchener was confident he would net him. But clever men can outwit the best of systems, and De Wet was clever. Ignoring the driving columns, he led his men to a point on the blockhouse line between Kroonstad and Lindley,. On the night of 7 February, an exceptionally dark night, his men quietly cut the wires between two blockhouses and he passed his entire force through the gap without a shot being fired. Then he brought his herd of cattle through as well. Driven by four brothers named Potgieter, the herd came through with a rush; they were fired on, but there was little loss. De Wet then marched men and cattle 40 miles to Doornberg and halted. When the drive was over, he coolly returned to Elandskop in the middle of the area that had just been swept.
The net result of the drive was a total of 286 Boers killed, wounded, or captured. It seemed a small bag for such a mighty effort, but Kitchener at once decided on another, grander drive, and it began only five days later. Again De Wet gathered his force and punched a hole through the British cordon, but this time there was fighting in the dead of night and he suffered 14 killed and about 20 wounded before he managed to get away. Even though the grand prize had once again slipped through, the drive was counted a success, yielding 50 Boers killed and 778 captured; 25,000 head of cattle and 200 carts and wagons were taken.
Ahead of the driving columns men, women, and children fled like animals before a fire. Schikkerling wrote a description of the turmoil created by one of Kitchener’s early drives, and the scene was doubtless often repeated:
Shall I ever forget the sight? The shouting and confusion of excited people, each with his wagon, mule or donkey, to which he selfishly clung, loading and preparing to get away or meditating to remain and surrender. Oxen and mules were being inspanned and outspanned by women, many of whom were once wealthy.... Wandering about with the commandos with which they remained for safety, they had slowly shed the bulk of their fortunes. These unfortunate people were now to lose the last of their possessions. Many women sat in their wagons weeping, and even some men sobbed unrestrainedly. One girl of about eighteen, barefoot, and with hardly a dress to her body, was all alone catching and harnessing donkeys. No one cared to help her, each being too engaged in his own affairs.20
Some managed to hide and thus escape; others tried ingenious methods without success. Three Boers buried themselves, leaving only a tube sticking up through which they could breathe, but soldiers found the new-turned earth and ran their bayonets into it until they heard muffled screams. Another burgher trying the same stratagem was stepped on by a horse.
By 27 February 1902, when the second new model drive ended, the troops were exhausted, but Kitchener gave them little rest; on 4 March a third drive was launch
ed over the same area covered by the first. A massive effort, lasting a week, it netted only about 100 Boers and De Wet again escaped, but Kitchener’s appetite for drives remained unabated. He made column commanders drag telegraph lines after them, and Ian Hamilton (in his old age, when Kitchener was long dead) described the commander-in-chiefs delight in using them:
He was like one of those stage performers who plays six instruments at once. ... K. worked over the wires direct with the four principal columns, and twice a day at least, and sometimes half a dozen times a day, gave them their orders. K. was perfectly enchanted with the game of making Generals dance at the end of wires like so many marionettes.... It was clear he regarded his column commanders as babes in the woods when deprived of his guiding telegrams.21
Once when the telegraph line to headquarters broke or was cut, Kitchener “rose from his chair, went straight to his room, and refused for the best part of two days and two nights to take a bite. Not one single crumb.”22
No Boer leader of any importance was ever captured in Kitchener’s drives. The cleverest and best always escaped. The one British tactic the Boers really feared was the night attack. De Wet said, “We soon discovered that these night attacks were the most difficult of the enemy’s tactics with which we had to deal.” He had too low an opinion of the British military mind to think that his enemy could have conceived of such tactics unaided: “They never would have thought of them at all if they had not been instructed in them by the National Scouts—our own flesh and blood.”23
When in war one side is unable to sustain enthusiasm through either victories or propaganda, there will be defectors in appreciable numbers, and some will become actual traitors to their original cause. As the war in South Africa dragged on, more and more Boers turned to helping the British.
Some of these “renegade Boers”—or, as the British called them, “tame Boers”—were formed into “burgher corps” which were used as police or as cattle guards, wearing red neck bands to distinguish them. The motives of such men varied. Some fought for money, some to win favours from their conquerers, some because they thought British rule might after all not be bad, and many because they saw the futility of the struggle and wanted it ended before their entire homeland was turned into a desert.
As early as December 1900 a group of influential Boers formed themselves into a Burgher Peace Committee and met with Kitchener. On their advice Kitchener issued a proclamation promising that all who voluntarily surrendered would be allowed to live with their families in government camps until peace was signed and they could return to their farms. Members of the committee sought out the laagers of the commandos and acted as peace emissaries, or tried to. The effort was not a success. The would-be peace makers were roughly handled, the fighting burghers regarding them as traitors and spies. Several were flogged and a few were actually put to death.
In September 1901 a number of leading Boers, including former generals A. P. Cronjé and Piet de Wet, offered to form military units to fight their fellow countrymen. Kitchener gave his consent, and the National Scouts were raised in the Transvaal and, at a later date, the Orange River Colony Volunteers. At first they were paid only in loot and occasional gifts; later they were given regular pay and treated as colonials—well, almost. The British never quite trusted them, and they were a negligible military factor, their total number never exceeding 2,000, but the formation of the National Scouts had its effect on the fighting burghers. That men would surrender was at least understandable; that they would turn and fight against their own people seemed monstrous, and the republican Boers held a detestation for them far exceeding their hatred for the British. When National Scouts were caught they were executed, and no quarter was shown in fights with them.
In England the antiwar and pro-Boer factions raised an outcry against this system of turning brother against brother. The Irish radicals were particularly incensed. In the House of Commons an acrimonious exchange took place between Chamberlain and John Dillon when Chamberlain quoted Frans Vilonel, the former commandant who had deserted when De Wet reduced him to the ranks. Now an officer in the National Scouts, he had written a message to the burghers in the field from which Chamberlain read a passage containing the phrase: “the enemies of the country are those who are continuing a hopeless struggle.” At this Dillon leaped to his feet to protest that Vilonel was a traitor. Chamberlain replied to the effect that doubtless the honourable gentleman from Ireland was a good judge of traitors. The exchange ended with Dillon calling Chamberlain “a damned liar,” an outburst which caused him to be suspended from the House.
Fireworks in Parliament did little to revive interest or enthusiasm for the war at home, and meant nothing at all to the soldiers “sloggin’ over Africa.”
38
SOLDIERING ON THE VELD
The inland plateau that forms the high veld impresses all who see it. Vast and bare, with its high-banked, unnavigable rivers that are raging torrents one day and muddy trickles the next, with its strange vegetation and exotic animals, with its peculiarly shaped hills, and above all, its great open skies that stretch away forever—this land, this veld, affected the men from the north who came to conquer it. Sitting in a lonely blockhouse day after day staring at a limitless horizon or marching on foot or horse for endless miles, many a British soldier hated it, longing for the green, well-manicured land of his birth. Yet there was something alluring about it. One young officer wrote: “The veldt is like the eye of the basilisk; it fascinates, no one knows why.”1 Herbert Lionel James described a feeling shared by many: “Immense,—a land without a horizon, a land every characteristic of which inspires a sense of independence and freedom. A sensation—an intoxication to be felt, not be described. Why should men fight in a land such as this? Surely there is room for all!”2
The soldiers’ work on the veld was inglorious, even demeaning. The burning of farms, the wanton slaughter of farm animals, the rounding up of women and children—these things did not seem proper soldiers’ work. Even the manhunting lacked glory. The prisoners they took, the men they killed, did not look like soldiers: bearded old farmers and ragged, hungry young men; they did not apear to be foes requiring the might of a huge army drawn from all parts of the Empire to subdue. Yet these slouching, undisciplined, dirty civilians, equipped only with rifles, bandoliers, and horses, were formidable fighting men. This was clear. It was equally clear that the Boers were a stubborn race. Roberts had been lenient; now Kitchener was being tough and ruthless; they responded neither to magnanimity nor to severity. But the British too were a stubborn breed. And so the soldiers marched on and fought on and did their duty as best they could.
Young Lieutenant Miller’s reaction was shared by many officers who in the beginning had been in favour of Kitchener’s ruthless policies but who were now forced to put them into practice. He told his mother: “I have seen many pitiful sights—such as make the heart bleed ... and I have seen what may make a man think.” There were indeed such sights, and many a British soldier found the work of burning farms and slaughtering livestock hateful; few became hardened to the sight of women and children sobbing before their flaming homes and bleeding animals.
Many of the Boer families stranded on the veld after their farms were burned led miserable lives. British columns began to see such sights as Miller described: “The other day we discovered several families living in a great hole in a rock by the banks of the Vaal River. They are living entirely on fresh meat and mealie meal.... [They] are, for the most part, in a frightful state of destitution—clothes made of blankets patched with bits of tablecloth or carpet.”3
Ian Hamilton, when he had become a very old man, still remembered how he had been able to dry the tears of one little girl of about twelve at Oliphant’s Nek in the Transvaal by saving her pet calf from the clutches of his own men. Hamilton even remembered his conversation with her. She told him nothing of the movements of De Wet, whom he was chasing, but she did tell him about her best friends, that she liked to
dance, and that her favourite book was an English novel, Cometh Up as a Flower, by Rhoda Broughton.
While soldiers must obey, generals can sometimes take liberties with standing orders. Old Mrs. de Kok and her grandson stood at the gate of their farmhouse worrying about the safety of their little herd of cattle when “a respectable soldier” rode by. He stopped when Mrs. de Kok called out to him, and he listened attentively when the boy ran up to tell him their troubles. Sitting his horse, he scribbled a note and handed it down to the boy. It read: “Don’t interfere with these cows—Hector Macdonald, General.”
It was usually only women, children, and old men whom the soldiers found on the farms. Crops were sown and harvested by Bantu under the supervision of the women with such help as the children could give. It was difficult trying to keep up the house, rear children, and do the men’s work on the farm, and heart-rending to see the fruits of their efforts wantonly destroyed. As De Wet said, “It was hard indeed for them to watch the soldiers fling the corn on the ground before their horses’ hoofs. Still harder was it to see that which had cost them so much labour thrown into the flames.”4
Most of the officers, at least, disliked the work, and, as Frederick Howland said, “It was certainly not an inspiring sight to see a Lieutenant-General of the British army [Methuen] sitting on the stoep of a dingy farmhouse saying he hoped the war would soon be over, to a group of women wringing their hands in his face.”5
Captain L. March Phillips of Rimington’s Scouts described one farm burning:
Great Boer War Page 54