This might seem surprising. Joubert was still intensely anxious about the possibility of White’s breaking out of the trap. On the second night after the Battle of Ladysmith (or Modderspruit, as the Boers called their victory on 30 October), there had been a somewhat ludicrous moment when Joubert, unable to grasp how shattered was the morale of White’s troops, had ordered his officers ‘to be on their toes’ to expect a night attack; and he had emerged from his tent at 12.30 a.m. ‘to put everything in order for the struggle’.13 Since then, the strength of his own troops had dwindled as burghers took French leave and returned home. Joubert cabled in desperation to Pretoria: ‘Als die HEd. Regeering mij nu geen steun kan geven, dan moet de zaak op nul uitlopen….’
Unless the government can give me their backing, then the whole thing is hopeless. The men come to me in streams asking for permission to go home. Although I refuse them permission every time, the number of burghers is melting away. The officers themselves … set the example in going off home. Every morning I receive such serious complaints about the melting away of the burghers and disobeying my orders, that I shudder at our situation. Unless the government publishes an order to send back the absent burghers immediately, I shall shortly have no commandos at all.14
Pretoria took action immediately. The burghers were ordered back to the front, and the railway authorities were forbidden to accept passengers travelling home without leave passes. But Joubert continued to be troubled by homesick burghers, and the unpredictable fluctuations in his army’s size continued to be one of its chief sources of weakness.15
If he faced such difficulties, why did Joubert propose such a daring move as the strike at south Natal? He certainly thought it less dangerous than the first option: to try to storm Ladysmith, which would be ‘a very risky business with a very doubtful outcome’.16 In fact, earlier that very day, there had been an abortive attempt to attack the British lines, which had proved that the burghers had neither the organization nor the heart for such a business.
Still, there proved to be numerous obstacles to the plan to go south of the Tugela. First, the horses of the commandos had not yet recovered from the strain of the fighting. Second, the Free State commandants had flatly refused to go south of the Tugela because of the risks involved. They had held their own council of war, independent of the Transvaal’s, and Marthinus Prinsloo, their Commandant-General, informed Joubert of this on 11 November. Third, it was reported (quite correctly) that the British were exploiting the ten days’ delay since the Battle of Ladysmith to pour reinforcements into Natal.17
But Joubert for once was firm and resolute. With fifteen hundred Transvaalers – all that could be raked together without dangerously weakening the force guarding Ladysmith – and five hundred Free Staters who had tagged along, despite Prinsloo’s decision, he reached the great gorge of the Tugela on Monday 13 November, and next day crossed the river. Then, having laid dynamite under the bridge at Colenso, in case it would be needed in future, Joubert and his cavalcade rode on across the smooth veld beside the railway line leading to Maritzburg and Durban.18
At Joubert’s side rode Louis Botha, and it was Botha, without a doubt, who was the driving force behind this raid on south Natal. Of all the Boer leaders who were to emerge in the war, thirty-seven-year-old Louis Botha was the prodigy. On his mother’s side he came from the voortrekker aristocracy; his grandfather, Gerrit van Rooyen, had been one of Andries Pretorius’s lieutenants. His father had been a cattle-rancher at Vrede, in the north-east of the Free State. He himself was a highly successful farmer and a crack horseman. But he had little education and limited experience of public life. As a junior member of the Raad, he had supported Joubert and the Progressives in trying to force Kruger to be more conciliatory in handling Britain and the Uitlanders. Botha is supposed to have been one of the members who voted against Kruger’s proposal to precipitate the war. But it was his own natural gift for war that had brought Botha’s name leaping to the front. He had distinguished himself as one of Lucas Meyer’s commandants at Talana. After the Battle of Ladysmith, Meyer had been invalided home, and replaced by Botha. Now Botha, a stripling among the patriarchs, with his violet eyes and boyish laugh, was the senior combat general (specially appointed general) with Joubert.19
By the evening of the 14th, the cavalcade had reached the outskirts of Chieveley, about twenty miles north of Estcourt. It was reported to Joubert that Estcourt was garrisoned by a force of three thousand British troops, supported by two large field-guns and four or five smaller ones. This was less than Joubert had feared.20 (In fact, most of the reinforcements that Buller was rushing out to Natal were still on the high seas. In early November, the total British forces between Ladysmith and the coast numbered two thousand three hundred men, of whom the bulk were concentrated at Estcourt.)21 Yet, with a raiding force of about the same number, with fewer field-guns, it was not Joubert’s, or Botha’s, plan to attack Estcourt. Their primary job was to reconnoitre the country. Of course, if any plums fell into their lap, that was all to the good. And next morning, a large plum, in the shape of an armoured train, whose passengers included young Winston Churchill, did fall straight into their lap.
‘Inconceivable stupidity’ was Buller’s comment when he heard the news of this disaster.22 It would indeed be hard to imagine a more fatuous proceeding than that adopted by the commander of the Estcourt garrison, Colonel Charles Long. On 3 November the British garrison, sent to guard the all-important bridge over the Tugela at Colenso, had scuttled back to the safety of Estcourt.23 Since then, Colonel Long had been sending men to patrol the line as far as Colenso. The patrols were made by armoured train, unaccompanied by mounted troops. It was a parody of modern mobile war: an innovation that was already obsolete. Imprisoned on its vulnerable railway line, the armoured train was as helpless against field-guns in the veld as a naval dreadnought sent into battle with its rudder jammed.
Botha, who was leading the column, must have rubbed his eyes. Soon after dawn on 15 November he saw the train – 150 men in three armoured trucks on either side of the armoured engine, with a 7-pounder ship’s gun visible in one of the loop-holes – steaming northwards towards Chieveley. The trap was soon sprung. Chieveley was ten miles north of a village called Frere. After three miles, just beyond a bridge across the Blaauw Kranz River, the line swung to the right and climbed a rise. It was here that Botha’s party of about five hundred men, drawn from the Wakkerstroom and Krugersdorp Commandos, watched (and were actually seen by the British as the train steamed past. Then they scattered rocks on the line, and waited.24
The veld in this part of Natal is a rolling downland, normally silent, and the steam-trains that still carry their loads along this line (now mainly Africans bound for the mines of the Rand) are a delight to the ear. A plume of brown smoke, a distant musical honk and then the panting breath of the train itself, intermittently muffled as the train vanishes into a cutting. That morning, 15 November 1899, there was a thick mist, but Botha must have heard the sweet sound of the armoured train soon after eight o’clock, as it steamed back southwards from Chieveley. He waited till it approached the bend close to the Blaauw Kranz River. Then his gunners loosed off a couple of shells at the armoured trucks. As expected, the engine-driver put on steam. The train swept round the corner and crashed headlong into the rocks blocking the track. The armoured engine half remained on the rails. But all three trucks were derailed: the front truck, which held some unfortunate railway workers, was hurled right off the line.25
The fight that followed was exactly to Botha’s taste. From nearly a mile away, his men poured shells and Mauser bullets into the stranded steel whale. They soon silenced the 7-pounder ship’s gun. The upturned trucks gave little cover to the British. Some of the soldiers scattered across the veld. They were hunted down, and captured hiding in the railway cutting and the river-bed. Only the armoured engine battered its way out of the trap, after some men had struggled heroically for half an hour to free the line. The engine carried fifty
survivors (mostly wounded) and the tale of disaster back to Frere.26
After the fight, Botha cabled jubilantly back to Pretoria: ‘Our guns were ready and quickly punctured the armoured trucks. The engine broke loose and returned badly damaged. Loss of the enemy 4 dead, 14 wounded and 58 taken prisoner, also a mountain gun (the ship’s cannon) Our loss 4 slightly wounded…. Blood visible everywhere. Much rain. Am in good health. Publish. Greetings.’27
Neither he nor Joubert mentioned what would become much the most famous feature of the fight: that Winston Churchill was one of the victims. Later Churchill came to believe that he had been captured by Botha in person. Although this cannot have been literally true – the man who captured him seems to have been a field cornet called Oosthuizen, known as the ‘Red Bull of Krugersdorp’28– Churchill was soon to be grateful to Botha for having given him a chance to make his name. And perhaps Botha should have been grateful to Churchill. For it was Churchill’s burning desire to see a battle, it appears, that helped persuade the officer commanding the armoured train, Churchill’s unfortunate friend, Captain Aylmer Haldane, not to turn back when they first saw the signs of Botha’s trap on their journey northwards.29
Botha and Joubert, at any rate, continued their drive southwards, taking a wide detour to avoid the three thousand men reported to have garrisoned Estcourt. Had they known how precarious was the morale of Colonel Long’s troops there, they might have been more aggressive. For the same thick mist swirled round both sides’ intelligence: a mist that never lifted, whatever the weather. In the eyes of British soldiers – and of subsequent British historians – Joubert’s two thousand men with two guns had become magnified to an expedition of seven thousand men with numerous guns, threatening Durban itself.30 Long had actually packed up his tents on 14 November and loaded his guns into railway wagons in preparation for a hasty retreat.31 As it was, Joubert had cautiously decided to split his forces into two columns: fifteen hundred men, led by himself and Botha; six hundred men under his nephew, David. Both columns would converge on the railway line south of Estcourt, cutting off the garrison from its base. They would try to deal with it like Ladysmith.32
That day, 16 November, it rained incessantly, and it was cold and wretched. Joubert rode in a light covered wagon – a ‘spider’ – and, what with the rain and the mud, he considered calling off the whole expedition. But he had no way of communicating with his nephew David’s column, and could not leave him in the lurch. So he rode gloomily on. The 19th was a Sunday, and the Boer soldiers spent much of it in church. The men of the Heidelberg Commando, for example, attended four church services. On Tuesday 21 November, Joubert’s column at last saw ahead the thin line of telegraph posts striding across the veld. They had reached the railway. After breaking up the line, they pitched their forward tents on a kopje commanding the line close to Willow Grange, a small village a few miles south of Estcourt. At the same time, Joubert was glad to be able to join hands with his nephew’s column.33
Joubert was still intensely anxious, and he had every reason to be. He had inadvertently slipped his small raiding party, two thousand men, with two guns and two Maxims, between two British brigades, led by Major-Generals Hildyard and Barton, totalling nine thousand, seven hundred men, with twenty-four field-guns.34 And this was only the vanguard of Buller’s Army Corps. On 12 November the Roslin Castle had docked at Durban. Ever since that day imperial troops had been pouring down the gang-planks to be packed into cattle trucks and sent up the railway line to the front in an unbroken stream.35
Clearly the danger now was that the two British brigades would combine and crush Joubert and Botha. But Barton and Hildyard, whose brigades were about twenty miles apart, found communication impossible while the Boers sat astride the railway line.36 So the British attack, that took place on the night of 22 November, fizzled out like a fire in the rain. It was actually the night of a ferocious thunderstorm, with lightning and hail more lethal than British bullets. The storm killed one Boer and six horses, more than were killed by Lee Metfords.37
On their part, Hildyard’s force had suffered eighty-six casualties at Willow Grange (including Percy Fitzpatrick’s brother, George, who was killed serving in the Imperial Light Horse). The Boers, by their gift for mobility and better use of the ground, had won a tactical victory38 The strategic question was what to do next? It appears that Botha, flushed with victory, proposed striking out for Durban (‘to come and eat bananas,’ he told a Durban audience nine years later).39 Next day, before a council of war could take place, an accident occurred, an accident with the most important consequences. Joubert’s horse threw him. He suffered internal injuries from which he was never fully to recover.40
The situation was now changed utterly. Joubert’s morale finally snapped. He proposed immediate retreat. Otherwise they would be ‘totally overwhelmed’.41 He did more. He sent an extraordinary, despairing cable to Kruger: ‘They must now try to make peace with the enemy in one way or the other.’42 Peace with the enemy. The idea was, of course, unthinkable to Kruger, and he promptly cabled back that they must stick to their guns, ‘dead or alive’.43 But when the council of war was held on 25 November, its decision was a foregone conclusion. Joubert must be escorted home, and they must all retreat to the line of the Tugela.44
By Sunday 26 November, the cavalcade, swollen by nearly two thousand horses and cattle looted from the rich grazing grounds of Natal, had reached Weenen (‘Weeping’), the settlement where the Zulus had massacred some of the voortrekkers in the days of the Trek. Many of the burghers attended the local church.45 It was a solemn moment. The raid on south Natal had been a dazzling success, viewed as a series of tactical operations. But it had added nothing to the defensive strength of the Boers’ strategic position. For this they must now look, as Prinsloo and the Free State commandos had urged all along, to the extraordinary natural strength of the Tugela. Its north bank rose in tier after tier of stony, red ramparts. It was here that the hare could lie in wait for the tortoise; or, to put it Kruger’s way, once again they would wait till the tortoise had put out its head and then chop it off.
While Joubert was escorted back to Volksrust, broken in body and spirit, Botha took complete command of the army on the Tugela. If ever a kingdom was saved by a horse, it was Kruger’s! For, after losing their sixty-eight-year-old Commandant-General, weak and demoralized at the best of times, the Boers had now entrusted their most critical operations to the youngest and most energetic of all their generals, who had shown himself, by his raid on south Natal, to be the most brilliant tactician of the war.46
Botha threw himself into the task of fortifying the line of the Tugela. It was an immense undertaking, even for an army, like the Boers’, that could draw on an inexhaustible supply of forced black labour.47 Fifteen miles of riflepits and gun pits, protected by dummy trenches and false gun emplacements, had to be hacked out of those red, boulder-strewn terraces. Though Vauban and the great military engineers of Europe would have turned in their graves at Botha’s lack of science, the Tugela line, when Botha had finished, was a work of art. Five thousand riflemen, supported by ten field-guns, would man the trenches. And the British would be within rifle-shot before they realized a single burgher was there.48
It was the end of November. The manoeuvrings of the last month had brought the most dramatic change to the war map of South Africa. As an offensive force, the Boers had shot their bolt. It was now the turn of the various detachments of the Army Corps to try their hand at attack. Already, on the western front, Lord Methuen had set out for Kimberley with six thousand infantry, a thousand mounted men and twelve guns. Meanwhile, inside Kimberley, Cecil Rhodes, the Lion of the Empire, was braying like an ass.
CHAPTER 16
The Lights of Kimberley
The Western Frontier, Cape Colony,
20–28 November 1899
‘To the indomitable will of the Chairman of this Company [Cecil Rhodes], whose pent up energies found vent in devising ways … of providing hungry wom
en and children with food … did Kimberley owe its preservation.’
12th Annual Report of the De Beers, December 1900
Lieutenant-General Lord Methuen looked like a man in his element. He was wearing a ‘Boer hat’ – a bush hat he had picked up on his travels – khaki trousers and slippers, and was in shirt-sleeves: quite ‘the most disreputable man in camp’, he claimed in a letter home.1
It was 20 November. He was sitting at the desk in his HQ tent near Orange River bridge writing interminable reports and telegrams, and interviewing officers on every subject under the sun. Mule wagons for food and ammunition, 190 of them; horses for war correspondents, four for eight correspondents; goats for the staff mess, six. The telegrams flew as thick as the flies buzzing round the tent.2 The pleasure he took in this job was genuine enough. Buller, dear Buller, had given him not only the 1st Division, but a field force, ‘Methuen’s Force’ it was now called. It was years since a British general had had such a beautiful command. He had eight thousand soldiers – the Guards Brigade and the 9th Brigade – here at Orange River. The Highland Brigade had been left to guard his lines of communication. He had to march the main column seventy-four miles across the sandy veld. It was all ‘intensely interesting’. They would set out before dawn next morning. It would probably take six days, and at least one battle. He added, with a most uncharacteristic piece of swagger, ‘I shall breakfast in Kimberley on Monday.’3
The Boer War Page 28