Leaving the leading infantry – Tucker’s division – snoring around their camp-fires at Ramdam, French’s cavalry division trotted out towards Kimberley at two o’clock on Monday morning. There was a waning moon. Ahead of them lay the only two obstacles in the veld: the two rivers themselves, the Riet and the Modder. Cronje had a force at Magersfontein estimated to be larger than their own. But the two infantry brigades left behind with Methuen had been ordered to engage Cronje’s attention by launching an artillery barrage. Speed should carry French’s cavalry division safely through. They were taking a wide détour to the east, tracing an arc about eighty miles long. And they were, after all, the cream of England’s cavalry regiments, with two mounted infantry corps and seven batteries of horse artillery to complete the flying column.14
It was not Cronje that proved the main obstacle to rapid progress, nor the Riet nor the Modder. The obstacle was the transport arrangements of the infantry – or their absence. On Monday, the cavalry halted at the Riet, after fording the river at three places almost without opposition. Their column of baggage mules then became trapped behind the slower-moving line of Tucker’s column of bullock transport. Roberts had failed to give orders for priority for the cavalry’s baggage, so it did not leave Ramdam till 5.00 p.m. At the Riet, the cavalry’s baggage again became hopelessly entangled with Tucker’s. On Tuesday, the cavalry could not leave the Riet till ten o’clock in the morning, the worst time of the day for men and horses. Soon, the cavalry was separated from its baggage again. The whole of Wednesday was spent waiting for it on the north bank of the Modder. By Thursday morning, Kelly-Kenny’s infantry had caught them up. Finally, at 9.30 a.m., French was free to go. His scouts reported that two parties of Boers, together perhaps one to two thousand men, were holding two ridges at Abon’s Dam, about four miles north of the Modder. There were only a few Boers at the end of the rise. French gave the order to charge through the gap.15
Sabres and lances sparkled in the sun. For the first and last time in the war, the arme blanche of military textbooks flashed like King Arthur’s sword. Then French and his cavalry division rode forward at a fast gallop and vanished into a great fog of dust, veiling the distant chimneys and mine wheels of Kimberley.16
The same morning found the Field-Marshal twenty miles to the south, in his field HQ, a wagon marked by a red flag, at Waterval Drift, a notch in the deep, broken banks of the Riet River. He was modest-looking, Lord Roberts; when he went out for a ride, people did not at first recognize the little, white-moustached man in anonymous khaki, with a forage cap, and a black band on his arm. Then the red-tabbed staff officers would come up. There would be a mutter of ‘Bobs’ and someone would call for a cheer.17 His field HQ was modest, too; just a covered wagon, with a canvas awning attached to one side.18 Here he sat for hour after hour, writing reports and receiving or despatching telegrams by way of the mobile telegraph line unrolled behind a special cart. Its Morse key was one of the keys to the whole campaign; day or night, it gave him the ear of Lord Lansdowne in London, as its Boer counterpart gave General Cronje the ear of Presidents Kruger and Steyn.
That morning, the line to London was busy and the news was good. How well Roberts played the part that the public expected of him: little Bobs, the pocket Wellington, the magician who had only to wave his field-marshal’s baton and victory was assured, and all those humiliations, earned by boobies like Methuen and Gatacre and Buller, would vanish with the dust.19 In fact, Roberts was both confident and anxious. The invasion of the Free State had been greatly complicated by the need to advance by way of Kimberley. The great flank march to bypass Cronje’s trenches at Magersfontein seemed to be working. Apart from a few isolated Boer raiding parties, Cronje’s army was reported to be still pinned down by one British brigade, left behind with Methuen at Modder River Station.
The flank march was not, however, working smoothly. Roberts had anticipated that transport and supply would be the main difficulty, and arrangements were indeed chaotic.20 Besides, Roberts was upset by the news from Natal. Buller’s third attempt to relieve White – an attack on Vaal Krantz, a ridge five miles to the east, ten days after the attack on Spion Kop – had ended in a third reverse.21 Roberts had now ordered him to act ‘strictly on the defensive’, even if this meant abandoning Ladysmith to its fate, until the results of his own flank march to Bloemfontein led to the withdrawal of the Free State forces in Natal.22
There were also serious anxieties for Cape Colony. The Boers had taken advantage of the way he had had to weaken the garrison at Colesberg, in the midlands, in order to strengthen his invasion force. They were now attacking again on that sector, and Milner, as usual, expected the worst.23
Still, to say that Roberts was overwhelmed by worries would be to exaggerate. He was usually a level-headed man. ‘He knows what he wants to do, and he does it,’ said Captain Lord Kerry, whom Roberts had taken the precaution of securing as an extra ADC24 (it was an extra way of getting the ear of Kerry’s father, Lord Lansdowne). He seemed unemotional – or, at any rate, he showed little difficulty in suppressing his emotions at moments of stress. Only once had he collapsed, almost in public – under the weight of grief at poor Freddy’s death. It was soon after his ship docked at Cape Town. He found himself talking to Captain Congreve, Freddy’s former comrade-in-arms from the Rifle Brigade, the man who had ridden beside him in that heroic attempt to save Colonel Long’s guns at Colenso. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he said to Congreve, and then, to Congreve’s horror, the Field-Marshal broke down and wept.25
How unthinkable that Kitchener would ever have allowed himself even that moment of weakness. It was the great fascination of Kitchener that he liked to behave as though he had no human emotions to suppress. The face like a bronze idol’s, painted with impossibly blue eyes, the moustache like a palm tree. Here was a prodigy that had put his stamp on the new imperialism, as surely as if his figure was stamped on the penny instead of Britannia’s; here was an allegorical figure of the imperial virtues – energy, will, virility – sprung to life in superhuman form. Of course, this was only the hero’s iron mask. But what was behind the mask: more iron? No one could imagine Kitchener, like Wellington, sickened by the sufferings of his own soldiers. He preferred to be thought a monster than to be thought sentimental. He flaunted his indifference to pain: he allowed oriental punishments, like the lopping of hands and legs for trivial offences, to be continued after his conquest of the Sudan, gloated in the desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb, ordered the Mahdi’s bones to be cast into the Nile; he himself toyed with the skull, and said it might be fun to make it into an inkstand or drinking cup.
At this point, the Mahdi had almost won his revenge. The affair of the Mahdi’s skull caused a hullabaloo in England. The row fizzled out, but many people were left with an unpleasant taste in their mouths.26 There was something altogether too oriental, and too unBritish, about Kitchener. ‘Not a very likeable fellow,’ said Cromer to Salisbury, with masterly understatement. Could he not be made C-in-C in India or somewhere?
Even Kitchener’s intimate friends – and he did have a small circle of men (his ‘band of boys’) with whom he could relax – were appalled by the callous way he talked. They were also aware of other flaws in his character. In private, he would occasionally give way to outbursts of self-destructive rage.
Throughout his career he suffered agonies of frustration. Strange to say, for someone endowed with such marvellous talents of organization, Kitchener also found it impossible to delegate. He was a maze of contradictions. In his personal habits he was fastidiously clean, his uniform spotless, his moustache oiled and clipped. But his office looked as though it had not been tidied for years. Papers littered every chair and window-sill, and woe betide anyone who tried to tidy the Sirdar’s desk; by some magic, the Sirdar knew where everything was kept.27
This was the extraordinary man – K of K, a forty-nine-year-old enfant terrible – whom Roberts had chosen as his Chief of Staff in South Africa. Politically, it made s
ense, and political considerations were always uppermost in Roberts’s mind. It represented the merger of the ‘Indians’ with the ‘Egyptians’, a tactical alliance that would snatch control of the British army and the War Office from Wolseley and his ‘Africans’. But what military role was Kitchener to perform? Not that of Chief of Staff, as normally understood: the subordinate who administers the plans and interprets the orders of the C-in-C.28 Kitchener was hardly someone who could play second fiddle easily. Kitchener would be the right-hand man, and partner. He was to be trouble-shooter, cutting the Gordian knots in the War Office red tape, in his well-known fashion; his demonic energy in organization, coupled with Roberts’s nimble strategy, would sweep them both to victory.
Such were the ideas shaping themselves in Roberts’s mind, in the harrowing days he had spent in London in December, and in the fortnight on the boat going out to the Cape.29 The reality had proved somewhat different. History sometimes repeats itself in terms of farce, more often in terms of irony. The irony of Roberts’s position was that he had more than once denounced Buller for weakness in abandoning his own strategic plans, feeling the squeeze of circumstances. Now he found himself acting in much the same way when feeling the same squeeze.
The main pressure came, as we have seen, from Rhodes. The strategy on which Roberts had set his heart was to postpone the relief of Kimberley until after the capture of Bloemfontein. He had been determined to break out of the treadmill set by White’s blunder in letting himself be locked up at Ladysmith, and Rhodes’s folly in getting himself locked up at Kimberley. Roberts wanted to recapture the strategic initiative – strike out at the Free State – as originally planned before the war. By itself, this should relieve the pressure on both Kimberley and Ladysmith, as well as on the frontier areas of Cape Colony, south of the Orange River, threatened by Boer invasion.30
He had worked out the details with the foremost British military thinker of the day, Colonel George Henderson, the author of the recent best-seller, Stonewall Jackson. Henderson had begged for a job, and Roberts had taken him from his desk at the Staff College and made him Director of Intelligence.
The line of attack was to be a most daring one, worthy of the Confederates’ march on Washington. Instead of allowing the lines of railways to dictate strategy – like his plodding predecessors, Methuen and Buller – he had gathered together enough bullock wagons and mule carts to make his whole force independent of the railway for several weeks. His armada would mass at a railhead somewhere on the western railway, north of Orange River Bridge. This was the only bridge across the Orange River that had remained in British hands (as we saw, it had somehow survived the Boer invasions of the previous autumn, and provided the vital link for Methuen’s line of railway to the south). From this point, the armada of oxen and mules would launch themselves boldly into the veld. They would strike the midland railway at Springfontein, one hundred miles south of Bloemfontein.31 It would be a coup worthy of Stonewall Jackson himself: to take the Free State capital virtually by surprise, to trap the Boer raiding parties south of the Orange River (after cutting off their main line of supply), as well as helping to relieve Kimberley and Ladysmith.
Surprise was to have been the keynote of this plan. Henderson had achieved prodigies constructing a ruse de guerre; he was ably assisted by an intelligence officer, Captain Willy Robertson (later to be the first Englishman ever to rise from the ranks to become field-marshal). The ruse was to persuade the Boers that the point of attack was to be Norval’s Pont, the bridge over the Orange River held by the Boers and facing the British garrison at Colesberg. There was a complete security blanket cast over the operations. Only a handful of officers were told the real route of the invasion force: by way of the flank march from the western railway. Bogus telegrams ‘in clear’ were sent to field commanders and then cancelled in cypher. Rumours were concocted and spread among the camps. Off-the-record briefings were given to a war correspondent who could be relied on to publish confidential information.32
Fortunately for Roberts, these ingenious games were largely unsuccessful in drawing the stolid Boers south to defend Norval’s Pont. For between 26 and 27 January, Roberts had decided to cancel this daring scheme, and it might have been distinctly awkward to have several thousand extra Boers threatening his line of communications at Colesberg.
The new plan was, in fact, to be what the Boers had expected all along: that Roberts would march to Bloemfontein by way of Kimberley. For a whole series of reasons, Roberts had weakened in his resolve. What weighed most in his mind was Rhodes’s begging and bullying. And what tipped the balance was the news of Buller’s reverse at Spion Kop, which had reached him on 26 January. In addition, Milner was quaking about a Cape rising. He himself was anxious about his lines of communication, while Cronje remained at Magersfontein. And could they rely on getting water while on a flank march across the open veld?33 How the pattern had repeated itself! These were the same reasons (apart from the events in Natal) that had decided Buller to abandon his own flank march to Potgieters in December.
It was in his decision not to reinforce Buller in Natal that Roberts took the greatest risk. It was a striking paradox that, of all the reinforcements pouring into South Africa since Warren’s 5th Division had joined Buller in early January, none had gone to Buller, except the drafts to replace casualties. Buller had double the number of Boers to cope with: twenty-five thousand estimated to be around Ladysmith, compared with ten thousand around Kimberley – twenty-five thousand dug in to a series of natural fortresses. Yet Roberts had given himself a fighting force not only much more mobile than Buller’s, but larger by one quarter: forty thousand compared with thirty thousand.34 It was the arithmetic of a walk-over – for Roberts’s ‘grand army’.
Buller protested too late – on 9 February, after his reverse at Vaal Krantz. Not that protests would have helped, one suspects: Roberts was a ruthless and formidable man – even to his friends. Buller claimed that he could not relieve Ladysmith with thirty thousand men. Then he must stay on the defensive, was Roberts’s curt reply.35 And, pour encourager les autres, Roberts proceeded to sack, or demote, a number of generals: Brabazon, the cavalry commander (‘said to be too old for real work. The fact is he is too fond of comfort’); Babington, one of French’s brigadiers (‘so “sticky” that the regiments have lost all their go’);36 his personal friend, Methuen (‘I am resolved that he shall not be entrusted with any independent command’).37 His choice of the first two victims seems to have been arbitrary enough; in Babington’s case it was said he had been punished simply as he was a friend of Buller’s, and the policy of summary punishment tended to make commanders more, rather than less, ‘sticky’.38
Arguably, Roberts kept too many troops for himself and starved Buller and the army of Natal, who were faced with the harder task. Arguably, Roberts was hasty in the way he sacked his subordinates. But, in one respect, there can be no argument about his shortcomings as a general, shortcomings due to impatience. His sweeping changes in the system of transport and supply were to prove one of the great blunders of the war.
Strange to say, for the two most famous British soldiers of the period, neither he nor Kitchener knew much about the working of the British army. They were both, in a way, outsiders. Bobs, the ‘sepoy general’, had lived all his army life in India. Kitchener, the Sirdar, had served so long, in both senses, in the wilderness. As a result, they did not understand the War Office system of transport and supply adopted in South Africa: the so-called ‘regimental’, or decentralized, system.39
The key to this system was that each battalion CO was made responsible for their day-to-day food supplies, each battalion had a transport officer, and the system was integrated into the normal army organization. Roberts and Kitchener shared two crucial misconceptions about the system. They believed that to allow each battalion its own carts must be extremely wasteful in transport, not realizing that the system had proved quite flexible enough for battalion transport to be recalled at any ti
me by the superior officer who had overall charge of transport. Nor had they grasped the existence of the non-regimental transport, the brigade’s supply columns. Apart from the ‘first-line’ regimental transport (with ammunition and fighting material), they decided to sweep away the system completely. Instead, they created a ‘general transport’ system, an extraordinary makeshift in which largely untrained transport officers, hustled into mule-cart and ox-wagon transport companies, were to supply all the different needs of the army.40
When a highly technical part of the army system, evolved and refined over a long period, is suddenly replaced in the middle of a war, there is bound to be trouble. And trouble there was. Kitchener, K of K, became known as ‘K of Chaos’.41 The professional transport officers prophesied disaster. They did not have to wait long.
Meanwhile, Roberts was all set to move up to the front. On 6 February the official train, luxuriously equipped as a mobile HQ, was sent ahead to De Aar with the HQ staff but without the Chief or the Sirdar on board. There was fear that there might be an attempt to sabotage the train. Roberts himself seemed calm and self-possessed. ‘Preparations well advanced,’ he cabled Lansdowne that day. ‘First move will probably be made on the 10th. All well and very confident. Inform my wife. Roberts.’ He recommended that Kitchener, though junior in the Army List to many of the generals in South Africa, should succeed him as C-in-C if anything happened to him. (‘It is unfortunate that there are no men of military genius amongst the senior officers, but I believe this has always been the case. Napoleon experienced this; and Wellington always said that he had not a single General he could trust to act alone.’) Then, travelling incognito, the modern Wellington drove to a small station outside Cape Town and took the ordinary mail-train to the north.42
The Boer War Page 50