He made only one change of policy after reaching the Modder. Originally, he had decided to conceal from Rhodes the news of the march. Kekewich cabled him on 9 February: ‘I fear it will be very difficult to resist pressure of large section of public many more days.’ This so disturbed Roberts that he decided the same day to allow Rhodes to be told the news that he was marching directly to relieve Kimberley. This should reassure Rhodes and the other faint hearts. He also ordered Kekewich to warn Rhodes of the ‘disastrous and humiliating effect of surrendering after so prolonged and glorious a defence’. Later the same day, he told Kekewich that he had full permission to arrest ‘any individual, no matter what may be his position’, who threatened ‘national interests’. In short, his advice was this: if Rhodes tries to put up the white flag, put him in gaol.43
By the 15th, Roberts was installed at his field HQ at Waterval Drift on the Riet River, waiting on tenterhooks for the news of French’s dash to Kimberley. Early that morning, he rode along with Colvile’s (9th) division north-westwards to a second ford, Wegdraai Drift, a few miles downstream. Delays in crossing at Waterval Drift had been so appalling, owing to the steep, broken river banks and the soft, sticky mud, that the supply convoy of two hundred ox wagons, acting as the mobile supply park for the divisions, was left behind on the north bank of the Riet at Waterval Drift for the three thousand oxen to graze and recuperate.44 About 9.00 a.m., a few hours after he had reached the second ford, Roberts was handed an alarming field telegram; the news threatened the whole future of his expedition.
It was not about French, who had yet to launch his cavalry charge. It was about the ox wagon convoy at Waterval Drift. A Boer raiding party (it was actually led by De Wet, the man who was to prove the outstanding guerrilla leader of the war) had ambushed the convoy and stampeded most of the three thousand oxen. Now the two hundred wagons, nearly a third of the entire transport available to Roberts for the advance to Bloemfontein, were stranded with their African drivers beside the Riet. Their precious loads – biscuits and bully beef, medicines and bandages, without which the army could not fight – were at the mercy of De Wet. To save time, Roberts abandoned the wagons.45 And what had he gained in return? As we shall see, that one day saved was worth little to Roberts; on the contrary, to delay De Wet for some days at Waterval Drift would have saved him a great deal of anguish. Moreover, Roberts did not, as his admirers later claimed, react to the disaster with the unflinching spirit of a great general.
According to evidence later supplied to the Royal Commission on the war, and not denied (though the witness was not a friendly one, it must be said, for it was Buller), Roberts lost his head momentarily when he heard of the disaster to the convoy. He proposed to abandon the advance, to throw away the chance of catching Cronje and beat a retreat to the railway line.46 Fortunately, he had a supply officer who saw there was a way out. French had managed to keep his transport safe from Kitchener; it was ‘regimental’ transport, organized on the old lines. French’s divisional supply park could come to the rescue. And so it turned out. French’s mule carts made up for part of the lost ox wagons, and other wagons (without animals) were captured from the Boers.47
Perhaps this humiliation at Waterval Drift gave Roberts some insight into the difficulties of the new-style war, and softened his attitude to Buller. For after Buller’s latest reverse – at Vaal Krantz the previous week – Lansdowne had cabled to Roberts giving him full power to sack Buller if Roberts saw fit.48 Roberts did not see fit.
And fortune smiled on him once again. A few hours after the news of the disaster to the convoys came the word that French was sweeping towards Kimberley like a torpedo across the veld.
CHAPTER 27
The Siege within the Siege
Kimberley,
9–17 February 1900
‘You low, damned, mean cur, Kekewich, you deny me at your peril.’
Cecil Rhodes to Colonel Kekewich, 10 February 1900
Events had moved swiftly inside as well as outside the gates of Kimberley. That desperate telegram from Kekewich, suggesting that Rhodes was threatening to surrender the town, was the climax of the siege within the siege, the four-month struggle for power between Kekewich and the Colossus.
‘Was ever another British commander in a more trying position?’ asked Major O’Meara, the garrison Intelligence Officer.1 Kekewich’s predicament was certainly odd. All very well for Roberts to tell him to take Rhodes and clap him in irons if he defied him. Who was to enforce this order? As Kekewich replied, somewhat lamely, in a note to Roberts, ‘The key to the military situation here in one sense is Rhodes, for a large majority of the Town Guardsmen, Kimberley Light Horse and Volunteers [the improvised colonial garrison] are De Beers employees.’2 In short, Rhodes was De Beers and De Beers was Kimberley-or at any rate, the English-speaking part of Kimberley. How could a handful of imperial troops arrest half a town? It was the classic problem of the new imperialism – how to impose the imperial will on a self-governing white colony – a dilemma reduced by Rhodes’s colossal ego to the level of cheap melodrama.
Kekewich found it no laughing matter. True, he thought Rhodes was bluffing. And here he was surely correct. Bluff was the tactic that had been Rhodes’s making and his undoing; it had launched Jameson on the Raid and led Chamberlain down the path to war. It was also true that Rhodes, despite his general recklessness, had been careful never to make the threat to surrender explicit.
What had happened was this. That Friday, 9 February, the Mayor had called at Kekewich’s HQ near the Kimberley Club and warned him that Rhodes was planning to hold a public meeting to protest against the delays in relieving the town. Kekewich warned the Mayor in turn that it would be a suicidal proceeding. There was the actual danger of shellfire. There were also a dangerously large number of Afrikaners among the population – perhaps ten thousand out of the twenty thousand white people – and it was reported that some of these had started a movement to stampede the town into surrender. What could be more calculated to play into the enemy’s hands than Rhodes’s public meeting?3
Rhodes himself called at Kekewich’s HQ later that morning. He was in an ugly mood. He told Kekewich that the purpose of the meeting would be to forward the townspeople’s views to Lord Roberts. Kekewich told him (as was true enough) that he had already most strongly impressed their views on Lord Roberts, and he officially banned the meeting. Rhodes became violent, and threatened to hold the meeting despite the ban, unless Kekewich revealed within forty-eight hours ‘full and definite’ information about Lord Roberts’s plans. ‘Before Kimberley surrenders,’ he shouted, ‘I will take good care that the English people shall know what I think of all this.’ He rushed from the office.4
Next day he returned to the attack. A long, bombastic editorial landed on Kekewich’s desk; it was in The Diamond Fields Advertiser, the local newspaper, owned by Cecil Rhodes. ‘Why Kimberley cannot wait’, was the impetuous headline. ‘How utterly the public and military authorities,’ the leader-writer thundered, ‘have failed to grasp the claim which Kimberley, by the heroic exertions of its citizens, has established upon the British Empire…. We have stood a siege that is rapidly approaching the duration of the siege of Paris…. Is it unreasonable, when our women and children are being slaughtered, and our buildings fired, to expect something better than that a large British army should remain inactive in the presence of eight or ten thousand peasants?’5
It was a characteristic literary production of Rhodes’s, crude, egocentric. It was also a flagrant breach of the military censorship. Kekewich ordered the editor to be arrested, only to be told Rhodes had hidden him down one of the mines. Instead, Rhodes himself stormed the HQ and taunted the unfortunate Kekewich with the news: ‘You forbade a public meeting, but I have held the meeting all the same; it was attended by the twelve leading citizens of Kimberley.’ Rhodes was then shown Roberts’s latest tactful messages for him, but still insisted on a long petition, drawn up by the twelve good men, to be sent to Roberts. Kekewich u
ndertook to send a précis of this. At this, Rhodes lost his temper completely. He accused Kekewich of keeping him in the dark about the relief, repeated his now familiar insults against the British army, and finally, clenching his fist, made a rush at Kekewich, shouting in his falsetto voice, ‘I know what damned rot your signallers are wasting their time in signalling. You low, damned, mean cur, Kekewich, you deny me at your peril.’ Rhodes was a big man, and his clenched fist shot over the shoulders of the Mayor and a staff officer who happened to be standing in front of Kekewich’s desk. Kekewich rose to his feet-his face ashen, according to a witness, and his eyes ablaze. Perhaps he would have knocked Rhodes down. But Rhodes suddenly turned tail and made for the door, hastily followed by the Mayor.6
At any other time, this would all have been ludicrous. Now it only confirmed Kekewich’s feeling that Rhodes had put the whole town in peril. Characteristically, Rhodes took the top-secret news that Roberts was marching directly to Kimberley – handed him in a cable marked ‘secret’ – and read it aloud to the passers-by from the steps of the Kimberley Club.7
There was a real reason for a collapse of the townspeople’s morale, which partly explained Rhodes’s antics, and the way the reported news of the postponement of the relief had caused such despondency. (And the overwhelming irony of the situation was that Rhodes, who had actually succeeded in diverting Roberts from his plan for first striking at Bloemfontein, had been so long unaware of his own success.) At 11.00 a.m. on Wednesday 7 February, a sinister new sound was heard in all quarters of the town. It was the day when Roberts was stuck in the mail-train from Cape Town, grinding along that narrow-gauge, single-track railway running for six hundred miles through the wilderness of the Great Karoo.
In Kimberley, people had got used to the sound of ordinary shelling. Over seven thousand shells had thumped into its broad, dusty streets from the Boers’ gun positions on the slate-green slag-heaps beside Kamfersdam Mine, Carter’s Ridge and half a dozen other places. The shells, fired from 9-pounders and 15-pounders, did little or no damage. Either they did not burst, or were smothered by the slag-heaps forming part of the British perimeter. The main result was a cheerful trade in old shell-cases collected by curio hunters. True, it was depressing to be fired at without being able to fire back. The garrison’s own artillery had been completely out-ranged. They were 7-pounders, what Rhodes indignantly called ‘pop-guns’. Then George Labram, De Beers’ enthusiastic American engineer, had succeeded in improvising a 4-inch gun, building it to his own design from a piece of steel shafting in the De Beers workshops. On 19 January, ‘Long Cecil’, as the gun was christened, first opened his mouth, and out came a 28-pound shell that flew, accurately enough, five miles through the air, smack into the Boer laager by the intermediate pumping station.8
Now, that Wednesday, came the Boers’ reply to Long Cecil, spoken by their own Creusot 6-inch gun, Long Tom. At eleven o’clock, the officer on watch on the conning-tower saw a puff of smoke by the winding-gear at Kamfersdam Mine, and 90-pound shells began to smash into the town. It was actually Ladysmith’s old friend, the Long Tom from Gun Hill, the gun that had been stuffed full of cotton on the night of 8 December by General Hunter and his raiding party, and then apparently blown to smithereens. But he had returned from the dead, his barrel several inches shorter, after extensive repairs in the railway workshops in Pretoria, and a long, roundabout journey to Kimberley.9 The effect was almost all the Boers could have hoped. There was panic in Kekewich’s HQ: the telephone operators, mainly civilians, took to their heels. Several buildings were set on fire. The noise of the explosions deafened Kekewich, and they were followed by an eerie, wailing diminuendo, as the twisted fragments of shell casing cut arcs through the air. Like some of his counterparts at Ladysmith, Kekewich acted at once to take precautions against the blitz. A signaller, posted on the conning tower, waved a flag when he saw the smoke of each shell, and buglers, suitably posted, sounded ‘G’ (‘take cover’) on their bugles. People then had fifteen seconds to find shelter in trenches or dugouts, in the slag-heaps or railway cuttings. But Long Tom achieved more in three days than the other six guns had in four months. On Wednesday, there were twenty-two Long Tom shells, and a coloured child was mortally wounded, a civilian wounded; on Thursday, thirty Long Tom shells, and another man dead, with four people and a child injured; on Friday, seventy-four Long Tom shells, and four died, including George Labram, the father of Long Cecil.10
Labram had been the life and soul of the siege. His amazing inventions had kept up everyone’s spirits: the 155-foot-high conning-tower, the 1400-cubic-foot cold meat plant, the water supply from Wesselton Mine, the home-made shells for the 7-pounders, the charges made from blasting powder, and, finally, Long Cecil – everything was owed to George Labram. He could hardly have been more of a contrast to Rhodes: modest, good-humoured (he would climb the conning-tower most mornings to brighten Kekewich’s dreary vigil) – above all, discreet. He had, however, scorned to take shelter. He was killed on Friday evening while dressing for dinner in his room at the Grand Hotel. They pulled him from the wreckage beside the wash-basin; half his head had been blown away, and his chest and thighs were smashed. Hundreds of people turned up at his funeral, held at night to avoid the bombardment. But still the Long Tom shells crashed down, hitting, indiscriminately, private houses, the railway and the hospital.11
For many people, it was this night blitz that proved the last straw. In the day, you could at least see where the shells landed. After dark, all the terrifying sounds were magnified: the bugler’s alarm call, the boom of the explosion, the wail of the shell splinters. Dr Ashe, the town’s Chief Medical Officer, had to leave his shelter and visit some patients. He cowered by a galvanized iron fence as earth and stones rattled all round him, but left him untouched. At the hospital, terrified patients watched a piece of shrapnel smash through one of the outlying wards.12
The cumulative strain of the siege had been severe, even though (or even because) so little had occurred during its course. The lack of news, especially news about plans for the relief, intensified the nagging sense, expressed in The Advertiser’s hysterical editorial, that their efforts were not appreciated by the outside world. No one is recorded to have signalled ‘Are-we-rotters-or-heroes?’ like the defenders of Ladysmith, but perhaps the thought was the same.
As at Ladysmith, the most destructive weapons used by the Boers were the classic weapons of a siege: starvation and disease. Soon after Christmas, Kimberley began to ‘feel the nip’, as Dr Ashe put it. ‘At last,’ he wrote in his diary on 10 January:
—we have begun to feel the siege a little more acutely. On Monday the people who went for meat were told that they could only take half their allowance in beef; the other half must be taken in horseflesh or else gone without. Lots of people went without…. I brought my chunk of horse home, and that night we had it for dinner. If I had not known what it was, I am sure I should not have known it from beef. It was tender and good for anything, but all the same it took some pushing down…. I guess I am not hungry enough yet.13
As a visiting doctor, Ashe had had the foresight (and the money) to stock up his larder in the first weeks of the siege. He still had several months’ supply of flour; he sowed seeds of beetroot and sweet corn in his garden, and soon had plenty of vegetables.14 But for most of the townspeople the siege diet was increasingly poor and monotonous. After Christmas, Kekewich had ordered all the stocks of beef, flour, sugar and so on to be commandeered by the military. Ration cards were issued, meat, bread and vegetables were sold at a fixed rate to long queues of white civilians at the market. (Africans had to queue elsewhere.) Luxuries – like milk, butter, stout, cheese – were only to be issued on production of medical certificates. Predictably, the scale of rations was highest for the garrison and lowest for the blacks: a pound of bread per day, and half a pound of meat, for soldiers; twelve ounces and four ounces respectively for white civilians; barely a pound of mealies for Africans. The white civilians soon lost their se
nse of delicacy about eating the horses that made up more than a third of the available meat supplies (164,183 pounds of horsemeat, 269,455 pounds of ox meat, and 45,653 pounds of mutton were eaten in the two months after January, according to Kekewich’s tally). The siege pinched the Africans worst, as they were not allowed to buy meat or vegetables, even if they could afford to.15 Infant mortality, fifty per cent among the white population, was catastrophic among the black and brown populations. In the four months between October and mid-February coloured children died at a rate of 93.5 per cent, according to official statistics.16 Infant mortality was (and is) an accepted part of life in Africa. What gave the siege a more unusual flavour was the deaths by scurvy among the ‘mine boys’, the ten thousand Africans confined, under a roof of wire-netting, in the Kimberley compounds.
To say that Rhodes deliberately starved his African workers to death would be absurd. That would have been worse than a crime, in Rhodes’s eyes; it would have been bad for business. For the mine boys were De Beers’ most important asset, apart from the diamonds themselves; without such a vast pool of cheap and regulated black labour, no diamond mine could be worked.
Still, the business-like principles that governed the running of the Kimberley compounds did not allow much room for sentiment. The fact was that the Africans – Zulus, Basutos, Fingos and so on – were starving. They had been recruited for the diamond mines; now they were temporarily redundant. Only a few of them managed to escape, and the only food that the rest were allowed by their employers was a few ounces of mealies. Vegetables grow rapidly in South Africa. The Wesselton mine could supply 250,000 gallons of water a day, and that mile-long avenue of vines planted at Kenilworth, Rhodes’s model village, had ripened by early February.17 Men carried the brimming baskets to the Sanatorium Hotel: grapes, nectarines, peaches for Mr Cecil, a tribute to the great man’s ingenuity and unconquerable spirit. Down in the compounds, there were fifteen hundred cases of scurvy, of which a third proved fatal. Starving people lay about under the wire netting, with bloated stomachs – hearing the muted boom of the shells, waiting to die.18
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