The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  From Haig’s point of view, the loss of seventy cavalrymen, humiliating as it was, did not alter the main issue: whether he could catch the fox – or at least drive it back over the river out of the Cape farmyards. For this fox-hunt French had given him three packs – that is, three columns totalling roughly two thousand men.22 The excitement of the chase raised everyone’s spirits. ‘From my point of view,’ Haig said earlier (it was at a time when Kitchener ‘used to get a fit of the funks’ and think De Wet was going to invade the Colony), ‘nothing would have pleased me and my column better than a good hunt after De Wet… the next best fox is Kritzinger.’23 Now it was Smuts who had slipped over the river on 3 September – unchallenged, owing to K’s bungling. Haig and French were exasperated by the way Kitchener interfered in the work of the columns. On the night of the 3rd, Kitchener had excelled himself. He wired to Major-General Fitzroy Hart, the Natal fire-eater, now serving as a humble column commander, telling him to take his men from guarding the ford at Kiba Drift and march them off to attack the Boers a few miles to the north of the Orange. Enter Smuts and his Two Hundred crossing Kiba Drift. (French’s furious comment: ‘What is the use in us doing our best to clear the Colony, if, the moment we drive Boers out at one corner, Lord K. drives them in another?’)24

  This fiasco was all the more galling, as French’s FID (Field Intelligence Department) was now pouring out telegrams full of information, much of which, events would show, was surprisingly accurate. What complicated the hunt for Smuts’s commando was that it was the most important, but not the only, needle in the haystack – or (to borrow Milner’s phrase) not the only ‘severed worm’ wriggling about in the veld. The FID identified six smaller enemy fragments in Cape Colony south of the Orange: Commandants Myburg with a hundred, Fouchée with a hundred, Wessels with two hundred, Malan with fifteen, Theron with eighty, and Scheepers with two hundred and fifty. Add General Smuts and his two hundred and fifty and the total, south of the river, was reckoned, rightly, at about a thousand. (Roughly the same number of Boers were reckoned to have invaded the Western Cape Colony, north of the river.)25 The counter-strategy comprised three basic aims. First, they must prevent these severed fragments from combining; second, ‘hustle’ them, so that they were unable to recruit followers or effectively raid the countryside; third, wear them out, so that they could eventually be overtaken and hunted down.

  The first two of these aims – the negative two – had proved easy enough to accomplish in the Cape, without the drastic sweep-and-scour methods pursued by Kitchener in the conquered republics. It was mainly a question of keeping the commandos on the move, and then denying them fresh horses. How simple an antidote to guerrilla warfare, compared with that immense operation of burning farms and carting off the whole civilian population of the countryside into the camps! Yet Smuts himself (and his official report soon fell into British hands) admitted how his inability to get fresh horses, coupled with difficulty in getting food, had crippled his whole enterprise.26

  Of course, ‘invasions’ by a total of two thousand men could hardly be compared to the military threat posed by the main guerrilla armies in the Free State and the Transvaal. But the guerrillas in the Cape had topographical advantages. The Cape was huge, four times the area of the old republics, with desert lairs to the west of the railway lines, mountain lairs in the east and midlands – though lairs, it must be said, made extraordinarily unpleasant by the spring storms.

  It was these spring storms that had played a crucial tactical role in French’s operations and helped bring to fruition the first real British success in the guerrilla war in the Cape. On the night of 5 September, the night after Smuts slipped across the Orange River at Kiba Drift, Commandant Lotter, with a commando of 130 rebels (Afrikaners from the Cape), was run to earth by Colonel Harry Scobell’s column in a gorge near the village of Petersburg.27 Scobell was perhaps the most dashing of all the column commanders in the Cape, a ‘rattling good man’ in the eyes of the troopers (he gave a ball at Cradock in May, where champagne flowed like water and some troopers were invited as well as the officers).28

  Not that there was anything effete about Scobell. On the veld, he lived like his men, and, if they ever got a decent meal, it was off Boer food that they had looted. The speed with which his column travelled put it in a different class from other British columns – in the Boer class. He had hunted Malan and Kritzinger and Scheepers up and down these same mountains ever since May. It was largely Scobell’s work (he had caught Kritzinger’s commando asleep at a farm on 6 June and killed six and captured twenty-five) that eventually drove Kritzinger back in despair across the Orange River.29 Since then, Scobell had refined his own counter-commando tactics still further by adopting Boer supply methods. He had discarded his wagons in favour of pack mules, carrying three days’ rations for a six-day Boer-hunt. The gain was not only in speed. The column could climb like goats up a mountain-side – so steep that the odd pack mule would lose its footing and come somersaulting down the scree.30

  On the night of 4–5 September, a storm was raging in the Tandjesberg, the tangle of mountains cutting off Cradock from Graaf Reinet. It was the fifth night of Scobell’s six-day trek, and the column was almost dead-beat. Trooper Edingborough, of the Cape Mounted Rifles, who had been trekking for sixteen months, found those five days the stiffest of all. He had lost his boots (stolen by some kind Tommy); he had to make do with canvas shoes; his mare had to be dragged (Scobell’s treks would reduce a fat pony to a ghost in a few weeks); he himself had eaten almost nothing. Then Scobell gave the order: a night march. And – because it was Scobell – the men followed almost without a grumble, sliding and slithering up the mountain.31

  Scobell’s plan to nail Lotter was the counterpart of Smuts’s successful plan to smash the 17th Lancers. He had far better scouts than Lotter – African Intelligence scouts; and the appalling weather was all on his side. After that, everything depended on dash and courage and extra numbers. With eleven hundred men of the 9th Lancers, the Cape Mounted Rifles, and the yeomen, he outnumbered Lotter’s rebel commando by nearly ten to one.32 Still, Scobell did not expect to have things all his own way. He said himself, ‘These rebels … know they are fighting with a rope round their necks, and it makes them fight very well. …’ Nor did Scobell have it all his own way.33

  Scobell expected Lotter’s commando to have spent the night at a farmhouse in a mountain gorge called Groenkloof. In fact, almost all the commando had taken shelter from the rain in a kraal a few hundred yards away, a stone sheep-house, thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, roofed with corrugated iron. Before dawn, Scobell disposed the main party along the ridges commanding the farm. Then, as the sky paled, a squadron of the 9th Lancers, led by Lord Douglas Compton, rode down cautiously to the kraal. At the doorway, Compton dropped his revolver and dismounted to retrieve it.34

  A hundred sleeping Boers, curled up in blankets, like so many exhausted sheep in the kraal – this was, indeed, one of the strangest sights of the war. Lord Douglas did not have long to enjoy it. From sheep into lions. Their rifles were cocked and a fusillade cut down the six behind Lord Douglas. He grabbed his revolver and galloped past the doorway. Other survivors fired and scattered. Meanwhile, a tempest of bullets burst over the kraal. It came from all the surrounding ridges, as well as from point-blank range, smashing and grinding the stones and wood and bone and flesh, as though the bullets were explosive themselves: half an hour of frenzy.35

  Trooper Edingborough was one of the first to enter the kraal. Seventy years later, he remembered that morning with pride, as though it were a victory described in The Boy’s Own Paper.36 At the time, he was appalled, as appalled as Haig at the sight of the Lancers. ‘The sight was horrible in the extreme.’ Someone had tried to wave a white flag, but, as there was still some resistance, the butchery had continued. Edingborough entered:

  8 were lying dead huddled under the wall, men were lying about with half their faces shot away, blood spouting out of their chests, thigh
s etc in fact the place was like a butchers shop, some men making awful noises groaning clutching the ground and rolling in the dirt in their agony it was awful; we buried the dead [13 Boers, 10 British – mostly Lancers] by the kraal in a donga covering them up with large stones from the wall.37

  Scobell had well and truly scuppered Lotter’s commando. Apart from thirteen dead, there were forty-six wounded and sixty-one other prisoners, including Lotter (he and seven others were in due course executed as Cape rebels). Then, ten days later, Smuts, as we saw, set the score even again by killing and wounding a similar number of the 17th Lancers at Elands River. Not that the score was really even. In losing Lotter, the Boers had lost more than a tenth of the guerrillas in the Colony north of the Orange, and their elite commando at that.38 Moreover, the British Empire was a bottomless well, when it came to replacing lost troops. The Boer wells were virtually dry.

  Meanwhile, dangerous new blobs of red ink had appeared on the battle maps at Kitchener’s HQ, and they threatened to transform the whole strategic situation. By the day of Smuts’s victory, Botha had reached the Buffalo River, poised to invade Natal.39

  Botha and his commandos had, in fact, marched south a week earlier, slipping out of their hunting grounds on the remote eastern border of the Transvaal, and skirting the mountains on the Swazi border. Botha’s commandos marched as light and fast as Smuts’s force. They had hundreds of pack mules and pack horses, instead of the old ox wagons that had been the bane of earlier campaigns; and they had hundreds of Mausers and captured Lee Metfords, without the impediment of a single field-gun (the last of the State Artillery’s Creusots had been deliberately left behind in the north). This invasion of Natal was the other half of the grand strategy agreed with Smuts at Standerton: its military aim, to divert pressure from the occupied republics; its political aim, to prove that the war was by no means over. Botha’s raid, planned in mid-August, was also a direct answer to Kitchener’s proclamation of 7 August: a piece of panache, a challenge accepted.40

  Yet was the Natal raid practicable, and not a Boer counterpart of Dr Jameson’s? What could less than a thousand horsemen achieve, when Kitchener could despatch twenty thousand men by railway to turn them back? Botha remained as uncommunicative as Smuts on these questions. The green hills of Natal haunted Botha —just as his father’s vineyards around Malmesbury beckoned to Smuts. This was Botha’s home country, the place where he had fought his pre-war campaign (fighting with one Zulu army against another), and this was the land of Colenso and Spion Kop.[sup]40[/sup]

  Botha’s march south took him past Piet Retief, and on across the bleak open veld of the south-east Transvaal, still relatively untouched by the war. The pace was too hot for the British columns to intercept him. The pace was also too hot for his own horses. In good weather, they might have stood it. But the horses were weak after the winter; and spring here in Natal, just as in the Cape, several hundred miles to the south-west, turned cruelly pro-British. Far from giving fresh grass to the horses, the cold rain made the roads into rivers; the horses were left shivering and starving. By 14 September, when Botha had reached a farm near Frischgewaagd, east of Utrecht, the transport problem was critical. Four hundred horses of the Bethel and Middelburg Commandos were so knocked up that he had to halt at the farm for several days to let them recover. And, if the rain also hampered the Khakis, the Buffalo River, which marked the Natal frontier, was now in spate. Could they ford it? Or should they splash on through the mud towards Zululand?

  Botha’s first target was the British camp at Dundee, ten miles the Natal side of the river. No doubt he planned to get fresh food and horses there, and then to cut the railway at Glencoe, on the main line between Durban and Pretoria, one of the two main arteries of the British army. But the rain ruined everything. He had arranged a dawn attack on the same lines as the attack on Sir Perm Symons’s position two years before. Yet his horses were too weak to attempt the night march. So Botha’s commando splashed on towards Zululand, hoping to dodge the British patrols and cross the Buffalo River somewhere to the south.41

  Major Hubert Gough, the nearest British commander, had plenty of ‘dash’, the quality Kitchener liked to see (and seldom found) in his cavalry COs. K had cabled him the moment the Intelligence at Pretoria got wind of Botha’s plan to invade Natal: Gough’s Mounted Infantry ‘to entrain without delay for the north’. Gough accepted the mission without enthusiasm. He and the 24th MI battalion were exhausted by the strain of twenty months’ scouring and sweeping the republics. It was not only the monotony (‘There is so much sameness about this trekking that it bores one nearly as much to write about as to carry on’), and the hardship of riding all day in the sun and then bivouacking with ice on the ground. Gough was also disgusted with the ‘aimlessness’ of K’s scouring strategy. He also accused his fellow column-commanders of ‘funk’. (‘They move about in solemn masses down the main roads, expecting and usually fearing (!!) a battle, which the Boers would not and could not fight.’) Now the prospect of a wild-goose-chase after Botha through the beastly hills of Natal did not entice Gough. He had just written off to Pretoria (privately, of course, to his friend Major Birdwood): any hope of a ‘quiet billet’ among the red-tabs up there?42

  Gough’s temper did not improve after his battalion had completed their five-hundred-mile journey in railway trucks to Natal. One Irish company got drunk on beer while entraining at Kroonstad; the other Irish company got drunk on port while detraining at Dundee. What an ‘awful pity’, he thought, that he could not, like a Boer commandant, order his men to be flogged! He marched them off in pouring rain to De Jager’s Drift, a depressing little camp guarding the main crossing-point of the Buffalo River, astride the old Natal—Transvaal frontier; Botha and up to seven hundred men were reported by Natal Intelligence to be threatening an attack.

  Gough himself doubted he would have any such luck. He expected the Intelligence were exaggerating; they generally were. Next day, 17 September, he was astonished – and delighted – to find Boers after all.43 As his three companies splashed forward to reconnoitre the plain on the Transvaal side of the Buffalo, he saw some two to three hundred Boers riding northwards from the stony ridge, called Scheeper’s Nek, astride the main road leading to Vryheid.44 Through his binoculars, Gough watched them off-saddle at a farm close to Blood River Poort, the mouth of the gorge a few miles from the meeting of the Blood River and the Buffalo River. He sent a message the few miles back to Lieutenant-Colonel H. K. Stewart, who was holding 450 MI in reserve: he could ‘surprise’ the enemy; he would gallop to the laager and give Brother Boer a good ‘dusting’. After months and months of trekking, there was, at last, hope of battle.45

  It was 2.00 p.m. on 17 September. An hour or two earlier, 350 miles away to the south-west, Smuts launched his own desperate charge at Elands River Poort, to break free from the cordon of the 17th Lancers. Now, at Blood River Poort, it was Botha’s turn.

  He had no field-guns, and only a thousand men. He had set no trap for the Khakis. But he saw his chance. The Khakis were still in the minority; soon the main British army, outnumbering his burghers by ten or fifteen to one, would be brought up by railway against them. He must turn the Khakis’ chosen weapon – surprise – back against them. Three hundred of his burghers off-saddled at the farm. Meanwhile, his main force, seven hundred men under his own command, galloped round the right-hand company of Khakis, who were holding a ridge. In twenty minutes, they had cut through them, as neatly as a man rolls up a carpet or a plough peels open a field of stubble.46

  From the centre of the bare plain, Gough watched, aghast. Botha’s men, hundreds of them. Swarming all over the ridge. He rode across to his two field-guns. The gunners were trying to fire case-shot, but could not find a target in the confusion. Some Boers galloped up, pointed their guns at the gunners and shouted, ‘Hands up!’ Gough put his hand down to his holster; it was empty; his batman had forgotten to put in his revolver that morning. ‘Shoot them, shoot them,’ Gough shouted, with the impot
ence of a man in a nightmare. Lieutenant Price-Davies, a subaltern of the 60th, drew his revolver, but was shot in the shoulder at point-blank range. (For this he later earned a VC.) Gough threw himself off his horse and tried to use it as a shield. But Botha’s men had overrun them completely.

  The nightmare of humiliation passed soon into farce. Gough, stripped of his helmet, field-glasses, coat, riding-boots and gaiters, played hide-and-seek with his captors under cover of darkness. He had grabbed someone else’s boots, five sizes too large, and with only a shred of a bootlace. He hid in an ant hole. The Boers ignominiously pulled him out. Later, when it grew inky black, he made good his escape, and groped his way, with blistered feet, to the nearest British patrol.47

  Next day, up and down South Africa, the telegraph lines were humming with the news of Gough’s disaster: Captain Mildmay and 19 men killed, 5 officers and 19 men wounded (including 3 officers mortally wounded), 6 other officers and 235 men taken prisoner.

  It was the most humiliating reverse since Clements’s smash-up at Nooitgedacht nine months before.48

  But for Botha, it was less than enough. He had captured 180 Lee Metford rifles, thirty thousand rounds of ammunition, two hundred horses, and two field-guns, as well as the Khakis. What he desperately needed was fresh horses, food and fodder, and a smooth path into Natal. He found the British horses were almost useless – ridden to death by Gough’s MI. The field-guns were too cumbersome for raiding warfare. So were the prisoners. They were simply stripped and sent back after Gough to their lines. Botha’s own ponies were badly knocked up. The icy spring rains beat down on Natal as they beat down on Cape Colony. To break into Natal, Botha had to ford the Buffalo somewhere and launch his men down the same road over the Biggarsberg towards Ladysmith that he and Joubert and their fifteen thousand men had taken two years before. Now he decided his force was too weak to cross the Buffalo. Three hundred of his sick ponies had to be sent northwards back to Vryheid. The rest continued south-east, inside the old Transvaal frontier, feeling their way for some opening into Natal not blocked by the British.49 The rain continued, too. The men were cold and wet and hungry, and Botha decided to raid two British camps – ‘Fort Itala’ and ‘Fort Prospect’ – astride the Zulu frontier.