by Max Hennessy
Back in England, he decided, people had no idea of the size of this country that contributed so much with its gold and diamonds to their prosperity. They always thought in terms of Europe where the distance between towns and cities was short and always interspersed with villages. Here, the country went on forever, mile upon empty mile of stone and scrub where kopjes, huge pink mounds of crumbling rock, rose from the stark plain, and it required six hundred acres to feed one sheep, and a herd of springbok could make the difference between life and death to the flock of some hard-bitten farmer. In Natal the land was green and rolling and the railway line zigzagged up and down through the hills in curves that would have horrified a European engineer. Further north still, it became tropical and dangerous with fevers that struck down both man and beast.
In London, though, they had always felt the world ended at Ealing or Greenwich, at Hoxton or Camberwell, and that anywhere devoid of its murky gaslight simply was not alive. England was still aglow over Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and patriotism had run wild at the homage paid by the crowned heads of Europe to the woman who had become the most venerated in the world. The belief that prosperity and wealth were all that mattered was beginning to grow uncertain, however, and there was even a feeling that it was becoming vulgar, and that the Prince of Wales, with his cards and his women, didn’t help the image much. Out here, away from the buildings and the theatres, away from Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay and the swirl of Lottie Collins’ red petticoats, things looked different.
The Afrikaners, he had noticed, seemed quite unimpressed by the jingoistic tub-thumping of British politicians. The only thing they seemed conscious of was that British settlers, the hated Outlanders, were trying to usurp power in the Transvaal. He had already become aware of the Boers’ distrust for the British and their contempt for the British soldier. Colley’s mismanagement of the 1881 campaign had added to their distaste for British interference a deep-seated scorn for the British army’s marksmanship, which compared unfavourably with their own ability to shoot the eye out of a springbok without damaging the meat.
Dabney had still been a small child at the time of that campaign and, like every other British schoolboy, had grown up feeling the shame of Colley’s defeat at Majuba Hill. He had been led to believe the British were invincible and the story of disaster at the hands of Boer farmers had been hard to accept.
He glanced across the carriage at his father who was sitting opposite, lean-faced, slim, surprisingly young-looking for his age. He was frowning. Looking up, he caught his son’s eye on him and Dabney waited warily. He still wasn’t sure whether the old man had wanted him as an aide. There were times even when he felt his father resented the trick he’d played, yet at others he had the feeling he was glad to have him, if only for someone to open his heart to, because his tour round the military bases of South Africa had made him few friends.
He had found most of the mounted regiments ineffective in the important tasks of reconnaissance – indeed, many of them seemed to have no idea what reconnaissance meant – and it was clear they considered the wastage of horses on such an unimportant task a disaster when they preferred to save them for the charge with levelled sabre or lance. Despite their objections to the carbine they carried, he had constantly insisted that they learned the duties of interception and had more than once tongue-lashed groups of sullen officers who clearly considered such menial tasks best left to black guides and scouts.
‘You’ll probably find,’ he had snapped at them, ‘that you’ll never get a chance to charge them anyway. If it comes to war, the Boers’ strategy will be to go in for raiding. And they’ll be well armed. They always are, and we’ve heard they’ve acquired twenty thousand Mausers as well as Creusot guns.’
A cocksure subaltern had interrupted that surely the Boers couldn’t be regarded as a serious military adversary and the General had glared.
‘If you think that, my boy,’ he had snapped, ‘then you want your head examining because it seems to have escaped your notice that they defeated the Zulus and wiped the floor with us in 1881.’
How much had sunk in Dabney had no idea. He had a feeling that many people thought his father out of date. Wasn’t his nickname Balaclava Bill? Wasn’t the Boer military system a laughable confusion, anyway? Apart from the German-trained artillery and the police, weren’t their armies merely burghers without uniform or drill? And didn’t your Boer never use the bayonet and keep his pony handy so he could run away if things grew too hot?
It flowed off the General like water off a duck’s back, and on one occasion, Dabney had seen a beefy red-faced officer who had dared to protest reduced to tears by the dressing down he received.
‘There are fools, sir,’ the General had snapped, ‘damn’ fools, and you!’
He had watched, blank-faced, as his father had gone on that, though a cavalry officer probably didn’t take well to discipline, he was at least expected to be quick-witted enough to be able to understand what was demanded of him, and had heard him insisting to the 18th Hussars that troopers – and officers – should wear their caps with the chin straps under their chins.
‘That’s why they’re called chin straps,’ he had snapped. ‘What damn good is a man riding at an enemy trying to hold his cap on with his sabre hand?’
To put his point about insisting on orders being carried out he had asked if the men all wore socks as they were supposed to, and, assured that they did, had ordered the colonel to dismount the nearest man and look. Dabney had seen the stare of puzzled disbelief as the man’s feet had proved to be naked inside his boots.
‘How did you guess, Father?’ he had asked.
‘Didn’t guess.’ The old man’s smile had been sly. ‘He used to be my batman and I could never make him wear ’em either.’
Dabney was itching to ask more questions but he had learned to remain silent and listen. An aide existed not to ask questions but to do as he was told, to run errands, and translate his chief’s wishes into facts. But if he had any sense at all he could learn an enormous amount that would be useful to him because he was standing alongside experience and wisdom and, no matter what the quality of his general, could learn how to handle things and sort out the bad from the good for his future use.
His father was staring from the window of the carriage now, his eyes narrowed and thoughtful.
‘What are you thinking of, Father?’ Dabney asked.
The General stirred. ‘Jameson,’ he said.
Dabney said nothing, waiting. Doctor Jameson’s ill-starred raid towards Johannesburg, the Transvaal capital, to seize power from the Boers, had first roused the bitter resentment that was now snowballing into a hatred that Dabney would not have believed possible when he had been in England. There, Jameson had seemed a hero. In South Africa his stature was considerably less, and the resentment the vociferous Outlanders had stirred up had reached a dangerous crescendo.
‘That damned raid—’ his father spoke slowly ‘—it didn’t happen because of the lack of parliamentary representation the Outlanders complained of. It happened because there’s gold in the Transvaal and they want to get their hands on it. There are too many businessmen out here itching to make money, and too many politicians who see a little personal glory on the horizon. Milner, the High Commissioner at the Cape, regards the Boer leaders only as humbugs. I rate them rather more highly.’
Dabney sat in silence, thankful that Lord Ellesmere, his father’s chief of staff, was laid up in Cape Town with a stomach upset, and that his father had agreed to leave the Cape garrison to him and take only one aide to the meeting that had been called at Pietermaritzburg with Hely-Hutchinson, the Governor of Natal, and Sir George White, who had been sent out as commander-in-chief. He was aware he was getting a very useful insight into military thinking.
‘Besides which,’ the General said slowly, ‘though the British army’s been in action on and off for years and
there are a lot of victories to crow about, nobody seems to have noticed they were all against untrained savages. Our manoeuvres are still worked out on exercises of a hundred years ago and that sort of thing’s sheer folly against the Boers.’
As they descended from the train at De Aar a spider was waiting for them. It was driven by a Kaffir who took their bags and jolted and rocked them along rough cart tracks to a spread of farm buildings in a flat valley between low hills. There were no cattle in sight, but there was a compound full of splendid-looking horses in the shade of a group of eucalyptus trees. Commandant Burger, who had been the General’s second-in-command with the North Cape Horse in Zululand, was an old man now and not afraid to offer warnings.
‘Your soldiers will have to learn to do things differently, my friend,’ he said as they sat on the step after lunch. ‘They spend two months of the year training and the rest parading. They also think of Boers as untrained farmers, but every Boer is his own general and he knows the country like the back of his hand. They have no supply problems and unlike your soldiers they are not taught to fight and die. Because there aren’t many of them, they have always fought to live and they know when to run away.’
The General nodded, not speaking.
‘If war comes,’ Burger continued, ‘the North Cape Horse will muster as they mustered in 1879 and 1881. Since I shall not be with them this time, though, my son will lead them. Nevertheless—’ the old man paused ‘—tell your people that they consider your rooinek officers éffète and lacking in staying power. You and I remember one such, meneer.’
‘We do indeed!’
The words burst out explosively and Dabney remembered that it had been Burger’s horse that Aubrey Cosgro, who had shot himself in Paris, had stolen after the disaster at Tshethoslane.
‘The Boers are not lacking in confidence either,’ Burger went on. ‘And you will have to send the biggest army in your history and maintain it at a terrible distance.’
‘Don’t underestimate us, Commandant,’ the General said. ‘If it comes to war – and God grant it won’t – the whole British Empire will be behind us.’
The old Cape Boer looked over his spectacles, a shaggy figure with a beard that looked like the nest of a not very tidy bird. ‘And don’t underestimate the Boers, my dear friend,’ he advised. ‘It will take time for you to bring your troops from Canada and Australia and New Zealand, and the only problem for the Boers they would present is that it would take a few weeks longer to kill them all. You must remember the Cape is two thousand miles from Durban and the Boers could overrun Natal before you could even get them on to trains.’
The scenery in Natal was green and rolling, and widow birds with long black tail feathers like the crêpe on the hat of an undertaker’s mute floated over the green slopes. The windows of the carriage were slashed with rain drops again and there were heavy grey clouds hanging on the hill tops. It seemed to reflect the general’s mood. He wasn’t looking forward to the conference that had been called.
Pietermaritzburg stood in a basin of smooth rolling down-land broken by forests of fir and gum trees and seemed sleepy and dead-alive, and to Dabney surprisingly mellow for a town only sixty years old, its gardens mature, its trees large and stable, the Raadzaal fitting into the background of the wide square it dominated.
One of Sir George White’s aides appeared as they watched the baggage unloaded and saluted smartly.
‘I have a carriage waiting, sir.’
The drive through the rain-swept town was made almost clandestinely so that Dabney became aware of the efforts the British army was making not to cause alarm. Surrounded by staff officers and aides, White rose as they entered. He was a tall thin man of much the same age as Dabney’s father but he seemed far less active, with a gaunt frame and sunken eyes. When he had broken his leg some time before, he had assumed his active service was over and had been surprised to be sent out in the growing crisis in South Africa to command Natal. He looked old, nervous and doddery.
‘Hello, George,’ General Goff said briskly. ‘How’s the leg?’
‘All right for everything except running away.’ White ran his hand over his bald head and gestured at the men with him. ‘You know Hely-Hutchinson, of course. This is Symons.’
General Symons had a curiously-shaped skull with an elongated jaw and soft cheeks. With his hair plastered down across his head and a looping moustache that didn’t quite manage to curl up at the ends, he looked a little like a grocer. Colby half-expected him to wring his hands and ask ‘What can I do for you, sir?’
Hely-Hutchinson led off with the comment that Milner was very uneasy.
‘So he ought to be,’ General Goff growled unforgivingly. ‘He’s done enough to stir up trouble.’
Hely-Hutchinson gave him a sour look. ‘He finds it hard to believe that two small republics will take on the British Empire.’
‘He obviously doesn’t know the Boers,’ the General said. ‘I remember them for their independence, mobility and marksmanship.’
‘And corruption,’ Symons observed.
The General ignored the remark. He didn’t seem to like Symons much, and Dabney remembered that, while Wolseley had been calling for ten thousand more men for South Africa, Symons had been saying five thousand were more than enough to defend the whole of Natal.
White gestured towards the maps spread on the table. ‘What’s your view, Coll?’
General Goff stepped across to the map. ‘I think they’ll invade,’ he said bluntly. ‘What’s more, they think they’ll win.’
‘They couldn’t possibly,’ Symons said.
‘No,’ the General agreed. ‘I don’t think they could. But by God, they’ll probably give us the fright of our lives.’
‘It’s a worrying situation,’ Hely-Hutchinson admitted. ‘We can hardly retreat from the north-west corner of Natal and leave it to them.’
‘It might save a lot of trouble,’ the General pointed out.
‘And leave the Colonists to the Boers?’
‘They’re not savages,’ the General said coldly. ‘They’re a God-fearing people who believe in the sanctity of the family and, despite what the newspapers try to make us believe, they aren’t given to atrocities. It wouldn’t be for long. We should get it back.’
‘We can’t let go a part of the Empire.’
‘It’s big enough. We shouldn’t miss it.’
‘A retreat would disgust the loyalists in Natal.’
‘The most belligerent of whom aren’t Natalians at all,’ the General snapped. ‘They’re Outlanders who’ve bolted from the trouble they’ve stirred up in Jo’burg.’
White hurried to change the subject, and one of Hely-Hutchinson’s young men, a sprig of aristocracy with a high stiff collar and a tight suit despite the heat of the day, gave Dabney a sidelong look and winked.
‘If they invade,’ White was saying, ‘they’ll probably be able to muster about thirty-five thousand men. With the reinforcements that are arriving, we shall have about thirteen. Of course, there’s an army corps expected by the end of the year.’
‘Who’s got it?’ Hely-Hutchinson asked.
‘Buller.’
‘Well, he’s all right. He’s got a good reputation and he knows the Boers.’
‘He’s also sick of South Africa,’ General Goff said sharply. ‘He told Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, that if he were ordered to the Cape he’d come back as soon as he could.’
Hely-Hutchinson gave him a startled look. ‘Buller?’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I do.’ Dabney recognised the stubborn tone in his father’s voice. ‘I’ve known him a long time. Buller backs away from responsibility and he’ll be handling more men than he’s ever been called on to handle before.’
‘Buller’s one of our best men.’ Hely-Hutchinson seemed to think
he was having his leg pulled. ‘And surely we can hold Natal until he arrives? Where are your people, George?’
‘Two main groups,’ White said. ‘Eight thousand at Ladysmith and four thousand at Glencoe, guarding the branch line to the coalfields at Dundee. I’d like to hold the Biggarsberg Mountains but water’s scarce up there and I feel we’d be exposed to flank attacks from the Orange Free State in the west and the Transvaal in the east – let alone head-on attacks from both. We’d be wide open to a giant pincer movement.’
‘Not sure the Boers are that sophisticated,’ General Goff observed. ‘Nor are they fools, however. In 1881, our Regulars didn’t know whether they were on their arse or their elbow.’
Symons gave him a sharp glance, vaguely contemptuous, as if he regarded him as a has-been. ‘From Glencoe my four thousand can strike at any gathering of Boers – particularly with the support of the eight thousand in Ladysmith.’
There was a great deal more argument but the words of Symons and the political weight of Hely-Hutchinson swayed White and he finally agreed uneasily to allow Symons to make his stand in the northern corner of the province. As the meeting broke up, Dabney saw that his father’s face was grim.
‘Symons is an ass,’ he growled. ‘He has only two ideas in his head – his bloody duty and doing it like a gentleman. The Boers don’t think that way. He’ll make a mess of things. He looks like a ferret, anyway.’
Dabney kept his face straight with difficulty. His father’s comments often sounded unthinking but the old man had a habit of being surprisingly shrewd.
Symons’ troops seemed in good shape, however, and, with polo for the officers and drill for the men, he considered he’d got them fit for anything the Boers might try. Putting on a field day for General Goff, he smiled as the artillery galloped up, unlimbered and fired blanks and the infantry moved forward in four waves.