The compositors and the plant were also captives of our bow and spear and rather cross about it — especially the ex-editor’s wife, a German with a tongue. When one saw a compositor, one told him to compose Lord Roberts’ Official Proclamation to the deeply injured enemy. I had the satisfaction of picking up from the floor a detailed account of how Her Majesty’s Brigade of Guards had been driven into action by the fire of our artillery; and a proof of a really rude leader about myself.
There was in that lull a large trade in proclamations — and butter at half a crown the pound. We used all the old stereos, advertising long-since exhausted comestibles, coal and groceries (facepowder, I think, was the only surviving commodity in the Bloemfontein shops), and we enlivened their interstices with our own contributions, supplemented by the works of dusty men, who looked in and gave us very fine copy — mostly libellous.
Julian Ralph, the very best of Americans, was a co-editor also. And he had a grown son who went down with a fever unpleasantly like typhoid. We searched for a competent doctor, and halted a German who, so great was the terror of our arms after the ‘capture,’ demanded haughtily; ‘But who shall pay me for my trouble if I come?’ No one seemed to know, but several men explained who would pay him if he dallied on the way. He took one look at the boy’s stomach, and said happily; ‘Of course it is typhoid.’ Then came the question how to get the case over to hospital, which was rank with typhoid, the Boers having cut the water supply. The first thing was to fetch down the temperature with an alcohol swabbing. Here we were at a standstill till some genius — I think it was Landon — said; ‘I’ve noticed there’s an officer’s wife in the place who’s wearing a fringe.’ On this hint a man went forth into the wide dusty streets, and presently found her, fringe and all. Heaven knows how she had managed to wangle her way up, but she was a sportswoman of purest water. ‘Come to my room,’ said she, and in passing over the priceless bottle, only sighed ‘Don’t use it all — unless you have to.’ We ran the boy down from 103 to a generous 99 and pushed him into hospital, where it turned out that it was not typhoid after all but only bad veldtfever.
First and last there were, I think, eight thousand cases of typhoid in Bloemfontein. Often to my knowledge both ‘ceremonial’ Union jacks in a battalion would be ‘in use ‘at the same time. Extra corpses went to the grave under the Service blanket.
Our own utter carelessness, officialdom and ignorance were responsible for much of the deathrate. I have seen a Horse Battery ‘dead to the wide’ come in at midnight in raging rain and be assigned, by some idiot saving himself trouble, the site of an evacuated typhoid-hospital. Result — thirty cases after a month. I have seen men drinking raw Modder-river a few yards below where the mules were staling; and the organisation and siting of latrines seemed to be considered ‘nigger-work.’ The most important medical office in any battalion ought to be Provost–Marshal of Latrines.
To typhoid was added dysentery, the smell of which is even more depressing than the stench of human carrion. One could wind the dysentery tents a mile off. And remember that, till we planted disease, the vast sun-baked land was antiseptic and sterilised — so much so that a clean abdominal Mauser-wound often entailed no more than a week of abstention from solid food. I found this out on a hospital-train, where I had to head off a mob of angry ‘abdominals’ from regular rations. That was when we were picking up casualties after a small affair called Paardeberg, and the lists — really about two thousand — were carefully minimised to save the English public from ‘shock.’ During this work I happened to fall unreservedly, in darkness, over a man near the train, and filled my palms with gravel. He explained in an even voice that he was ‘fractured ‘ip, sir. ‘Ope you ain’t ‘urt yourself, sir.’ I never got at this unknown Philip Sidney’s name. They were wonderful even in the hour of death — these men and boys — lodge-keepers and ex-butlers of the Reserve and raw town-lads of twenty.
But to return to Bloemfontein. In an interval of our editorial labours, I went out of the town and presently met the ‘solitary horseman’ of the novels. He was a Conductor — Commissariat Sergeant — who reported that the ‘flower of the British Army’ had been ambushed and cut up at a place called ‘Sanna’s Post,’ and passed on obviously discomposed. I had imagined the flower of that Army to be busied behind me reading our paper; but, a short while after, I met an officer who, in the old Indian days, was nicknamed ‘the Sardine.’ He was calm, but rather fuzzy as to the outlines of his uniform, which was frayed and ripped by bullets. Yes, there had been trouble where he came from, but he was fuller for the moment of professional admiration.
‘What was it like? They got us in a donga. Just like going into a theatre. “Stalls left, dress circle right,” don’t you know? We just dropped into the trap, and it was “Infantry this way, please. Guns to the right, if you please.” Beautiful bit of work! How many did they get of us? About twelve hundred, I think, and four — maybe six — guns. Expert job they made of it. That’s the result of bill-stickin’ expeditions.’ And with more compliments to the foe, he too passed on.
By the time that I returned to Bloemfontein the populace had it that eighty thousand Boers were closing in on the town at once, and the Press Censor (Lord Stanley, now Derby) was besieged with persons anxious to telegraph to Cape Town. To him a non-Aryan pushed a domestic wire ‘weather here changeable.’ Stanley, himself a little worried for the fate of some of his friends in that ambuscaded column, rebuked the gentleman.
The Sardine was right about the ‘bill-sticking’ expeditions. Wandering columns had been sent round the country to show how kind the British desired to be to the misguided Boer. But the Transvaal Boer, not being a town-bird, was unimpressed by the ‘fall’ of the Free State capital, and ran loose on the veldt with his pony and Mauser.
So there had to be a battle, which was called the Battle of Kari Siding. All the staff of the Bloemfontein Friend attended. I was put in a Cape cart, with native driver, containing most of the drinks, and with me was a well-known war-correspondent. The enormous pale landscape swallowed up seven thousand troops without a sign, along a front of seven miles. On our way we passed a collection of neat, deep and empty trenches well undercut for shelter on the shrapnel side. A young Guards officer, recently promoted to Brevet–Major — and rather sore with the paper that we had printed it Branch — studied them interestedly. They were the first dim lines of the dug-out, but his and our eyes were held. The Hun had designed them secundum artem, but the Boer had preferred the open within reach of his pony. At last we came to a lone farm-house in a vale adorned with no less than five white flags. Beyond the ridge was a sputter of musketry and now and then the whoop of a field-piece. ‘Here,’ said my guide and guardian, ‘we get out and walk. Our driver will wait for us at the farmhouse.’ But the driver loudly objected. ‘No, sar. They shoot. They shoot me.’ ‘But they are white-flagged all over,’ we said. ‘Yess, sar. That why,’ was his answer, and he preferred to take his mules down into a decently remote donga and wait our return.
The farm-house (you will see in a little why I am so detailed) held two men and, I think, two women, who received us disinterestedly. We went on into a vacant world full of sunshine and distances, where now and again a single bullet sang to himself. What I most objected to was the sensation of being under aimed fire — being, as it were, required as a head. ‘What are they doing this for?’ I asked my friend. ‘Because they think we are the Something Light Horse. They ought to be just under this slope.’ I prayed that the particularly Something Light Horse would go elsewhere, which they presently did, for the aimed fire slackened and a wandering Colonial, bored to extinction, turned up with news from a far flank. ‘No; nothing doing and no one to see.’ Then more cracklings and a most cautious move forward to the lip of a large hollow where sheep were grazing. Some of them began to drop and kick. ‘That’s both sides trying sighting-shots,’ said my companion. ‘What range do you make it?’ I asked. ‘Eight hundred, at the nearest. That’s close quarters
nowadays. You’ll never see anything closer than this. Modern rifles make it impossible. We’re hung up till something cracks somewhere.’ There was a decent lull for meals on both sides, interrupted now and again by sputters. Then one indubitable shell — ridiculously like a pip-squeak in that vastness but throwing up much dirt. ‘Krupp! Four or six pounder at extreme range,’ said the expert. ‘They still think we’re the — Light Horse. They’ll come to be fairly regular from now on.’ Sure enough, every twenty minutes or so, one judgmatic shell pitched on our slope. We waited, seeing nothing in the emptiness, and hearing only a faint murmur as of wind along gas-jets, running in and out of the unconcerned hills.
Then pom-poms opened. These were nasty little one-pounders, ten in a belt (which usually jammed about the sixth round). On soft ground they merely thudded. On rock-face the shell breaks up and yowls like a cat. My friend for the first time seemed interested. ‘If these are their pom-poms, it’s Pretoria for us,’ was his diagnosis. I looked behind me — the whole length of South Africa down to Cape Town — and it seemed very far. I felt that I could have covered it in five minutes under fair conditions, but — not with those aimed shots up my back. The pom-poms opened again at a bare rock-reef that gave the shells full value. For about two minutes a file of racing ponies, their tails and their riders’ heads well down, showed and vanished northward. ‘Our pom-poms,’ said the correspondent. ‘Le Gallais, I expect. Now we shan’t be long.’ All this time the absurd Krupp was faithfully feeling for us, vice-Light Horse, and, given a few more hours, might perhaps hit one of us. Then to the left, almost under us, a small piece of hanging woodland filled and fumed with our shrapnel much as a man’s moustache fills with cigarette-smoke. It was most impressive and lasted for quite twenty minutes. Then silence; then a movement of men and horses from our side up the slope, and the hangar our guns had been hammering spat steady fire at them. More Boer ponies on more skylines; a last flurry of pom-poms on the right and a little frieze of far-off meek-tailed ponies, already out of rifle range.
‘Maffeesh,’ said the correspondent, and fell to writing on his knee. ‘We’ve shifted ‘em.’
Leaving our infantry to follow men on ponyback towards the Equator, we returned to the farm-house. In the donga where he was waiting someone squibbed off a rifle just after we took our seats, and our driver flogged out over the rocks to the danger of our sacred bottles.
Then Bloemfontein, and Gwynne storming in late with his accounts complete-one hundred and twenty-five casualties, and the general opinion that ‘French was a bit of a butcher’ and a tale of the General commanding the cavalry who absolutely refused to break up his horses by gallop ing them across raw rock — ’not for any dam’ Boer.’
Months later, I got a cutting from an American paper, on information from Geneva — even then a pest-house of propaganda — describing how I and some officers — names, date, and place correct — had entered a farm-house where we found two men and three women. We had dragged the women from under the bed where they had taken refuge (I assure you that no Tantie Sannie of that day could bestow herself beneath any known bed) and, giving them a hundred yards’ start, had shot them down as they ran.
Even then, the beastliness struck me as more comic than significant. But by that time I ought to have known that it was the Hun’s reflection of his own face as he spied at our back-windows. He had thrown in the ‘hundred yards’ start’ touch as a tribute to our national sense of fair play.
From the business point of view the war was ridiculous. We charged ourselves step by step with the care and maintenance of all Boerdom — women and children included. Whence horrible tales of our atrocities in the concentration-camps.
One of the most widely exploited charges was our deliberate cruelty in making prisoners’ tents and quarters open to the north. A Miss Hobhouse among others was loud in this matter, but she was to be excused.
We were showing off our newly-built little ‘Woolsack’ to a great lady on her way upcountry, where a residence was being built for her. At the larder the wife pointed out that it faced south-that quarter being the coldest when one is south of the Equator. The great lady considered the heresy for a moment. Then, with the British sniff which abolishes the absurd, ‘Hmm! I shan’t allow that to make any difference to me.’
Some Army and Navy Stores Lists were introduced into the prisoners’ camps, and the women returned to civil life with a knowledge of corsets, stockings, toilet-cases, and other accessories frowned upon by their clergymen and their husbands. Qua women they were not very lovely, but they made their men fight, and they knew well how to fight on their own lines.
In the give-and-take of our work our troops got to gauge the merits of the commando-leaders they were facing. As I remember the scale, De Wet, with two hundred and fifty men, was to be taken seriously. With twice that number he was likely to fall over his own feet. Smuts (of Cambridge), warring, men assured me, in a black suit, trousers rucked to the knees, and a top-hat, could handle five hundred but, beyond that, got muddled. And so with the others. I had the felicity of meeting Smuts as a British General, at the Ritz during the Great War. Meditating on things seen and suffered, he said that being hunted about the veldt on a pony made a man think quickly, and that perhaps Mr. Balfour (as he was then) would have been better for the same experience.
Each commando had its own reputation in the field, and the grizzlier their beards the greater our respect. There was an elderly contingent from Wakkerstroom which demanded most cautious handling. They shot, as you might say, for the pot. The young men were not so good. And there were foreign contingents who insisted on fighting after the manner of Europe. These the Boers wisely put in the forefront of the battle and kept away from. In one affair the Zarps — the Transvaal Police — fought brilliantly and were nearly all killed. But they were Swedes for the most part, and we were sorry.
Occasionally foreign prisoners were gathered in. Among them I remember a Frenchman who had joined for pure logical hatred of England, but, being a professional, could not resist telling us how we ought to wage the war. He was quite sound but rather cantankerous.
The ‘war’ became an unpleasing compost of ‘political considerations,’ social reform, and housing; maternity-work and variegated absurdities. It is possible, though I doubt it, that first and last we may have killed four thousand Boers. Our own casualties, mainly from preventible disease, must have been six times as many.
The junior officers agreed that the experience ought to be a ‘first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,’ but their practical conclusions were misleading. Long-range, aimed rifle-fire would do the work of the future; troops would never get nearer each other than half a mile, and Mounted Infantry would be vital. This was because, having found men on foot cannot overtake men on ponies, we created eighty thousand of as good Mounted Infantry as the world had seen. For these Western Europe had no use. Artillery preparation of wire-works, such as were not at Magersfontein, was rather overlooked in the reformers’ schemes, on account of the difficulty of bringing up ammunition by horse-power. The pom-poms, and Lord Dundonald’s galloping light gun-carriages, ate up their own weight in shell in three or four minutes.
In the ramshackle hotel at Bloemfontein, where the correspondents lived and the officers dropped in, one heard free and fierce debate as points came up, but — since no one dreamt of the internal-combustion engine that was to stand the world on its thick head, and since our wireless apparatus did not work in those landscapes — we were all beating the air.
Eventually the ‘war’ petered out on political lines. Brother Boer — and all ranks called him that — would do everything except die. Our men did not see why they should perish chasing stray commandoes, or festering in block-houses, and there followed a sort of demoralising ‘handy-pandy’ of alternate surrenders complicated by exchange of Army tobacco for Boer brandy which was bad for both sides.
At long last, we were left apologising to a deeply-indignant people, whom we had been nursing and doct
oring for a year or two; and who now expected, and received, all manner of free gifts and appliances for the farming they had never practised. We put them in a position to uphold and expand their primitive lust for racial domination, and thanked God we were ‘rid of a knave.’
* * * * *
Into these shifts and changes we would descend yearly for five or six months from the peace of England to the deeper peace of ‘The Woolsack,’ and life under the oak-trees overhanging the patio, where mother-squirrels taught their babies to climb, and in the stillness of hot afternoons the fall of an acorn was almost like a shot. To one side of us was a pine and eucalyptus grove, heavy with mixed scent; in front our garden, where anything one planted out in May became a blossoming bush by December. Behind all tiered the flank of Table Mountain and its copses of silvertrees, flanking scarred ravines. To get to Rhodes’ house, ‘Groote Schuur,’ one used a path through a ravine set with hydrangeas, which in autumn (England’s spring) were one solid packed blue river. To this Paradise we moved each year-end from 1900 to 1907 — a complete equipage of governess, maids and children, so that the latter came to know and therefore, as children will, to own the Union Castle Line — stewards and all and on any change of governess to instruct the new hand how cabins were set away for a long voyage and ‘what went where.’ Incidentally we lost two governesses and one loved cook by marriage, the tepid seas being propitious to such things.
Ship-board life, going and coming, was a mere prolongation of South Africa and its interests. There were Jews a plenty from the Rand; Pioneers; Native Commissioners dealing with Basutos or Zulus; men of the Matabele Wars and the opening of Rhodesia; prospectors; politicians of all stripes, all full of their business Army officers also, and from one of these, when I expected no such jewel, I got a tale called ‘Little Foxes’ — so true in detail that an awed Superintendent of Police wrote me out of Port Sudan, demanding how I had come to know the very names of the hounds in the very pack to which he had been Whip in his youth. But, as I wrote him back, I had been talking with the Master.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 998