AT THE BRITISH FRONT
LADYSMITH, NATAL, _Wednesday, October 11, 1899_.
Ladysmith breathes freely to-day, but a week ago she seemed likely to
become another Lucknow. Of line battalions only the Liverpools were
here, besides two batteries of field artillery, some of the 18th
Hussars, and the 5th Lancers. If Kruger or Joubert had then allowed the
Boers encamped on the Free State border to have their own way, no one
can say what might have happened. Our force would have been outnumbered
at least four to one, and probably more. In event of disaster the Boers
would have seized an immense quantity of military stores accumulated in
the camp, and at the railway station. What is worse, they would have
isolated the still smaller force lately thrown forward to Dundee, so as
to break the strong defensive position of the Biggarsberg, which cuts
off the north of Natal, and can only be traversed by three difficult
passes. Dundee was just as much threatened from the east frontier beyond
the Buffalo River, where the Transvaal Boers of the Utrecht and Vryheid
district have been mustered in strong force for nearly a fortnight now.
With our two advanced posts "lapped up" (the phrase is a little musty
here), our stores lost, and our reputation among the Dutch and native
populations entirely ruined, the campaign would have begun badly.
For the Boers it was a fine strategic opportunity, and they were
perfectly aware of that. But "the Old Man," as they affectionately call
the President, had his own prudent reasons for refusing it. "Let the
enemy fire first," he says, like the famous Frenchman, and so far he has
been able to hold the most ardent of the encamped burghers in check. "If
he should not be able!" we kept saying. We still say it morning and
evening, but the pinch of the danger is passed. Last Thursday night the
1st Devons and the 19th Hussars began to arrive and the crisis ended.
Yesterday before daybreak half the Gordons came. We have now a mountain
battery and three batteries of field artillery, the 19th Hussars (the
18th having gone forward to Dundee), besides the 5th Lancers (the "Irish
Lancers"), who are in faultless condition, and a considerable mixed
force of the Natal Volunteers. Of these last, the Carbineers are perhaps
the best, and generally serve as scouts towards the Free State frontier.
But all have good repute as horsemen, marksmen, and guides, and at
present they are the force which the Boers fear most. They are split up
into several detachments--the Border Mounted Rifles, the Natal Mounted
Rifles (from Durban), the Imperial Light Horse, the Natal Police, and
the Umvoti Mounted Rifles, who are chiefly Dutch. Then of infantry there
are the Natal Royal Rifles (only about 150 strong), the Durban Light
Infantry, and the Natal Field Artillery. As far as I can estimate, the
total Natal Volunteer force will not exceed 2,000, but they are well
armed, are accustomed to the Boer method of warfare, and will be watched
with interest. Unhappily, many of them here are already suffering from
the change of life and food in camp. That is inevitable when volunteers
first take the field.
But Ladysmith has an evil reputation besides. Last year the troops here
were prostrated with enteric. There is a little fever and a good deal
of dysentery even now among the regulars. The stream by the camp is
condemned, and all water is supplied in tiny rations from pumps. The
main permanent camp is built of corrugated iron, practically the sole
building material in South Africa, and quite universal for roofs, so
that the country has few "architectural features" to boast of. The
cavalry are quartered in the tin huts, but the Liverpools, Devons,
Gordons, and Volunteers have pitched their own tents, and a terrible
time they are having of it. Dust is the curse of the place. We remember
the Long Valley as an Arcadian dell. Veterans of the Soudan recall the
black sand-storms with regretful sighs. The thin, red dust comes
everywhere, and never stops. It blinds your eyes, it stops your nose, it
scorches your throat till the invariable shilling for a little glass of
any liquid seems cheap as dirt. It turns the whitest shirt brown in half
an hour, it creeps into the works of your watch and your bowels. It lies
in a layer mixed with flies on the top of your rations. The white ants
eat away the flaps of the tents, and the men wake up covered with dust,
like children in a hayfield. Even mules die of it in convulsions. It was
in this land that the ostrich developed its world-renowned digestive
powers; and no wonder.
[Illustration: MAP OF LADYSMITH AND NEIGHBOURHOOD]
The camp stands on a barren plain, nearly two miles north-west of the
town--if we may so call the one straight road of stores and tin-roofed
bungalows. Low, flat-topped hills surround it, bare and rocky. But to
understand the country it is best to climb into the mountains of the
long Drakensberg, which forms the Free State frontier in a series of
strangely jagged and precipitous peaks, and at one place, by the
junction with Basutoland, runs up to 11,000 feet. Last Sunday I went
into the Free State through Van Reenen's Pass, over which a little
railway has been carried by zigzag "reverses." The summit is 5,500 feet
above the sea, or nearly 2,000 feet above Ladysmith. From the steep
slopes, in places almost as green as the Lowlands or Yorkshire fells, I
looked south-east far over Natal--a parched, brown land like the desert
beyond the Dead Sea, dusty bits of plain broken up by line upon line of
bare red mountain. It seemed a poor country to make a fuss about, yet as
South Africa goes, it is rich and even fertile in its way. Indeed, on
the reddest granite mountain one never fails to find multitudes of
flowering plants and pasturage for thinnish sheep. Across the main
range, Van Reenen's is the largest and best known pass. The old farmer
who gave it the name is living there still and bitterly laments the
chance of war. But there are other passes too, any of which may suddenly
become famous now--Olivier's Hoek, near the gigantic Mont aux Sources,
Bezuidenhaut, Netherby, Tintwa, and (north of Van Reenen's) De Beer's
Pass, Cundycleugh, Muller's, and Botha's, beyond which the range ends
with the frontier at Majuba. Three or four of these passes are crossed
by waggon roads, but Van Reenen's has the only railway. The frontier,
marked by a barbed wire fence across the summit of the pass, must be
nearly forty miles from Ladysmith, but from the cliffs above it, the
little British camp can be seen like a toy through this clear African
air, and Boer sentries watch it all day, ready to signal the least
movement of its troops, betrayed by the dust. Their own main force is
distributed in camps along the hills well beyond the nine-miles' limit
ordained by the Convention. The largest camp is said to be further north
at Nelson's Kop, but all the camps are very well hidden, though in one
place I saw about 500 of the horses trying to graze. The rains are late,
and the grass on the high plateau of the Free State is not so good as
on the Natal slopes of the pass. The Boer commandoes suffer much from
want of it. When all your army consists of mounted infantry, forage
counts next to food.
At present the Van Reenen Railway ends at Harrismith, an arid but
cheerful little town at the foot of the great cliffs of the Plaatburg.
It boasts its racecourse, golf-links, musical society, and some
acquaintance with the German poets. The Scotch made it their own, though
a few Dutch, English, and other foreigners were allowed to remain on
sufferance. Now unhappily the place is almost deserted, and Burns
himself would hardly find a welcome there. In the Free State every
resident may be commandeered, and I believe forty-eight hours counts as
"residence." You see the advantage of an extended franchise. The penalty
for escape is confiscation of property, and five years' imprisonment or
£500 fine, if caught. The few British who remained have had all their
horses, carts, and supplies taken. Some are set to serve the ambulance;
a few will be sent to watch Basutoland; but most of them have abandoned
their property and risked the escape to Natal, slipping down the railway
under bales or built up in the luggage vans like nuns in a brick wall.
In one case the Boers commandeered three wool trucks on the frontier.
Those trucks were shunted on to a siding for the night, and in the
morning the wool looked strangely shrunk somehow. Yet it was not wool
that had been taken out and smuggled through by the next train. For Scot
helps Scot, and it is Scots who work the railway. It pays to be a Scot
out here. I have only met one Irishman, and he was unhappy.
But for the grotesque side of refugee unhappiness one should see the
native train which comes down every night from Newcastle way, and
disappears towards Maritzburg and safety. Native workers of every
kind--servants, labourers, miners--are throwing up their places and
rushing towards the sea. The few who can speak English say, "Too plenty
bom-bom!" as sufficient explanation of their panic. The Government has
now fitted the open trucks with cross-seats and side-bars for their
convenience, and so, hardly visible in the darkness, the black crowd
rolls up to the platform. Instantly black hands with pinkish palms are
thrust through all the bars, as in a monkey-house. Black heads jabber
and click with excitement. White teeth suddenly appear from nowhere. It
is for bread and tin-meats they clamour, and they are willing to pay.
But a loaf costs a shilling. Everything costs a shilling here, unless it
costs half-a-crown; and Natal grows fat on war. A shilling for a bit of
bread! What is the good of Christianity? So the dusky hands are
withdrawn, and the poor Zulu with untutored maw goes starving on. But if
any still doubt our primitive ancestry, let them hear that Zulu's
outcries of pain, or watch the fortunate man who has really got a loaf,
and gripping it with both hands, gnaws it in his corner, turning his
suspicious eyes to right and left with fear.
The air is full of wild rumours. A boy riding over Laing's Nek saw 1,000
armed Boers feeding their horses on Manning's farm. The Boers have been
seen at a Dutch settlement this side Van Reenen's. Yesterday a section
of the Gordons on their arrival were sent up to look at them in an
armoured train. It is thought that war will be proclaimed to-day. That
has been thought every day for a fortnight past, and the land buzzes
with lies which may at any moment be true.
Half the Manchesters have just marched in to trumpet and drum. When I
think of those ragged camps of peasants just over the border the pomp
and circumstance seem all on one side.
_Friday, October 13, 1899._
So it has begun at last, for good or evil. Here we think it began
yesterday, just at the very moment when Sir George White arrived. Late
at night scouts brought news of masses of Boers crossing the Tintwa
Pass, and going into laager with their waggons only fifteen miles away
to the west. The men stood to their arms, and long before light we were
marching steadily forward along the Van Reenen road. First came the
Liverpools, then the three batteries of Field Artillery with a mountain
battery, then the Devons and the Gordons. The Manchesters acted as
rear-guard, and the Dublin Fusiliers, who were hurried down from Dundee
by train, came late, and then were hurried back again. The column took
all its stores and forage for five days in a train of waggons (horses,
mules, and oxen) about two miles long. When day broke we saw the great
mountains on the Basuto border, gleaming with snow like the Alps. Far in
front the cavalry--the 5th Lancers and 19th Hussars with the Natal
Volunteers--were sweeping over the patches of plain and struggling up
the hills in search of that reported laager. But not a Boer of it was to
be seen. At nine o'clock, having advanced eight or nine miles, the
whole column took up a strong position, with all its baggage and train
in faultless order, and went to sleep. About one we began to return, and
now just as the mail goes, we are all back again in camp for tea. And so
ends the first day of active hostilities.
[Illustration: GENERAL SIR GEORGE STEWART WHITE, V.C., G.C.I.E., G.C.B.,
G.C.S.I.]