TO MEYER'S KOP.
Leeuwspruit--Bethlehem--De Wet surrounded--Ridley goes to
Slabbert's Nek--De Wet already through--Meyer's Kop---Rifle
Positions--Inefficiency of shrapnel--Necessity of adapting tactics
to those of the enemy--A looted store.
We marched out of Reitz on the 13th of July, and camped at Hartebeeste
Hoek about dusk, experiencing an icy cold night with a very heavy frost:
the companies on picket suffered severely, as there was no wood to be
got in the neighbourhood. Our march the next day to Leeuwspruit, just
outside Bethlehem, was very trying indeed: there was a strong wind
blowing from our front, and clouds of dust gathered up from the burnt up
veldt stung our faces and filled our eyes and mouths. There was not a
patch of grass anywhere, nothing but black ground for miles: the battery
on this occasion, with unusual want of thought, persisted in marching on
the windward side, every now and then raising up great clouds of dust,
which came rolling over to us like black smoke from a huge fire. It is
difficult and trying for horses, which walk faster than men, to keep in
rear of a battalion of infantry, and for this reason a careful battery
commander tries to get on the flank of infantry; but when the wind is
blowing from that flank, it is very uncomfortable for the foot soldiers.
We halted a day and a half at Leeuwspruit, and left that place at three
o'clock in the afternoon on the 16th of July for Bethlehem, reaching the
town at dusk and halting for orders on the outskirts. The Camerons
received orders to remain at Bethlehem with the G.O.C., the Headquarters
of the Brigade, the Supplies and the Field Hospital; but we were
directed to fill up our wagons with several days' rations and to
proceed with Major Simpson's battery, the 81st to a farm called
Sevastopol, lying somewhat to the south west. We waited a couple of
hours while our wagons went off to draw rations, which were all over the
place--biscuit in one camp, tea and sugar in the town--and eventually we
got away, at 8.30 p.m., in pitch darkness. We led out through the town
looking still and ghostly in the dark and up a steep and terribly sandy
road, which tried our overloaded wagons to the utmost, until at last we
reached the open veldt, where the road was hard, and clear from rocks
and sand. On the top of this hill we had a long wait, while the wagons
were closed up: we lay down and tried to keep warm, but the cold was too
intense, and finally the whole battalion had to stand up and move about
to keep their blood circulating. So we went on, halting every now and
then to allow the lagging wagons to close up, until at last at the top
of a sudden drop into a valley our advanced guard was challenged by a
picket, whom we found to belong to Ridley's Mounted Infantry, camped
about a mile further on.
It seems that news had been received that De Wet, who was almost
surrounded by Hunter's and Rundle's Divisions and was shut up inside the
cordon of hills enclosing the Caledon Valley (access to which was only
to be obtained by certain passes which were watched by several
Brigades), was suspected of an intention to break out; and we had been
packed off in a hurry to guard Ridley's baggage and rations while he
dashed off towards Slabbert's Nek, one of these passes, to intercept De
Wet in case he tried to break out in that direction.
At half past two in the morning we formed up in the valley, posted
pickets and got some sleep; but at half-past five we were on the move
again. Ridley had gone off at daybreak, taking his baggage with him, so
we started and marched about four miles, and then halted by the roadside
near Meyer's Kop, for further orders. In the distance, another four
miles on, rose the hills surrounding the Caledon Valley: we could just
distinguish the break in the range leading to the pass or Nek, which was
somewhat inside the fringe of low-lying hills. Four miles to the south
could be seen the camp and tents of General Paget's Brigade, with which
signalling communication was opened. A signal station was also
established on the top of Meyer's Kop, and communication opened with
Conical Hill, a sugar loaf peak about five miles south of Bethlehem.
Orders were received in the afternoon from General Hunter, who was then
in Bethlehem, directing us to remain at Meyer's Kop for the present; so
the Colonel selected a site for a camp, and we settled down in a valley
close under this kopje, bivouacing on a dirty piece of blackened, burnt
up ground, which was the cleanest that could be found.
The force under Lieut.-Colonel Donne's command consisted of our
battalion, the 81st Battery, a few local irregulars of Prince Alfred's
Guards, and, later, some of the Lovat Scouts.
We heard afterwards that De Wet had succeeded in breaking out of
Slabbert's Nek before we arrived, passing within a mile of where we were
then camped, and had gone off with 1,200 men and no wagons, only Cape
carts, in the direction of the railway. All our available Mounted
Infantry, under General Ridley, had hurried after him, and General
Broadwood, with his cavalry, had snatched up the Derbyshire regiment to
look after his baggage and had hastened off in the same direction. The
futility of chasing mounted men with a force dependent for their
supplies on wagons escorted by infantry was soon apparent, and, as is
now a matter of history, De Wet succeeded in making good his escape,
and led our troops a dance which lasted for months, and covered the
greater part of the Orange River Colony.
Our energies were now concentrated on keeping the remainder of the Boer
commandos inside the Caledon Valley, exit from which could only be
obtained from the passes at Ficksburg, Slabbert's Nek, Retief's Nek,
Naauwpoort Nek and Golden Gate; these were watched--at Ficksburg by
Rundle, who was advancing up the Caledon Valley towards Fouriesburg; by
Paget's Brigade and ourselves at Slabbert's Nek; by Hector Macdonald's
Highland Brigade at Retief's Nek; and by Bruce Hamilton, who with the
remains of his Brigade was advancing towards Naauwpoort Nek; but, as
regards Golden Gate, which was not passable for wagons, it would appear
that this pass was not watched by any of our troops.
Meyer's Kop was a rock of extraordinary shape. Imagine a huge sugar
loaf, which had been cut in half horizontally, so that the lower half
formed a great truncated cone, and then stick this up in the centre of a
level plain, and you have a fair idea of what this kopje, at whose base
we bivouacked for six days, looked like. There was a certain amount of
debris and many huge rocks scattered around the base of the kopje; its
sides were quite perpendicular except on the north, where there was a
winding path by which access might be had to the summit. The top was
almost flat, one enormous table-top of rock, about 80 yards across and
full of huge pot holes, which in ages gone by had been washed out by the
action of water.
There were numerous other kopjes similar to this one in the
neighbourhood, and it is easy to conceive how, at one time, all the
surrounding country had been at the bottom of the sea, and how it had
risen gradually, the pinnacles of rock like Meyer's Kop, all scored and
washed clean by the rushing water, appearing first out of the sea. At
one corner of the rock, on the top, were piles and piles of cartridge
cases, Mauser, Lee-Metford and Martini, lying in little heaps in places
which showed us how each Boer marksman had taken up his position,
concealed behind most excellent cover, whence to shoot down from his
point of vantage our soldiers as they advanced across the open plain
beneath or showed themselves over the rising ground, at points of which
every Boer of course knew the range. To these men, each snug in his
little nook among the rocks, our rifle fire would have no terrors, as
our bullets would whizz harmlessly over their heads, even if aimed in
their direction--an unlikely event, for the chances would be hundreds to
one that the Boers would never be spotted as long as they used cordite.
Shell fire also would cause no trepidation to a Boer well posted behind
cover; but I doubt if he would have been so happy, or would even have
remained so long behind his cover, had he been exposed to the old
fashioned shell fire from mortars, where the projectiles, fired at a
high angle with a varying charge of powder, sailed slowly and
gracefully, humming to themselves, through the air, their track marked
by a thin stream of blue smoke from the burning fuse; and then, dropping
quietly immediately in rear of the enemy's parapet or into his trenches,
burst into hundreds of fragments and spread devastation around.
Something of that kind is what has been wanted in the class of warfare
which we have been carrying on lately with the Afridis and the Boers,
_i.e._ against a much scattered enemy, invisibly and securely posted
behind rocks, and armed with the latest development in small bore
rifles.
Shrapnel is all very well when used against an enemy in a formation like
quarter-column, and its moral effect is at all times good; but its
killing powers against a thin line of skirmishers, say ten paces apart,
advancing across a plain or posted on a ridge are limited to the width
of front to which its 256 bullets will, on the explosion of the bursting
charge, extend, and are about equal to the damage which might be done
by, perhaps, two rifles. The trajectory of a shell is too flat to cause
any harm to a Boer or an Afridi behind a rock.
At Meyer's Kop the rocks on the east had received a vigorous shelling on
one occasion from our guns, and it interested some of us to potter
about, looking at the marks on the rocks and ground that showed where
the shells had struck, picking up shrapnel bullets and fragments of
iron, trying to estimate the number of shells fired, and examining the
ground to see where the enemy's sharpshooters had been lying.
On this particular occasion (I don't know when it occurred or what
troops of ours had been engaged), the ground on the slope of, and below
the eastern side of the kopje, was covered, over a large area, with
shrapnel bullets and bits of shell; and the large prominent boulders,
some of them as big as haystacks, bore marks where shells had struck in
numbers; _but_, away up on a corner of the kopje, fifty yards off, were
at least 500 cartridge cases, showing where some three or four men had
lain in perfect security and had kept up a harassing fire in spite of
our shrieking shell, and the whistling but inoffensive bullets from our
bursting shrapnel.
They had played the Boer game, which the introduction of smokeless
cordite had rendered so easy; they had studiously avoided all the
prominent objects behind which one would naturally expect to find an
enemy, and had selected other places on the flanks, from which to pour
in, unobserved, their annoying and ceaseless fire, whilst our advancing
troops blazed away, and continued to blaze away, at the top of the
hills, at green bushes, and at any stone walls in the neighbourhood,
instead of impartially searching with their fire the slopes of all the
hills in their front, or watching the spirts of dust thrown up by the
Boer bullets and trying to discover from these indications the direction
whence the fire was coming and the probable location of the marksman.
These are all points which, unfortunately, can only be learned when
bullets are flying around, but a very little instruction in this goes a
tremendously long way; and when skirmishing is again introduced, as it
must inevitably be, into the curriculum of instruction we give our
infantry soldiers in peace time, no doubt more attention will be paid to
the question of adapting your system of warfare to meet that of your
enemy. The invading force which enters an enemy's country is, to my
mind, entirely at the mercy of and eventually forced to adopt, any
system of warfare which may be thrust upon it by the owners of the
country; thus, a widely scattered enemy must be met by our thin clouds
of skirmishers: changes of position rapidly carried out by an enemy
entirely mounted must be checkmated by our strong bodies of mounted
infantry: the withdrawal, when pressed by us, of the enemy to a
previously selected position must be met by our timely flanking
movements: the invitation by the enemy to a frontal attack over a
suspiciously open piece of country must be met by an attack delivered
somewhere else.
In fact, whatever the enemy obviously wishes us to do, must not be done,
lest we be drawn into a trap; and above all nothing must ever be taken
for granted. I am fully aware that these axioms are as old as the hills,
and that every soldier is supposed to absorb them with his military milk
in his infancy as a recruit; but I am afraid that he does not assimilate
enough of this particular kind of diet.
Many are the instances, some of them microscopic, some of them serious,
which I have seen of the neglect of the golden rule--take nothing for
granted; and I might also add to this rule another, namely--never
despise your enemy--to which the attention of all amateur soldiers might
be drawn when they next race off in the direction of any campaign which
may be threatening.
This queer Meyer's Kop made an excellent helio station from which
signalling communication was easily maintained to the north and south;
and it was also a first-rate observation post, from which the
surrounding country for miles round could be seen. One of the officers
was usually on watch up there from daylight to dark, and it was really a
very pleasant way of spending three or four hours on a fine day.
Sometimes we could see what we thought were Boers riding about on the
sky line, and we used to especially watch the entrance to Slabbert's
Nek, in the hopes of seeing some of the enemy moving about. Once or
twice we went out with a few men and some wagons to procure forage from
the farm of an Englishman named Passmore, a horsebreeder and trainer,
and a jockey well known at Johannesburg, who had a run near us, but who
had had to bolt when the Boers arrived in the neighbourhood. This man
had opened a small store on his property, but when we arrived we found
that it had been carefully looted. I never saw such confusion as there
was; nearly everything had been torn down or off the shelves and thrown
promiscuously on to the floor; things looked as though a whole troop of
monkeys had been allowed a free hand for half an hour or so. Only once
have I seen anything approaching such a state of matters, and that was
years ago, when Captain Farrell's pet monkey was accidentally shut up in
his master's quarters for a couple of hours; and the havoc that monkey,
who was of an enquiring turn of mind, played with writing table,
dressing table, chest of drawers, and tin uniform cases may be better
imagined than described.
Passmore's store however had been visited, it was suspected, by Kaffirs
and not by Boers. It was a curious circumstance, noticed by one of our
officers with a Sherlock Holmes disposition, that all the tins, of which
there were a number containing mustard, medicines, pepper, linseed,
ginger and other things, had a small opening, roughly made, evidently to
enable the contents to be examined. Now, no white man would have gone to
the trouble of doing this, even if he couldn't have read the label,
which was plain enough in every case.
G and H Companies were sent in with wagons, on the 20th of July, to
Bethlehem, to draw another supply of rations and to get the mails,
sixty-three bags of which were waiting for us. They returned the next
day in the afternoon, together with the Bedfordshire regiment, who
camped alongside of us, but left the next evening to join Paget's
Brigade, which was only a few miles away.
The Bedfords, who had been equipped earlier in the campaign than we had,
when things were more plentiful, were very well provided as regards
transport. They had plenty of wagons, Scotch carts, ammunition carts and
water carts, while we were still limited to the one water cart with
which we originally started, and the two old Scotch carts, procured at a
farm, which we utilised to carry some of our reserve ammunition. The
four ammunition and other carts we had brought from home had been left
at Glen for want of mules to draw them.