"let me get at them," all sword and spurs officers. There have been
several of this sort in the army, and it is impossible to help very
often admiring their dash. But they are most dangerous leaders. What
chiefly distinguishes the Boers is their coolness. You cannot bluff or
flurry them, or shift them by the impetuosity of your attack from a
position which they are strong enough to hold. If indeed you have reason
to believe them weak, then the faster you go at them the better: for if
they mean going this will force them to go in a hurry and you will
diminish the time you are under fire. But see your calculations are
pretty sound, for if they don't mean bolting it will not be the fury of
your charge that will make them. Generally when they begin on you at a
very long range it is safe to go for them; but if they reserve their
fire then look out for squalls. The Colonel has a very cool judgment in
these matters; and though no one, when he does go for them, goes
straighter and faster than he, no one, on the other hand, calculates
more coolly the probable effect and consequence of the move.
In all scouting operations in our frequent long patrols he shows the
same mixture of prudence and daring. He goes long distances from his
supports and penetrates far into the enemy's country, and yet in none of
these expeditions has he ever got trapped or cut off. Of course with men
like the Guides, who have experience of the country and the enemy, and
ways of picking up information not open to strangers, this is easier
than it would be with men who had no such experience; but at the same
time the chief credit and responsibility in these affairs must rest with
the commanding officer. For one thing Rimington has an extraordinary
good eye for a country. Perhaps at first you will scarcely realise the
value of this gift. The features of this country and the way the long,
undulating slopes of the veldt merge into each other are extremely
perplexing, and as an engagement may be carried on over many miles of
ground and your own movements may be extensive and involved, it becomes
very difficult, in fact to most people absolutely impossible, to
remember the lie of the land and how the various hills and slopes are
related to each other. Thinking about it and trying to observe does no
good at all; but some people have an extraordinary instinct by which
they hold the configuration of the ground mapped in their head; judging
not by slow calculation and an effort of the memory, but intuitively and
at once. This instinct is called "an eye for a country," and is a most
valuable gift. Personally, I am very ill equipped with it, which makes
me the more inclined perhaps to admire it in others. It is developed in
the Colonel to an extraordinary degree, and is one of the chief means by
which, however hard beset, he has always been able, so far, to find a
way out. Most nearly of any of our officers his tactics in daring and in
craft resemble the tactics of that prince of scouting officers,
Christian De Wet.
Kronstadt, Lindley, Heilbron, Frankfort, has been our round so far. We
now turn westward along the south of the Vaal. Farm burning goes merrily
on, and our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages,
by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. We usually burn from six
to a dozen farms a day; these being about all that in this
sparsely-inhabited country we encounter. I do not gather that any
special reason or cause is alleged or proved against the farms burnt. If
Boers have used the farm; if the owner is on commando; if the line
within a certain distance has been blown up; or even if there are Boers
in the neighbourhood who persist in fighting--these are some of the
reasons. Of course the people living in the farms have no say in these
matters, and are quite powerless to interfere with the plans of the
fighting Boers. Anyway we find that one reason or other generally covers
pretty nearly every farm we come to, and so to save trouble we burn the
lot without inquiry; unless, indeed, which sometimes happens, some names
are given in before marching in the morning of farms to be spared.
The men belonging to the farm are always away and only the women left.
Of these there are often three or four generations; grandmother, mother,
and family of girls. The boys over thirteen or fourteen are usually
fighting with their papas. The people are disconcertingly like English,
especially the girls and children--fair and big and healthy looking.
These folk we invite out on to the veldt or into the little garden in
front, where they huddle together in their cotton frocks and big cotton
sun-bonnets, while our men set fire to the house. Sometimes they entreat
that it may be spared, and once or twice in an agony of rage they have
invoked curses on our heads. But this is quite the exception. As a rule
they make no sign, and simply look on and say nothing. One young woman
in a farm yesterday, which I think she had not started life long in,
went into a fit of hysterics when she saw the flames breaking out, and
finally fainted away.
I wish I had my camera. Unfortunately it got damaged, and I have not
been able to take any photographs. These farms would make a good
subject. They are dry and burn well. The fire bursts out of windows and
doors with a loud roaring, and black volumes of smoke roll overhead.
Standing round are a dozen or two of men holding horses. The women, in a
little group, cling together, comforting each other or hiding their
faces in each other's laps. In the background a number of Tommies are
seen chasing poultry, flinging stones, and throwing themselves prostrate
on maimed chickens and ducks, whose melancholy squawks fill the air.
Further off still, herds and flocks and horses are being collected and
driven off, while, on the top of the nearest high ground, a party of
men, rifles in hand, guard against a surprise from the enemy, a few of
whom can generally be seen in the distance watching the destruction of
their homes.
One hears the women talk. Their ideas about the war are peculiar, for
they all maintain that they will succeed in the long-run in asserting
their independence, and seem to think that things are going quite
satisfactorily for them. "Of course we shall go on fighting," they say,
quite with surprise. "How long?" "Oh, as long as may be necessary. Till
you go away." It is curious coming to household after household and
finding the whole lot of them, women and children, so unanimous, so
agreed in the spirit in which they face their afflictions. Husbands and
sons in the hill fighting. Homes in the valley blazing, and they sitting
and watching it all, almost always with the same fortitude, the same
patience, and the same resolve. I am impressed, for I have never seen
anything of the sort before. It is not often in these days that you see
one big, simple, primitive instinct, like love of country, acting on a
whole people at once. Many of our officers, the thoughtful and
candid-minded ones, do these people justice; but many don't. Many catch
at any explanation but the true one, and attribute every kind of motive
save the only one that will explain the facts. They refuse to call the
Boers patriots, but that the Boers are prepared to face a slow
extermination in defence of their country is now evident. It has become
more evident since the war has assumed its present character of
individual, personal effort. I much respect and admire them for it.
It is time to bring this long letter to an end. I wish I could see an
end to the campaign. When I come home "an old, old, aged and infirm old
man," I mean to pass the evening of my days in a quiet cottage with its
full allowance of honeysuckle and roses. There I shall grow sweet
williams and, if I can stand the extra excitement, perhaps keep a pig.
They tell me the _Times_ has pronounced the war over. I would be glad to
pay £5 out of my own pocket to have the man who wrote that out here on
the veldt with us for a week. We have just heard that Dewetsdorp has
fallen, and that there is a rising in the Colony near Aliwal North.
_Vogue la galère!_
LETTER XXV
THE SITUATION
CAMP ON THE VAAL,
NEAR KLERKSDORP,
_December 23_, 1900.
We are encamped close to the Vaal, which is here a fine stream, as wide
as the Thames at Richmond. I have just been bathing in it. It is early
morning, and I am sitting under a thicket of great weeping willows by
the river. The banks slope down and make a trough for the stream a good
deal below the level of the plain, and in this hollow, hidden till you
are close to it, congregates all the verdure there is for miles,
especially a quantity of willow trees, with gnarled black trunks leaning
down to the stream, sometimes bending over and burying themselves in the
ground and then shooting up again, making arches and long vistas, with
green grass below and silvery foliage waving above. After our long
marches on the veldt, the contrast here is wonderfully refreshing. One
seems to drink in the coolness and greenness of the scene with eyes that
have grown thirsty for such things. The trees straddling down the bank
are rather like figures of men, giants that have flung themselves down,
resting on hands and elbows, delighted, one would think, as I am, to
come and rest near water again.
I can hardly believe that it only wants two days to Christmas. Our last
Christmas we spent on the Modder. I remember it well; a wet night, and
all night long we sat on a steep kopje watching the lights of a Boer
laager and expecting to be attacked. Methuen's little campaign strikes
one now as a sort of prelude, or overture, to the main show; but how
very much surprised we should have been that November morning when we
marched from Orange River Camp if you had told us we should ever be
looked at in that light. Ten thousand men was a big army in those days.
We have been on the trek now for about six weeks with Bruce-Hamilton,
and though we have not so far been seriously engaged, there has been
almost daily fighting round the fringes and skirts of the column
("skirt-fighting," you may call it).
"_November_ 17.--Left Lindley. This neighbourhood quite as disturbed as
ever. Shooting.
"_November_ 18.--More shooting. Boers in all hills.
"_November_ 19.--More shooting and galloping about. Reached Heilbron.
"_November_ 20.--Left for Frankfort. Boers in attendance as usual. Our
two guns and pompom very useful."
Those were the last entries I made in my diary. The day's events became
too monotonous to chronicle, but very much the same sort of entries
would have applied to almost every day since. Sometimes there are
exciting incidents. Yesterday half-a-dozen Boers hid in a little hollow
which just concealed them until our column came along, and opened fire
at close range on the flank guard. One or two men were hit and several
horses. My friend Vice had five bullets through his horse and was not
touched himself, which was rather lucky for him (or unlucky for the
horse). A few days before that we were camped on the river and had a
picket on the other side. Two or three Boers crept up the river right
between our picket and the main body, and then walked straight to the
picket as if coming from us and fired into it at point-blank range. They
mortally wounded one of our men and in the dusk escaped. They are as
cunning as Indians. Sometimes, as in these cases, they show great
coolness and daring, while at others they are easily dispersed; but they
are generally pretty keen, and you have to be very much on the alert in
dealing with them.
You at home will probably be annoyed to find the war dragging on so.
About election time the papers were announcing that it was over. It had
been a hard job, they said, but it was finished at last. A good deal was
occurring out here which did not quite tally with that theory, but those
things were ignored or very slightly referred to, so that we on the spot
wondered to see the war drop out of sight, and were puzzled to read in
the _Times_ that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at
the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding
Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line
blown up in ten different places. The continuance of the war must strike
you as a renewal, but there was never a lull really.
People who think the war can be ended by farm-burning, &c., mistake the
Boer temper. I scarcely know how to convey to you any idea of the
spirit of determination that exists among them all, women and even
children as well as men. The other day I picked up at a farmhouse a
short characteristic form of prayer, written out evidently by the wife
in a child's copybook, ending thus: "Forgive me all my sins for the sake
of your Son Jesus Christ, in whom I put all my trust for days of sorrow
and pain. And bring back my dear husband and child and brothers, and
give us our land back again, which we paid for with blood from the
beginning." Simple enough as you see, and no particular cant about it,
but very much in earnest. At another farm a small girl interrupted her
preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at
us on an old piano. We were carting the people off. It was raining hard
and blowing--a miserable, hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy
soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing
along her children to the ox-waggon outside, and this poor little wretch
in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final
defiance. One smiled, but it was rather dramatic all the same, and
exactly like a picture. These are straws, but one could multiply them
with incidents from every farm we go to. Their talk is invariably, and
without so far a single exception, to the same effect--"We will never
give in, and God sooner or later will see us through."
And then I see a speech of Buller's explaining that the war is being
carried on by a few mercenaries and coerced men, and that it is in no
sense a patriotic war. He is emphatic on this point and his audience
cheer him. One realises the difficulty of getting you to understand. The
breaking up of the big commandoes and the change to guerilla tactics, in
which every man fights on his own account, shows in a way there is no
mistaking that it is the personal wish of each man to fight out the
quarrel to the last. It is just because they are so individually keen
that this sort of warfare of theirs is so hard to cope with. These men
are uncoerced. Spontaneously and one by one they turn out to fight us as
soon as we show ourselves in their neighbourhood, and all the suffering
we can inflict only serves to harden their resolution.
Yet we certainly inflict a great deal. Boer families usually average up
to a dozen. They stick together, and grow up on their farms, which are
of enormous extent, and which they get to love with the instinctive
force of people who have never seen any other place. Love of family and
love of home are their two ruling affections. The household life of a
big family on a 20,000 acre farm--three and often four generations
represented--is usually uninterrupted for weeks at a time by the sight
of a strange face or a bit of outside news. Their lives are altogether
bound up, in their serene and stolid way, with each other and with their
homes. Anything that breaks up a family is felt by them more grievously
than would be the case with most people; and, in the same way, anything
that severs them from "the land" would be more profoundly felt too. It
amounts to an entire dislocation of their ideas of life.
This must make the war at present very hard to bear. "My dear husband
and child and brothers" are away fighting. One or two of them very
likely killed by this time, or in Ceylon or St. Helena. "And as for the
others who are still in the field, we are in constant terror of hearing
the bad news, which we know, if the war continues, must some day come."
So the family is quite broken up, and now the home is being destroyed
and the occupants carried off, so that altogether the chances of ever
renewing the old life again in the old place seem very remote indeed.
All this should be enough to break Boer hearts, and there is no doubt
they feel it very much. I can recall many scenes and incidents which
show that--scenes which, if you saw them out of your peaceful, natural
life, you would perhaps be never able to forget. But yet, in spite of
all they have to suffer, their determination remains just the same.
Anything like loud lamentations or complaints are almost unheard. They
rise to the occasion, and though naturally a very simple people, who
express openly what they feel, they act now in this crisis with a
constant composure which I have often thought most remarkable.
What supports them and keeps them going is just that spirit of
patriotism which Buller denies the existence of. A patriot is a man who
puts his country first thing of all. The final result of it all, "the
uselessness of prolonging the struggle," and such newspaper talk as
that, is not for him. There fronts him one fact, his country is invaded;
and there fronts him one duty, to fight till he dies for it. This would
have been a Greek's definition of the word, and it is the Boer farmer's
definition. It is of course just because patriots never do count the
cost, and are what the newspapers call "deaf to reason," that they
sometimes bring off such astonishing results.
The Boers have now to watch a slow, implacable, methodical devastation
of their country, tract by tract. Day by day they fight, and one by one
they fall. Comrades and friends drop at each other's sides; sons drop by
fathers, and brothers by brothers. The smoke rises in the valley, and
the home is blotted out. All that makes life worth living goes, then
life itself. What sterner test can a nation be put to than this? It is a
torture long and slow; the agony and bloody sweat. I know well that if
my own country were invaded I should, or hope I should, behave exactly
as these men are doing; and as I should call it patriotism in my own
case, I cannot refuse to call it the same in theirs. You see bribery and
coercion are not adequate motives, and do not explain the facts; only,
unfortunately, a lot of people would rather hunt up any base motive,
however inadequate, than take the obvious one if it did their enemy any
credit.
It is most important that the situation should be realised at home, for
if it were the conduct of the war would be changed. You cannot torture
and terrorise men like this into submission. Probably no system will end
the war off quickly, but certainly kind, or at least fair, treatment is
the best chance and best policy in every way. The present system hardens
these men's resolution to iron, and so tends to prolong the war; and it
embitters Dutch hatred of the British, and so tends to perpetuate the
ill effects of the war. In fact, I am convinced that it is the worst
policy you could possibly adopt, and the sooner you change it the
better.
As for the fighting itself, you must make great allowance for our
difficulties. So long as we had big commandoes with guns, convoys, &c.,
to deal with, there was a definite object to hit at. It was possible to
deal a blow that took effect. Now we are fighting shadows. Our columns
march through the country and see no enemy, or at most only a few small
parties hovering on the sky-line. Scouts and patrols are often engaged,
and no one can wander out of sight of the column but the ugly voice of a
Mauser will warn him back. Invisible eyes watch us all the time, ready
to take advantage of detached parties or unprotected convoys. We are
teased and annoyed, but never definitely engaged. We are like the
traveller and the gnats--
"Nor could my weak arm disperse
The host of insects gathered round my head,
And ever with me as I walked along."
Carried on in a country like this, where a man on horseback is like a
bird in the air, and by people so individually keen as the Boers, the
present kind of war may go on indefinitely. After all, it is the sort of
war the Boers understand best. The big-battle war is a matter of science
which he had in a great measure to be instructed in, but this is a war
which the natural independence of his own character and self-reliant
habits make natural to him. The war, now that it has become a matter of
individuals, is exciting all its old enthusiasm again, and the Burghers
are up in arms in every district in the country. Fighting in their own
country, the Boers have one advantage over us, which is their salvation:
they can disperse in flight, but we cannot disperse in pursuit.
This vagrant form of war is more formidable than it sounds. These
wandering bands can unite with great rapidity and deal when least
expected a rapid blow. As we cannot catch them we must be prepared to
receive them at all points. The veldt is a void to us, all darkness, and
it hides a threat which, as it may fall anywhere, must be guarded
against everywhere. This, what with all our garrisons and enormous lines
of communication, means that the far greater part of our army has to act
on the defensive; to sit still waiting for an enemy who may be a hundred
miles off or behind the next hill. As for our wandering columns, they
have about as much chance of catching Boers on the veldt as a Lord
Mayor's procession would have of catching a highwayman on Hounslow
Heath. The enemy are watching us now from a rise a few miles away,
waiting for our next move, and probably discussing some devilry or other
they are up to. The line of our march is blotted out already. Where we
camp one day they camp the next. They are all round and about us like
water round a ship, parting before our bows and reuniting round our
stern. Our passage makes no impression and leaves no visible trace. It
does amuse me to read the speeches and papers in England with their
talk of what we are to do with the country now we have conquered it.
"With the conclusion of the war in South Africa arises the question,"
&c., &c. It reminds one of a child's game of make-believe. There is the
same pompous air of reality. "This is the shop and you are the
shopwoman. Good morning, Mrs. Snooks, I have come to buy a pound of
sugar." Unfortunately the facts remain. I find that some of the
shrewdest onlookers out here are just beginning to feel a sort of half
doubt whether we shall ever conquer the country at all. It depends on
whether the home Government and press give up their babyish "let's
pretend" attitude and face the difficulties of the situation.
All this is very sad and lugubrious, is it not? and I daresay you think
me a croaker; but there is a melancholy satisfaction in trying to see
things as they are, and I believe what I have told you is nearer the
truth than what you get from the papers. I only hope I may turn out to
be wrong.
I add a note (January 12th) from Ventersberg, where we have just
arrived. This has been our last trek, we believe. Rimington takes
command of his regiment, and the corps, like the rest of the Colonial
Division, will be paid off. I have a vision of a great blue steamer with
a bow like a cliff bursting her way through the seas on her homeward
voyage. And yet I can scarcely believe it.
Bad news waits us here. They say the Colony is rising. Now mark my
words. If we don't watch it, we shall end by bringing about the very
state of things we have been dreading. There will be a Dutch South
African conspiracy, but it will be one of our own making. We shall have
our own treatment of these people to thank for it. Be sure of this, that
for every house up here that is destroyed, three or four in the south
are slowly rousing to arms.