Some attempt has now been made to sketch the succession of events which
had ended in the investment of Ladysmith in northern Natal, and also to
show the fortunes of the force which on the western side of the seat
of war attempted to advance to the relief of Kimberley. The distance
between these forces may be expressed in terms familiar to the European
reader by saying that it was that which separates Paris from Frankfort,
or to the American by suggesting that Ladysmith was at Boston and that
Methuen was trying to relieve Philadelphia. Waterless deserts and rugged
mountain ranges divided the two scenes of action. In the case of the
British there could be no connection between the two movements, but the
Boers by a land journey of something over a hundred miles had a double
choice of a route by which Cronje and Joubert might join hands, either
by the Bloemfontein-Johannesburg-Laing's Nek Railway, or by the direct
line from Harrismith to Ladysmith. The possession of these internal
lines should have been of enormous benefit to the Boers, enabling them
to throw the weight of their forces unexpectedly from the one flank to
the other.
In a future chapter it will be recorded how the Army Corps arriving from
England was largely diverted into Natal in order in the first instance
to prevent the colony from being overrun, and in the second to rescue
the beleaguered garrison. In the meantime it is necessary to deal with
the military operations in the broad space between the eastern and
western armies.
After the declaration of war there was a period of some weeks during
which the position of the British over the whole of the northern part of
Cape Colony was full of danger. Immense supplies had been gathered at De
Aar which were at the mercy of a Free State raid, and the burghers, had
they possessed a cavalry leader with the dash of a Stuart or a Sheridan,
might have dealt a blow which would have cost us a million pounds' worth
of stores and dislocated the whole plan of campaign. However, the chance
was allowed to pass, and when, on November 1st, the burghers at last in
a leisurely fashion sauntered over the frontier, arrangements had been
made by reinforcement and by concentration to guard the vital points.
The objects of the British leaders, until the time for a general advance
should come, were to hold the Orange River Bridge (which opened the
way to Kimberley), to cover De Aar Junction, where the stores were, to
protect at all costs the line of railway which led from Cape Town to
Kimberley, and to hold on to as much as possible of those other two
lines of railway which led, the one through Colesberg and the other
through Stormberg, into the Free State. The two bodies of invaders who
entered the colony moved along the line of these two railways, the one
crossing the Orange River at Norval's Pont and the other at Bethulie.
They enlisted many recruits among the Cape Colony Dutch as they
advanced, and the scanty British forces fell back in front of them,
abandoning Colesberg on the one line and Stormberg on the other. We
have, then, to deal with the movements of two British detachments. The
one which operated on the Colesberg line--which was the more vital
of the two, as a rapid advance of the Boers upon that line would have
threatened the precious Cape Town to Kimberley connection--consisted
almost entirely of mounted troops, and was under the command of the
same General French who had won the battle of Elandslaagte. By an act of
foresight which was only too rare upon the British side in the earlier
stages of this war, French, who had in the recent large manoeuvres on
Salisbury Plain shown great ability as a cavalry leader, was sent out
of Ladysmith in the very last train which made its way through. His
operations, with his instructive use of cavalry and horse artillery, may
be treated separately.
The other British force which faced the Boers who were advancing through
Stormberg was commanded by General Gatacre, a man who bore a high
reputation for fearlessness and tireless energy, though he had been
criticised, notably during the Soudan campaign, for having called upon
his men for undue and unnecessary exertion. 'General Back-acher' they
called him, with rough soldierly chaff. A glance at his long thin
figure, his gaunt Don Quixote face, and his aggressive jaw would
show his personal energy, but might not satisfy the observer that he
possessed those intellectual gifts which qualify for high command. At
the action of the Atbara he, the brigadier in command, was the first to
reach and to tear down with his own hands the zareeba of the enemy--a
gallant exploit of the soldier, but a questionable position for the
General. The man's strength and his weakness lay in the incident.
General Gatacre was nominally in command of a division, but so cruelly
had his men been diverted from him, some to Buller in Natal and some to
Methuen, that he could not assemble more than a brigade. Falling
back before the Boer advance, he found himself early in December at
Sterkstroom, while the Boers occupied the very strong position of
Stormberg, some thirty miles to the north of him. With the enemy so near
him it was Gatacre's nature to attack, and the moment that he thought
himself strong enough he did so. No doubt he had private information
as to the dangerous hold which the Boers were getting upon the colonial
Dutch, and it is possible that while Buller and Methuen were attacking
east and west they urged Gatacre to do something to hold the enemy in
the centre. On the night of December 9th he advanced.
The fact that he was about to do so, and even the hour of the start,
appear to have been the common property of the camp some days before
the actual move. The 'Times' correspondent under the date December
7th details all that it is intended to do. It is to the credit of our
Generals as men, but to their detriment as soldiers, that they seem
throughout the campaign to have shown extraordinarily little power
of dissimulation. They did the obvious, and usually allowed it to be
obvious what they were about to do. One thinks of Napoleon striking at
Egypt; how he gave it abroad that the real object of the expedition was
Ireland, but breathed into the ears of one or two intimates that in very
truth it was bound for Genoa. The leading official at Toulon had no
more idea where the fleet and army of France had gone than the humblest
caulker in the yard. However, it is not fair to expect the subtlety
of the Corsican from the downright Saxon, but it remains strange and
deplorable that in a country filled with spies any one should have known
in advance that a so-called 'surprise' was about to be attempted.
The force with which General Gatacre advanced consisted of the 2nd
Northumberland Fusiliers, 960 strong, with one Maxim; the 2nd Irish
Rifles, 840 strong, with one Maxim, and 250 Mounted Infantry. There were
two batteries of Field Artillery, the 74th and 77th. The total force was
well under 3000 men. About three in the afternoon the men were entrained
in open trucks under a burning sun, and for some reason, at which the
impetuous spirit of the General must have chafed, were kept waiting
for three hours. At eight o'clock they detrained at Molteno, and thence
after a short rest and a meal they started upon the night march which
was intended to end at the break of day at the Boer trenches. One feels
as if one were describing the operations of Magersfontein once again and
the parallel continues to be painfully exact.
It was nine o'clock and pitch dark when the column moved out of Molteno
and struck across the black gloom of the veld, the wheels of the guns
being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was known that the
distance was not more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and
the guides were still unable to say that they had reached their point it
must have become perfectly evident that they had missed their way.
The men were dog-tired, a long day's work had been followed by a long
night's march, and they plodded along drowsily through the darkness.
The ground was broken and irregular. The weary soldiers stumbled as they
marched. Daylight came and revealed the column still looking for its
objective, the fiery General walking in front and leading his horse
behind him. It was evident that his plans had miscarried, but his
energetic and hardy temperament would not permit him to turn back
without a blow being struck. However one may commend his energy, one
cannot but stand aghast at his dispositions. The country was wild
and rocky, the very places for those tactics of the surprise and the
ambuscade in which the Boers excelled. And yet the column still plodded
aimlessly on in its dense formation, and if there were any attempt at
scouting ahead and on the flanks the result showed how ineffectively it
was carried out. It was at a quarter past four in the clear light of a
South African morning that a shot, and then another, and then a rolling
crash of musketry, told that we were to have one more rough lesson of
the result of neglecting the usual precautions of warfare. High up on
the face of a steep line of hill the Boer riflemen lay hid, and from
a short range their fire scourged our exposed flank. The men appear to
have been chiefly colonial rebels, and not Boers of the backveld, and to
that happy chance it may be that the comparative harmlessness of their
fire was due. Even now, in spite of the surprise, the situation might
have been saved had the bewildered troops and their harried officers
known exactly what to do. It is easy to be wise after the event, but it
appears now that the only course that could commend itself would be to
extricate the troops from their position, and then, if thought feasible,
to plan an attack. Instead of this a rush was made at the hillside, and
the infantry made their way some distance up it only to find that there
were positive ledges in front of them which could not be climbed. The
advance was at a dead stop, and the men lay down under the boulders
for cover from the hot fire which came from inaccessible marksmen above
them. Meanwhile the artillery had opened behind them, and their fire
(not for the first time in this campaign) was more deadly to their
friends than to their foes. At least one prominent officer fell among
his men, torn by British shrapnel bullets. Talana Hill and Modder River
have shown also, though perhaps in a less tragic degree, that what with
the long range of modern artillery fire, and what with the difficulty of
locating infantry who are using smokeless powder, it is necessary that
officers commanding batteries should be provided with the coolest
heads and the most powerful glasses of any men in the service, for a
responsibility which will become more and more terrific rests upon their
judgment.
The question now, since the assault had failed, was how to extricate
the men from their position. Many withdrew down the hill, running the
gauntlet of the enemy's fire as they emerged from the boulders on to
the open ground, while others clung to their positions, some from
a soldierly hope that victory might finally incline to them, others
because it was clearly safer to lie among the rocks than to cross the
bullet-swept spaces beyond. Those portions of the force who extricated
themselves do not appear to have realised how many of their comrades had
remained behind, and so as the gap gradually increased between the men
who were stationary and the men who fell back all hope of the two bodies
reuniting became impossible. All the infantry who remained upon the
hillside were captured. The rest rallied at a point fifteen hundred
yards from the scene of the surprise, and began an orderly retreat to
Molteno.
In the meanwhile three powerful Boer guns upon the ridge had opened
fire with great accuracy, but fortunately with defective shells. Had
the enemy's contractors been as trustworthy as their gunners in this
campaign, our losses would have been very much heavier, and it is
possible that here we catch a glimpse of some consequences of that
corruption which was one of the curses of the country. The guns were
moved with great smartness along the ridge, and opened fire again and
again, but never with great result. Our own batteries, the 74th and
77th, with our handful of mounted men, worked hard in covering the
retreat and holding back the enemy's pursuit.
It is a sad subject to discuss, but it is the one instance in a campaign
containing many reverses which amounts to demoralisation among the
troops engaged. The Guards marching with the steadiness of Hyde Park
off the field of Magersfontein, or the men of Nicholson's Nek chafing
because they were not led in a last hopeless charge, are, even in
defeat, object lessons of military virtue. But here fatigue and
sleeplessness had taken all fire and spirit out of the men. They dropped
asleep by the roadside and had to be prodded up by their exhausted
officers. Many were taken prisoners in their slumber by the enemy who
gleaned behind them. Units broke into small straggling bodies, and it
was a sorry and bedraggled force which about ten o'clock came wandering
into Molteno. The place of honour in the rear was kept throughout by
the Irish Rifles, who preserved some military formation to the end. Our
losses in killed and wounded were not severe--military honour would have
been less sore had they been more so. Twenty-six killed, sixty-eight
wounded--that is all. But between the men on the hillside and the
somnambulists of the column, six hundred, about equally divided between
the Irish Rifles and the Northumberland Fusiliers, had been left as
prisoners. Two guns, too, had been lost in the hurried retreat.
It is not for the historian--especially for a civilian historian--to say
a word unnecessarily to aggravate the pain of that brave man who, having
done all that personal courage could do, was seen afterwards sobbing on
the table of the waiting-room at Molteno, and bewailing his 'poor men.'
He had a disaster, but Nelson had one at Teneriffe and Napoleon at Acre,
and built their great reputations in spite of it. But the one good thing
of a disaster is that by examining it we may learn to do better in the
future, and so it would indeed be a perilous thing if we agreed that our
reverses were not a fit subject for open and frank discussion.
It is not to the detriment of an enterprise that it should be daring
and call for considerable physical effort on the part of those who are
engaged in it. On the contrary, the conception of such plans is one of
the signs of a great military mind. But in the arranging of the details
the same military mind should assiduously occupy itself in foreseeing
and preventing every unnecessary thing which may make the execution
of such a plan more difficult. The idea of a swift sudden attack upon
Stormberg was excellent--the details of the operation are continually
open to criticism.
How far the Boers suffered at Stormberg is unknown to us, but there
seems in this instance no reason to doubt their own statement that their
losses were very slight. At no time was any body of them exposed to
our fire, while we, as usual, fought in the open. Their numbers were
probably less than ours, and the quality of their shooting and want of
energy in pursuit make the defeat the more galling. On the other hand,
their guns were served with skill and audacity. They consisted of
commandos from Bethulie, Rouxville, and Smithfield, under the orders
of Olivier, with those colonials whom they had seduced from their
allegiance.
This defeat of General Gatacre's, occurring, as it did, in a disaffected
district and one of great strategic importance, might have produced the
worst consequences.
Fortunately no very evil result followed. No doubt the recruiting
of rebels was helped, but there was no forward movement and Molteno
remained in our hands. In the meanwhile Gatacre's force was reinforced
by a fresh battery, the 79th, and by a strong regiment, the Derbyshires,
so that with the 1st Royal Scots and the wing of the Berkshires he
was strong enough to hold his own until the time for a general advance
should come. So in the Stormberg district, as at the Modder River, the
same humiliating and absurd position of stalemate was established.