The Great Boer War

At about the same date a convoy proceeding from Beaufort West to Fraserburg was attacked by Malan's commando. The escort, which consisted of sixty Colonial Mounted Rifles and 100 of the West Yorkshire militia, was overwhelmed after a good defence, in which Major Crofton, their commander, was killed. The wagons were destroyed, but the Boers were driven off by the arrival of Crabbe's column, followed by those of Capper and Lund. The total losses of the British in these two actions amounted to twenty-three killed and sixty-five wounded.

The re-establishment of settled law and order was becoming more marked every week in those south-western districts, which had long been most disturbed. Colonel Crewe in this region, and Colonel Lukin upon the other side of the line, acting entirely with Colonial troops, were pushing back the rebels, and holding, by a well-devised system of district defence, all that they had gained. By the end of February there were none of the enemy south of the Beaufort West and Clanwilliam line. These results were not obtained without much hard marching and a little hard fighting. Small columns under Crabbe, Capper, Wyndham, Nickall, and Lund, were continually on the move, with little to show for it save an ever-widening area of settled country in their rear. In a skirmish on February 20th Judge Hugo, a well-known Boer leader, was killed, and Vanheerden, a notorious rebel, was captured. At the end of this month Fouche's tranquil occupation of the north-east was at last disturbed, and he was driven out of it into the midlands, where he took refuge with the remains of his commando in the Camdeboo Mountains. Malan's men had already sought shelter in the same natural fortress. Malan was wounded and taken in a skirmish near Somerset East a few days before the general Boer surrender. Fouche gave himself up at Cradock on June 2nd.

The last incident of this scattered, scrambling, unsatisfactory campaign in the Cape peninsula was the raid made by Smuts, the Transvaal leader, into the Port Nolloth district of Namaqualand, best known for its copper mines. A small railroad has been constructed from the coast at this point, the terminus being the township of Ookiep. The length of the line is about seventy miles. It is difficult to imagine what the Boers expected to gain in this remote corner of the seat of war, unless they had conceived the idea that they might actually obtain possession of Port Nolloth itself, and so restore the communications with their sympathisers and allies. At the end of March the Boer horsemen appeared suddenly out of the desert, drove in the British outposts, and summoned Ookiep to surrender. Colonel Shelton, who commanded the small garrison, sent an uncompromising reply, but he was unable to protect the railway in his rear, which was wrecked, together with some of the blockhouses which had been erected to guard it. The loyal population of the surrounding country had flocked into Ookiep, and the Commandant found himself burdened with the care of six thousand people. The enemy had succeeded in taking the small post of Springbok, and Concordia, the mining centre, was surrendered into their hands without resistance, giving them welcome supplies of arms, ammunition, and dynamite. The latter was used by the Boers in the shape of hand-bombs, and proved to be a very efficient weapon when employed against blockhouses. Several of the British defences were wrecked by them, with considerable loss to the garrison; but in the course of a month's siege, in spite of several attacks, the Boers were never able to carry the frail works which guarded the town. Once more, at the end of the war as at the beginning of it, there was shown the impotence of the Dutch riflemen against a British defence. A relief column, under Colonel Cooper, was quickly organised at Port Nolloth, and advanced along the railway line, forcing Smuts to raise the siege in the first week of May. Immediately afterwards came the news of the negotiations for peace, and the Boer general presented himself at Port Nolloth, whence he was conveyed by ship to Cape Town, and so north again to take part in the deliberations of his fellow-countrymen. Throughout the war he had played a manly and honourable part. It may be hoped that with youth and remarkable experience, both of diplomacy and of war, he may now find a long and brilliant career awaiting him in a wider arena than that for which he strove.

Chapter 36. The spring campaign (September to December, 1901)

The history of the war during the African winter of 1901 has now been sketched, and some account given of the course of events in the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, and the Cape Colony. The hope of the British that they might stamp out resistance before the grass should restore mobility to the larger bodies of Boers was destined to be disappointed. By the middle of September the veld had turned from drab to green, and the great drama was fated to last for one more act, however anxious all the British and the majority of the Boers might be to ring down the curtain. Exasperating as this senseless prolongation of a hopeless struggle might be, there was still some consolation in the reflection that those who drank this bitter cup to the very lees would be less likely to thirst for it again.

September 15th was the date which brought into force the British Proclamation announcing the banishment of those Boer leaders who continued in arms. It must be confessed that this step may appear harsh and unchivalrous to the impartial observer, so long as those leaders were guilty of no practices which are foreign to the laws of civilised warfare. The imposition of personal penalties upon the officers of an opposing army is a step for which it is difficult to quote a precedent, nor is it wise to officially rule your enemy outside the pale of ordinary warfare, since it is equally open to him to take the same step against you. The only justification for such a course would be its complete success, as this would suggest that the Intelligence Department were aware that the leaders desired some strong excuse for coming in – such an excuse as the Proclamation would afford. The result proved that nothing of the kind was needed, and the whole proceeding must appear to be injudicious and high-handed. In honourable war you conquer your adversary by superior courage, strength, or wit, but you do not terrorise him by particular penalties aimed at individuals. The burghers of the Transvaal and of the late Orange Free State were legitimate belligerents, and to be treated as such – a statement which does not, of course, extend to the Afrikander rebels who were their allies.

The tendency of the British had been to treat their antagonists as a broken and disorganised banditti, but with the breaking of the spring they were sharply reminded that the burghers were still capable of a formidable and coherent effort. The very date which put them beyond the pale as belligerents was that which they seem to have chosen in order to prove what active and valiant soldiers they still remained. A quick succession of encounters occurred at various parts of the seat of war, the general tendency of which was not entirely in favour of the British arms, though the weekly export of prisoners reassured all who noted it as to the sapping and decay of the Boer strength. These incidents must now be set down in the order of their occurrence, with their relation to each other so far as it is possible to trace it.

General Louis Botha, with the double intention of making an offensive move and of distracting the wavering burghers from a close examination of Lord Kitchener's proclamation, assembled his forces in the second week of September in the Ermelo district. Thence he moved them rapidly towards Natal, with the result that the volunteers of that colony had once more to grasp their rifles and hasten to the frontier. The whole situation bore for an instant an absurd resemblance to that of two years before – Botha playing the part of Joubert, and Lyttelton, who commanded on the frontier, that of White. It only remained, to make the parallel complete, that some one should represent Penn Symons, and this perilous role fell to a gallant officer, Major Gough, commanding a detached force which thought itself strong enough to hold its own, and only learned by actual experiment that it was not.

This officer, with a small force consisting of three companies of Mounted Infantry with two guns of the 69th R.F.A., was operating in the neighbourhood of Utrecht in the south-eastern corner of the Transvaal, on the very path along which Botha must descend. On September 17th he had crossed De Jagers Drift on the Blood River, not very far from Dundee, when he found himself in touch with the enemy. His mission was to open a path for an empty convoy returning from Vryheid, and in order to do so it was necessary that Blood River Poort, where the Boers were now seen, should be cleared. With admirable zeal Gough pushed rapidly forward, supported by a force of 350 Johannesburg Mounted Rifles under Stewart. Such a proceeding must have seemed natural to any British officer at this stage of the war, when a swift advance was the only chance of closing with the small bodies of Boers; but it is strange that the Intelligence Department had not warned the patrols upon the frontier that a considerable force was coming down upon them, and that they should be careful to avoid action against impossible odds. If Gough had known that Botha's main commando was coming down upon him, it is inconceivable that he would have pushed his advance until he could neither extricate his men nor his guns. A small body of the enemy, said to have been the personal escort of Louis Botha, led him on, until a large force was able to ride down upon him from the flank and rear. Surrounded at Scheepers Nek by many hundreds of riflemen in a difficult country, there was no alternative but a surrender, and so sharp and sudden was the Boer advance that the whole action was over in a very short time. The new tactics of the Boers, already used at Vlakfontein, and afterwards to be successful at Brakenlaagte and at Tweebosch, were put in force. A large body of mounted men, galloping swiftly in open order and firing from the saddle, rode into and over the British. Such temerity should in theory have met with severe punishment, but as a matter of fact the losses of the enemy seem to have been very small. The soldiers were not able to return an effective fire from their horses, and had no time to dismount. The sights and breech-blocks of the two guns are said to have been destroyed, but the former statement seems more credible than the latter. A Colt gun was also captured. Of the small force twenty were killed, forty wounded, and over two hundred taken. Stewart's force was able to extricate itself with some difficulty, and to fall back on the Drift. Gough managed to escape that night and to report that it was Botha himself, with over a thousand men, who had eaten up his detachment. The prisoners and wounded were sent in a few days later to Vryheid, a town which appeared to be in some danger of capture had not Walter Kitchener hastened to carry reinforcements to the garrison. Bruce Hamilton was at the same time despatched to head Botha off, and every step taken to prevent his southern advance. So many columns from all parts converged upon the danger spot that Lyttelton, who commanded upon the Natal frontier, had over 20,000 men under his orders.

Botha's plans appear to have been to work through Zululand and then strike at Natal, an operation which would be the more easy as it would be conducted a considerable distance from the railway line. Pushing on a few days after his successful action with Gough, he crossed the Zulu frontier, and had in front of him an almost unimpeded march as far as the Tugela. Crossing this far from the British base of power, his force could raid the Greytown district and raise recruits among the Dutch farmers, laying waste one of the few spots in South Africa which had been untouched by the blight of war. All this lay before him, and in his path nothing save only two small British posts which might be either disregarded or gathered up as he passed. In an evil moment for himself, tempted by the thought of the supplies which they might contain, he stopped to gather them up, and the force of the wave of invasion broke itself as upon two granite rocks.

These two so-called forts were posts of very modest strength, a chain of which had been erected at the time of the old Zulu war. Fort Itala, the larger, was garrisoned by 300 men of the 5th Mounted Infantry, drawn from the Dublin Fusiliers, Middlesex, Dorsets, South Lancashires, and Lancashire Fusiliers – most of them old soldiers of many battles. They had two guns of the 69th R.F.A., the same battery which had lost a section the week before. Major Chapman, of the Dublins, was in command.

Upon September 25th the small garrison heard that the main force of the Boers was sweeping towards them, and prepared to give them a soldiers' welcome. The fort is situated upon the flank of a hill, on the summit of which, a mile from the main trenches, a strong outpost was stationed. It was upon this that the first force of the attack broke at midnight of September 25th. The garrison, eighty strong, was fiercely beset by several hundred Boers, and the post was eventually carried after a sharp and bloody contest. Kane, of the South Lancashires, died with the words 'No surrender' upon his lips, and Potgieter, a Boer leader, was pistolled by Kane's fellow officer, Lefroy. Twenty of the small garrison fell, and the remainder were overpowered and taken.

With this vantage-ground in their possession the Boers settled down to the task of overwhelming the main position. They attacked upon three sides, and until morning the force was raked from end to end by unseen riflemen. The two British guns were put out of action and the maxim was made unserviceable by a bullet. At dawn there was a pause in the attack, but it recommenced and continued without intermission until sunset. The span betwixt the rising of the sun and its last red glow in the west is a long one for the man who spends it at his ease, but how never-ending must have seemed the hours to this handful of men, outnumbered, surrounded, pelted by bullets, parched with thirst, torn with anxiety, holding desperately on with dwindling numbers to their frail defences! To them it may have seemed a hard thing to endure so much for a tiny fort in a savage land. The larger view of its vital importance could have scarcely come to console the regimental officer, far less the private. But duty carried them through, and they wrought better than they knew, for the brave Dutchmen, exasperated by so disproportionate a resistance, stormed up to the very trenches and suffered as they had not suffered for many a long month. There have been battles with 10,000 British troops hotly engaged in which the Boer losses have not been so great as in this obscure conflict against an isolated post. When at last, baffled and disheartened, they drew off with the waning light, it is said that no fewer than a hundred of their dead and two hundred of their wounded attested the severity of the fight. So strange are the conditions of South African warfare that this loss, which would have hardly made a skirmish memorable in the slogging days of the Peninsula, was one of the most severe blows which the burghers had sustained in the course of a two years' warfare against a large and aggressive army. There is a conflict of evidence as to the exact figures, but at least they were sufficient to beat the Boer army back and to change their plan of campaign.

Whilst this prolonged contest had raged round Fort Itala, a similar attack upon a smaller scale was being made upon Fort Prospect, some fifteen miles to the eastward. This small post was held by a handful of Durham Artillery Militia and of Dorsets. The attack was delivered by Grobler with several hundred burghers, but it made no advance although it was pushed with great vigour, and repeated many times in the course of the day. Captain Rowley, who was in command, handled his men with such judgment that one killed and eight wounded represented his casualties during a long day's fighting. Here again the Boer losses were in proportion to the resolution of their attack, and are said to have amounted to sixty killed and wounded. Considering the impossibility of replacing the men, and the fruitless waste of valuable ammunition, September 26th was an evil day for the Boer cause. The British casualties amounted to seventy-three.

The water of the garrison of Fort Itala had been cut off early in the attack, and their ammunition had run low by evening. Chapman withdrew his men and his guns therefore to Nkandhla, where the survivors of his gallant garrison received the special thanks of Lord Kitchener. The country around was still swarming with Boers, and on the last day of September a convoy from Melmoth fell into their hands and provided them with some badly needed supplies.

But the check which he had received was sufficient to prevent any important advance upon the part of Botha, while the swollen state of the rivers put an additional obstacle in his way. Already the British commanders, delighted to have at last discovered a definite objective, were hurrying to the scene of action. Bruce Hamilton had reached Fort Itala upon September 28th and Walter Kitchener had been despatched to Vryheid. Two British forces, aided by smaller columns, were endeavouring to surround the Boer leader. On October 6th Botha had fallen back to the north-east of Vryheid, whither the British forces had followed him. Like De Wet's invasion of the Cape, Botha's advance upon Natal had ended in placing himself and his army in a critical position. On October 9th he had succeeded in crossing the Privaan River, a branch of the Pongolo, and was pushing north in the direction of Piet Retief, much helped by misty weather and incessant rain. Some of his force escaped between the British columns, and some remained in the kloofs and forests of that difficult country.

Walter Kitchener, who had followed up the Boer retreat, had a brisk engagement with the rearguard upon October 6th. The Boers shook themselves clear with some loss, both to themselves and to their pursuers. On the 10th those of the burghers who held together had reached Luneburg, and shortly afterwards they had got completely away from the British columns. The weather was atrocious, and the lumbering wagons, axle-deep in mud, made it impossible for troops who were attached to them to keep in touch with the light riders who sped before them. For some weeks there was no word of the main Boer force, but at the end of that time they reappeared in a manner which showed that both in numbers and in spirit they were still a formidable body.

Of all the sixty odd British columns which were traversing the Boer states there was not one which had a better record than that commanded by Colonel Benson. During seven months of continuous service this small force, consisting at that time of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, the 2nd Scottish Horse, the 18th and 19th Mounted Infantry, and two guns, had acted with great energy, and had reduced its work to a complete and highly effective system. Leaving the infantry as a camp guard, Benson operated with mounted troops alone, and no Boer laager within fifty miles was safe from his nocturnal visits. So skilful had he and his men become at these night attacks in a strange, and often difficult country, that out of twenty-eight attempts twenty-one resulted in complete success. In each case the rule was simply to gallop headlong into the Boer laager, and to go on chasing as far as the horses could go. The furious and reckless pace may be judged by the fact that the casualties of the force were far greater from falls than from bullets. In seven months forty-seven Boers were killed and six hundred captured, to say nothing of enormous quantities of munitions and stock. The success of these operations was due, not only to the energy of Benson and his men, but to the untiring exertions of Colonel Wools-Sampson, who acted as intelligence officer. If, during his long persecution by President Kruger, Wools-Sampson in the bitterness of his heart had vowed a feud against the Boer cause, it must be acknowledged that he has most amply fulfilled it, for it would be difficult to point to any single man who has from first to last done them greater harm.

In October Colonel Benson's force was reorganised, and it then consisted of the 2nd Buffs, the 2nd Scottish Horse, the 3rd and 25th Mounted Infantry, and four guns of the 84th battery. With this force, numbering nineteen hundred men, he left Middelburg upon the Delagoa line on October 20th and proceeded south, crossing the course along which the Boers, who were retiring from their abortive raid into Natal, might be expected to come. For several days the column performed its familiar work, and gathered up forty or fifty prisoners. On the 26th came news that the Boer commandos under Grobler were concentrating against it, and that an attack in force might be expected. For two days there was continuous sniping, and the column as it moved through the country saw Boer horsemen keeping pace with it on the far flanks and in the rear. The weather had been very bad, and it was in a deluge of cold driving rain that the British set forth upon October 30th, moving towards Brakenlaagte, which is a point about forty miles due south of Middelburg. It was Benson's intention to return to his base.

About midday the column, still escorted by large bodies of aggressive Boers, came to a difficult spruit swollen by the rain. Here the wagons stuck, and it took some hours to get them all across. The Boer fire was continually becoming more severe, and had broken out at the head of the column as well as the rear. The situation was rendered more difficult by the violence of the rain, which raised a thick steam from the ground and made it impossible to see for any distance. Major Anley, in command of the rearguard, peering back, saw through a rift of the clouds a large body of horsemen in extended order sweeping after them. 'There's miles of them, begob!' cried an excited Irish trooper. Next instant the curtain had closed once more, but all who had caught a glimpse of that vision knew that a stern struggle was at hand.

At this moment two guns of the 84th battery under Major Guinness were in action against Boer riflemen. As a rear screen on the farther side of the guns was a body of the Scottish Horse and of the Yorkshire Mounted Infantry. Near the guns themselves were thirty men of the Buffs. The rest of the Buffs and of the Mounted Infantry were out upon the flanks or else were with the advance guard, which was now engaged, under the direction of Colonel Wools-Sampson, in parking the convoy and in forming the camp. These troops played a small part in the day's fighting, the whole force of which broke with irresistible violence upon the few hundred men who were in front of or around the rear guns. Colonel Benson seems to have just ridden back to the danger point when the Boers delivered their furious attack.

Louis Botha with his commando is said to have ridden sixty miles in order to join the forces of Grobler and Oppermann, and overwhelm the British column. It may have been the presence of their commander or a desire to have vengeance for the harrying which they had undergone upon the Natal border, but whatever the reason, the Boer attack was made with a spirit and dash which earned the enthusiastic applause of every soldier who survived to describe it. With the low roar of a great torrent, several hundred horsemen burst through the curtain of mist, riding at a furious pace for the British guns. The rear screen of Mounted Infantry fell back before this terrific rush, and the two bodies of horsemen came pell-mell down upon the handful of Buffs and the guns. The infantry were ridden into and surrounded by the Boers, who found nothing to stop them from galloping on to the low ridge upon which the guns were stationed. This ridge was held by eighty of the Scottish Horse and forty of the Yorkshire M.I., with a few riflemen from the 25th Mounted Infantry. The latter were the escort of the guns, but the former were the rear screen who had fallen back rapidly because it was the game to do so, but who were in no way shaken, and who instantly dismounted and formed when they reached a defensive position.

These men had hardly time to take up their ground when the Boers were on them. With that extraordinary quickness to adapt their tactics to circumstances which is the chief military virtue of the Boers, the horsemen did not gallop over the crest, but lined the edge of it, and poured a withering fire on to the guns and the men beside them. The heroic nature of the defence can be best shown by the plain figures of the casualties. No rhetoric is needed to adorn that simple record. There were thirty-two gunners round the guns, and twenty-nine fell where they stood. Major Guinness was mortally wounded while endeavouring with his own hands to fire a round of case. There were sixty-two casualties out of eighty among the Scottish Horse, and the Yorkshires were practically annihilated. Altogether 123 men fell, out of about 160 on the ridge. 'Hard pounding, gentlemen,' as Wellington remarked at Waterloo, and British troops seemed as ready as ever to endure it.

The gunners were, as usual, magnificent. Of the two little bullet-pelted groups of men around the guns there was not one who did not stand to his duty without flinching. Corporal Atkin was shot down with all his comrades, but still endeavoured with his failing strength to twist the breech-block out of the gun. Another bullet passed through his upraised hands as he did it. Sergeant Hayes, badly wounded, and the last survivor of the crew, seized the lanyard, crawled up the trail, and fired a last round before he fainted. Sergeant Mathews, with three bullets through him, kept steadily to his duty. Five drivers tried to bring up a limber and remove the gun, but all of them, with all the horses, were hit. There have been incidents in this war which have not increased our military reputation, but you might search the classical records of valour and fail to find anything finer than the consistent conduct of the British artillery.

Colonel Benson was hit in the knee and again in the stomach, but wounded as he was he despatched a message back to Wools-Sampson, asking him to burst shrapnel over the ridge so as to prevent the Boers from carrying off the guns. The burghers had ridden in among the litter of dead and wounded men which marked the British position, and some of the baser of them, much against the will of their commanders, handled the injured soldiers with great brutality. The shell-fire drove them back, however, and the two guns were left standing alone, with no one near them save their prostrate gunners and escort.

There has been some misunderstanding as to the part played by the Buffs in this action, and words have been used which seem to imply that they had in some way failed their mounted companions. It is due to the honour of one of the finest regiments in the British army to clear this up. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the regiment under Major Dauglish was engaged in defending the camp. Near the guns there were four separate small bodies of Buffs, none of which appears to have been detailed as an escort. One of these parties, consisting of thirty men under Lieutenant Greatwood, was ridden over by the horsemen, and the same fate befell a party of twenty who were far out upon the flank. Another small body under Lieutenant Lynch was over taken by the same charge, and was practically destroyed, losing nineteen killed and wounded out of thirty. In the rear of the guns was a larger body of Buffs, 130 in number, under Major Eales. When the guns were taken this handful attempted a counter-attack, but Eales soon saw that it was a hopeless effort, and he lost thirty of his men before he could extricate himself. Had these men been with the others on the gun ridge they might have restored the fight, but they had not reached it when the position was taken, and to persevere in the attempt to retake it would have led to certain disaster. The only just criticism to which the regiment is open is that, having just come off blockhouse duty, they were much out of condition, which caused the men to straggle and the movements to be unduly slow.

It was fortunate that the command of the column devolved upon so experienced and cool-headed a soldier as Wools-Sampson. To attempt a counter-attack for the purpose of recapturing the guns would, in case of disaster, have risked the camp and the convoy. The latter was the prize which the Boers had particularly in view, and to expose it would be to play their game. Very wisely, therefore, Wools-Sampson held the attacking Boers off with his guns and his riflemen, while every spare pair of hands was set to work entrenching the position and making it impregnable against attack. Outposts were stationed upon all those surrounding points which might command the camp, and a summons to surrender from the Boer leader was treated with contempt. All day a long-range fire, occasionally very severe, rained upon the camp. Colonel Benson was brought in by the ambulance, and used his dying breath in exhorting his subordinate to hold out. 'No more night marches' are said to have been the last words spoken by this gallant soldier as he passed away in the early morning after the action. On October 31st the force remained on the defensive, but early on November 1st the gleaming of two heliographs, one to the north-east and one to the south-west, told that two British columns, those of De Lisle and of Barter, were hastening to the rescue. But the Boers had passed as the storm does, and nothing but their swathe of destruction was left to show where they had been. They had taken away the guns during the night, and were already beyond the reach of pursuit.