When Greene opened the packet containing the ‘black spot’ he must have gasped. He himself had struggled hard for a settlement and been rebuked by Milner in consequence. He had always believed that Smuts was prepared to compromise. The terms of the ultimatum, drafted, it seems, by Smuts, were absolutely uncompromising. It accused Britain of breaking the London Convention of 1884 by interfering in the internal affairs of the Transvaal (that is, by taking up the Uitlanders’ case) and by massing troops. It demanded that Britain should give the Transvaal immediate assurances on four crucial points. First, to agree to arbitration on ‘all points of mutual difference’; second, that the British troops ‘on the borders of this Republic shall be instantly withdrawn’; third, that all British reinforcements that had arrived after 1 June should be withdrawn from South Africa; fourth, that ‘Her Majesty’s troops which are now on the high seas shall not be landed in any port of South Africa’. And unless HMG complied within forty-eight hours, the government of the South African Republic (Transvaal) would ‘with great regret be compelled to regard the action as a formal declaration of war’.25
No wonder Greene was astounded. This was not the voice of Kruger, of the exhausted old man who had said at Bloemfontein, ‘It is our country you want.’ This was something much more virile and dangerous. It was the voice of David as he took his sling to smite Goliath.
The rains had come early to the southern Transvaal that spring, dappling the veld green and scattering stripes of daisies beside the railway line at Sandspruit.26 It was here, at the station, twelve miles from the frontier, that Joubert and the Transvaal burghers had been waiting impatiently for Kruger’s ultimatum. For the last week the Pretoria troop-trains had emptied their loads there: a dozen trains every twenty-four hours, monstrous, slow centipedes of trains; carriages full of men and boys, carrying their Mausers slung over their Sunday clothes; cattle trucks loaded with Creusot artillery, hugger-mugger with ox-wagons and oxen, wives and African servants.27
To English witnesses it all looked absurdly unmilitary. And this was how it was described by Leo Amery of The Times, who had followed the burghers from Pretoria to the front. There were no straight lines in the Boer army. For miles the sandy plain was dotted with ponies and oxen and covered wagons; all the paraphernalia of the Great Trek. At night the camp-fires glowed like the lights of a city, and bearded old men sat round the fires singing Dutch psalms with their wives and children. Side by side with these trekboers from the backveld were the burghers from Pretoria and the Rand. They were clean-shaven; many talked English, as they were colonial-born or British-born; they sounded almost like regular soldiers as they sang ribald songs round the campfire.
In the artillery laager at the centre of the plain, a large white marquee served as the HQ of Joubert, the Commandant-General. In Amery’s eyes he seemed a splendidly confident figure: flashing dark eyes, a flowing beard, and a welcome (surprisingly) for the correspondent of a jingo newspaper.28 In fact, Joubert was anxious, as usual. He was grateful for the rains; though down here, on the Natal border, the veld was only starting to flush green.29 Everything else had gone wrong during the last fortnight. The arrangements with the Free State, hold-ups on the railway, the ox-wagons – everything.30 All the time the thought haunted Joubert: was the war necessary at all?
As the leader of the Progressive bloc in the Raad and Kruger’s principal political opponent, Joubert had always asserted that a deal could be made with the Uitlanders. Only restore the original five-year franchise, he claimed, and there would be no danger to the republic. Kruger had stubbornly found no alternative to war. And now war was inevitable, Joubert was frustrated by the delays. ‘I have never been … in such a corner in all my life,’ he cabled back to Pretoria ‘… know nothing of the Free State.’31
If Joubert blamed Kruger for breaking off negotiations, he could only blame himself for the near-collapse of the arrangements for mobilization. Many of the men had no tents or even macintoshes to protect them against the rain; the mules supplied by dishonest contractors could hardly stand up; the wheels of the wagons were already falling to pieces.32 It was left to the fifteen thousand Transvaal burghers on the roll – of whom only about nine thousand had yet turned up – to improvise as best they could.33
One responsibility, at any rate, Joubert was spared: that of disciplining the burghers. Apart from the eight-hundred-strong grey-uniformed artillery corps, they were a people’s army – commandeered willy nilly. As a professional soldier, the Commandant-General was supposed to supply them with the material of war – Creusot and Krupp artillery, Mausers, ammunition, tents, food and so on – and to co-ordinate strategy. Their elected civilian leaders were made commandants – appointed, that is, to lead the five hundred to two thousand burghers of each commando in battle. In this commando system, it was no one’s job to train the burghers. Apart from the annual wappenschauw (or shooting practice), the men were left to fight as they had always fought – with the tactics of the mounted frontiersmen. If the enemy were superior in numbers, they would provoke the enemy’s attack, dismount, take cover and shoot, remount and ride away. In European military manuals it was a formula known as ‘strategic offensive, tactical defensive’. The Boers had never seen the manuals. But the tactics had served them well in countless wars against natives – and in 1881 at Laing’s Nek against the British. They had not lost a battle since Boomplatz in 1848, when Sir Harry Smith had thrashed General Pretorius.34
By 10 October the Boer army had shaken down into some sort of order, and Joubert decided on an unusual ceremony: a military parade. It was Kruger’s birthday. The burghers mounted their ponies, and formed up in sections. To one of the Pretoria Commando – Deneys Reitz, the seventeen-year-old son of Kruger’s State Secretary – the spectacle was ‘magnificent’.35 In fact, Joubert, sitting there on his horse, commanded an army that was probably the largest body of mounted riflemen ever assembled in Africa.36
Beyond the broad valley of Sandspruit was the town of Volksrust (‘People’s Rest’), a simple place of tin roofs and blue gum-trees, like so many other towns of the veld. A few miles beyond Volksrust were the misty hills of Natal: Laing’s Nek and Majuba. How well Joubert knew all that country! He had led the Transvaal forces here, eighteen years before, in attacking General Colley. His victory against four hundred redcoats had echoed round the world.37 Could he achieve the same today against an army forty times as strong?
The strategic plan that Kruger had concerted with Steyn and ordered Joubert to carry out was a diluted version of Smuts’s plan. It also bore the clear stamp of Kruger’s character; it was crude, but it was daring.
In early September, when Smuts had proposed the blitzkrieg, there had been only three small contingents of the British army close to the republics: five hundred men of Colonel Baden-Powell’s irregulars at Mafeking in northwestern Cape Colony, five hundred regulars at Kimberley, and the two thousand men of the garrisons under General Sir Penn Symons at Ladysmith and Dundee, in the northern prong of Natal.
There were now roughly thirteen thousand British troops close to the frontiers. Nevertheless, Kruger and Steyn had decided to strike with two-thirds of all the troops so far mobilized – twenty-one thousand out of thirty-five thousand – at these three points. (See maps on pages 6–7 and 127.)
The two Presidents had sent roughly twenty-one thousand men to Natal – fifteen thousand Transvaalers and six thousand Free Staters, divided into four groups and arranged in a crescent formation. On the south-west were six thousand Free Staters. The Johannesburg and German commandos, led by General Johannes Kock, formed the western horn in the Drakensberg Mountains. The eleven thousand men of the Pretoria and other commandos were with Joubert in the centre. The two thousand men of the Wakkerstroom and other commandos, led by General Lucas Meyer (a Progressive Party ally of Joubert’s), were at Vryheid, to the east. This crescent formation was designed to trap the forward British positions at Ladysmith and Dundee – unless they retreated in time.
Co-operation wi
th the fifteen thousand men of the Free State was essential to both Kruger’s offensives. Commandos from the Free State must seal off Mafeking (and later Kimberley) from the south, just as the six thousand from the Drakensberg must join hands with Kock’s forces forming the western horn of Joubert’s attack on Natal.38
This was Kruger’s daring plan. The Natal part of the plan had not reassured Joubert. He knew that Symons’s forces at Ladysmith and Dundee had grown from two thousand to twelve thousand in the last month. At first he had been afraid that the British might invade the Transvaal before his own commandos were in position. Symons was reported to have prepared an armoured train to raid deep into the Transvaal.39 Then Joubert thought that Laing’s Nek railway tunnel might be full of explosive. How could he be sure that Symons was not lurking somewhere in ambush? But September had safely passed. Even Joubert felt it was time to advance.40
It was now 3 p.m. on 10 October, the day of the military parade in honour of Kruger’s birthday. Commando after commando filed past the Commandant General: ranchers from the bushveld down at Middelburg; clerks and solicitors from Pretoria; a thousand Dutch and German Uitlanders from the Rand; a hundred Irish Uitlanders, whose second-in-command was a certain Major John MacBride, a name which would be famous one day in Ireland. All the burghers were mounted, though a few (notably the Irish miners) looked as though they would hardly stay mounted for long. As each man passed Joubert, he waved his hat or his rifle, according to his idea of a salute. The commandos then formed into a mass, and galloped cheering up the dry, grassy slope where Joubert sat his horse under an embroidered banner. He rose in his stirrups to address them, but his words were lost in the crowd.41 Perhaps he pointed across the valley at Majuba. There lay Natal – Natal stolen from the voortrekkers, Natal the Promised Land, that was theirs for the taking.42
While he was speaking, the news that Kruger had at last delivered the ultimatum reached Sandspruit. Deneys Reitz saw the quiver in the ranks as the word was passed from man to man. The excitement was immense. People stood in their stirrups and shouted themselves hoarse. Joubert and his retinue had to fight their way back through the crowd. There was singing and shouting from the laagers until dawn.43
On 12 October, in the small hours, the Boers struck camp and Joubert’s columns began to move forward – ‘a weird opening scene to the great drama’, as Leo Amery described it, ‘an endless procession of silent misty figures, horsemen, artillery, and wagons, filing past in the dark, cold night along the winding road that led to where the black shoulder of Majuba stood up against the greyer sky.’44
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Natal frontier, the British general, Sir George White, viewed his own military preparations with even more misgiving than Joubert.45
White had landed at Durban on 7 October a fortnight after Symons had rashly divided the Natal field force and pushed forward a brigade from Ladysmith to Dundee. This dangerously weakened the position of White’s ten thousand men, already outnumbered two to one by the combined Free State and Transvaal armies.
For two days White was preoccupied with the disembarkation at Durban of the last of the reinforcements. Unlike Joubert’s chaotic mobilization, the British disembarkation ran as smoothly as a machine. Down the gang-planks poured a stream of bronzed veterans from India, who were then despatched, five trains for each regiment, up the twisting railway line to Ladysmith.46 On 9 October White was ready to deal with Symons, who had come down the line to meet him.
Strategically, one crucial question remained (it was Milner’s third question). How far north to station the British forces? In the rugged northern triangle at Dundee and Ladysmith? Or south of the triangle, at Estcourt, in the smooth plains beyond the Tugela River? White knew of Buller’s warnings. Nothing north of the Tugela.
One of White’s ablest staff officers, Colonel Rawlinson, echoed the warning:
The Boers are thought to have some 15,000 to 20,000 men on the frontier all told. We have not more than 10,000 at present [2,000 were still on the high seas]. Yet they are split up half at Glencoe [Dundee] and half at Ladysmith both of which are too far forward to secure the defence of the colony. [The] only thing is to hold the line of the Tugela River and withdraw from Glencoe and Ladysmith. The situation … which we are going to take up is one which from a military point of view is absolutely false and… courts disaster for it has no flanks whatever and the Boers can pass and avoid either place or if they choose surround or annihilate either place in detail. If I were in Sir George White’s place I would insist on withdrawing to the Tugela or on throwing up the command… but, and this is the main point, I am not in command.47
Nothing north of the Tugela. Symons saw no cause for alarm. ‘Symons is brimful of confidence,’ Rawlinson added. ‘They talk as if the war were over, now a brigade is coming from India, and speak of a British brigade being able to take on five times in Boers, which is silly rot.’48
Next day, 10 October, White went to see the Governor of Natal in Maritzburg, and was shocked to find that he agreed with Symons, for strictly political reasons.
Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the Governor, claimed that a retreat from Dundee would ‘disgust’ the loyalists in Natal. The most belligerent of these were not Natalians but Uitlander refugees from Johannesburg.49 At Milner’s suggestion, they had been formed into two mounted corps of their own – fifteen hundred strong: the Imperial Light Horse and (at Cape Town) the South African Light Horse. Outwardly, these were similar to other irregular corps being formed in South Africa at this time. Actually, they were a fully fledged Uitlander army, eventually twenty thousand strong, largely financed by Wernher-Beit, and led by precisely the same men – Woolls-Sampson, ‘Karri’ Davies and others – who had been the political leaders of the Rand ever since the Raid.50 They had their own ideas on strategy, as well as diplomacy, and Hely Hutchinson was not the man to stand in their way. Second, Hely-Hutchinson was afraid that a retreat from Dundee might precipitate an Afrikaner rising in Natal. Much of that northern triangle of Natal was occupied by descendants of the voortrekkers. Third, he warned White that a retreat from Dundee might stir up the 750,000 Zulus in north-east Natal.51
To Sir George, trained like Symons in the Indian army, where political considerations always weighed so high in the balance, this talk of the native peril proved decisive. He could imagine that wave of Zulus sweeping down on the white population. No, better even to risk defeat by the Boers. That evening he agreed to let Symons keep the camp at Dundee, against all his own military instincts52 – and common sense. A defeat at Dundee would have still worse political repercussions than a retreat.
At Dundee itself, the morale of the small garrison was excellent. Whatever his defects as a strategist, Sir Penn was a popular commander.53 In private, he admitted being disappointed by three of the infantry battalions the War Office had sent him: they were a ‘dull and backward’ lot; they seemed not to have been made ‘to do any work properly for years’. He was depressed too by the mountain battery: the Cape Coloured drivers could not compare with ‘our Punjabi drivers’.54
But now he had licked his force into shape. Drill for the men, polo for the officers, field-days for everyone. Some of the officers were astonished at Symons’s old-fashioned reliance on close order. Symons did not worry. First, the field artillery. They galloped up, unlimbered and fired off a dozen blank cartridges, filling the air with black smoke. Then the attack. (‘In four waves, heaped together à la Gravelotte,’ wrote one of Symons’ mounted infantrymen. ‘He must be mad.’) The infantry swept forward, firing volleys by numbers, halting each time the whistle blew. Finally, the Hussars. They charged up to where the referee stood with his red flag, cutting the air with their swords.55
On Wednesday 11 October, the Dundee garrison learnt that Kruger’s ultimatum had expired, and there were rumours in the town of Dundee that the first shots of the war had been fired. But in Penn Symons’s camp, a few hundred yards to the west of the town, under the great shoulder of Mount Impati, the order was
‘business as usual’. Apart from a thunderstorm that threatened to wash away the picket lines, life in the camp continued undisturbed.56 The senior officers’ ladies remained at their husbands’ sides;57 there were guest nights in the regimental mess, as if they were still in India; Sir Penn was the life and soul of the garrison. Had they heard the story of the young lady who had been to see Kruger in September? ‘Well, Mr President,’ she had asked, ‘is there going to be war or not?’ ‘Madame, I will tell you. The Transvaal is a very pretty girl. England is her lover. The lover has been refused several times; now he is going to kill her.’58
In the mess of the 60th Rifles, the officers wore their dress uniforms: scarlet and green. Despite the thunderstorm, Dundee’s water supply was running short. Yet, as young Lieutenant Charles Trench wrote in his diary that night: There was no shortage of ‘soda water and whisky’.59 It was a convivial evening. People talked of dining in Pretoria that Christmas.60 ‘It will be another Omdurman picnic with halts at Bloemfontein and Johannesburg’, wrote Lieutenant Maurice Crum on the day after the ultimatum was issued.61
Outside the mess tent, at sunset, the great peaks of the Drakensberg glowed like the peaks of the Himalayas seen from Simla. How well Symons knew that Indian hill country! Here in Natal, he had only one anxiety: that he might miss the ‘row’. His Intelligence Officer reported Joubert’s army at Sandspruit to consist of ten thousand men, with twenty-four guns.62 Yet Symons still thought Dundee was too far south for striking at the Boers. Laing’s Nek and Majuba would have made a better place. ‘I wish every commando in the Transvaal was there in a bunch,’ he had told one of White’s staff, ‘so that I could make one sweep of the lot of them.’63
The Boer War Page 18
