It was now 8 November, and when Milner went for his afternoon outing, he heard a rumour that the Roslin Castle had already anchored in Table Bay. In fact, he could see no sign of it, and he spent a wretched night (‘anxiety of all sorts beginning to tell more than it has done yet,’ he wrote in his diary). Next day he took his horse out for a ride.57 Probably he rode up to the flanks of the Lion, the gigantic scarp of rock below the plateau of Table Mountain. Below him was the great sweep of Table Bay and beyond Table Mountain, behind his back the veld, running five hundred miles north-east to the Orange River. The door was wide open from the river to the sea. Wide open to the Boers. This was the nightmare that had sat on Milner’s chest throughout these harrowing days. But that day, like a castaway whose heart leaps at the sight of the sail on the horizon, Milner looked down on the red funnels of the Roslin Castle, carrying the No. 3 Field Hospital and No. 4 Bearer Company, anchored below him in Table Bay.58
The Roslin Castle was the first of the armada, whose funnels and masts and rigging soon crowded Table Bay like a forest. South Africa had never seen so many liners, nor so many troops. Nor had the British navy, which had organized the armada, had such a task since they sent sailing ships to carry Lord Raglan and his thirty thousand men to Scutari in 1854. Each day, when Milner took his ride, he could count the new arrivals. There were the transports bringing the 2nd Infantry Division, commanded by Sir Francis Clery and destined for Natal; there were the Moor, the Yorkshire, the Lismore Castle, the Harlech Castle, the Manila, the Gurkha, and so on. What a Homeric catalogue of ships! By 16 November, they had all been sent steaming off to Durban.59 Still more heartwarming, from Milner’s point of view, was the sight of Lieutenant-General Lord Methuen’s 1st Infantry Division, Lieutenant-General Sir William Gatacre’s 3rd Infantry Division, and a cavalry division – all destined to reinforce the Cape.60
On 13 November a south-easterly gale had blown up (‘almost a hurricane’, it seemed to Milner) and he was intensely anxious for the transports caught out at sea or lumbering in the harbour. The gale lasted four days, but no ships were wrecked.61 By 18 November – nine days after the Roslin Castle’s arrival – more than a third of the forty-seven thousand men of the Army Corps had disembarked at Cape Town, or been sent on to Durban. That day Buller decided he was strong enough to push Sir William Gatacre’s 3rd Infantry Division forward to Naauwpoort, in the north-eastern part of the Colony, from where they had earlier been withdrawn.62 Milner wrote the first cheerful entry in his diary since October: ‘Rather an exciting day, General determined to race back to Naauwport which was successfully accomplished late at night.’63 Milner could give thanks to the High Gods. In the Cape Colony, if not yet in Natal, the Army Corps had begun to stem the tide of invasion.
In the meantime, Buller had been performing prodigies down in his headquarters, a small, unpretentious house he had rented in Grave Street.64 To improvise half a dozen separate commands out of the four divisions – that was the beginning of the problem. Major-General French’s cavalry division was left in the Cape more or less intact. However, in the infantry divisions Buller had to reallocate not only the brigades, but even the battalions within the brigades, according to the dates of their arrival and according to his assessment of the strategic threats in each area. His army’s deficiencies, Buller found, came from that jigsaw planning of Wolseley’s. And jigsaw it was: an Army Corps that had never seen a day’s parade, but existed only on paper.65 How different it would have been, if Buller had been allowed to go to South Africa earlier that year and prepare the ground.
There was one overwhelming – and, indeed, unique – feature of a war against the Boers. The Boers were virtually all mounted infantry. The War Office had made almost no concessions to this fact. Against fifty thousand Mausers, in the hands of Boer irregulars, they had planned to match roughly fifty thousand Lee Metfords in the hands of British regulars. That, and the weight of British artillery, was the thinking behind the War Office ‘steam-roller’. But the arithmetic looked very different if one counted feet, not rifles. The Boers had six feet – two for a man, four for a horse – behind every Mauser. Only an eighth of the British force was mounted.66 Hence it would be mobile war, but of a strange, unequal sort: the war of a whale, like the one they had seen from the deck of the Dunottar Castle, and the small fish that pursued it.
Buller, in his own fashion, recognized this. In fact, his plan, when he reached Cape Town at the end of the previous month, had been to put flesh on the War Office’s paper army and give the Army Corps an entirely new mobility. He had intended to raise large numbers of irregular colonial troops – men who could ride and shoot exactly like the Boers – and retrain his Army Corps in the novel principles of war in the veld. Meanwhile the ox and mule transport had still to arrive (and in fact this would not all arrive until January). Then came disaster: Rhodes stranded at Kimberley, White at Ladysmith. Buller had to drop everything and speed away – the whale to the rescue.67;
‘Ever since we have been here we have been like a man,’ he told one of his staff before he left for Natal on 22 November, ‘who, with a long day’s work before him, overslept himself and so was late for everything all day.”68 It was true enough. There was no time to do anything well. Everything had to be improvised: guns, transport, supplies, and, above all, staff. Buller’s own headquarters staff had vanished to the winds, like the Army Corps itself. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles a Court, who, as Charles Repington, would later be famous as a military historian, was sent off to recruit the new mounted corps – the South African Light Horse – drawn from Uitlander refugees at the Cape.69 At this he distinguished himself, though Buller was upset to find he had appointed as colonel a man called Villiers, who had ridden with Jameson in the Raid. Colonel Herbert Miles, the Assistant Adjutant-General, took command of the vital railway junction at De Aar, from where Lord Methuen’s relief expedition was being mounted. Major Julian Byng, the future Lord Byng of Vimy, was sent to raise more mounted corps.70 So, when Buller left for Natal on the 22nd, he had only his personal staff – his ADCs and his Military Secretary – for what he recognized would be the greatest struggle of his career. Indeed, it would be almost a ‘forlorn hope’ to rescue White, Buller thought, with the limited troops and time available.71
After Buller’s departure Milner relapsed into gloom. Buller had ‘done wonders’ in the three weeks he had been at the Cape. Milner himself was the first to admit this to Chamberlain. He accepted, if reluctantly, Buller’s decision to divert a third of the Army Corps to Natal. But he wished Buller had not decided to lead the Natal relief force in person. It needed a soldier of Buller’s stature to keep a grip on affairs at the Cape and Buller had ‘grasp’. When he was gone, they would be back to the old state of ‘drift’.’72
Actually, Buller’s departure coincided with the improvement in imperial fortunes in South Africa that he had hopefully forecast. The race to stem the tide of invasion seemed to have been virtually won. In Natal, two of the three brigades of Clery’s 2nd division – about eight thousand men – were already at Estcourt and Mooi River. They should be able to shield Maritzburg from the Boers’ drive south. On the western borders of Cape Colony, Lord Methuen had set off on 20 November from his base at De Aar. He had now crossed the Orange River, taking rations for five days, and it was hoped he would be at Kimberley within a week. In the Midland and Eastern districts of the colony, it was true, the Boers were still advancing. But here, too, the imperial shield had been slipped into position in the nick of time. Gatacre’s 3rd ‘division’ – not yet a brigade, in fact – was holding Queenstown without difficulty. The cavalry division, led by French, now back in the saddle, was holding the line at Colesberg. The Boers might slip through the gaps; that was Milner’s new source of anxiety. But only a pessimist would deny that the strategic situation had taken a dramatic turn for the better.73
Milner remained a pessimist.74 His temper was not improved by a number of trivial, but irritating, events that occurred at this time to cast a pa
ll over his personal life.
One of his most intimate friends, Mrs Richard Chamberlain, freshly widowed, had come out to Cape Town. That, one might have thought, would have delighted him. Mrs Chamberlain was high-spirited, with just that touch of wildness he found so attractive in women. She was also a passionate imperialist (she had haunted Dr Jameson’s trial in London) and – still more important – she was the Colonial Secretary’s sister-in-law. She had helped Milner in a variety of ways. She would come to see him in London, and spend half the night gossiping tête-à-tête in his chambers in Duke Street.75 But since she had been widowed, the strength of her feelings had become intensely embarrassing to Milner. His other friends, especially Margot, disapproved of Mrs Chamberlain. ‘Please, please don’t marry that woman – promise me that,’ Margot wrote.76 Milner told people he had no intention of marrying, which was true enough. The news that she had pursued him to Cape Town especially alarmed him because she was suspected in the Chamberlain family of having been unfaithful to her husband. Milner sent a private cypher cable to explain his predicament to Joe. He had not in any way ‘countenanced’ her visit; he disapproved of it.77
At the same time, Violet Cecil, the ‘godsend’, as Milner called her, had deserted Government House. In October she had moved to Groote Schuur, where Cecil Rhodes kept open house for influential British visitors. Since Rhodes’s enforced absence at Kimberley, she had been acting as his hostess, but Milner saw her nearly every day. She would arrive after tea and they would go for long walks. Perhaps they played tennis; for Milner, dissatisfied with his success at archery, had just taken up the game. Certainly Violet and he went riding together on the Cape Flats.78 But something was lacking from their relationship. Part of the trouble was that Violet, nearly twenty years younger than Milner and extremely pretty, resented the stiffness of diplomatic life. There had been a ghastly evening with Milner and the foreign military attachés. They had all been kept standing for hours. Eventually, she had made a rude face at Alfred, who had taken the hint. She made no secret that diplomatic life was not the life for her.79
In fact, she had just revealed another annoying facet of her nature – a talent for gossip quite as dazzling as Margot’s. When Buller left for Natal, it had apparently been agreed with Milner that, for security reasons, his destination should be known to as few people as possible. Hence Milner’s astonishment when Violet rushed round to Government House the evening of Buller’s departure to tell Milner the exciting news. ‘You are mistaken,’ was his first comment. Then she told him her source; a young staff officer. ‘Well, say nothing about it,’ he replied bluntly.80 How characteristic of Violet to have wormed out the most closely guarded secret of the war!
A few days earlier, Milner had heard a depressing item of news from Natal concerning one of the young men whom he was anxious to help make his way in the world: Winston Churchill. Milner had received two eloquent letters about Churchill – one from Chamberlain (‘He has the reputation of being bumptious. Put him on the right lines …’)81 the other from George Wyndham, the Under-Secretary of State for War. Wyndham wrote, ‘He is a very clever fellow & is bringing out an unprejudiced mind.’82 And there was nothing, no doubt, that would have pleased Milner more than to tell young Churchill about that little corner of the imperial chessboard where they both found themselves, though it might have been Churchill who would have done most of the talking. In the event, Churchill had not lost a day in Cape Town. He had rushed off to Natal, hoping to reach Ladysmith before the siege began. And he had now been carried off as prisoner of war to Pretoria, after some inconceivably stupid incident involving an armoured train.83 So, for the time being, Churchill’s budding career as a war correspondent seemed to have ended in disaster; while Milner had lost the chance of explaining to that ‘unprejudiced mind’ the background to the ‘great Afrikaner conspiracy’ to take over all South Africa, a conspiracy whose reality the Boers’ invasion now seemed to confirm.84
CHAPTER 15
Botha’s Raid
South Natal,
9–30 November 1899
‘Joubert stopped me from coming to Durban in 1899 to eat bananas.’
Louis Botha at a banquet in Durban, 1908
Meanwhile, the Boers were poised to strike deeper into British territory. But their aims were more limited than Milner – obsessed with the threat, both military and ideological, which the Boers posed – could ever have grasped. Had Milner had a spy in the laager of Joubert, the Commandant-General, in those first ten days of November, it would have done wonders for his morale.
Poor Joubert was crushed under the weight of his own victories: an old man, tired and ill, beset by problems on every side. No shoes for the horses, no proper supplies, half the burghers ready to ride off to raid Durban, the other half to abandon the struggle and go home.1 This was hardly an exaggeration. And from Kruger and the Executive Council there was little help or encouragement on the overwhelming strategic problem: how to exploit their victories, the better to defend their own borders.2
Younger burghers, like Deneys Reitz, the son of Kruger’s State Secretary, rightly regarded Joubert as ‘weak and hesitant’, because he shrank from attacking the enemy.3 But it is a moot point whether a young and brilliant general like Louis Botha, who had emerged as Joubert’s right-hand man, could now have adopted a very different strategy from Joubert’s, given the decisions of the Boer politicians and the practical military difficulties. For what Reitz (and, indeed, Milner, Amery and subsequent British historians)4 failed to understand was that, despite the urging of enthusiasts like Smuts, the agreed strategy of the two republican governments was defensive. Kruger’s main political objective was a new settlement, with Britain giving the Transvaal unqualified independence. A new military victory in Natal – a second Majuba – could achieve this, but the first priority was now, as it had been in 1881, to defend the land and the volk. Hence the crucial fact that the forty-five thousand men of the Boer forces in the field had been disposed at the outbreak of war merely to block the enemy’s attacks.5
True, Kruger’s plan was daring. He and Steyn had chosen attack as the best form of defence. But none of their pre-emptive blows was planned, as real offensive strategy demanded, to fall where the enemy was weakest. On the contrary, the aim was to find the strongest points in the enemy’s attacking force and then smash them. In fact, their ‘defensive-offensive’ strategy involved invasion of colonial territory for two reasons. First, they had to block the immediate military threat. This they had now achieved in both Natal and Cape Colony. They had bottled up White and his twelve thousand in Ladysmith; they had put the stopper, so to speak, on Baden-Powell at Mafeking and Rhodes in Kimberley. Second, they had to seize the best strategic positions for blocking the expected British counter-attack, which would probably take the form of at least two relief expeditions, as well as a British invasion of the Free State by the obvious route from the south. It was part of this second task that now faced Joubert and Botha in Natal: how best to trap the expedition hurrying to rescue White?6
On the afternoon of 9 November the commandants of the Transvaal army held a council of war in the shade of Joubert’s tents at Modderspruit, a few miles east of Ladysmith. It was a moment to take stock. They had been at war for a month, and from some points of view their success had been dazzling. That wild mass of irregulars who had galloped up to Joubert’s tent at Volksrust on President Kruger’s birthday, cheering and shouting themselves hoarse at the news of the ultimatum – these men had now beaten, in open warfare, the cream of the British army. No doubt they still shouted and cheered Joubert when he made his rounds to inspect the twenty-odd camps of burghers stretched in a great circle around Ladysmith. The reverses at Talana and Elandslaagte had hardly affected morale, for the simple reason that they had involved such a small number of burghers.7
Yet Joubert had every reason to regard these first actions of the war as disasters, reckoning up what they had cost him both in men and in opportunities lost. At Dundee, General Lu
cas Meyer had bungled the first great opportunity of the war: to trap Symons. Had Meyer waited one day before occupying Talana Hill, he could have joined forces with General Erasmus’s commandos, whom Joubert had sent forward to Mount Impati, and how could Symons’s four battalions have coped with an attack from both directions?8 The strategic error had been compounded by General Kock at Elandslaagte. Joubert had ordered Kock to lie in wait for Symons’s force on the Biggarsberg. Instead, Kock had pushed on to Elandslaagte, where he had recklessly exposed himself to White’s attack.9 Hence Joubert’s inability – even supposing he had had the self-confidence to attempt it – to trap Symons’ force while it was retreating under Yule’s command, a victory that would have put Majuba into the shade. And hence the exceptionally heavy cost, from Joubert’s point of view, of these early actions: 607 burghers killed, wounded and captured. These casualties (over half of them the result of Kock’s folly10) represented, according to Joubert’s official report to Kruger, ‘a total defeat as great as has ever yet befallen the Afrikaner volk’.11
Still, war is, in the last resort, a contest in blunders, and it was thanks to Sir George White, more than to Joubert’s own generals, that all these British troops were now trapped at Ladysmith. The question was how to frustrate the expected counter-attack. At the council of war on 9 November, Joubert put the three main options to his commandants. They could try and take the town by storm before relief arrived. They could divide their own forces, and dig in along the line of the Tugela. They could drive deep into Natal to reconnoitre defensive positions nearer Durban. It was to the third option that Joubert himself inclined.12
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