Beyond the headquarters tents, and the endless lines of regimental bell-tents, there was white sand, soft and deep, into which you could sink at every step; beyond that the brilliant blue-green of the willows, marking the Orange River itself. Everything else was as khaki as Methuen’s trousers: khaki from its coating of dust. The stone huts of the railway workers, the sage bushes and acacia thorns dotted across the veld, the lizards, the ants, the black faces of the African mule-drivers – everything was thick in dust. Even in spring, the veld here on the western front was not green like the veld of Natal, green and glowing with daisies. It was a wilderness.4 Methuen himself knew it well from his previous campaign here in 1885–6, when he had raised a troop of Light Horse to fight with General Warren in Bechuanaland.5 The previous week he had refreshed his memory of the Great Karoo from the train that had brought him from Cape Town: a stony beach four hundred miles broad, strewn with kopjes, round and flat-topped like sand castles. This scene of desolation extended all the way to the Orange River. But that day it had begun to rain ‘like a shower-bath’: a ‘grand’ thunderstorm. What a godsend! said Methuen. No more worries, for the moment, about getting water for the men or grazing for the animals.
‘For once I think I am excited,’ he wrote, as the warm rain splashed against the walls of the tent.6 Excitement was not an emotion that came easily to Methuen. He was rather a solitary man. He was a great English landowner; he had been brought up at Corsham Court in Wiltshire, amid the glow of Rubens and Reynolds portraits. No one had ever claimed he was a great general. ‘Painstaking’ was the word his friends used about him.7 He was tall and big-framed, with a drooping moustache, and he tended to stoop. He was not one of Roberts’s ‘Indians’, nor one of Wolseley’s ‘Africans’ despite his service in Africa; he was too detached – an abstemious, taciturn man. His troops had cheered him to the echo when the Moor had docked at Cape Town eleven days before, but it was, he said himself, ‘because I had hardly spoken to anyone during the entire voyage’.8
He had the advantage of having influential friends, including his close neighbour and fellow-magnate, Lord Lansdowne, the War Minister. But recently Lansdowne had partly lost confidence in him. He had caught him ‘talking Boer’ on the Irish manoeuvres in August.9 Like Buller, that other English landowner-general, Methuen had a soft spot for the Boers of the backveld, though he blamed the war on those ‘rascals in Pretoria’.10 Lansdowne found this displeasing. He was also aware of Wolseley’s doubts about Methuen. ‘Paul Methuen is a great friend of mine,’ he told Buller, ‘and I have always regarded him as an able… soldier’. He doubted, however, if he was ‘man enough… to “run the show” in the Cape’ during Buller’s absence in Natal.11
Fortunately for Methuen’s morale, he could not know of Wolseley’s or Lansdowne’s strictures. All he knew was that he had been given three splendid infantry brigades and told to relieve Kimberley. His job was not to garrison it himself. He was merely to throw in a few troops and guns, with full supplies, and take out those of the inhabitants who were reported to be giving trouble: the women and children, ten thousand Africans and one notable Englishman, Cecil Rhodes.12
Buller had met Methuen and Clery soon after the Moor had docked at Cape Town, and told them how White’s blunder in letting himself be locked up in Ladysmith had wrecked all the plans for the advance on Bloemfontein. Methuen was as astonished as anyone. When he sailed from England in October, he said that he felt ‘almost sure there will be very little fighting’, and laughed at General Gatacre, the energetic commander of the 3rd Division, for pounding away on his typewriter, composing memos for his staff. ‘You would imagine,’ said Methuen, ‘that we are in for a second Peninsular War.’13 Then he arrived at the Cape and heard of White’s disaster. ‘Everyone was very low,’ Methuen reported to his wife, ‘at the state of affairs, but Redvers was perfect. He told Clery and myself in ½ hour how things are: White frightened to death, Ian Hamilton mad, and French all right.’ The same story had been repeated to him, suitably modestly, by French himself.14
The central problem now facing Methuen at Orange River, as, indeed, it had faced White in Natal, and was to dominate the war, was intelligence: where and how strong was the enemy? How strong was the invisible fence of steel, blocking the path between Kimberley and the Orange River?
Spanning the Orange River – two hundred feet wide in the rainy season, but now only a third of that and as muddy as the Thames at Windsor – was the Orange River railway bridge. It was a clumsy affair of wooden planks and freshly painted red steel lattice-work. It carried the single-track railway line, the life-line of western Cape Colony, to Kimberley, Mafeking and on to Rhodesia. Somehow this vital Orange bridge had remained intact in the first month of the war, guarded by a handful of imperial troops. Nothing showed more clearly how limited was the Boers’ offensive strategy than this: the Free State commandos had never been sent to seize the bridge.15 Now it was safe, shored up by the full weight of Methuen’s field force. But the Free State commandos remained, lurking in the heat haze among those blue-grey hills beyond the river. Where were they now?
The first skirmish of the war, on Methuen’s front, had taken place here a couple of days before Methuen had arrived. Julian Ralph, the Daily Mail correspondent, described it graphically. He had hired a buggy and driven gallantly towards the battle. He found the station, on the south bank of the Orange River, half deserted: officers’ horses tethered to the wooden fence, tents pitched in the front gardens, beside the old paraffin tins full of flowers (perhaps petunias); in the middle of the street, some soldiers working a heliograph, with a thing like a shaving mirror connected to the morse key. Hardly any other soldiers were to be seen.
What does it mean?
We have heard that the patrol is cut off by a large force of Boers, and every man-jack in the place – field batteries, infantry and all – has gone to their relief in the train.
People were scanning the red-hot veld, whole families of Africans, standing outside their huts, holding up the pink palms of their hands to shield their eyes.16 Ralph rode a mile and a half through the camp, clattered over the great red railway bridge, and then climbed a kopje, from which he was told he would see everything. He saw nothing. Or rather, he saw a Major Hall of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, who seemed to have arrived at that god-forsaken spot, a kopje littered with dirty sandbags, direct from a London drawing-room: not a speck of dust on his creaseless leather puttees, every star and button and buckle shining like a woman’s jewellery. Beside this mysterious apparition stood a dozen soldiers, coated, like the sandbags, in khaki dust. Standing beside them, scanning the plain with the same upright carriage and intense, professional concentration, was a tame ostrich.17
The veld, too, had its apparitions. Northwards, it rolled fifty miles, on and on, almost to Kimberley, with here and there strange funnel-shaped clouds of dust, streaming like vapour from the plain, then a galloping grey horse, whose head and tail, intersected by the dark body of the rider, rose and fell like wings. A ghostly train vanished into an invisible fold of ground, as though it had sunk through a hole in the veld.18
Of the actual skirmish Ralph saw only these phantoms. Yet Ralph and the other correspondents had seen one thing that was to be the dominant theme of every battle of the war: invisibility. Like their colleagues in Natal, they began to realize that this was in the very nature of the new warfare – the warfare of the new, long-range, smokeless magazine rifle. The range of the rifle had spread the battlefield over five or ten miles. This and the fact that the ammunition was smokeless made conventional reconnaissance impossible. The enemy were an army of ghosts. Yet the five-shot Mauser magazine – and the ten-shot British Lee Metford and Lee Enfield – made the fighting doubly real.19
So it had proved that day. When the trains came clattering back across the Orange River bridge, Ralph saw the casualties from Colonel George Gough’s reconnaissance patrol being unloaded: Lieutenant-Colonel Falconer, dead with a bullet through the head; Lieutenant Wood d
ying; two other officers and two privates wounded. It was Ralph’s first sight of the colour of war – the dark patch on the khaki suit. It was also notable that, of the six casualties, four were officers. The Boers ‘will not play the game fairly’, said one of the soldiers. Ralph drew a different lesson. Those gleaming insignia, the stars and buttons and buckles of the professional soldier, were all very well in the drawing-room. In the sunshine of the veld they blazed like a heliograph. Against an invisible enemy, the British officers had been as conspicuous as redcoats.20
Such had been the disastrous end to Colonel Gough’s reconnaissance of the Boer positions just before Methuen’s arrival at the Orange River. Its immediate result had been more ‘quakings’ by Milner for the safety of the British positions, even as far south as the main railway junction, De Aar.21 And Buller had told Methuen: for goodness’ sake follow Symons’s example in Natal and make the officers dress like the men; and take extra care with reconnaissance. Hence the new dust-coloured look of Methuen’s officers.22 As for Colonel Gough, he was soon to be sent back to the Cape in disgrace: the first of a long line of COs to be ‘Stellenbosched’, in the phrase soon to be coined from the name of the main base camp. (Gough himself took the disgrace hard. He blew his brains out with his pistol.)23
Milner’s fears proved unfounded. The Free State commandos did not follow up their success. And now that Methuen had arrived, where were the Boers?
The sketchy intelligence reports, and the inadequate maps supplied to him in Cape Town, had led Methuen to believe that there were two likely positions in which the enemy would try to make a stand. First, at some kopjes at Belmont twenty miles ahead, where they had a laager estimated at fifteen hundred to two thousand men. Second, just across the Modder River, at the lines of kopjes at Magersfontein and Spytfontein sixty miles ahead – that is, about ten miles south of Kimberley. The main enemy force was expected to be at this second position. Buller had warned Methuen that nine thousand men were besieging Kimberley, some of whom would clearly move south to block his advance.24
After Gough’s disaster, Methuen had sent out various patrols. His best scouts were the ‘Tigers’. They were part of a unique corps of two hundred colonial guides raised by Major Mike Rimington, one of the special service officers sent out in July. They were nicknamed ‘Rimington’s Tigers’ after the ‘tiger-skin’ (actually, leopard-skin) puggaree they wore on their Boer hats. There was little else but this leopard-skin to distinguish them from Boers, for they spoke either the taal or ‘Kaffir’, and some knew this district as well as any trekboer.25 But the obstacle to all intelligence-gathering remained the long-range Mauser. Conventional scouting was impossible in flat ground, where the best scout in the world could be picked off by the enemy from more than a mile away.26 So Methuen had only the vaguest estimate of the enemy’s position and strength.27
His second handicap (and, again, one that was to haunt Buller in Natal) was shortage of animal transport. The railway he had, and on the railway everything depended. Grinding up that rusty single track, five hundred miles long, had come every box and bale of his supplies: everything from the largest field-gun to the smallest secret weapon, the experimental Marconi wireless set. But, to be fully mobile, he needed animals to haul wagons cross-country. He had 190 mule wagons instead of the 367 promised. There were no oxen. It would be nearly Christmas before any oxen reached the front, as it was only three months since the War Office had ‘pressed the button’.28;
Methuen was also desperately short of mounted troops. This, too, was the price to be paid for starting the expedition more than a month earlier than planned. Buller had only been able to rake together less than a thousand mounted troops for Methuen: the ‘Tigers’, the 9th Lancers and some mounted infantry.29; There were not many wings for Methuen’s so-called ‘flying column’.
These were the handicaps – weak intelligence, poor mobility. It was they – and the need to move at once – that shaped Methuen’s plan of attack. A wide detour was out of the question without ox transport. Buller had recommended him to stick to the railway as far as the Modder River. Hence Methuen’s plan: to go bald-headed for Kimberley along the railway line. The men would carry greatcoats, rifles, food and ammunition. The engineers would repair the line as they went. Then the trains could follow, bringing up heavy supplies and reinforcements, and the food for Kimberley. If they attacked at night they would march by compass bearing.30 Surprise – the weapon that had won British infantry so many victories in colonial wars – would have to carry them through. Surprise and British pluck.31
That evening, Tuesday 21 November, Methuen’s column, more than three miles long, clattered across the bridge and camped on the north bank of the river. It was a clear night, and cold after the thunderstorm. The men lit fires, using the piles of thorn scrub cut and stacked there that afternoon. The blue smoke, full of the sharp, aromatic smell of acacia wood, drifted back across the river, across the pools of muddy water trapped among the sand-banks and the dykes of black rock.32 Round the fires sat the men, singing the usual British soldiers’ choruses, sentimental, bawdy and ironic, choruses like:
Hiding in the ammunition van
Midst the shot and shell I’ve been
While my comrades fought as comrades ought
I was nowhere to be seen Tarara….33
Lord Methuen lay in his tent. He did not relish the choruses. They kept him awake. Besides, he liked songs to be patriotic, and war to have a high moral tone. In his own tent he was reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. He was approaching Prince Hal’s moment of glory: the battle scene.34
At 4.00 a.m., just as the sky began to lighten, Methuen’s eight thousand, leaving the tents still standing and having piled more acacia branches on the camp-fires to hide their departure, began to tramp northwards through the soft white sand to Kimberley.35
The same morning at the same hour, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Kekewich, commander of the Kimberley garrison, climbed the 155-foot high ladder leading to the top of the ‘conning-tower’ and scanned with his telescope the hardening lines of the veld to the south. In the five weeks of the siege he had made this pre-dawn ascent his regular practice – except when he had to organize a sortie against the Boer positions.36 The conning-tower was a tower of scaffolding built on the headgear of Kimberley’s main diamond mine, the De Beers Mine, extending upwards from the huge steel wheel of the winding gear. Kekewich frequently slept in a wooden hut, the size of a ship’s cabin, which he had ordered to be built at its foot.37 From the summit he could see beyond the barbed-wire fence that marked the Free State border four miles to the east; to the south, the view towards the Orange River was cut short by the lines of kopjes at Spytfontein and Magersfontein about ten miles along the railway line; directly below were the geometric lines of defences and sandbagged redoubts that comprised the thirteen-and-a-half-mile perimeter of Kimberley’s defences. These redoubts were all connected by telephone to the conning-tower. It needed strong nerves to stand there in the crow’s-nest. The tower commanded a magnificent view. It also presented a magnificent target to the Boers’ 9-pounders. Kekewich had strong nerves.38
Kekewich had taken over the garrison almost by accident. He was a mere battalion commander, the CO of the 1st Loyal North Lancashire Regiment; a pleasant, plump, bald, unassuming man of forty-five, who had fought in the small wars of the eighties and nineties without attracting attention. He was, like Methuen, a serious, painstaking soldier, and he had already shown the diplomatic gifts that were to be severely tested in the months ahead. He had been sent by Milner in August to report secretly on the defence of Kimberley; it was the largest and richest town in the Colony after Cape Town itself, and four miles from the Free State border.39 Kekewich telegraphed back: Kimberley was a sitting duck.40 So Milner, despite obstruction by Schreiner’s ministry, had arranged for the place to be reinforced by British regulars. Kekewich was given a half-battalion of his own North Lancashires, and six semi-obsolete 21-inch guns.41 Three weeks later, the war broke
out. On the following days, the Free State commandos poured across the border, cutting both the railway and telegraph lines.42 By then Kekewich had transformed the place. He was not happy about all aspects – and members – of the garrison. But he was now confident that the battle for Kimberley would not be a walk-over.43
It was a claustrophobic place at the best of times. Like many towns which owe their existence purely and simply to the wealth beneath them, it occupied a poor enough situation above ground: no river, no woods, no hills – just a hillock in the sandy landscape to point up the flat lines of the veld. Its climate was severe, even by South African standards: dust-storms in summer, blowing in from the Kalahari Desert to the north-west; icy winds on winter nights that could kill a man caught out on the veld. Here, to this God-forsaken spot, the diggers had come from all over the world, and built South Africa’s first boom-town. The diamond rush began in 1870. Twenty-nine years later that hillock was a hole: the biggest man-made hole in the world. Out of Kimberley now came ninety percent, of the world’s supply of diamonds, worth £5 million a year. Even if this was small change compared to the £20 million output of the Rand gold mines, Kimberley was the rock on which the new self-governing Cape Colony was built.44
For thirty years Kimberley’s diamond crop continued to blossom. The Big Hole got deeper, the mine dumps higher, the citizens more solid and respectable. Kimberley became a place of twenty thousand Europeans and thirty thousand Africans and Coloureds – the prototype of a commercial oasis of the desert, complete with a town hall in the classical taste, and a luxurious hotel-sanatorium.45 Yet, in a sense, Kimberley was a shadow of what it had been in the days of the diamond rush.
The Boer War Page 29
