There was one thing that the townsfolk had to say for the Boers: here at Kimberley (though not at Ladysmith) the pious burghers had never believed in fighting on Sunday. Punctually at 11.15 p.m. (11.55 p.m. Transvaal time) came Saturday’s final shell. Then Long Tom rested for the sabbath. The townsfolk did not rest. In peacetime, the town had always been such a dreary place on Sunday, for the days of the diamond rush were long over, and Kimberley was highly respectable. That Sunday, 11 February, there was a frantic effort to complete building shell-proof shelters before the shelling began again on Monday. White people found themselves doing heavy labouring work for the first time in their lives, as there were not enough African ‘boys’ to go round.19
Dr Ashe rattled through the town in a Scotch cart, wearing dirty grey flannels and a big Boer hat and sitting on a pile of dirty sacks. He found his fort very ‘jolly’: a sandbagged shelter, reinforced with huge mine props; seven feet square and seven feet high; furnished with beds, a mirror, a clock and some books; the walls lined with sheets, and decorated with a photograph of Kitchener, pinned to the wall with a big diamond brooch. That was, as he wrote in his diary, a Sunday he would not forget in a hurry: ‘Everywhere you went, forts were being built, and the clang of sheet steel, railway rails, and iron railway sleepers etc. was heard all over the place.’ People stuffed their sandbags with the first materials that came to hand – coarse kitchen salt for a grocer’s fort, flour for a baker’s – and an ingenious coolie in the Malay location evicted a dog from a kennel and squatted there, Ashe recorded, ‘like a little King in that yard’.20
Meanwhile, the other more famous King of Kimberley had not been idle. It was obvious that the two great diamond mines, deep enough to supply the whole world with diamonds, could also provide Kimberley with shelter against Long Tom. Although the mines were not in use, there was still enough coal for the steam-engines that worked the mine lifts and drove the electric dynamos; and as De Beers had not paid too much attention to the order commandeering food supplies, the mines were well supplied with corned beef and condensed milk. That afternoon, notices were posted up in prominent parts of the town, and a cart toured the streets displaying the same text:
SUNDAY.I RECOMMEND.WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
WHO. DESIRE. COMPLETE. SHELTER. TO. PROCEED
TO.KIMBERLEY.AND.DE BEERS SHAFTS. THEY
WILL.BE.LOWERED AT ONCE IN THE MINES
FROM 8 O’CLOCK.THROUGHOUT. THE. NIGHT.
LAMPS.AND GUIDES.WILL.BE PROVIDED.
C. J. RHODES21
It was a typical coup de theâtre by the great man: spiriting people away to safety in the treasure chests of De Beers. And respond the people did, with only too much alacrity. There had been rumours about the new bombardment to come: two new Long Toms; twenty new Long Toms; anyway, Monday would be a black day. Now it was assumed that Rhodes had had definite information, and a regular panic ensued. Of course, if Rhodes had told Kekewich of his scheme, the panic could have been avoided – and proper sanitary facilities in the mines could have been arranged. As it was, people fled for refuge to the mine heads as though their last hour had come, dragging their children and bundles of bedding. All that evening, from 5.30 till after midnight, the great mine wheels rotated and counter-rotated on the headgear, as the lifts ascended and descended. Down the mine-shafts, the scenes beggared description: two and a half thousand women and children and babies huddled together in the mine galleries, packed so tight, twelve hundred feet below the surface, that it reminded Dr Ashe of a colony of sea-gulls he knew in Lincolnshire; you could not put a foot down there without treading on a young bird.22
Up at the Sanatorium Hotel, Rhodes savoured his triumph. True, Monday and Tuesday brought anti-climax in the shape of a very half-hearted bombardment. But Rhodes was now setting the stage for the final scene in the great drama of the siege: the relief. It was to be a transformation scene. Rhodes, whose threats to surrender Kimberley continued to distort the whole strategy of the war, naturally cast himself as hero. Champagne, peaches, and grapes were prepared for a victory banquet in honour of General French and the cavalry division – and, more important still, the war correspondents. Rhodes had always excelled at handling Press men, even when he did not own their newspapers. As for Kekewich, that low, mean cur, Kekewich – Rhodes had not yet finished with him, though it was not to be many weeks before he was saying, ‘Kekewich? Who’s he? You don’t remember the man who cleans your boots.’23
The great cavalry charge at Abon Dam that same Thursday, 15 February, had swept across the veld like a torpedo across the sea. It was brilliant; the German military attachés, who later wrote the German official history of the war, hailed it as a master-stroke.24 But was it not almost too brilliant? To explode, a torpedo must actually hit something; otherwise, it expends itself in vain. French’s cavalry galloped on through that immense dust-cloud, spearing a handful of Boers on the way (and losing a handful of their own men); otherwise they did no damage to Cronje’s marching troops. Of course, to damage the enemy had not been Roberts’s first aim. French’s instructions were simply to ride like the wind to save Kimberley. How different the instructions would have been if it had not been for Rhodes. French’s five thousand men were Britain’s only large mobile force in South Africa, a unique instrument for hunting down a mobile enemy and their not-so-mobile siege guns. Instead, the five thousand had to expend themselves in a magnificent, but quite unnecessary dash to self-destruction across the veld.25
The extraordinary fact was that the mere effort of galloping a few miles had been the death of so many British cavalry horses. Their bloated bodies marked the route of French’s triumphant swoop: cutting the Boer line at ‘Susanna’, the Boer redoubt facing Premier Mine, through the barbed-wire fence, and so back into Cape Colony and on towards Kimberley. It was not only that many cavalry horses were still unacclimatized; their masters, too, had yet to learn that they could not gallop across the veld as though hunting with the Quorn; and trained cavalry horses were impossible to replace.26 So heavy was the toll in dead or exhausted horses, that the cavalry division was virtually destroyed as an effective fighting force.
Meanwhile, Kimberley waited agog for the end of the 124-day ordeal. About lunch time, Long Tom fired his last shell. At 3.30 p.m. a man told Dr Ashe that the cavalry division could be seen from the Beaconsfield slag-heaps. Dr Ashe could not believe it. They confirmed it at the club. Ashe went straight away and bought the largest Union Jack he could get hold of, and hung it out, at the end of a long pole, from the veranda on the second storey. When the vanguard of the relief column finally appeared – the Tigers, and some Scots Greys – there were uninhibited scenes: the ladies almost pulled the first man off his horse – respectable ladies hugging a dust-covered soldier. At the club, people took their freedom more calmly. ‘Everybody was far too deeply moved,’ said Ashe, ‘to be noisy.’27
Rhodes, too, was deeply moved – and rather noisier. He held his own private party at the Sanatorium. While Kekewich was arranging for a mounted force to try to capture Long Tom, Rhodes had captured a much more important prize: the ear of General French. Whatever his other defects, Rhodes certainly had a marvellous gift for words. French was a hard-headed soldier, and he must have been told by Roberts that Rhodes’s antics had jeopardized the whole strategy of the war. Yet half an hour at Rhodes’s party in the hotel was enough to swing French head over heels to Rhodes’s side. When Kekewich finally tracked down French at the Sanatorium Hotel, he found a strange scene. One of his staff officers later wrote, ‘As we approached the building we heard sounds of merriment and many voices in the hall…. Tables were laid in the hall, laden with all manner of luxuries, champagne was flowing freely, and to us, who had seen nothing but the meagre rations … for many weeks past, this display of dainties came as a great surprise.’28
There were to be more surprises. Kekewich sent a message to say that he wished to report himself officially to French, to ask for instructions. Rhodes happened to be in the hall and pushed forwa
rd, shouting, ‘You shan’t see French; this is my house, get out of it’ (Actually, it was not Rhodes’s house but De Beers’, like most things in Kimberley.) Kekewich took no notice, went upstairs and saw French alone in a private room. Exactly what took place is not clear. But it was an icy interview. Kekewich was not an articulate man; no doubt he got the worst of it. He was accused of being overbearing and tyrannical towards Rhodes.29
Two days later, the seal was set on Rhodes’s triumph. When Kekewich arrived at his office at the HQ in Lennox Street, he found his desk occupied. Colonel Porter, the CO of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, had been appointed in his place as garrison commander. Without informing Kekewich of this fact – in effect, that he had sacked Kekewich – French had galloped away on urgent orders from Roberts.30
With the raising of the siege, French had redeemed Milner’s and Rhodes’s original strategic blunder of garrisoning Kimberley. The price to the garrison had not been heavy – apart from the death-rate among young white children and Africans of all ages. The military price of victory had been paid by the relief expeditions: first Methuen’s losses, now the destruction of the cavalry division as an effective force. ‘A week ago I commanded the best mounted regiment in the British Army,’ wrote a cavalry colonel that week, ‘and now it is absolutely ruined.’81 It was the same with other regiments. Throughout the division, the horses were in a pitiful state. The last straw had been French’s totally ineffective attempt, on the 16th, to capture the Long Tom.32
Still, if ever the truth of Napoleon’s dictum, that victory goes to the side that makes the fewer blunders, was confirmed, it was on the following day, 17 February. For the Boers now made a blunder that eclipsed all those on the British side, the fiasco of Lord Roberts’s transport arrangements, the loss of the convoy and the ruin of French’s cavalry division included.
Kimberley was relieved, De Beers ‘indomitable’ chairman was happy giving champagne to the Press; and the curtain rose on an utterly changed strategic situation. The advantage implicit in the ever-increasing British superiority in numbers, since the Boers’ advance had been checked in mid-November, had at long last been realized. Three months of stone-walling were finished; and over the Free State borders hung those vast dust-clouds, obscuring the sun and the moon, dust-clouds raised by Lord Roberts’s invading army.
The overwhelming question that Cronje had to answer was this: where would Roberts strike? And not merely: in what direction? Would Roberts only try to seize enemy territory, or would he try to seize the enemy himself?
Cronje’s own strategic role, now that the static blocking campaign had failed, was hazardous, yet full of opportunities. Since the collapse of the British cavalry, he could safely withdraw to the north along the railway towards Mafeking. Alternatively, he could lie in wait for Roberts’s ponderous bullock columns, and wage guerrilla war against his communications. Or, third, he could retreat eastwards across the open veld to help block the expected advance on Bloemfontein.33 But whatever he did, there was one iron law of strategy imprinted on the mind of the Boers, like a law of the wild: the answer to superior numbers is superior mobility; in other words, fight to the last ditch, but, when facing defeat, pick up the ditch and run. And it was this military instinct, making the Boers such a formidable military nation, that Piet Cronje, the fox, paradoxically forgot.
Cronje, at any rate, chose the third, and more risky, strategic option. On the night of 15 February, while Rhodes was giving his great party in Kimberley, and Roberts was making his disastrous decision to abandon the convoy at Waterval Drift, Cronje began his retreat. About five thousand Transvaalers and Free Staters at last uprooted themselves from their earthwork guarding Magersfontein, their home for the previous two and a half months. Both of Cronje’s ablest commanders – Generals J. S. Ferreira and De Wet – had objected in principle to the line of retreat Cronje had chosen: eastwards along the wooded banks of the Modder River towards Bloemfontein. De Wet had, of course, already embarked on his guerrilla campaign. Ferreira now rode north across the veld beyond Kimberley, and then hovered there, understandably anxious to see how Cronje fared.34
Luck at first remained faithful to Cronje. On the 15th, in brilliant moonlight, his five-mile-long train of bullock wagons passed a few miles to the north of General Kelly-Kenny’s 6th Division, encamped on the Modder River at Klip Drift. Incredibly, no one in the 6th Division saw the bullock train.35 Apart from abandoning some seventy-eight loaded supply wagons (this was a prize for Roberts’s half-starved troops), Cronje had stubbornly kept his whole laager with him, and this restricted the pace of his retreat to the pace of the bullock: about ten miles a day.36 On the 16th Kelly-Kenny’s infantry caught up with Cronje’s rearguard. However, that night Cronje shook them off, and the ponderous bullock train was alone again in the veld. On the 17th, French’s surviving cavalry – the fifteen hundred out of the original five thousand who were still fit for duty – 37 at last intervened. Alerted by Captain Chester Master of The Tigers, they caught up with the van of his column near Paardeberg Drift, about twenty miles north-east of Ramdam.38
Cronje was still not in any great danger, provided he kept moving. He could have brushed aside French’s pitifully small force – though he was probably unaware that they were a mere fifteen hundred. He could have cut loose from his heavy baggage (and the womenfolk who haunted every laager) and struck northwards to link up with Ferreira. He could have joined hands with De Wet. He did none of these. In a mood of self-destructive inertia, worthy of Sir George White, he halted – as though determined to let Roberts’s thirty thousand infantry catch up. Two nights after leaving the great rabbit-warren of trenches at Magersfontein, Cronje’s men were once again burrowing into the earth – digging trenches for horses, bullocks, women and all, down in the thirty-foot-deep white sandy banks of the river at Paardeberg.39
But the old fox had not found a new earth. He had found a steel noose and put his head in it.
CHAPTER 28
Gone to Earth
Paardeberg,
17–27 February 1900
‘We then had a regular fusillade all day and were doing splendidly when Lord K. getting impatient ordered ½ the Cornwalls … over the river to charge with the Canadians. I was horrified when I saw them moving forward to charge about 3.30 pm as I could see they had not a ghost of a chance …’
Major-General Horace Smith-Dorrien’s diary 18 February 1900
At midnight on Saturday 17 February, the moon rose, and already De Wet had decided to leave his hiding-place at Koffyfontein. They must do what they could to rescue Cronje and the main force of Boers. The Modder was thirty miles away to the north: nearly a day’s ride. The word passed round: up-saddle.1
A Boer commando travelled light, light and fast. De Wet’s commando moved like a hunting cat on the veld. One minute the men lay there: formless, huddled around the small fires of cow-dung, sipping coffee, or trying to sleep, wrapped up against the cold in their blankets; behind them squatted the African servants of the better-off burghers; ponies picked at the bare veld, hobbled by foreleg and halter. The next minute the raiding party was on the move, bobbing heads under slouch hats, Mausers erect, bandoliers swathed across the men’s shoulders, strips of biltong (dried meat) and pouches of flour tied to the saddle-bow. De Wet’s commando was not a majestic fighting machine, like a British column. It was a fighting animal, all muscle and bone: in one sense, the most professional combatant of the war.2
To look at, Vecht-Generaal (Combat-General) Christiaan De Wet was curiously unimpressive and unassuming. He was forty-five, and might have been a country lawyer or a small businessman. There was little to suggest the steel of his character: no vast, black, patriarchal beard like De la Rey’s, no chest like a mountain-side. He was short, stocky and wore his beard neatly clipped; a gold watch-chain cut an arc across his tweed waistcoat; he carried a brief-case to hold the heliograms and other military papers. This and his field-glasses were his only concession to a general’s uniform. His eyes were his one
remarkable feature: brown and very bright – a hunter’s eyes.3
In fact, De Wet had travelled far and learnt fast in the previous four months. He himself had missed most of the great set-piece battles of the war, as he had been recalled from Natal to reinforce the Free Staters on the western front in early December, and had spent the great days of Black Week cooped up in a railway carriage. But he had seen enough to realize that, quite apart from the blunders of Boer generals like Cronje, the overwhelming numerical superiority of the British now demanded new strategy from the Boers. Indeed, the commando system was best suited not to large-scale, set-piece battles, but to smaller-scale, guerrilla strikes. A smaller group could make better use of their best asset, mobility; and their worst defect, indiscipline, would prove less of a handicap.4
De Wet’s views, reflecting those of many of the more intelligent younger Boers, had certainly paid off in practice. His hunting bag since Roberts had begun his advance was prodigious. He had half-crippled Roberts by capturing the two hundred wagons at Waterval Drift (and what trophies this raid had produced – 140,000 rations of biscuits, jam, milk, sardines, salmon, corned beef and so on, to be sent on in triumph, together with twenty white prisoners and thirty-six Africans, out of the convoy’s four hundred African drivers, to Bloemfontein). He had also captured a second group of Khakis, fifty-eight mounted men.5 But how could he gather strength enough to help Cronje? He had been joined by only one hundred and fifty extra men at Koffyfontein, Philip Botha’s party sent on President Steyn’s orders. And he had had to detach a hundred of his own men to escort the captured convoy. So his commando totalled three hundred, a mere pebble in the way of the British steam-roller.
The Boer War Page 52
