An hour after dawn on Sunday 18 February, they heard the rumble of heavy guns, ‘an indescribable thunder’, it seemed to De Wet, though they were still fifteen miles away to the south. The worst had happened – or was about to happen. De Wet gave his men and horses only the briefest pause for food.6 Then they saddled up once again and rode on with the sun on their right cheeks. The heat came early that Sunday; it was the kind of Sunday morning when farmers would sit on the stoep reading their Bibles and mopping their brows with their handkerchiefs. The commando rode on. The echo of the guns grew louder and harsher, and the hot dust caked on their lips.
The Modder River, seen from the veld to the south, first appears as a long, meandering line of willows and tamarisks, dark against the sandy plain.7 At 4.30 p.m., De Wet’s commando caught their first sight of the river. They were now about six miles to the east of Paardeberg: ‘Horse-Hill’, the kopje that had given its name to the ford above Klip Drift. De Wet lifted his field-glasses. He later described the scene:
Immediately in front of us were the buildings and Kraals and there on the opposite bank of the river stood Paardeberg. To the left and right of it were khaki-coloured groups dotted everywhere about…. What a spectacle we saw! All round the laager were the guns of the English, belching forth death and destruction, while from within it at every moment, as each successive shell tore up the ground, there rose a cloud – a dark-red cloud of dust.
It was necessary to act – but how? We decided to make an immediate attack on the nearest of Lord Roberts’s troops … and to seize some ridges which lay about two and a half miles south-east of the laager.
So, while Cronje’s circle of covered wagons was attacked on every side, hemmed in by the British just as the voortrekkers had been hemmed in by Dingaan, De Wet’s gallant little band rode off to storm the kopje south of the river: three hundred against Kitchener’s fifteen thousand.8
Eleven hours earlier, Kitchener, too, had gazed out across the river at Cronje’s laager. Kitchener had reached a kopje, two miles to the west, a little after dawn.9 Beside him stood the tall, grey figure of Lieutenant-General Thomas Kelly-Kenny, the commander of the 6th Division.
How peculiarly ill-matched were these two British officers, on whose cooperation a British victory depended. Both were bachelors and both Irish-born-though Kitchener’s Irish birth was due merely to the unwelcome accident that his parents had been living in Kerry. Kelly-Kenny was, by contrast, a Catholic, an Irish nationalist of a sort and a Wolseleyite – like his intimate friend, Sir William Butler, the man deposed by Milner for his sympathy with the Boers. Kelly-Kenny did not sympathize with the Boers.10 Nor did he sympathize with Kitchener. In fact, he found his ‘fussiness and interference’ intensely irritating. For the last four days, ever since the 6th Division reached the Riet River, Kitchener had been breathing down his neck. ‘Who is in command?’ asked Kelly-Kenny on Wednesday. ‘You,’ said Kitchener, and proceeded to infuriate Kelly-Kenny by pressing him to storm some hills without sending scouts ahead.11 On Saturday, a private message arrived from Roberts to say that Kelly-Kenny was to take anything Kitchener told him ‘as an order from Roberts’. Kelly-Kenny found this most humiliating. As a lieutenant-general, he was a step above Kitchener, at least by South African rank, and to the public would still appear to exercise an independent command. But at least this new arrangement cleared up his own doubts as to who was in actual command at Paardeberg. It was Kitchener.12
The new arrangement was the result of Roberts himself being detained at Jacobsdal, twenty-five miles downstream. Roberts was laid up with a chill. What was even more humiliating to Kelly-Kenny was the realization that Roberts did not trust him. Clearly Kitchener had been sent along to hustle him. The Commander-in-Chief and his Chief of Staff apparently thought him too slow and cautious. Well, they would see. His own view was that Kitchener was recklessly impatient.13
In fact, Kelly-Kenny was no genius, but he had a sensible plan for dealing with Cronje that, if Kitchener had not interfered, would probably have succeeded at very small cost.
His own scheme was to extend a ring around Cronje’s laager in order to seal him off from outside help: especially from the commandos known to be hurrying to his rescue, Ferreira’s and De Wet’s. His own division had marched all night in order to catch up with Cronje, and the men were exhausted.14 They were also quite unused to the new style of warfare. Except for a few odd skirmishes, they had no first-hand experience of the power of magazine rifles in the hands of entrenched opponents. Moreover, the terrain did not favour an infantry attack. Cronje had let himself be cornered. He was now squeezed between the upper millstone of French’s surviving cavalry at Koodoosrand, and the nether millstone of two infantry divisions at Paardeberg. But he had turned his laager on the north bank of the river into a natural fortress. The white, sandy banks of the Modder River up here made just as effective trenches as they had against Methuen at Modder River Station, thirty miles downstream. Cronje’s four thousand men had fortified them with their usual ingenuity. They had dug a network of rifle pits for two miles below the circle of wagons and for a mile above it; these connected with flanking trenches constructed from the numerous dry dongas that joined the river at right-angles.15
It is not clear how far Kelly-Kenny was aware of these elaborate earthworks. At any rate, his instinct was sound: use the infantry to seal off Cronje; rely on the artillery, for which the terrain was ideal, to bombard Cronje into surrender. He had already begun to extend his force for this purpose, when Kitchener brusquely countermanded the plan. The infantry must storm the laager immediately.16
Kitchener’s plan, like his attitude to tactics in general, was aggressive and brutally simple. Strike at the heart. That was his instinctive reaction, and he had no second thoughts. He decided to throw all his infantry into the battle before Cronje could bolt – or help could reach him. Kelly-Kenny and most of the 6th Division must launch a frontal attack from the south bank. Meanwhile, Colvile would divide the two brigades of his 9th Division. MacDonald’s Highland Brigade would attack upstream from the south bank; Smith-Dorrien’s 19th Brigade would ford the Modder at Paardeberg Drift and attack upstream from the north bank, Cronje’s side of the river.17 And to complete the encircling movement, a small force would attack downstream along the north bank. This was to be Hannay’s MI (part of the 6th Division), supported by the other two battalions of Stephenson’s 18th Brigade, the 1st Welsh and the 1st Essex.18
Hold the Boers down with a frontal attack from the plain to the south. Then simultaneously fling a right hook from upstream and a left hook from downstream. This was Kitchener’s simple tactical plan. And simply disastrous it was to prove.
To understand both the causes of its failure and the enormity of Kitchener’s blunder, one must turn back to the other two major battles of the war involving a river crossing: Methuen’s costly success at Modder River in November, and Buller’s humiliating reverse at Colenso. In each case, the Generals had tried to force a river crossing in the teeth of an entrenched enemy – and had paid the price. In the new-style war pioneered by the Boers – long-range, smokeless, rapid-firing rifles plus trenches – the balance of advantage, as we have seen, had tilted dramatically to the side of the defenders. New, more subtle methods of attack were needed, as well as greater numerical superiority. It was true that Kitchener could deploy twice as many men and heavy guns against Cronje here as Methuen had had available at Modder River in November. But why attack at all? Cronje showed no sign of budging. De Wet’s and Cronje’s expected reinforcements comprised only a mere sixteen hundred men, one-twentieth of Kitchener’s own three divisions.19 Unlike Kitchener, Methuen and Buller had not had the good fortune to be able to choose whether to attack or merely invest the enemy. Mistakes they had certainly made in plenty. But both Generals had had exceptionally difficult problems to contend with, and no chance to profit by learning from the mistakes of others. Kitchener displayed no interest in learning from the mistakes of Buller and Methuen. He probably at
tributed their own failures, as Roberts did, to their own personal defects, especially, in Buller’s case, to his own supposed lack of self-confidence.20 Of the revolution in tactics – of the new, invisible war of the rifle-plus-trench – he showed himself supremely unaware.
Kitchener looked at his watch and turned to his staff officer. ‘It is now seven o’clock. We shall be in the laager by half past ten.’21 He might have been taking a train to Birmingham.
But the days of such short cuts to victory were over, days when a whole war could be won by willpower and rifle power in the space of a few hours. Something more was needed: insight and patience. The same Kitchener who had helped Roberts sweep away Wolseley’s transport system when he reached South Africa, now recklessly swept away Kelly-Kenny’s tactical plan. To compound his error, Kitchener showed himself quite unable to delegate authority or even to issue coherent written orders. It was one of the oddest traits in the Sirdar’s extraordinary character that he abhorred having to write things down.22 No doubt he was reluctant, like Cecil Rhodes, to let anything – even a letter – come between his subordinates and his own supremely personal authority. At any rate, the battle that now ensued was made especially disastrous by the fog of conflicting orders emanating from Kitchener’s HQ.
To some extent, the blame must be shared by Roberts, who had put Kitchener in the embarrassing position of trying to fight a battle without a proper staff to transmit his orders.23 But Kitchener was not the man to use a staff properly even when he had one. ‘No written orders of any sort. Kitchener only sends verbal messages – takes my Staff and my troops on no order or system.’24 These were Kelly-Kenny’s unpublished comments written that black Sunday, and they were to be confirmed, hardly more politely, by General Maurice, the official historian. The study of this battle, Maurice wrote, was ‘exceptionally valuable from the obvious results which followed from the very chaos’.25 In short, Kitchener had well earned his nickname, ‘K. of Chaos’.26 Paardeberg was a study in how not to fight a battle.
At eight o’clock, Kitchener sent a brief, confident cable to Roberts: ‘We have stopped the enemy’s convoy on the river here. General Kelly-Kenny’s Division is holding them to the south, enemy lining the bank of Modder, convoy stationary in our immediate front.’ After detailing his plan of attack, he predicted, ‘I think it must be a case of complete surrender.’27
Already, from Kitchener’s viewpoint on the kopje west of the laager, Kelly-Kenny’s frontal attack could be seen to be developing: brown dots, strung out across two miles of absolutely exposed plain, approaching the enemy, invisible in the trees and scrub across the river. Ahead of them the shells of twenty heavy guns – naval 12-pounders, two batteries of field artillery and a howitzer battery – threw up spouts of earth in the laager itself. Soon the covered wagons began to catch fire, and yellow smoke and flames began to rise from exploding ammunition carts.28
Down in the plain, Kelly-Kenny’s infantry, too, caught sight of Cronje’s circle of wagons, and the effect on the troops was electric. It was a week since they had left the railway line, perhaps the longest week in their lives. Half rations (that is, mainly dry biscuits, and sometimes not even that, for days on end); no blankets at night, when the transport broke down, and everyone was soaked to the skin by a thunderstorm. Now they had been marching ever since five o’clock the previous afternoon, marching grimly on without a chance to fill their water bottles, nor any means of knowing where they were going. Then, quite suddenly, as they came over a rise, they saw, only four thousand yards away, that great circle of covered wagons, glinting in the sun. Old Cronje. Cornered. A shiver of excitement passed through the exhausted columns. And the men themselves seemed as keen as Kitchener.29
First into the attack were the 1st Welsh and the 1st Essex, sent forward to support the right hook from Colonel O. C. Hannay and the MI upstream of the laager. Both units suffered heavy casualties, pinned down in the plain, with only occasional glimpses of the enemy. Behind these battalions came four more from Kelly-Kenny’s 6th Division, charging straight across the plain from the southwest towards the line of trees marking the Modder. The Yorkshire Regiment, advancing by rushes of alternate sections, got within two hundred yards of the river bank, but lost their CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Bowles, and many others in the process. A party of this battalion then tried to ford the river, but found it in flood, and were driven back by a storm of bullets. To their left, two other battalions fared a little better. The West Riding were more extended and found some cover in broken ground. With the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, they succeeded in charging up to the Modder itself, where they captured some outlying trenches held by the Boers on the southern bank. But the commander of the brigade (the 13th), Major-General Charles Knox, was himself wounded. And shortly before noon a message came from Kelly-Kenny himself: on no account attempt to cross the river and storm the laager.30
Meanwhile, four battalions of the 9th Division – the Highland Brigade – closed up with the left of the 6th Division. No one was more surprised to see their advance than the 9th Division’s commander, General Colvile. His own instinct had been to concentrate both his brigades on Cronje’s side of the river and then attack upstream from the west. But Kitchener had ordered off the Highland Brigade for some purpose of his own. Colvile watched them moving across the plain. Then one of his staff pointed out that they had wheeled and were making a frontal attack. Colvile was astonished. But it was too late to recall them. Anyway, it was out of his hands. Presumably Kitchener had ordered this reckless attack. ‘One can hardly say,’ wrote Colvile, ‘the ground was worse for advancing over under fire than that which the Guards had to deal with at the Modder River fight’ (Methuen’s November battle) ‘for that would be impossible to find; but it was certainly as bad, and I never hope to see or read of anything grander than the advance of that thin line across the coverless plain, under a hail of lead from their invisible enemy in the river-banks.’31
It was, indeed, the story of Methuen’s Battle of the Modder over again: caught by surprise; the endless duel with snipers, flat on the face behind an ant heap, where the flash of a canteen on the hip, or a hand stretched out to scratch an ant bite, could bring instant retribution; all this under an African sun that, as usual, burnt the backs of the Highlanders’ legs as raw as meat; and the men lying, tortured with thirst, nailed down a hundred yards behind the cool, dark waters of the Modder.32
The Highlanders, who had survived the Battle of Magersfontein, did not this time lose their heads. But that thin line grew ‘thinner and thinner,’ as Colvile put it, ‘and thicker and thicker the brown patches on the grass behind it. What men are able to do, the Highlanders did….’33 By midday, the attack had petered out. Apart from a few companies of the Seaforths and Black Watch, who had forded the river, MacDonald’s brigade was nailed down along the south bank below Knox’s brigade; and MacDonald, like Knox, had been taken off wounded to the field hospital.34
At one o’clock, Kitchener left the kopje, where he had stood all that morning, and rode over to Colvile’s HQ at Signal Hill, about half a mile to the west. What about Colvile’s men, Kitchener asked, making a ‘more determined assault?’ Colvile replied that he had only a handful of fresh troops: the half-battalion of the Cornwall Light Infantry who had been guarding the baggage. The Corn-walls must go at once, said Kitchener. They must ford the river and rush the position with the other brigade of the 9th Division – the 19th Brigade, led by Smith-Dorrien. This was the long-delayed left hook. After Kitchener had ridden off, Colvile told the Cornwalls’ CO, Lieutenant-Colonel W. Aldworth, the cheerful news. Aldworth explained that the exhausted men were just about to have their dinners. Postpone the attack till afterwards, said Colvile. At least the poor devils would not have to attack on an empty stomach.35
An hour or so later, Kitchener returned to tell Kelly-Kenny that the 6th Division must renew the attack. Relations between the two men had reached a nadir. Kelly-Kenny wrote tersely in his diary:
I was terribly strained �
� the battle lasted all day. Kitchener kept pressing me to press flanks. I did so at great loss. He took away ½… Battn. from Cope [kopje] on my R. flank to support Stevenson [sic], said I could hold it [kopje]…. I resisted assault in front, as troops were exhausted and I could not get the Brigade together.36
It is clear that Kelly-Kenny successfully resisted Kitchener’s attempt to renew the frontal attack. Where he failed was to prevent Kitchener continuing the flank attack – the long-delayed right hook. He had also failed to prevent Kitchener making a new blunder by weakening the British hold on the kopje on his right flank (soon ironically called ‘Kitchener’s Kopje’). It was this kopje, near Stinkfontein Farm, that was later recognized as the tactical key to the whole position, and Kitchener had offered it to the enemy on a plate.37
After Kitchener had gone, Kelly-Kenny rode gloomily down towards the field hospital where both the Brigadiers lay wounded. He was an old man, the oldest man in the army after Roberts himself, and the strain of keeping his temper with Kitchener, coupled with an attack of dysentery (the ‘Modders’, it was called), had left him in a state of collapse. When he was near the river, one of the Boer pom-poms got the range, and sent a string of I – pound shells drumming through the white hospital tents. There was a scene of panic: wounded men tried to crawl out of the tents. Kelly-Kenny himself did not visit the hospital that day, perhaps because the sights so appalled him. ‘Awfully sad. Poor fellows’ legs being amputated,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it sickens one with war.’38
Meanwhile, Kitchener drafted a note to Colonel Hannay ordering him to launch the right hook at once: ‘The time has come for a final effort. All troops have been warned that the laager must be rushed at all costs. Try and carry Stephenson’s brigade on with you. But if they cannot go the mounted infantry should do it. Gallop up if necessary and fire into the laager.’39
The Boer War Page 53
