The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Meanwhile, Botha’s and Joubert’s armies had dug in along the line of the Biggarsberg range, sixty miles to the north, between Dundee and Ladysmith. Buller was anxious to press on. On 7 March he cabled to Roberts that he believed he could turn the Biggarsberg line by attacking the Drakensberg passes on the Free State frontier to the west. In three weeks, the Ladysmith garrison would be fit. Could he have permission to continue the advance?80

  Poor Buller, the most humiliating defeat of his life was still ahead of him. The Boers were no longer to give him great trouble. On the contrary, an unbroken record of successes in the field against the Boers stretched ahead. But, against Buller himself, the campaign was only beginning.

  The vanguard was led by Ian Hamilton: brilliant, excitable, vindictive, burning from his own humiliations in Ladysmith (it was Hamilton’s rashness that was partly responsible for White letting himself be locked up there; it was Hamilton’s failure to fortify Caesar’s Camp and Wagon Hill that had nearly led to disaster). He told Roberts, writing from Maritzburg, on his way to join his old chief, ‘Buller was very rude to Sir George and spoke to him in the vilest way of you and Kitchener, whom he appears to dislike and to attribute dishonest motives to, almost as much as he does you….’81

  He denounced Buller to Spenser Wilkinson, the military correspondent of The Morning Post, and a leading imperialist writer on military questions. (Significantly, Wilkinson was on intimate terms with Milner and Roberts, and no doubt shared their fundamental distrust of Buller as supposedly ‘pro-Boer’.)82 What Hamilton wrote to Wilkinson was almost ludicrously violent in tone; in fact, Hamilton had fever at the time. He gave a grossly distorted text of the telegram White had received from Buller after Colenso: ‘After the battle he wired us that we had better fire off our ammo and make the best terms we could. We thought at first our cypher and helio must have fallen into the hands of the Boers, it seemed so incredible the Great Buller of all men could be giving such unworthy advice.’83 In fact, of course, the real text of Buller’s ‘surrender’ telegram to White was that it would take him a month to relieve them, and if he could not hold out a month, then White would have to make terms or cut his way out.84

  Ian Hamilton’s tirade contained another remarkable passage:

  I want you to know sharp, Buller is no use. He is indeed far, far worse than useless, and I write to beg you to use all your influence to get the man recalled before he does more mischief… generally officers and men have lost all confidence in Sir Reverse as they call him. I should think 100 of his army have been in to see me since I have been ill and from General to Subaltern they agree that he is as unsatisfactory as a general could be … except in the case of the Colenso fight, everyone is confident that the Battalions could in every case have fought their way through all right had they been given their heads….85

  A fortnight later, Hamilton reached Cape Town where doubtless he met Leo Amery, The Times chief correspondent, and talked to him in the same wild, vindictive spirit. It was heaven-sent ammunition enough for the generation of young imperialists who yearned to find one simple explanation for Britain’s humiliations ‘Buller is no use’. ‘Buller ordered Ladysmith to surrender.’ A whispering campaign was launched in the imperialist Press, brilliantly orchestrated by Leo Amery, and tacitly encouraged by Roberts and Lansdowne.86 This Press campaign was to culminate in Buller’s dismissal from the army, a year after his return to England. And the idea that Buller was the main cause of defeat has passed into permanent currency through the medium of The Times History of the War, edited by Amery.87

  All this lay in the future. At the time, it was Sir George White whose reputation seemed to have found the proverbial graveyard in South Africa. Roberts, a personal friend of White’s from Indian days, refused to employ White in any responsible position because of his original strategic blunder. Buller offered him a division in Natal, a sad come-down for the man who had commanded a field force. White’s illness came as a relief to everyone. He went down to Durban with Rawlinson, and was invalided home.88

  As the two men took the train down the line to Durban, past all the battlefields where Buller’s men lay buried – past Hart’s Hill, where the Irish Brigade had lost five hundred men; past Colenso, where the skeletons of Long’s battery horses lay bleached in the sun – a sudden, astonishing change of heart occurred in Rawlinson. A week before, he had remarked, at the sight of Buller’s men at the victory parade, ‘After seeing them it is to me astounding that they did not get through before.’89 Now he saw, from an open railway truck, some of the physical difficulties Buller had to contend with: the boulders and the precipices, the thorn-covered mountain-sides, everything that went to make up the extraordinary natural strength of Botha’s line on the north side of the Tugela.

  Rawlinson was at heart a fair-minded man, as well as one of the most able of all Roberts’s admirers. Perhaps he was ashamed at the way Buller was being made the scapegoat for the set-backs. At any rate, he wrote in his diary that night, ‘Most interesting – it was marvellous they got through at all…’90

  CHAPTER 31

  The Plague of Bloemfontein

  The Orange Free State,

  13–28 March 1900

  Who recalls the noontide and the funerals through the market,

  (Blanket-hidden bodies, flagless, followed by the flies?)

  And the footsore firing-party, and the dust and stench and staleness,

  And the faces of the Sisters and the glory in their eyes?

  Rudyard Kipling Dirge of Dead Sisters

  ‘Far more people have been killed by negligence in our hospitals than by Boer bullets … Men are dying by hundreds who could easily be saved…’

  Lady Edward (Violet) Cecil to the Prime Minister 30 May 1900

  ‘Bloemfontein is a pretty little place,’ wrote one of Rimington’s Tigers, ‘but it takes you by surprise.’1 And its fall; too, took everyone – not least Lord Roberts – by surprise.

  The place, a capital city of four thousand souls (including African souls), emerged more or less out of nowhere. Coming from Kimberley, you could follow the victors’ trail, blazed by great, empty biscuit tins, letters from home, and dead or dying horses,2 across a hundred miles of brown, grassy, undulating void. Nothing else but the odd whitewashed farmhouse, with its muddy dam, and two or three Lombardy poplars like tall, lonely chimneys. Then, all of a sudden, below some flat-roofed kopjes, a crowd of red-brick, tin-topped, colonial-style bungalows, with white chrysanthemums, tended by African servants – so many black and white stripes across the front gardens. There was a dusty market square; the Flemish gables of a British insurance office and the Indian-looking balconies of the English Club; and the tall, cool, Ionic columns of the Raadzaal (Parliament Building) and the Railway Bureau. Without warning, you had ridden into the heart of the enemy’s capital.3

  The fall of Bloemfontein occurred equally without warning on the morning of 13 March. Where were the Boer armies? They had fled, vanished like a mirage in the veld. Those men who fought so stubbornly to hold their trenches in British territory around Kimberley, abandoned the trenches around their own capital without even an apology for a fight. The result was something of an anticlimax. Roberts did not complain.

  The previous evening, President Steyn had fled northwards by one of the last trains to get away before the British blew up the line. At midnight, Roberts heard that French and the cavalry division had seized the flat-topped kopjes south of the African location, and the tactical key to the town. At eight o’clock, Roberts and his staff breakfasted at the country estate belonging to Steyn’s brother, whose wife served them with fresh milk and butter to supplement the good things on the HQ mess cart. One of the Press Corps then rode up with some news. In reply to a threat by Roberts to bombard the city, the Mayor, the Landrost (magistrate) and other worthies – including Mr Gordon Fraser, the English-speaking South African who had stood against Steyn at the last election – had already surrendered.4 They were now on their way to present the Field-
Marshal with the keys to the public offices: keys to empty buildings, since the state archives had been evacuated a few days earlier. Wire-cutters would have been more suitable tokens of surrender, said one of the Press, in view of the barbed wire that swathed the veld.5

  It was appropriate that the Press, rather than the army, should be first in to Bloemfontein. Roberts had always believed in the pen as a weapon of war, and had always given good relations with the Press a high priority. Now three of their more enterprising members – H. A. Gwynne of Reuters, Percival Landon of The Times, and ‘Banjo’ Paterson of The Sydney Morning Herald – had galloped into the city, to find Boers leaping off their bicycles, and throwing up their hands in token of surrender, as though their lives depended on it. (A rival claim to have captured Bloemfontein was later lodged by some telegraph men of an RE company. They had been told to follow on and take the telegraph line into the town, and plodded along, unrolling the great wooden drum down the road, without realizing they were ahead of the army.)6

  In due course, the Field-Marshal arrived and the Flag followed the Press into the town. As a triumphal procession, this column of battle-stained khaki presented an austere, almost drab, impression, though it did have its moments.

  Bloemfontein, the home of the Free State’s small Uitlander community, had always looked incongruously colonial, a country cousin of Johannesburg’s. It looked especially English now that the Boers had taken to their heels. People were waving Union Jacks, and handing out sandwiches, as though it was the relief, and not the capture, of Bloemfontein. Of course, it was, for some, a relief. Forty-six years earlier, the British had handed back the country, and its African majority, to the voortrekkers. Today, the Africans celebrated. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ cried a burly African over and over again. Other Africans looted the Boer artillery barracks, to celebrate the new freedom of the Free State under the Empire.7

  Roberts’s arrival was graphically described by Lord Kerry, the War Minister’s eldest son and one of the nobility with whom Roberts chose to decorate the HQ staff, ‘Entered in procession,’ wrote Lord Kerry, ‘about 12 o’clock.’

  1st Chief riding alone, then 4 ADCs, then rest of HQ s[taff] in fours, mil. attachés kept in order by [Lord] Downe, escort of a cavalry regt., as no infantry up. Received with much enthusiasm by few remaining inhabitants, chiefly English women, who all insisted on shaking hands with Chief… ex-government official [the Landrost] in shooting suit and knickerbockers acted as guide … men decorated with red, white and blue rosettes, walked alongside singing ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ ‘Tommy Atkins’ and other popular airs (some had drink taken) passed south fort built by us about 1850 ‘staats artillerie’, and barracks which Kaffirs busy looting, drove them off and put guard on, rode through town and market square to… statue of late President Brand [the President who had kept the Free State neutral in the war of 1880–1] which Chief inspected. Thence to [Steyn’s] Presidency crowd sung national anthem, as we entered gate… hoisted small union jack worked by Lady Roberts, on extemporised flag staff in garden, good house… marble Hall, Tottenham Court Road furniture … all in good order, lunch and dinner in club. Chief’s health proposed by Gen. French, capital speech in reply: ‘good work of Cavalry’, ‘endurance of all ranks8

  It must have seemed a convivial evening, that first banquet in the enemy’s capital. In the main square, by the wooden veranda of the English Club, the band of the Highland Brigade entertained the Boers. Outside Steyn’s Presidency, the small, silk, imperial flag, sent out by Nora Roberts (as the wife of an Irishman, she had worked a discreet Irish shamrock into the design) fluttered like washing on a washing-line.9 Inside, in the reassuringly English bad taste of the President’s marble hall (Maples had supplied the furniture from their Tottenham Court Road emporium), the victors drank each other’s health out of the President’s glasses, and goggled at an incongruously nude statue of a lady.10

  But behind the cigar smoke and the clubland toasts – ‘good work of the cavalry’ – there were growing tensions and ironies. Success, like defeat, magnifies the inner strains of a campaign. Roberts and his generals were no different in kind from Buller and his generals. Roberts blamed French and Kelly-Kenny for losing him one of the great opportunities of the war, at Poplar Grove, a week earlier. French and Kelly-Kenny agreed – only they blamed Roberts for the failures.11

  It was Roberts’s miscalculations, they claimed – his reckless re-arrangement of the transport – that had crippled his own army, especially the cavalry and artillery, by starving men and horses. ‘Endurance of all ranks.’ It was Roberts’s blunders they all had to endure.

  Who was, in fact, to blame? The Battle of Poplar Grove on 7 March shares one feature with many battles that disappointed the British. It is easy to say what went wrong, hard to apportion responsibility. Certainly there was a chance that morning of making a most sensational bag, one that would have far overshadowed the capture of Cronje and his four thousand. Among the six thousand burghers on the battlefield (though Roberts did not hear of this till next morning) was Oom Paul himself, who had come to help the Almighty put new heart into His people.12

  The Boers’ hastily improvised trench lines at Poplar Grove had straddled a line of kopjes, on a ten-mile-wide front at either side of the Modder River, about thirty miles upstream (east) from Kimberley. It seemed to be the last natural line of defence before Bloemfontein. Roberts’s plan of attack was based, understandably, on taking to heart the lessons of Paardeberg. He had told French to go with the cavalry division, some MI units and horse artillery, and make a seventeen-mile détour around the Boers’ east flank. He was to make a wide enough sweep to avoid the Boers’ lines, and then to attack the laagers in the rear, and cut off the Boers’ escape route to Bloemfontein.13 After the cavalry had passed round, the three infantry divisions were to attack from the right, supported by an artillery barrage: Kelly-Kenny’s (6th) Division, the Guards Brigade and Tucker’s (7th) Division against the main position on the south bank of the river; Colvile’s (9th) Division, and some MI on the north bank.14 This was the plan: an improved version of Paardeberg tactics – that is, a plan to get the greatest possible bag with the fewest possible losses; at all events, to avoid the reckless losses incurred by Kitchener three weeks before. In a sense, it was a plan for some rough shooting. Take some guns and go round to the back of the hill, said Roberts to the beaters (French and the cavalry division). When you’re in position, the main line of guns (Kelly-Kenny and the infantry divisions) will walk up the birds.

  The trouble was the Boers did not behave like well-bred pheasants. They ran. Roberts had assumed the Boers would sit tight, as Cronje had sat in the riverbed of the Modder, then fly at the approach of the guns. Instead, the Boers started to run, ventre à terre, the moment they saw the cavalry coming to outflank them.15 In itself, this might not have seemed fatal to Roberts’s scheme. For what was the actual purpose of the cold steel of the cavalry – the famous arme blanche, in which the hunting gentlemen who made up the cavalry so passionately put their trust? Was it not to hunt down a panic-stricken enemy? Then here was the place and the moment: six thousand Boers, led by President Kruger in his top-hat, fleeing across the veld, as smooth and flat and grassy as Salisbury Plain, while the cavalry division, with forty-two mobile guns, thundered after them.16 View halloo! A sight to dream of! But it was not what Roberts saw through his binoculars.

  To Roberts’s disgust, French never gave chase at all. Instead of hacking and skewering the fleeing enemy, the cavalry advanced at a walk. Indeed, they fought dismounted, several thousand cavalry checked by groups of absurdly few riflemen (in fact, a masterly rearguard action organized by De Wet). Roberts held French principally to blame for this fiasco: ‘We should have had a good chance of making the two Presidents prisoner if French had carried out my orders of making straight for the Modder River, instead of wasting valuable time going after small parties of the enemy.’17

  Roberts also accused French of wretched horse-mastershi
p. If the cavalry had treated their horses better, they would not have broken down.18 French bitterly resented this charge. The cavalry blamed Roberts’s hopeless transport arrangements for the breakdown of the division. ‘I have never seen horses so beat as ours that day,’ wrote Douglas Haig, his Chief of Staff. ‘They have been having only 8lbs of oats a day and practically starving since … February 11th. So many Colonial Skally wag Corps have been raised that the horses of the whole force could not have a full ration.’19 As these colonial corps were quite useless, according to Haig (‘good only for looting … disappear the moment a shot is fired’), he ridiculed Roberts’s expedient of reducing the regular cavalry’s ration in order to feed ‘these ruffians’. Presumably Haig was right, and Roberts had partly himself to blame if the ‘pick-up’ of Boers after the shoot (in Haig’s sporting phrase) was so wretched.20 But the basic fact was that the day of cavalry charges was over. The Mauser had made conventional cavalry tactics obsolete. The ‘white arm’ had become a white elephant.’21

  Roberts also blamed Kelly-Kenny for being slow and cautious in attacking the Boers’ trenches. Kelly-Kenny admitted that he would have attacked earlier if he had known the Boers were so demoralized.22 But he blamed Roberts for the collapse of his own men and horses. The 6th Division had been ‘starving’ ever since De Wet had captured the food convoy at Waterval Drift, and there was only one water-cart for each battalion, barely enough for half a water-bottle for each man.23

  Whoever was to blame, the effects of the Battle of Poplar Grove were disastrous and long-lasting for the British.

  Not only did Roberts fail to catch Kruger and the rest. He also made the crucial deduction from the panic-stricken way the Boers had fled – only De Wet saved them from losing all their guns and wagons24 – that the Boers’ morale was broken, and the war nearly over.25 This, apparently confirmed by an action at Driefontein on 10 March,26 and by their abandoning Bloemfontein on 13 March without a shot, was to be the greatest strategic miscalculation of his career, though Milner, as we shall see, shared the responsibility.27