The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Surrender would thus entail the destruction of the volk as a political nation. This was the first point the two Presidents wished to demonstrate: to play on the fears of losing their political manhood that had always been central to the very existence of the voortrekkers. Fear, and shame (the ‘blood of their fellow-citizens’ would be on their heads), were indeed powerful moral propellants. But something more was needed to add to the mixture: hope.

  Characteristically, the two Presidents offered very different brands of that precious commodity. Steyn had told the krijgsraad that there was ‘reliable news’ of a Russian ‘plan’ to occupy Herat and threaten India; if the republics could hold out another six to eight weeks, Britain would have to come to terms.12 In a public manifesto, Steyn also spoke of ‘favourable news’ from Europe and Cape Colony. In fact, Steyn knew, by then, that the rebellion at Prieska in the Cape was crumbling. And though it was true that there was much evidence of moral support for the cause of the two republics among people in Holland, France, Germany, Russia, and their kith and kin in the United States of America, support of any other sort was, Steyn well knew, a forlorn hope. The Russian ‘plan’ to occupy Herat had been reported to Reitz by Leyds on 10 February: ‘From very good authority I gather that the Russians will be in Herat in May. I send the news for what it is – a probability, but not a certainty.’13 But even if this story were true (it rapidly proved false), Herat was close to the Russian border in the extreme north-west of Afghanistan. It was a long step from being a serious threat to Britain’s grip on India.

  More to the point was Steyn’s plan to send a Boer diplomatic mission permanently abroad, which would offer a continuous source of vague hope to the burghers, without risk of disappointment. It was agreed to send abroad some Boer politicians who could be spared. In early March, these fortunate men – including Smuts’s friend, Abraham Fischer, of the Free State – took the train down to Lourenço Marques, and from there embarked on a conveniently slow boat for Europe.14

  Kruger had endorsed this scheme, and publicly acknowledged the various ways in which foreign sympathizers continued to aid the twin republics. Russia, Holland, France and other countries had sent Red Cross teams; ‘the whole world is on our side in this struggle for right and liberty’. At the krijgsraad, Kruger also agreed to promote to the rank of general the most distinguished of the various foreign freebooters serving in the commandos: a Frenchman, Colonel the Comte de Villebois-Mareuil. (He did not survive the honour long. He was killed, after a quixotic Last Stand, on 5 April.15) But Kruger did not, like Steyn, believe in stressing the hope of foreign military intervention, or even hope of diplomatic mediation, by one or more of the Powers. The volk must trust in themselves, and trust in the Lord. That remained Kruger’s simple text. The calamities that had befallen them, the death of their friends, were a sign of God’s will; His people needed to be tried and purified by suffering. But they must not doubt the Lord’s purpose. ‘How did it go with Ahab? The mighty enemy came before the walls of the city, and the people had lost courage. Then came the prophet of God, and said “Fear not”. Then God arose, and in that God we must place our trust…. It is still the same God Who led Israel from the wilderness and hardened Pharaoh’s heart to the end, until at last all the first-born of the Egyptians died [a reference to the typhoid epidemic at Bloemfontein] whereupon Pharaoh allowed the Israelites to depart.’16

  It was as broad as it was narrow, Kruger’s appeal to the volk. They must remember that they were the chosen people; remember, too, that victory over the Beast was a victory for all Christianity. ‘See the three youths in the fiery furnace. Did they rejoice alone? No, but God’s people over the whole earth. Was it only for Daniel, what happened in the lion’s den?’ To this theme of the holy war Kruger was to return again and again. And, predictably, he denounced the British for the most emotive of all atrocities: the employment of black Africans to fight the Boers.17 As we shall see, the claim that Baden-Powell had enrolled black troops at Mafeking was correct, though the charge of atrocities – atrocities against blacks – was one that would principally be laid at the door of the Boers. Still, the image of Dingaan’s successors fighting for Lord Salisbury struck at the very heart of the volk; it was one more apocalyptic sign that Lord Salisbury’s side was the side of the Beast; and that the Lord God of Hosts would work miracles for His people.

  Probably Kruger, the prophet, stirred more hearts than Steyn, the statesman. The geography of the Bible was more familiar to the volk than the geography of Russia and the Great Game. At any rate, Boer spirits, always mercurial, rebounded. De Wet wrote that ‘there was only one word on every tongue: “FORWARD!”’18 And if the Lord was to work miracles, it was De Wet, above all, who saw himself as the chosen instrument.

  For the new-style war, De Wet and De la Rey had proposed, and the krijgsraad unanimously agreed, that the commandos would be divided into flying columns. A large column, led by De la Rey and Philip Botha, would drive southwards in the direction of Bloemfontein, ‘to entice the enemy out of it’. Meanwhile, De Wet’s Free Staters would swoop down to the south-east, join hands with General Olivier’s six thousand men who were withdrawing from the Orange River, and together attack the British lines of communications.19

  By the end of March, De Wet was ready to strike. Roberts had taken the bait offered by De la Rey, and moved troops north. To screen the capital, and repair the railway to the north, Roberts had stationed part of French’s cavalry at Glen, sixteen miles to the north, where the Free State railway intersected the arc of the Modder River at the end of the first stage of its meandering, 150-mile journey towards Kimberley. So De Wet decided that his first target would be the Bloemfontein water-works at Sannah’s Post on the Modder, twenty-three miles to the east, and the source of all drinking water for the capital. He gathered that this pumping station at Sannah’s Post was only defended by a couple of hundred men. With two thousand burghers, he should not have much difficulty in turning off that strategic water tap. The main danger was the close proximity of Roberts’s enormous army. De Wet expected to be able to strike fast – and run fast – now that he had got rid of the wagon columns. He relied on speed and its counterpart, secrecy. He also hoped to make a tactical ally of the Modder, the river whose crumbling, white banks had played such a decisive part, for better or worse, in all the great battles of the Free State.20

  To trap those two hundred men between two parts of his raiding force of fifteen hundred. That was the plan; and it sounded simple enough. De Wet, its author, was the most aggressive and confident of all the Boer commanders. Yet even De Wet was overwhelmed by the sight of the great fish that he was now to find flapping in his nets beside the Modder.

  Nothing concentrates the military mind so much as the discovery that you have walked into an ambush. Brigadier-General Robert Broadwood was confronted with this disagreeable news soon after dawn on 31 March.

  Broadwood was the man with whom Roberts had replaced the unfortunate Major-General Babington as commander of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade. It may not have been true, as Methuen said, that Babington had been sacked simply because he was a friend of Buller’s. But it was true that Broadwood had got the place because he was a favourite of Roberts’s and Kitchener’s. He had what those generals admired in a cavalry leader: ‘dash’; he was also, like them, somewhat impatient; and the lapse that sent him straight into De Wet’s arms suggests that he was no military genius.

  He had failed to send out scouts at the head of his column.21

  The trap was sprung as Broadwood was withdrawing back to his base at Bloemfontein from a ‘bill-posting’ expedition in the district of Thabanchu close to the Basuto frontier. This was the ‘kill-Boer-rule-with-kindness’ expedition that had originated in Roberts’s half-hearted attempt to block Olivier. After this military failure, the cavalry had been given sheaves of Proclamation forms to distribute. French and Haig had then retired, leaving Broadwood in charge – both grumbling (reasonably enough) at the use of the precious cavalry on this p
olitical mission. As Haig said, ‘many poor creatures brought in their guns and swore on oath not to fight against us again. Then we withdraw our troops and the Transvaalers burn all the farms!! Such conduct merely brings us into contempt.’22

  It was to bring worse than contempt. After a few days, Broadwood had been forced by Olivier’s commander to retire from Thabanchu. On 30 March, he wired to Roberts’s HQ in Bloemfontein that he was retiring to the safety of the water-works. He had a relatively small force of 1,700 men: some of the ‘Tigers’, two cavalry regiments (or, rather, the skeleton of two regiments, for they had only 332 horses between them), U and Q Batteries of horse artillery and Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Alderson’s brigade of 830 MI. He also had a convoy of 92 wagons, many of which belonged to civilian refugees, seeking the protection of Roberts’s great army.23

  The pumping station at Sannah’s Post comprised a collection of buildings astride the western bank of the Modder. Here was the ford where the main Bloemfontein-Thabanchu wagon road crossed the river. There was a second ford, two and a half miles to the west, where the road crossed the tributary, the Korn Spruit, which joined the main river a couple of miles below. The road itself thus formed the south side of a small triangle of land whose east and west sides were formed by the Modder and Korn Spruit respectively. For twenty miles beyond the Korn Spruit, right up to the outskirts of Bloemfontein, the veld was almost featureless – apart from a boulder-strewn kopje, Bushman’s Kop, south of the road, about five miles to the west of Korn Spruit.24

  It was midnight before the first of Broadwood’s straggling column splashed across the Modder drift and reached the pumping station. This was the convoy of ninety-two wagons, and their African drivers, the civilian refugees and an escort of MI. Broadwood and the rest did not turn up till 3.30 a.m., about an and a half before dawn. Everyone was exhausted after the long slog along the muddy road from Thabanchu, and a running fight with Olivier’s commandos the previous day. The men threw themselves down beside the wagons and were soon asleep. No special orders were given by Broadwood to guard the bivouac. He assumed that the only danger came from Olivier, and Olivier was far behind. He knew nothing of De Wet’s two forces. He consulted the commander of the water-works garrison, Major Amphlett, and was reassured. Four men had already gone out to patrol the road westwards as far as Bushman’s Kop, as they did every night. Before dawn, patrols would be sent out to scout the country across the Modder to the north and east.25

  Soon after dawn, these patrols returned. They were followed, to everyone’s astonishment, by rifle fire and shelling from some kopjes on the far bank of the Modder. Broadwood then made his fatal lapse. He decided to withdraw his whole force to Bushman’s Kop. But no scouts were sent ahead. The convoy of wagons rumbled off, followed by some dismounted men, and U and Q Batteries of horse artillery, and fell straight into De Wet’s lap at Korn Spruit.26 ‘Hands up!’ shouted the burghers, concealed in the river banks. A forest of hands went up. In a few minutes, De Wet’s men had captured two hundred soldiers and were all set to capture twelve pieces of artillery, a bigger coup than the capture of Long’s ten guns at Colenso.

  Broadwood – two miles to the rear at Sannah’s Post pumping station – at last realized his predicament. He was trapped between two forces, with a third, General Olivier’s, somewhere to the east. An officer of the 10th Hussars was sent to ride like the wind to Bloemfontein. They were in a devil of a mess.27 The ‘little man’ must get them out of it again.

  The little man was not one of those people who look best in a crisis. It was partly that, as a flyweight, Roberts could not, like Buller, hope to reassure people simply by the jut of his jaw and the thrust of his massive shoulders. Partly, too, that Roberts, unlike Buller, tended to over-react, unable for once to control the nervous and impatient side of his character.28

  Sannah’s Post was a mere twenty miles from Roberts’s HQ, a couple of hours’ ride on a good horse, not twice the length of one of the battlefields of the Tugela or the Modder. Roberts’s new staff officer, Colonel Sir Henry Rawlinson (brought over from Ladysmith at Roberts’s special request), actually heard the distant rumble of Broadwood’s guns as he rode out of Bloemfontein before breakfast. Rawlinson returned and told Roberts: an ominous noise indeed, so close to the capital. Roberts did nothing. Two hours later, Broadwood’s first SOS message, relayed from the post at Bushman’s Kop, reached the HQ. It was followed, about half an hour later, by the breathless report of the officer of the 10th Hussars.29

  The way to respond to this SOS seems, with hindsight, somewhat obvious. Send a flying column down the road to Bushman’s Kop. Make it a communications centre (the rocky hilltop overlooked the whole meandering line of the Modder and comprised both a telegraph and heliograph station). Reach out a controlling hand to co-ordinate the vast numbers of men that could be sent to overwhelm De Wet. After all, Broadwood’s difficulty was also Roberts’s opportunity. Ever since Poplar Grove, the problem of fighting Boers had been to find them. Here was De Wet’s forward line – less than five hundred men – isolated between Broadwood and Bloemfontein. Roberts had thirty thousand men within twenty miles. And if Roberts were to seize this opportunity, to catch De Wet in his own trap, why not go in person to establish a forward HQ nearer the action? It was a fair criticism of Buller (Buller had made it himself) that he did not do one thing that the complexities of modern warfare made it essential for the GOC to do – to assert himself during a battle and not delegate the chief command. Why did Roberts not now ride out the fifteen miles to Bushman’s Kop and take a grip on affairs?

  It is easy to say this, in the clear light of future events: it was hard, in the fog of the present, to achieve. As it turned out, Roberts had swung from over-confidence to near-panic. What was the strength of De Wet’s raiding force? Somehow he got it into his head that Bloemfontein itself was in danger. The best mobile force – what was left of French’s cavalry division – was not despatched at once to help Broadwood, and give chase to De Wet. French wasted the whole morning and afternoon hunting for Boers around Bloemfontein. An infantry division was sent, led by Colvile.30 In the meantime, Broadwood was left to cut his way out as best he could.31

  If the root cause of the disaster went deeper than Broadwood’s blunder, the reason why the disaster was not still more serious can largely be ascribed to the behaviour of one man.

  In that shot-spattered triangle of wet grass between the Korn Spruit and the Modder, the battle had now resolved itself, like the second phase of the Battle of Colenso, into a struggle to save – or to capture – the twelve British guns. The man in charge of the six guns of Q Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery was Major Edward Phipps-Hornby. He had stumbled into his bivouac beside the water-works at 4 a.m. At 5.30 a.m., he was woken by someone shouting, ‘Major, there’s a lot of rifle fire going on! Hadn’t we better harness up?’ There was no sign of the enemy. (Generals Froneman’s, Wessels’s, and Piet De Wet’s 1,150 men were dug into the kopje on the far bank of the Modder.) After a minute, shells began to go shrieking overhead or crashing into the rain-sodden ground among the horses and wagons. The two British batteries found that the Boer guns outranged them by nearly a thousand yards. Broadwood ordered a retirement: Major Taylor, of U Battery, to lead, followed by Q Battery. Ahead of both of them, as the shells smacked down, the wagons of the convoy, and the refugees, galloped pell-mell towards the Korn Spruit.32

  Now a battery of the RHA, however choreographic their manoeuvres on the parade ground, was by nature a cumbersome force. Each of the six guns had its individual ammunition limber; there were the wagons, with reserve ammunition; a total of fifty officers and men rode astride or beside the guns.33 When the two batteries had retired about a mile from the bivouac, Taylor’s battery was ordered to cross the Korn Spruit and occupy the ridge beside a farmhouse on the far side.34 Phipps-Hornby and Q Battery followed quietly. He watched the confused mass of convoy halt and spread out along the deep, crumbling banks of the Korn Spruit. He thought the convoy had halted to le
t Taylor’s battery pass; Taylor’s battery did, in fact, ride up on their right, and they, too, halted at the ford. Suddenly a gunner ran up: ‘We are all prisoners! The Boers are there.’ (He pointed to the river-bank.) ‘They are in among the convoy and among the guns.’35

  Phipps-Hornby was now only three hundred yards from the ford. He could see a cluster of Boers standing up on the top of the river bank, and thought they must be unarmed. He did not believe the gunner. However, he realized there was some kind of ambush. He ordered Q Battery to get into line. Then he gave the order: wheel to the left, back the way they had come. As the leading horses wheeled, an invisible wave of bullets splashed the ground all around. Three horses and a wagon team were down. Then the gunner in front of Phipps-Hornby was hit in the back. He pitched forward; another bullet caught him in the head. Now there were riderless horses galloping past – belonging to the men of Roberts’s horse whom Broadwood had failed to send ahead as scouts. One of the guns was upset and had to be abandoned. But somehow Phipps-Hornby got the other five guns back to a firing line on a ridge 1,150 yards from the ford. Soon they were in action, blasting away at those black dots on the river bank, Boer heads that ducked at each flash of the guns.36