At Colenso, Long’s two field-gun batteries had tried to reply at much the same range to Botha’s riflemen concealed in trenches on the other bank, a dialogue that did not last long. Perhaps here, at the Modder, Phipps-Hornby had no choice, because of the broken ground, between taking up a firing position that was too close or not taking one at all. In the event, Q Battery was soon silenced, and, of the original fifty officers and men, only one officer (Phipps-Hornby), one sergeant, one corporal and eight men were still in action. Broad-wood’s ADC then appeared. The General ordered them to retire with the guns. The question was how?37
About seventy yards behind the firing line were a stone parapet and some station buildings, part of a new branch line to Thabanchu in course of construction. Phipps-Hornby found some of his missing gunners, and a crowd of infantry, cringing among the horses against the lee side of the station. ‘I called them cowards,’ he said later, ‘and gave them the rough edge of my tongue, and said I would shoot any man who didn’t go out…. I said “Go out and fight – or come and help me.” They went somewhere but I never saw them again.’38
Meanwhile, the ten NCOs and men and some of the Essex had begun to bring in the five guns and gun limbers. The guns had to be brought in by hand, as it was impossible to hook in the limbers under that blizzard of Mauser and Martini-Henry fire. Some of the limbers, too, had to be manhandled part of the way. Each time the men went back into the blizzard, Phipps-Hornby noticed how they jammed their helmets on their heads and leant forward as though meeting a wind. One of the gunners, called Humphreys, lost his stick, swept out of his hand by a bullet, but calmly bent down and picked it up again. Eventually, all except one gun and one limber were safely brought under cover; these had to be abandoned, like the gun lost earlier. Then the surviving men – four of whom were to be awarded VCs – galloped the four guns back across the Korn Spruit by a new ford higher up river, which the Tigers had discovered, and joined the rest of Broadwood’s column.
So there were no more captures for De Wet. Phipps-Hornby, splashed all over with blood, but unscathed, rode back to Bloemfontein with the débris of the battery. He had three whiskies and sodas, and some sausages and bacon. He was the hero of the hour. Everyone complimented him for his gallantry. He broke down and wept.39
De Wet’s nimble column of fifteen hundred easily eluded the bear-hug of Roberts’s ten thousand – Colvile’s lumbering infantry division and French’s shattered cavalry division, belatedly sent in pursuit. Colvile was later blamed for the fiasco. Broadwood was privately censured, officially exonerated. The seven captured guns (five of U Battery’s and the two of Q Battery that Phipps-Hornby had been forced to abandon), 117 wagons and 428 prisoners were sent back northwards.40 Meanwhile, De Wet’s column continued their raiding expedition to the south. De Wet himself went ahead to reconnoitre, and managed to persuade some local farmers, who had given up their arms in Bloemfontein, to rejoin the army. His force only totalled eight hundred, some of whom were not properly armed, when he attacked a British garrison of about six hundred men of the Royal Irish Rifles near Reddersberg on 3 April. De Wet had three field-guns and the British had none. After a twenty-four-hour fight, the entire garrison surrendered, losing 45 officers and men killed and wounded, and 546 taken prisoner.41 Next, De Wet attacked and laid siege to nineteen hundred men of Brabant’s Horse at Wepener. These were mostly Afrikaners from Cape Colony, and the thought that they had volunteered to serve the Crown (and earn five shillings a day in the process) whetted the appetites of De Wet’s men. However, the Wepener garrison dug themselves in with skill; they had their backs to Basutoland (and an open telegraph wire throughout the siege). Mean-while, Roberts’s infantry divisions were plodding along to the rescue. After sixteen days, De Wet let go of Wepener, and swooped back to his eyrie in the north. When the British arrived, the eagle had flown.42
What De Wet would have achieved, if Steyn and Kruger had wholeheartedly supported his brilliant raiding strategy, one can only guess. He had had to rely on an active force of a mere fifteen hundred, supported by local burghers, who were distrustful of the sincerity of the Proclamation offering amnesty. Many claimed to have been put under arrest, despite its terms. With this handful of men, he had opened a new front. He had done more; he had opened a new dimension in the war. He had failed, however, to cut the railway line. To achieve that all-important strategic task, he would have needed a much bigger share of the Boer armies. And Steyn and Kruger and the rest were not yet convinced of the need for such a revolution in their strategy. They still clung to the hope of somehow halting Roberts’s combined force of fifty thousand men as they plodded north alongside the railway line to the Transvaal.43
From Roberts’s point of view, De Wet’s raid thus postponed, but did not prevent, the advance of his grand army. And, on 3 May, he was finally ready for a double ‘tiger-spring’: the advance on Pretoria with his main army, while Colonel Bryan Mahon’s flying column struck out far to the north-west to relieve Baden-Powell at Mafeking.
CHAPTER 33
‘The White Man’s War’
Mafeking (Cape Colony Border),
30 April-May 1900
‘It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingos and Baralongs against us – in this you have committed an enormous act of wickedness … reconsider the matter, even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking … disarm your blacks and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man’s war.’
General Cronje’s message to Colonel Baden-Powell, 29 October 1899
On the last day of April, a patrol from Mafeking, plodding through the sandy veld of no-man’s-land, came across a curious letter addressed to Baden-Powell and attached to the abandoned railway line.
To Colonel Baden-Powell. I see in The Bulawayo Chronicle that your men in Mafeking play cricket on Sundays and give concerts and balls on Sunday evenings.
In case you would allow my men to join in the same it would be very agreeable to me as here outside Mafeking there are seldom any of the fair sex and there can be no merriment without their being present….
Wishing you a pleasant day,
I remain your obliging friend
S. Eloff. Commandant of Johannesburg Commando.1
The letter was brought to Baden-Powell’s sandbagged, two-storey HQ in a lawyer’s office in Market Square, from which he spent hours scanning the empty veld. He read the letter, his biographers record, with a sardonic smile.2 One can well believe it. Baden-Powell may have had his shortcomings, but he did not lack a sense of the absurd. A cricket match with the Boers, a Sunday cricket match with the Boers, whose senior commander had earlier denounced the British for desecrating the Sabbath with sports. This was just B-P’s form (even if ‘merriment with the fair sex’ was not). B-P knew Eloff by reputation. He had lately arrived from Johannesburg, determined to win his spurs. He was cocky, people said, and ambitious, one of Kruger’s immense brood of grandsons, but surprisingly anglicized, none the less.3 B-P sent Eloff a jaunty reply, under the white flag, that was both a challenge and a rebuff:
Sir, I beg to thank you for your letter of yesterday…. I should like nothing better – after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days, not out, against the bowling of Cronje, Snijman, Botha … and we are having a very enjoyable game.
I remain, yours truly
R. S. S. Baden-Powell4
Two hundred days not out: a fine innings, a double century. And so it must have felt in the other sense: two centuries spent in Mafeking. Colonel Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell would not have been human if he had survived the six and a half months locked up at Mafeking without feeling the strain. He showed no outward sign of it, except by that odd habit he had taught himself of whistling when he was frustrated.5
Baden-Powell (‘B-P’ for short; appropriately, these initials coincided with the current slang for the ‘British Public’) was a most unusual kind of British colonel. He was neat and dapper and bal
d; his favourite coat, a coat of many colours. He was a man of parts: the conventional pig-sticking colonel (he had commanded the 5th Dragoons in India); the exhibitionist (he revelled, wearing a wig and a girl’s dress, in amateur theatricals); the military eccentric (he had ideas about the importance of scouting that most officers would have considered laughable). He had a boyish enthusiasm for hard work and new knowledge. Ingenuity was, in a sense, his second name – the ‘Stephenson’ stood for the one who had designed the ‘Rocket’, for he had been his godfather.6 B-P would have made an ideal headmaster in a Victorian adventure story. A ripper when the going was good, but an alarming man to have as your enemy.
In his messages from Mafeking to the outside world, B-P played the stereotype of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman to perfection. ‘All well. Four hours bombardment. One dog killed.’ So he had reported the first day’s shelling to Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Plumer,7 the commander of the nearest British military force, a Rhodesian MI regiment at Tuli, and it was exactly what the other B-P, the British Public, wanted to hear. For six and a half months of the siege he remained (in contrast to poor, demoralized Sir George White) the life and soul of his own garrison. ‘Col. Baden-Powell is one of the best fellows going,’ wrote Trooper Alfred Spurling, B Squadron Protectorate Regiment; ‘he sings comic songs, and had a lot of sketches at an Exhibition which was held the other day.’8 His versatility astonished even his admirers. ‘He was able to assume very various roles with “Fregoli-like” rapidity,’ wrote a lady of the garrison, describing one Sunday concert. ‘Suddenly there was an alarm of a night attack…. In an instant the man who had been masquerading as a buffoon was again the commanding officer, stern and alert.’9
The siege itself had been no picnic. There was the cumulative strain of its length, now nearly double the length of the sieges of Kimberley and Ladysmith. There were proportionately much heavier casualties, both from enemy shelling and from raids on the enemy lines. There was, above all, the utter isolation. Mafeking (‘The Place of the Stones’, the Africans called it)10 was on the borders of nowhere: a railway siding, 250 miles north of Kimberley on the line to Rhodesia, an oasis of tin roofs and mud walls in the sandy wastes where Cape Colony, the Bechuanaland Protectorate and the Transvaal all touched fingers on the flank of the Kalahari Desert.
For months, the garrison had felt utterly abandoned. The same awful thought that haunted the Ladysmith garrison obsessed B-P: ‘Are we fools or heroes?’ To that, at least, there came splendid reassurance.11 In February, a native runner brought him the congratulations of Lord Roberts.12 In April, a runner brought him a letter from his sister, Agnes: ‘Everybody is talking of you. You are the hero of the day. All the papers describe your many-sided talents Your photo is in all the shops now.’13 A few days later, the Queen’s own accolade: ‘I continue watching with confidence and admiration the patient and resolute defence… under your ever resourceful command. VRI.’14 He was the hero of the war.
It is easy to underrate today a man whose contemporary reputation was so over-sold. What is forgotten is that it was B-P’s job to play the fool – not merely to keep up the spirits of the garrison at Sunday sports days, but to act out the strategic role designed for him, the previous summer, by the Cabinet. B-P had been Lansdowne’s and Chamberlain’s secret weapon in that wild mood of optimism in early July. They had hoped to force Kruger to a ‘climb-down’ simply by the ‘moral effect’ of B-P and a thousand men threatening the northern borders of the Transvaal.15 Failing the climb-down, B-P’s secret instructions and, strange to say, these have never been published before) were to raid the Transvaal the moment that war broke out.16
Looking back on it now, the idea seems almost incredible: a plan to attack the Transvaal ‘à la Jameson’, as B-P rightly described it.17 Two regiments of colonial irregulars (‘loafers’ he called them) to be raised, like Jameson’s men, in Bulawayo and other colonial towns, and then sent galloping into the Transvaal.18 But those were B-P’s orders. ‘In the event of hostilities with the Transvaal, you should endeavour to demonstrate with the largest force at your disposal, in a southerly direction from Tuli, as if making towards Pretoria.’ Demonstration was a polite word. In effect, B-P and his ‘loafers’ were to play the fool in the northern Transvaal. The object, however, was of great strategic importance: to draw off large numbers of Transvaal burghers and so protect the vulnerable parts of Cape Colony and Natal in the first weeks of the war before reinforcements arrived.19
In the event, circumstances decided that the raiding strategy must be abandoned. B-P had successfully raised two regiments of slouch-hatted MI: a Rhodesian corps at Bulawayo, a Bechuanaland Protectorate corps at Ramathlabama, just across the border from Mafeking. But, by September, Milner had proposed that B-P’s Mafeking force was needed as a garrison to protect that northern outpost from a Boer attack across the frontier.20 B-P acquiesced in this, failing proper artillery and other reinforcements being sent to Mafeking. He put the Rhodesian force at Tuli under Colonel Plumer, and took personal command of the Bechuanaland force at Mafeking. His new plan was to provoke the Boers, without exposing himself to the risks of a raid. Mafeking itself would be the bait. It was not only the most vulnerable town in Cape Colony. It was also the exposed nerve of the Boers’ political consciousness.21 For it was from Mafeking, and nearby Pitsani, that Dr Jameson and his grey-shirted, slouch-hatted Raiders had set off four years before.22
The Boers swallowed the bait whole – that is, with B-P inside. During the first agonizing month of the war, the whole of Cape Colony south of Kimberley had been guarded by less than seven thousand regulars; the whole of Natal south of Ladysmith, by a mere three thousand.23 Here was the Boers’ greatest strategic opportunity of the war. It was largely thanks to B-P that they had not taken it. His two regiments of loafers, with a dozen imperial officers, had actually drawn off General Cronje and 7,700 Boers to the northern and north-western borders: nearly a fifth of the two Boer armies.24 Recently, it has become fashionable for historians (unaware of B-P’s secret War Office instructions) to deride his claims to have played a crucial part in the strategy of the first phase of the war.25 The figures – a dozen imperial officers and the loafers enticing away nearly eight thousand Boers – speak for themselves. Arguably, B-P’s antics saved South Africa for the British.
Of course, that heady phase of the war only lasted a month. Once the Army Corps arrived in mid-November, once Buller reached the Tugela and Methuen crossed the Orange River, Mafeking became, in conventional strategic terms, a side-show. Cronje left for the south, to block Methuen’s advance towards Kimberley, on the road that was to lead him to the Modder River, Magersfontein, and eventually to Paardeberg. The siege of Mafeking was left to an even more stolid general, Snyman, and a much smaller force: fifteen hundred burghers.26 Hence the second, and most depressing, phase of the siege. For many dismal months, holding on to Mafeking meant little more than denying it as a base for the Boers; and what had Mafeking got – apart from eighteen railway engines–27 that would prove of practical use to the Boers? Arguably, if Mafeking had surrendered in December 1899, as the other smaller garrison towns along the railway line to Rhodesia had surrendered, it would have made no direct difference to the war.28
That Mafeking had not surrendered was largely due to B-P’s remarkable professionalism – the will to win, hidden behind the mask of good clean fun. He was a junior member of Wolseley’s magic circle, one of the élite of British officers thrown up by those endless little frontier wars of the new imperialism. He served as Chief of Staff in Rhodesia in 1896.29 The War Office Intelligence Department recommended him as a man who could be trusted to succeed in an independent command.30 He paddled his own canoe. Indeed, he had paddled it on the Limpopo almost too single-mindedly during the Matabele War (though this incident had been hushed up). He had been accused by the Colonial Office of murdering an African chief, Uwini, whom he had taken prisoner. He admitted killing him, but claimed that the man deserved what he got. The case had been referred
to Lansdowne, but Lansdowne had backed B-P, and it fizzled out.31
There was, it must be said, one rather chilling facet to B-P’s character: he played to win, and he made his own rules as he went along. But the charge of murdering an African chief had lost him no friends among white Rhodesians.32 In fact, he was something of a hero to them – and this was one of the reasons why the War Office had chosen him for his present command. He had also published a popular book on the Matabele campaign that showed that he could out-Boer the Boers, both in his skill at scouting and in what he called the ‘sport’ of ‘nigger-hunts’.33
Still, whatever B-P’s methods, his success in defending Mafeking cannot be questioned. From the beginning of the siege, he displayed the right mixture of ‘audacity and wariness’ (i.e., bluff) recommended by the War Office for the raid from Tuli.34
The basic problems were simply stated. There was the all-pervading question of arithmetic. To hold a perimeter of twelve to fifteen miles at Ladysmith, Sir George White had had twelve thousand regulars and 55 guns. To defend a perimeter of ten miles at Kimberley, Kekewich had had six hundred regular troops and 14 light guns; to these he had added over two thousand colonial irregulars, police and town guards.35 Now take a circle round Mafeking wide enough to keep a proper field of fire: say, five to six miles. How were twenty imperial officers, and the 680 men of the newly raised Protectorate Regiment, and police, to defend this against Piet Cronje and six thousand Boers? Add another three hundred white men – every able-bodied man in the town – and the garrison were still at a disadvantage of one to six. Add the Mafeking field-guns – an opera bouffe collection, the best of which were two muzzle-loading 7-pounders sent up from Cape Town by mistake for two howitzers – and set them against Cronje’s nine modern field-guns and a 94-pounder Creusot Long Tom (alias ‘Gretchen’ or ‘Old Creechy’).36 There was no avoiding the conclusion. The Mafeking garrison was a paper tiger.
The Boer War Page 63
