The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  CHAPTER 34

  Across the Vaal

  The Orange River Colony and the Transvaal,

  31 May—June 1900

  Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl – Son of a Lambeth publican – it’s all the same today!

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’

  ‘The long-looked to, long-waited for moment has come at last,’ said the newly promoted young officer of the Tigers, Lieutenant March Phillipps.1 He felt pleased with himself, and with good reason. They had ridden 260 miles in twenty-six days. He was the front pair of legs of a triumphant, undulating centipede – of 860 centipedes, in fact, the forty-three thousand men of Roberts’s ‘Grand Army’.2 It was 31 May, and victory now seemed as close to the touch, in the champagne-clear light of the high veld, as the golden mine dumps of the Rand. Over there was British Johannesburg, only ten miles down that avenue of iron mine chimneys and spidery winding gear. And beyond the Golden City, awaiting relief, there was Kruger’s Pretoria, awaiting her conquerors.

  It had been a breathtaking leap, that twenty-six-day march from Bloemfontein to the Rand. No one had expected the Boers to give much of a ‘show’. But the speed and the momentum had surprised even Roberts, who had planned the march, and was never one to doubt his own success.3 Here at last, it seemed, those war dreams of the previous year had come to reality, if not in time for Christmas, at least before the Derby: the ‘walk-over’, the ‘apology for a fight’ (Milner’s phrase to Chamberlain),4 the ‘irresistible force’ meeting some highly movable objects and scattering them like dust beneath the wagon wheels.

  Exit the old Orange Free State; thus Roberts’s official proclamation on 28 May.* Enter the new ‘Orange River Colony’.5

  The pattern of the advance rarely faltered. The enemy was the veld, not the Boers: a sun to fry you, and a frost to freeze you (for winter had come, encrusting the men’s blankets with hoar-frost as they slept), too little trek ox to eat, too few biscuits – when there were rations at all. Each morning, under the stars, the cry is raised, ‘Saddle up!’ and the Tigers curse as they lie there, huddled in greatcoats, their saddles as pillows. Then the great column, which has curled itself up for the night like a caterpillar, begins slowly to stretch itself and crawl, wagon after wagon, horse after horse, kicking up dust from the road.6 And soon the infantry column is off ‘on the tramp’:7 an army of sixty thousand boots, marching to Pretoria under the eye of a war balloon. Winston Churchill, who had now turned his attention to the western front, compared this war balloon to the ‘pillar of cloud that led the hosts of Israel’.8

  To the young officer of the Tigers, the march seemed less biblical: ‘The Huns or the Goths, in one of their vast tribal invasions, may have looked like this.’ That day, 31 May, the whole of the double column of Roberts’s invasion force converged on Vredefort, astride the central railway. For a few hours, the right flank could see the main column and grasp the immensity of it all: ‘Endless battalions of infantry, very dusty and grimy … guns, bearer-companies, Colonial Horse, generals and their staffs go plodding and jingling by … long convoys of the different units … groaning and creaking along, the oxen sweating, the dust whirling, the naked Kaffirs yelling, and the long whips going like pistol-shots. The whole thing suggests more a national migration than the march of an enemy.’9 So it was in a sense: Britain’s great trek.

  How did it look to the British trekkers – including that new-fangled recruit to the British army, the gentleman-trooper?10 Kipling was right.11 Never had war looked so democratic. Over half of the ten thousand rank and file of the Imperial Yeomanry and City Imperial Volunteers, raised in that whirlwind of patriotism that followed Black Week – over half of these troopers were from the middle class.12 About four thousand of these recruits were now marching with Roberts to Pretoria.13 But raising these volunteers was not just an imperialist stunt. The recruits included many competent amateur soldiers. They believed – and soon they would have their chance to prove it – that a British soldier, like his Boer counterpart, could make up with common sense what he lacked in military training. Already, these gentlemen-rankers, like Trooper 8008 and Driver Erskine Childers (alias the Hon. Sidney Peel, barrister-at-law, and Mr Childers, Clerk of the House of Commons), had made important discoveries about the facts of war. The ‘big things’ were not the battles, let alone the rights and wrongs of the war.14 They were the personal things: how to get wood for the fire, how to steal a duck from a farm without being caught, how to make their biscuits last tomorrow’s march.15 And, above all, the boots:

  Don’t-don’t-don’t-look at what’s in front of you.

  (Boots-boots-boots-boots movin’ up an’ down again).16

  The Field-Marshal rode in his covered wagon – the mobile HQ – and his anxieties were of a more elevated sort. There was one thing about this war he could not explain, not even to himself. His own army had marched at prodigious speed – having covered that distance at a speed never equalled by his hero, Wellington. How had the Boers marched faster? Theirs was a retreat, chaotic and demoralized, he thought, yet never, for one moment, a rout. At each of the natural defence lines – five broad, muddy, brown rivers that intersected railway and road; the Vet, the Zand, the Vaalsch, the Rhenoster, and the great Vaal itself – at each of them the Boers had dug trenches, as though determined to defend them as they had defended the Modder. Roberts, with ten times the mounted troops that either Buller or Methuen had had, sent his men to outflank the trenches. The Boers had fled. The main column had hardly a skirmish.17 All that Roberts and his staff, standing on a kopje, ever saw of the enemy was more like a mirage than a battle: a train steaming away into the distance, a shadowy group of horsemen, the pillar of black smoke as the bridges and railway culverts were dynamited by the Boers own ‘Irish Brigade’ (‘Wreckers Corps’) led by Major John McBride. Somehow the cavalry never ‘got into’ the Boers, as the phrase went. Why couldn’t the fellows stand and fight like gentlemen? ‘They slip away in the most extraordinary manner,’ explained Roberts to Lansdowne.18 Somehow there was always a rearguard strong enough to hold off French’s cavalry and horse artillery. Somehow the Boers always saved even their wagons and heavy guns without paying the price in casualties.19 Botha’s army was in full flight – yet they marched like victors.

  So the great question still remained open, as the army approached the Rand at the end of May. Roberts could save the gold-mines, perhaps. He could rescue the three thousand British prisoners held at Pretoria, probably. He could capture Pretoria, certainly, and proclaim the Transvaal, like the Free State, a British colony. But would this end the war?

  There was an intelligence report supplied by the Director of Military Intelligence, Colonel McKenzie, who forecast that Kruger would retreat north to Lydenburg, and only defend Pretoria lightly. The war would go on. This view was echoed by Colonel Rawlinson, at the heart of Roberts’s inner circle. ‘It looks to me,’ Rawlinson wrote on 13 May, ‘as though the war could last for a good many months more. The enemy will, as I have always said, break up into small parties and take to guerrilla war, which will entail much time and blood to conquer.’ Ian Hamilton, however, Roberts’s confidant and closest protegé, took his usual optimistic view,20 and Roberts now agreed with Hamilton.

  Roberts pinned his faith on the psychological effect of a blow to the heart – striking at Pretoria. He rejected the alternative: to deal with De Wet and Steyn first. Not that he ignored the fact, when he had set out from Bloemfontein, that about seven thousand of Christiaan De Wet’s Free State burghers would be left behind his own lines. On the contrary, he had detached nearly half the force, designed to invade the Transvaal, to protect the Free State and the all-important railway to the Cape ports from raids by De Wet. The job of these twenty thousand men was to disarm the Boer population (and unhorse them, too), so as to deny any further support to De Wet.21 At the same time, Roberts was most anxious to be lenient to any Boers who were prepared to co-operate. Thus, looting was strictly forbidden i
n Army Orders, except where farms had been used as bases for attacking the British (a practice which was fortunately widespread, according to the looters).22 But Roberts had set his face against trying to crush De Wet before marching out of the Free State. He was impatient to end the war, anxious to keep his losses down, as demanded by the British public. The risk of De Wet’s and President Steyn’s re-emergence as the centre of Boer resistance was a ‘risk he had to run’, so he told Lansdowne. He did not expect it.23

  Thus on 3 May, he had started the push northwards, preceded by General Hunter’s column (and its offshoot, Colonel Bryan Mahon’s flying column) fifty miles to the west, swooping along the banks of the Lower Vaal. His own double column stayed within reach of the main railway line – Tucker’s and Pole-Carew’s divisions (the 7th and 11th) under his own eye, and a new division, specially created for his favourite, Ian Hamilton, marching ten to twenty miles away to the east.24 On 10 May, Buller had at last agreed to bestir himself with the two remaining Natal divisions, from his bases south of the Biggarsberg.25 So, on this broad front of 330 miles, Roberts still retained crushing superiority of numbers, despite the twenty thousand troops he had left in the Free State: eight thousand with Hunter along the Vaal; thirty thousand with himself and Hamilton in the centre; twenty thousand with Buller in Natal.26

  At first, Roberts assumed that he could find some way to entrap the Boers, as Cronje had been trapped. ‘All is going well but it is a pity we shan’t have a fight at the Zand,’ wrote Rawlinson in his diary on 8 May. ‘No bag again….’27 A couple of days earlier, Roberts himself had told Hamilton to make a ‘supreme effort to run the Boers down between this and Kroonstad’. Roberts soon had to reconcile himself to his failure to make any ‘bag’. After driving the Boers out of Kroonstad, he halted ten days (to Rawlinson’s disgust), in order to allow the railway to be repaired behind him.28 His mobility was bedevilled, like Buller’s in Natal, by the problem of transport and supply. Despite the improvement made by largely restoring the old transport system, the troops still went hungry when they stepped far from the railway; and the repairs to the railway could not even keep up with the pace of the ox. The Boers’ own ‘Irish Brigade’ had blown up every culvert and bridge from Bloemfontein to the Vaal, and each mine left a tangle of steel rails knotted to the permanent way. The man who straightened out these knots – in effect, the chief hero of the advance – was the Director of Railways, a thirty-three-year-old engineer called Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Girouard, whose promotion so young was one of Kitchener’s few really successful ideas; Girouard was one of K of K’s band of ‘boys’ from the Sudan. But even Girouard, and thousands of black railway navvies, could not bridge the Vet and the Zand and the Vaal in a day. Meanwhile, the British went hungry, or lived on emergency rations of meat paste, and the Boers had leisure to consolidate their flight.29

  The most costly aspect of these interruptions to the railway was not the few days they held up Roberts’s advance, or the meals they lost his troops, but the way they exacerbated the crisis of the field hospitals. Nothing better illustrates Roberts’s limitations as a military commander than the fact, as it emerged at Kroonstad, that his field medical services were in as scandalous a state as the fixed hospitals at Bloemfontein. Typhoid, Dingaan’s revenge, assiduous camp-follower of the victors ever since Paardeberg, caused more British casualties that month than all the battles of Black Week. Belatedly, Roberts was coming to recognize the disaster and its causes – although he did not admit it in his letters to Lansdowne.30 He told the Surgeon-General, Wilson, to find a new sanitary officer instead of the notorious Colonel Exham, the PMO from Ladysmith transferred to Bloemfontein.31 He gave Wilson himself a stiff reprimand for failing to send doctors and nurses to keep up with the army. ‘Hospital arrangements,’ he wrote from Kroonstad on the 21st, ‘are most unsatisfactory, and I trust you to come here and superintend them … some hundred mattresses are urgently needed…. The requirements for Kroonstad should have been foreseen and spare surgeons should have been on the spot….’32

  Perhaps one should not blame Roberts for what he styled ‘unfortunate incidents’ in the hospitals of the Free State, any more severely than one should blame Buller for the reverses in Natal. Both Generals made errors of judgement, and their men paid the price. In lives, Roberts’s errors to date were the more expensive of the two.33

  Indeed, a new contrast was emerging between the two rivals: Roberts and Buller. Since the great advance had begun in May, they had both been fighting on roughly comparable terms against relatively weak and demoralized Boer forces. Both were triumphant. But the reverses that blighted the triumphs changed the whole character of the war and, above all, trebled its length. These reverses, as we shall soon see, were all on Roberts’s side.

  Twenty miles east of Kroonstad, Ian Hamilton was in his element. He had two infantry brigades, including the 1st Battalion of his own regiment, the Gordon Highlanders.34 Beside him rode a dashing new ADC, the Duke of Marlborough, transferred from Roberts’s staff, and beside Marlborough rode his first cousin, The Morning Post correspondent, Winston Churchill; Hamilton had persuaded Winston to come along and see ‘the show’. As they rode into Lindley, Hamilton’s shattered wrist flapped at the saddle: a ‘glorious’ deformity, as Churchill tactfully said. It was a reminder of a personal account with the Boers still not paid off in full; for this was the wrist smashed when he had served with the Gordons at Majuba.35

  One can guess why everyone (except Buller and the remnants of the Wolseley Ring) found Hamilton so attractive, why Bobs himself praised him as he praised none of his other field commanders. Hamilton’s character supplied what Roberts pre-eminently lacked: style. Hamilton was gallant and boyish, the beau idéal of the warrior, whether seen through the eyes of Sargent, and painted in full-dress uniform, or of Winston Churchill, as the hero of his forthcoming ‘Ian Hamilton’s March’. And how Hamilton loved to be loved. In the Army List he was a mere colonel still. Now the little man had made him acting Lieutenant-General, with a force of fifteen thousand men and thirty-eight guns. What a contrast to those dismal days locked up with poor old White at Ladysmith! He had now been given the right flank of Roberts’s double column: that is, two mounted brigades (Broadwood’s cavalry and Ridley’s MI) and two infantry brigades (Major-General Horace Smith-Dorrien’s 19th and Major-General Bruce Hamilton’s 21st). His job was to smooth the path of the main column, and smooth it he would.36

  To say that Ian Hamilton’s column had thus seen some brisk fighting was not to say much. There had been a stiff action at Houtnek on 7 May; and, in turning the flank of the Boers at Zand River on 10 May, he had suffered rather less than a hundred casualties. But the pattern of Hamilton’s advance was hardly less monotonous than Bobs’s. It was a lumbering leap towards the Rand: days of plodding along dusty tracks east of the railway; a moment’s skirmish with the Boers’ rearguard; then back to the other adversaries: hunger, thirst, frost, sun, disease.37

  It was 18 May when the column approached Lindley, which had been proclaimed the new provisional capital of the Free State after the fall of Kroonstad. It had already been abandoned by Steyn and his government when Hamilton’s vanguard rumbled into the town. Lindley struck people as a depressing place. It was one of those strange, bare little towns, whose presence on the veld was so inexplicable: no visible roads led to it; no fertile fields, let alone trees or gardens, surrounded it; it was just a cluster of tin roofs and a bleak, tall church. The veld carried Lindley on its lap as casually as the sea carries a ship.38 And a kind of ship Lindley was soon to be: the flagship of De Wet and his raiders.

  Hamilton himself found the omens understandably difficult to read. The inhabitants were unwelcoming, except for the British settlers who owned the two shops; their loyalty was embarrassing. (Churchill warned one of them to haul down the Union Jack; this column was not a garrison.)39 On the other hand, an encouraging message reached Broadwood, the cavalry commander, from Christiaan De Wet’s brother, Piet: he was contemplating surrend
er, and he would bring in a thousand burghers, too; could Broadwood guarantee he would not be sent as a prisoner to Cape Town? Broadwood guaranteed it. Hamilton (incidentally, Churchill, too) agreed that it would be wise to offer the most generous terms. Then a telegram arrived from HQ: Roberts told Broadwood he had no authority to make these terms; so the offer of surrender lapsed.

  The column lumbered out of Lindley, with Piet De Wet’s men snapping at their heels. There was an unfortunate incident when Hamilton lost fifty-nine of his rearguard. This was partly offset by a minor coup of Broadwood’s: he captured fifteen Boer wagons. Lindley sailed off into the heat-haze. General Colvile and the Highland Brigade, whose job was to sweep up behind Hamilton, would be able to deal with De Wet in a few days. After that, the Union Jacks could be run up and could stay up. So it was fondly imagined.40

  Hamilton crossed the Vaal, the Boers’ Rubicon, on 26 May. By this time, Roberts had switched Hamilton’s army from the east flank to the west of the railway line. Roberts’s plan for taking Johannesburg, forty miles beyond the Vaal, was straightforward enough. The two most mobile columns – twenty thousand men, led by French and Hamilton – were to swing round to the west of the city, and cut the main road leading from the townships along the Rand: Krugersdorp, Florida and so on. Meanwhile, the main force, of about the same size, would go straight up the railway line to the east and so outflank Johannesburg from the other side. These were the tactics that had worked time and again all the way north from Bloemfontein, the tactics of the walk-over.41 But for once Hamilton saw his way to the honours of a real battle. The Boers were entrenched at Doornkop, beside a small white farmhouse, on a high ridge in sight of the mine chimneys of Krugersdorp. Here, perhaps for the last time, was a chance to wipe that ‘something’ off the slate. For this was the Doornkop, the actual kopje, beside the farmhouse, where Jameson had raised the white flag, five years before.42