There seemed a special appropriateness about both the setting and the actors in this final scene of the struggle for the gold-mines. The four infantry battalions in Bruce Hamilton’s 21st Brigade included not only the Gordons – the Majuba regiment – but also the Lord Mayor of London’s much-publicized gift to the nation, the City Imperial Volunteers. Hamilton gave the CIV a place of honour in the front of the battle line. The City now had its turn to redeem the Raid by storming the Rand.43
Ian Hamilton agreed with French that French should take the mounted troops, including Hamilton’s own two brigades, and outflank Doornkop from the west. Then, to the surprise of one of the brigadiers (Major-General Edward Hutton) and of one of the correspondents (Churchill), Hamilton launched his two infantry brigades in a four-mile-wide frontal attack on the ridge.44
The charge that followed – the CIV and the Gordon Highlanders charging up a hillside, without cover from fire or proper support from artillery – was to provide one of the last set-piece battles of the war. It was, in a way, magnificent. Lieutenant March Phillipps, who had fought at Graspan, Magersfontein and the other big battles on the western front, wrote about the Gordons’ charge: ‘This was, I think, the finest performance I have seen in the whole campaign.’ The Gordons marched up, with the swing of their kilts and a swagger that only Highland regiments had, and then lay down quickly, beside Hamilton’s staff officers, on the crest line facing the Boer position. ‘Advance!’ The front line got up, and walked slowly forwards down the slope. ‘Advance!’ and another kilted line rose and followed them; and then another. The lines were widely separated and there were gaps of about fifteen yards between each man; otherwise, the advance was conducted with the same drill-book tactics as Hamilton had used at Elandslaagte (and, indeed, Raglan at Balaclava).45
Before the front line had reached the floor of the valley, Hamilton and the watchers could hear the dull, vicious ‘crick-crack’ of the Mausers. (In fact, the Boers were a few hundred Johannesburgers, led by Viljoen, and the Lichtenburgers, led by De la Rey.) Soon there were puffs of dust among the lines of men. Farther on, where the hill sloped up to the stony kopjes held by the Boers, the grass was burnt black and bare, and the bullets cut through the cinders, throwing up dust, white against black. Still, the lines advanced. Here and there, visible through binoculars, men staggered and fell; but no one knew if they were hit or had thrown themselves down to take aim. The shooting became fast and furious. The British guns thundered; smoke from the burning grass drifted across the view. Then, there was a gasp and murmur among the watchers. Against the backdrop of burnt veld, sparkling in the sun, the ripple of steel. Fixed bayonets! The figures gained the skyline, a few at first, then more. There was a sharp, rapid exchange of shots, then the firing flickered and died away. The Gordons had the hill. They had lost a hundred men in ten minutes, but they had done the trick.46
It was now dusk, and Ian Hamilton galloped forward and, in the glare of the grass fires, addressed the victors. ‘Men of the Gordons, officers of the Gordons, I want to tell you how proud I am of you; of my father’s old regiment, and of the regiment I was born in. You have done splendidly.’47
Next day, Churchill, whose own feelings about war were more complicated, visited the spot where the worst slaughter had taken place. It was the grassy hollow between two crest lines – the false and the true crest lines. Churchill interviewed one of the Gordons, a kind-faced man with the Indian Frontier ribbon on his tunic.
‘Well, you see, sir… we was regularly tricked. We began to lose men so soon as we got on the burnt grass. Then we made our charge up to this first line of little rocks, thinking the Boers were there. Of course they weren’t here at all, but back over there, where you see those big rocks….
We knew we was for it then; it didn’t look like getting on, and we couldn’t get back – never a man would ha’ lived to cross the black ground again with the fire where it was.
‘What was done? What did you do?’
‘Why, go on, sir, and take that other line – the big rocks – soon as we’d got our breath. It had to be done.’
Faced with the melancholy sight of the grey-stockinged feet of eighteen dead Highlanders waiting for burial, Churchill found himself seized by a strange burst of anger. It was illogical, he thought; for, like almost all patriotic Englishmen, Churchill refused to believe that this was a war fought to win control of the gold-mines. Yet, faced with the dead men, lying there only a few miles from the great gold reef, Churchill found himself, he wrote later, ‘scowling at the tall chimneys of the Rand’.48
There was another question that Churchill did not ask himself. ‘It had to be done,’ said the Highlander. But did it have to be done in that particular fashion?
As it happened, the battalion leading the attack on the western end of the Boer-held ridge had employed less spectacular, but rather more up-to-date tactics. The CIV, being an amateur battalion, had little of the Balaclava mentality to unlearn. They had made their charge in short rushes (one group giving covering fire to another), and they took care to offer as little of a target as possible. They, too, took the hill. But they suffered few casualties, compared to the Gordon’s seventeen killed and eighty wounded.49
Yet, despite the relative success of the CIV’s new tactics (roughly the same as had been painfully hammered out by Buller and his men in Natal), there remains the question: was any charge necessary at all? Hamilton later gave three reasons for risking a frontal attack: first, that he thought that the enemy’s line was weak because it was so extended; second, that the men, short of rations for days, must march by the direct road to Florida; third, that he was afraid of dividing, by too wide a gap, his main force from the men guarding the hills behind him. None of these explanations is very convincing. The battle lasted till dusk, so the men did not reach Florida (and its meagre food supplies) till next afternoon. And there was a way round: through the gap opened up by French and the seven thousand mounted men, a four-mile detour west of Doornkop. It is hard to believe that the infantry could not have shouldered through that way, too. Of course, Hamilton had little experience of the new twentieth-century-style warfare. After Elandslaagte, he had spent most of the war locked up in Ladysmith. He knew nothing of those creeping artillery barrages, evolved to support the infantry attacks in Natal. His handling of his artillery at Doornkop proved lamentable, considering he had fourteen guns, including two 5-inch ‘cow-guns’ – heavy guns drawn, like the Boers’ Long Toms, by bullocks.50
A more convincing explanation for Hamilton’s decision to fight the battle of Doornkop, rather than go round, was that Hamilton wanted to fight it. He could not resist the challenge to redeem the two white flags.
He received nothing but praise from Roberts and Roberts’s admirers. Leo Amery wrote in The Times History a eulogy that already – that is, before Ypres, Mons and the Somme – had a ghastly, anachronistic ring. Even if the attack had not been necessary, wrote Amery, ‘it would not have been wasted, for the steady enduring discipline of the men under fire, their absolute indifference to losses, contributed to carry on the glorious traditions of the British infantry’.51
Meanwhile, Roberts’s central column – Colonel Henry’s MI, Tucker’s 7th Division and Pole-Carew’s 11th Division – had plodded on to Elandsfontein, the strategic railway junction eight miles up the valley to the east of Johannesburg.52
Prevost Battersby, another of The Morning Post’s intrepid men-at-the-front, watched the incongruous scenes at the railway station on the 29th. Coming from the empty veld, it was odd to find this valley full of mining machinery, bristling with chimneys, winding gear, and blue-grey spoil heaps. Odder still, to see that some of the mines were still working. ‘Trains were shunting in and out of the station, smoke from the pumping engines rose from some of the chimneys, and save for an occasional distant thud there was no suggestion of war.’53
Battersby rode up to the great muddy dam built to provide water for the Simmer and Jack mine. Suddenly Henry’s MI were pinned
down by some Boers firing from behind the spoil heaps, five hundred yards away. The troopers lost a third of their number; the rest took cover behind some prospecting trenches. The firing stopped; the trains continued shunting. Over by the station, passers-by thought the battle was over, and gathered on the pavement. The battle was by no means over. Skirts fluttered, women screamed, bullets pattered on the tin-roofed houses ‘like the first heavy stones of a hailstorm’. In the station, people crouched under the platform, or huddled against the brick wall; others crawled between the wheels of railway trucks. Bullets hissed and shrieked as they smashed through the corrugated iron and bounced off down the street.
It was all very quaint [wrote Battersby later], and much more like melodrama than an event of life and death; but that is the charm of street fighting – its extraordinary air of unreality. The reality was there. A man lay on the platform pushed up against the wall, with a great patch of cloth blown out of his thigh, where some foul bullet had passed out through his leg; and a Boer was lying back against the white slope of cyanide ash [cyanide is used in refining gold ore] with his throat visible through the gap which had held his eye. And below were the women, peering and screaming, and starting hysterically at each fresh phase of the fight.54
Apart from this small affair (‘a piece of interesting colour, the only piece of the kind, so far, in the campaign’),55 there was nothing further to check the army here, and they pushed on a few miles before dark; then their bivouac fires glowed among the gum-trees, grown for pit-props, filling the valley. Next evening, two bicyclists came pedalling down the road from the west, carrying official despatches from Hamilton, modestly describing his triumph at Doornkop. The two daredevils on bicycles had ridden through Johannesburg itself They were shown into the local landrost’s house, which Roberts had made his HQ, and one was taken in to see the Chief. One of them was bumptious young Winston Churchill. If he had not captured Johannesburg single-handed, he had done the next best thing.
Churchill later reported how the Field-Marshal’s eyes ‘twinkled’ when he reported his adventures. The Chief was in high spirits.56 There was unpleasant news from Colvile and the Highland Brigade; they had got themselves into a ‘tight corner’ somewhere north of Lindley, in the Free State. Otherwise, the news seemed, in every sense, golden. Commandant Krause, the Boer official now in charge of Johannesburg, had promised that the mines of the Rand would all be left intact. Johannesburg would be surrendered next morning, at eleven o’clock. There was one vital condition imposed by the Boers. Roberts must give them twenty-four hours to withdraw their army from the town. And to this kind of armistice Roberts had been perfectly willing to agree.57 He halted his two divisions at Germiston and allowed the Boers to withdraw their army intact, instead of continuing the advance and trying to crush them.
It was probably the most serious strategic mistake of his career – as we shall see. But there is no mystery about Roberts’s reason. It was in keeping with the ‘velvet-glove’ strategy of trying to bring the war to a speedy and humane conclusion, and of giving priority to saving the gold-mines. Go for the Boer capitals. Offer the Boers individually (but not as a government) the most lenient terms. These were Roberts’s two guiding principles. Now the gold-mines were virtually safe, and with them Wernher-Beit’s millions,58 and, indeed, the whole idea of a Federation of British South Africa.
The war was nearly over, so Roberts believed. So why waste British lives by attacking the Boers now? It seemed a sensible and humane short-cut. In fact, it was only by the narrowest of margins that the policy was to fail, and lead to disaster: to extend the fighting by nearly two years of dismal guerrilla warfare.
All that day, Wednesday, Louis Botha’s army trundled northwards to Pretoria in a vast cloud of dust and scenes of utter confusion. All the heavy guns, all the strategic supplies – including the last boxes of gold mined on the Rand – were dragged safely out of Johannesburg.59 Next day, the conquerors marched in from the opposite direction. The scene was as incongruous as the one on 13 March, when the Grand Army had marched into Bloemfontein. Lord Kerry, Roberts’s ADC, later described the imperial moment of glory to his father, Lord Lansdowne:
Formal surrender of town brought in early, so started off at 10-o’clk riding right along Rand ridge with 11th, and 7th Divisions following, met Dr Krause, who accompanied the procession outside Jeppestown then all down Commissioner Street to the Law Courts; a good many people all along the road chiefly niggers and Jews, and a big crowd waiting outside law courts, unattractive looking people speaking with tongues, mostly friendly and wearing red white and blue badges but an occasional groan could be heard.
Arrived at Law Courts, Chief dismounted and went into a room where members of municipality etc assembled; these introduced to Chief, who afterwards came outside for the ceremony. Drums of the Guards Brigade marched into the square followed by about two companies of Essex regt, the leading one of 18th Brigade; there was not room for more. The vierkleur flying on flag staff in the square was then pulled down and Union Jack hoisted in its stead, Royal Salute, God Save the Queen, and three cheers for the Queen called for by Chief…. Dr Krause sat on his horse next to the Chief and apparently thought the whole show was partly in his honour, as he as well as Lord R. took all salutes. Some of Tuckers (VII Div.)… started cheering as they past [sic] the saluting base and this was taken up by the remainder, the men taking off their hats and getting wildly excited, to the great horror of experts in drill and Queen’s regulations who were present. About 4 o’clock got away and went to lunch, a good one, more especially as no member of the establishment was perfectly sober.60
After these brief antics, the humdrum life of the big city began to return to Johannesburg, especially the life of the Africans. There were fourteen thousand mine boys still employed on the Rand;61 they were the worker bees of the golden hive; they had kept the gold vats full in enough of the commandeered goldmines to pay for the whole Boer war effort, with a balance of £1,294,000 still on hand.62
Now the Africans found that their celebrations of Roberts’s victory, celebrations which included widespread burning of ‘passes’, had been premature. Indeed, when Lord Kerry saw those ‘niggers’ cheering the Chief from the pavements during the march-past, he had probably not fully grasped the incongruity of the occasion. Pavements were forbidden by Transvaal law to all Africans and coloured people. So the first step of Roberts’s military government in Johannesburg was to get them off the pavements and back into their locations. This was one set of Transvaal laws that the conquerors had no intention of changing: the laws affecting the natives. Indeed, it was ironical that the laws that made Africans into the helots were now to be applied with an efficiency that the Boers had never been able to muster.63
What of Chamberlain’s brave words in the draft of the British ultimatum of October 1899, of ‘most favoured nation status’ for coloured British subjects in the Transvaal? Fortunately for the British, this ultimatum was still collecting dust in the Colonial Office files. At any rate, the men who were now to administer British Johannesburg were not interested in this particular type of reform. They were Uitlanders. Their aim was to take political control of the country in which they had such vast wealth at risk. One reform, they had always said, made sense for African labour – indeed, it was absolutely vital: to cut mining costs by cutting the absurdly high level of African wages.64
It was no coincidence that the two principal civilian Commissioners whom Roberts appointed to administer the Rand, under the military governor, were not only both Uitlanders, but also employees of the mining firms. Wybergh, the mining engineer sacked by Rhodes’s firm when he led the League agitation, now re-emerged as Commissioner for Mines. And Sam Evans, Wernher-Beit’s man in Johannesburg, was made Commissioner for Finance. In due course, Milner, who had sent them, by agreement with their employers, would follow them north, to begin that Herculean task of clearing out the ‘Augean stables’ at Pretoria.65
The Augean stables. For once, Milner’s
colourful phrase did not seem so out of place, that Saturday, 2 June, as Botha’s burghers streamed back from the line of the Rand and vanished into Pretoria as if into a quagmire. The mess, the confusion, the shame, the humiliation – they beggared description. Jan Smuts, the State Attorney, was to remember ‘that awful moment’ all his life. ‘It was not Lord Roberts that they feared; it was the utter collapse of the Boer rank and file which staggered the great officers.’ Smuts, Botha, De la Rey, Viljoen – all the stoutest hearts and strongest wills in the Transvaal army – had become convinced of the ‘utter hopelessness’ of continuing the struggle.66 If ever Lord Roberts had victory there for the asking, it was during the three awful days – 30 May to 1 June – of the retreat to Pretoria.
Kruger himself – the unflinching, unyielding old President, whose iron will had sustained the volk, like Abraham, lifting his arms in the long hours of battle – Kruger had given way to despair. On the day of the Battle of Doornkop, he had been smuggled out of Pretoria, after a last farewell to his invalid wife in the little house in Church Street (they were never to meet again). Then he had taken the train eastwards to Machadodorp, 140 miles down the line towards the Portuguese frontier.67
With Kruger went most of the Transvaal government, including Frank Reitz, the State Secretary. The occasion for the hasty retreat was a report that a British flying column was to cut the railway east of Pretoria. In fact, Roberts cast away this opportunity, as he cast away so many opportunities that week, by sending French’s cavalry division to the west instead of to the east of Pretoria. The actual ‘flying column’ sent consisted of a small dynamite party, led by Majors Hunter Weston and Fred Burnham, the daredevil American scout. They were themselves demolished.68
The Boer War Page 68
