It was 2 December, when Smuts heard from the special corps of scouts which he had organized that a large, ill-defended British ox-wagon convoy was heading westwards for Rustenburg along the road that runs north of the Moot. Here was the chance of getting their hands on the supplies urgently needed by Broadwood and his column at Rustenburg. Next morning at dawn, Smuts and De la Rey pounced on the convoy as it passed some kopjes at Buffelshoek. Though only partially successful (and a bullet aimed at Smuts at twenty-five yards’ range killed his companion), the guerrillas got a fine haul of Christmas presents: 118 wagons and fifty-four prisoners. The British lost sixty-four other casualties. Smuts released the prisoners, kept fifteen wagons that had boots and clothing; then made a bonfire of the rest.20 Broadwood would have no champagne for Christmas.
The success of this ambush naturally whetted Smuts’s and De la Rey’s appetite for bigger game. A week later they found it: General Clements, Broad-wood’s collaborator and the destroyer of the Moot, a bull-necked Englishman caught by the horns, so to speak, in the gorge at Nooitgedacht (‘Never Expected’) inside the Moot. ‘I do not think,’ Smuts wrote later, ‘it was possible to have selected a more fatal spot for a camp and one which gave better scope for Boer dash and ingenuity in storming the position.’ The sheer walls of the Magaliesberg, a thousand feet high at this point, dominated the camp from the north – indeed, commanded the whole valley. In fact, Clements had had two reasons for choosing this site, and neither had anything to do with defence. He had put a signalling station here on the crest of the mountain to keep in touch with Broadwood, whose heliograph flashed out at Rustenburg, twenty miles away in the shimmering plain to the north-west. He had also acquired a rare prize, a supply of pure mountain water. For Nooitgedacht was the place where a romantic stream, plunging down in a series of waterfalls, had cut a twisted cleft out of the side of the gorge. No doubt Smuts and De la Rey guessed Clements’s motives. They had three days to spy out the land. It was obvious that Clements’s intelligence service was so poor that he had no notion that they were intending to attack him, and attack him with superior numbers. For while Clements’s men were quietly bathing at Nooitgedacht, General Christiaan C. J. Beyers, with fifteen hundred more burghers, was hurrying to join hands with Smuts and De la Rey. The three men jointly reconnoitred the camp on the 12th. It was agreed that half of Beyers’s men would wait behind, to mark Broadwood in case he tried to come to the rescue. The others – about fifteen hundred, against Clements’s twelve hundred – would storm the camp next day at dawn.
For an offensive plan as bold as this there was no recent parallel on the Boer side; nothing since the January day, nearly a year before, when Joubert’s men stormed Caesar’s camp and Wagon Hill at Ladysmith. Still, that opportunity had been a forlorn hope, given the small number of the attackers, and the size of the garrison. The position was very different now. The fatal defect of Clements’s camp site was that the mountain commanded it, and the mountain was only held by a weak line of pickets. Hence the plan of attack: General Beyers’s fifteen hundred men to roll up these pickets along the mountain; Commandant Badenhorst, detached from De la Rey’s force, to attack the camp from the west. Smuts and De la Rey were to seize the kopjes in the Moot to the south, and so block the only route to escape.21
A dawn attack means, almost inevitably, a night march, and night is a notoriously fickle ally. So Wauchope had discovered at Magersfontein, trapped in close order in front of De la Rey’s trenches, and so had Woodgate, caught in Botha’s frying-pan at Spion Kop. Tonight, the Boers stumbled and blundered, but there was no disaster — for the attackers. Their guides, who knew every fold of the Moot and every gully on the mountain, and carried lanterns, lost their bearings. It was so dark just before dawn that Smuts, marching up the Moot from the west, could not even make out the shadowy profiles of the kopjes. On the mountain walls, north-west of Clements’s camp, Commandant Badenhorst and his men stumbled straight into the British picket lines. There was a brief explosion of firing: bang and flash in the blackness; a sudden storm in the night (like the struggle for the naval gun on Wagon Hill at Ladysmith) which killed the local British commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Legge, and others, Boers included; but Badenhorst was driven back. Down in the Moot, Smuts heard rifle fire, followed by gunfire, rolling off the mountains. Then there was silence. Beyers made no answering move, and doubtless Smuts cursed the wretched Badenhorst, whose blunders had forewarned the British.22
However, to be forewarned was not enough, not in the few minutes available. The British pickets on the mountain were three hundred men of the Northumberland Fusiliers, under Captain Yatman. He had no extra ammunition beyond the spare rounds kept in the men’s pouches. And the sun, when it rose, was too hazy to flash the vital SOS message to Broadwood. Already, as soon as it was daylight, the storm had broken. Beyers’s men charged like veteran British infantry against the sangars of the twin lines of pickets, each section hidden from the others as well as from the camp itself. Yatman’s men fought doggedly for a while, losing over a hundred casualties. Then, just before seven o’clock, Yatman could bear it no more, and hoisted the white flag, surrendering with all the surviving men. Soon after, what was described as a ‘warm, plunging fire’ (a fusillade fired downwards on the camp) announced to the astonished Clements that the key to his camp was in enemy hands.23
Clements seems to have been an odd mixture of folly and flair. He had lost half his force, and all chance of signalling to Broadwood. The camp was doomed. By all the rules, a general who had been fool enough to get his men into such a mess should have found it hopeless to try to extricate them. Clements, however, not only spotted the one theoretical chance that remained, but acted with dash and resolution into the bargain. He had always been famous as a horseman. Now he had somehow to pull his broken force together, calm the stampeding oxen and mules, and organize the retreat. Before the camp itself was overrun, they must get back to a hill, Yeomanry Hill, in the Moot below. That was the only chance. Somehow the impossible was achieved: 350 riflemen, horse-guns, and all, crawling back to Yeomanry Hill, a small enough perimeter for the survivors to hold, and out of range of Beyers’s riflemen on the mountain. Only the largest gun was left behind in the general retreat, the six-ton 4.7-inch naval gun, waiting in an emplacement on the hillside above the camp and pointing (futilely) down into the valley below.
Strange to say, the fact that the 4.7, the symbol of Clements’s strength, pointed the wrong way, pointed to its salvation. Earlier, Clements, never dreaming that the enemy would attack from the overhanging cliffs, had given no orders to the artillerymen to clear a field of fire for the 4.7 on this side. Thus, the gun’s gallant commander, Major Inglefield, was hidden by brushwood as he crawled back to try to rescue his tame juggernaut. Somehow he roped up nine out of the sixteen-span team of oxen which had stampeded earlier in the day. But it was impossible to drive the oxen back uphill to fetch the gun. The gun must come down itself. And it came. Out of the disaster emerged a kind of comic miracle: Inglefield’s gun-crew heaved the great gun bodily round in its emplacement; it shook itself free, rose like a great elephant from the mimosa scrub, rolled down the hill, gathering speed, every Mauser levelled at it; now it was travelling fast; it thundered through the camp; and at length Inglefield, the triumphant mahout, roped it up and conducted it safely onwards to Yeomanry Hill.24
Meanwhile, no doubt unaware of this triumph, Smuts and De la Rey were still trying to storm Yeomanry Hill (or Green Hill, as they called it). In timing their triple plan of attack, they had assumed that De la Rey could seize this hill at the same time as Beyers crushed the picket lines. In fact, Smuts and De la Rey had overrun all the kopjes in the Moot except Yeomanry Hill. The reason was, paradoxically, Beyers’s own speedy success, and the speedy retreat it precipitated. As the tide of defenders rolled down on Yeomanry Hill, De la Rey saw the chance of his own success slip away. Perhaps Badenhorst’s premature attack had something to do with it; when Smuts’s men attacked the outlying kopjes in
the first glimmer of daylight at 4.30 a.m., they could see that the Khakis, already forewarned, were streaming out to man the forts. At any rate, to subdue these kopjes had taken an hour too long. Smuts’s men had only a foothold on Yeomanry Hill itself, when, at about eight o’clock, Clements swept them off again. The way that Clements concentrated on Yeomanry Hill aroused even Smuts’s admiration: it was a proof of Clements’s ‘insight and soldierly qualities’; his retreat was ‘stubborn and skilful’, and he did everything possible to redeem the ‘hopelessly wrong choice of a site’.25
But was Clements still doomed? That depended on the insight and soldierly qualities of Smuts, De la Rey and Beyers. Clements was surrounded. Up and down the Moot, he had rampaged for three months. Now he was trapped there. There was no prospect of either Broadwood or Paget (the nearest commander on the east side) arriving before next day, at the earliest. There was no proper water supply on Yeomanry Hill. There was little cover, and no time to dig trenches. All the Boers had to do was bombard the place for all they were worth, killing the transport animals. Even if Clements did manage to cut his way out, most of his equipment, including the guns, would be captured. But the chances were that the whole of Clements’s force would be forced to surrender: the greatest blow to British prestige, measured in prisoners, of the whole war. And after Clements was in the bag, Broadwood might follow. Such was the likely result if the Boers, who had planned and executed a tactical plan with such mastery, could follow it up with a united attack on Yeomanry Hill. Instead, Smuts watched wretchedly as Clements’s survivors rode off at four o’clock that afternoon, almost unopposed, back on the road towards Pretoria.
Why did the victors flinch? In his memoirs of the war, Smuts said that he could always count on the British generals, during their offensives, flinching at the last moment from the final move, from ‘that last desperate resolve which would clinch the whole matter, and reap the fruit of all the deep-laid planning’.26 The same retort could have been made that day by Clements. There were, in fact, a number of bread-and-butter reasons why Smuts was forced to acquiesce in the burghers flinching from that desperate resolve that would reap victory.
Everyone was exhausted, having had nothing to eat or drink since the previous evening. The burghers took one glance at the loot in Clements’s camp, and nothing would get them back into battle. Anyway, what was the practical advantage to be gained by risking their lives in renewing the attack on Clements? Apart from capturing Clements’s field-guns, of which they were admittedly in the greatest need, they would merely take a lot more Khakis prisoner. And taking prisoners had lost its appeal, since they would have to be released again within a few hours; for the guerrillas had no secure base to which to send them back. More fundamental, Smuts and Beyers were out of sympathy with each other; that odd mixture of ‘praying and pillage’, for which Beyers was famous, grated on Smuts, as did Beyers’s habit of flogging his men into battle; indeed, it was something of a miracle that the two Boer columns had linked hands for a few hours so effectively.27
The truth was that the loosely organized Boer armies, as ill disciplined in the ranks as they were ill co-ordinated at the higher level, had always been unsuited to large-scale offensive strategy. The fragmented character of guerrilla warfare only intensified this, making each group of commandos more or less independent. Without a telegraph system, communications from the government could take weeks rather than minutes. Anyway, there was no one capable of imposing his will on the volk, now that Oom Paul’s gigantic shadow had faded from the scene. A major offensive, involving grand strategy and a cumulative series of operations: that would have been the next step, in theory, if Clements could have been crushed at Nooitgedacht. Broadwood could have been dealt with next. Then they could have launched a combined offensive to blow up the cursed mines of the Rand. This was part of the grand strategy that Smuts had advocated at Cypherfontein, and still passionately believed in.28 But was it, given the nature of the Boer armies, like crying for the moon?
The answer, revealed to Smuts that very evening, brought him back to earth with a bump. At sunset, he rode back up the hill, dispirited after the feeble pursuit of the Khakis. He found that Beyers’s victory (like De Wet’s near-fatal defeat at Bothaville a month earlier) had created pandemonium in the camp. After any victory there were the accepted incongruities: jokes and laughter and comic songs a few yards away from the blanched faces and bloody uniforms of the dead. But that night the burghers had excelled themselves. ‘What a sight met my eyes,’ he wrote later.
An indescribable pandemonium in which psalm-singing, looting and general hilarity mingled with explosions of bullets and bombs. … Kemp had unwisely set most of the wagons on fire, and as many of them contained ammunition cases the camp resembled more the rattling fire of an action. … All round the camp groups of our horses were tethered together having a good time from Clements’ ample commissariat. Here parties were wandering about the tents looking for rare objects in the officers’ kits; there another group were discussing over a bottle of rum, with tears of enjoyment in their eyes, the incidents of the day; here some zealous young fellows were poring over the papers of General Clements for valuable information. … On the other side of this wagon the veteran Rev. A. P. Kriel was eloquently expressing the feelings of joy and thanks of his large audience, into which a broadside or volley would from time to time be poured from the fateful ammunition wagon. …
And there, sitting on some officer’s stool, hawk eyes taking in everything, was Smuts’s chief, De la Rey, usually so solemn and austere, shaking with silent laughter.29
Three days later, the Boers celebrated the Day of the Covenant, Dingaan’s Day, at Naauwpoort, on the farm of Commandant Steenkamp. It was only forty miles from Pretoria. Yet how remote in time the last celebration of that anniversary, when President Kruger had addressed the congregation from the pulpit of the church and described with his usual gusto how, as a boy of nine, he had seen the Zulus storm the laager of wagons and how the Boer women had cut off their hands with axes. That anniversary was 16 December 1899, the day after Colenso, a victory celebration indeed. Now, despite the coup against Clements at Nooitgedacht, what was there to celebrate? Kruger had been forced into exile. About three thousand burghers had been killed or crippled. Fifteen thousand others were languishing in prisoner-of-war camps at home or in Ceylon or in St Helena. Both the capitals, all the main towns, and all the main railway lines of both republics were in British hands.30
Despite the dangers, thousands of burghers – women and children, too – now trekked out to Naauwpoort to attend the celebration. Almost all had relatives to mourn, killed in the war. They were addressed by the three Generals with the expected words of comfort and consolation. It was through suffering and defeat, said De la Rey, that the Lord strengthened His people and prepared them for ultimate triumph. Beyers probed into the reasons for their past defeats: the flaws in national character (presumably the capacity for compromise) that threatened the continuation of resistance. Then it was Smuts’s turn. He reminded the men how it was the Boer vrouw to whose heroism they owed so much. The women had insisted that the men should trek out of Natal, although they could have stayed there in peace and plenty; they preferred to go barefoot over the Drakensberg and endure nameless sufferings among the Kaffirs, rather than submit to the British flag. This must remain the inspiration of the men, the refusal of these heroines ever to submit. He did not explain how the victory was to be won.31
In private, Smuts still clung to the hope of returning to the offensive. But he pinned his faith in the immediate future on the results of the war outside the Transvaal. He had a dream of a general rising of the Afrikaners in the Cape, precipitated by De Wet’s invasion. He had also a hunch – and this, at any rate, was not to be misplaced – that British public opinion would rapidly lose patience with Kitchener.32
However, for the moment he had to accept that the initiative had passed back again to the British. Refreshed and reinforced, Clements was breathing s
moke and fire once again in the Moot.33
CHAPTER 38
Disregarding the Screamers
Cape Town and Beyond,
17 December 1900 – 28 May 1901
‘If we are to build up anything in South Africa, we must disregard and absolutely disregard the screamers.’
Alfred Milner to Richard Haldane, 7 June 1901
It was four nights after Clements’s disaster at Nooitgedacht, and a Cape southeaster had begun to play the devil with the garden at Government House, Cape Town, bullying the palm-trees, spitting dust and pebbles on to the tennis lawn, and drumming its fingers on the stoep where the High Commissioner liked to sleep out in summer. Tonight, Sir Alfred was still hard at work, although it was midnight; there he sat, an angular shadow against the cold, grey, gaslit bookshelves of his study, hard at work on the scarlet boxes embossed with the Queen’s golden monogram, undisturbed by the raging storm.1
He might have been a medieval monk reading his breviary or a medieval knight at his prie-dieu. Milner was not in the mood for such Gothic imagery. At times like these, he preferred the language of the stiff upper Up. The ‘everlasting see-saw’ was the way he described this phase of the struggle to Chamberlain.2 ‘Fearfully grey… as grey as badger,’ was how he described himself ruefully to a woman friend.3 How ‘pumped’ he felt. He was dog-tired, and no wonder, after this dog’s life, chained to the desk in his study, month after month, ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, with none of his ‘chums’ to help him. Worse than the physical strain was the moral exhaustion. He had used the word ‘stale’ to describe his soldiers, especially Roberts and Kitchener, in that cri de coeur to St John Brodrick, the new War Minister. To even more intimate friends, like Violet Cecil, or dear old Gell, St John’s brother-in-law, he confessed it was true of himself.
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