About three in the morning, the going became rougher as the path began to descend; far below there was a glint of white in the bed of the canyon. By dawn, they were splashing through the turbulent, creamy current in single file. As the sun worked down the walls of the canyon, Smuts’s band rode out into Cape Colony, into British territory.6
What was this mission of Oom Jannie’s? A forlorn hope, a last despairing throw of the dice, or a perfectly feasible strategic stroke that might well change the whole course of the war? Deneys Reitz was himself puzzled about their mission. He had been warned of the dangers. In the last ten months, all the most famous ‘invaders’ of the colony had been hunted back into the Free State, with heavy losses: De Wet, Hertzog, Kritzinger. The scattered guerrilla bands operating at present in the colony were able to survive only at the cost of their effectiveness as a striking force. Reitz believed that the purpose of their own mission was to take a plunge into the central districts of the Cape, to test the difficulties of launching a large-scale invasion later on, an invasion to relieve the increasing pressure against the main Boer armies to the north. Smuts had welcomed him as a recruit for the commando; Smuts was, of course, an old friend of his father. But he offered no reassurance about success. (‘Terrible privations awaited them. … Their tombs would become a hallowed memory for the generations to come.’) As for the precise purpose of the mission, Smuts was distinctly uncommunicative.7
In fact, Smuts, the twenty-eight-year-old enthusiast, the ex-admirer of Cecil Rhodes, did not by any means regard his mission as a forlorn hope, though danger heightened its romantic colours.
For eight months, ever since that conference in December at Cypherfontein, he had believed passionately in the need for the third front, for carrying the war into the enemy’s country: into the Cape, politically British but morally the Afrikaner heartland where, outside the towns, the volk were still the overwhelming majority. The advantages were, he claimed, obvious: friends in every village, ready to feed, clothe and hide the guerrillas; friends whose farms could not be burnt and their herds destroyed, for the Afrikaner-dominated ministry would never allow it.8 This had been his argument in December – and he deeply regretted that the opportunity had been let slip meanwhile. How to account, then, for the failure of successive missions by De Wet, Kritzinger and Hertzog? To Smuts these Free State expeditions only proved his point. They were unco-ordinated; there was no joint strategy between them, let alone with the Transvaal. Of course, they were beaten back over the Orange.
In June, Smuts put his own plan again to the war council at Standerton in the Transvaal. This was after the receipt of Kruger’s telegram urging them to fight on. Botha, as the Transvaal Commandant-General, had asked what hope of success remained. Botha, in fact, conceded the success of Kitchener’s sweep-and-scour strategy. How could the guerrillas operate in the republics when their bases were destroyed, when their men were surrendering at the rate of hundreds a month, there were no new recruits, and the blockhouse lines along the railways were beginning to criss-cross the country? To this, Smuts repeated his plan for a Cape offensive. He would join forces with Assistant Commandant-General Kritzinger, and help him reorganize the surviving Free State bands holed up in the tangled mountains of the Eastern Cape. Then he would cut his way through to the Western Cape, to prepare the ground for a large-scale invasion of Transvaalers led by De la Rey. Even this pilot expedition should have a disproportionate effect in relieving the hard-pressed forces commanded by Botha and De Wet. At best, it would set the whole Cape alight, raise that fire-storm of a great Afrikaner rising that represented the last positive hope of winning the war by force of arms.
Of course, there was a less spectacular alternative, the classic of guerrilla warfare: not to win the war, but to preserve a country’s independence by forcing a stalemate on the enemy. Smuts was far too intelligent and politically astute to despise this negative strategy. He had noted with enthusiasm that Chamberlain, according to the Cape papers, was weakening. His old friends and political allies in the Cape, Sauer and Merriman, had been to England and stirred up a great wave of outrage about the concentration camps, a wave that might propel the Liberals back into power. But would they come to power in time? And would they then wish to repeat the conciliatory policy pursued after Majuba? It was here that the Cape invasion, however weak in a military sense, could tip the balance in the political war.9
Anyway, whether successful or not, it seemed hard for war to be more wretched in the Cape than the current war in the Free State. Kitchener’s attempt to sweep all animals off the Free State farms had been only partially successful; yet Smuts had lost thirty-six men crossing the exposed veld. He was sickened by the destruction he saw everywhere he trekked: every dam on the farms choked with dead cattle and horses; bleating lambs beside their dying mothers; sheep-pens filled with sheep mangled by dynamite. ‘Surely such outrages… on nature will lead to certain doom,’ wrote Smuts grimly in his private diary. Then, to take refuge from these horrors, he turned to his beloved Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of his own epic march across Asia Minor in the sixth century BC. Smuts carried it, and his copy of Erasmus, in his saddle-bag.10
On 4 September, their first day in the Cape, they met danger from a new kind of enemy. The Africans at Herschel, the Native Reserve on the borders of Basutoland, had been told by the British to repel invaders, and repel them they did, attacking some of Smuts’s foraging parties, killing three men and wounding seven. However, the Boers’ rifles were more than a match for African spears and blunderbusses. Next day, the commando reached the safety of some Afrikaner farms, where for the first time after so many months they saw a people at peace: men working in the fields, women and children standing unafraid beside the doors. They gave the commando food; it was the first slice of bread and butter and the first sip of coffee Deneys Reitz had tasted for a year. They could not spare any clothes, as the British army controlled their distribution, in order to prevent farmers helping the invaders. Still, the coffee put the commando in excellent spirits; they whistled as they rode along.11
Two days later, Smuts himself narrowly missed disaster. At a place called Mordenaar’s Poort (‘Murderer’s Gorge’), he took three men and went forward to reconnoitre. The spring rains had begun at last, after so many months of winter sunshine. The men huddled in thin blankets around the fire, waiting for the General’s return. He came back at midnight on foot and alone. All three companions had been shot by the Khakis. By a miracle he had escaped down a ditch.12
The troubles of the commando were only beginning. The rain increased as they headed south-west towards the Stormberg Mountains, a tempest of wind and icy rain which demoralized men and killed horses. It was clear that the British general (French) was drawing a cordon around them. For three days, from 9 to 13 September, they tried to fight their way out. On the third day, the Khakis surrounded the commando at a wretched little farm on the grassy summit of the Stormberg. The men had been marching for forty hours without sleep. The Khakis blocked every pass. So it seemed. Then a man on crutches hobbled out of the farm – he was a hunchback – and promised to show them a way out. He led them by a squelching path that brought them so close to the British camp that they could hear voices and the champing of bits. It led to the edge of the escarpment.
There followed a miraculous escape in the darkness, as the whole commando of 250 men, and at least 500 horses, went glissading down the south face of the Stormberg. Fortunately, the fall was cushioned with grass, otherwise few would have come down alive. After sliding and slithering into the valley, they crossed the first railway, the line leading to some coal-mines, just as the lights of a train swung into view. Should they put stones on the rails and try to ambush the train? Smuts refused. He had no wish to attack civilians here in the Cape Colony. So the hungry and exhausted men crouched in the darkness as the lighted carriages went thundering by, and Reitz caught a wistful glimpse of British officers, smoking and drinking in the dining-car. (His wistfulness increased, later on
, when he heard that this elegant company included French and his staff, in hot pursuit of the commando.)
Although they had missed their dinner, their spirits were raised when they caught an empty goods train soon afterwards. The guard’s van contained something almost as precious as a hot meal – a Cape newspaper. Smuts, it declared, had invaded Cape Colony ‘with the riff-raff of the Boer armies. There was also a copy of Kitchener’s solemn proclamation of 7 August, threatening perpetual banishment for those who did not surrender by 15 September, now two days away. Both items of news were received with ribald laughter.
There was, however, a thin edge to the laughter. By 15 September they were in fact on their last legs: many horses dead, little ammunition, starving.13
It was the spring rains, not the British, that had nearly finished them. All that terrible night, while their pursuers apparently retired to their tents, the commando floundered in the mud. The guides lost the path. About midnight, the rain turned to sleet. The grain bag which passed for Reitz’s greatcoat froze solid like a coat of mail. The cold was so intense that the ponies, hardy mountain ponies at that, began to die of exposure. Reitz stumbled over their carcasses. Near daybreak, they found a deserted farm, where they came back to life, huddled together, breaking up the chair and tables, floors, and windows, anything that would burn, to dry their clothes and blankets. But fourteen men were found to be missing, and the survivors were too exhausted to send out a search party. Outside the farmhouse, the bodies of the ponies, fifty or sixty of them, lay in heaps where they had fallen.
That ordeal – the ‘Night of the Great Rain’, as it came to be called – brought Reitz closer to despair than any other experience in the war. The horses were like scarecrows. A quarter of the commando were horseless, carrying their saddles. Bandoliers were almost empty. Worse, the men had begun to lose confidence in Smuts. Where was he leading them? Where were the Afrikaner recruits Smuts had promised them? There was a whispering campaign to have Smuts replaced by his second-in-command, Commandant Van der Venter. Smuts remained uncommunicative. Next night, they were near Tarkastad, and found a farm with unthreshed oats for the horses; they slaughtered sheep for themselves. But the Khaki noose still tightened, slippery with rain. French had sent two columns splashing after them. Ahead of them, every muddy pass in the mountains was blocked, so some cheerful Kaffirs assured them. After floundering for a fortnight, Smuts’s ‘invasion’ seemed to have come to a still more bitter end than Kritzinger’s or Hertzog’s or De Wet’s: the winged feet of the commando stuck fast in the mud of the Bamboo Mountains.14
After all the airy talk of prospects in the colony (‘only cross the river and the volk will rise in thousands’), Smuts had come squelching back to earth. It was impossible to live off this country. The Khakis had taken the food, the forage, and the horses. It was as simple as that. This was the reason why the volk would not join them. Even if the commando broke through the net, how could they survive without food and horses – and ammunition? There was only one place to reap that harvest: in the Khakis’ own laagers.
As it happened, Smuts’s commando found a hole in the net and a chance of reaping that harvest all in the space of one afternoon.
On the 17th, still heading south, they came to a long gorge leading to the Elands River valley. The leaders had to drag their horses after them. The wounded followed in the rear. But the sun was warm on their backs for the first time since they had crossed the Orange. Smuts sent Reitz and the ‘Dandy Fifth’ to ride forward and investigate. At the place where the gorge began to widen out, a farmer rushed out of his cottage and shouted, hoarse with excitement. Khakis. Two hundred of them. With mountain guns and Maxims. Laagered on the pass at the end of the gorge, Elands River Poort. Smuts decided to attack at once, and Reitz overheard him say, ‘If we don’t get those horses and a supply of ammunition, we’re done for.’ The ‘Dandy Fifth’ trotted on down the valley, forded a stream, and were brushing through a mimosa wood when they met, less than ten yards from the leaders, fifteen or twenty British troopers, cantering towards them.15
The Battle of Elands River, that followed, was brief, bloody, and decisive – as near a massacre as anything that spring. Smuts’s men’s shooting at Elands River was deadly accurate. They were, after all, De la Rey’s veterans, their battle skills honed and polished by two years’ grind in the Transvaal. Their sporting opponents, Captain Sandeman and Lord Vivian, with 130 men of the famous 17th Lancers (the ‘death and glory boys’, with a skull-and-crossbones blazoned on their uniforms), were relative amateurs. Moreover, the weather had suddenly sided with the commando. The morning was foggy, and, at first, the passes to the north were invisible from the British camp. When Reitz’s scouts were sighted by a British patrol, they were mistaken for irregulars of Colonel Gorringe’s column, that was pursuing them. This was not simply a matter of fog. Many of the Boers were wearing captured khaki. ‘Don’t fire. We are 17th Lancers!’ shouted the officer. ‘And we are the Dandy Fifth,’ said an answering volley of bullets. Reitz himself used up his last two rounds, then threw away his rifle and grabbed a Lee Metford and bandolier from one of the first British soldiers to fall. He shot two gunners dead, having crawled up to within a few yards of the main British encampment, under the lee of a rocky outcrop.16
A desperate duel followed, ‘almost at handshake distance’, as Reitz put it. One wounded officer (it was Lieutenant Sheridan, a cousin of Churchill’s) rose to his feet, his face streaming blood, and was shot through the brain. Reitz shot another man in the heel. The shock made him leap in the air, and Jack Borrius, the Boers’ field cornet, brought him down. In all, Reitz’s party claimed to have killed twelve or thirteen, without loss to themselves, though, earlier, three of their men were wounded.
Meanwhile, the main commando had worked up to the British camp from the rear. Many Boers here, too, were dressed in captured khaki, and this meant that they were allowed to approach to within a few hundred yards, a crucial advantage. When the confused butchery was over – twenty-nine killed and forty-one wounded on the British side, compared to one dead and six wounded among the Boers – the victors took stock of their captures. And well stocked the camp was, beyond the dreams of hunger. ‘We were like giants refreshed,’ wrote Reitz later. ‘We had ridden into action that morning at our last gasp, and we emerged refitted from head to heel. We all had fresh horses, fresh rifles, clothing, saddlery, boots and more ammunition than we could carry away, as well as supplies for every man.’
Reitz helped himself from Lord Vivian’s bivouac tent. He had started the day with two cartridges, a foundered horse, and a grain-bag as an overcoat. Now he had a khaki cavalry tunic, with a skull-and-crossbones and ‘or glory’ on the badge; a sporting Lee Metford; an Arab polo pony (this was the unfortunate Lieutenant Sheridan’s), and an extra mule for trekking.
Smuts told the men to set fire to the surplus, including a field-gun, too immobile to be any use. As the wagons blazed up like torches, Reitz paid a personal visit to see the gunners he had killed, to check his bag, so to speak. He did not hate the British, he said, but he was proud of his share in the day’s work. ‘A fight is a fight.’ Then, leaving the prisoners and their African retinue to shift for themselves, the new race of giants broke out of the Bamboo Mountains and rode in triumph into the open plain, their confidence in Smuts reborn.17
Colonel Douglais Haig, the commander directly responsible, under the overall direction of General French, for this section of the cordon, did not regard Smuts or his commando as giants. ‘Brutes’ and ‘ruffians’ were the words he used. The news of the smash-up suffered by C Squadron of the 17th Lancers reached him at Tarkastad, fourteen miles from Elands River Poort. It was 4.30 p.m. Haig galloped that fourteen miles in an hour and a quarter, splashing down the water-logged track. He was appalled by what he saw. ‘The brutes had used explosive bullets.’ Four of the six officers were dead, and Sandeman and Lord Vivian were wounded – Lord Vivian, whose sister Haig was to marry.
Haig, newly ap
pointed CO of the 17th Lancers, as well as director of five different columns, had sent the regiment round the mountains in the train from Stormberg, to head Smuts off. He had sat with Sandeman during a break in the appalling weather of the previous day and picknicked off a hamper of delicacies, sent from England, out on that fatal kopje.18 He did not blame poor Sandeman for what had happened now. The tactical weakness of C Squadron’s camp at Modderfontein was that it was commanded by high ground on the west side of the valley. Smuts’s capture of this high ground, combined with his men’s use of captured khaki uniforms, had enabled the commando to storm the camp from the rear.19
How was Haig to deal with such ‘ruffians’? The week before, he had written a jaunty letter home, describing the execution of colonial rebels at Colesberg: ‘The authorities are all for blood I hear! This will have a good effect. There were 3 men shot at Colesburg [sic] when I was there. I did not care to go and see the spectacle but all the local Dutch magnates had to attend and a roll was called to see they were present. —I am told the sight was most impressive and everything went off well. —Just think what amusement old Baxter and even Hobday would have if they were now in this country! By the way I wired Gilbey for some more claret and champagne.’20
Now that champagne tasted bitter enough, as Haig saw the smashed and mangled bodies of Lieutenant Sheridan and the other young officers of the 17th Lancers. He renewed his orders (they were French’s and Kitchener’s, too): all Boer prisoners caught wearing British uniforms were to be shot on the spot.21
For the next four weeks, the guerrilla war in the mountains of the eastern Cape Colony centred on a personal duel between Haig and Smuts, between two well matched, though differently armed, opponents, each intensely professional, each relentless drivers of men.
The Boer War Page 83
