Among Kitchener’s scattered mounted columns, the isolation intensified the sense of bitterness against an enemy who would not fight, or broke the rules when he did. The sight of the bodies of British scouts – mainly black or Coloured but occasionally white men – taken prisoner and then shot by the Boers, started a spiral of reprisals. It was an open secret that some of the irregular colonial corps made it a principle not to take prisoners.’ “Hold up your hands, men,” said Charlie Ross.’ Captain Ross was second-in-command of a Canadian corps of Scouts raised by Major ‘Gat’ Howard. ‘We held up our hands. “I want you to take an oath with me not to take another prisoner,” said Charlie. We held up our hands.’ These Canadians, according to the story of one of the sergeants, had just found the bullet-riddled body of ‘Gat’ Howard, shot after capture.
The guerrilla war was fast brutalizing both adversaries. The worst scandals on the British side concerned colonial irregulars – Australians, Canadians and South Africans – whose official contingents, ironically, had won a reputation for gallantry in so many set-piece battles. The most notorious case involved a special anti-commando unit, raised by Australians to fight in the wild northern Transvaal, and called the Bush Veldt Carbineers. Six of its officers (five Australians, one Englishman) were court martialled for multiple murder. The facts were admitted: in August 1901, twelve Boers, earlier taken prisoner, had been shot by the Carbineers on the orders of their officers. The Australians’ defence: as a reprisal, shooting prisoners was now accepted practice. Two of the Australian officers, Lieutenants ‘Breaker’ Morant and Handcock,* were executed in February 1902, on the orders of Kitchener. The affair caused an outcry in Australia. There arose a misconception (still current) that foreign political pressures had induced Kitchener to make scapegoats of Morant and Handcock. In fact Kitchener’s motives were cruder: evidence of his own army’s indiscipline drove him wild with frustration.
Kitchener’s own sense of isolation at GHQ had reached a climax. Even with his ‘band of boys’, he found ordinary human contact impossible. Only ‘the Brat’, Captain Frank Maxwell, VC, his fair-haired young ADC, had found a way to Kitchener’s heart, if heart it was. ‘He is awfully shy,’ the Brat wrote home, describing K. ‘He really feels nice things, but to put tongue to them… he would rather die.’20 Exactly what K felt for the Brat will never be known. There was the odd incident when K, who normally detested being photographed, insisted on being taken sitting docilely beside the Brat. (To the Brat’s embarrassment, he made a ‘vile fuss about my appearance. “Good heavens, your hair’s all over the place.”’21 At any rate, the Brat was the apple of K’s eye. As a kind of jester at Kitchener’s court, he was allowed to take liberties forbidden to senior generals. ‘We are now High Commissioner of South Africa,’ the Brat wrote home in May, and explained: ‘In talking at or to K., we always say “we made a speech”, “we drew so much pay”, “we are this or that”.’22 Of course, this did not endear the Brat to the rest of the staff (‘Poor boy, I fear his brain is not his strong point’),23 which further appealed to the Chief’s oriental sense of humour.
K had also acquired another pet: perversely, he had insisted on rescuing two lost baby starlings that had fallen down the chimney of his bedroom at GHQ. One died. He made the GHQ staff, to their intense disgust, put the other in a cage and look after it. Even the Brat’s sense of loyalty was strained by this chore – and by the sight of the Chief fussing about worms all day, and chirping at the starling through the wire, and rolling his porcelain-blue eyes at the little beggar, leaving the war to look after itself. In due course, the bird escaped – while the Chief was on a visit to Pietersburg – to the consternation of everyone at GHQ. The Brat was told to draft the telegram to prepare K for this shock. ‘C-in-C’s humming bird… broke cover and took to the open. Diligent search instituted; biped still at large. Mily. Secy. desolate; ADC in tears. Army sympathizes.’ On his return, K seemed to take the matter stoically. But he rushed through the accumulation of two days’ telegrams, then organized a great drive (‘a small army of staff officers, menials and orderlies’, grumbled the Brat) to hunt down the missing bird. It was found at 7.00 p.m., having taken refuge in a neighbour’s chimney – but not before the Chief himself was covered in mud, ‘having repeatedly fallen prone in wet flower-beds’. Earlier, K remarked breathlessly, ‘I’ve never been so fond of that bird as since it’s been loose.’24
Towards De Wet, Botha – and the rest of the Boers still loose on the veld — Kitchener gave equally dogged pursuit. In December there was some good news from that front Colonel Rawlinson, one of the ‘band of boys’, had been given an ‘extra mobile column’ of two thousand mounted men, co-ordinated by Major-General Bruce Hamilton. Few of the eighty-odd column commanders had so dominated the columns’ score-board as Rawlinson’s (apart from the unfortunate Benson), and that month Rawlinson had excelled himself in three dramatic coups against Benson’s old adversaries in the Eastern Transvaal. Rawlinson’s night raiding tactics were a model for the British army – and almost indistinguishable from the tactics now adopted by the Boers. Here was the modern counterpart of the cavalry charge (charging with rifles, instead of the arme blanche), combined with the long-term mobility that had always come naturally to the Boer with his rifle, his blanket, his biltong, and his pony. Ever since September, Kitchener had strained every nerve to make his columns as mobile as their opponents. Now Rawlinson, like Scobell in the Cape, had proved it was possible to leave tents and food wagons behind them for up to six days, relying, except for medical supplies, guns, and ammunition, on what his men could carry on their saddles.25
March at night, gallop the enemy’s laager at dawn. These were the dazzlingly simple new rules of the game. But success demanded not only an extra mobility. The other ingredient, as always, was extra intelligence. In this respect, Kitchener’s mobile columns had come to be deeply in debt to Colonel David Henderson’s reorganization of the Field Intelligence Department. When Roberts had left South Africa, this department had only numbered thirty officers and 250 white subordinates. Now there were over two thousand white troops serving in the FID (132 officers, and 2,321 white troops, at the end of the war). There were also thousands of Africans employed. The key to the success of the columns was the column’s Intelligence Officer, and the key to his success, in turn, was the skill with which he organized his black scouts, guides, and spies.26
Rawlinson’s new Intelligence Officer was Benson’s former one, that eccentric Uitlander, Colonel Aubrey Woolls-Sampson, ex-gold-miner, ex-Reformer, ex-Commander of the ILH, a man better suited to serve as the hero of a novel by Rider Haggard than as an irregular soldier. As commanding officer of the Imperial Light Horse, Woolls-Sampson had proved a severe trial to Kitchener —indeed, his idiosyncrasies had become so alarming that Kitchener had cabled an SOS to London asking for him to be removed. But now, as the leader of a team of specially paid African scouts (specially paid, that is, out of his own pocket), Woolls-Sampson had pulled off successive feats of intelligence. Three times in succession, as Rawlinson reported to Kitchener, Woolls-Sampson had led them at 3.40 a.m. ‘bang on top of the laager’. The result: of the total of 756 Boers, the official bag throughout South Africa in the second and third weeks of December, no less than three hundred had fallen to Rawlinson’s column, and two other small columns under Bruce Hamilton’s overall command, for a loss of only three men wounded in Rawlinson’s column.27
Rawlinson’s account of the night raid made by the column of 2,000 mounted troops, 6 guns, and no less than 450 Africans illustrates the exhilaration of the new-style war, hunting down the Boers like ‘game’:
Dec 10. Tuesday. Bethel (Transvaal)
We struck the road all right soon after midnight but there was not a sign of a spoor on it so we turned north towards Trichardtsfontein – It was three thirty when the [African] boys that [Woolls] Sampson had sent on returned to say the boers were all there – a tremour [sic] of excitement ran through us all and I got the 2[nd] MI up quickly on
my right whilst I sent [Colonel ‘Bimbash’] Stewart off well to the left. It was just light enough to see as we began to trot on, and then just at 3.45 AM, as we came over the rise, the whole of the Boer laager lay at our feet only some 800 yards off. The Mounted Infantry let go a cheer and a whoo-hoop which must have been a rude awakening to the laager – a few odd shots, the whiz of one or two bullets and the whole of our line of over 2000 mounted men set off at a gallop, yelling with delight – we never waited to shoot – The more the Boers shot the more we yelled – My orders were that none of the men were on any account to stop at the laager, there was to be no looting of wagons or waiting to shoot, our objective was to be the mounted boers and the gun we heard was with them —
I don’t think I have ever seen a prettier or more exhilarating sight than that was in the grey of dawn— The M.I. all streaming away just like a pack of hounds and giving tongue like Red Indians – we had a good long gallop of nearly 7 miles – The horses did well and we were rewarded by collecting 53 prisoners… only 6 got away – we killed 4 and had one officer, 8[th] M.I., slightly wounded in the leg… Having stopped the hunt and collected the ‘game’ we went back to the laager… There we found some 67 more prisoners about 3000 cattle and some 30 carts and wagons… The Chief will be delighted and W[oolls] Sampson deserves the utmost credit for having led us so well.
Rawlinson added a chilling footnote “The stand cost the Boers 16 killed for our men were angry and shot freely when they got close up.’28
By the end of December, Botha’s commandos in the Eastern Transvaal had been so crippled by these raids, that Kitchener decided to transfer Rawlinson and Woolls-Sampson to a still more important sector: the north-east corner of the Orange River Colony, where Steyn and De Wet, the twin spirits of Boer resistance, had for months been able to baffle their pursuers. Meanwhile, a new British humiliation had been suffered in that district, demonstrating how De Wet, despite all his handicaps, still had sharp teeth when he found a chance of using them.
De Wet himself has left a lively account of his exploits that summer. The blockhouse system, he claimed, did not worry him. Far from it. He called it the ‘blockhead’ system. ‘The building of these blockhouses cost many thousand pounds, and still greater were the expenses incurred in providing the soldiers in them with food And it was all money thrown away! and worse than thrown away … this wonderful scheme of the English prolonged the war for at least three months.’
It was their excellent African Intelligence and their new raiding tactic, the tiger-spring on the laager at night, that alarmed De Wet. From May 1901 onwards, he knew that British column-commanders had made a whole series of coups against the Free State laagers, using this tactic: indeed, it was, directly or indirectly, responsible for much of the ‘bag’. (Somewhat ruefully, De Wet had adopted Kitchener’s picturesque phrase.) De Wet’s reply was to borrow the tiger-spring tactic for his own purposes. He needed what guerrillas traditionally needed: fresh horses, food, and clothing. So the blockhouse system – not so much the blockhouses themselves as their supporting network of ox-wagon convoys and protecting columns – seemed to provide a heaven-sent opportunity.29
During November, desultory sweeping movements had been conducted by the British columns, which De Wet found no difficulty in side-stepping. Fourteen columns marched and counter-marched. Hundreds of engineers (and thousands of African labourers) continued to push out the blockhouse lines – bobbing across the veld, like floats supporting a net at sea.30 De Wet lay low. He had to conserve his men’s and his horses’ strength.
At the heart of the north-eastern corner of the Free State there is an archipelago of three small towns – Lindley, Bethlehem, and Reitz – grouped in a triangle forty miles across. It was here that, ever since June 1900, De Wet had found the safest base from which to conduct his raids. Little was now left of the towns themselves: in Lindley, for example, every building, including the large church, had been burnt by one side or the other. But the grass of the district, dry and brown, even in early summer, was good enough to support De Wet’s threadbare little force, if they dispersed among the neighbouring farms. On 28 November, De Wet called a krijgsraad for the leaders: General Michael Prinsloo, with Commandants Olivier and Rautenbach of the Bethlehem Commando; Commandant Van Coller, with the Heilbron Commando; Commandant Hermanus Botha from Vrede, and others. The krijgsraad took place at Blijdschap, near Reitz. The leaders decided to seize the first chance to launch a concentrated attack, De Wet’s first serious attempt to take the offensive since early in 1901. The strength of his own main force was seven hundred.31 Pitted against him were at least twenty thousand men, including his own brother, ex-General Piet De Wet, now fighting for the British as one of General Andries Cronje’s National Scouts. But the columns were, of course, scattered in fragments all over the North-eastern Free State.32 De Wet waited and watched for his chance.
The place he found it was near Bethlehem, and the time, grimly apposite, was Christmas Day. Indeed, this opportunity was a Christmas present from the local British commanders. Clearly, the most vulnerable point of the incomplete blockhouse line was the head: that is, the unsupported end on which the engineers were still working. Just before Christmas, General Rundle had half completed the eastern half of the great line, 160 miles long, which was being pushed from the railhead at Harrismith to link up with the line from Kroonstad. The blockhouse head on the eastern side had reached Tweefontein, a farm straddling a series of kopjes about twenty-five miles east of Bethlehem. To cover the engineers, Rundle had been allocated a weak force, mixed in quality as well as type. He had further weakened them by dividing them into four groups: the main force (four hundred yeomanry and two guns, commanded by Major Williams) encamped at Groenkop, a two hundred-foot knob of a hill commanding the convoy road from the south; Rundle’s own force (270 Grenadier Guards, 60 MI, and a gun, plumped down alongside the wagon road); a few more infantry (150 of the East Yorks) directly guarding the actual head of the blockhouse line; and a regiment of 400 irregulars, the ILH, stationed at Elands River bridge, thirteen miles to the east.33
Any of these three weak detachments, separated by so many miles from the fourth, would have made a tempting prey for De Wet. But it was the lines of white tents in the yeomanry camp at Groenkop, the bully beef tins and cases of rum, that looked especially appetizing to the hungry and thirsty burghers. In theory, it should have been a natural strong-point, this craggy hill, commanding such a Claude-like prospect: the wagon road cutting across the raw plain, the tangled chasms called Tiger Kloof, the blue rim of the Langeberg Mountains to the south. But it was a lesson to be learnt from all South African kopjes (a lesson still not learnt, despite Majuba, Spion Kop, and Caesar’s Camp) that kopjes were dangerous allies for the British. Attack the steep side of the kopje, the side where attack is least expected and the cover, at the same time, is best. This had long been the Boers’ guiding principle. At Groenkop, the craggy west face of the hill seemed insurmountable, yet, in fact, there was the line of a gully to help the burghers scramble up to the summit. Negligently, the British had failed to station pickets below this face.34 De Wet made this discovery after three days of carefully reconnoitring his prey. Then, at 2.00 a.m. on the morning of Christmas Day, half-concealed by a hazy moon, the tiger left Tiger Kloof – and sprang.
De Wet described what followed:
When we had gone up about half-way we heard the challenge of a sentry:
‘Halt, who goes there?’
My command rang out through the night – ‘Burghers, storm.’
The word was taken up by the burghers themselves, and on all sides one heard, ‘Storm, storm.’
It was a never-to-be-forgotten moment. Amidst the bullets which we could hear whistling above and around us, the burghers advanced to the top calling out, ‘Storm, Storm.’35
Never-to-be-forgotten was indeed the word. Sixty-nine years later, Trooper Bowers, a survivor of the massacre, recalled on tape that same breath-catching moment, looking from the oppo
site side:
Well, at 2 o’clock in the morning I was awakened by a shot The sentry who shouted ‘Halt, who goes there’, he fired the shot, and I think that woke me up, and immediately after that there was a fusillade and the bullets were ripping through the tents all the way down the slope, and I was in the top one.
I think there was about 14 of us in the tents and we had got our breeches on, and I seized the rifle (the rifles were piled up around the tent pole), I seized the first rifle I could get hold of a rushed out, and thinking the top of the hill was our strong point I made for the top of the hill. But of course it was already in the hands of the Boers. And when I got near the top, I could see by the stars there and the flashes from their rifles, hundreds of them, I was on the wrong track. Bullets were whistling round me like an overturned bee-hive. Well, there were some oat-sacks lying about, sacks full of oats (which of course were no protection whatever) and there was one solitary sack by itself and I plumped down straight on my belly behind this sack, and there was another chap there, and behind this one sack we cuddled ourselves to try to get a bit of shelter.
The Boer War Page 86
