Well, this chap and I were cuddling one another when a bullet went through his stomach – tore the oat sack and went through his stomach. We were cuddled close together, and he yelled in his agony – and he was very quickly dead.
Well, there were a few more oat sacks… and behind them were three men. One was Lt. Watney, a young fellow of 17, a very dandy young fellow whom we used to make fun of; he was in the Middlesex Yeomanry. He died most bravely. When the Boers came shouting and shooting, shouting and shooting as they ran down the slope, young Watney with his revolver in his hand shouted: ‘Come on boys, charge!’ Well it was of course a very noble thing to say but perfectly ridiculous. And he and his two men ran out, and I ran across to join him… I was only a few yards from him, only a few yards, and the Boers were all round us. And they put in a volley into us. They riddled those 3 poor chaps… Yet not a single bullet touched me. And the next moment (of course it was hardly daylight, hardly daylight) somebody had ripped off my bandolier of cartridges and snatched my rifle out of my hand. And all the time the bullets were coming up from the bottom of the hill, from our fellows [The Boers] said get in that tent, get in that tent, and don’t move (they could all speak English, of course, the Boers) and I got into the tent, and after that other fellows began coming in…. And presently a black-bearded chap with a sjambok in his hand came and put his head in the tent and said, ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot you!’ And when he’d gone, the sentry said ‘Don’t you know who that was?… That was General Christiaan De Wet.’36
By daylight, Trooper Bowers saw the camp, now a terrible sight. The Boers (like the Boers that Hickie fought at Bothaville) had used expanding bullets. Captain Bryce had the bottom of his face shot away. Other men had their stomachs ripped open. Bowers, who helped carry the wounded to a makeshift hospital, was soon caked in blood from head to foot. But for Bowers – at any rate – the horrors dissolved in the morning sun. The British prisoners were struck by the incongruous dress of De Wet’s men: they were so short of clothes that many were wearing the poke bonnets and black dresses of the Boer vrouw. Bowers himself was stripped of his uniform and sent back to Rundle’s camp without a stitch of clothing.37
Major Williams’s disaster at Tweefontein depressed Kitchener, who was afraid it might give the Boers new heart. The disaster was blamed on Williams’s ‘carelessness’, and no doubt this was the principal cause. If the pickets had been stationed at the bottom of the hill as well as on the top, the camp could never have been surprised. Christmas ‘slackness’, snorted Kitchener. He told Brodrick, ‘It is very sad and depressing that the boers are able to strike such blows, but I fear… we shall always be liable to something of the sort from the unchecked rush of desperate men at night.’38
Then it became clear that De Wet’s coup, like Botha’s and Smuts’s before him, had only marginally impeded progress. Of this the January bag seemed conclusive evidence: below the December average, yet still reasonable, totalling 378, 327, 255, 426 in the four weeks.39
Kitchener stuck doggedly to his steam-roller strategy. Indeed, the humiliation at Tweefontein only sharpened his appetite to have the great machine made ready to go. As soon as the blockhouse lines were safely completed, the new experiment in steel and barbed wire – that is, forcing the enemy up against the network of blockhouse lines – could at last begin.
By 5 February, the steam-roller was ready.40 The Field Intelligence Department reported De Wet and Steyn to be still based at Elandskop, a hill near Reitz which commanded the country for miles in every direction. Elandskop lay to the east of the centre of an open rectangle roughly fifty miles square: the west side formed by the Kroonstad-Wolvehoek line of railway and blockhouses; the south side, by the Kroonstad-Lindley-Bethlehem blockhouse line; the north side, by the Wolvehoek-Heilbron-Frankfort blockhouse line. It was from the open side – from east to west – that the columns would advance, squeezing the enemy against the blockhouse lines, like a gigantic piston bearing down the walls of a cylinder block. Kitchener had welded together his best MI columns and superimposed four elite commanders to forge this piston: Rawlinson and his veterans of night raids in the south-east Transvaal, the 2nd and 8th MI, strengthened by the 12th and 20th MI, and the two regiments of the ILH; Lieutenant-Colonel Byng, with Lieutenant-Colonel F. S. Garratt’s New Zealanders and Lieutenant-Colonel J. W. Dunlop’s new-fangled Royal Artillery Mounted Rifles (a new expedient for turning gunners into MI); Colonel Rimington, with another corps of RAMR and Major Charles Ross’s Canadian Scouts (the men who had sworn to take no prisoners); Major-General E. L. Elliot, with his whole division. None of these extra-mobile units was cavalry; many were colonial irregulars; they were the elite of the army.
On the night of 5 February, these four super-columns, about nine thousand strong, roughly one man for every ten yards, lined out across the fifty-four miles of the open end of the rectangle. Meanwhile, other columns were sent to reinforce the blockhouses on the three other sides, and seven armoured trains, equipped with guns and searchlights, steamed up and down the railway tracks, like ships in line-ahead formation. At dawn on the sixth, the commanders were given Kitchener’s sealed orders: march west.41
To Kitchener, waiting at Army HQ, the next two days passed in ill-suppressed frustration. When his column commanders were resting on the blockhouse line, he could at least try to communicate; sometimes, he could even converse with Rawlinson over the open line, using the morse of the telegraph like a telephone.42 Now, the nine thousand men were virtually incommunicado. Meanwhile, the coils of blue telegraph tape accumulated at Pretoria. London had an insatiable appetite for detail, now Parliament had reassembled:
no 885. From the Secretary of State for War to Lord Kitchener. War Office, 7th February 1902. (Telegram No. 11370, Code.) Question in Parliament. Telegraph numbers of each kind – horses and mules purchased in South Africa.
no 886. From the same to the same. Question in Parliament. Can Merriman of Stellenbosch freely send and receive letters to and from friends and legal advisers in South Africa and England?
no 888. From the same to the same. My no. 11352, code. Question in Parliament. Is Mrs C. De Wet in a refugee camp?
no 890. From the same to the same. 8th February, 1902. Your no. 860. Parliamentary question on Monday. In what camp is Mrs C. De Wet? Is she compulsorily detained, and, if so, on what grounds? Please report fully…
London remained unanswered.43 Kitchener had left Pretoria with the Brat on the 7th to see for himself the climax of his drive, the moment when the piston met the end of the cylinder. His armoured train, microcosm of the new war machine, rolled into Vredefort Road station that afternoon. The results he pronounced ‘considerable’, if ‘disappointing’. The experiment, in fact, proved part success, part anticlimax. By dawn on 8 February, only 285 out of 2,000-odd Boers had been accounted for (including 140 bagged by Rawlinson’s columns on the right). Cattle, it is true, were captured in huge numbers. For the first time, large numbers of exhausted saddle-horses were also brought in, proof of the extent to which the Boers had been hustled. But the blockhouse lines had not held firm. And bagging Steyn and De Wet, the aim which now transcended all other objectives in the war, for Kitchener believed it might end the war at a stroke – this great coup still eluded K’s grasp. It happened just as Kitchener had himself predicted.44 De Wet sensed where the human meshes of the net were weakest: in the south-west corner, along the Kroonstad-Lindley blockhouse line. And, with the help of an ordinary pair of wire-clippers, De Wet and Steyn broke the line at 1.00 a.m. on 7 February, and trotted out of the trap, losing only three men out of seven hundred.45
Kitchener grimly thrust the gears of the war machine into reverse. A few days spent strengthening the south-west corner, then back eastwards along those sandy tracks towards the starting-point, and beyond it, up to the blue mountain walls of the Drakensberg. These were the new battle orders for the four super-columns. Meanwhile, Kitchener himself steamed off to Cape Colony to hustle General French, to put to him the same quest
ion that haunted Kitchener, day and night: how on earth, armed with such a sledge-hammer, could he fail to crack the nut?46
Was the blockhouse system in fact a ‘blockhead system’, a gigantic white elephant, as De Wet claimed? It is a question that cannot be finally answered even today. Certainly the new arrangements still left much to be desired: in the tensile strength of the wire fences (soon to be increased); in the distances between blockhouses (progressively being reduced); above all, in Kitchener’s failure to trust senior generals sufficiently to create a proper chain of command (there was no one in the field deputed as overall CO of the four super-columns). On the other hand, the blockhouse system was a great improvement on its predecessor, the aimless sweep-and-scour policy. It was a system. Outside the blockhouse lines, keen young column commanders like Colonel Allenby continued to be utterly demoralized by Kitchener’s failure to co-ordinate the columns. Here, inside the lines, even K of Chaos had had to accept the discipline of a co-ordinated plan of attack. Moreover, the system automatically provided other advantages: lines of blockhouses served as lines of communication and lines of supply, thus adding both to the mobility and the intelligence of the columns.
Yet the blockhouse system was not in itself a short cut to end the war. There were two other innovations adopted by Kitchener, both forced upon him by circumstances, and arguably just as decisive as moral weapons.
The first was the large-scale use of native troops. In all the myths that have accumulated around the war, none has been as misleading as the idea that it was, as both sides claimed, exclusively a ‘white man’s war’. From the beginning, Africans had played a central role as non-combatants serving both armies. No one will ever know the total number of black ‘Boers’, or black British, many of whom were forced labourers. At a conservative estimate, there were forty thousand labourers during the war on each side. At any rate, there were never enough to serve either army willingly, just as there were never enough black labourers to serve the Uitlanders in the mines. White South Africa had always valued the strength of the African’s arm, and had often been prepared, as it was cheaper than a white arm, to pay for it. Behind every white artisan there had always been a black man, and so now, behind every white man with a rifle was a black man with a spade, hewing out the white man’s trenches, driving his ox wagons and mule wagons, guarding his cattle; diggers and drivers and drovers, as ubiquitous and docile as the cattle themselves – and (to most white men) as invisible.47
When an African had a gun in his hand, however, he became suddenly very visible indeed. And it was Kitchener, despite his protestations to the contrary, who had armed the Africans with rifles. The total to which he finally confessed in answer to questions in Parliament came to over ten thousand: 4,618 in Natal, the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal; 2,496 in Cape Colony (both these groups referred to armed men employed as ‘watchmen’ on railways and blockhouse lines); 2,939 Cape Coloured men who served as ‘scouts and police’ on the western blockhouse lines; and an unspecified number of armed ‘guards’ in the native districts of Cape Colony, Swaziland, and Basutoland.48
It was claimed by Kitchener —and was, indeed, to be repeated as a confidential circular in April 1902 – that these men were only armed for their own defence, for ‘protection of stock and occupied blockhouses’, but were not to be used ‘as garrison of blockhouse lines instead of troops’. Such was the claim.49 The intelligence reports in Cape Colony give the reality. The ‘watchers’ were the key to the blockhouse line; they took an offensive role; and they certainly accounted for more of the bag than white troops in certain areas. (Sometimes they also inadvertently bagged British troops, it must be said.)50
In addition to the ‘watchers’, and not included in Kitchener’s totals, were the Africans who were a large minority in every mobile column. How large, is difficult to say. When Rawlinson had commanded the 2nd and 8th MI in December, his column had contained nearly a quarter Africans: 453, to add to the 79 white officers and 1,3 80 white troops. Lieutenant-Colonel J. S. S. Barker’s column in the ORC consisted of 1,000 Africans and 2,500 white men.51 No doubt the proportion varied, column by column, but the total number of Africans serving with Kitchener’s ninety-odd columns must have been enormous: twenty thousand, perhaps. Some of them served in the exacting and dangerous role of scouts; in fact, it was these Africans who were the main source of each column’s intelligence. It was Kitchener’s policy to arm these scouts, like other combatants. In the Transvaal, as we shall see, this did more than protect the scouts. It struck terror into the Boers.
Arming the natives came naturally to Kitchener, the Sirdar, whatever the political embarrassment this caused. In his second innovation, political and military interests coincided better. Some time at the end of 1901, Kitchener reversed his concentration camp policy. No doubt the continued ‘hullabaloo’ at the death-rate in these concentration camps, and Milner’s belated agreement to take over their administration, helped change Kitchener’s mind.52 By mid-December at any rate, Kitchener was already circulating all column commanders with instructions not to bring in women and children when they cleared the country, but to leave them with the guerrillas.53
Viewed as a gesture to the Liberals, on the eve of the new session of Parliament at Westminster, it was a shrewd political move. It also made excellent military sense, as it greatly handicapped the guerrillas, now that the drivers were in full swing. Indeed, this was perhaps the most effective of all anti-guerrilla weapons, as would soon emerge. It was effective precisely because, contrary to the Liberals’ convictions, it was less humane than bringing them into the camps, though this was of no great concern to Kitchener.54
A week after the nine thousand men of the four super-columns had rolled westwards towards the Wolvehoek-Kroonstad railway line, they began to roll back in the opposite direction. The same grouse-moor tactics were adopted: every day, the men lined out along the veld, like sportsmen walking-up birds on a moor. Every night, they dug themselves ‘butts’, to prevent the birds breaking back over their heads. The scale of operations was still more ambitious. Strategically, the obvious weakness of the previous drive (on 5–8 February) was that the aims of the hunters were soon made clear to the hunted; only a few strands of wire, and a handful of private soldiers in a blockhouse (and African Scouts outside it) stood between them and freedom. This time, Kitchener had devised a much more complicated drive. By adding extra columns to the four super-columns, he would first flush the birds back into the main cage from north and south; then all columns would converge on the south-east corner of the box, driving the birds into the angle formed by the Bethlehem-Harrismith blockhouse line and the Drakensberg.
It would be tedious to describe the operations of 16–2 8 February in detail. This drive, like its predecessor, failed in its principal object: once again, that old fox, De Wet, sidled out of the trap. His men were hustled and harried, and abandoned most of their mobile food supplies, their herds of cattle. Otherwise, the bag of this second drive seemed even thinner than usual. With one exception, every organized commando made good its escape.55 Then, on the last morning of the drive, 27 February (Majuba Day), one column achieved the greatest single coup, judged by the number of prisoners taken, since Hunter’s capture of Prinsloo in the Brandwater Basin eighteen months earlier.
When Kitchener and the Brat steamed into Harrismith next morning, they found that Rawlinson had surrounded a laager at Lang Riet, only a few miles from that ill-omened kopje at Tweefontein, and captured 650. The commando, Meyer’s, was physically intact, but completely demoralized by the drive. It surrendered to Rawlinson, on condition that the burghers could keep their personal property. The total bag for the drive came to 25,000 cattle, 2,000 horses, 200 wagons and 778 prisoners.56 It was sweet revenge after Tweefontein. And Kitchener’s prisoners were prisoners indeed, gloomy, plodding pedestrians bound for the POW camps – not sent back, naked and blushing, to their friends, like British prisoners, with the compliments of De Wet, after being relieved of their rifl
es, boots, and clothes.
Kitchener’s thunderous third drive, on grouse-moor principles, lasted from 4–11 March, and was a thunderous flop. The central ‘cage’ was driven westwards for the second time. The bag was a mere hundred. De Wet and Steyn flew to safety once again – and worse. They broke clean out of the Orange River Colony (across no less than three blockhouse lines) and by mid-March had forded the Vaal and touched hands with De la Rey in the Western Transvaal.57
By then Kitchener’s eyes, too, were turned to that wild and inhospitable region.
There was no blockhouse system, no steam-roller there; impractical to build blockhouses where water was so short. Instead, Kitchener had given ‘extra mobile’ columns to nine separate column commanders, the most important of whom was that veteran Lord Methuen. Their job was to hunt down De la Rey in his lair between the Mafeking railway and the Magaliesburg.
After two months of desultory manoeuvring, the hunters at last came in touch with the hunted – and for the British the results were utterly disastrous. On 24 February, at Yzer Spruit, De la Rey swooped on a wagon convoy belonging to Lieutenant-Colonel S. B. Von Donop. De la Rey killed, wounded, or captured 12 officers and 3 69 men, at a loss to his own force of 51.58 Emboldened by this success, De la Rey then attacked Methuen himself, and crushed his force at Tweebosch on 7 March in circumstances that could hardly have been more humiliating. Most of Methuen’s ‘extra mobile’ men were freshly recruited yeomanry and other irregulars. They panicked and fled. Methuen, wounded in the thigh, was forced to surrender, the first and last British general to be captured by the Boers in the campaign.59
The news of Methuen’s smash-up at Tweebosch was telegraphed to Kitchener next day, and the news knocked him flat. A column of twelve hundred men, with four field-guns, virtually wiped out: it was the biggest disaster for two years. Kitchener’s elastic morale, frayed by months of alternating hope and disappointment, finally snapped.
The Boer War Page 87
