The Boers, on the other hand, did change their strategy, notably the kind of positions they chose. They had always preferred positions on the slopes or crest of a hill or mountain. But the Transvaal field general, Koos de la Rey, had learned from experience at Modder River that there might be a better alternative. An entrenched position at the foot of a hill, for instance, would give them the advantage of a horizontal and therefore more effective line of fire over British infantry storming towards them. He proposed trying this more systematically with the next line of defence—the last before Kimberley—near Magersfontein. The Transvaal adjutant-general, Piet Cronjé, dismissed the idea as a dangerous gimmick, but President Steyn of the Orange Free State, who had come to the front, was impressed. De la Rey could go ahead. He ordered his 8000 troops to dig trenches in a sweeping half-moon formation over an eight-kilometre front, around the forward slope and two sides of Magersfontein Hill. In front of them he erected a barbed-wire fence. Now they would wait for the British to attack.
They came in the same formation as always, but this time with an overwhelming force. Methuen had increased his troops to 15,000 men. On Sunday 10 December Boer sharpshooters in decoy positions on the crest of the hill held off the British scouts. Believing that the Boers were dispersed over the slopes as usual, Methuen ordered an all-out artillery bombardment. For more than two hours his 33 guns transformed Magersfontein and the surrounding heights into a blazing inferno which surely no one could have survived. This was the moment to storm the Boer positions. Shortly after midnight—it was now 11 December—the Highland Brigade, led by Major-General Andy Wauchope, began its advance, with other units following on either side. By dawn they were to be in position for a frontal attack on Magersfontein Hill. They got there in time. At first light they were about to cover the last few hundred metres to the hill.
The Boers, safely entrenched, were ready as well. The ferocious bombardment of the previous day had claimed only three casualties. Now their time had come. The Highlanders, at close range and in their conspicuous green kilts, were an easy target. The Boers unleashed a relentless barrage of gunfire. The elite Scottish troops fell by the dozen, Wauchope among them. Those who were lucky managed to protect themselves by lying flat on the ground. Those who were wise remained there all day in the burning sun, enduring hunger, thirst, ants, flies and sunstroke, rather than face a certain bullet. The battle around them was more evenly matched. Both sides were frenzied. The Scandinavian Volunteer Corps, holding a forward position on the Boer side, incurred the heaviest casualties. British infantrymen managed to penetrate parts of the Boer lines, only to be driven back subsequently. By afternoon it was over. The retreat had begun even before Methuen gave the signal. Only the unfortunate Highlanders, too close to the Boers to escape, were compelled to wait until nightfall. The British losses came to 210 dead and 740 wounded, missing or captured, the vast majority of them from the Highland Brigade. On the Boer side 90 were killed and 185 wounded.44
The British defeat at Magersfontein was all the more bitter because things had gone badly the previous day as well, on 10 December, at Stormberg, the railway junction on the line between De Aar and East London. Five weeks earlier Churchill had travelled on the last train to get through. Since then, 2000 Free State commandos led by Jan Olivier had occupied the Stormberg valley. Sir William Gatacre was determined to drive them out. Like Lord Methuen, he was counting on the surprise effect of an attack by night. The evening before, at nine o’clock, he and his column of 3000 men had set off from nearby Molteno. As at Magersfontein, it was the attacking force that was taken by surprise, and again because they were unfamiliar with the terrain. The column lost its way and the disoriented troops wandered around aimlessly in the dark. As it turned out, they ended up close to the Boer commandos on the Kissieberg, precisely where they were heading, except that they had come from the opposite direction and had no idea where they were.
They soon found out. The Boers, having just sat down to breakfast, were pleasantly surprised. They couldn’t believe their eyes. The British troops had unwittingly walked straight into their trap. From their positions on the hillside they could pick them off one by one. But there were still the Royal Irish Rifles and the Northumberland Fusiliers to contend with. Once they had recovered from the shock, they began to storm the crest, but boulders near the top blocked their way. Close to exhaustion after their ordeal in the night, they took cover to await reinforcement. When help arrived, it only made matters worse. The British artillerymen firing on Kissieberg were blinded by the rising sun and failed to realise that their missiles were raining down on their own men. Their infantrymen on the hill had only one thought: get down as quickly as possible. Those who couldn’t took shelter behind the boulders. Eventually Gatacre had to concede that the situation was hopeless. He called a retreat at half past five, just over an hour after the fighting had begun. But as soon as they started their descent, the British troops were attacked from the opposite side by commandos under Esaias Grobler, the Free State chief commander on the spot. In all the commotion Gatacre had ‘forgotten’ that his order to withdraw hadn’t reached the contingent at the rear. After waiting in vain for hours, the 600 officers and men on the slopes of the Kissieberg were forced to surrender. Casualties on the British side came to 28 dead, 60 wounded and 634 captured. The Boers lost eight dead and 26 wounded.45
After the debacles at Stormberg and Magersfontein, Buller had a lot to put right in Natal. From Estcourt and Chieveley, both familiar to Churchill, he made preparations for the relief of Ladysmith. The whole situation was worrying. By mid-December his force had grown to 19,500 men. He also had 44 guns and 18 machine guns, but before him lay the Tugela. It was a turbulent, meandering river which could only be crossed at a few unreliable drifts. And the railway bridge at Colenso—still intact a month earlier, when Churchill had joined the reconnaissance in the armoured train—had since been blown up. The real problem, however, was the positions the Boers had taken on the opposite bank of the river. Buller could see their strongholds on the hills on the north bank. They were mainly concentrated around the railway line he had been depending on to get his troops and supplies closer to Ladysmith. They had obviously been waiting for him here, so he couldn’t take them by surprise; skirting around them, moving away from the railway line, was too dangerous. It would have to happen here.
The Boers across the Tugela did have a surprise in store. Firstly, they had a new commander, a man of a different calibre from Piet Joubert. The commandant-general had fallen from his horse and was unable to remain active on the front. On 30 November 37-year-old Louis Botha assumed command of the troops at the Tugela. At Modderspruit he had made a favourable impression as acting commandant. Here, at Colenso, he was about to demonstrate his brilliance as a tactician.
Botha’s force was greatly outnumbered by Buller’s. He had 3000 men with five pieces of artillery, and a few kilometres to the west another 1500 men to cover his right flank. Even so, Botha had absolute confidence in the strength of his position. Like De la Rey at Magersfontein, he had chosen flat terrain rather than hillside positions, as close to the river as possible. The strongholds Buller had seen on the heights were deliberately intended to mislead him. In reality, the Boers were entrenched in the mud over a ten-kilometre front on the north bank. Their positions were well camouflaged and fortified with sandbags.
The only weak spot in the Boer line was its far left flank at Hlangwane Hill, where the Tugela took a sharp bend to the north. When the commandos who were first sent there fled in panic on 13 December, President Kruger had to intervene in person, or at least by way of three peremptory telegrams. ‘Do not surrender the summit across the river, or all hope will be lost. Fear God, not the enemy... Fight in the name of the Lord and trust Providence to guide you and lead you to victory.’ The message helped. On 14 December Botha replied that as a result of Kruger’s words ‘our fears have been overtaken by courage’.
It was just in time. For the previous two days the British
artillery had been pounding the hills north of the Tugela, and that night the Boers saw a multitude of small lights flickering in the British camp. Buller was obviously preparing for an all-out attack. His war machine went into action at a quarter past five the following morning, Friday 15 December. First a battering from the powerful naval gun at the rear, then the infantry divisions advanced over a broad front. At Colenso itself they were preceded—an element of surprise after all—by Colonel Long with 12 field guns and six small naval guns. For two days the Boers had managed to keep their gunpowder dry—and their positions secret—and they continued to do so until Botha gave the signal. Once the British infantry units reached the south bank of the Tugela and Long had ranged his guns neatly in the vicinity of Colenso, then, and only then, did Botha give the command to open fire, first with the largest of the Boers guns, then the remaining four. This was what his men had been waiting for. They discharged a volley of Mauser bullets, at far closer range than the British had expected. It came as a complete surprise: vicious fire from an invisible enemy and nowhere to hide. British soldiers fell to the ground left, right and centre, slain, wounded or in sheer terror. Their artillery also took a beating. Long himself was wounded, and at seven o’clock the survivors retreated. They took their wounded and their small naval guns, but were forced to abandon their 12 fifteen-pounders.
Half an hour later Buller withdrew other units from untenable positions and in the course of the morning he ordered a general retreat. He called for volunteers to rescue the remaining guns. One of the men who came forward was Lieutenant Frederick Roberts, the field marshal’s only son. They managed to retrieve two of the guns, but ten were left behind. Seven of the men were recommended for a Victoria Cross, including Lieutenant Roberts. But the award came posthumously. Roberts was one of 143 killed on the British side, along with 756 wounded and 240 missing. The Boers lost eight dead and 30 wounded, took 38 prisoners, and captured ten guns in perfect working order, as well as a good supply of ammunition. All told, Black Week cost the British 2800 men, killed, wounded or captured, compared with 350 Boers. It was a total humiliation.46
The only good news Churchill came across in his pile of newspapers was about the three towns besieged by the Boers. Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith were still holding out. Glimmers of hope turned into blinding spotlights in the British press. The Boers had destroyed their telegraph lines, but the towns were able to communicate with the outside world by means of heliograms and with the help of African and coloured couriers who managed to slip through the Boer lines. The local commanders—White in Ladysmith, Kekewich in Kimberley and Colonel Robert Baden-Powell in Mafeking—were thus informed about the liberating armies’ delay. Conversely, the outside world received news about the plight of the beleaguered civilians and soldiers.
After the British defeats on the battlefield, their ordeals—bombardments, starvation, infectious diseases—assumed epic proportions. The three towns were of special interest to those who followed the news in Natal, the Cape Colony and Britain, as there was at least one well-known personality in each of them. ‘Doctor Jim’ Jameson, who had carried out the controversial raid, was in Ladysmith. Cecil Rhodes, the architect and sponsor of the raid, was in Kimberley, the city of diamonds, which he, as the kingpin of De Beers Consolidated Mines, regarded more or less as his personal property. Mafeking’s celebrities came from the ranks of the titled and well-to-do. There was Baden-Powell, who made a name for himself during the siege and later as a pioneer of the international Scout movement, and his two staff officers, both with noteworthy family connections. Major Lord Edward Cecil was the son of Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister; Lieutenant Gordon Wilson was married to Lady Sarah, Lord Randolph Churchill’s youngest sister. In other words, Lady Sarah Wilson was Winston Churchill’s aunt. She was a fellow journalist as well, reporting on the war in South Africa for another English newspaper, the Daily Mail. They had even more in common. Lady Sarah had also been imprisoned by the Boers, in her case—rightly—for espionage. She regained her freedom around the same time as her nephew, though not through her own doing. The Boers agreed to release her in exchange for Baden-Powell’s undertaking to extradite a certain Petrus Viljoen, a horse thief with whom they still had a score to settle. In any event, Lady Sarah was able to join her husband in Mafeking in time for Christmas. By smuggling out dispatches she kept readers of the Daily Mail informed about daily life in the besieged town. Winston Churchill’s interest in her was purely professional. Personally, he couldn’t care: he was not particularly fond of his aunt. During his time as a military cadet at Sandhurst she had once accused him of ‘thievish practices’—and only because he had tried to sell a pair of surplus field glasses. ‘Such a liar that woman is,’ he had fulminated to his mother. He had kept out of her way ever since.47
But the sieges of Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith were interesting enough, personal anecdotes aside. There were similarities in the way events unfolded in the three embattled towns, just as there had been in the battles at Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso. The most surprising characteristic was a complete reversal of roles. Here, the Boers were the unsuccessful invaders and the British the victorious defenders. None of the Boer commanders—Piet Joubert at Ladysmith, Piet Cronjé at Mafeking and Christiaan Wessels at Kimberley—had tried to push through right at the start. As a result, their counterparts, White, Baden-Powell and Kekewich, had all the opportunity they needed to organise their defences and improve their reinforcements, trenches and underground hideouts. After an initial burst of momentum, the sieges gradually declined into a state of inertia, broken only by the occasional skirmish. The Boers’ artillery fire became predictable and discipline in their camp grew slack.
Again it was clear that the Boers weren’t at their best in an offensive position, at least not as far as their older commanders were concerned. Even when they were out to conquer they seemed to retreat into a defensive role. They shrank from frontal attacks to avoid losses. Unlike British generals, they were sparing with their men. Instead, they resorted to the tactics they had always used against the fortified settlements of indigenous adversaries, namely surround them and starve them into submission. And they too dug trenches and erected fortifications. Seen from the air, the three towns under siege must have been a remarkable sight. All three were surrounded by a double ring of defence lines facing each other: the rings of Saturn symbolising defence as a superior tactical concept.
Not that life was easy for the civilians and soldiers in Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith. The bombardments claimed casualties, food was scarce, rations were steadily reduced, and infectious diseases were rampant. But that didn’t diminish the perseverance and resourcefulness with which the organised white community defended themselves—or their indifference to the plight of the African and coloured population. For this was also typical of all three sieges: Africans and coloureds paid the highest price.
Mafeking, with a white population of 1500, was located just over the south-western border of the Transvaal. The adjacent and likewise beleaguered ‘stadt’ of Mafikeng was inhabited by 5000 Tshidi Barolong and 1500 black mine workers who had fled from the Rand. Baden-Powell called on everyone to assist in the town’s defence. He increased his regular white troops with locally recruited volunteers to a total of 1200, and armed another 400 Barolong and other Africans and coloureds with rifles. The heavy work on the defence lines was done by black labourers, who were also responsible for vital intelligence work—with occasional help from the odd eccentric like Lady Sarah. African scouts, spies and couriers transmitted information to and from the outside world. Yet their valuable contributions to the defence effort were not rewarded with an equitable share of available food. When rationing was introduced in November 1899, many of them, particularly the refugees from the Rand, were unable to afford even the meagre rations to which they were entitled. As a result, most of the deaths during the siege occurred in Mafikeng.
The Boers likewise employed black labour. They recrui
ted workers among their old allies, the Rapulana Barolong, rivals of the traditionally pro-British Tshidi Barolong. Around 300 men were armed and deployed in the trenches and on the fortifications. Others served as scouts or were sent to raid cattle from the enemy. Before long these raids were their only form of offensive action. Cronjé had started the siege in mid-October with 5500 men, but within a week Koos de la Rey had gone off with 2500 of them, first to Kimberley, then to Modder River. Cronjé himself followed three weeks later. By mid-November there were no more than 1400 Boers around Mafeking, under the command of General Kootjie Snyman. They had three pieces of artillery left, a Long Tom, a Krupp and a Maxim, none of which was put to much use. Once a week, they fell totally silent as the Boers faithfully observed a day of worship. This gave the townspeople and soldiers a chance to relax, with polo for the officers and soccer for everyone else.48
In Kimberley too, the number of Boers holding the siege declined significantly. In late October, Wessels still had 7000 men from the Free State and the Transvaal. In November, they countered several attempts by British units trying to break through, making use of their heavy artillery. Kimberley was a coveted prize. It occupied a strategic position and was home to the famous diamond mines, along with their infrastructure and large supplies of dynamite and coal. There was also a psychological factor. The Boers hadn’t forgotten the time the British had confiscated the diamond fields in 1871.49 They also knew that Cecil Rhodes, the bane of their lives, was in town. But none of this was enough to make them change their approach. The countryside around Kimberley is flat and open, offering no natural cover. That alone was a reason for the Boers not to attack. They merely shelled the town from a distance, to little effect. In the heaviest bombardment, on 11 November, they fired around 400 shells. Most of them landed in the Big Hole and only one of the town’s inhabitants was killed. Their last direct confrontation was a skirmish on 28 November. After that the Boers turned their attention to Lord Methuen’s advancing army. No more than 1500 Free Staters, under the command of General Sarel du Toit, were left around Kimberley. The opportunity to capture the town had passed.
The Boer War Page 27
