A Handbook of the Boer War.

by Gale and Polden.

PREFATORY NOTE

The author has endeavoured in this Handbook to compile, for the use of students and others, a general account of the various phases of the Boer War of 1899-1902, in which he served for twenty-six months.

With some exceptions, every statement of fact relating to the military operations may be verified in one or more of the following publications--

The "Times" History of the War;

The War Office Official History of the War;

The Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the War.

To the two Histories, which have been but recently completed, the Author is much indebted. Other authorities have, however, been consulted.

The Sketch Maps and Plans of certain areas and battlefields are only intended to give, by means of a few hachures, contours, and form-lines, a general impression of topographical features.

The Author has from time to time in the course of the narrative indicated what he believes to have been the chief causes of the prolongation of the War:--

The inefficacy of modern Tactics as a means of dealing with partisan warfare;

The moral reinforcement derived from a confident belief in the justice of a cause, by which the enemy was continually encouraged to persevere;

The reluctance of the British leaders to fight costly battles;

The constitutional inability of the British Officer to take War seriously;

The waste of British horses due to inexpert Horsemastership.

May, 1910.

CHAPTER I

Prolegomena

I. THE ROUNDHEADS OF SOUTH AFRICA

History often reproduces without reference to nationality some particular human type or class which becomes active and predominant for a time, and fades away when its task is finished. It is, however, not utterly lost, for the germ of it lies dormant yet ready to re-appear when the exigencies of the moment recall it. The reserve forces of human nature are inexhaustible and inextinguishable.

It is probable that few of the Boers had ever heard of Oliver Cromwell, or that his life and times had ever been studied in the South African Republics, and had influenced the Boer action; yet the affinity of the South African burghers of the XIXth century with the Puritans and the Roundheads of the XVIIth is striking. It was not so much a parallelism of aims and hopes, for the struggle in England was political and not national as in South Africa, as of temperament, character, and method.

There was hardly an individuity in the Boers of the War which might not have been found in the followers of Cromwell. Like these they were fanatically but sincerely religious, and their unabashed and fearless adherence to their beliefs and their open observance of the outward forms of religion exposed them to the same cruel and baseless charge of hypocrisy. Just as the aristocratic followers of Charles I had jeered at the Roundheads, so did every thoughtless officer and newspaper correspondent jeer at the psalm-singing and the prayer meetings in the laagers. The Boers had the courage of their religious opinions, and were not ashamed to proclaim them in the face of man. The Bible was the only book they knew, and they guided themselves according to their lights by its precepts. In opposing the English they believed that they were resisting the enemies of the Almighty. Like the Puritans they honestly thought that certain passages in the Holy Scriptures applied to them as the Chosen People, and that they were assured of Divine Protection; and if they erred in their exegesis their delusion at least deserves respect. Yet all the while the Old Testament was the volume they chiefly studied, and if they quoted the New Testament they sometimes modified the context to their own advantage.

Each Puritan movement has derived its strength not so much from its abstract merit as from the intense personal conviction felt by each unit engaged in it, that the righteousness of the cause was unassailable. The Puritan never wavered in philosophic doubt. No misgivings disturbed his soul, and he pursued his object with all the strength of his body.

The Puritan stir in the reign of Charles I was a revival, almost a continuation, of the half political, half religious activity which in the previous century had effected the Reformation. The Boer movement in South Africa, which sprang up after a germination lasting three generations, was brought about by a recrudescence of the spirit which made the Boers of the Netherlands rise against Alva and the Spanish domination in the XVIth century.

In the XVIIth century the Boers of the Netherlands, made a voluntary settlement in South Africa, and there under the Southern Cross they were joined by French Puritans, who had fought under Conde and who left their country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and also by some persecuted sectaries from Piedmont. The two stocks, although one was of Teutonic and the other of Celtic origin, easily came together, and under the pressure of common interests and common dangers were consolidated and vulcanized: and if in the previous generation the English Pilgrim Fathers of the _Mayflower_ had directed their course to the south instead of to the west, and had cast anchor off the shore of that distant region of Good Hope, it is probable that a mighty nation would have been founded in South Africa.

Cromwell as the military leader of the Commonwealth Boers is, at least in England where the military art has not been scientifically studied, one of the suppressed characters of history. His political achievements, as is perhaps natural in a community which courts the voter and despises the soldier, have put out of sight the means by which he mainly won them; namely his genius as a cavalry and partisan commander. An ungainly, narrow-minded, bigoted, bucolic squireen of Huntingdon, lacking in every quality which we are accustomed to associate with a cavalry officer, inaugurated an era in the history of Mounted Troops.

His methods are studied on the Continent, and the German Staff has recently discovered that he was the first leader to use cavalry as a screen to hide the movements of the main body. Yet there is no evidence that he ever studied the military art, and he did not become a soldier until he had reached his fourth decade. In the Royalist Army opposed to him were soldiers by profession and experience; officers and men who had been under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War; for in the XVIIth century the services of aliens were in request on the Continent, and at one time no less than eighty-seven senior officers of British nationality were serving in the Swedish Army, then the most renowned in Europe. Yet Cromwell with his "Eastern Association," his Ironsides, his yeomen and raw levies, beat the Royalist Army, officered from the same class which is still believed to possess the monopoly of the aptitude for leading men in war, by exercising the homely qualities of energy, self-control, endurance, and practical common sense applied instantly to the occasion of the moment.

The lessons to be learnt from Cromwell's campaigns have been thus epitomized by General Baden-Powell:--"There is one thing that ought not to escape the attention of students, namely the success that attended Cromwell's method of rallying his troops whenever they got dispersed.

When things looked bad, as they did on one or two occasions, when some of his cavalry were defeated and the rest scattered, he never lost heart and his men never lost heart; they knew they had to rally again and attack somewhere else. Very often the enemy were deceived by that, thinking that the Roundheads were scattered and broken up, and took no further notice of him until they suddenly found him attacking from quite a new direction. That was the secret of his success on many occasions, and one that has its lesson to-day, just as it had in those days--that when all seems pretty bad and you are scattered and broken, keep up a good heart and get together again and have another go." With scarcely the change of a word these remarks will account for the prolongation of the war for two years after the occupation of the Boer capitals.

The Boer leaders, like their great prototype Cromwell, owed much of their success to their novel and skilful use of mounted troops. The European conception of the functions of mounted troops had been stereotyped for some time; Cavalry screens an advancing army, prevents the enemy observing its dispositions, acts as its eyes and ears; and so forth. It is true that Great Britain had already for at least a generation employed Mounted Infantry in colonial wars; but the innovation had never been approved of on the Continent, where it was regarded as a cheap and inefficient British substitute for Cavalry.

Yet the famous postscript "unmounted men preferred,"[2] which was affixed to the acceptance of the help proffered by the Australian Colonies, shows that at first the power of mounted troops acting not as the eyes and ears of an army, but as a mobile and supple "mailed fist,"

was not understood. In ten weeks, however, the tune changed, and it was "preference given to mounted contingents."

When the grand operations were over, the enemy's chief towns occupied, and the lines of communication fairly secure, the necessity for mounted troops became still more apparent. The Boers saw that it was useless for them to campaign at large. They took to _guerilla_, and restricted themselves generally to independent horse raids against which foot troops were powerless. Gradually the proportion of horses to men in the British columns rose, until practically all the combatants were mounted, and at last the Cromwellian principle that the best military weapon is a man on a horse was fully accepted.

The military qualities of the Boers, like those of Cromwell's men, were useful but not showy. They came by instinct and not by acquisition, and they cannot be sufficiently accounted for as the outcome of experience in the pursuit of game on the veld. They were neutralized partially by characteristics the reverse of military. The Boers were not remarkable for personal courage. If there had been in the Boer Army a decoration corresponding to the Victoria Cross it would have been rarely won or at least rarely earned. There is scarcely an instance of an individual feat of arms or act of devotion performed by a Burgher. On the few occasions when the Boers were charged by cavalry they became paralysed with terror. They were incapable of submitting themselves to discipline, and difficult to command in large numbers. They could not be made to understand that prompt action, which possibly might not be the best under the circumstances, was preferable to wasting time in discussing a better with the field cornets. They were subject to panics and, for the time, easily disheartened: and their sense of duty was not conspicuous.

The principles of strategy were unknown to them, their tactics were crude, and with the exception of a very few who had fought in 1881, they were without experience of the realities of war.[3]

If in the month of September, 1899, an impartial military critic in a foreign Ministry of War had been directed to draw up an appreciation of the situation and to forecast the course of the impending struggle, he would probably have expressed himself somewhat as follows:--

"An Army of 100,000 men is the utmost that Great Britain will be able to place in the field in South Africa, for the Indian and Colonial drafts must be provided for, and the Militia and other Auxiliary Forces, which are not of much account, are tethered to the country; but it will be sufficient for the purpose. Although the military system of Great Britain is hopelessly behind the times, she has always done wonders with her boomerangs, bows and arrows, and flint instruments. That Army will be fairly well furnished with modern weapons and equipment, and the excellent personality of the soldier will compensate to a great extent for incapacity in the Staff and superior officers. With this Army she will have to meet a brave but undisciplined opponent whose numbers cannot be estimated. Even if the Free Staters are included it is improbable that more than 100,000 men can be put into the field. These have had no military training, their leaders will be unprofessional officers who will be unable to make good use of the munitions of War which the two Republics have been strangely allowed to import through British ports and to accumulate in large quantities. If the burghers of the Orange Free State throw in their lot with the Transvaalers, which is improbable as they have no quarrel with Great Britain, the numbers opposed to her will certainly be augmented, but the task before her will be greatly simplified. Instead of having to send one portion of her Army by way of Natal to effect a junction in the Transvaal, with the other portion working northwards through Kimberley and Mafeking, a campaign which would involve two long and vulnerable lines of communication, she will be able to strike at once through the heart of the Free State and will advance without much difficulty to Johannesburg and Pretoria. The hardest part of her task will be the passage of the Vaal, where a great battle will be fought, and the capture of Pretoria, which is reported to be well fortified. With Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, Pretoria and the railways in the possession of Great Britain, the opposition will collapse in a very few weeks, for no nation has ever been able to carry on a struggle when its chief towns and means of communication are in the enemy's possession."

This hypothetical appreciation probably represents the general opinion current both at home and abroad during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the War; but it proved to be mistaken from the first.

The Free Staters joined the Transvaalers and the allied forces assumed the offensive over a wide area without delay. Kimberley and Mafeking were threatened on the west, and on the east the Boers poured into Natal, upon which they had for sixty years looked with the aggrieved and greedy eyes of a dog from whom a bone, to which he believes he is entitled, has been recovered.

To Natal, in 1824, had come a handful of British pioneers. From Chaka, the King of the Zulus, they obtained a grant of land upon the coast, and after eleven years they endeavoured without success to induce the British Government to recognize the settlement, which in course of time became the City of Durban, as a Colony to which, in honour of the Princess heiress presumptive to the Throne of Great Britain, they proposed to give the name Victoria; and they were thus the first to associate her with the Empire, which, in spite of reluctant politicians who did their best to restrict it, was destined to expand marvellously during her reign.

The Natal settlement was frowned on by the Imperial Government, who even confiscated a little ship which the pioneers had toilfully fitted out and which was bringing envoys from the King of the Zulus to the King of England, on the plea that it was unregistered and that it came from a foreign port. In 1828 Chaka, who was not unfavourably disposed towards the Durban pioneers, was murdered by his brother Dingaan, who succeeded him as King of the Zulus. It is said that his last words to Dingaan were, "You think that you will rule the land when I am gone, but I see the white men coming, and they will be your masters."

His words were prophetically true, but there were two races of white men hovering over Natal; and the Great King of the Zulus, a tribe held in little account before his time, but which had under his leadership absorbed or exterminated almost every other tribe from Pondoland to Delagoa Bay, was no longer with them to choose between the rivals to his own ends and advantage; and Dingaan inherited the cruelty without the ability or the statecraft of his brother, the Napoleon of South Africa.

Of all the races of Europe the Low Germans of Holland seemed the least likely to contract the migratory habit. The Hollander of the present day, popularly but incorrectly called a Dutchman, is home-staying and home-loving. The compact, well-cared-for, well-ordered homestead, village, and town communities of the Netherlands are inconsistent with a roving disposition, and yet the Hollanders of South Africa furnished the most conspicuous example of Nomadism in modern times.

It may have been that the ordeal of Alva and the subsequent disturbance of the Thirty Years' War had constitutionally unsettled the Hollanders to such a degree that their descendants, emancipated from European ideas, became prone to restlessness, for in a generation or two they began to trek; or perhaps the magic of the spacious veld, with its clear sky and the mountains and flat-topped kopjes sharply defined on the horizon, irresistibly lured them on. In the land they had quitted the air was dense with moisture; scarcely a hill was to be seen; they were hemmed in by sluggish rivers and by the sea, which leaned heavily against the dykes and threw its spray angrily down on to the reclaimed pastures which had been stolen from it.

The original Dutch settlement at the Cape was made by a Company of Amsterdam merchants for the refreshment and refitting of their ships engaged in trade with the East. The Company was a harsh and extortionate master, who paid little attention to the needs and the welfare of the settlement, which was regarded merely as a place of call. The discontented colonists began to leave the seacoast and trekked inwards, where the heavy hands of the cordially detested representatives of the Company could not reach them. Its rule came to an end in 1795, when, at the request of Holland, Great Britain took over the Colony in order to prevent it falling into the hands of France. It was restored at the Peace of Amiens, but in a few years again came into the possession of Great Britain.

The Colonies of the Empire were at that time administered by a Branch of the War Office which regarded the Cape settlement much in the same light as it had been regarded by the Dutch Company, as a necessary but troublesome depot on the way to the East; and had the Overland Route and the Suez Canal been available a generation earlier it would probably have been abandoned.

The Boers hoped that their new masters, who at least were not an association of Amsterdam merchants absorbed in their ledgers, would treat them with more sympathy and consideration. But the only serious colonial problem with which British politicians had up to that time been called upon to deal was in North America, and they had disastrously failed in their attempt to solve it. They were without experience in the management of white plantations, they shirked the future and looked only to the "ignorant present," and their policy in South Africa was based upon two principles: that on no account must the boundaries of the Empire be enlarged and new responsibilities incurred, and that in all quarrels between white man and black man the presumption was that the white man was in the wrong.

The Great Trek of 1836-7 was brought about by the emancipation of the slaves and by the refusal or inability of the Government to protect the farmers against the raids of the "Kaffir"[4] tribes on the border. There is no doubt that enslaved Hottentots, Bushmen, and even Malays who had been with the knowledge of the authorities imported from Madagascar and Malacca, were often ill-treated by individual slave-owners; but the Boers resented the charge of wholesale cruelty which was made against them, and the favour and patronage bestowed upon native tribes.

Moreover, although the slave-owners were entitled to compensation for the loss of their helots, the fund was administered in London, with the result that a considerable proportion of the already inadequate sum was retained in the hands of agents.

The object of the Great Trek was deliverance from the harsh and hostile jurisdiction of the British Government, and the setting up of a new and independent Boer community in Natal, which was reported to be a promised land flowing with milk and honey. The Boers proposed to shake themselves free from the Egyptian and to occupy Canaan.

The _voortrekkers_, among whom was the boy Paul Kruger, slowly passed away towards the north and crossed the Orange River. Moshesh, the chief of the Basutos, watched curiously from his mountains the trains of wagons strung out on the veld, but refrained from molesting the emigrants. Not so Moselekatse,[5] a chief who had formerly broken away from Chaka and had set himself up beyond the Vaal, and who subsequently founded the Matabele Kingdom in which he was succeeded by his son Lobengula. He swooped down upon the advanced parties, who defended themselves with success and afterwards chastised him in his own country, in which, hidden from his eyes, lay the gold-bearing reefs of Johannesburg.