A Handbook of the Boer War by Gale and Polden, Limited

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A HANDBOOK OF THE BOER WAR

With General Map of South Africa
and 18 Sketch Maps
and Plans

GALE AND POLDEN LIMITED

LONDON AND ALDERSHOT

1910

BUTLER & TANNER

THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS

FROME AND LONDON

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I PROLEGOMENA 1

I The Roundheads of South Africa 1

II Patriotism, Duty and Discipline 19

III War considered as a Branch of Sport 26

II THE NATAL WEDGE 36

III DEUS EX MACHINA NO. I 51

IV KIMBERLEY AND THE SIEGE OF RHODES 82

V A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS 96

VI MORE TUGELA TROUBLES 116

VII LADYSMITH AT BAY 138

VIII DEUS EX MACHINA NO. 2 156

IX ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS 193

X BADEN-POWELL AND THE SIEGE OF MAFEKING 212

XI BLOEMFONTEIN TO PRETORIA 229

XII THE NEW COLONY 247

XIII NEC CELER NEC AUDAX 262

XIV THE TAMING OF THE TRANSVAAL 273

XV THE RECURRENCES OF DE WET 294

XVI LORD KITCHENER AT WORK 311

XVII THE MECHANICAL PHASE 345

I Orange River Colony 345

II Eastern Transvaal 354

III Western Transvaal 357

IV Cape Colony 363

XVIII THE END 365

COMMANDERS OF DIVISIONS AND BRIGADES 368

INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES 369

SKETCH MAPS AND PLANS[1]

PAGE

Northern Natal 50

Modder River and Magersfontein 59

Stormberg 65

Colenso 70

Spion Kop and Vaalkrantz 98

Spion Kop 104

Final Advance on Ladysmith 128

Siege of Ladysmith 139

Riet and Modder Drifts 161

Paardeberg 172

Poplar Grove and Driefontein 185

Sannah's Post 199

Magaliesberg District 240

Diamond Hill 243

Brandwater Basin 257

Orange Free State 260

Southern Transvaal 292

Noitgedacht Nek 319

General Map of South Africa--at the beginning.

[Footnote 1: The thanks of the Author are due to the Army Council for
permission to copy the maps and plans in the Official History of the
War, and to L.S. Amery, Esq., for permission to copy the plans in the
fifth volume of the _Times_ History of the War.]

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 Condé 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 depôt 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.

Meanwhile the British Government had forged a useless and clumsy weapon
for the coercion of its "erring and misguided" subjects. It was held by
the lawyers that the trekkers could not at will and by the simple
process of migration throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England,
and a declaratory Act was passed under which all British subjects south
of Latitude 25, whether within or without the colony, could be arrested
and punished.

The Boer scouts discovered passes over the Drakensberg which gave them a
readier access than they had expected into Natal. It had not recovered
from the devastations of Chaka and was thinly inhabited. Settlements
were made near the banks of the Tugela, while Piet Retief, after a brief
visit to Durban, went on to negotiate with Dingaan at the royal kraal of
Umgungundhlovu in Zululand. He was received with some cordiality, but
accused of participating in a recent cattle raid. Retief, to show his
good faith, offered to catch the robber, a chief named Sikunyela, whose
kraal was a hundred miles away. He found Sikunyela, who greatly admired
the glistening rings of a pair of handcuffs shown him by the slim
Dutchman, and who was even persuaded that they would be a becoming
ornament to a native chief. He tried them on, but a more intimate
acquaintance with the use of handcuffs induced him to surrender the
cattle he had stolen from Dingaan, the King of the Zulus.

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