FOOTNOTES:
[1] This account is true of a type, but I should not let it stand if I thought it would make the reader forget that, besides these, there are any number of men in the army who lead lives in every way straight and honourable.
LETTER XIX
THE MARCH SOUTH
BETHLEHEM, July 14, 1900.
Whenever in this campaign we have dealt the enemy what looked like a crushing blow, he has always hit back instantly at us. When Methuen reached the limit of his advance at the Modder River victory, the Boers were round immediately threatening us from behind. When we took Bloemfontein they at once swarmed round to the east and south, and dealt us two nasty blows at Sanna's Post and Reddersberg; and no sooner had we taken Pretoria than the same activity was displayed again.
They threatened us now from two points. Louis Botha had collected a large force, and was watching us from the hills east of the town, while the everlasting De Wet, far south, was breaking up the railway and burning our letters. The first thing we did, and we did it the very day after entering the capital, was to march against Botha. Ian Hamilton has paid our little corps the compliment of taking it on as his bodyguard. He is a general that inspires every one under him with great confidence. It is curious, by the way, how very soon troops get to know the worth of a leader; just as a pack of hounds knows by instinct when it is properly handled. Outsiders may argue about this or that general, and analyse his tactics, and never very likely get much nearer the truth (for there is a monstrous lot of luck one way or the other in all manoeuvres, and the ones often succeed that didn't ought to, and vice versa); but once you are under a man, you don't need to argue; you know. We all know that Ian Hamilton, with his pleasant well-bred manner, and the mutilated hand dangling as he rides, is the best man we have had over us yet, and we would all do great things to show our devotion.
The Diamond Hill action was one of those great big affairs which it would be impossible to explain without a plan of the country and a lot of little flags. Our attack from extreme left to right was spread over a frontage of, I daresay, twenty miles. The idea was for the mounted troops to turn the enemy's flanks and let in the infantry in front. Ian Hamilton had to deal with the Boer left flank, French with the right. Of course we saw and heard nothing of French, who might as well have been fighting in another planet, so far as we knew. Our difficulty here, as on some former occasions, was to find the limit of their flanks. The more we stretch out, the more they stretch out. They have the advantage of being all mounted, while the bulk of our force is infantry, massed inertly in the middle; and also from the lofty position they occupy they can command a bird's-eye view of the wide valley across which we are advancing, and perceive the disposition of our forces, and in what strength we are threatening the various points of defence, while their forces are quite concealed from us. This is so much in their favour that, on our flank at least, it is we, and not they, who are threatened with being outflanked.
Their position could scarcely have been stronger if nature had designed it for the purpose. A low range of hills gives admittance on the west side to a long wide valley, and on the east side of this a steep rocky range rises boldly up, showing in the sky a level outline like a rampart fringed with wall-like slabs of rock or detached masses, giving excellent cover from shrapnel. But besides this higher and last line of defence, there are some lower hills and slopes which project from the main rampart and command the valley, while they are in turn commanded by the heights. It is a two-step position, in fact. You carry the lower step first, and immediately come under the fire of the upper. The General told me next day that he thought it as strong as anything he had seen on the Natal side, and Winston Churchill set the matter at rest by pronouncing it stronger in point of formation than Spion Kop.
In the first day's fighting we drove them from the western hills and across the valley, which was more fertile than usual and full of cover, until we had forced them into the two-step eastern range. My own work lay right out on the flank end, at the very finger-tips, where the farthest limit of each force was trying to feel a way round the other. Here, with some of the Camerons, we felt about the hills, shelling them with a couple of guns for Boer sharpshooters, and occasionally flushing one or two. We were rather detached and out of the main action, feeling rather like a gun that has been sent to stop birds from "going back" while the main battue is at work in front. We stayed out all day, and as we rode in that night to headquarters the whole valley under the starlight was echoing like a great gallery and bustling with the multitude of our army arranging itself and settling down for the night. We picked our way through the various convoys hurrying forward in search of their brigades, but often losing their way or getting off the track, checked by muddy fords, where an engulfed team wallows piteously, barring the passage. We pass detachments of infantry hurrying in tired and silent, and meet other detachments with blankets and greatcoats coming out on picket. Waifs and strays, by ones and twos, who have lost their way, shout for guidance, hallooing dismally for the brigades or regiments to which they belong, and which many have small hope of rejoining that night. Meantime, right down the valley and far across it, the various camp-fires twinkle out like glow-worms. The air is keen and frosty, and stars, clear and sharp as icicles, glitter all over the sky. Above everything is still and calm, very well arranged evidently, and everything in its proper place. Below all is confusion, noise, and darkness, disappointment, and difficulty, vague wandering to and fro, lamentations, and general chaos. They manage these things better up there! However, after a bit order begins to reign. The several units draw together. The camp-fires are beacons. The waggons struggle up. The bleating of the lost sheep is gradually hushed, as one by one they find their way to their various folds, and slowly, in spite of darkness and broken ground, the tangle is smoothed out.
By a small farm, where the General lodges, blazes a huge fire. Round it gather some staff officers, and among them, recognised from afar, are the welcome tiger-skins of the Guides' officers. The Major sits by the blaze in that familiar attitude of his, like a witch in "Macbeth," with a wolf-skin karross drawn over his shoulders, and the firelight on his swarthy face as he turns it up with a grim laugh to chaff the others standing round. But there is rather a gloom on the party to-night. News has just come in that poor Airlie, charging at the head of his Lancers, has been killed. Many here knew him, and every one who knew him seems to have been fond of him.
Winston Churchill turns up and enlivens us. There are several colonels and senior officers squatting about, and Churchill takes the opportunity of giving them a bit of his mind. He is much annoyed with the day's proceedings. He has been a good deal shot at; so has the Duke, and so has the General. They have had to use their Mauser pistols. This sort of thing should not happen. Then where was French? Checked, indeed! a pretty fine thing! And the Guards? The Guards were somewhere where they had no business to be, instead of being somewhere else. Would any one kindly tell him why the Guards were not somewhere else? And Churchill (he has a face like a good-natured child, and looks about fourteen) eyes the old colonels, who fidget nervously round the fire like disturbed hens. He talks and argues incessantly, but very cleverly. Before he goes he dashes off a sketch of South Africa's future with a few words about farming and gold-mining. He gives us a cup of hot cocoa all round, which he produces from nowhere, like a conjuring trick, re-arranges our fire, tells us when the war will be over, and strolls off (daring the old colonels with his eye to so much as look at him) to the farm to give the General his final instructions about to-morrow's action.
Next day our infantry established itself on the lower step of the Boer position, but the final ridge still remained in their hands. It was a ding-dong fight between the two, for the positions were within half-rifle shot of each other. However, we could not turn them out, though we got a field-battery right up in the firing line, which cracked shrapnel over them as hard as ever it could load and fire. They had determined to hold that ridge till night gave them the opportunity of moving off their waggons and guns safely; and hold it they did. No doubt we could have carried it by storm, but crossing that thousand yards of open ground would have meant a terrible loss, and the General did not attempt it. As it was, there was a great deal of banging and blazing, almost like the old Modder days, for a time; guns hard at it, and Mausers and Lee-Metfords jabbering away at a great rate, though, as both sides were under cover, the loss was not heavy. The firing went on till pitch dark, and we camped close under the ridge we had won. Next morning we found the ridge vacant, with only heaps of empty cartridge cans and an occasional blood-stain on the rocks to show where our enemy had lain.
A little way out from Pretoria there are some very smart-looking new houses, what they call "villa residences" in England, built in the style, a sort of mild and tepid Gothic (what I call grocer's Gothic, for it always reminds me of brown sugar and arrowroot), common around watering-places; small gables sticking out everywhere, till it looks like a cluster of dog-kennels; walls faced with ornamental tiles and lath and plaster; small shrubberies round, and a name on the gate. There were two especially beautiful ones. The General had one and we had the other. Ours was quite new. There was no furniture in it; but this, as we had been so long without it, we did not miss. But everything we really needed—gorgeous wall-papers, and dados, and polished floors, and electric-bells, and stained-glass windows—was there. We had hot baths at the Grand Hotel, and we dined at the club, and we forgot all about the war, and the veldt, and the dust, and the long marches, and the Boer lurking in ambush, and the whispering bullet from the hill. This went on for two days, and then we marched again, and we have been marching ever since.
We left Pretoria on June 19th, and, taking it easy, reached Bethlehem on July 9th, doing a bit under 200 miles in the twenty days. The meaning of the new scheme begins to dawn on us. Clements and Paget have come up from the west; Rundle is down south-west, near Ficksburg; the Basuto border runs up from there south and south-east, and within the ground thus enclosed we have penned a very considerable force of the enemy, among whom is that Jack-in-the-box, Christian De Wet. We know they are there, and indeed we have little fights with their scouts every day. The question is, how are we to collar them? The country is very broken and hilly and very extensive.
Hunter is looking after us now. Poor Ian Hamilton, as you will know, had an accident at Heidelberg. His horse put a foot in an antbear's hole, just in front of me as it happened, and came down, flinging the general forward over his head. I thought he was killed, he lay so still, but it was only his collar-bone and a bad shaking. He is in the field again now.
Hunter has a great reputation as a fighter, which is rather alarming, especially when we are confronted with such a poisonous country as the one before us now; a medley of big mountain ranges, fantastically heaped, stretching thirty miles south to Basutoland, and forming part of the great mountain formation that reaches to and culminates in the Drakensberg range. These hills are garrisoned by about 7000 Boers with several guns, and De Wet to lead them; altogether a formidable force. There is a saying, that you should not bite off more than you can chew. I hope we have not done that. Hunter looks as if he could chew a good lot, I think. Still the job is likely to be a difficult one to handle, and if he asks my advice I shall tell him to leave it to Rundle.
I should think a life of this sort would be likely to have some permanent effect on one's mind and intellect. The last mail—that is to say, the last news of any sort of the outside world—which we have received was on April 27th before leaving Bloemfontein; three months less a week since any whisper concerning events or people out of our immediate sight has reached us. My ignorance of things in general weighs on me. It is a taste of life in the dark ages before modern inventions kept one in touch with the world.
During all this time we have been wandering like an army in a dream over the unlimited surface of the veldt. The same programme is repeated day by day. A little before dawn you hear through your blanket-folds the first unwelcome "Saddle up," and the muttered curses in reply. You unwind yourself with groans. A white-frost fog blots out everything at fifty yards, and a white sugary frost encrusts the grass. These first hours are piercingly cold, for it is now mid-winter with us. A cup of water left overnight is frozen solid. You dress by simply drawing your revolver-strap over your shoulder, and flinging your blanket round you, make your way to where a couple of black boys are bending over the beginnings of a fire, and to which several other blanketed and shivering figures are converging with the same thought—coffee—in every mind.
Then the great army column that has curled itself up like a caterpillar for the night begins slowly to uncurl. On the march our huge convoy stretches out in line, waggon following waggon along the rude track, and extending to a length of nearly ten miles. At night, of course, it collects (parks is the proper word) at some selected spot where the ground is favourable, and where in the shape of a sluit, river, or farm-dam there is water. On the slopes and hills around infantry pickets are set, while the convoy and main camp are massed in the hollow beneath. You must not think of our camp in the English sense of the word. We have no tents. The men sleep tightly rolled in greatcoat and blanket, stretched on the bare earth, with saddles for pillows. If anything takes you about the camp at night, you might think you were walking among thick strewn corpses after a fearful carnage, so stiff and still the frosted bodies lie on the ground.
Now the great creature wakes for its next crawl. First its antennæ, or long feelers, are pushed out in front. Its scouts, that is, among which, if you belong to our corps, you will probably find yourself, go cantering on ahead. They pass the pickets on the hill, who promptly shoulder blankets and turn back to camp, and break into extended order, and throw out little feelers of their own in front and to the sides as they enter an unexplored country. Following them come several companies of infantry, a block of solid strength, marching at the top of the column, and a battery or section of guns. Then comes the long line of convoy waggons, piled high with provisions, fodder, and kit, strengthened and protected at intervals by companies of infantry marching at ease, with the two great cow-guns somewhere about the middle. The tail of the column, like the head, is strengthened by a considerable force of infantry, followed at an interval of a mile or so by the mounted rearguard, which has scattered its scouts far and wide across the track of the column, and withdraws them from point to point as we advance. Likewise to left and right, far out on the plain, the horsemen of the flank guards are scattered in little bands of twos and threes, cantering along or stopping and spying, sniffing cautiously round kopjes or peeping into farms, and by-and-by you will probably hear from one direction or other a few scattered single shots, and yonder two scouts in the distance, lately advancing so quietly, are now seen to be turned and galloping back as hard as they can split, while two or three Mausers crack at them from the sky-line.
It is a pretty sight, from some hill far in advance, to turn back and watch the army coming into view. You push on, scouts feeling the way, to occupy some prominent kopje on the line of march, and climbing up and sitting among the rocks, command with your glasses a view far and wide over the plain. The air has been very cold and sharp, with an intense penetrating cold hitherto, but now the sun is shining and its mellow warmth is instantly felt. The rich pure colour-lines, only seen when the sun, rising or setting, is low in the sky, lie straightly ruled across the plain, brown and orange and pale yellow, and in the distance blue. The ten-mile off rocks look but a mile in this air. Every object, distant or near, is exact to the least detail. So clear are the outlines you would think there was no atmosphere here at all, and that you might be looking out over the unaired landscapes of the moon. One would think that such an air would breed an exceptional race, and that the men, and horses too, for that matter, of this country would show something of the Arab character, sensitive, fiery, and high strung. Yet nothing can be conceived less Arab like than your stolid but practical Dutchman and the underbred screw he rides.
Left and right of you, your two or three flankers, half a mile off, have halted, in obedience to your halting, and are standing by their horses' heads scanning the country. Under the kopje your main body are sitting about, while their ponies, with bridles thrown over their heads, graze. Far back, two or three miles, the bits of dark kilt showing behind their khaki aprons, a company of the Camerons comes into view, the brown colour so exactly matching the plain that they are first visible only by their motion. Here come the flank guards, sprinkled far out over the country. And now, at the point where the distant kopjes slope to the plain, the air grows heavy with dust-wreaths, rising like steam from a cauldron, and underneath, slowly emerging, comes something dark and solid. It is the head of the column. The great caterpillar is crawling forward. You must push on—"Stand to your horses!"
LETTER XX
PRINSLOO'S SURRENDER—I
CAMP, NEAR FOURIESBERG, July 26, 1900.
We have a whole day of peace and rest before us—very welcome after the hard fighting we have been doing lately. This lull is to allow Bruce-Hamilton and Macdonald to stop the exits at the eastern end of the valley. We don't want to push the enemy east till we are sure the passes in that direction have been secured. Some of us are annoyed at the delay. We were in touch with the enemy this morning, our scouts and advance guard exchanging shots with their rearguard. We could see them prancing about on the bare hills east of Fouriesberg, and making off in a leisurely way up the eastern valley, and most of us were quite expecting that we should give chase immediately.
Hunter rode forward to have a look. He watched the tiny horsemen hovering on the hills or cantering away; then back he came with a quiet smile on his face, and instead of ordering the advance, as the impetuous ones expected, he led his column back over the way we had come for several miles, and then camped.
So here we are, sitting or lying about, sleeping, smoking, or reading. Our camp is in a small plain, five or six miles from Fouriesberg, surrounded by ranges of great hills. Those south and east, their gaunt peaks rising, streaked with white, above the lower and nearer ones, are in Basutoland. They play an important part in our programme, for it is against that huge barrier that we are pressing the Boers. There are some rounded, turf-clad hills, but most are rocky. Sharp points and stony ridges rise up with jagged and clear-cut outlines into the sky, with gorges and valleys retreating in between, full of deep blue shade, and often horizontal bands of strata, showing like regularly built courses of white masonry along the flanks of the mountains. It is very fine, though gaunt, bare, and untenanted. We have had nothing but level veldt to march on for weeks past, and the change to the eye is a pleasant one. Nevertheless, it is a bad country for our business. To us mountain ranges are not fine scenery, but strong positions; and rocks and crags are not grand and picturesque, but merely good cover. We always serve out extra-ammunition when we come to a pretty bit of scenery.
The present position is this: We have got the Boers, a big lot of them, at any rate, into a very broken and mountainous country, a country which, though it suits their tactics and is strong for defence, is nevertheless very difficult to get out of. The way south is barred by the Basutoland border. They dare not cross that or they would have the hordes of Basutos, who are already buzzing and humming like a half-roused hive, on to them. The other passes Hunter occupies in this way: Rundle comes up from the south-west to Fouriesberg through Commando Nek. Paget and Clements march south towards the same point through Slabbert's Nek. A little farther east Hunter himself forces Retiefs Nek, while farther east still Bruce-Hamilton, helped by Macdonald, is to hold Naawpoort Nek and block the Golden Gate road. The western columns, i.e. Rundle's, Clement's, Paget's, and Hunter's, are to force a simultaneous entrance into the Fouriesberg valley, and having got the enemy's force jammed against the Basuto border, to force it to turn eastward up the rugged Caledon valley, the only two exits to which are, we hope, by this time held by Bruce-Hamilton and Macdonald. This we have now done. Now it only remains to see whether these eastern exits have been successfully occupied by our columns or not.
PLAN TO ILLUSTRATE PRINSLOO'S SURRENDER
From the moment of leaving Bethlehem, at which place we remained nearly a fortnight while the General placed his columns, we entered among the hills and fighting was continuous. Our passage to force was Relief's Nek, and, as we had expected, the Boers made a determined stand there. The ground lay in a naturally defensive position; a narrow plain among steep, almost precipitous, ranges, and in the plain, arresting further progress, an abruptly sunken valley, scooped out to a depth of a couple of hundred feet; as though, what must perhaps have happened, some sudden collapse down below had allowed the ground here to fall in. The sides are in most places precipitous, but to the north they shelve up by degrees in terraces of sloping rock which a man can easily clamber up. The first terrace is only a few feet deep, and accordingly a number of men can form here along the brink and fire across the plain, being totally concealed from the advancing troops. Moreover, the edge of this curious and sudden valley is indented and pierced with a number of little crevices and fissures in which riflemen can snugly ensconce themselves with little risk of being seen by attackers in front. This was the main Boer position. You see it departed from the general rule, and instead of occupying a hill, occupied a hollow. They are past-masters in the art of choosing ground. The adjacent heights were also held.
On the morning of the 23rd we struck our camp a few miles north of the Nek, and advanced to find out whether the enemy were in position here or not. We started before daylight. The night had been intensely cold and very wet. On the high mountains snow had fallen. The sky was heavily clouded, and about sunrise-time dense masses of mist rose and clung about the hills, sometimes closing in the view at fifty yards and then drifting off and leaving it clear again. Our scouts advanced steadily, reconnoitring hill after hill and ridge after ridge, but still there was no sound of firing, and we began to think that the enemy had abandoned the place altogether. This preliminary scouting work, poking about in the hills with a handful of men to find the enemy, always reminds me of tufting for deer in the Exmoor woods before the pack is laid on.
Then there came a few shots from our extreme right, from the hills on the right of the valley's nose, sounding very muffled and dull in the mist, and we, out on the left, advanced with the more caution. It was my chance to come upon the enemy first on this side, and as it will give you a fair notion of the usual risks of scouting, I will tell you how it happened!
I was out with my tufters on the left front, and we were drawing with all possible care the hills on that side. In front of us was a tall peak, and I sent a few men to work round it on the left while I went round the right. This hill really overlooked the Boer position. My left flankers got round and rejoined me in front. Either they must have been concealed from the Boers by the mist or have been mistaken for a party of Boers themselves, for they had passed within a few hundred yards of the edge where the enemy lay and were not fired at.
Damant, our captain, coolest and bravest of officers, now joined me, and with two or three men we pushed cautiously on towards some loose rocks, which, from the top of the rise, seemed to command a view of the valley beneath. We had advanced to within eighty yards of the rocks, in open order, when we thought we heard voices talking, and immediately afterwards some one said loudly in Dutch, "Who rides there?" And then another voice more to the right exclaimed, "Here they are!" At the same instant one caught a motion as of heads and shoulders cuddling down and adjusting themselves in a disagreeable way. There they were and no mistake, all tucked in among the rocks like wood-lice.
Our position then was a curious one, for we had actually walked quite in the open up to within speaking distance of the main Boer position, a position that was to defy our army for a day and a half.
The ground sloped down in a slight hollow. It was thickly sprinkled with snow and dotted here and there with little green spots where the grass tufts showed through. A wire fence crossed the hollow lower down. Luckily we heard their voices before they started shooting, and instantly we turned and rode for it, the Mausers all opening immediately and the bullets cracking and whistling round our ears. As bad luck would have it, my pony, which, like most of them, knows and dreads the sound of rifles fired at him (though he will stand close to a battery or among men firing without minding it in the least), became so frantic at the noise of the bullets that I was quite unable to steer him. With head wrenched round he bored away straight down the hill towards the wire. As we got to it I managed to lift him half round and we struck it sideways. The shock flung me forward on to his neck, which I clasped with my left arm and just saved myself falling. For an instant or two he struggled in the wire, a mark for every rifle, and then got clear. In his efforts he had got half through his girths and the saddle was back on his rump. A pretty spectacle we must have looked, I sitting back on his tail, my hat in my hand, both stirrups dangling, and the bullets whistling round both of us like hailstones. However, I lugged him out at last, and we went up the side of the fence broadside on to the shooters, as hard as ever we could lay legs to the ground. It is a difficult thing to bring off a crossing shot at that pace, and in a few hundred yards we were over the slope and out of shot. I have seen lots of our men have much narrower escapes than this.
Well, after all that, we will get back to the action. Having located the enemy, the Guides all collected behind the conical hill, climbed up, and from the edges of it began shooting down into the Boer position. Here we were joined by the Black Watch, who carried on the same game. It was not, however, at all a paying game, and the fact that the Boers had not held this hill themselves, though so close to their position, is sufficient of itself to show their remarkable skill in choice of ground. For the hill, conical and regular in shape, was perfectly bare, and while they behind the sharp ledges and in the fissures of the rocks below were well concealed from the men above, these as they crept round the smooth hillside came into immediate view against the sky. The sleet of bullets shaving the hill edge was like the wind whistling past. The Black Watch lost a lot of men here. In the afternoon the Guides and some of Lovat's Scouts pushed forward on the left and gained a low ridge, where, lying down, we could command a part of the enemy's position, and send in a flanking fire. This manoeuvre was useful and suggested a plan for next day. That night I had to take out a picket on a hill on our south-east front and had but a sorry time of it; for it was a bitterly cold, rather wet night, and the position was not without its anxiety. I got little sleep.
Next morning, July 24, soon after light, the main body of the Guides and Lovat's Scouts (who are under Rimington at present) came out, and we rode down to the slopes on the left of the Boer valley again. Here we crept up as far as we could and began to put in our fire. It must have been very annoying for them, for a part of their position was quite exposed to us. We could see the short white cliff at the edge of the basin and the Boers moving about and running up and down, diving into fissures and getting under cover, for all the world like rabbits, as our fire searched the position. They replied, but though a lot of bullets were whistling about, no one was hit. There was a Maxim at the foot of the conical hill rattling away, and the Black Watch were again on the hill itself, blazing away at the rocks as vigorously as ever. Then at last between us and them up gallops a section of guns, and the little puff balls begin to burst along the rock edge in a way which we could see was very disconcerting for the Boers, who were rapidly finding the place too hot for them. A little after, some one sings out, "Here comes the attack!" and true enough we can make out the little khaki dots in long loose strings moving forward round the hill towards the valley head. It is the Seaforths. We on our side "carry on the motion," dash forward, lie down and shoot, and on again. We make for a kopje on our edge of the valley. The fire is too hot for the Boers to dare to show up much and there is not much opposition. But I can assure you that a charge of 1500 yards, even without the enemy's fire, is a serious thing enough. Puffing and panting, I struggle on. Long-legged Colonials go striding by land leave me gasping in the rear. When at last we reach the kopje and look down into the sunken valley, the Seaforths are pouring in their fire on the retreating Boers, our fellows are doing the same from the kopje top, but I myself am too pumped out to care for anything and can only lie on the ground and gasp.
I see in your last letter you want to know about the character of the Guides, and whether there has been any cases of treachery among them. I don't know what started these old yarns. They were invented about Magersfontein time, probably to account for that awful mishap, and got into the local press here and made a lot of fuss, but we have heard nothing since on that score. There is such a lot of treachery put here (owing to the intermingling of English and Dutch in their two territories) that almost anything in that line seems credible, and there are numbers of people about, loafers in bars and fifth-rate boarding-houses, to whom anything base seems perfectly natural, and who delight in starting and circulating such tales. At the same time there are also numbers of honest and loyal men, and it is from these, and exclusively from these, that the fighters are drawn. In South Africa, and among the South Africans, a war of this sort, between neighbours and cousins, is the sternest test of loyalty. Many have failed to stand it. But the loyalty of those who have not wavered, but have taken up arms for their country in a quarrel like this, is of a sort you can trust to the utmost extremity. There are no men in the field who feel so deep an animosity towards the Boers, and whom the Boers in their turn hate so much, as the fighting South African Colonials. As for the Guides, I can assure you that there has not been a single case of any one of our men having been accused of treachery, nor suspected of treachery. I have made careful inquiries, lest such a case might have occurred without my knowledge, and I am assured by our adjutant (C.H. Rankin, Captain 7th Hussars) that there has been no such case, and that the slander was without the slightest foundation whatever.
Shortly after Magersfontein the greater part of the Guides turned back to Colesberg, leaving fifteen of us with Methuen, the services of the whole corps not being required, as Methuen's force was now stationary. Before it left, Methuen paraded the corps and spoke in the warmest terms of the good work it had done. Nevertheless it was their turning back, or being sent back, as it was called, that gave a pretext to the slander that was then started. Later, when his attention was called to the story, Methuen wrote to the Cape Times a most emphatic letter vindicating the corps from the least suspicion, and indignantly denying that the least cause for any had existed. Lord Roberts himself, who came up soon afterwards, wrote a very handsome and decisive letter to the same paper, and since then I don't think we have heard anything about it. The whole story is so ridiculous, considering the way the Guides hate the Boers, and the danger of the services they do, that to any one who knows anything about the corps it is a tale rather to be laughed, at than seriously resented. I saw the other day a letter from Hunter to Rimington, in which the General speaks of the corps with a kind of weighty deliberation that is very satisfactory, mentioning emphatically its "trustworthiness," its "bravery," and its "exceptional and proved value in the field."
Our casualty list so far is about forty per cent., I believe; but this loss, though not light, does not in a Colonial corps give an adequate idea of the service done. All the Colonials, so far as I know (the Australians and South Africans certainly), have much the same qualities that make our enemies so formidable. They have individual intelligence and skill, a faculty for observation, and the habit of thinking for themselves. They are therefore able to take care of themselves in a way which our regular troops, mostly town-bred men, without independent training, cannot do.
The difference comes out chiefly in scouting, including all the flanking and advance guard business, extending for several miles to left and right, and in front and rear of an army column, by which that column feels its way through an enemy's country. The regulars usually carry out these tactics in long lines with wide intervals between the men. But nothing is so conspicuous as a long line of men riding at fifty yards' interval. They can be detected a dozen miles off, and plenty of opportunities will occur for a mobile, cunning enemy like the Boers to lie in ambush and get a shot at the outsider. Our regulars are better at this game than they used to be, but many lives have been lost at it. On the other hand, Colonials adopt more the tactics of a Scotch gillie in a deer forest, whose object is to see, but not to be seen. Sky-lines are avoided and cover taken every advantage of. From places where a good view is to be obtained the country is intently studied; not by a horseman poised in relief like the Achilles statue in Hyde Park, but by a man who has left his horse on the reverse slope and lies hidden among the rocks with his glass. Again, if a farm or suspicious-looking kopje has to be approached, this is partly encircled, and threatened or examined in flank or rear before being occupied; while if the place, a long range of hills for instance, has to be approached in front, a sudden left or right wheel at long range may often draw the enemy's fire. These are a few of the many expedients that sometimes suggest themselves to lessen risk. In all, the first necessity is personal intelligence in the men and the habit of taking notice and thinking for themselves, faculties which the independent, self-reliant life of the Colonials has greatly developed. Just the same holds good when it comes to shooting; choosing cover, keeping oneself hidden, creeping on from point to point without giving the enemy a fair shot, or detecting the probable bushes or rocks behind which an enemy may be lying, or any sign of his whereabouts. The Tommy as he advances is apt to expose himself, because he doesn't think. The Colonial will get to the same spot perhaps quite unperceived. This is why I say that our loss does not give an adequate idea of the work done by the corps. The defence of the conical hill here at Relief's Nek is a good example. Our men hold the hill for several hours before the regulars come up, and lose one man. As soon as the regulars arrive (though by this time the exposed places are known and the enemy located), they begin to lose men, and by the conclusion of the action have lost, I am told, over forty. I think, and have often spoken so highly of our soldiers' courage, that I don't hesitate to point out their weakness. They are lacking in personal intelligence. For all their pluck, they don't know how to look after themselves. There have been, as you will have heard, many cases in which detached parties of our cavalry, mounted infantry, and yeomanry have been cut off and captured. How often has this happened to the Colonials?
LETTER XXI
PRINSLOO'S SURRENDER—II
August 4th.
We have been up the valley and back again, and I write this once more from Fouriesberg. We passed through here, joining Rundle, as I told you a week ago, and pushed on eastward in the direction of Naawpoort Nek and the Golden Gate. Six miles out from here, passing through a very rugged country, we came on their outposts. These we shelled and drove back. They then retired to some hills not very high, but with perpendicular sides of low white cliffs commanding the approach across the plain. These they held till nightfall. We shelled them a good deal and knocked out the only gun they had, and the infantry pushed forward in front and we took a hill on the right, but the attack was not pressed home, as it would have cost too many lives. The infantry took the hill during the night, but found it evacuated, the Boers having retired as soon as it got dark.
We did not know all this time how things had gone with Macdonald and Bruce-Hamilton, and whether or not they had been able to block the eastern exits. On this everything depended. So it was with a feeling of the most gleeful satisfaction that we heard next morning, having followed the Boers up some two or three miles without seeing anything of them, the deep, heavy baying of a big gun in the distance, which we all recognised as the voice of one of the 5-inch cow-guns that had gone with Bruce-Hamilton. It fired a few shots and then ceased. With infinite toil, forty oxen to each gun, we then dragged our own two 5-inchers up the hill we were on, and got them into position for shelling the defiles ahead. They were not, however, needed. Messengers now began to arrive from the Boer laagers carrying white flags. There was a lot of palaver. These went, others came. Le Gallais, our chief of the staff, interviewed them, while Hunter strolled a little way apart, dreamily admiring the view. It was evident the Boer envoys were sticking out for terms which they couldn't get. I could see Le Gallais indicate the surroundings with summary gestures. The Boers looked very glum. They eyed the cow-guns especially with profound disgust. These were looking particularly ridiculous. The nose of one of them projected in the direction of those secret Boer-tenanted defiles as if the great creature were sniffing for its enemies in the distance; which gave it a very truculent and threatening air, as who should say, "Come now, Le Gallais, old fellow, suppose you let me put a word in," while the other, hanging its head till its nose touched the very ground, seemed overcome, poor wretch, with a sudden fit of bashfulness, most absurd in so huge and warlike a monster. The Boers looked from them to Le Gallais and from Le Gallais to them, but there was no more hope from one than the other, and at last they realised that there was nothing for it but to surrender, and surrender was agreed to. We could scarcely believe our good fortune. At Paardeberg we caught 4000, but we used 50,000, more or less, to do it, and we lost about 1500 doing it. Here we trapped as many or more, composed of some of the best commandoes of the Free State, caught them, too, in a wild mountainous country such as you would think was almost impregnable. We used 15,000 to do it, and we lost, I suppose, not 200 altogether. Also, we have taken enormous quantities of horses, oxen, and waggons, which will come in very useful.
It seems to me that Hunter deserves the utmost credit that can be given to him. We have had plenty of generals who have done direct fighting and done it well; but, with the doubtful exception of Paardeberg, we have had no triumph of tactics. We have never scored off the Boers, never made a big capture, or cut them up, or taken guns or transport, or bested them in any decisive way by superior strategy till now. This has always been our lament. We have always said, "Why, with all these armies in the field, cannot we surround them, or catch them, or deal a decisive blow of some sort?" But hitherto we have never succeeded in bringing off such a coup. We have pushed them before us, losing as many or more than they at every shift, but, whenever we have thought to get a hold of them, they have always eluded us. You may think it is a strange thing that they have been caught this time. The daring of Hunter's plan and the rapidity it was carried out with made it succeed. The Boers—so they tell me at least—never believed that we should venture with so small a force to penetrate by four or five different routes into such a strong country. The scheme seemed to lay us open to a disaster if the enemy had rapidly concentrated and flung itself on one of the separated forces. This danger, however, was more apparent than real, because the ground manoeuvred over was not altogether of very large extent, so that relief might be sent from one column to another, or the enemy, if concentrated against one column, rapidly followed up by one or more of the others. Besides which, if the country offered strong positions to take, it offered strong ones to hold, and in a very short time any threatened column could have placed itself in such a position as to make it impossible for the Boers to shift it in the time at their disposal. Still the plan, considering the Boers' skill in defending strong positions, had an audacious look about it. Several of the Boer prisoners have since told me—I don't know with what truth—that they thought we should follow them in by the Relief Nek pass, and that it was their intention to work round and threaten our communications, and either cut us off or force us to fight our way out as best we could.
The quickness of our advance, too, was of the utmost importance. From the moment we started, the enemy was given no opportunity to pull himself together and look about him. Hunter, Paget, Clements, and Rundle dashed into the Fouriesberg Valley exactly together. Directly we had got through, Hunter detached the main part of his column, the Highland Brigade, under Macdonald, and sent it with several guns as hard as it could pelt to back up Bruce-Hamilton, knowing, now that we had carried our end of the valley, that the pressure would come at the east end. Meantime, while Macdonald marched, we waited. We even retreated two or three miles, and for twenty-four hours lay on the pass and slept. Then we got up and began sauntering up the big irregular valley along the Basutoland border towards Naawpoort Nek.
It was a moment of infinite expectation. Bets were laid on the amount of our bag. The general impression was that we should get some of them, but that the main body would, somehow or other, escape. We had so often toiled and taken nothing, that this sudden miraculous draught quite flabbergasted us. And what must have been the feelings of the poor Boers? They tried Naawpoort Nek: no exit. They knocked at the Golden Gate: it was locked. Then back they turned and met Hunter sauntering up the valley, and we gave them the time of day with our cow-guns, and told them how glad we were to see them. "Fancy meeting you, of all people in the world!" And so they chucked it. It was a complete checkmate.
The surrender occupied the next three days; our total bag 4100, I am told. I wish you could have been there. It was a memorable sight among those uninhabited and lonely mountains. The heights of Basutoland, ridge behind ridge, to right of us; the tops snow streaked; groups of excited Basutos riding about in the plains, watching our movements; to left the great mountain chain we had fought our way through; and in the midst spread over the wide saddle-backed hill, that slopes away north-eastward, and breaks up in a throng of sharp peaks and a jumble of inaccessible-looking hills in the direction of the Golden Gate, is drawn up the dirty, ragged, healthy, sun-scorched British army with greasy rifles in its blackened hands, watching imperturbably and without much interest, the parties of Boers, and waggons, and droves of cattle as they come meandering in. Each Boer, as he rides up, hands over his rifle, or more often flings it angrily on the ground, and the armourers set to work, smashing them all across an anvil. Rather a waste of good weapons it seemed, I must say. Many of the Boers were quite boys, about fourteen or fifteen. They are much better looking than you would think from the men. The men are big and well built, but they look, for the most part, stupid and loutish, and when this is not so, their expression is more often cunning than intelligent. The amount of hair about their face, too, and their indifference to washing, does not improve their appearance. However, in the boy stage, and before the dulness of their surrounding has had time to tell, they are quite different, frank-faced and manly, with clear skin, tall and well grown, like young larches. It does seem strange that such mere children should be in the field against us. What would you think of giving Puckie a rifle and sending him out to fight? Boer prisoners have told me that the courage of these boys could be relied on; they were often braver, and would stick to a position they had been placed in longer than the men. They showed traces of the experience they had been through, though. Not only in being deeply tanned and more or less ragged and thin, but by an unmistakable expression (in many instances) in their faces and in their eyes; a dilated look, as of one who sees something appalling before him, and braces himself to face it out. Considering what it is to be exposed to lyddite and shrapnel fire (the absolute hell of din and concussion besides rain of bullets), one doesn't wonder that it leaves marks on young faces.
R. and I rode eastward through the hills in the Golden Gate direction, meeting parties of Boers, waggons, Cape-carts, &c., coming straggling in. It reminded me of the road to Epsom on a Derby morning. There is some pleasure in meeting Boers on these terms. "Good morning. How are you? A pleasant morning for a ride, is it not?" "Good morning, sir; it is fine now, but I think we shall have rain later." That's what I like. There's nothing like a little urbanity.
Towards the end of a long valley we come to some signs of defensive work that interest us. The Boers evidently expected to be able to await our advance here before they found their retreat was cut off. They have thrown up some shelters. We noticed from afar off several very conspicuous stone sangars, but coming close, we were surprised to find that they were made of stones loosely put together with big chinks, very flimsy and frail, and much too high for their purpose, too. They evidently were not intended for shelters at all. What were they there for? We looked carefully round, and at last the meaning of the device struck us. A hundred yards to the right the ground dropped sharp, leaving an edge; here was the real position and the natural cover. We walked over, and found the usual little hollows and inconspicuous stones arranged. Here was where their riflemen had lain, with a view right up the valley. And the meaning of those conspicuous edifices was now plain. Stuck up on the bare brow, plain to be seen at 2000 yards, they were simply meant to draw our fire. The smokeless Mausers would have told no tales, and I have no doubt that, if the attack had come off, the device would have more or less succeeded, for the stone shelters, though obviously dummies on close inspection, looked all right at a distance. Besides, a definite mark always attracts fire. It was characteristic of Boer cuteness.
LETTER XXII
FIGHTING AND TREKKING
HEILBRON, August 17.
We stayed several days among the mountains on the scene of the surrender, collecting our prisoners and the waggons, guns, horses, &c., and sending them off to the railway. The valley, viewed from the hill where we were camped, looked much like one of our West Country horse fairs on a very large scale. The separate commandoes were herded together in big groups of several hundred men, sitting and lying about and talking. The ox-waggons and battered Cape-carts were drawn up together in a great array; but the busiest part of it all was the division of the horses into mobs fit or unfit for remounts, and the distribution of them to the various regiments. Rimington superintended this job. Of course, after all our marching, we were sadly in want of remounts. The Boers had any number of horses, many of them bringing in two or three apiece, and the majority were in good condition and fit for work, probably owing to the fact that the grazing all about this side of the Free State, especially among these mountains, is excellent. The South African ponies, I may tell you, are the only satisfactory mounts for South Africa. We have tried horses from all parts of the world now, and they can none of them stand the climate, work, and food like the native breeds. The South African pony, wretched little brute as he looks, will tripple and amble on, week after week and month after month, with a heavy man on his back, and nothing to eat but the pickings of sour, dried-up veldt grass and an occasional handful of Indian corn; and though you will eye him with an eye of scorn, no doubt (if he should happen to be allotted to your use), and envy some other man his fat Burmese or Argentine, yet by-and-by you will find out your mistake; for the fat Burmese and the Argentine, and all the other imported breeds, will gradually languish and fade away, and droop and die, worn down by the unremitting work and the bad, insufficient food; but your ragged little South African will still amble on, still hump himself for his saddle in the morning, and still, whenever you dismount, poke about for roots and fibres of withered grass as tough as himself, or make an occasional hearty meal off the straw coverings of a case of whisky bottles. With an action that gives the least possible exertion; with the digestion of an ostrich, and the eye of a pariah dog for any stray morsel of food; with an extraordinary capacity for taking rest in snatches, and recouping himself by a roll whenever you take his saddle off; and of course, from the natural toughness of his constitution, too, he is able to stand the long and gradual strain of being many hours under the saddle every day (and perhaps part of the night, too) in a way that unaccustomed horses cannot do. By this time we all know his merits, and there is immense demand from every mounted corps for the Boer ponies. The Major is up to his eyes in work, as officers and orderlies come galloping up with requisitions from the various regiments. He has the born horse lover's dislike for parting with a really good horse except to a man he knows something about. Loud and uproarious is the chaff and protestations (now dropping to confidential mutterings) as the herds of horses are broken up and the various lots assigned. As I say, it looks from the hilltop exactly like a west country fair on an enlarged scale, and the great lonely Basuto mountains, too, might seem a larger edition of the Exmoor hills around Winsford. The Boer prisoners, poor fellows, have no eye for the picturesque. They congregate together and grumble and watch the distribution of their horses with a very sour expression.
From this point we sent our prisoners in, viá Winberg, to the railway, the Major and most of the corps going with them as part of the escort; while I with twenty men, consisting partly of Guides and partly of Lovat's Scouts, was detached to continue as bodyguard to Hunter. He, with the main column (we reunited at Bethlehem), marched to Lindley and then here to Heilbron.
It was ten miles south of this that we came in contact with Olivier. Olivier and De Wet had both broken through our cordon at different times and escaped from the hills. Sent one morning with a message to the Sussex outside Slabbert's Nek I saw shells bursting, and all the appearance of a heavy fight going on over the hills to the north-west. This was Christian De Wet, who with several guns and about 1500 well-mounted men, had made a dash for freedom when he found the place was getting too hot, and had been promptly tackled by Broadwood when he got outside. Pursuer and pursued vanished into the blue distance of the veldt, battering each other as they went, like birds that fight and fly at the same time. Broadwood, however, had got hold of his enemy by the wrong end. What happened exactly we don't know, but De Wet got clear somehow, and immediately turned his attention to his beloved railway line, which he never can tear himself away from for more than a few days at a time. He is now, I should imagine, in the very seventh heaven of delight, having torn up miles of it, besides capturing several trains.
De Wet is getting an immense reputation. The rapidity of his movements is extraordinary. He always has two or three of our columns after him; sometimes half-a-dozen. Among these he wings his way like a fowl of some different breed, a hawk among owls. Some amusement was caused by the report in orders the other day that De Wet had marched north pursued "by various generals;" as if two or three, more or less, didn't matter, as indeed it didn't. Of course, mere fast marching would not always extricate him, but he shows such marvellous coolness and common sense in the way in which he doubles. Several times he has been reported surrounded; but each time when we came to look he had disappeared. It is like a conjuring trick. He seems to have an intuitive knowledge of the plans of our generals, and to divine how any movements of his will modify theirs. He makes a swift march. This he knows will set in motion a certain column. Night comes and back he steals, and dashes out through the gap left without any one being the wiser. He never loses his sangfroid, but acts always, in the most hopeless positions, with equal craft and rapidity. In short, like the prophet Isaiah, he is "capable de tout." For he can hit hard, too. I think since the arrival of the main army he is the only man who has scored off us at all freely. Sanna's Post and Reddersberg came first; then, last May, came the capture of the 500 Yeomanry at Lindley; that was followed immediately by the surprise of the Heilbron convoy and all its escort; then came the capture of the Derbyshire Militia, and a few days later the taking of Roodeval with a train of mails and various details. Even when he had bolted out the other day between our legs, and was flying north with two or three cavalry brigades after him, he found time to snap up a hundred Welsh Fusiliers and break the line as he passed. He is, they say, extremely amusing, and keeps his men always in a good temper with his jests; the other day, after one of his many train captures, he sent a message to the base to say that "he was sufficiently supplied with stores now, and would they kindly send up some remounts." He is now the only prize left worth taking, and every one is desperately keen in his pursuit. I notice, however, that people never seem to meet him when they want to, though when they don't want to, they very often do.
Olivier, with a force about equal to De Wet, also broke out from the hills, and having reached the open country, hung about to watch our movements. There are some kopjes ten miles south of Heilbron, very nicely arranged, with a back hill commanding a front one, so that the first position gained would only bring us under the fire of the second; a very favourite Boer trick. Here Olivier awaited our coming, and, knowing the range to an inch, landed his first shell plump in the middle of our convoy. Hunter, and we with him (it is certainly great fun being with the Staff for the time being), were at the head of the column, and heard the shell go over. Never have I seen a better shot. It exploded on the track, right underneath a great waggon, to the amazement and consternation of the Kaffir drivers and the wretched oxen; though they were all, I believe, a good deal more frightened than hurt. Three or four more quickly followed. "Roll that up," said Le Gallais to the Guide carrying the General's flag. A few minutes passed, during which we were shot at without being able to reply. Then two Field Batteries came galloping to the front. Guns! Guns! Way for the guns! like the fire-engines down Piccadilly they came tearing along. As the iron wheels strike upon rocks the guns leap and swing. Stones and splinters fly right and left, and the dust flung up by wheel and hoof boils along their course. Nothing is more stirring than to see guns coming full speed into action. In another minute they have lined up on the ridge and their shells are bursting on the enemy's hill.
Hector Macdonald is a man who always amuses me. Ordinarily he is a somewhat grim-looking individual; but when there is any fighting going on his whole manner changes, and he beams and mantles with a sort of suppressed mirth. He comes swaggering up now as the guns are opening, looking like a man who has just been told the best story he ever heard in his life, and is still chuckling over it. "They're on to us again," he bubbles out, knocking his boot with his whip in irrepressible glee. "What! what! they're on to us again." He looks round at us and grins, and seems to lick his lips as a shell goes howling overhead and bursts behind us. His merits as a general are very much discussed, but there is one thing he does thoroughly enjoy, more than any man I know, and that is being shot at. I suppose he would rather win a battle than lose one, but I am sure he would rather lose one than not fight at all.
Next to him, in marked contrast to his excitement, stands out the cool attentive face of "Archie" Hunter; the most popular officer, as I believe one might call him, of all the British army. He is noted chiefly as a fighter and for his dash and gallantry. He did all the fighting in the Egyptian campaign. During the siege of Ladysmith it was he who planned and led the night attack which blew up the big Boer gun. When I was coming out on the steamer the one question asked among the war correspondents, who wanted to be where the most fighting was going on, was "Where will Hunter be?" But it is probably his kindness and the deep interest he feels in all his men that makes him so universally popular. Here is a tiny instance, perhaps not worth mentioning. We were halted on the march for a moment, sitting about and smoking, when the General gave the word to mount, and one of the orderlies, a trooper of the Lancers, jumped up in a hurry and left his pipe behind him. Hunter saw the filthy, precious object lying on the ground, and put it in his own pocket. At the next halt he went up to the trooper, and with that manner of his of deliberate kindness, returned it to him. A mere nothing, of course, but very characteristic.
He has a way of looking at you, no matter who you are, Tommy or officer or what not, with a wonderfully kind expression, as if he felt the most friendly interest in you. And so he does; it is not a bit put on. He does not seem to think about himself, but about the people and things round him. Every morning he finds time to stop and ask after the horses and men of our little body, and to exchange a word with one or two of the men whom he has had occasion to notice. Not a grain of condescension is there in him; not even a thought that he is giving them pleasure. It is a natural impulse with him, the result of the real regard and interest he feels in every soldier that marches under him. In action his manner, always calm, is just as calm as at any other time. He says little; observing the most important developments or listening to the reports of orderlies from various parts of the field, more often than not without any comment at all. Yet nothing escapes him.
Our action with Olivier is a rather stupid one, and I shall not attempt to describe it. We take the first position, losing from forty to fifty men, only to find that the enemy have retired to the second range, and that it is too late to follow them up. Probably the only man at all satisfied with the day's performance is old Mac.
Through a weary land we have come marching north these ten days. The veldt is at its worst, parched and dry and dead. Our column trekking raises a huge cloud of reddish dust that hangs still in the air, and marks for miles back the way we have come. The whole expanse is quite colourless—almost white, or a dirty grey. All day long the blue sky is unvaried, and the sun glares down unobscured by a cloud; sky and earth emphasising each other's dull monotony. Only at sunrise and late evening some richer and purer lines of colour lie across the distant plain, and the air is fresh and keen. Round about the town, which, like all these Boer towns, stuck down in the middle of the veldt, reminds one of some moonstruck flotilla becalmed on a distant sea, the grass is all worn and eaten to the very dust. Whiffs of horrid smell from dead carcases of horses and cattle taint the air. All the water consists of a feeble stream, stagnant now and reduced to a line of muddy pools, some reserved for horses, some for washing, and some for drinking, but all of the same mud colour.
And yet even for this country, I think it with a kind of dull surprise as I look out over the naked hideousness of the land, men can be found to fight. What is it to be a child of the veldt, and never to have known any other life except the life of these plains? It is to reproduce in your own nature the main features of this extraordinary scenery. Here is a life of absolute monotony, a landscape, huge, and on a grand scale, but dull and unvaried, and quite destitute of any kind of interest, of any noteworthy detail, of any feature that excites attention and remark. And the people, its children, are like unto it. Their minds are as blank, as totally devoid of culture and of ideas as the plains around them. They have an infinite capacity for existing without doing anything or thinking anything; in a state of physical and mental inertia that would drive an Englishman mad. A Boer farmer, sitting on his stoep, large and strong, but absolutely lethargic, is the very incarnation of the spirit of the veldt. At the same time, when one remembers the clatter and gabble of our civilisation, it is impossible to deny him a certain dignity, though it may be only the dignity of cattle.
The problem will apparently be, when we have burnt these people out or shot them, and in various ways annexed a good deal of the land they now live on, how are we to replace them? What strikes one is that time and the country, acting on the naturally phlegmatic Dutch character, has produced a type exactly suited to this life and these surroundings. And it does seem in many ways a pity to destroy this type unless you have something to take its place. Except in one or two very limited areas, accessible to markets, and where there is a water supply, no English colonist would care to settle in this country. The Canadians and Australians, many of whom volunteered, and came here with the view of having a look at the land and perhaps settling, are, I hear, unanimous in condemning it. Indeed, it does not require any great knowledge of agriculture to see that a country like this, a lofty table-land, dry and barren, with no market handy, or chance of irrigation, is a wretched poor farming country. Hence the pity it seems of wiping out the burghers. They may not be a very lofty type of humanity, but they had the advantage in nature's scheme of filling a niche which no one else, when they are turned out, will care to fill in their place. The old dead-alive farm, the sunny stoep, the few flocks and herds and wandering horses sparsely scattered over the barren plain, the huge ox-waggon, most characteristic and intimate of their possessions, part tent and part conveyance, formed for the slow but sure navigation of these solitudes, and reminding one a great deal of the rough but seaworthy smacks and luggers of our coasts, that somehow seem in their rudeness and efficiency to stand for the very character of a whole life, all these things are no doubt infinitely dear to the Boer farmer, and make up for him the only life possible, but I don't think it would be a possible life for any one else. It seems inevitable that large numbers of farms, owing to death of owners, war indemnity claims, bankruptcy, and utter ruin of present holders, &c., will fall into the hands of our Government when the war is over, and these will be especially the poorer farms. But yet probably as years pass they will tend to lapse once more into Dutch hands, for it is difficult to believe that men of our race will ever submit to such a life of absolute stagnation. In dealing with the future of the country, it will always be a point that will have to be borne in mind, that the natural conditions of life outside the towns are such as favour the Dutch character very much more than they do the English.
LETTER XXIII
WRITTEN FROM HOSPITAL
HOSPITAL, KRONSTADT, September 6, 1900.
It is only a bad attack of influenza. I lie here in a dim, brown holland coloured twilight. A large marquee of double folded canvas keeps out the sun; a few shafts of light twinkle through here and there. Through three entrance gaps I catch glimpses, crossed by a web of tent ropes, of other surrounding tents, each neatly enclosed by a border of whitened stones, the purpose of which is to prevent people at night from tripping over the ropes. Everything is scrupulously neat and clean. Orderlies run from tent to tent minding their patients. Every now and then a pretty little nursing sister, with white cuffs and scarlet pelisse, trips across the open spaces between the straight lines of marquees, or stops to have a moment's chat and a little quiet bit of a flirt (they can always find time for that, I notice) with one of the officers or doctors. I watch with faint interest and a feeling of vague recollection. She looks up sideways and shades the sun off her eyes with her fingers. They keep it up still then!
Some way off, among the Tommies' quarters, I can see groups of patients in clean, dark-blue clothes walking about, or sitting on seats, taking the air; some hobbling on crutches, some with arms in slings, heads bandaged, or patched and mended in some way or other. You feel like some damaged implement tossed aside a moment for repair. "Mend me this lieutenant!" The doctors get to work, deft and quick; a little strengthening, repairing, polishing, and out you are shot again.
It has been the only glimpse of absolute peace and rest I have had this eleven months. Every one is kind and sympathetic; a cool breeze blows through the looped-up tents; it is all very luxurious and pleasant for wearied-out soldiers. I like to lie and watch the little pictures through the tent openings of low blue veldt hills in the distance (which somehow remind one of the background glimpses in old Italian pictures), and dream over things one has seen and done, many of which seem already such ages ago, and listen to the bugle calls that sound at intervals in the camp. I have managed to buy some pyjamas. Probably you would see something very ludicrous in the way in which, after an elaborate hot-bath and hair-cutting, dressed out in one's clean pyjamas and lying between clean sheets, one rolls one's eyes with unutterable complacency on one's surroundings. All our comforts are attended to. We have a shell-proof shelter in a ravine close by, handy in case of visits from De Wet; and the two great cow-guns, like guardian angels, doze on the top of the hill behind the hospital. Under the shadow of their wing I always feel perfectly safe.
From patients who come in daily from various parts of the country and various columns we get a general impression of how things are going. The army seems to be adopting very severe measures to try and end the campaign out of hand, and the papers at home are loudly calling for such measures, I see, and justifying them. Nevertheless, it is childish to pretend that it is a crime in the Boers to continue fighting, or that they have done anything to disentitle them to the usages of civilised warfare. The various columns that are now marching about the country are carrying on the work of destruction pretty indiscriminately, and we have burnt and destroyed by now many scores of farms. Ruin, with great hardship and want, which may ultimately border on starvation, must be the result to many families. These measures are not likely, I am afraid, to conduce much to the united South Africa we talk so much of and thought we were fighting for.
I had to go myself the other day, at the General's bidding, to burn a farm near the line of march. We got to the place, and I gave the inmates, three women and some children, ten minutes to clear their clothes and things out of the house, and my men then fetched bundles of straw and we proceeded to burn it down. The old grandmother was very angry. She told me that, though I was making a fine blaze now, it was nothing compared to the flames that I myself should be consumed in hereafter. Most of them, however, were too miserable to curse. The women cried and the children stood by holding on to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house. They won't forget that sight, I'll bet a sovereign, not even when they grow up. We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods—beds, furniture, and gimcracks strewn about the veldt; the crackling of the fire in their ears, and smoke and flame streaming overhead. The worst moment is when you first come to the house. The people thought we had called for refreshments, and one of the women went to get milk. Then we had to tell them that we had come to burn the place down. I simply didn't know which way to look. One of the women's husbands had been killed at Magersfontein. There were others, men and boys, away fighting; whether dead or alive they did not know.
I give you this as a sample of what is going on pretty generally. Our troops are everywhere at work burning and laying waste, and enormous reserves of famine and misery are being laid up for these countries in the future.
How far do you mean to go in this? Are you going to burn down every house, and turn the whole country into a desert? I don't think it can be done. You can't carry out the Cromwellian method in the nineteenth century. Too many people know what is going on, and consciences are too tender. On the other hand, nothing is so disastrous as that method half carried out. We can't exterminate the Dutch or seriously reduce their numbers. We can do enough to make hatred of England and thirst for revenge the first duty of every Dutchman, and we can't effectively reduce the numbers of the men who will carry that duty out. Of course it is not a question of the war only. It is a question of governing the country afterwards.
So far we only really hold the ground on which our armies stand. If I were to walk out from this tent a mile or two over the hills yonder, I should probably be shot. Kronstadt has been ours for four months. It is on the main railway. The country all round is being repeatedly crossed by our troops. Yet an Englishman would not be safe for a minute out of range of those guns on the hill.
There is a delightful feeling of spring in the air. We have had some warm, heavy rains lately. The veldt grass, till now dry and dusty and almost white, is beginning to push up tiny green blades, and the green colour is beginning to spread almost imperceptibly over the distant hills. I begin to feel a sort of kindred impulse in myself. The old lethargy, bred of the dull, monotonous marches over the dreary plains, is passing, and I begin to cock an attentive eye at the signs of awakening, and feel that I am waking up myself. If you could see the view from here, the barren expanse of veldt stretching miles away, the cluster of tin roofs and the few leafless thorn-trees beyond, I have no doubt you would laugh at this fancy of a spring day. And yet I am sure I can feel it; there is a change in the air. It has grown elastic and feels alive, and there is a smell in it to my mind of earth and vegetables. Yesterday, when I toddled in as far as the village, I saw a little fruit tree in a garden that carried white starry blossoms at the ends of its black twigs. It gave me quite a thrill. Oh, to be in England now that April—Dear me! I was forgetting 'tis autumn, and partridges and stubble fields with you.
The Hospital Commission of Inquiry has just turned up here, very dignified and grand in a train of half-a-dozen saloon carriages, which must be a great nuisance on the overworked lines. I have had several talks with the R.A.M.C. officers and men here about the alleged neglect and deficiencies, especially with the second in command, a very candid, liberal-minded man. He quite admits the shortcomings. The service is under-manned. There are not enough medical officers and not enough orderlies. This hospital, for instance, is entitled to a full colonel and two lieutenant-colonels, instead of which it has only one lieutenant-colonel, and the same proportion is preserved in the lower grades. Men in all departments are stinted, and the hospitals are all seriously short-handed. They have done their best to make up the deficiency with volunteers and civilian doctors and surgeons, but it is only partly made up. Their numbers compare very unfavourably with the numbers allotted to other nations' hospitals in the field. This has all been represented to the War Office many times of late years without result.
At the same time, with the men and accommodation they had, the hospitals have done their utmost. In the base hospitals there was nothing to complain of. At Bloemfontein there was great suffering owing to lack of medical staff, surgeons, nurses, orderlies, &c., and also owing to the lack of necessary supplies and medical comforts. For the shortness of the staff the War Office is of course responsible, and as blaming the War Office hurts nobody, I dare say the Commission will come down on it severely. For the shortness of supplies, this was due to the working of our line of communication, which considered the efficiency of the army a great deal, and the lives of the sick very little. But here you come to individuals, and the matter craves careful handling.
It is no fun fighting for you people at home, because you don't know when to clap. The English papers' account of Prinsloo's surrender have just come in. By Jupiter, for all the notice you take of it, it might be the capture of a Boer picket and a dozen men. Here have we been marching and fighting and freezing and sweating and climbing up great Alpine mountains in the snow for weeks, and captured 4000 great ugly live Boers and all their guns and baggage, and by the god of war, you hardly take the trouble to say thank you. This sort of thing will just suit Hunter, because his idea of bliss is to do the work and run the risk, and then somehow to evade the praise. But he ought not to be allowed to evade it. It is true we had no war correspondents with us, but I should have thought the bare facts would have spoken for themselves. It was the first thing of the war and our one really big score off the Boers. However, I shall not discuss it any more. I am disgusted with you. Mafeking day is about your form.
LETTER XXIV
FIGHTING AND FARM-BURNING
Frankfort, November 23, 1900.
Frankfort is one of our small garrison towns. It exists in a perpetual state of siege, like Heilbron, Lindley, Ladybrand, Winberg, Bethlehem, and a dozen others in this neighbourhood; in fact, like all the towns held by us not on the railway. At intervals of a month or two a column comes along bringing supplies and news from the outside world; mails, papers, parcels, clothes and kit, great quantities of regular rations, ammunition, &c., &c. You can imagine how eagerly the little garrison, stranded for months in this aching desolation, looks for the column's coming. Then arise other questions. Sometimes a part of the garrison is relieved and receives orders to join the column, while some of the troops forming the column are left behind in their place. Of course every one in the town is longing to get away, and every one in the column is dreading having to stay, and there is an interval of ghastly expectation while contradictory rumours go hurtling from village to camp and back again; and men look at each other like cannibals, every one hoping the doom will fall on some one else. We in our corps are spared all this anxiety, and can lie on our backs and look on and condole with the unlucky ones. We never get left anywhere.
For the last few weeks we have been cruising about over the veldt from one little British fort to another with our huge fleet of waggons, doling out supplies. During this time we have been fighting more or less, I think, every day. Perhaps you would hardly call it fighting; long-range sniping the greater part of it. Out of our 250 mounted men we have had some half-dozen casualties only, and we have accounted for a dozen or so of the enemy and a few prisoners. They have the advantage of their intimate knowledge of the country. We have the advantage of a pompom and two 15-pounders. These are invaluable in keeping the Boers at a respectful distance. It is rather satisfactory to plump some shrapnel on to a group of waiting, watching Boers three miles off, who are just concocting in their sinful hearts some scheme for getting a shot at you; or to lay a necklace of exploding pompom shells among some rocks where you guess they are hiding. "There, my boys, take that, and I hope you enjoy it," I feel inclined to say. You will understand that the side that has no guns at this game is apt to look rather silly. Rimington has initiated an entirely new use for guns. They are used now with the Scouts. Instead of remaining with the column, where they would never be of the slightest use, he takes them right out to the limits of his flankers or advance or rear guard, or wherever there is most need of them. So that when these scattered skirmishers get engaged, as they are constantly doing, instead of having to extricate themselves as they best can from an awkward corner, and being followed up and hampered and pressed as they keep up with the column, they know that in about two minutes they will hear the voice of one of the 15-pounders or the indignant pompom speaking on their behalf, and that the pressure will be immediately relieved. I am sure that the use made of these guns has saved us a number of casualties, besides inflicting loss on the enemy. It isn't very orthodox, I fancy, and I have noticed officers of the column rather stare sometimes at the sight of these volatile guns of ours careering away in the distance, but with the Colonel this is only another reason for using them so. At the same time the pertinacity of these Dutchmen is really remarkable, and the instant the guns limber up, on they come, darting round corners and creeping upon us with a zeal that never seems to diminish.
The work falls chiefly on front and rear guards, but perhaps mainly on the rear, as the difficulty of retiring is usually greater than advancing; i.e., if the advance guard gets pressed, all they have to do is to sit tight and the natural advance of the column will bring them up supports. But when the rear guard gets engaged, the advance of the main column tends to leave it stranded; it is bound to keep on retiring to avoid this, and retiring under fire is a difficult and dangerous job. The Boers, who have an instinctive knowledge how to make themselves most disagreeable, of course know all about this susceptibility of a rearguard, and there are always sure to be a number of them sniffing about in that direction. "Where are you to-day?" "Rearguard." "Oh! Good-bye, then!" was the farewell given to a rearguard officer this morning.
On the other hand, the advance is of course the most exciting. You make a dash for a kopje, probably uncertain if it is held or not. The clucking of the old Mausers at long range warns you that it is, and a few bullets kick the dust up. The squadron swing to the right to flank the kopje, and the fire gets hotter and the whistle of bullets sharper and closer. Suddenly the welcome report of a gun, followed by a second one, sounds behind you, and next instant the rush of the quick-coming shells is heard overhead. Then the squadron goes headlong for the kopje. The ponies tear along, mad with excitement, their hoofs thundering on the hard ground. The men grip their loaded carbines with their right hands; not one that won't be first if he can. There go the shells! There is a little shout of approval; one bursts right among the rocks on the top of the kopje in a puff of white smoke; the other half-way down, raising a great cloud of dust. The Mauser fire ceases as if by magic, and the next instant the racing squadron has reached the rise. Down jump the riders and clamber up over the stones. Yonder the enemy go, bundling along a rough track not 500 yards away, half seen through whirling dust. The men fling themselves down, some tearing a handful of cartridges from their bandoliers to have handy, and settle their carbines on the rocks. Crack! goes the first shot, and at the sound, as at a signal, the covey of fleeing Boers shakes out and scatters over the veldt. The fire quickens rapidly as the carbines come into action. Every Boer as he rides off, you can see through the glasses, is pursued and attended by little dust tufts that tell where the bullets strike. Surely they can't be going to get off scot-free. "Take your time, men; now do take your time," insists our captain. "A thousand yards, and aim well ahead!" And now at last it is seen with glee that something is the matter with the man on the white horse. Horse is it, or man? Both apparently. The man seems to be lying on his horse's neck, and the horse has lapsed into a walk. Instantly two of his comrades have turned to him. One begins thrashing the horse with his rifle into a canter. The other seems to be holding the rider in the saddle. Every carbine is on to them. Another Boer jumps off and lies down, and the report of his rifle reaches us at the same instant that a bullet whistles overhead. No one attends to him. Every man is blazing away at the little slow moving group of three, a good mark even at this distance. But it is not to be; though the dust spots are all round them, hit them we can't; and at last as they move away in the distance, the last reluctant shot is fired, and we give it up. On this particular occasion we capture one of the Boers a little further on hidden in a farm garden, his horse having been shot, though we did not notice it. This accounts for two anyway, which is about what we expect, and we proceed good-naturedly to help the farm people out with some of their furniture before burning the house down.
I am writing this lying on my back in our tiny tent. Outside the sun is blazing. Across the river, on the edge of the hill, our picket, under the lee of a kraal wall, is shooting at intervals. It sounds as if some one in the distance were chopping wood. The Colonel and Driscoll are standing just outside watching through their glasses. They can make out Boer scouts on the horizon, but no one pays much attention.
Driscoll, of Driscoll's Scouts, is a thick-set, sinewy man, rather short than tall. He is of an absolute sooty blackness. Hair and moustache coal-black, and complexion so scorched and swarthy that at a little distance you might almost take him for a nigger. There is about his face a look of unmistakable determination amounting to ferocity in moments of excitement. He looks and is a born fighter, but is apt to be over headlong in action. His scouts are part of our 250 mounted men under Rimington.
As for the Colonel I don't know if I have ever tried to describe him to you. He is a man who invites description. Of all the men in the army he is the one you would single out to sketch. An artist would be at him at once. He is the living image of what one imagines Brian de Bois Guilbert to have been. An inch or two over six feet high, his figure, spare but lengthy and muscular, has been so knocked about (by hunting and polo accidents) that it has rather a lopsided look, and he leans slightly to one side as he walks, but this does not interfere with his strength and activity nor detract from the distinguished and particularly graceful look of the man. His face, like Driscoll's, is sun-blackened rather than sun-browned; its general expression stern and grim, and when he is thinking and talking about the Boers (he talks about them just as Bois Guilbert did about the Saracens) this expression deepens into something positively savage, and he looks, and can perhaps sometimes be, a relentless enemy. But this is only half the man. In ordinary talk he is quite different. He has the Celtic sensitiveness and humour. He is an artist. His manner among friends is extraordinarily winning and sympathetic, and his grave melancholy face has a way of breaking into a most infectious laugh. Altogether, what with his tall person, dark determined face, his fierceness and gentleness, and the general air of the devil about him, you are not surprised to find that no soldier's name is more common in men's mouths out here than Mike Rimington's. You might fit Marmion's lines to him well enough—
"His square-turned joints and length of limb
Show him no carpet knight so trim,
But in close fight a warrior grim."
He ought to have lived five hundred years ago and dressed in chain-mail and led out his lances to plunder and foray. As it is he does his best even in the nineteenth century. Picturesque is the word that best describes him. He makes every one else look hopelessly commonplace. His men admire him immensely, like him a good deal, and fear him a little. Generals in command sometimes find him, I fancy, a bit of a handful, that is, if their policy is at all a backward one. But most people watch him and talk of him with a certain interest, and whatever their opinions or ideas of him may be, one feels sure that none who have once met will easily forget him.
He is essentially a man who means business, who believes that the army is here to fight, and it is especially in action that he makes his value felt. Then, when he leads his squadron and the rifles begin to speak, and the first few shots come one by one like the first drops of a shower, and when he turns round in his saddle and thunders his, "Let them go" down the ranks, then I tell you there is not a trooper at his heels who does not realise that the man at their head is the right man in the right place.
At the same time it would be a mistake to think of him as one of our "let me get at them," all sword and spurs officers. There have been several of this sort in the army, and it is impossible to help very often admiring their dash. But they are most dangerous leaders. What chiefly distinguishes the Boers is their coolness. You cannot bluff or flurry them, or shift them by the impetuosity of your attack from a position which they are strong enough to hold. If indeed you have reason to believe them weak, then the faster you go at them the better: for if they mean going this will force them to go in a hurry and you will diminish the time you are under fire. But see your calculations are pretty sound, for if they don't mean bolting it will not be the fury of your charge that will make them. Generally when they begin on you at a very long range it is safe to go for them; but if they reserve their fire then look out for squalls. The Colonel has a very cool judgment in these matters; and though no one, when he does go for them, goes straighter and faster than he, no one, on the other hand, calculates more coolly the probable effect and consequence of the move.
In all scouting operations in our frequent long patrols he shows the same mixture of prudence and daring. He goes long distances from his supports and penetrates far into the enemy's country, and yet in none of these expeditions has he ever got trapped or cut off. Of course with men like the Guides, who have experience of the country and the enemy, and ways of picking up information not open to strangers, this is easier than it would be with men who had no such experience; but at the same time the chief credit and responsibility in these affairs must rest with the commanding officer. For one thing Rimington has an extraordinary good eye for a country. Perhaps at first you will scarcely realise the value of this gift. The features of this country and the way the long, undulating slopes of the veldt merge into each other are extremely perplexing, and as an engagement may be carried on over many miles of ground and your own movements may be extensive and involved, it becomes very difficult, in fact to most people absolutely impossible, to remember the lie of the land and how the various hills and slopes are related to each other. Thinking about it and trying to observe does no good at all; but some people have an extraordinary instinct by which they hold the configuration of the ground mapped in their head; judging not by slow calculation and an effort of the memory, but intuitively and at once. This instinct is called "an eye for a country," and is a most valuable gift. Personally, I am very ill equipped with it, which makes me the more inclined perhaps to admire it in others. It is developed in the Colonel to an extraordinary degree, and is one of the chief means by which, however hard beset, he has always been able, so far, to find a way out. Most nearly of any of our officers his tactics in daring and in craft resemble the tactics of that prince of scouting officers, Christian De Wet.
Kronstadt, Lindley, Heilbron, Frankfort, has been our round so far. We now turn westward along the south of the Vaal. Farm burning goes merrily on, and our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages, by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. We usually burn from six to a dozen farms a day; these being about all that in this sparsely-inhabited country we encounter. I do not gather that any special reason or cause is alleged or proved against the farms burnt. If Boers have used the farm; if the owner is on commando; if the line within a certain distance has been blown up; or even if there are Boers in the neighbourhood who persist in fighting—these are some of the reasons. Of course the people living in the farms have no say in these matters, and are quite powerless to interfere with the plans of the fighting Boers. Anyway we find that one reason or other generally covers pretty nearly every farm we come to, and so to save trouble we burn the lot without inquiry; unless, indeed, which sometimes happens, some names are given in before marching in the morning of farms to be spared.
The men belonging to the farm are always away and only the women left. Of these there are often three or four generations; grandmother, mother, and family of girls. The boys over thirteen or fourteen are usually fighting with their papas. The people are disconcertingly like English, especially the girls and children—fair and big and healthy looking. These folk we invite out on to the veldt or into the little garden in front, where they huddle together in their cotton frocks and big cotton sun-bonnets, while our men set fire to the house. Sometimes they entreat that it may be spared, and once or twice in an agony of rage they have invoked curses on our heads. But this is quite the exception. As a rule they make no sign, and simply look on and say nothing. One young woman in a farm yesterday, which I think she had not started life long in, went into a fit of hysterics when she saw the flames breaking out, and finally fainted away.
I wish I had my camera. Unfortunately it got damaged, and I have not been able to take any photographs. These farms would make a good subject. They are dry and burn well. The fire bursts out of windows and doors with a loud roaring, and black volumes of smoke roll overhead. Standing round are a dozen or two of men holding horses. The women, in a little group, cling together, comforting each other or hiding their faces in each other's laps. In the background a number of Tommies are seen chasing poultry, flinging stones, and throwing themselves prostrate on maimed chickens and ducks, whose melancholy squawks fill the air. Further off still, herds and flocks and horses are being collected and driven off, while, on the top of the nearest high ground, a party of men, rifles in hand, guard against a surprise from the enemy, a few of whom can generally be seen in the distance watching the destruction of their homes.
One hears the women talk. Their ideas about the war are peculiar, for they all maintain that they will succeed in the long-run in asserting their independence, and seem to think that things are going quite satisfactorily for them. "Of course we shall go on fighting," they say, quite with surprise. "How long?" "Oh, as long as may be necessary. Till you go away." It is curious coming to household after household and finding the whole lot of them, women and children, so unanimous, so agreed in the spirit in which they face their afflictions. Husbands and sons in the hill fighting. Homes in the valley blazing, and they sitting and watching it all, almost always with the same fortitude, the same patience, and the same resolve. I am impressed, for I have never seen anything of the sort before. It is not often in these days that you see one big, simple, primitive instinct, like love of country, acting on a whole people at once. Many of our officers, the thoughtful and candid-minded ones, do these people justice; but many don't. Many catch at any explanation but the true one, and attribute every kind of motive save the only one that will explain the facts. They refuse to call the Boers patriots, but that the Boers are prepared to face a slow extermination in defence of their country is now evident. It has become more evident since the war has assumed its present character of individual, personal effort. I much respect and admire them for it.
It is time to bring this long letter to an end. I wish I could see an end to the campaign. When I come home "an old, old, aged and infirm old man," I mean to pass the evening of my days in a quiet cottage with its full allowance of honeysuckle and roses. There I shall grow sweet williams and, if I can stand the extra excitement, perhaps keep a pig. They tell me the Times has pronounced the war over. I would be glad to pay £5 out of my own pocket to have the man who wrote that out here on the veldt with us for a week. We have just heard that Dewetsdorp has fallen, and that there is a rising in the Colony near Aliwal North. Vogue la galère!
LETTER XXV
THE SITUATION
CAMP ON THE VAAL,
NEAR KLERKSDORP,
December 23, 1900.
We are encamped close to the Vaal, which is here a fine stream, as wide as the Thames at Richmond. I have just been bathing in it. It is early morning, and I am sitting under a thicket of great weeping willows by the river. The banks slope down and make a trough for the stream a good deal below the level of the plain, and in this hollow, hidden till you are close to it, congregates all the verdure there is for miles, especially a quantity of willow trees, with gnarled black trunks leaning down to the stream, sometimes bending over and burying themselves in the ground and then shooting up again, making arches and long vistas, with green grass below and silvery foliage waving above. After our long marches on the veldt, the contrast here is wonderfully refreshing. One seems to drink in the coolness and greenness of the scene with eyes that have grown thirsty for such things. The trees straddling down the bank are rather like figures of men, giants that have flung themselves down, resting on hands and elbows, delighted, one would think, as I am, to come and rest near water again.
I can hardly believe that it only wants two days to Christmas. Our last Christmas we spent on the Modder. I remember it well; a wet night, and all night long we sat on a steep kopje watching the lights of a Boer laager and expecting to be attacked. Methuen's little campaign strikes one now as a sort of prelude, or overture, to the main show; but how very much surprised we should have been that November morning when we marched from Orange River Camp if you had told us we should ever be looked at in that light. Ten thousand men was a big army in those days.
We have been on the trek now for about six weeks with Bruce-Hamilton, and though we have not so far been seriously engaged, there has been almost daily fighting round the fringes and skirts of the column ("skirt-fighting," you may call it).
"November 17.—Left Lindley. This neighbourhood quite as disturbed as ever. Shooting.
"November 18.—More shooting. Boers in all hills.
"November 19.—More shooting and galloping about. Reached Heilbron.
"November 20.—Left for Frankfort. Boers in attendance as usual. Our two guns and pompom very useful."
Those were the last entries I made in my diary. The day's events became too monotonous to chronicle, but very much the same sort of entries would have applied to almost every day since. Sometimes there are exciting incidents. Yesterday half-a-dozen Boers hid in a little hollow which just concealed them until our column came along, and opened fire at close range on the flank guard. One or two men were hit and several horses. My friend Vice had five bullets through his horse and was not touched himself, which was rather lucky for him (or unlucky for the horse). A few days before that we were camped on the river and had a picket on the other side. Two or three Boers crept up the river right between our picket and the main body, and then walked straight to the picket as if coming from us and fired into it at point-blank range. They mortally wounded one of our men and in the dusk escaped. They are as cunning as Indians. Sometimes, as in these cases, they show great coolness and daring, while at others they are easily dispersed; but they are generally pretty keen, and you have to be very much on the alert in dealing with them.
You at home will probably be annoyed to find the war dragging on so. About election time the papers were announcing that it was over. It had been a hard job, they said, but it was finished at last. A good deal was occurring out here which did not quite tally with that theory, but those things were ignored or very slightly referred to, so that we on the spot wondered to see the war drop out of sight, and were puzzled to read in the Times that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line blown up in ten different places. The continuance of the war must strike you as a renewal, but there was never a lull really.
People who think the war can be ended by farm-burning, &c., mistake the Boer temper. I scarcely know how to convey to you any idea of the spirit of determination that exists among them all, women and even children as well as men. The other day I picked up at a farmhouse a short characteristic form of prayer, written out evidently by the wife in a child's copybook, ending thus: "Forgive me all my sins for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, in whom I put all my trust for days of sorrow and pain. And bring back my dear husband and child and brothers, and give us our land back again, which we paid for with blood from the beginning." Simple enough as you see, and no particular cant about it, but very much in earnest. At another farm a small girl interrupted her preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at us on an old piano. We were carting the people off. It was raining hard and blowing—a miserable, hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing along her children to the ox-waggon outside, and this poor little wretch in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final defiance. One smiled, but it was rather dramatic all the same, and exactly like a picture. These are straws, but one could multiply them with incidents from every farm we go to. Their talk is invariably, and without so far a single exception, to the same effect—"We will never give in, and God sooner or later will see us through."
And then I see a speech of Buller's explaining that the war is being carried on by a few mercenaries and coerced men, and that it is in no sense a patriotic war. He is emphatic on this point and his audience cheer him. One realises the difficulty of getting you to understand. The breaking up of the big commandoes and the change to guerilla tactics, in which every man fights on his own account, shows in a way there is no mistaking that it is the personal wish of each man to fight out the quarrel to the last. It is just because they are so individually keen that this sort of warfare of theirs is so hard to cope with. These men are uncoerced. Spontaneously and one by one they turn out to fight us as soon as we show ourselves in their neighbourhood, and all the suffering we can inflict only serves to harden their resolution.
Yet we certainly inflict a great deal. Boer families usually average up to a dozen. They stick together, and grow up on their farms, which are of enormous extent, and which they get to love with the instinctive force of people who have never seen any other place. Love of family and love of home are their two ruling affections. The household life of a big family on a 20,000 acre farm—three and often four generations represented—is usually uninterrupted for weeks at a time by the sight of a strange face or a bit of outside news. Their lives are altogether bound up, in their serene and stolid way, with each other and with their homes. Anything that breaks up a family is felt by them more grievously than would be the case with most people; and, in the same way, anything that severs them from "the land" would be more profoundly felt too. It amounts to an entire dislocation of their ideas of life.
This must make the war at present very hard to bear. "My dear husband and child and brothers" are away fighting. One or two of them very likely killed by this time, or in Ceylon or St. Helena. "And as for the others who are still in the field, we are in constant terror of hearing the bad news, which we know, if the war continues, must some day come." So the family is quite broken up, and now the home is being destroyed and the occupants carried off, so that altogether the chances of ever renewing the old life again in the old place seem very remote indeed.
All this should be enough to break Boer hearts, and there is no doubt they feel it very much. I can recall many scenes and incidents which show that—scenes which, if you saw them out of your peaceful, natural life, you would perhaps be never able to forget. But yet, in spite of all they have to suffer, their determination remains just the same. Anything like loud lamentations or complaints are almost unheard. They rise to the occasion, and though naturally a very simple people, who express openly what they feel, they act now in this crisis with a constant composure which I have often thought most remarkable.
What supports them and keeps them going is just that spirit of patriotism which Buller denies the existence of. A patriot is a man who puts his country first thing of all. The final result of it all, "the uselessness of prolonging the struggle," and such newspaper talk as that, is not for him. There fronts him one fact, his country is invaded; and there fronts him one duty, to fight till he dies for it. This would have been a Greek's definition of the word, and it is the Boer farmer's definition. It is of course just because patriots never do count the cost, and are what the newspapers call "deaf to reason," that they sometimes bring off such astonishing results.
The Boers have now to watch a slow, implacable, methodical devastation of their country, tract by tract. Day by day they fight, and one by one they fall. Comrades and friends drop at each other's sides; sons drop by fathers, and brothers by brothers. The smoke rises in the valley, and the home is blotted out. All that makes life worth living goes, then life itself. What sterner test can a nation be put to than this? It is a torture long and slow; the agony and bloody sweat. I know well that if my own country were invaded I should, or hope I should, behave exactly as these men are doing; and as I should call it patriotism in my own case, I cannot refuse to call it the same in theirs. You see bribery and coercion are not adequate motives, and do not explain the facts; only, unfortunately, a lot of people would rather hunt up any base motive, however inadequate, than take the obvious one if it did their enemy any credit.
It is most important that the situation should be realised at home, for if it were the conduct of the war would be changed. You cannot torture and terrorise men like this into submission. Probably no system will end the war off quickly, but certainly kind, or at least fair, treatment is the best chance and best policy in every way. The present system hardens these men's resolution to iron, and so tends to prolong the war; and it embitters Dutch hatred of the British, and so tends to perpetuate the ill effects of the war. In fact, I am convinced that it is the worst policy you could possibly adopt, and the sooner you change it the better.
As for the fighting itself, you must make great allowance for our difficulties. So long as we had big commandoes with guns, convoys, &c., to deal with, there was a definite object to hit at. It was possible to deal a blow that took effect. Now we are fighting shadows. Our columns march through the country and see no enemy, or at most only a few small parties hovering on the sky-line. Scouts and patrols are often engaged, and no one can wander out of sight of the column but the ugly voice of a Mauser will warn him back. Invisible eyes watch us all the time, ready to take advantage of detached parties or unprotected convoys. We are teased and annoyed, but never definitely engaged. We are like the traveller and the gnats—
"Nor could my weak arm disperse
The host of insects gathered round my head,
And ever with me as I walked along."
Carried on in a country like this, where a man on horseback is like a bird in the air, and by people so individually keen as the Boers, the present kind of war may go on indefinitely. After all, it is the sort of war the Boers understand best. The big-battle war is a matter of science which he had in a great measure to be instructed in, but this is a war which the natural independence of his own character and self-reliant habits make natural to him. The war, now that it has become a matter of individuals, is exciting all its old enthusiasm again, and the Burghers are up in arms in every district in the country. Fighting in their own country, the Boers have one advantage over us, which is their salvation: they can disperse in flight, but we cannot disperse in pursuit.
This vagrant form of war is more formidable than it sounds. These wandering bands can unite with great rapidity and deal when least expected a rapid blow. As we cannot catch them we must be prepared to receive them at all points. The veldt is a void to us, all darkness, and it hides a threat which, as it may fall anywhere, must be guarded against everywhere. This, what with all our garrisons and enormous lines of communication, means that the far greater part of our army has to act on the defensive; to sit still waiting for an enemy who may be a hundred miles off or behind the next hill. As for our wandering columns, they have about as much chance of catching Boers on the veldt as a Lord Mayor's procession would have of catching a highwayman on Hounslow Heath. The enemy are watching us now from a rise a few miles away, waiting for our next move, and probably discussing some devilry or other they are up to. The line of our march is blotted out already. Where we camp one day they camp the next. They are all round and about us like water round a ship, parting before our bows and reuniting round our stern. Our passage makes no impression and leaves no visible trace. It does amuse me to read the speeches and papers in England with their talk of what we are to do with the country now we have conquered it. "With the conclusion of the war in South Africa arises the question," &c., &c. It reminds one of a child's game of make-believe. There is the same pompous air of reality. "This is the shop and you are the shopwoman. Good morning, Mrs. Snooks, I have come to buy a pound of sugar." Unfortunately the facts remain. I find that some of the shrewdest onlookers out here are just beginning to feel a sort of half doubt whether we shall ever conquer the country at all. It depends on whether the home Government and press give up their babyish "let's pretend" attitude and face the difficulties of the situation.
All this is very sad and lugubrious, is it not? and I daresay you think me a croaker; but there is a melancholy satisfaction in trying to see things as they are, and I believe what I have told you is nearer the truth than what you get from the papers. I only hope I may turn out to be wrong.
I add a note (January 12th) from Ventersberg, where we have just arrived. This has been our last trek, we believe. Rimington takes command of his regiment, and the corps, like the rest of the Colonial Division, will be paid off. I have a vision of a great blue steamer with a bow like a cliff bursting her way through the seas on her homeward voyage. And yet I can scarcely believe it.
Bad news waits us here. They say the Colony is rising. Now mark my words. If we don't watch it, we shall end by bringing about the very state of things we have been dreading. There will be a Dutch South African conspiracy, but it will be one of our own making. We shall have our own treatment of these people to thank for it. Be sure of this, that for every house up here that is destroyed, three or four in the south are slowly rousing to arms.
You will think, I daresay, that I have been putting the case one-sidedly. Possibly that is so; but I am putting the side that wants putting. I am constantly seeing it stated that any measures are justifiable so long as they are likely to end the war. "Well, but we must end it somehow," is a common phrase. That is all rubbish. We must fight fairly, that's the first rule of all. I daresay there may have been individual acts of cruelty or treachery on the part of the Boers, but I am sure that any just and unprejudiced officer will tell you that on the whole they have behaved surprisingly well, and in a way that is really very striking when we consider how undisciplined and individually independent they are. Let us then, on our side, play the game fairly. No doubt it is very exasperating to have the thing dragging on in the way it is doing, and the present intangible, elusive warfare is desperately irritating, but there is after all nothing unfair about these tactics of the Boers, nothing illegitimate in any way; they are merely the turning to account of natural advantages; and this being the case, we have no right to lose our tempers and get vicious just because we have taken on a tougher job than we thought for. Unluckily there seems to be a big party who are prepared to do anything and fight anyhow to get the thing finished. You will gain nothing by those means. You will not hasten the end of the war, and you will make its after effects more lasting and hard to deal with.[2]