To allow Great Britain time to arouse, to assemble and put forth her strength, before some really decisive advantage, material or moral, was gained over her, was to ensure defeat. This, however, was what the Boers did. Although they put in force successfully a levée en masse, and thus in point of time concentrated into action their whole fighting population, they did not with equal exclusiveness of purpose concentrate in force upon a single military objective; nor was such choice as they made dictated by sound military principle, or carried out with sound military judgment.
It so happened that the conditions at the opening of the campaign bore a curious resemblance, though on a considerably larger scale, to those attending the hostilities of 1881 in South Africa. Then, as now, the British were in number far inferior. Then, as now, they were scattered here and there in small detachments. Then the Boers had achieved successes which doubtless surprised themselves as well as their enemies, and had produced for them the unfortunate result of overvaluing their own prowess, and of inducing a secure belief that both they and their opponents, after twenty years, remained in native and acquired qualities in the same relative positions of individual superiority and inferiority that they had somewhat prematurely assumed.
It was a natural result of such prepossessions that, instead of concentrating to hold in mass some decisive position by which to prolong the war, or to destroy or capture some important detachment—such as that at Ladysmith—they should settle themselves down to sieges, to a war of posts. In 1881, of several posts they had in the same manner leisurely invested, one surrendered. They probably believed that the others would have done so, had not the British Government of that day yielded and made peace. Whatever the reasoning, it was to the method of 1881 that the Boers resorted. After the preliminary battles in Natal, already narrated, in each of which the British attacked, they settled down with facile indolence to an investment of Ladysmith.
The dissemination of the enemy on the Free State frontier, so graphically summarized by Steevens, could not induce them to crush, with the concentrated force permitted by their imposing superiority of numbers, any one of the small detachments thus fatally exposed. The place, not the force within, had military value in their eyes. To the general result contributed no doubt the tendency of local interest to dominate general considerations in a rural and loosely organised population. It was noted at the time that the principle of local operation decided not only that the Transvaal should operate chiefly in Natal, and the Orange Free State toward Cape Colony, but also determined the course of action within each state. "There has been very little moving about of burghers from one part of the Transvaal or Free State to the other.... In the latter, the eastern commandos have gone to Natal, the western ones to Kimberley, and to the southern ones, numbering probably less than 4,000 men altogether, have been left the double task of invading Cape Colony and keeping off the Basutos; and as the ordinary Free State burgher is much more anxious about his own farm than about turning our colony upside down, the result is that practically nothing has been done to attack the most vulnerable point in our defence."
The same correspondent, writing from Cape Town, October 25, said that there were not 3,000 men of regular troops, and no artillery, in Cape Colony when the war broke out. His means of information were doubtless better than those of Steevens, who was in Cape Town less than forty-eight hours and made his guess—4,100—before he had time for personal observation over the ground.
It is scarcely necessary to point out what an opportunity was here presented for a rapid succession of blows at isolated detachments, such as military history has often before witnessed. It is difficult to believe that the frontier could not have been swept clean from end to end, and the entire railroad system, essential to the advance and centralised action of the British forces, hopelessly dislocated and smashed by an operation embodying the most elementary conceptions of concentration. Instead of that the centre of the line was kept almost undisturbed, the principal demonstrations of the Boers across the border being on the flanks—Kimberley and Mafeking on their right, Stormberg and the districts north and east of it on their left; the railroad from Naauwport to De Aar, and thence to the Orange River, being scarcely molested, and for working purposes remaining intact. So far as military purpose can be inferred from military action, the effort of the Boers was concentrated—or rather localised—upon the occupation of unprotected and friendly districts in the east, where they took up scattered defensive positions, while for offensive operations they satisfied themselves with the investment of Kimberley and Mafeking.
An American correspondent—evidently not unfriendly—writing of Pretoria about October 20, records an instructive anecdote, which reveals much of the Boer idea and purpose, and suggests food for thought as to underlying causes, not unprecedented in history, which from the first, if then known, would have foretold sure defeat. "A large door on the opposite side of the room opened, and a clerk informed the Secretary (Mr. Reitz) that he was wanted in the Executive Council room. While he was collecting a number of papers on his desk I could hear the conversation of men in the adjoining room. Suddenly there was a deep roar—almost like that of a lion—and at the same time a bang on the table that made the windows rattle. And the voice—it was that of a man—continued its deep bellowing, and again there was a thundering bang on the table. 'The old President has met with some obstacle in his plans,' said the Secretary of State, smiling at my look of surprise at the sound of such a human voice, and he disappeared with an armload of papers.... When he returned he was chuckling to himself. 'General Cronje wants to assault Mafeking,' he said. 'He has wired that he can take the town in a hand-to-hand fight, but the old President won't listen to it. He says the place is not worth the lives of fifty burghers, and has just issued an order that Cronje is to continue the siege and simply see to it that Colonel Baden-Powell and his troops do not escape. The Council was divided; some thought that Cronje should be permitted to storm the place. The President has just ordered that one of the big siege-guns shall be sent to Cronje.'"[10]
Time apparently was of no account. The burghers and the Boers had only to wait open-mouthed for plums to drop—at Mafeking, at Kimberley, at Ladysmith. Mafeking very possibly was not in itself worth the lives of fifty burghers; but it was worth a great deal more if it was to be the means of detaining them before its little worth to their exclusion from action concentrated elsewhere, which their numbers would have gone to make overpowering, and which by proper direction would have been decisive—not perhaps of ultimate issues—but of those prolonged delays in which lies the best hope of a defence. It is an interesting commentary on Kruger's decision that, at the moment these lines are writing, the deliverance of Mafeking is known to have been preceded immediately by a fruitless assault of the burghers, which cost more than that presumed for the attack at the outset, which a competent general on the spot believed then would be successful. Control at a distant capital, exercised by an obstinate, overbearing old man, who, though unquestionably shrewd and acute, was equally unquestionably narrow with the narrowness of contracted experience and limited military knowledge, boded ill for the Boer cause. While Cronje at Mafeking, and Wessels at Kimberley, and Joubert at Ladysmith were waiting for a moment that never came, time was flying, the hostile reinforcements were speeding forward 300 miles a day, and the very danger of the three places was goading the British people into wide-awake activity.
Yet more imminent was the nearer opportunity, fast disappearing into the nearer danger, ultimately to become the established and fatal centre of ruin—at De Aar. "This was not the sort of fighting-ground the Boer is wont to choose," wrote one there present, "but we felt that he must come because we menaced his frontier sixty miles away, and tempted him with such an amount of stores, guns, and ammunition as would enable him to prolong his warfare at least two months longer than his own resources would permit." A somewhat narrow view this, leaving out of the account De Aar's intrinsic advantage in position; but to continue—"Every day that the Boers delayed our camp grew stronger, though this was not the case before General Buller arrived at the Cape (October 31). Until then we had only one battalion—about 800 men—to protect stores estimated at half a million pounds; but within forty-eight hours a battery and a half—nine guns—had arrived from England, to be followed by another half battery from the Orange River."[11]
The position of De Aar indicated it absolutely as a point which the British must hold, fortify, and use as a depot and base. Camps and buildings began to be laid out and put up about October 25, and stores to accumulate; ten days later came the batteries and also reinforcements; but these—400 in number—imperatively demanded by the superior importance and exposure of De Aar, which required concentration upon it, were obtained by evacuating Colesberg and Naauwport, the latter a most regrettable necessity. But what were the Boers doing while these fragments were drawing together into a single body, while batteries were arriving, and works, not yet existent, were being thrown up? They were besieging Kimberley and Mafeking, 150 and 300 miles away, and pottering about just within Cape Colony, occupying undefended towns and making proclamations of annexation. "Fancy," says the writer just quoted,—"fancy the Orange River sixty miles away, with 2,500 men (British) holding the (railroad) bridge over it, and a battalion of 1,000 men broken into five bodies of troops isolated at as many points—all, excepting the force at Orange River, inviting certain destruction."[12]