The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

We have won South Africa purely and simply by the sword and so must we keep it. But we could keep it best—as we keep the peace in India—by not ignoring the military spirit of the people, but by showing the justice of our rule, and keeping alive the soldier feeling as a national police. Any other course is impossible with savage or semi-barbarous people. Nothing is despised more than a weakness which they translate as fear. It is a fatal day when a nation, whose history throughout is one of conquest, forgets how she has made the empire, and thinks to hold it by other means, such as by a popular opinion which it takes centuries to create and make good. To forget the traditions of the race is equally fatal. Our empire was never made by concessions; it was made by forcible possession, and that, as a general rule certainly, for the eventual benefit, as far as civilisation is concerned, of the people we have conquered. The neglect of this is at the bottom of the disastrous campaign that followed the destruction of the Zulu power.

“Vestigia nulla retrorsum.” To go back is weakness with all except the highest intellectual nations. We took the Transvaal, and stated that the former condition of things there should never be restored! The wisdom of the first step may be a matter of opinion. The evil of the “afterwards” is another question altogether.

Anyhow, our annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 had led to collision with Sekukuni, a turbulent Basuto chieftain, and at first the operations taken against him were unsuccessful, Colonel Rowland’s force, which included a company of the 13th, having to fall back to Lydenburg. During the Zulu campaign he had openly sympathised with Cetewayo, and had had frequent skirmishes with the Transvaal Boers. When, therefore, the Zulu war terminated, Sir Garnet Wolseley’s attention was turned towards this constant source of trouble, and in October 1879 he moved against the “fighting Koppie” with detachments of the 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers, 86th, and 94th, in all 1400 European troops, and 4000 native levies, to meet a force estimated at 14,000 men, strongly entrenched. The district occupied by Sekukuni lies in a bend between the junction of the Oliphant and Steelpoort rivers, and was surrounded by fortified posts. The fortress itself was naturally strong: “Its whole interior was honeycombed by nature, intersected by passage and gallery, leading into great chambers with chinks, clefts, and crannies, forming natural loopholes for musketry, and in one place there yawned an appalling chasm which had never been fathomed, and was believed to contain water at the bottom. When in the agonies of thirst on the third day of their blockade, some of Sekukuni’s people went down by means of great leather thongs tied together, none of them ever came up again; no more was heard from them.” This is a good type of the African rock-fortress.

On the 28th of November the attack was made, and was fully successful, but some of the caves still held many who would not surrender, and who preferred rather to die of thirst and starvation than give up either themselves or their chief. The conduct of these warriors was chivalric in its devotion to Sekukuni, who did not surrender until the 2nd December, and was then conveyed to Pretoria. There the 4th, 58th, 80th, the 1st Dragoon Guards, and Curling’s battery paraded for a review of the largest body of regular troops yet seen in that town, and Commandant D’Arcy as well as Privates Flawn and Fitzpatrick of the 94th received the Victoria Cross. Sir Garnet Wolseley left the Transvaal with a small garrison, and, he thought, at peace.

So it might have been had there been greater firmness and more tact displayed after he left. But there was friction between the British and the Dutch settlers, who had refused to remain under our rule long years before. In 1845, three companies of the 91st and some Cape Mounted Rifles defeated 500 Boers, who fled after making but a faint resistance. Collision again occurred in 1848 at Boomplatz, the second of a series of small conflicts which one by one have sought to wrest from the Boers the territories they had conquered and in part reclaimed. The tendency throughout had been to treat them as only another sort of semi-barbarous occupant, to be got rid of when their land was wanted by others. In this skirmish were engaged some companies of the 45th, 91st, and Rifle Brigade, with two squadrons and two guns, and they routed a Boer command, estimated at 1000 strong, though strongly entrenched behind breastworks of piled stones. There was but little loss on either side, and it is said that a drummer of the 91st, tired of the long waiting, while the men were lying down firing, himself beat the charge, and the men went in with cheers, and the enemy fled without an effort to rally. Then they retired behind the Vaal to form the Transvaal Republic, and in 1851 the Orange River Territory, which had been annexed by us in 1848, was relinquished to form the “Orange Free State.” But now for reasons that the future historian will wonder at, we annexed the Transvaal. Our past experience of the Boer had taught us nothing. Anyone who will read the Parliamentary Blue Book and Colonel Brackenbury’s despatches must see that war was inevitable. Yet, with a fair knowledge of what Boers were, and with an idea of superiority which was to have a rude awakening, we entered into a serious war with a light heart and with a force that was insufficient to meet even a Zulu impi. The war is remarkable in every way, primarily as the first instance, since the firearm was introduced, in which regular soldiers came under careful, well-directed, aimed, rifle fire, and were in every case beaten. The only parallel instance is that of the war of American Independence. There also a people goaded into fighting by wrong were victorious; and succeeded both because the justice of their cause strengthened their moral fibre, and their guerilla warfare, for it was often little else, was in many cases accompanied by careful shooting. But the difference in the nature of the weapons at the end of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century is so great as to mark, by the heavy loss the defeated troops sustained, the terrible nature of modern rifle fire when carefully directed.

The Transvaal had been annexed in 1877, though in 1852 it had been recognised as a free and independent State; the reason assigned, among others equally unreasonable, being that the State was bankrupt. The true Boer, the “Dopper,” is the descendant as much of French Huguenots as of the Dutch employees of the East India Company. “They are,” writes Sir William Butler, “a homely, sober, quiet, dull race of beings, as full of faith in God and fair dealing between man and man as this world holds sample of.” Doubtless there are many exceptions to their character as thus drawn, but the vast majority agreed in one thing, protest against the loss of their freedom. Meeting succeeded meeting, appeal followed appeal. To threats of force the answer was, “We do not rely upon regiments, but on right.” When, therefore, the storm burst, there were but three battalions (the 21st, 58th, and 94th) of regulars in the Transvaal, with a detachment of the 4th, a squadron of the King’s Dragoon Guards, and a battery of artillery, while the nearest reinforcements were the 3-60th in Natal, and the 91st at the Cape.

Hostilities began in this way. In December 1880, the 94th, about 250 strong, under Colonel Anstruther, was acting as convoy guard on the road from Lydenberg to Pretoria. On crossing Brunker’s Spruit, they were opposed by 150 Boers, who opened fire when Anstruther, on being informed of the declaration of the Republic, refused to retire, and in twenty minutes 120 men were hors de combat, of whom 7 were officers. Mrs. Smith, the wife of the bandmaster, who was shot by her side, and was herself wounded, behaved with the greatest gallantry in assisting the wounded, and was afterwards given the silver medal for deeds of gallantry on land. Meanwhile the isolated garrisons in the Transvaal at Pretoria, Rustenberg, Wakkerstroom, Standerton, Heidelberg, Lydenberg, Middleberg, Fort Victoria, Fort Albert, and Marabos Stadt, were more or less invested, and the Boers, crossing the Natal frontier, placed a strong force à cheval the road from Newcastle to Standerton about Laing’s Nek.

Open sympathy with the Boers increased rapidly and came from all sources, the Cape, the Orange Free State, the Dutch in Holland, and even Belgium. Every effort was made to bring about an understanding, but all to no effect. The evil cry on our side, “Restore us our prestige and then we will treat” prevented peace as yet. So a “relief” column left Newcastle for Potchefstroom and Pretoria, under Sir George Pomeroy Colley, consisting of detachments of the 58th, 60th, 2nd Scots Fusiliers, and a naval brigade with 6 guns and 2 Gatlings, but the total strength was not 1000 men. A purely frontal attack, by men conspicuous with white helmets, against the steep and partly entrenched position of the Boers at Laing’s Nek, on the 28th January 1881, met with a severe reverse, 208 men being killed and 80 wounded. The fighting had been close, for, as Joubert reports, “One of the officers even fired in among our men with his revolver before he was shot, but then the Lord helped us!”

The reverse was somewhat startling to those who thought there would be no opposition. Two companies of the Gordon Highlanders were hurried up to Mount Prospect Camp, between which and Colley’s base at Newcastle ran the Ingogo River. It was south of this stream that the second fight took place, and was brought about by despatching a force, including some of the King’s Dragoon Guards and the 60th, to assist in covering a convoy which was expected from Newcastle; but as the Boers had already interposed between Newcastle and the Ingogo, it had returned to the town. The ground favoured the tactical skill of the foe, “men who could neither march, manœuvre, nor even form sections of fours, but were resolute in heart, muscular in figure, and deadly marksmen, who were accustomed to bring down the fleet springbok at full speed from their saddles, and stalk all the great game with which Southern Africa abounds.”

So the British loss was heavy. Most of the killed were shot through the head as they essayed to fire over the boulders that sheltered them; the two guns were soon disabled, and the wearied remnant returned to camp, with a loss of 132 officers and men. Still, the men had behaved well and coolly, and suffered no panic.