In point of fact, Cronje’s main force was not all mounted, much less well mounted. Sandy soil and burning heat had played havoc among his horses during the last two months. Not more than a quarter of his burghers were well enough mounted to perform long and rapid marches; about half were poorly mounted, and the rest were actually on foot. Regarded as a whole, moreover, his army was no more mobile than our own. It was supplied, like ours, through the agency of heavy ox-transport, in motion slow and cumbrous to the last degree.
I have to insist on these figures and facts because, obviously, they have a close bearing on our inquiry into the relative merits of the steel weapon and the firearm. On the whole the Cavalry division, when the operations began, was approximately as well off in the matter of horses as Cronje’s force. They were in as good condition, probably, as the horses of an invading army coming 6,000 miles by sea to a different hemisphere can expect to be. The division was given a laborious task, though a strictly normal task, in the shape of a raid. The weather was very hot, water scarce, and the conditions exceedingly trying. The horses succumbed in hundreds, mainly from unpreventable causes. But we have to recognize a preventable cause. We may pass over the vexed question of overloading. Most contemporary critics seem to have agreed that the horses of all our mounted troops were overloaded; but the light load is a counsel of perfection exceedingly difficult to work out in practice. I refer to faults under the heading of horse management, which was admittedly not up to the war standard. The defect was common to all our mounted troops, but in the case of the professionally trained Cavalry we can trace the indirect influence of the shock theory, which in time of peace had encouraged artificial manœuvre as opposed to work under real field conditions. And yet, by perverse reasoning, the destruction of horse-flesh has been twisted by some writers into a negative argument for the arme blanche. As we shall see, steel weapons at no period of the war had any combat-value, whatever the condition of the horses.
It is depressing to reflect that the short raid now proposed under the trying conditions described was not strategically necessary. Kimberley stood in no material danger. Roberts, in overwhelming force, only twenty miles away, and ready to strike at Cronje, would have been justified in disregarding the demands made by the civil population for immediate relief. Practically he could scarcely take this course. Facing the situation boldly and generously, he included the immediate, physical relief of the town in his scheme of attack on Cronje, asked the Cavalry Division to perform the task, and was enthusiastically and energetically obeyed. We must remember, however, that under normal conditions the situation could scarcely have arisen. Faced by 45,000 men, of whom, guns apart, a fifth were mounted, Cronje must have raised the siege, and, if he risked a battle, have concentrated every man for it. Even as it was, had our large mounted force been not only as mobile but as highly trained in the rifle as the enemy, it would surely have been used to secure the envelopment and defeat of Cronje where he stood, in the Magersfontein position. But it was not so highly trained. That was the governing factor and the true “abnormality.” Kimberley could be given immediate relief only by a long, circuitous march which in the end wrecked the mobility of the division.
The position was this: The Modder separated Cronje from Roberts. Twenty miles north of the Modder, and behind Cronje, lay Kimberley; but Cronje’s communications did not lie in this direction. Though the force investing Kimberley was still supplied by rail from the Transvaal—that is, from the north—Cronje himself was now based by road on Bloemfontein, nearly 100 miles to the east—towards his left flank, that is—a thoroughly false and dangerous strategical position for the Boer leader. It lay with Roberts to cut this line of communication and envelop Cronje. North he must have operated, for Cronje might decide at any moment to cut adrift from Bloemfontein and retire north; but there was nothing to be gained by operating as far north as Kimberley.
Cronje, stubborn in spirit, but slow in thought and action, and, on this occasion, badly served by his scouts, was thoroughly mystified by the secrecy and suddenness of his enemy’s stroke. Until the last moment he clung to the belief that he was to be attacked in the Magersfontein trenches, which he had defended so successfully two months earlier. When threatening symptoms appeared to his left front, he did his best to watch this quarter by despatching successively three small bodies of his best-mounted burghers, under A. Cronje, Lubbe, and Christian de Wet, some 1,200 in all; but he made no effort to set in motion his partly dismounted main force of about 6,000 men, with its unwieldy laager.
Ramdam, twenty miles south of the Modder, and forty miles by air-line from Kimberley, was the British point of concentration. French and the Cavalry division left this point for the north early on February 12, with the main army slowly following, less Methuen’s division, which remained to confront Cronje. Two days’ march brought French to the Modder, with his troops and gun-horses already much spent. According to the “Official History,” forty horses were dead and 326 unfit to march. There had been barely more than a show of opposition at the crossing of the Riet and the Modder. De Wet, if he had chosen, might have done more to delay the advance with the 800 men whom at one moment he had under his hand, but he was daunted by the imposing array of horsemen and guns, and left Lubbe with only 250 men to dispute the passage of the Modder. He himself hung on the rear of the grand army, where he soon found his opportunity for a formidable stroke.
From the Modder at Klip Drift to Kimberley is twenty miles. Cronje, though he did not yet suspect French’s objective, was beginning to be alarmed, and now detached another 800 men and 2 guns, under Froneman and De Beer, who were joined by 100 men under Lubbe, to oppose him. French, on the morning of the 15th, after a day’s rest, swept this little force aside by one abrupt and vigorous stroke, which has become famous as the “Klip Drift Charge.” A mountain of error has been heaped upon this event. Let us examine the circumstances.
French, on the night of the 14th, had been joined, thanks to some splendid forced marching, by the sixth Infantry division and by most of Hannay’s brigade of Mounted Infantry—that is to say, by about 6,000 Infantry, 20 guns, and 1,500 mounted men—a force in itself numerically superior to the whole of the main body now remaining with Cronje. With the Cavalry division added there were now at Klip Drift some 13,000 men and sixty-two guns. Cronje’s communications with the east were definitely severed, the point of severance was held in force, and French was free for his independent spring on Kimberley. As it happened, Cronje on the same afternoon, dimly alarmed, had moved his headquarters and main laager a little east, so that it actually lay only six and a half miles west of Klip Drift, though the Cavalry, in spite of a day’s rest, were too tired for the reconnaissance necessary to discover this fact. If the fact had been discovered, it would have shed a curious light on the proposal to relieve Kimberley.
However, the immediate problem was to open the road for French to that town. Nine hundred Boers (with 100 of Lubbe’s men reckoned in) and two guns faced the large force at Klip Drift. They were disposed in an arc, concave from the British point of view, occupying two converging ridges, between which ran an expanse of open ground about a mile in width at the narrowest point, and gently rising to a “Nek.” Both valley and Nek were good galloping ground, without wire or obstacles of any kind. Very few Boers were on the Nek—perhaps a hundred; the majority were on the two ridges. Instead of clearing them out in the manner usual at this period, by a slow preliminary assault, French resolved to rush his whole division through the valley and over the Nek, under cover of Artillery fire.
It was a sensible resolve, promptly made and admirably executed. At the moment when French formed it he was about a mile distant from the Modder and about two miles from the Nek. His division, in column of brigade masses, had been checked by the fire of the two Boer guns posted on the western or left-hand ridge, about 3,000 yards away, and by rifle-fire from the nearest part of the eastern ridge, about 1,500 yards away. All seven batteries of Horse Artillery, supported by two batteries of the Infantry division and two naval guns—fifty-six guns in all—had opened on the two ridges and the devoted pair of Boer guns, and had temporary silenced the latter. It was now that French ordered the charge, and while it lasted, all but two horse batteries, which were kept in reserve, continued to bombard the Boer positions. Gordon’s brigade, less two squadrons, which were engaged on the flanks, led the way, deployed in extended order—eight yards between files, twenty yards between front and rear rank—pace, fourteen miles an hour. Broadwood’s brigade came next, 800 yards behind, and the other two brigades (one of Cavalry, the other of mounted riflemen) followed, though exactly at what interval and in what formation we are not told precisely. But I think we may assume that the fully deployed charge was made only by Gordon’s brigade, and that, at any rate, this was enough to secure the object in view.[[24]]