On the night of the 15th the old Boer General, alarmed by the news of Klip Drift, had at last awakened to the fact that his 5,500 men and his cumbrous laager were on the point of being surrounded by an army of between 30,000 and 40,000 men. Resolving to retire along the Modder towards Bloemfontein, he called up his men from the Magersfontein trenches, and trekked in bright moonlight across the front of the sixth division at Klip Drift without being discovered by the Mounted Infantry. On the 16th, while French was riding north from Kimberley, Cronje held the sixth division at bay, and secured his next strategic point east, the passage of the Modder at Drieputs Drift. In the action of this day we may note that the Mounted Infantry tried to do what the Cavalry had done so successfully at Klip Drift—to ride in force through a fire-zone in order to pierce the enemy’s line. Through no fault of their own, but simply through lack of that drill and horsemanship which the Cavalry possessed, they failed badly, and were thrown into great disorder. After dusk, again unobserved, Cronje continued his retreat, and at 4.30 a.m. on the 17th his main body and convoy were halted within a few miles of Vendutie Drift, with an advance-guard as far east as Koodoos Drift.
It was at this moment that French, in accordance with orders, was leaving Kimberley to head off Cronje. His division as a fighting unit had practically ceased to exist. Horses had died in hundreds; whole regiments were demobilized. Of the three brigades engaged in the northward sweep from Kimberley, only one regiment—the Carabineers—was fit to march. This and Broadwood’s brigade, which had not been engaged, gave French 1,500 men and 12 guns. Ardent as ever, notwithstanding, he started off, and in six hours reached Vendutie Drift in time to head off Cronje. Midway he had passed within two or three miles of Ferreira’s force, about his equal in strength. Ferreira, though he appears to have been but dimly aware of the course of events, should undoubtedly have thrown himself across the path of the Cavalry. He missed the opportunity, and French rode on.
The mission of the Cavalry was to hold Cronje until the main army should come up and attack his rear. They performed this mission with skill, tenacity, and complete success, using fire-tactics and bluff to impose upon a force nearly four times their superior. Once more, in short, they were doing what they and the Colonials had done so well in the Colesberg operations two months earlier. Tactically, they stood in much the same position as the 900 Boers at Klip Drift, and if Cronje had come to the point even of contemplating the abandonment of his transport and dismounted burghers, he would have had, theoretically, the opportunity of bursting through the British containing line and making his point on Bloemfontein, just as French had burst through the Boer line and gained Kimberley. Knowing what we know now, we can see that this was what Cronje should have done or tried to do, though we can understand why he still declined to take this sort of action. His was not an independent mounted force, backed by an army. Not only in his instinctive perception, but in fact, it was an army in itself, the reverse of mobile, badly horsed, but, on the other hand, supported by small outlying detachments (under Ferreira, De Wet, etc.), from whom he expected vigorous co-operation. His transport represented not only public commissariat, but the private property of his burghers. Meanwhile his men carried the same rifles which had wrought such terrible havoc at Magersfontein. Slow-witted as he was, we must make allowance for this point of view throughout the operations of which the climax was now approaching, and indeed throughout the whole war. It was a standing weakness of the Boer organization that their transport was as ponderous as their fighting men were mobile. The ox governed net speed, not the horse.
These considerations do not detract in any way from the credit due to French and the Cavalry for their ride from Kimberley to the Drifts, and for pinning Cronje to his ground at this critical moment. During the night two Infantry divisions and the Mounted Infantry division, by dint of severe forced marching, were placed within striking distance of Cronje’s laager at Paardeberg. Then came the battle, the week’s investment, the surrender.
Unquestionably this day—February 17, 1900—was the great day of the Cavalry in the South African War. But, alas for the tyranny of names! Here is the Official Historian’s comment: “Yet that night was a memorable one for French’s troops; for they had accomplished the mission assigned to them by Lord Roberts, and had demonstrated that the conditions of modern fighting still permit Cavalry and Horse Artillery to play a rôle of supreme importance in war.” Here is what I may call the inverted moral over again. “Still permit!” What a pitifully cautious conclusion! Is it for that that we maintain enormously expensive mounted corps and entrust them with vitally important duties?
The real truth is that it was in spite of being “Cavalry,” not because they were “Cavalry,” that French’s troops had succeeded in the mission assigned to them by Roberts. Throughout the operations the characteristics, inborn or acquired, which distinguished them from mounted riflemen, had been their bane, not their blessing. Their steel weapons had been so much dead weight, their carbines poor substitutes for rifles, while faulty horsemastership, which we cannot dissociate from the artificialities of their peace training, is admitted to have been one of the causes of the appalling mortality in horses. French, as a spirited leader of horsemen, not as a leader of steel-armed, shock-trained horsemen, by pure force of will had overcome these obstacles and performed his allotted rôle. But without these obstacles, and leading a division of highly-trained mounted riflemen, what might he have done? Unquestionably, his powerful division would have been employed at the outset to aid in crushing by normal tactical means Cronje’s small force where it originally stood. But, apart from that fundamental difference, he might probably have dispensed with men numerous enough and efficient enough to act as eyes for the main army, a function which was in complete abeyance during these operations, with disastrous results at Waterval Drift, where De Wet raided a supply column. He might, perhaps, in the course of his independent rôle, have ridden at, instead of through, the Boers at Klip Drift, with far more demoralizing after-effects upon the enemy. He might have discovered and snapped up in his stride, as it were, Cronje’s defenceless laager, then lying so near to him, and still have obeyed his orders to reach Kimberley that night. He might, perhaps, have converted the northerly sweep from Kimberley into a fruitful operation, by eliminating the absurd delay occasioned by the Dronfield detachment. Probably he would have reached the Drifts with a larger and fresher force, able to regard what had been achieved rather as a prelude to still greater things than as the climax of a supreme effort. Climax, in fact, it was. When Roberts, a week later, called upon the Cavalry for another divisional enterprise, French was unable to respond. This sort of thing will not do in any future war; let us be clear about that. We cannot afford to use up Cavalry at this exorbitant rate. They are far too few and valuable, and will have far more varied and difficult duties to perform than French’s division performed.
There is no need, for our purpose, to describe the battle of Paardeberg at any length, or to enter deeply into the controversy which has raged around the question of storming versus investment. Time, I think, will confirm the view expressed in the Times and German Histories that Kitchener, in spite of his ambiguous personal position on the battle-field of the 18th, and in spite of his faulty and disjointed tactical methods, was right in his endeavour to storm the laager at all costs there and then, and that he should have received more whole-hearted co-operation from the subordinate commanders. Time, perhaps, may have already convinced Lord Roberts that the subsequent policy of investment, with its far-reaching moral and material consequences, was a mistake. But however this may be, the outstanding technical lesson is the same—the extraordinary power possessed by mounted riflemen, trained to entrench and shoot straight, even when they have lost their mobility, even when they suffer from flagrant defects of organization, morale, and discipline, in holding at bay vastly superior regular forces of all arms.
Directly Cronje accepted envelopment, his force lost its last resemblance to a mounted force. He was assailed mainly by Infantry and Artillery. But two incidents, which have a strong mounted interest, if the expression is permissible, deserve brief notice.
1. The pathetic little charge of Hannay and fifty or sixty of his Mounted Infantry towards the end of the day. Kitchener, burning to get into the laager in spite of many a bloody repulse, realizing that an irruption even at one point in the front of two and a half miles would lead to the collapse of the defence, and that such an irruption was beyond the power of the slow-moving Infantry under the deadly Boer fire, sent the following message to Hannay at 3.30 p.m.:
“The time has now come for a final effort. All troops have been warned that the laager must be rushed at all costs. Try and carry Stephenson’s brigade on with you. But if they cannot go, the Mounted Infantry should do it. Gallop up, if necessary, and fire into the laager.”