On Cavalry in offence he is enigmatically reticent. The strange comment on the Klip Drift charge I have noticed. Equally strange are the comments on subsequent actions. Much impressed, apparently (pp. 159 and 166), by the failure of French’s division to dislodge the little Dronfield detachment on February 16, as compared with their success in containing Cronje on the 17th, he seems to be on the very verge of embracing the obvious rational conclusion. The two combats he describes as being of “quite extraordinary value” for instructional purposes. We wait breathlessly for the inference. But there is none, except, so far as I understand him, the depressingly lame conclusion that no more can be done by Cavalry than was done at Dronfield. And yet a few pages earlier (p. 150) we find him accepting De Wet’s destructive attack on the army’s supply column as the most natural thing in the world; while a few pages later he is actually blaming the same leader for not converting his intervention at Paardeberg (smart enough in itself, in all conscience) into a decisive attack against immensely superior forces.
The exasperating feature of all this is that for a controversialist like myself, who is trying to make a point good, there is never anything quite concrete enough to grapple with closely. It is not as if, in his remarks on the Klip Drift charge, the critic ever even alluded to the conventional function of Cavalry in offence, shock with the arme blanche, and endeavoured to explain why it was in abeyance in all this fighting against the Boers, and why we may expect that in future wars it will resume its old sway. If he were to take that course, issue could be joined frankly and fairly. But, as I have said, he is absolutely silent on this crucial point, just as he is absolutely silent on the comparative merits of the Boer type. The two themes, so patently and intimately intertwined, are kept rigorously distinct, shut off from one another by a kind of thought-tight bulkhead which divides his mind into two hermetically-sealed compartments, in one of which, I suppose, is enshrined the arme blanche dogma, inviolate, inviolable, not to be sullied by the least intrusion of polemical argument.
It is strange enough to find Germans accepting this class of criticism. It is barely credible that we, whose war this was, should, in our turn, accept it at second-hand from Germans and hail it as oracular. That seems to be the situation. But the paradox does not end there. As I shall show at the proper time, Bernhardi’s work, the bible of our own Cavalry school, contains within itself the most crushing refutation of the arme blanche theory, simply because his special purpose and special environment permitted him to descant more freely and enthusiastically on the virtues of the rifle. He, too, kept the rifle and the steel in carefully separated compartments, but the arrangement is so transparent that it cannot deceive. Experience of his own in South Africa, confirming in every particular those fire-lessons which he drew from the American Civil War, would have saved him from many palpable inconsistencies. However that may be, let the reader clearly understand this, that what I have quoted from the official critic is the kind of evidence on which German practice is founded. If he thinks it convincing and satisfactory, well and good. But let him not be deluded into thinking that the Germans have honestly assimilated and co-ordinated the lessons of the South African War. The contrary can be proved to demonstration out of their own mouths.
It must be added that, besides these comments on the Kimberley operations, scarcely any attention is paid in the German Official History to the mounted question. The war may be truly said to have been studied by Germans from a purely Infantry standpoint. That the mounted factor was dominant throughout is a fact they disregard, even if they perceive it.
II.—Poplar Grove.
March 7, 1900.
I have now to record the progress of events up to the capture of Bloemfontein. The investment of Cronje’s laager lasted nine days. De Wet reinforced the key position at Kitchener’s Kopje, and implored Cronje to break out. Cronje could not induce his men, whose horses were gradually destroyed by Artillery fire, to try. De Wet, who was driven off his kopje by an enveloping movement in which the Cavalry took the principal part, tried to regain it two days later and failed. Meanwhile reinforcements from other parts of the theatre of war gradually brought the total of Boers outside the lines and between Paardeberg and Bloemfontein up to something between 5,000 and 6,000. Aware of the process of reinforcement, and fully alive to the ill-effects of delay, Roberts tried to arrange for a raid by the Cavalry on Bloemfontein. By the 24th transport had been collected, the brigades reorganized, and all was ready for a start. But at the last moment French was compelled reluctantly to state that the horses were not in a fit state for the expedition. De Wet might possibly have made some more effective diversion with the newly-arrived troops, had not the moral decay which made such havoc in the Boer forces after the date of Cronje’s capture begun even before that capture was consummated.
Cronje surrendered with 4,000 men on February 29. Vastly more important as the results might have been, had it been possible to storm the laager and accelerate the advance on the Free State capital, Paardeberg was, nevertheless, the turning-point in the war. Roberts’s broad scheme of strategy was signally justified. Many days before the actual surrender pressure had been relieved at every threatened point in the theatre of war, Mafeking alone excepted—at Kimberley, at Colesberg, Dordrecht, and other points along the frontier of Central Cape Colony, and at the Tugela heights and Ladysmith. Buller fought the successful battle of Pieter’s Hill on the day Cronje surrendered, and on the next day Ladysmith was relieved.
Another week’s delay followed Cronje’s surrender, a delay attributed by our Official Historian mainly to the need of still further recuperating the Cavalry and Artillery horses, partly also to the necessity of increasing the general supplies for the army, in view of the contemplated change of base to the Free State railway. Behind all we see the far-reaching effects of De Wet’s raid on the supply column on the 15th of the month.
Methuen’s division had been sent north by way of Kimberley. With the other three Infantry divisions, 4,900 mounted riflemen (including some recent additions), and 2,800 regular Cavalry, Roberts, on March 6, had an army with an effective strength in round numbers of 30,000 men and 116 guns. Facing him, on the Poplar Grove position, a few miles east, and barring the road to Bloemfontein, were between 5,000 and 6,000 Boers and 8 guns under De Wet. These are the figures supplied at the time by the Intelligence, and apparently accepted by the Official Historian, though Villebois de Mareuil is quoted as having estimated them at 9,000. But the Frenchman appears to have reckoned in the forces at Petrusberg and elsewhere, which did not take part in the coming battle. Roberts, giving the outside estimate of 14,000 men and 20 guns in his Instructions of March 6, evidently included, in order to be on the safe side, all the commandos which were known to have left Colesberg, Stormberg, and Ladysmith, but which the Intelligence mentioned as “not since located.”