Our particular concern is with the British mounted troops, which had been remounted, reorganized, and largely increased in number. An additional regular Cavalry brigade joined the central army under Roberts; fresh battalions of regular Mounted Infantry, suffering from a serious scarcity of officers, were hastily formed, and fresh contingents of Colonial troops, both from overseas and within South Africa, continued to come into line. Half the Imperial Yeomanry—between 4,000 and 5,000 men, that is—were available at the beginning of May, and the whole force of 10,000 was before very long in the field.
For administrative purposes, Cavalry and mounted riflemen, hitherto associated together, were now separated. For the central army a division of four brigades of regular Cavalry, about 5,000 sabres strong (without counting Horse Artillery) was formed;[[43]] and at the same time the mounted riflemen were organized anew in one big division, 11,000 strong, divided into two brigades of four corps each, each corps being composed jointly of regular Mounted Infantry and Colonial mounted riflemen. Neither of these organizations proved to be permanent. The latter was from the first little more than nominal. In order to supply the mounted needs of the army at large, as time went on units had to be broken up and distributed where they were most required. The Yeomanry, similarly, were never employed as a divisional unit, but only in detachments.
Brabant’s Colonial Defence Force was now at its full strength of 3,000, and Buller, in Natal, though he had had to part with the Imperial Light Horse, who were sent round with Hunter’s Division to Kimberley, possessed, owing to the union of the Tugela and Ladysmith armies, between 5,000 and 6,000 mounted men, divided into three brigades, two of them homogeneous Cavalry units of three regiments apiece, the third composed of South African mounted riflemen.
In the far west of the theatre of war the Kimberley mounted troops were now available for active work, and in the north-west Plumer, with some 750 mounted Colonials, was still conducting his clever and plucky operations for the assistance of Mafeking and the security of the Rhodesian border. In the far north the Rhodesian Field Force, some 4,000 strong, mainly consisting of Australasian mounted riflemen and partly of Yeomanry, was on its way westward from Beira, under Carrington. Strathcona’s Horse, a new Canadian corps, 500 strong, had been detached on an abortive scheme for raiding the Delagoa Bay Railway via Lourenço Marques.
To sum up, if we compute the Yeomanry at their full strength, but exclude from the calculation the garrison of Mafeking and various small detachments doing duty on the communications or in process of formation into regiments, there were at this period in the field nearly 40,000 mounted men, of whom about 8,300 were Cavalry, still armed with carbine and lance or sword, and the rest, in the generic sense, mounted riflemen. Numerically, therefore, our mounted strength, viewed apart from the great masses of Infantry and Artillery, was greater by several thousand than the Boer strength actually in the field, even if we deduct half the Yeomanry as not yet fully available. But I need scarcely again warn the reader that such comparisons, for many obvious reasons, must be used with caution. In one quarter, however—the centre—our preponderance in mounted strength alone over the Boers opposed to us was very remarkable.
The Commander-in-Chief’s strategical scheme was of great simplicity and enormous magnitude. On a front of 300 miles, 109,000 men (I am using round numbers), with 350 guns, were to execute converging marches northward, with Pretoria as the central objective. On the extreme right, Buller, with 45,000 men, was to march through Natal; on the extreme left, Hunter, starting from Kimberley with 10,000 men, was to penetrate the Western Transvaal, and, incidentally, to relieve Mafeking. Methuen, starting with another 10,000 from the same point, was to march through the Western Free State. Lord Roberts, in the centre, with 25,000 men, was to move directly up the railway from Bloemfontein; while immediately on his right flank Ian Hamilton, with 14,500 men, supported by Colvile with 4,000 men, moved through the Eastern Free State.
Such was the plan of the grand advance. The principal subsidiary field-force was that of Rundle and Brabant, who were to follow slowly through the Eastern Free State, which was the most formidable region of all, sweeping up arrears, and making good the ground won. Warren, with 2,000 men, was to quell the rebellion in Bechuanaland; and Carrington was designed to co-operate from the far north, moving through Rhodesia upon the Northern Transvaal.
The distribution of mounted troops was as follows: Exclusive of Artillery corps, troops, etc., there were with Roberts and the central army four and a half corps, in all 3,600 strong, of mounted riflemen, and three brigades of Cavalry under French, also 3,600 strong. These three brigades, however, did not come into line until May 8, five days after the beginning of the advance. Having been employed almost continuously since the capture of Bloemfontein, and having received only small instalments of fresh horses, they had to spend the first days of May in a thorough refit. Their Horse Artillery had been wisely reduced to one battery for each brigade. The remaining brigade of Cavalry, under Broadwood, and the four remaining corps of mounted riflemen—1,400 and 4,300 strong respectively—were with Ian Hamilton. Buller’s mounted troops I have mentioned. Hunter’s were the Imperial Light Horse and the Kimberley corps. The Yeomanry were distributed between Methuen, Warren, Carrington, and Rundle, with the latter of whom Brabant’s Colonial division was acting.
There is no need, even if my space permitted, to follow with any closeness the fortunes of the grand advance. I have now reached a point in the war where it is necessary only to summarize events, to select from a vast number of operations conducted over a vast expanse of territory, typically interesting examples of mounted action, and along with the process of selection to trace the growth of principles.
The most interesting, naturally, of all the operations of that period were those of the two central columns under Roberts and Ian Hamilton, which from May 3 onwards[[44]] worked in close combination, and may be regarded as one force, nearly 40,000 strong, with 119 guns, exclusive of Colvile’s supporting column. It will have been noticed that they were far stronger in mounted troops than any other portion of the army. Indeed, at the lowest computation of their effective mounted strengths, and at the highest estimate of the Boer effectives from time to time opposed to them, it appears that Roberts and Hamilton together must at every stage in the advance have had a decisive superiority in mounted troops alone over the whole force of their opponents. Until May 8, when French’s three brigades of Cavalry came up, not more than 5,500 Boers in all opposed both columns, which at that time had 9,200 mounted men between them. At the Zand River fight on May 9 and 10 the Boers, reinforced by 3,000 Transvaalers under Botha, who thenceforth took over the supreme control from De la Rey, reached their highest numerical fighting strength of about 8,000. At the same moment, reinforced by French’s Cavalry, our own mounted strength also reached its highest point of nearly 13,000.[[45]] After this, and until the fall of Pretoria, the enemy never appear to have mustered more than 5,000 men in opposition to the combined columns; for the Free State forces withdrew altogether before crossing the Vaal, and betook themselves to local warfare. At Diamond Hill four fresh Transvaal commandos from Natal counterbalanced other defections, and enabled Botha to put 6,000 men into the field. Here, for the first time, our mounted strength in action (a little below 5,000) was below the total Boer strength. This was partly the result of wastage in horses. All along our mounted troops suffered heavily from this cause, and the same cause affected the Boers also, though not in anything like an equal degree. Botha, in his despatches at this time, used habitually to refer to his “Infantry,” meaning the burghers who had lost their mounts.[[46]]