A few days later, Christian de Wet, with 1,200 men and 5 guns, again took the field, and continued the series of raids which he had initiated at Sannah’s Post and Reddersburg. This time he directed his efforts mainly against the weakest British point—the enormously lengthy line of railway communications which linked Roberts to his base. After snapping up a convoy near Heilbron on June 4, he attacked and captured simultaneously three posts on the railway between Kroonstad and Pretoria at daybreak on June 7, and a fortnight later, with varying success, carried out other raids upon the railway or upon convoys. Trivial as the direct military results of these exploits were, their moral effect was enormous, not only in awakening De Wet’s compatriots to a lasting sense of their own capacity, but in strengthening the higher Boer counsels at a very critical moment. Roberts and Botha had opened tentative negotiations for peace between June 5 and 11, after the capture of Pretoria. There can be no question that De Wet’s successes on June 4 and 7 inclined the scale in favour of war.
The firebrand next appears in July, midway in the drama of the Brandwater Basin. Hunter’s envelopment of this, the great mountain fastness of the Eastern Free State, and his capture of over 4,000 men under Prinsloo on July 29, was the most extensive and the most ably conducted of all the subsidiary operations during the year 1900. “Subsidiary,” indeed, is the wrong term. It was capital, in the sense that it actually removed from the field a large body of fighting burghers, a result which no other operations, those of Paardeberg alone excepted, had achieved. The mounted interest, however, in the manœuvres which led to the surrender, is small. For us the chief interest lies in the eruption from the death-trap, on July 15, just before it closed, of De Wet, Steyn, and 2,600 of the best Boer troops, with 5 guns and an immense convoy.
Dashing away to the north, flinging off two Cavalry brigades, and capturing a train en route, De Wet reached the neighbourhood of Reitzburg, and lay there for twelve days (July 25 to August 6), occupying himself with little raids upon the railway. Roberts, who had just completed his eastward advance to Middelburg, determined to run to earth the irrepressible Boer leader, and for nine days all eyes in South Africa were turned upon the extraordinary spectacle presented by the first of the three great “hunts” with which De Wet’s name is associated.
Ten mobile columns, including large numbers of mounted men, took part, at one time or another, in the chase, and in all nearly 30,000 men were engaged directly or indirectly in the enveloping operations. Thrice the net was drawn so closely around the quarry that there seemed to be no hope of escape. But De Wet got through, dodging and doubling over the Vaal, across the Western Transvaal, and through the Magaliesberg Range to the district north of Pretoria, having achieved—with a loss of a gun and some waggons—the only specific object of all this desperate marching; that, namely, of escorting President Steyn to a point whence he could reach the Transvaal leaders, and concert fresh measures of defence with them.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this and many another similar feat of evasion was that it was performed throughout at the “net” speed of ox-waggons, of which a large number accompanied the Boer column, together with herds of cattle and sheep, an increasing number of dismounted burghers, and, until near the end, a considerable number of British prisoners. De Wet himself, from the beginning to the end of his career, was always dead against taking heavy convoys on independent expeditions of this sort, but his power over his burghers rarely reached the point of persuading them to adopt his view. With our vastly superior resources for forming advanced bases we should have been able to make our mounted troops far more independent, but we never succeeded in overcoming the transport difficulty. Our “net” speed was less than De Wet’s on this occasion. Mounted interest from the Boer standpoint is confined: (a) To their customary skill in handling small protective screens, so as to check pursuit, and compel us to waste time in the preparatory shelling of positions; (b) to the brilliant scouting of Theron’s corps of 200 picked scouts. Knowledge of the country had very little to do with the success of these scouts, a considerable proportion of whom were foreigners from Europe. Reconnaissance was our own weakest point. Touch was rarely kept for twenty-four hours together, and we find already growing up that insidious tendency to rely more on centralized intelligence for the blocking of all supposed outlets of escape to the pursued force than on local scouting, backed by universal co-operation in strenuous tackling energy, for running that force to earth wherever and whenever it could be found.
There was plenty of individual British energy displayed in the chase, but very little co-operative energy. Methuen’s column, which originally was a mixed force of all arms, bore almost the whole brunt of the direct pursuit, and performed marvels of endurance. During the last three days Methuen dropped his Infantry, and followed the trail with 600 Yeomanry, 600 Colonials, and 11 guns, and with these men on the 12th made the only effective attack in the course of the hunt, capturing a gun and sixteen waggons. The purely mounted columns, of which there were three, two of Cavalry and one of mounted riflemen, never gained fighting contact with the enemy at all.
For the rest, De Wet’s own native audacity and ingenuity were his salvation. We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we European peoples, with our “regular” armies and our authorized textbook regulations for “regular” war, can afford to ignore the very least of the elements of success in these feats of evasion. If they seem to be wholly defensive in character, we must remember that they could not have been otherwise. To stand and fight it out meant envelopment by overwhelming numbers, and the loss of men who could never be replaced. And defensive power is only the correlative of offensive power. I need scarcely add that the whole of the work done by both sides in this hunt, and in all similar hunts, was essentially Cavalry work. Every good quality shown by either party was a Cavalry quality.
IV.—The Advance to Komati Poort.
President Steyn’s safe arrival in the north about the middle of August, after this perilous series of adventures, brings us somewhat prematurely to the last scene in the first great phase of the war. He came too late to be of use in averting the final dissolution of the Transvaal forces before the advance of Lord Roberts up the Delagoa Railway to the Portuguese frontier. But we must retrace our steps a little before we reach that point.
Since Diamond Hill (June 12) the Transvaal leaders had gradually abandoned all serious intention of defending the Delagoa line to extremities. Botha soon seems to have resigned himself to the eventual necessity of guerilla warfare, and during June sent off most of his commandos to their own districts, there to fight for their own homes, reserving for the defence of the Delagoa Railway only those burghers through whose districts it passed, together with the Police and most of his Artillery. For a month he held the Tigerpoort range of hills, fifteen to twenty miles east of Pretoria. Meanwhile the south-eastern men opposed Buller’s advance from the Natal border to Heidelberg, the northern men prepared to defend the Pietersburg Railway, and De la Rey organized the first of many formidable offensive revivals in his own district, the Western Transvaal, culminating on July 11 in the capture of the post at Zilikat’s Nek, in other small attacks, and in a general threat to Pretoria from the west. Botha, who had just been driven off the Tigerpoort range by a well-managed movement of mounted troops under Hutton and French (July 5 to 11), now saw a chance of an effective combination with De la Rey by a counter-attack upon the position just lost. Viljoen, with 2,000 men (against about 4,000 on our side), carried out this enterprise with considerable spirit on July 16, and came dangerously near success on our left at Witpoort. The situation was saved in this quarter by what the Official and Times narratives call a “charge” of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, though how near it came to being a mounted charge I am unable to discover.