The whole of the South African War, and the guerilla war in particular, was a superb school for mounted troops. It was an exceedingly hard school, but hard schools are the best. Our soldiers, and above all our Cavalrymen, ought to thank Providence on their knees for having given them this unique and unrivalled opportunity for practice in their art within a ring-fence, so to speak, subject to no external disturbance, and against an enemy who, however formidable in quality, could never be reinforced, and were bound to dwindle in numbers.
Did we tackle the guerilla war in such a way as to make the most our schooling? I am afraid we did not. I am not at all sure that, by the time we had reached that stage, we had the power to do so; but however that may be, when we are looking for lessons, let us ruthlessly eliminate bad or doubtful precedents, and fix our eyes on good precedents.
Our principal weakness was not a new one, though it assumed a new shape. We had always aimed too much at the positions and possessions of the enemy, and too little at his personnel. It was the same now. His new base henceforward was the land, and we made it one of our principal endeavours, if not our primary endeavour, to cut off that great and fruitful source of supply. Roberts, as early as September, 1900, had enjoined the destruction of crops, and, under certain conditions, of farms, though comparatively little had been accomplished when he quitted the command. Kitchener initiated a plan of systematic devastation, with its corollary, the systematic deportation of non-combatants to concentration camps. With the ethical and political aspects of this measure we are not now concerned. Its military result was to retard the education and restrict the fighting efficacy of our mounted troops by setting before them two incompatible aims: that of grappling with the enemy, and that of destroying his crops and cattle and deporting his families. The latter aim, which was secondary, too often tended to become primary, simply because it was the easiest to put into practice, and human nature is prone to follow lines of least resistance.
Another doubtful precedent, closely allied with the last, and only to be justified as a pis aller to meet an immensely difficult case, was the system of “drives”—the system, that is, of sweeping defined tracts of country with large groups of columns, according to formal plans worked out in a central staff department, and controlled in execution from that department. This, broadly speaking, was Kitchener’s method of dealing with the guerilla war. He varied it with other methods, with concerted movements of a minor and less centralized character, with the night-raid system, the constabulary post system, and with the work of independent columns, while periodical eruptions of spontaneous Boer activity often compelled him to retaliate with any rough-and-ready means that came to hand. A vast amount of good independent or semi-independent work was done in one way or another by enterprising British leaders, but on the whole it is true to say that the drive was our principal weapon. Now, the spirit of the drive was diametrically opposed to the spirit which should actuate ardent mounted troops. It sacrificed dash to symmetry, and it gave no scope for surprise, the soul of mounted effort. Designed to cope with evasion, it bred habits which reacted on enterprise just when enterprise had its best opportunities—that is, when the Boers took the offensive. Except in weeding out weak-kneed burghers and in facilitating devastation, it proved sterile until reinforced by its complement, the block-house system. This system added physical barriers to human barriers and provided a far-flung network of communications and supply centres, by the aid of which, in addition to the railways and base-towns, enormous numbers of men could be manœuvred in driving lines, fifty or sixty miles in length, with mathematical precision and speed. But the system was not ready for application in its complete form until February, 1902, after sixteen months of guerilla war, and even this huge and elaborate mechanism, although by a throttling, starving process it eventually brought the Boers to their knees, failed to achieve the supreme object of war, the defeat of the enemy in the open field. To the last, veterans who still possessed horses and the will to escape, overleapt the strongest barriers, whether animate or inanimate, and to the last, wherever pressure was relaxed, dealt biting blows at isolated columns.
It is easy to point out the drawbacks of Kitchener’s military policy. But it is difficult to see how, with his professional mounted troops still so backward, and with the raw levies which constituted so large a portion of his mounted army, he could have adopted any other policy. As it was, he took great risks and incurred substantial penalties in throwing prematurely into the field untrained troops. The fact, about which there can be no question, that during the last year of the war the enemy replenished his ammunition almost entirely from British sources, and at the end had largely re-armed himself with Lee-Enfield rifles, is proof enough by itself of the penalties incurred. The most we can say in criticism of Kitchener is that he might have done more, as the troops gained confidence and efficiency—and they did gain both, rapidly and continuously—to temper the rigidity of his excessively centralized system. Even here we are on debatable ground. His genius was for organization; his countrymen profited by that genius, and it ill becomes them to cavil at the defects which were its inevitable accompaniment. A weaker man, actuated by the theoretically higher aim of educating his mounted troops on ideal lines, at whatever cost, might very well have failed miserably. We can obtain a rough criterion of what this education meant by a study of the guerilla war in Cape Colony, where devastation and deportation were out of the question, where drives were barely feasible, though they were sometimes tried, and where the single object of finding and fighting the rebel bands stood out unobscured. With full allowance for the immense difficulties of the problem, the results cannot be regarded as satisfactory.
In summing up the whole matter we must remember that two great factors—one military, the other moral—exercised an influence upon events which Kitchener, beyond a certain point, was powerless to modify. The military factor was simply the initial inferiority of our troops to the Boers as mounted riflemen. At bottom, the excessive driving tendency was promoted by the same cause as the tendency during the regular war towards disproportionately wide turning movements, as opposed to direct aggressive tackling. The idea was to circumvent, not to attack; to trap, not to pierce. Similarly with reconnaissance. This, by the time Kitchener took the command, had become almost a lost art. To revive it, in the exacting conditions, was beyond the power of a Commander-in-Chief. We came to rely almost wholly on outside agencies—natives and Boer spies—for our intelligence, and on central agencies for the diffusion of this intelligence. This was a fatal precedent for our Cavalry in future wars. Naturally, the effect was to favour centrally organized drives and to discourage that highest form of enterprise which inspires men who use their own eyes to secure opportunities for their own weapons. What is the weapon which not only decides the combat but aids the scout to use his eyes? Everywhere and always, in Manchuria as in South Africa, the rifle.
I touched on the moral factor in my last chapter. The Boers had the highest possible moral stimulus—that of defending their homes and nationalities. We had no motive so stimulating. Racial hatred would have been the only stimulus correspondingly strong, but we had none. The Boers improved on acquaintance. We had taken up arms to secure the political equality of our countrymen, and we had already secured that object beyond question, and annexation as well. To go farther, and aim at so cowing the Boer national spirit as to gain a permanent political ascendancy for ourselves was an object beyond our power or will to achieve, and beyond the power or will of any free democracy or confederation of free democracies of the British Imperial type to achieve. Peaceable political fusion under our own flag was the utmost we could secure. That meant a conditional Boer surrender, on a promise of future autonomy. The unconditional surrender which Lord Milner was anxious to obtain, however long and bitter a struggle it entailed, could scarcely have led to peaceable fusion. The only other alternative, feasible possibly, but outside discussion or contemplation, was the permanent expatriation of all the most vigorous elements in the two Boer races. Kitchener grasped the truth as soon as he took command. That his own spontaneous instinct as a soldier was towards sharp, mercilessly decisive blows in the field he had shown clearly enough at Paardeberg. But that opportunity and many others had been lost, never to return. From a soldier’s point of view he saw the insuperable difficulties at this hour of attempting, with the material now at his command, to deal blows sharp and heavy enough to destroy the Boer national spirit. Hence his rather mechanical military system, aiming at slow attrition rather than fierce aggression; hence his schemes for dealing with the civil population; and hence his political policy, which was to obtain at the earliest moment, but without the least relaxation of strong military effort—indeed, with a daily intensification of those efforts—a settlement on agreed terms. The Boers, clinging desperately to their independence, held out against any settlement whatever, conditional or unconditional, until May, 1902. Meanwhile the task of inducing them to recognize the inevitable was not one which evoked, or could be expected to evoke, any marked degree of military enthusiasm. There was a great deal of very natural caution among commanders in the field, increased by the ever-present impression that the war was on the point of ending and by a well-grounded reluctance to make a bold use of new troops against veterans. It was useless for Kitchener to enjoin daring and enterprise if he could not get his subordinates to accept the necessary responsibility. There is no doubt that some of his genuine efforts in this direction met with inadequate reply. But, again, we cannot blink the fact that the responsibility, as events showed, was very heavy, and from purely military causes. The net result was that the strongest will in South Africa exerted its full and legitimate influence, and produced a military system based mainly on organization and numbers, rather than on expert capacity in normal field operations.
Raids.—It was natural, therefore, that during the guerilla war sound lessons for the future should come mainly from the Boer side. In strategy—so far as the word is applicable to the guerilla war—they had little to teach us; but that little is not unimportant. Beyond the simple policy of distracting our efforts and alleviating their own distress by outbreaks timed so as to relieve one harassed district at the expense of another less harassed, they had only one consistent strategical object—that, namely, of feeding the rebellion in Cape Colony by successive small invasions. The instinct was sound. Infinite embarrassment came of it and a drain on our mounted troops, which was constant and severe. The principal raids by which this policy was carried out—(1) that of Hertzog and Kritzinger, December, 1900, to January, 1901; (2) that of Christian de Wet, January to March, 1901; (3) that of Smuts, August to September, 1901—are well worth careful study as examples of what small numbers of determined mounted riflemen can do, even when burdened, as De Wet was, with heavy transport, in traversing great tracts of country through hosts of enemies for a strategical purpose. No. 2 led to the third and greatest “De Wet hunt”—an episode packed with excitement and dramatic interest from beginning to end. No. 3—the ride of Smuts with 340 men from the Gatsrand (West Transvaal) to Cape Colony—merits even closer attention.
We must add to the list of raids Botha’s attempted invasion of Natal—September to October, 1901—which was also an instructive example for future wars, regular or irregular. Botha failed in what from the first was a hopeless undertaking, but he showed audacity and nerve, not only in tactical aggression, but in extricating himself from envelopment by immensely superior forces on his return journey. Both for making and checking such raids—and we must include under the same general heading the previous “hunts” and De Wet’s early raids upon the railway—rifle-power is everything. In Chapter XIV. I shall contrast the abject failure of the Russian Cavalry in similar enterprises owing to lack of rifle-power with the rare but brilliant Japanese successes. Kimberley and the American Civil War drive home the same lesson.
Night Attacks.—These were numerous, and prove conclusively that in this class of enterprise small, thoroughly disciplined forces have good chances of success against troops who fall short in the slightest degree in vigilance and sound outpost work. We may divide the attacks roughly into two classes—those against mobile forces encamped for the night, and those against more or less permanently fortified posts or towns. Of the former class, one of the most brilliant, because it was undertaken against the wariest of wary veterans, was that of Colonel Scobell upon Lotter’s rebel commando at Bouwer’s Hoek (Cape Colony) on September 4, 1901. A Cavalry regiment—the 9th Lancers—and the Cape Mounted Rifles shared in the assault, which led to the only complete and unqualified success we ever obtained in Cape Colony. Another plucky exploit was that of Major Shea and a detachment of South Australians, who attacked Smuts at Grootvlei on the night of August 1, 1901, just as that clever young leader (for once caught napping) was beginning his ride to Cape Colony.