In the same report General Clements stated that Major K. P. Apthorp, who was temporarily employed as an intelligence officer on his staff, had afforded him “very great help until taken prisoner on June 6.”
The following non-commissioned officers and private soldiers were also mentioned:—
No. 4512, Lance-Corporal P. Doyle;[304] No. 4248, Lance-Corporal M. Tytherleigh; No. 4868, Lance-Corporal J. Rathbone; No. 1408, Private —— Baker; No. 4129, Private —— Ryan; and No. 5024, Private P. Dumphy, particularly distinguished themselves on the night of July 23. No. 4506, Private J. Kavanagh, who showed remarkable courage and coolness on the same occasion, was wounded while carrying a message across ground heavily swept by fire.
As soon as General Clements learned that the Highland brigade had driven the Boers from Retief’s Nek, he marched two or three miles along the road to Fouriesburg, the chief town in the Brandwater Basin, and then encamped. The halt was very welcome; an officer writes, “we were all very much done up, especially those who had been in Colonel Guinness’s night march, and after a good ‘square’ meal and a double issue of rum (Reger, our Quartermaster, surpassed himself on this occasion) there were few of us awake that afternoon.” Next day the whole of Hunter’s army was in motion. MacDonald was sent to help Bruce Hamilton in the task of sealing the mouths of Naauwpoort Nek and the Golden Gate, the passes by which the Boers might dash eastward into the open country round Harrismith, the principal town in that part of the Free State. Clements and Paget marched through a fertile country, well watered and full of prosperous farms, towards Fouriesburg, whither Rundle, who had dislodged the burghers from Commando Nek, was also hastening. As the advance-guard of the 8th division was the first to reach the goal, Clements’ and Paget’s brigades were halted a few miles from Fouriesburg, and did not move again until the 27th, when they entered the place after a feeble opposition from a few snipers dropped by the main body of the enemy who, still ignorant that British troops awaited them at the eastern passes, were retreating at speed towards Naauwpoort Nek and the Golden Gate. But though most of the burghers were hurrying eastward, it was necessary to ensure that no detachments should break out through Slabbert’s, Retief’s, or Commando Neks, and so heavy was the call upon the infantry to garrison these defiles that Hunter could only muster five battalions to drive the Boers into the net spread by MacDonald and Bruce Hamilton. One of these was the 1st battalion, Royal Irish regiment, which with part of the Wiltshire formed the advance-guard under Clements on the 28th, when the burghers fought a rear-guard action near Slaap Kranz ridge with great tenacity and cunning. The position proved to be a very strong one, and Clements was unable to oust the enemy from it, though his artillery and infantry were engaged throughout the day. Colonel Guinness was anxious to be allowed to seize a commanding knoll in front of the left of the Boer line, which seemed to offer a good base for an assault upon the pass itself, but General Clements considered that the Royal Irish had done enough for the day, and ordered a battalion of the Scots Guards, recently arrived on the field, to occupy it. At midnight they advanced on the main position and found it undefended, for the Boers, after checking the whole column for many hours, had silently disappeared when they saw that the odds had become too heavy for them to face. The casualties of the day amounted to thirty-four killed and wounded, the Royal Irish losing one man killed and five wounded.[305]
With the encounter at Slaap Kranz the campaign in the Brandwater Basin came to an end. De Wet had always opposed the policy of retreating into the mountains of Fouriesburg, but his views had been over-ridden, and, as mentioned on [page 330], he had fought Clements at Bethlehem to gain time for the main body to complete its concentration in the valley of the Brandwater. When he arrived there with his rear-guard, he set himself to convince the members of his very unruly army that the fastnesses to which they had betaken themselves would prove not a sanctuary but a trap, and urged them to follow him in a bold dash into the open veld. His rough eloquence appeared to convince the majority; his scheme for breaking out of the mountains was accepted, and on the night of July 15, he made his way with two thousand six hundred men across Slabbert’s Nek, and headed northwards, in the full belief that within twenty-four hours the remainder of the burghers would follow him. But as soon as De Wet’s commanding personality was removed the Free Staters fell into confusion; instead of carrying out the plan to which they had agreed they began to quarrel among themselves; they lost precious days in wrangling over the choice of another leader, and by the time that Hunter’s columns were advancing upon the passes they had become demoralised, suspicious of their chiefs and of each other. Dry rot spread so rapidly among them that on the 30th, Prinsloo, who claimed to have been elected General-in-Chief, surrendered with 4140 men, three guns (two of which had been lost by the Royal Horse artillery at Sannah’s Post), 4000 horses and ponies, many waggons, a large number of rifles, and a million rounds of small-arm ammunition.
The Royal Irish saw enough of the prisoners to form an idea of the manner of men with whom they had been fighting since the beginning of the year. The first impression was one of utter astonishment. Was it possible that this motley crowd of civilians formed part of the burgher levies which for many months had constantly opposed and frequently defeated the British army? Some were old men with long white beards; others were in the prime of life; others, again, were lads not half-way through their teens; none wore a vestige of uniform, and the majority were dressed in clothes so badly cut that no self-respecting peasant in Europe would have condescended to wear them. Yet among the captives every grade of society in the Free State republic was represented: there were land-owners, who possessed tens of thousands of acres and great wealth of flocks and herds; members of Parliament; civil servants; merchants; lawyers; doctors; and last, but by no means least in numbers, “bywohners,” or poor Boers, who, as they had no land of their own, were allowed to squat on the estates of their richer neighbours. The land-owning class, as a rule, were magnificent men, well-grown, sturdy, and inured to hardships; constant hunting on their farms had made them good rifle shots and excellent judges of distance,[306] and, as has already been mentioned, many of them had served in campaigns against the Kaffirs. In character they much resembled the British yeomen of two hundred years ago, for although brave, patriotic, and hospitable, they were ignorant, obstinate, and deeply distrustful of new men and new ideas. A certain number of the professional classes had been sent in their youth to Europe to complete their education; their travels had greatly widened their intellectual horizon, and as they did not stay away long enough to lose their sporting tastes or their hereditary instinct for irregular warfare, they proved a valuable asset in the Boer army. In dress as well as education these younger men presented a curious contrast to their fellow-citizens, who were still as uncouth in speech and manners as the original pioneers of the Free State, while the Europeanised burghers were dressed in well-cut Norfolk jackets, boots, and breeches, and spoke English admirably with accents acquired at the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, or Glasgow. The very baggage owned by the prisoners when they surrendered showed how wide a difference there was between the old school and the new. The old-fashioned burghers, however rich they were, had gone on active service with their few belongings packed in old and shapeless carpet-bags; the youngsters took the field with kit-bags or suit-cases imported from England.
General Hunter’s success in the Brandwater Basin, to which the Royal Irish contributed not a little, was far-reaching in its results; in the words of the official historian “it removed in a moment the possibility of attack in force from the west, which had kept Sir Redvers Buller’s army chained fast to the railway from Heidelberg down to Ladysmith. True, De Wet, Olivier, and other guerillas were still at large, but, vagrant and weakened, they were unlikely seriously to raid Natal across the Drakensberg, an eventuality which had never been absent, and with reason, from Sir R. Buller’s mind. None had known better than he how vulnerable still that many-gated colony was to incursions which would have undone in a few hours the heavy work of months.”[307] Now General Buller was able to organise a mobile force to march northwards against the Pretoria-Komati Poort railway in order to co-operate with Lord Roberts in the invasion of the Eastern Transvaal, where the remnants of the Boer army still kept the field. In this great movement the Royal Irish were destined to play their part, for on the 1st of August Clements’ brigade left Hunter’s army; on the 9th it marched into Kroonstad, and after many halts and delays on the railway reached Pretoria on the 18th. It was one of the peculiarities of the war in South Africa that no General could hope to keep his brigade intact for any length of time; so far Clements had been fortunate, but now his turn for dismemberment arrived, and after bidding farewell to the commander whom they admired and respected deeply, the Royal Irish were sent off to Belfast, a station on the Komati Poort line, where they joined Major-General Smith-Dorrien’s brigade (the 19th) in a column commanded by Lieutenant-General Ian Hamilton.[308]
The battalion was not actively engaged on the 27th of August in the battle of Bergendal, though some of the companies on outpost came under long-range artillery fire from the formidable position astride of the railway, which Lord Roberts and Sir Redvers Buller attacked respectively in front and flank. When the Boers fell back from their carefully prepared entrenchments they retired at first along the railway; but under the dispiriting influences of this, its latest defeat, the burgher army soon began to fall to pieces. One column struck southward; a second hurried eastward towards the Portuguese frontier; while a third, commanded by General L. Botha, turned northwards and headed for the maze of hills by which the town of Lydenburg is surrounded. This detachment made so firm a stand at Badfontein that Sir Redvers Buller, who had been entrusted with its pursuit, asked for reinforcements, and General Ian Hamilton was sent to his help with the greater part of his column. Starting from Belfast on September 3, Hamilton, after two days’ hard marching and continuous skirmishing, succeeded in placing himself on the right rear of Botha’s entrenched line at Badfontein; the Boers thereupon drew off eastward to Paardeplaatz, a huge mountain within distant cannon-shot of Lydenburg. As a preliminary to dislodging the burghers from this new position, the British troops occupied Lydenburg during the morning of the 7th; in the afternoon, after the bivouacs had been formed, the soldiers were allowed to bathe in the creeks; they were splashing about in the water, when suddenly two 6-in. guns began to fire from Paardeplaatz, ten or eleven thousand yards off, and an unlucky shell killed two men of the battalion and dangerously wounded another.[309] The Royal Irish were at once moved to a place of safety, and for the rest of the day had the satisfaction of watching the Boer gunners waste invaluable ammunition upon the empty shelters of the bivouac. Next day (the 8th) Paardeplaatz was carried by the British troops. The Boers held a precipitous hill, 1500 feet in height, and shaped exactly like a horse-shoe: the only track ran to the farthest point of the shoe up an ever-narrowing ridge, cleft asunder in various places by deep dongas, almost impassable even by infantry. Two 6-in. guns commanded the path, and lighter guns and pom-poms were posted on various points along the crest. Hamilton was ordered to attack in front and to turn the left flank, while Buller worked round the right of Botha’s line. Although the turning movements involved several hours of hard marching and scrambling, the frontal and flank attacks were delivered simultaneously, and carried the position with a rush. A wing of the Royal Irish (F, G, H companies, and the volunteers) under Major Hatchell were the first troops to reach the topmost ridge, which commanded the enemy’s only line of retreat, a natural causeway a few yards wide, with deep precipices on either side of it. This road was crowded with Boers, who, after saving their guns, were now in full retreat; the mass presented a splendid target for musketry, but just as the men were bringing their rifles into play down fell a mountain mist, completely veiling the burghers from their view. To pursue amidst the precipices in such a fog was impossible; the only thing left to do was to fire volleys in the direction taken by the enemy, who is said to have suffered some loss from these unaimed bullets. The British casualties were small; and in the Royal Irish only one man was wounded.[310]
Hamilton now returned to the railway, and then moved eastwards towards Komati Poort, over country in places so difficult as to be almost impassable. For instance, part of his route lay over hills so steep that in the ten miles between Godwaan station and Kaapsche Hoop the track rose 2200 feet. To lighten the loads, the wooden cases enclosing the biscuit tins were removed, and the soldiers were made to carry their second blankets, usually transported in the waggons. As the column toiled up the steep inclines, the troops hauled the vehicles after them by main force, and when the descent began, each waggon was held back by ten men, who steadied it with drag-ropes down the worst places on the road. Though Hamilton encountered none of the enemy, the march was in many ways an exciting one. A company of the battalion was crossing a railway bridge only wide enough to carry a train, when the sound of an engine was heard in a cutting hard by, and an officer who was present wrote—