An American with Lord Roberts

Preface

These records of the South African war, in continuation of my former volume, " Towards Pretoria," are practically fresh, and are mainly on subjects of wide interest. They include material which has never been published anywhere, as well as much that has not before been presented to the American public.

Even those chapters which originally appeared in the " Daily Mail " as letters from the front have, in many cases, been recast and extended. I desire here to thank Mr. Alfred Harmsworth for his generous permission to make this new use of the material.

One chapter appeared in " Harper's Magazine," and another in " The Century Magazine," and these, also, have been subjected to material changes.

The fault of delay in the publication of the book is thus, I hope, atoned for by the careful revision of that which was not new, and the liberal addition of material especially prepared for this work.

THE AUTHOR.

January^ igoi.

Contents

?AGB

CHAPTER

I. The Teuton Tug of War i

Chapter I

When Field-Marshal Lord Roberts came out to South Africa he came to take the command in what had every outward aspect of a losing game. The army was not daunted, though it was checked. The people of England were not despondent, but they were depressed, and they had yielded their spirits to be alternately swept along upon high waves of exultation, or dashed down into gulfs of anxious misgiving. They did not at first realise that their armies were fighting a country quite as much as an enemy ; that the veldt offered a problem which no army had ever before encountered ; that in British colonies the conditions of civil war were present, and had to be suppressed. The Boer was, perhaps, the least difficult to overcome of these three novel obstacles in the army's path, and the

British public realised that they were not doing as

I gloriously as they were wont ; they were not even having their own way slowly, and so each citizen became a critic of all the generals who were at the front.

When Lord Roberts actually arrived, the force in the field was not seeing the daybreak of a change for the better from any single point at which it was halted. Over in Natal an army was locked up in Ladysmith, with the Boers holding the door, and an outer force battering at it and at them in vain. In the south. General French, the cavalry leader who had done so splendidly at Elandslaagte, and was yet to do as well under Lord Roberts, was harassing the Boers with spirited and incessant energy along such a front as only the latest warfare produces— a thirty to forty mile position, but he was not gaining ground. On the west, Lord Methuen had run the front wheels of his army against a boulder called Maaghersfontein, and could not get over it. It was to this state of things that the Field-Marshal came, and, by the magic of his name and presence, by his unerring instinct and masterly resource, by his commanding genius and sound strategy, he altered the entire situation in what now seems no time at all — as with a blow.

Let us look back over the experience of Lord Methuen, who seemed for a time to be conducting a military waltz rather than a mere promenade from the Orange River to Kimberley. We shall see that it was the country of the Boers that he was fighting, quite as much if not more than the Boers of the country. To begin with, the British set up an advanced supply station at De Aar, in Cape Colony, eighty miles below the Orange River. There they gathered in profuse abundance all that could be needed by an army in the field : horses, mules, carts, forage, food, saddles, uniforms, accoutrements, shoes, harness — everything. When they had half their stores there, the tents and corrugated iron sheds in which they were stored were closely packed in the middle of a valley commanded on the right and left by kopjes, with a wide open piece of veldt to the southward, and a narrow pass at the other end. They had but few troops to guard the treasure, and they did not fortify the hills. When the largest amount of stores was there they had only one regiment of infantry, a battery, and a corps of scouts to defend the place. They dug trenches across the veldt, and fortified the principal hill on either side ; but even then they could not have withstood such an attacking force as it would have been well worth an enemy's while to send forward.

Thus at the very outset the country itself — the peculiar surface and nature of the ground — began to tell against the British. No attack was made ; yet they were surrounded by Boers and rebels. Practically every so-called farmer in the neighbourhood was up in arms ; rebels were in and out of the camp all day and every day, pretending to have horses, forage, or gardenstuff to sell. Commandoes were hovering about in the north, on both sides, and never far off ; yet no attack was made. This proved that the Boer knew the true value of his country, and that he had begun to use it to the best advantage. He could hold a place like De Aar with a thousand men against ten thousand, but he would not attack it — or any place, or any one — unless the natural surrounding offered nearly complete shelter to himself. He attacked in the open in daylight but once or twice in these seven months ; he made a night attack once only, I believe. De Aar, then, was unmolested because the Boer used himself and his strange surroundings in combination. In what follows we shall see how he did this, and what proportion of the impediments in the way of British success should be credited to the character of the land round Great Britain's army.

The South African veldt is the most easily defended country in the world — " the best defensive country " is how a military man might put it. On every mile or two there is a natural fort — or half a dozen of them. These are the so-called kopjes, short, thick, volcaniclooking hills, often with a squared-off summit or a crater-like bowl on the top, such as Majuba has. They are rocky hills, but not rocky as the reader is likely to understand the term, for these are nothing but rocks — hills made of rocks, so that the surface is a fret-work of the outermost boulders. Between and around these kopjes lies the veldt, which always looks level, but is never s6.

It looks level because it is a dead and dull monotony of baked earth, sage tufts, and stones, any single acre being precisely like the next hundred or ten thousand. Instead of being smooth, it rises and falls in earth billows, and often in the depression behind the ridge of such a billow an army can move. I have seen a long railway train lost on an apparently level veldt when it turned into one of these depressions. But there is far better cover for the Boers than these afford. There are the so-called nullahs and spruits, which seam the veldt in millions of places. No one can see them until he is almost upon them, yet there troops can move unseen on horseback. In hundreds of them the whole Boer army could ride invisible for miles. At Belmont I was watching the retreating Boers and the pursuing mounted men. Looking down from the kopje's top, I saw the entire cavalcade suddenly disappear as if the earth had yawned and swallowed it. I went to the place afterward, and found that it was one of these rifts made by a torrent in the rainy season, a dozen or fourteen feet deep, and a great deal wider. Had the British mounted force pushed on they would have been decimated before they saw this gutter, but fortunately their horses were too jaded, and they did not go so far.

At Modder River, on the left of the Boers' main position, they used a part of one of these huge cracks in the earth as a kraal (corral) for their horses. This was a spruit, but, being bone-dry, was the same as a nullah. You could hide a two-storied house in it, and it ran to the river from a distance of half a mile. Here all their horses were knee-haltered and left with forage, and when the Boers retreated they ran to this place, under cover of the river-side trees and shrubbery, sprang to saddle, and rode the full length of the gutter before they could have been seen — had it been daylight.

Only think what their position was at Modder River ! Here they took advantage of the extraordinary defensive qualities of one of their rivers, qualities not to be found elsewhere. These South African rivers are, during nine months in the year, narrow, shallow, muddy streams that form a mere ribbon in the centre of a very wide, very deep cavity in the earth. The configuration of this bed is marked or terraced, as if to show the varying heights to which the river rises. There is, first, a short but precipitous fall from the level of the veldt to where the incline of the bed begins. Small trees and shrubs grow on this slope down to the point which the water reaches in normal seasons of flood. Below this incline is a flat, broad bed, all paved with large, smooth-topped stones. In the middle of this bed flows the normal river.

Thus these rivers are, like the dry clefts in the veldt, natural defensive positions, ready-made trenches, impromptu sunken forts. We shall see, by describing how the Boers used the Modder at the battle of that name (and again at Paardeberg, where Cronje surrendered), how perfect a defence such a place gives, and how skilfully the Boers use the opportunities their ground offers.

They dug a trench parallel with the river-bank, close to its edge, and turned the excavated earth into a breastwork, in which they stuck boughs and branches of trees to blend with the foliage behind them. Here riflemen, thousands strong, took their position, and held it for nearly twelve hours, without its ever being known to most of the British troops, whose progress they stopped, whether the Boers were on the same side of the river as themselves or on the farther side. Of such immense value is smokeless powder. By its use the Boers, whose chief aim is to keep out of sight, made even their fire— their fighting— invisible.

We have seen that the South African river-beds begin with a sheer declivity, a precipitous outer edge. This wall provided shelter for the officers, stretcherbearers, ammunition-distributors, and water-carriers, who passed freely and safely up and down the rear of their line, even on horseback, if they were so minded. Those who had occasion to pass to and from the trenches and this deep-sheltered ^'runway" found that the plentiful vegetation, skirting the bed's edge in a narrow but dense line, gave them their needed chance to remain out of view of the British.

As a rule the adjacent land slopes toward a river, but South African topography violates all rules, and at this place the land inclined downward and away from the stream, so that every object as large as a jack-rabbit could be seen by the entrenched Boers at a distance of three miles. There appears, now, to have been nothing but luck in our winning that battle. It was the former belief that there were 7,000 or 8,000 Boers in those trenches, but there were nothing like so many, in all probability. Yet they held the British flat upon their stomachs all day,while they pumped lead over their heads as I verily believe bullets were never shot before. They did no other fighting than to stay in a gutter and shoot. It was their country that perplexed and hindered the British most, for many of them did not even know the Boers* whereabouts. They never saw them. At last a handful of ever-valorous, recklessly brave men got across the river, and cheered with an Anglo-Saxon " Hip, hip, hurrah ! " in order to warn a British battery and some of their own men not to continue shooting in that direction. At this sound the Boers, imagining that 10,000 men were about to flank them, took alarm and fled.

Another feature of the veldt which helps to make this land easily defensible against any power on earth, is that it is scored and seamed by the usually dry beds of the small tributaries of the rivers. These are deep, broad, steep-walled trenches dug into the earth by running water, and cannot be seen until you are within a few score yards of them. It was in one of these, called Corne Spruit, a little tributary of the Modder near Bloemfontein, that General Broadwood's convoy was trapped, when he was being shelled by an enemy that he supposed was entirely in his rear. The Boers suddenly came out from their hiding-places in the spruit, and demanded the surrender of the waggons, and also of the guns of a battery which had been driven into the web. This was another instance of utilising nature as an ally, and also a fine bit of strategy, the finest the Boers had then worked out.

But South African land formation has not contented herself with assisting her lords and masters merely with hollows, ridges, sluits, spruits, and kopjes. In order to provide a fortification to every square mile of the land, she has devised stone breastworks. These are oftenest found at the foot of a kopje, but the rule has such plentiful exceptions that no one can know where he will come across a collection of great boulders behind which men may hide and attack wild game or human foe. These collections of great black rocks may comprise a few in an irregular line or two, or they may cumber a square half-mile of the veldt, thrown over it thickly and in confusion. These the Boers can utilise on the open veldt, or as they lo THE TEUTON TUG OF WAR

did at Maaghersfontein, they may fringe the foot of sl kopje, and, with the added help of bushes, may make them serve as a screen, from behind which reinforcements, ammunition, and water can be safely passed to the men in the trenches.

Of all these obstacles the men of Lord Methuen's flying column made light, by sheer valour — by a bravery which other soldiers may match, but which no men on earth can possibly excel. These British officers and " Tommies " have a quality of courage that passes my understanding, and baffles all calculation when I consider the return it makes for the cost it entails. At Belmont and Graspan the troops stalked up kopjes against almost literal ropes of bullets. The more experienced were placed five paces apart, and most of them escaped, but the naval brigade and the Grenadier Guards, who lacked either proper orders or experience, marched along almost shoulder to shoulder, seeing their comrades drop like autumn leaves in a gale, but still plodding on, until the Boers must have imagined them demons, so that, with terror at their heartstrings, they turned and fled from both battlefields. The naval force lost almost 50 per cent, of their number. Thus Methuen's men marched on, hungry, tired, thirsty, losing a battalion out of ten, but rushing at the foe three times in one week, though his haunt each time was a volcano's crater spewing lead. At Maaghersfontein the very men who lost the battle were those whose bravery

THE TEUTON TUG OF WAR ii

had earned them more celebrity than any troops in the British army — the Highlanders.

The rest of the army thanked God that the mishap had befallen those whose glorious records for valour left them best able of all who served the Queen to afford one such rebuff.

With all these natural advantages of position at his disposal, of what sort is the Boer himself in character and conduct ? You must never think of him as a farmer, which he is not — any more than is any young Englishman or American who is ranching in the Bad Lands. The Boer is a cattle-herder, but this is so new a vocation of his that we must consider him as, first of all, a hunter. He was nothing else three or four decades ago — and more recently in some parts of his countries. He clings to his sporting-rifle to-day, and he longs to be a hunter solely, as his father was.

"The Boers have the great defect of all amateur soldiers," wrote George W. Steevens from the Natal side early in the war : " they love their ease, and do not mean to be killed." The Boer is an amateur soldier ; but then, again, he is a natural soldier, and of his kind the best natural soldier in the world. He does not mean to be killed. He stays in battle as long as he can inflict harm, and then removes to a stronger position, previously agreed upon, as soon as the tide turns and he begins to receive damage. He did not follow these tactics at Paardeberg, but this was owing to the stupidity of Cronje, who could not be made to believe that he was surrounded, and continued to wait for the frontal attack, which he had good reason to believe was the only mode of assault known to the British.

The Boer may love his ease, but he has most heroically restrained himself from, taking it. In European military parlance he is a mounted infantry-man, and the Hghtest-riding, most mobile, that we know among civilised or semi-civilised peoples. In this war some of the same leaders and commandoes have frequently crossed and recrossed the Free State, now fighting Buller in Natal, now engaging French at Rensburg, and even combating or threatening Methuen at Modder and Maaghersfontein. This rapid work must have been done with only biltong in the saddle-bags, and with no transport. But that is not the Boer's favourite or characteristic mode of soldiering. He usually has a considerable transport near by, in which is carried not only plenty of good and varied fare, but often his women as well. It is not wise to believe anything a Boer says under any circumstances, for the Spartans never can have reduced theft to such a science as these singular people have developed the practice of lying, and yet I have heard this statement as to their comforts in such ways and with such details that I am inclined to think there is some basis for it.

The Boers seem not to know or to value the truth, for they lie to one another, are lied to by their leaders, and are surfeited with lies by their newspaper organs. It is a condition so extraordinary that I cannot comprehend it, though every one in South Africa knows it to be true. I have seen the files of a Boer newspaper dating from the beginning of the war, and every battle report ended with " our loss was two killed and fifteen wounded," or *' one killed, while the English dead covered the field." Kimberley's relief, Cronje's surrender, Ladysmith's freedom, were all denied, and at the same time the commandants told their fighting-men that Russia and England were at war, that Russia had seized a large part of India, and that 15,000 Russian troops had landed in Natal.

Since it is certain that "truth will prevail," and every lie about the war has to be retracted more or less quickly, I cannot understand the minds which at one and the same time indulge the practice and are duped by it. What this leads to is evident in the fighting habits of the Boer, so that these rem.arks are not of the nature of a digression. It leads to British soldiers being invited into a Dutch garden to help themselves to fruit, and then being shot at by Boers hiding in the garden. It leads to such incidents as that at Jacobsdal, where every garden wall vomited shot, and yet where, when the town was taken, the men came out — very many with Red Cross badges on their arms — to welcome our soldiers and tell them how glad they were that the

British were coming to give them good rule and honest rulers. It leads to an instance the exact opposite of that, in which, at a village near Ladybrand, Colonel Broadwood and his men, while scattering Lord Roberts's proclamation, were entertained at tea in the best houses, and were told that all the people were glad the British had come. Within the half-hour that the little band of British enjoyed the hospitality of the place, a galloper came in to warn Broadwood that several thousands of Boers were approaching. The colonel and his men leaped upon their horses and made a hasty escape, but, as they fled, from the windows and the garden walls the Boers who had welcomed them fusilladed them with rifle-fire. Both this practical form of deception and actual lying are included in the definition of the Boer word " slim." To be ^' slim " is the aim of every man of that much mixed blood. They openly boast of and glory in it. In a dictionary the word would stand thus : —

Slim — Cunning, tricky, able to get the better of all with whom one has to do.

I have called the Boer a great natural soldier, but I suspect that what he is as a soldier is merely what he first became as a hunter. All his attributes are those of the clever stalker of wild and savage game. One trait that belongs to the born hunter he has lost — at least he has lost it in warfare — that is, his marksmanship. Considering the vast stores of cartridges he has burned in this war, and taking into weighty account the fact that the British have always been the attacking party, usually approaching him in full view, it is amazing how small a percentage of men the British have lost. One of the universally circulated bits of knowledge of the Boer that has had to be unlearned is this, for at the outset the most that was urged in his behalf as a warrior was that he was an excellent marksman. He does shoot straight, but the modern magazine-rifle destroys marksmanship while the marksman uses it. When an enemy is approaching, and you can shoot at him as often as you can move your right forefinger, you are apt, if not certain, to prefer throwing a hail of shot rather than to take time for deliberate aim. It is simpler, easier, and more satisfactory to send a mass of lead into a mass of men— particularly when they are Britishers rushing toward you as if their khaki uniform covered bodies of tempered steel.

The inspection of half a dozen battle-fields immediately after their desertion by the Boers seems to show that the Boers may be classed under three groups, the Transvaaler, the Free Stater, and the wretchedly poor soldier— the last being common to both countries. It is a queer way to study people, but I began my studies among dead Boers, and, in a measure, have continued them with the same material. To describe the three sorts of Boers with a wide brush and a few strokes, as a cartoonist would, I should say that I pick out the i6 THE TEUTON TUG OF WAR

Transvaaler as the sturdy, tall, lithe, young man in homespun, or the burly, heavily-bearded elder in the same dress ; both rude, not caring for clothes except as covering, not trim, yet not very unkempt ; always vigorous, powerful, thick-necked, and stubborn-jawed. I decide those to be Free Staters who are of finer mould, softer skin, better dress, who even in death carry an atmosphere that connects them with the British colonists who are their neighbours. One notices a hint of ornament, the path of the razor, the signs of toll taken by the scissors from the hair and beard. Orice I even saw a pair of gloved dead hands — the only gloves Fve ever seen worn by " Brother Boer." And then there are the dreadful-looking poor. Brutish they look when one sees them marching to prison, with cunning little eyes set only a finger-breadth apart, as baboons' eyes are put, with long, matted beards and knotted hair. The memory of some of these whom I have seen dead will cling to me till I follow them.

At first I thought that these dreadful-looking poorer Boers were servants or ranch-hands. I have not yet quite cleared this up, but I am told that they more nearly correspond to the poor whites of the Southern States of America than to any other people. They may work on the ranches kraaling and feeding the cattle and horses, and doing the chores ; or they may be simply squatters who have settled upon a ranch, built themselves a hutch-like sort of cabin, and never been disturbed by the ranch-owner. For I am told that always, when misfortune overwhelms a typical Boer of the genuine stripe, he gives up ambition, but clings to his rifle and to the land he once owned, upon which he squats and remains undisturbed. The existence of this class completes and perfects the resemblance which I early noticed between the Boers of the two republics and the mountain folk in West Virginia. Whenever I have seen a throng of Boers my mind has gone back to memorable days spent in the Blue Ridge mountains a few years ago, and to a village festival which brought together the people of the valleys and hills from far and near. The Boers are heavier men, and in advanced years grow portly, but otherwise the type is much the same, and I should say that the social and intellectual grade is nearly identical in the two regions. Both races are bearded, and wear the same sort of roughand-ready shop-made clothes ; both live out-door lives on the backs of horses ; both keep their rifles handy, in simple homes which are arranged and appointed in surprisingly similar style.

Some of the well-to-do Free State Boers used to drive to battle in their Cape carts, a luxurious practice of which I never heard anywhere else, and which wholly justifies the late Mr. Steevens's happy designation of them as " amateur soldiers." When they had slain as many British as they thought possible, and the tide of victory was setting against them, they rolled i8 THE TEUTON TUG OF WAR

back to their ranches in their comfortable carts (for a Cape cart is a very roomy, heavy, two-wheeled carriage of somewhat the pattern of an old-time chaise or gig), or, more often, upon the fleet spare horse which they had led behind them in the morning. I saw this at Belmont and at Graspan ; and there, also, I first saw the wolfish, tangle-bearded, wretchedly poor dead whom I have described. I inferred, from their being the only dead on the kopjes, that the poor wretches, whose surroundings showed that they had lived and slept in their rocky crannies for weeks, were labourers, and had been commanded to stay there, to continue a hopeless fight, and to mask the retreat of the others.

I know better now, and what I have learned reveals one of the most peculiar habits of the Boer in battle. They were left lying dead where they were killed because they were poor, and because they had no relatives in the commando, at least none who was able to carry their bodies away. Understand that the British find very few dead on the field, even after the hottest battle. This is because a Boer who dies in battle falls among his people and they carry his body away. He has his brothers, sons, uncles, or cousins fighting by his side, and it is as if he fell on his own ranch. Immediately one of his relations takes away the body. The bodies that are left — and none are left unless the field is vacated by sudden flight — are the always-despised foreigners, and those who have no kin at hand to care for them.

From a kopje on one of Methuen's battle-fields we saw the dead being thrown over the saddles of the living, and one officer declared that he saw a dead Boer lifted upon his horse and held there by another man, who rode away holding up the .corpse with one hand. At Maaghersfontein a friendly woman who lived on the veldt behind the Boer position declared that the dead were carried past her house all day during the long and bitter fight. On that battle-ground I found many new graves, into which, without doubt, the despised Hollanders, French, Germans, and Scandinavians were tumbled hastily ; while others were sunk in the Riet River, which joins the Modderat that battlefield. One gathers from the systematic deception practised by their leaders upon the Boers with regard to their losses in battle, that this instant removal of the dead by various means is intended to deceive their own soldiers, quite as much as to conceal the truth from the British.

I speak of the Boer's disrespect for foreigners in his own ranks because so many facts attest it. The Scandinavians who were captured at Maaghersfontein told us they had never been kindly treated by the Boers. An American who is a burgher and fought against the British told me that the Boer distrusts every foreigner, including the Hollander. Another burgher, in a Boer home and surrounded by a Boer family, assured me that Albrecht was the only foreigner whom the Boers respected. Him they trusted because he had lived so long with them — yet his speech was always half Taal and half German. Poor gallant Villebois, who, though misguided, was sincere, suffered continual rudeness at the hands of his comrades. When, at Jacobsdal, he warned Cronje that he was being flanked by the British, the obstinate old fighting rancher replied, " The British will never leave the railway." And when Villebois persisted, the half-savage Cronje said to him in coarse language, what can be clumsily refined in this sentence : '' Shut up ! I was a soldier when you were a baby." Subsequently the grim old guerilla is said to have torn up Villebois's plan for the recapture of Kimberley after the paper had been approved by the Kriegsraad.