CHAPTER 10.
THE BATTLE OF STORMBERG.
Some attempt has now been made to sketch the succession of events
which had ended in the investment of Ladysmith in northern Natal,
and also to show the fortunes of the force which on the western
side of the seat of war attempted to advance to the relief of
Kimberley. The distance between these forces may be expressed in
terms familiar to the European reader by saying that it was that
which separates Paris from Frankfort, or to the American by
suggesting that Ladysmith was at Boston and that Methuen was trying
to relieve Philadelphia. Waterless deserts and rugged mountain
ranges divided the two scenes of action. In the case of the British
there could be no connection between the two movements, but the
Boers by a land journey of something over a hundred miles had a
double choice of a route by which Cronje and Joubert might join
hands, either by the Bloemfontein-Johannesburg-Laing's Nek Railway,
or by the direct line from Harrismith to Ladysmith. The possession
of these internal lines should have been of enormous benefit to the
Boers, enabling them to throw the weight of their forces
unexpectedly from the one flank to the other.
In a future chapter it will be recorded how the Army Corps arriving
from England was largely diverted into Natal in order in the first
instance to prevent the colony from being overrun, and in the
second to rescue the beleaguered garrison. In the meantime it is
necessary to deal with the military operations in the broad space
between the eastern and western armies.
After the declaration of war there was a period of some weeks
during which the position of the British over the whole of the
northern part of Cape Colony was full of danger. Immense supplies
had been gathered at De Aar which were at the mercy of a Free State
raid, and the burghers, had they possessed a cavalry leader with
the dash of a Stuart or a Sheridan, might have dealt a blow which
would have cost us a million pounds' worth of stores and dislocated
the whole plan of campaign. However, the chance was allowed to
pass, and when, on November 1st, the burghers at last in a
leisurely fashion sauntered over the frontier, arrangements had
been made by reinforcement and by concentration to guard the vital
points. The objects of the British leaders, until the time for a
general advance should come, were to hold the Orange River Bridge
(which opened the way to Kimberley), to cover De Aar Junction,
where the stores were, to protect at all costs the line of railway
which led from Cape Town to Kimberley, and to hold on to as much as
possible of those other two lines of railway which led, the one
through Colesberg and the other through Stormberg, into the Free
State. The two bodies of invaders who entered the colony moved
along the line of these two railways, the one crossing the Orange
River at Norval's Pont and the other at Bethulie. They enlisted
many recruits among the Cape Colony Dutch as they advanced, and the
scanty British forces fell back in front of them, abandoning
Colesberg on the one line and Stormberg on the other. We have,
then, to deal with the movements of two British detachments. The
one which operated on the Colesberg line--which was the more vital
of the two, as a rapid advance of the Boers upon that line would
have threatened the precious Cape Town to Kimberley
connection--consisted almost entirely of mounted troops, and was
under the command of the same General French who had won the battle
of Elandslaagte. By an act of foresight which was only too rare
upon the British side in the earlier stages of this war, French,
who had in the recent large manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain shown
great ability as a cavalry leader, was sent out of Ladysmith in the
very last train which made its way through. His operations, with
his instructive use of cavalry and horse artillery, may be treated
separately.
The other British force which faced the Boers who were advancing
through Stormberg was commanded by General Gatacre, a man who bore
a high reputation for fearlessness and tireless energy, though he
had been criticised, notably during the Soudan campaign, for having
called upon his men for undue and unnecessary exertion. 'General
Back-acher' they called him, with rough soldierly chaff. A glance
at his long thin figure, his gaunt Don Quixote face, and his
aggressive jaw would show his personal energy, but might not
satisfy the observer that he possessed those intellectual gifts
which qualify for high command. At the action of the Atbara he, the
brigadier in command, was the first to reach and to tear down with
his own hands the zareeba of the enemy--a gallant exploit of the
soldier, but a questionable position for the General. The man's
strength and his weakness lay in the incident.
General Gatacre was nominally in command of a division, but so
cruelly had his men been diverted from him, some to Buller in Natal
and some to Methuen, that he could not assemble more than a
brigade. Falling back before the Boer advance, he found himself
early in December at Sterkstroom, while the Boers occupied the very
strong position of Stormberg, some thirty miles to the north of
him. With the enemy so near him it was Gatacre's nature to attack,
and the moment that he thought himself strong enough he did so. No
doubt he had private information as to the dangerous hold which the
Boers were getting upon the colonial Dutch, and it is possible that
while Buller and Methuen were attacking east and west they urged
Gatacre to do something to hold the enemy in the centre. On the
night of December 9th he advanced.
The fact that he was about to do so, and even the hour of the
start, appear to have been the common property of the camp some
days before the actual move. The 'Times' correspondent under the
date December 7th details all that it is intended to do. It is to
the credit of our Generals as men, but to their detriment as
soldiers, that they seem throughout the campaign to have shown
extraordinarily little power of dissimulation. They did the
obvious, and usually allowed it to be obvious what they were about
to do. One thinks of Napoleon striking at Egypt; how he gave it
abroad that the real object of the expedition was Ireland, but
breathed into the ears of one or two intimates that in very truth
it was bound for Genoa. The leading official at Toulon had no more
idea where the fleet and army of France had gone than the humblest
caulker in the yard. However, it is not fair to expect the subtlety
of the Corsican from the downright Saxon, but it remains strange
and deplorable that in a country filled with spies any one should
have known in advance that a so-called 'surprise' was about to be
attempted.
The force with which General Gatacre advanced consisted of the 2nd
Northumberland Fusiliers, 960 strong, with one Maxim; the 2nd Irish
Rifles, 840 strong, with one Maxim, and 250 Mounted Infantry. There
were two batteries of Field Artillery, the 74th and 77th. The total
force was well under 3000 men. About three in the afternoon the men
were entrained in open trucks under a burning sun, and for some
reason, at which the impetuous spirit of the General must have
chafed, were kept waiting for three hours. At eight o'clock they
detrained at Molteno, and thence after a short rest and a meal they
started upon the night march which was intended to end at the break
of day at the Boer trenches. One feels as if one were describing
the operations of Magersfontein once again and the parallel
continues to be painfully exact.
It was nine o'clock and pitch dark when the column moved out of
Molteno and struck across the black gloom of the veld, the wheels
of the guns being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was
known that the distance was not more than ten miles, and so when
hour followed hour and the guides were still unable to say that
they had reached their point it must have become perfectly evident
that they had missed their way. The men were dog-tired, a long
day's work had been followed by a long night's march, and they
plodded along drowsily through the darkness. The ground was broken
and irregular. The weary soldiers stumbled as they marched.
Daylight came and revealed the column still looking for its
objective, the fiery General walking in front and leading his horse
behind him. It was evident that his plans had miscarried, but his
energetic and hardy temperament would not permit him to turn back
without a blow being struck. However one may commend his energy,
one cannot but stand aghast at his dispositions. The country was
wild and rocky, the very places for those tactics of the surprise
and the ambuscade in which the Boers excelled. And yet the column
still plodded aimlessly on in its dense formation, and if there
were any attempt at scouting ahead and on the flanks the result
showed how ineffectively it was carried out. It was at a quarter
past four in the clear light of a South African morning that a
shot, and then another, and then a rolling crash of musketry, told
that we were to have one more rough lesson of the result of
neglecting the usual precautions of warfare. High up on the face of
a steep line of hill the Boer riflemen lay hid, and from a short
range their fire scourged our exposed flank. The men appear to have
been chiefly colonial rebels, and not Boers of the backveld, and to
that happy chance it may be that the comparative harmlessness of
their fire was due. Even now, in spite of the surprise, the
situation might have been saved had the bewildered troops and their
harried officers known exactly what to do. It is easy to be wise
after the event, but it appears now that the only course that could
commend itself would be to extricate the troops from their
position, and then, if thought feasible, to plan an attack. Instead
of this a rush was made at the hillside, and the infantry made
their way some distance up it only to find that there were positive
ledges in front of them which could not be climbed. The advance was
at a dead stop, and the men lay down under the boulders for cover
from the hot fire which came from inaccessible marksmen above them.
Meanwhile the artillery had opened behind them, and their fire (not
for the first time in this campaign) was more deadly to their
friends than to their foes. At least one prominent officer fell
among his men, torn by British shrapnel bullets. Talana Hill and
Modder River have shown also, though perhaps in a less tragic
degree, that what with the long range of modern artillery fire, and
what with the difficulty of locating infantry who are using
smokeless powder, it is necessary that officers commanding
batteries should be provided with the coolest heads and the most
powerful glasses of any men in the service, for a responsibility
which will become more and more terrific rests upon their judgment.
The question now, since the assault had failed, was how to
extricate the men from their position. Many withdrew down the hill,
running the gauntlet of the enemy's fire as they emerged from the
boulders on to the open ground, while others clung to their
positions, some from a soldierly hope that victory might finally
incline to them, others because it was clearly safer to lie among
the rocks than to cross the bullet-swept spaces beyond. Those
portions of the force who extricated themselves do not appear to
have realised how many of their comrades had remained behind, and
so as the gap gradually increased between the men who were
stationary and the men who fell back all hope of the two bodies
reuniting became impossible. All the infantry who remained upon the
hillside were captured. The rest rallied at a point fifteen hundred
yards from the scene of the surprise, and began an orderly retreat
to Molteno.
In the meanwhile three powerful Boer guns upon the ridge had opened
fire with great accuracy, but fortunately with defective shells.
Had the enemy's contractors been as trustworthy as their gunners in
this campaign, our losses would have been very much heavier, and it
is possible that here we catch a glimpse of some consequences of
that corruption which was one of the curses of the country. The
guns were moved with great smartness along the ridge, and opened
fire again and again, but never with great result. Our own
batteries, the 74th and 77th, with our handful of mounted men,
worked hard in covering the retreat and holding back the enemy's
pursuit.
It is a sad subject to discuss, but it is the one instance in a
campaign containing many reverses which amounts to demoralisation
among the troops engaged. The Guards marching with the steadiness
of Hyde Park off the field of Magersfontein, or the men of
Nicholson's Nek chafing because they were not led in a last
hopeless charge, are, even in defeat, object lessons of military
virtue. But here fatigue and sleeplessness had taken all fire and
spirit out of the men. They dropped asleep by the roadside and had
to be prodded up by their exhausted officers. Many were taken
prisoners in their slumber by the enemy who gleaned behind them.
Units broke into small straggling bodies, and it was a sorry and
bedraggled force which about ten o'clock came wandering into
Molteno. The place of honour in the rear was kept throughout by the
Irish Rifles, who preserved some military formation to the end. Our
losses in killed and wounded were not severe--military honour would
have been less sore had they been more so. Twenty-six killed,
sixty-eight wounded--that is all. But between the men on the
hillside and the somnambulists of the column, six hundred, about
equally divided between the Irish Rifles and the Northumberland
Fusiliers, had been left as prisoners. Two guns, too, had been lost
in the hurried retreat.
It is not for the historian--especially for a civilian
historian--to say a word unnecessarily to aggravate the pain of
that brave man who, having done all that personal courage could do,
was seen afterwards sobbing on the table of the waiting-room at
Molteno, and bewailing his 'poor men.' He had a disaster, but
Nelson had one at Teneriffe and Napoleon at Acre, and built their
great reputations in spite of it. But the one good thing of a
disaster is that by examining it we may learn to do better in the
future, and so it would indeed be a perilous thing if we agreed
that our reverses were not a fit subject for open and frank
discussion.
It is not to the detriment of an enterprise that it should be
daring and call for considerable physical effort on the part of
those who are engaged in it. On the contrary, the conception of
such plans is one of the signs of a great military mind. But in the
arranging of the details the same military mind should assiduously
occupy itself in foreseeing and preventing every unnecessary thing
which may make the execution of such a plan more difficult. The
idea of a swift sudden attack upon Stormberg was excellent--the
details of the operation are continually open to criticism.
How far the Boers suffered at Stormberg is unknown to us, but there
seems in this instance no reason to doubt their own statement that
their losses were very slight. At no time was any body of them
exposed to our fire, while we, as usual, fought in the open. Their
numbers were probably less than ours, and the quality of their
shooting and want of energy in pursuit make the defeat the more
galling. On the other hand, their guns were served with skill and
audacity. They consisted of commandos from Bethulie, Rouxville, and
Smithfield, under the orders of Olivier, with those colonials whom
they had seduced from their allegiance.
This defeat of General Gatacre's, occurring, as it did, in a
disaffected district and one of great strategic importance, might
have produced the worst consequences.
Fortunately no very evil result followed. No doubt the recruiting
of rebels was helped, but there was no forward movement and Molteno
remained in our hands. In the meanwhile Gatacre's force was
reinforced by a fresh battery, the 79th, and by a strong regiment,
the Derbyshires, so that with the 1st Royal Scots and the wing of
the Berkshires he was strong enough to hold his own until the time
for a general advance should come. So in the Stormberg district, as
at the Modder River, the same humiliating and absurd position of
stalemate was established.
