GREAT BRITISH BATTLES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11346, 14 April 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

GREAT BRITISH BATTLES.

[AM, rights deserved.]

THE SOUTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGN ITS PROGRESS AND ITS LESSONS.

No. IV. [IIT CHARLES I.OWE, M.A.]

(Author of "Lives of William 11. of Ger-

many," " Prince Bismarck," etc.) Wl', have now had about four months of the war into which wo wen' with the object of establishing our supremacy over all South Africa, though the attainment of this object, as far as our military successes are concerned, is about as far off as ever. Hut one great result it has already produced and the rest will duly follow. For if the war has not yet added the two Boer Republics, as it ultimately will and must, to the dominions of the Queen, it has practically federated all the other portions of her Empire by uniting them in a common brotherhood of arms. Another immediate result of the campaign is that it has completely revolutionised all military tactics, and marked the beginning of quite a new era in tho military history of mankind. Foi it is practically the first war between combatants armed with modern weapons, and is being waged in a country particularly favourable to the use of those arms on the defensive side.

Yet it was the Boers who first took the offensive by invading Natal in three columns on October 11, the day after (lie delivery of the ultimatum. They thus gained the initial advantage, not only of securing their own fields and homesteads from the destructive influence of war, but also of compelling us to fight them on ground of their own choosing. What their united strength was at the outbreak of the war it is impossible to sft", seeing that even now wo have no exact estimate of their numbers, though these were believed by our Intelligence Department to be not more than 60,000 men; lint whatever the aggregate of those Humbert; on all their fronts— which has been variously computed at from 50,000 to 90,000 men—it is. a fact that their extreme mobility, due to their being all raouutcd, gave, them the advantage of more

than double their actual figures, while this process of practical multiplication was still further increased by their entrenched portions, as well as by the circumstance that the Mauser, the weapon of the Boers, has an enormous advantage over the clumsier Lee-Met ford as a quick-hiding and quickfiring rifle. On the other hand when the Boers invaded Natal Sir George White had at his disposal there little more than 13,000 men, though reinforcements were on their way. His own sound intention was not to split up this comparatively slander force, but to concentrate it at Ladysmith, which in itself, moreover, was the worst conceivable place for concentration, seeing that it lay in a cup-like valley surrounded by hills. Yet it so happened that immense quantities of stores had been collected there previous to Sir George's arrival, and without his assent, so that he bad to make the most of the situation which he found to hand. But even this, on his own showing, he was debarred from doing to the fullest extent by yielding in a weak moment to the representations of the Governor of Natal, who, for political reasons, strongly argued in favour of detaching a portion of the Ladysmith force under General Penn-Symons to hold Dundee, some 15 or 20 miles to the north. . It has invariably been found that when political are allowed to override purely, military considerations in the conduct of a campaign the result is fatal— so it also

proved in this case. The first victories of

tho war fell to our share at Glencoe (or Talana Hill, near Dundee) and Elandslaagte, where our gallant soldiers, with invincible valour, stormed the Boer hill positions, capturing some of their guns, routing their commandoes, and reversing Majuba. But, alas! it soon became apparent that those tactical triumphs involved strategical defeats, seeing that, instead of the Boers being driven back out of Natal, they continued, after rallying and combining their forces, to press us even more southward, causing us to evacuate tho positions which our troops, with so much sacrifice of We and limb, had so brilliantly gained. it was a great initial shock for us to hear that in the reckless pursuit of the Boers at Glencoe, a squadron of the 18th Hussars and some mounted infantry of tin; Dublin Fusiliers had been surrounded and captured— % first instalment of the numerous hostages of the same kind which we were yet to give to our foes; but it was a still greater disappointment to us when Major-General Yule, who had succeeded to the command of the mortally wounded Symons, now found that his victorious brigade was unequal to the task of holding Glencoo against the ever increasing masses of Joubert's Boers, and therefore led it by a masterly movement back h Ladysmith, leaving all our wounded to the care of tho enemy. To facilitate this retrograde movement of Yule, General White fought a successful yet costly enough action at Rietfontein, which enabled his divided forces to rejoin hands, and a week later they made what professed to be a reconnaissance in force towards the Boer position north of Ladysmith, though gradually this took tie form of something like a regular battle when Joubert may •be said to have outgencralled White and driven him back to Ladysmith—there to find, to his horror, that two'half battalions of his belonging to the Gloucester's and the Royal Irish Fusiliers, under Colonel Carleton, had been isolated at Nicholson's Nek, and compelled to surrender to Cronje of tho Free State—this capitulation of theirs having been rendered all the most inevitable by the running short of their cartridges through the stampeding of their ammunition mules in the darkness of the previous night. General White was now thrown on the purely defensive, and gradually the circle of the Boer toils round Ladysmith was completed by the end of October—only ten days after our first victory at Glencoe—though not before some long-range naval guns from Durban had been providentially rushed up to the now beleaguered British garrison; , and but for those few naval guns, which were the only ones we bad capable of coping with the Creusofc "Long Toms" of the Boers —who thus outranged us with their artillery as they had outwitted us by their generalship—Ladysmith must, soon have fallen a prey to tin' fate which overwhelmed the Bible cities of the plain! On Lord Mayor's Day, which is also the Prince of Wales' birthday, White celebrated the occasion by repulsing a Boer attack, but at the same time he must have now realised that it would have been simple massacre and blue murder for him to have attempted to break through the strongly-entrenched lines of the Boers with his 9000 men, to which his force had been reduced by killing, wounding, and capture, as well as by the detachment of 2000 of his troops to hold his base at Colenso —a base which they abandoned on the approach of some Boer commandos who now occupied the Tugela, crossing the railway bridge, which they subsequently blew up, thus rendering ten times more difficult than before the task imposed upon the British force sent to relieve Ladysmith.

There were two possible ways of doing this—either by sending an" army up through Natal from Durban direct towards Ladysmith to break through its lines of investment and join hands with (lie beleaguered garrison, as was done at Lucknow; or by despatching converging columns from Port Elizabeth and Last London which should unite somewhere on the Orange River—say about Norval's Pout—force the passage (f the river, and head for Bloemfontetn across the open veldt country which is the characteristic of the Free State, and which is thus much less adapted for Boer tactics than the hilly region of northern Natal, than which nothing could be more favourable for their peculiar hind of defensive warfare. A movement of this kind on our part in slifllcient force would have had the effect of imperilling Bloemfonlein and thus of diverting to iis defence at least all the Free Staters around Ladysmith, and of probablycausing their comrades of the Transvaal to raise the siege. In the light of subsequent events there can bo little doubt that, the true way of relieving Ladysmith was the indirect, way thus indicated of advancing in overwhelming force on liloemfontein, and there is even reason to suppose that when Sir Redvers Midler left, England to assume supreme command of South Africa, this was the essential feature of his plan of campaign —one division of his Army Corps to advance from Capetown, another from Port Elizabeth, and the third from East London, with the Free State capital of their ultimate objective, and thence on to Pretoria. But by the time Puller himself reached the Cape, the military situation in Natal had been changed to 'such an extent that this sensible plan of campaign was modified, so that one half of his Army Corps was landed in Cape Colony, and the other half sent on to Durban ; and there is reason to believe that as White bad weakly allowed himself to be influenced by political considerations in detaching a portion of his force to the impossible task of holding Dundee, with all its subsequent train of disaster, so Puller also—even Duller the self-willed and the strong—had laid himself open to similar over-persuasion at Capetown. Anyhow, he himself soon followed to Natal the half of his Army Corps which had been diverted thither, 'leaving Lord Melhuen to proceed northwards from Capetown to the relief of Kiinbetiey, and Catacre to make his way northward' to the Orange Diver from East London with his disjointed and fragmentary force. Duller had thus, perhaps against his better judgment, committed himself to the impossible task of relieving Ladysmith with the mixed force of regulars and colonial troops at his disposal— totalling something like 30,000 men: impossible by reason of the impregnability of the Peer hill-positions on the Tugela, and by their other advantages of defence which were tantamount to the advantage of more than double their numbers. But it was some time before Duller himself came to rea'ise the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken. It, bad been comparatively easy for his troops, in actions like that of Willow Orange and elsewhere, to sweep the audacious Poors north of the Tugela and establish his headquarters successively at Frero and Chieveley-tho while the gallant and determined garrison of Ladysmith still kept up their spirits by making successive night sorties to capture the destroy lie "Long Toms" and the howitzers of tatir besiegers. At length, on December 15, Duller committed himself to a hammcr-and-tongs frontal attack on the entrenched Boer posi-

tion on the north side of the Tugela, at Colenso, and had the mortification to own that he had suffered a "serious reverse" - of which the chief feature, apart from a casualty list of nearly 1100 in killed, wounded, and captured—was the loss of ?1 of his guns, which, it would seem in dir»it disobedience to his express orders, had been impetuously rushed by his artillery 20mmander up to fatal proximity to the Boer linesa commander who had committed the foolhardy error of employing in front of. invisible Boer marksmen the tactics which he had applied to the spear-armed Dervishes at Omdurman.

But all this had not yet been enough to convince Buller of the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken with the meagre means at his disposal; (Aid four weeks later, after lying low and organising his plans, he led his force over the Tugela, some 15 mih-8 to tho west of Colenso, with intent to turn the Boer flank, and march on Ladysmith, saying to them that this time there wo'tM "be no turning back." But within a week from the date of this address to his troops, ho had again led them bae'; to the southern bank of the river, without the loss, as he boasted, "of a single man" (in the course of his retirement) or a single pound cf stores" but with the loss of Spionkop, the key to the Boer position, which Warren's men bad seized by night and held with magnificent courage for a whole day, and a great many brave men in killed and wounded as the consequence of his impracticable enterprise. And now it was that Buller at last realised with his distressed countrymen at Home, the error of judgment he had com-, milted in selecting the direct instead of the indirect method of relieving Ladysmith, as above indicated.

' On the day after Iris " serious reverse" at Colcnso, it was a great relief to the nation to hear that Lord Roberts, of Kandahar, had been appointed to supersede Duller as Com-, mander-in-Chief in South Africa— as it was officially phrased, by way of reproach, hut in order that Sir Rcdvers might devote his undivided energy to the prosecution of the campaign in Natal. Rut there had been other urgent reasons for this change of supreme command. For only five days before Roller's repulse at Colenso, General Gatacro had suffered an almost equally 'serious' reverse, at Stormberg, on which he had meditated a night attack, by falling into a trap which very nearly proved the destruction of his entire column, and resulted in the panic-stricken retreat of his decimated force to Molteno. Moreover, on the day after this catastrophe at Stormberg, Lord Methuen's division of Guards and Highlanders—the flower of the British army—was afflicted with a similar massacre at Magersfontein, on the north bank of the Modder River, to which His Lordship had fought his obstinate way by three comparatively successful, though by no means errorless frontal attack actions at Belmont, Enslin, and Modder on his eager way to relieve Kimberlcy, which had held out so long and so gallantly under Colonel Kekewich; just as Mafekin'g, under Hie daring, alert, and resourceful Baden-Powell had for an equal period defied all the efforts of Cronjc and his Boers to reduce him to submission. And parenthetically it may be here remarked that the defence of Kimberlcy, Mafeking, and Ladysmith, by their garrisons have so far formed the bright redeeming features of the war. But of all its blackest features the massacre of the Highland Brigade at Ma'gcrsforitein was perhaps the worst, a massacre due to the deplorable fact that the Highlanders were led into another trap in the darkness of night—led in quartercolumn, of all formations in the world of text-books, right up to the unreconnoitred and barbed-wire entangled trenches of the Boers, like so many sheep to the slaughter, though it is said that their dying brigadecommander, . General Wauchope, murmured with his parting breath that it was not he who was to blame for the slaughter of his gallant but.ill-directed men. ■It was only from the column of General French, consisting to a great extent of ! mounted men,'capable of checkmating the Boers by the laws of their own game, that wo were gratified with the news of pretty consistent and persistent successes, though even in this quarter of the seat of war several companies of the Sussex regiment succumbed to the fascination of Boer wiles and i surrendered themselves to join the great and ever-growing company of British officers and men who are now in captivifc7 at Bloemfontein and Pretoria. And as for Colonel Pitcher's successful raid to Douglas from the Mcthucnline of communications, a raid carried out by a body of our combined "sons"of the Empire," from the Mother Country, Canada, ami Australia—what did it result in but an undoing overnight of the Penelope web of war woven during the day? And the same remark applies- to many of our other operations in the field. This only professes to be a general outline of the'course of the war for its first lour months, at the end of which we had practically been reduced to a position of stabmate in all our four main lines of advance by Methuen, French, Gatacre, and Duller ; and of this initial and experimental period, the main redeeming feature, by the testimony of all, has been the behaviour of our soldiers, which was always " splendid" and "magnificent" in the most trying circumstances. That, these splendid soldiers of ours, who have now been reinforced by numerous colonial contingents, by militia battalions, and, grandest of all results of our patriotism, by regiments of volunteers and yeomanry—that these splendid soldiers of ours, I say. have not been able to do more than they have hitherto done is not in the least so much due to any fault of theirs as to tho unfaniiliarity of their leaders with the new conditions of warfare; to the fact that the scouting and intelligence duties of those leaders have been poorly performed ; that, the Boers have been able to bring into tho field guns of superior range and calibre to our own; that our transport arrangements have been exceedingly defective ; that wo have had no proper maps of the seat of war; that the Boers, by reason of their being all mounted, enjoy a mobility which practically trebles or quadruples their numbers; that 'they have further the immense advantage of fighting on the defensive in positions of their own choosing—though their great assault on Ladysmith on January 6 proved that they arc no match for the British soldier when they venture out into the open ; and above all, that our soldiers have laboured under 'the tremendous drawback of carrying on a dislocated and dispersed, instead of a cohesive and concentrated campaign. But this drawback, the greatest of all. was remedied when Lord Roberts assumed supreme command and determined to revert to the original plan of campaign with Bloemfontein as its immediate objective. The pushing up of the 6th and 7th divisions towards (ho line of the Orange River was an unmistakable sign of His Lordship's intentions in this respect ; and on his arrival at Mclhuen's camp on February 9, just four months after tho presentation to us of the Boer ultimatum, he was enthusiastically received by the troops. One of his first acts was to visit, tho camp of the Highland Rrigade and congratulate- General Hector Macdonald-whom, as a a colour-sergeant in the Gordons, he had repeated cause to congratulate on his famous march from Kabul to lCandahar-as to the result of his skilful fight at Koodoosberg Drift. • But, on the other hand, Lord Roberts, on reaching Modder River camp, had been met with the announcement that Buller, though he had succeeded in crossing the Tugela for the thud time, had also for the third tune failed to light his way through (he bullet-swept and cannon-crowned Boer hill positions to beleaguered Ladysmith. After retiring from Spionkop, he 'had promised his men that they would be in Ladysmith within a week, but' again he had failed to keep Ins tryst _ Still the nation felt consoled for this other disappointment of its hopes by the conviction that Lord Roberts' concerted preparations on the centre, lino of action, and his advance across the Orange River with an overwhelming force, would indirectly accomplish what Butter's direct endeavours ii.m failed to achieve. Tho more so, as at the beginning 'of this second stage of the war, our Commander-in-Chief enjoyed the prospect of soon having at his disposal throughout the entire theatre of operations an aggregate force of about 200,000 troops with 500 guns, which was more than double the number of men with which Hannibal crossed the Alps for tho subjugation of Rome, and a third of tho colossal host which Germany, in 1870, sent into tho field against Franco. '