British Defeats in the Transvaal.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIII, Issue XIII, 23 September 1899, Page 546

British Defeats in the Transvaal.

HOW THE BOERS WON THE FIGHT AT BRONKERSPRUIT AND CARRIED MAJUBA HILL.

Most of ua remember only too well the sNort-liyed English domination in the Transvaal during the latter part of the seventies, as well as the way in whieh misfortune seemed to dog the steps of those on whose shoulders fell the burden of upholding it there. We had found the country in a bankrupt condition, and had restored its finances; we had found it threatened by the formidable Zulu monarch, with his army of fifty thousand fighting savages, thoroughly drilled, and in a state of high military effieiency. After a desperate struggle. in which we suffered severe losses. including the battle of Isandula, where our eamp was taken and the whole of its defenders slaughtered, the British arms finally achieved a complete but hard-won triumph. We had broken the power of Cetewayo, :>>■<' dispersed his regiment of “celibate. man-destroying gladiators,” to use the phrase in which Sir Bartie Frere onee described his justly dreaded impis. Subsequently, in the Transvaal itself, we had overthrown Secocoen i. a powerful native chief who had occasionally defied the Boer Government; while enterprising British traders had supplied an abundance of excellent sporting rifles to the people of the country, who earned not a little money by shooting down the game with them. In brief, we had removed one by one every obstacle to a revolt on the part of the emigrant farmers who made up the bulk of the population of the Transvaal outside the towns.

The revolt followed, as might have been expected. It broke out in the month of December, 1880, during the warm summer of the Southern Hemisphere, and it came to an end with the peace that was concluded after the disastrousi battle of Majuba mountain of February 6, 1881. The tale of misfortune begins with the affair of Bronkerspruit in December. The Ninety-fourth Regiment, forming a part of the British garrison of the Transvaal. had been ordered to concentrate at Pretoria, and was on the march thither. No actual fighting had as yet taken place; but the Boers had held a mass meeting, proclaiming a republic, and announced that they were going to begin. At Bronkerspruit they laid a carefullyprepared ambush along the road by whieh the Ninety-fourth were advancing. and awaited their victims.

The British Colonel had been warned to look out for traps, but, as far as can now be known, he had no idea that these sharp-shooting farmers were really in earnest, and he failed to profit by the warning. The Ninetyfourth were strung out for half a male along the road: the weather was hot, and many of the soldiers had put their rifles in the waggons; in short, the inarch was conducted as in a time of profound peace. At a certain spot the long column was halted by a Boer patrol. There was a brief colloquy between the Colonel and the Boers; they ordered him to go back, and he refused. Nobody seems to have noticed the ambushed riflemen, or to have observed the little heaps of stones with which these skilled hunters of wild game, old hands at shooting over the bare veldt, had thoughtfully marked out beforehand at 100. 150. and 200 yards, their exact distance from their intended targets. The Boer rifles eracked, and in twenty minutes all the officers and half the British troops were shot down, and the rest were made prisoners; the loss on the side of the farmers was almost nil. As a Western American crudely observed, it was a case of a lot of first-class frontiersmen taking in a crowd of tenderfeet out of the wet. It was a terribly severe lesson that in the face of a possible enemy a soldier must never be off his guard. After the Bronkerspruit. disaster the whole country was up. AH the British garrtisons in the Transvaal were beleaguered by the Boers, and one garrison. Potchefstroom. was known both by them and by Sir George Pomeroy Colley, the General in command in Natal, to be short of provisions. Colley gallantly determined to cut his way in. if possible, and relieve it. He knew well enough that ere long an army from overseas

must be sent to retrieve the honour of the British arms, but he was also aware that it must inevitably arrive too late to save Pochefstroom. The Boers had occupied luting's Nek, the pass leading into the Transvaal from Natal, and with the small British force he had at his command he hoped to be able to dislodge them and clear the road. General Colley was considered to be one of the very best officers in the British army. He had some experience in actual fighting in China, and he had exhibited extraordinary skill and courage and resource in the difficult task of organising the transport in the Ashanti campaign. He certainly could not be called a novice in war. But, unfortunately, there was one thing of which all his previous experience had taught him nothing, and that was how to fight against good shots armed with modern breech-loaders.

On January 21. 1881, Colley moved upon Laing's Nek with about eleven hundred men and six guns. The force of Boers opposed to him is said by Alfred Aylward, who appears to have acted as their military secretary, to have numbered 1437, under General Joubert and Smidt. The Boers had no guns, and dreaded artillery far more than anything else; accordingly, they dug some dummy trenches in soft, ground on a conspicuous part of the Nek. and then judiciously disposed themselves in safety elsewhere. Colley's guns opened fire at a mile and a half, and appear to have principally occupied themselves in shelling the empty trenches, as. according to Alfred Alyward, no one was hurt or even frightened by the cannonade. It may be noted that Alfred Aylward’s figures are not contradicted by Sir William Butler in the “Life of Sir George Colley,” which he has recently published; and. indeed, with reference to this particular action. General Colley himself deplores the ineffectiveness of his artillery practice in one of the letters printed by his biographer. Posting the naval brigade, with the roeket apparatus and some of the Sixtieth Rifles, in an inclosed ground where they were under cover, and keeping about half his force in reserve, Colley dispatched five companies of the Fifty-eighth Regiment, numbering 480 bayonets, together with about a hundred mounted men, to assault the left of the Boer line. In broad daylight the foot advanced in column of companies across the open ground and up the hill, against nearly thrice their own number of the best shots in the world, who were under cover and armed with good modern rifles. The charge of the Dervish host at Omdurman was not so gallant or so futile. In a few minutes the handful of mounted men were scattered, and one-third of the Fifty-eighth lay dead or wounded on that bloody slope. The survivors drew off, re - formed their scattered lines behind the Sixtieth Rifles, and retired in good order. The Boer loss is said to have been two. It was magnificent, but it was not war. It. proved, if any proof were needed, that for infantry in column to charge in broad daylight works thus strongly held by resolute men who can handle breech-loaders is to court ruin and disaster.

After Laing’s Nek the exultant Boers threatened Colley's communications, and on February Bth he sallied out from his camp at Mount Prospect to clear the road in his rear. This time he took with him five companies of the Sixtieth Rifles who, being in reserve. had not been cut up at Laing’s Nek—and four guns, together with thirty-eight mounted men. A few miles from camp he left a half company and two guns to guard the drifts of the flooded Ingogo river, and a mile, or two further on he encountered a strong party of Boers. With a confidence begotten of their easy victory at Laing’s Nek, the Boers did not wait to lie attacked, but. without hesitation, assumed the offensive. Colley took up a position on a flat-topped hill and stood on his defence, having now about 300 men and two guns with him. According to Alfred Aylward, the Boer patrol numbered 167. The Boers took cover all round the hill, and a prolonged rifle duel ensued betwen the two forces.

Avoiding the British tactics at living's Nek, the conditions of which were exactly reversed upon this occasion, the Boers refrained from any at-

tempt to take the hill by direct assault in a body, but as independent sharpshooters they kept up an incessant rifle fire until nightfall. In accuracy of shooting and in the skill in which they sheltered themselves they proved to be superior to the defenders of the hill. They drew off ai last with a loss of twelve killed and fourteen wounded, but the defenders had actually lost six times as many. The sharpshooting skirmishers had put no less than half the force they were attacking hors de combat. After the withdrawal of the Boers, Collev. whose horses were nearly all killed, with great difficulty succeeded in saving the guns, dotted all over as they were with the splashes of the Boer bullets, and by a desperate night march he regained his camp under cover of darkness with the remnant of his forces. England had to learn by bitter experience that valour without good shooting is but a waste of the lives of her bravest sons. The spirit and staunchness of the British troops were admirable; and Colley’s own letters warmly acknowledged* the fact. But as shots they were completely outclassed.

Re-inforcements now began to arrive. Colley’s force at the front, which had suffered so heavily in these two engagements, was strengthened by the arrival of the Ninety-second Highlanders. fresh from their victories in Afghanistan; and with them he resumed the offensive. This time he decided to avoid making a direct attempt on Laing’s Nek, and aimed at turning that position by occupying the Majuba mountain, which overhung the pass on the southwest. After Laing's Nek, Colley had promised the survivors of the Fifty-eighth to give them another chance of trying conclusions with their opponents; and to seize Majuba he took with him a force composed of three companies of the Ninety-second, two of the Fiftveighth, and two of the Sixtieth, supplemented as before by a naval contingent. By a skilful and daring march, on the night of February 25th. he occupied, without opposition, this post of vantage, which appeared to him impregnable.

But, unfortunately for Colley, the position he had seized was not so strong as he had imagined. The Majuba mountain was what Western Americans would caU a belted mesa; it was it flat-topped, or rather a saucer topped, height, with a belt of perpendicular cliff running round it a little below the summit, broken only here ami there by a few gullies, through which access to the summit might be gained from the lower slopes. These lower slopes were steep, and the upper parts of them were screened from view from the summit by being below the belt of cliff which looked so formidable to the eye. Technically speaking, they were “dead” ground.

In his fancied security, Colley omitted to fortify his position, the very error which two years before had led to the disaster of Isandula. He allowed his staff to distribute most of his men around the rim of the saucershaped basin, where they contented themselves with piling up little heaps of stones to lie behind.

As soon as daylight revealed to the force holding Laing's Nek that their flank was threatened, they began to prepare to send their waggons to the rear, but they determined also, before retreating, to try the effect of a direct assault upon Majuba. According to the account given by General Sir William Butler, some of the Highlanders showed themselves boldly on the sky line in the morning light, shaking their fists defiantly at the hostile camp, which lay two thousand feet below, and of which they could now see every detail. “Come up here, you beggars,” they cried; and if Alfred Aylward may be trusted, 223 Boers accepted the invitation. Part of the Boer assailants took cover at once with their usual skill, and opened a long-range fire on the summit of Majuba. This fire did but little execution, though a single shot at 900 yards mortally wounded the brave Romilly, commander of the naval contingent. But. generally speaking, the defenders of the hill took good care not to expose themselves unnecessarily to the marksmanship of the Boers, with the result that the actual loss inflicted by the long-range fire was small. Though the Boers kept it up incessantly all that long summer’s morning, scarcely anyone except poor Romilly was touched. Nevertheless, the Boers were not

throwing away their powder for nothing. They succeeded in their object of compelling the defenders of the hill to keep closely under shelter, and prevented them" from observing what happened on the slopes below the encircling girdle of cliff. Protected thus by the fire of their companions, small parties of Boers were creeping its stealthily as deerstalkers over the wide spaces of the mountain side where the cliff wall above screened them both from the sight and from the fire of the defendes. Sir William Butler gives an excellent map, shaded so as to exhibit clearly the “dead" portions of the hillside across which these experienced hunters made their way unobserved. So stealthy and so cautious were they that they took the whole morning over their stalk: but their caution and skill were crowned with perfect success.

At one part of the circumference of Majuba there is a little outlying kopje, or peak, which is really the key to the position. With unerring instinct, one of the Boer leaders made for this point. According to Sir William Butler, he had about sixty men with him; and when he arrived quite hear it, with his patry siill undiscovered, he detected a picket of several soldiers, who were standing in an exposed position, unconscious of the near neighbourhood of their foes. The Boer leader ordered a number of his men to hold their rifles at the “present,” step back out of cover, and Are a , rapid volley. The manoeuvre was skilfully executed; the whole picket was clean swept away, and in a few minutes more the Boers had got the key of the position in their hands. By this success they had turned the left of the British troops.