History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 Part 7

[Sidenote: Rivers Limpopo and Orange.]

[Sidenote: The water-parting.]

Pa.s.sing from the mountains to the great plateau they enclose, the first point to be noted is that its surface is set at two opposite "tilts," the portion north of the Wit.w.a.ters Rand inclining downward to the east, the other, south of that ridge, to the west. The drainage, therefore, runs respectively east and west, and it is effected by the two great streams of the Limpopo and the Orange, with their many affluents. The general river system of the central plains is thus of the simplest; the Indian Ocean receives their northern waters, the Atlantic their southern; the remarkable factor of the arrangement being that a physical feature so insignificant as the Wit.w.a.ters Rand should perform the function of water-parting for a region so gigantic.[64]

[Footnote 64: There are, of course, in South Africa numerous minor and local watersheds (_e.g._, the Drakensberg, where they initiate the drainage of Natal in an easterly direction, and the mountains of southern Cape Colony, which send some of her rivers southward to the Indian Ocean). These have been necessarily almost disregarded in so general a survey of the sub-continent as that aimed at in the present chapter.]

[Sidenote: Course of Limpopo.]

The Limpopo, or Crocodile river, rises as a paltry stream in the Wit.w.a.ters Rand between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and flows into the Indian Ocean, 80 miles north of Delagoa Bay, covering in its course fully 1,350 miles.

[Sidenote: Course of Orange.]

The Orange has three distinct sets of headstreams from the western flank of the Drakensberg, and a total length of 1,300 miles. From the Basuto border to Ramah, on the Kimberley railway, about 220 miles, it divided the Orange Free State from Cape Colony. The Orange receives on its right bank its greatest affluent, the Vaal, which is between 500 and 600 miles in length. Commercially, both the Orange and the Vaal are as useless as their smallest tributary, being entirely unnavigable at all times of the year. Raging floods in the wet season, and mere driblets in the dry, they are at present denied to the most powerful or shallowest of river steamboats. The prospects of the Orange river as a potential waterway are in any case practically destroyed by a great bar which blocks approach to the estuary from the sea.

[Sidenote: Military character of streams of S.A.]

The streams of the South African plateau, whether river, spruit, sluit, or donga, have, in addition to their extreme variability, another marked and almost universal peculiarity. Running in deep beds, of which the banks are usually level with the surrounding country, and the sides terraced from the highest to the lowest water-mark, they const.i.tute natural entrenchments which are generally invisible, except where rarely defined by a line of bushes, and, owing to the dead uniformity of the surrounding country, are almost impossible to reconnoitre. Nor, in 1899, were their defensive capabilities lessened by the dearth of bridges, by the dangers of the drifts, and by the absence of defined approaches to all crossing-places away from the main roads. The "drifts," or fords, especially rendered the laying out of a line of operations in South Africa a complex problem. Their depth varied with the weather of the day; they were known by many names even to local residents, and were of many types; but all alike were so liable to sudden change or even destruction, that any information concerning them, except the most recent, was practically useless.

[Sidenote: Effect of winds on climate.]

[Sidenote: The velds.]

To comprehend broadly the salient physiological features of a region so enormous as South Africa, the causes of the climatic influences which affect them must be understood. These causes on are simplicity itself. The warm winds blow from the east, and the cold from the west; the former, from the warm Mozambique current, skirting the eastern seaboard, the latter, from the frigid Antarctic stream, setting from south to north, and striking the western coast about Cape St. Martin.

It follows, therefore, that the climate and country become more genial and fertile the further they are removed from the desiccating influence emanating from the western seaboard. The dreariness of the solitudes between Little Namaqualand and Griqualand West, the latter slightly more smiling than the former, attests this fact. But the comparative inhospitality of the Boer States--comparative, that is, to what might be expected from their proximity to the warm Indian Ocean--demands further explanation. From the Atlantic to the eastern frontiers of these States no mountain ranges of any elevation intervene to break the progress of the dry, cold breezes; from the mouth of the Orange river to the Drakensberg the country is subject almost uninterruptedly to their influence. But it is not so with the milder winds from the east. The great screen of the Drakensberg meets and turns them from end to end of South Africa; no country west of this range profits by their moisture, whereas the regions east of it receive it to the full. Hence the almost tropical fertility of Natal and eastern Cape Colony, with their high rainfall, their luxuriance of vegetation, indigo, figs, and coffee, and the jungles of cactus and mimosa which choke their torrid kloofs. Hence, equally, the more austere veld of the central tableland, the great gra.s.s wildernesses, which are as characteristic of South Africa as the prairies and the pampas of America, and, like them, became the home and hunting-ground of a race of martial hors.e.m.e.n. Agriculture, following nature, divides the veld into three parts, the "High," "Bush," and "Low" Velds; but it is the first and greatest of these which stamps the central tableland with its peculiar military characteristics. Almost the whole of the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal east of the Natal railway, are High Veld, which may be taken to mean any gra.s.sland lying at an elevation of about 4,000 feet, upon which all vegetation withers in the dry season, while in spring and summer it is covered with nutritious herbage. The Low Veld lies properly between longitude 31 and the tropical eastern coast; while the Bush Veld is usually understood to mean the country lying between the Pretoria-Delagoa railway and the Limpopo river. The terms, however, are very loosely used. The Low Veld differs widely from the High Veld. Upon the former is rich--almost rank--vegetation and pasture flourishing throughout the year. But the climate is hot, moist, and unhealthy; and the Boer farmers, forced by the course of the seasons to drive their flocks from the sparkling, invigorating air of the uplands to the steamy lowlands, were wont to take the task in turn amongst themselves, as an unpleasant one to be performed as seldom as possible.

[Sidenote: Transvaal High Veld.]

The High Veld of the Transvaal differs slightly from that of the Free State in appearance. It is more broken and undulating; the range of vision, at times apparently boundless in the southern state, is rarely extensive, except from the summit of a kopje, being usually bounded by the low ridge-lines of one of those great, gentle, almost imperceptible, rolls of the ground which are a feature of the Transvaal veld, and with its hidden watercourses, its peculiar tactical danger. A mountain range is seldom out of sight; and, speaking generally, the Transvaal may be said to be less sombre than the southern or western districts of the great plateau.

[Sidenote: The kopjes.]

If the veld can only be compared with the sea, the kopjes which accentuate, rather than relieve, its monotony resemble in as marked a degree the isolated islands which rise abruptly from the waters of some tropic archipelago. Sometimes, indeed, the kopjes form a rough series of broken knolls, extending over a s.p.a.ce of several miles, as, for instance, the ridges of Magersfontein and Spytfontein, between Kimberley and the Modder; sometimes a group of three or four, disposed irregularly in all directions, become a conspicuous landmark, as at the positions of Belmont and Graspan; and it is not uncommon to find larger ma.s.ses, not less irregular, enclosing the river reaches which their drainage has created, among which may be enumerated the heights south-east of Jacobsdal, and by the river Riet, and those about Koffyfontein and Jagersfontein on the same stream.

[Sidenote: Better for view than defence.]

But, as a rule, the kopje of the veld is a lonely hill, a ma.s.s of igneous rock--flat-topped or sharp-pointed. From 200 to 800 feet in height, without spur or underfeature, accessible only by winding paths among gigantic boulders, sheer of face and narrow of crest, it is more useful as a post of observation than as a natural fortress; for it can almost always be surrounded, and the line of retreat, as a general rule, is naked to view and fire.

[Sidenote: Boer States as defensive terrain.]

So far as tactical positions are concerned, any force on the defensive upon the veld of the Boer States must be mainly dependent on the rivers. Yet the spurs of the Drakensberg, blending in a range of ridges, form a mountain stronghold admirably adapted for guerilla warfare; and all along the Basuto border, at a distance of from 10 to 20 miles west of the Caledon, stands out a series of high, detached hills, which form a covered way along the eastern boundary of the Free State, crossing the Orange, and leading into the recesses of the Stormberg Mountains.

[Sidenote: Natal features.]

For every wavelet of land upon the surface of the Boer States, a hundred great billows stand up in Natal. Kopje succeeds kopje, all steep, and many precipitous, yet not the bare, stony cairns of the transmontane regions, but moist green ma.s.ses of verdure, seldom parched even in the dry season, and in the wet, glistening with a thousand cascades; not severely conical or rectangular, like the bizarre eminences which cover Cape Colony with the models of a school of geometry, but n.o.bly outlined. Many of the foothills, it is true, are mere heaps of rock and stone; but even these are rarely such naked and uncompromising piles as are found on the higher levels. Even where northern Natal occasionally widens and subsides to a savannah, as it does below the Biggarsberg, and again south of Colenso, the expanse, compared with the tremendous stretches of the Boer veld, is but a meadow.

[Sidenote: Healthy theatre sole favour for invader.]

As a theatre of war South Africa had one advantage, that it was for the most part eminently healthy. Enteric fever, the scourge of armies, was bound to be prevalent amongst thousands exposed to hardships in a country where the water supply was indifferent, where sanitation was usually primitive amongst the inhabitants, and impossible to improvise hurriedly. But the purity of the air, the geniality of the temperature, the cool nights, the brilliant sunshine, and the hard dry soil were palliatives of evils inseparable from all campaigning.

Otherwise, for regular armies of invasion, South Africa was unfavourable. The railways were so few that the business of supply and movement was always arduous; s.p.a.ces so vast that large forces were swallowed up; the enormous distances from one strategical point to another, intensified, in difficulty by the almost entire absence of good roads, the scarcity of substantial bridges, of well-built towns, of commodious harbours, and of even such ordinary necessaries as flour or fuel, all these complicated every military problem to a degree not readily intelligible to the student of European warfare alone.

[Sidenote: The central plateau.]

It is not easy to sum up briefly the typical qualities as a fighting area of a region so vast and diversified as South Africa; but its dominant feature is undoubtedly the great central plateau comprising southern Rhodesia, all the Transvaal, except a narrow fringe on the eastward, the Bechua.n.a.land Protectorate, the Orange Free State, and the northern and central portions of Cape Colony. Westward this tableland slopes gradually and imperceptibly to sea level; to the south it reaches the Atlantic in the series of terraces and escarpments already described. Eastward it is shut in by the Drakensberg, whose spurs, projecting to the Indian Ocean, traverse at right angles Natal, Zululand, Swaziland, and Portuguese East Africa.

[Sidenote: Effect on operations of plateau.]

Upon the central South African plateau tactical and strategical success is dependent upon rapid manoeuvring. Positions are so readily turned that they can seldom be resolutely held. It is difficult, therefore, to bring an evasive enemy to decisive action, and the fruits of victory must chiefly be plucked by pursuit. The horse is as important as the man, and the infantry arm is reduced to the position of a first reserve, or to the _role_ of piquets on the lines of communication, which remain always open to attack. Superior numbers and, above all, superior speed, are irresistible. There are no first-cla.s.s physical obstacles; the rivers, excepting only the Orange and the Vaal, are, as a rule, fordable; the hill features for the most part insignificant or easy to mask. Mobility is thus at once the chief enemy and aid to military success.

[Sidenote: and of lower spurs.]

But on the stairway descending from the south of this plateau, and on the spurs reaching up from the coast on the east, all this is reversed. The approach of an army acting on the offensive, uphill or across the series of ridges, is commanded by so many points, that a small number of defenders can readily arrest its advance. Position leads but to position, and these, prolonged almost indefinitely on either flank, are not readily turned, or, if turned, still offer locally a strong frontal defence, should the enemy be sufficiently mobile to reach them in time. Streamlets, which would be negligible on the plateau, become formidable obstacles in their deep beds. The horseman's occupation is greatly limited, for he can neither reconnoitre nor gallop. Marches must, therefore, be made painfully in battle formation, for every advance may entail an action. Thus strategy is grievously cramped by the constant necessity for caution, and still more by the tedious movements of the ma.s.s of transport, without which no army can continue to operate in a country spa.r.s.ely inhabited, and as spa.r.s.ely cultivated.

[Sidenote: Variety of rainfall.]

In South Africa even the rainfall militates against concurrent operations on a wide scale, for, at the same season of the year, the conditions prevalent upon one side of the sub-continent are exactly the opposite to those obtaining on the other. In the western provinces, the rainy season occurs in the winter months (May--October), in the eastern, including the Boer States, the rain falls chiefly in the summer (October--March). Yet so capricious are these phenomena that a commander, who counted absolutely upon them for his schemes, might easily find them in abeyance, or even for a period reversed.

[Sidenote: Variety of S.A. climate.]

Beyond the broad facts stated above, the extent of South Africa renders it as impossible to specify any typical climatic or scenic peculiarities common to the whole of it, as to fix upon any strategical or tactical character that is universal. Cape Colony alone exhibits such ant.i.theses of landscape as the moist verdure of the Stormberg and the parched dreariness of Bushman and Little Namaqua Lands, and a rainfall ranging from two to seventy-two inches per annum. The variations in other parts are little less striking. The temperature of the High Veld, for instance, is wont to rise or fall no less than sixty degrees in twelve hours, or less. Thus, whilst one portion of an army on a wide front might be operating in the tropics, another might be in the snows, whilst a third was sheltering from the sun by day, from the frost by night, conditions which actually obtained during the contest about to be described. What effect such divergencies must exercise on plans of campaign, on supplies of clothing, shelter, food, forage, and on military animals themselves, may be readily imagined.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BOER ARMY.

[Sidenote: Many previous cases compare with Boer resistance.]

[Sidenote: Inherited faculties.]

Any force of irregulars which offers a prolonged resistance, not unmarked by tactical successes, to a regular army of superior strength is apt to be regarded as a phenomenon. Yet, from the earliest times, history has shown how seasoned troops may be checked by an enemy who is inferior in numbers, discipline and armament, but possessed of certain counterbalancing resources, due either to the nature of his country, to his own natural characteristics, or to a combination of both.[65] Of such resources the Boers at the close of the nineteenth century possessed, largely by inheritance, a full share. With their forefathers, the early Afrikanders, loneliness had been a pa.s.sion to which their very presence north of the Orange river was due. Flying from society, from burdens and responsibilities which they considered intolerable, from pleasures which seemed to them G.o.dless, from a stir which bewildered them, and from regularity which wearied them, they had penetrated the wilds northward in bands as small as possible, each man of which was wrapped in a dream of solitude, careless whither he went so long as he went unseen. It troubled these pioneers little that they were plunging into a sea of enemies. Society, with its conventions and trammels, and most of all, perhaps, with its taxes, was the only enemy whom they feared, the only one they could never escape. But before it caught them up, their combats with corporeal foes were incessant and deadly. Wild beasts prowled round their herds; savages swooped upon their homesteads; all animated nature was in arms against them; every farmhouse was a fortress, usually in a state of siege. In the great s.p.a.ces of the wilderness the cry for help was but seldom heard, or if heard, only by one who had his own safety to look to. The Boer farmer of the forties, therefore, had to work out his rescue, as he worked out every other problem of his existence, for himself, acquiring thereby, a supreme individuality and self-reliance in the presence of danger. He acquired also other characteristics. The fighting men of his nation were few in number; every mature life was little less valuable to the State than it was to the homestead whose existence depended upon it. The burgher's hope of injuring his enemy was therefore subordinated to solicitude for his own preservation, and he studied only safe methods of being dangerous. Even when in later days the Boer expeditionary bands, reclaiming to the full from the blacks the toll of blood and cruelty which had been levied on themselves, were more often the attackers than the attacked, their aggression was always tempered by the caution of the individual Boers, who would still forego a chance of striking a blow should it contain an undue element of hazard. The republican warriors relied, indeed, less on attack than on defence. They trusted yet more to that weapon, perfected by many small races which have been compelled to work out their own methods of warfare, the weapon of evasion. Nearly always outnumbered, never sure of victory, the burghers always provided, then kept their eyes continually upon, a loophole of escape, for if that were closed they felt themselves to be lost. These characteristics, with many more which will be noted, the early Boer bequeathed to his sons and grandsons; a legacy so strangely composed that many of the very qualities which brought temporary victory to the campaigners of 1899 foredoomed them to ultimate defeat.

[Footnote 65: _E.G._, the revolt of La Vendee, the resistance of the Maories, the Red Indians, the Achinese, the Montenegrins, of the Trans-Indus Highlanders, of Andreas Hofer's Tyrolese, of Shamyl's Caucasians.]

[Sidenote: Value of these in present warfare.]

Self-reliance and individuality are factors of extraordinary military importance under any conditions, but especially under circ.u.mstances involving such dispersion of combatants, such distances between commanders and commanded, as were brought about by the conjunction of long-range arms, an open terrain and the clearest atmosphere in the world. South Africa was a country which gave the freest play to the deadly properties of small-bore rifles. The new weapons fitted into the Boer's inherited conceptions of warfare as if they were a part for which his military organisers had long been hoping and waiting. He had an antipathy to fighting at close quarters, but he knew the value and necessity of striking; the Mauser enabled him to strike at the extreme limit of vision, multiplying tenfold the losses and difficulties of the enemy who attempted to close with him. The portability of the ammunition, the accuracy of the sighting, the absence of betraying smoke, all these increased the Boer's already great trust in himself, and he took the field against the British regular infantryman with more confidence than his sires had felt when they held their laagers against the Zulu and the Matabele. The modern rifle, moreover, still further increased his self-reliance by rendering avoidance of close combat, which alone he feared, a much simpler matter than hitherto.

His father had escaped the bayonets of the British at Boomplaats; he himself was no more willing or likely to be caught by the steel fifty years later, when he could kill at two thousand yards instead of two hundred, or failing to kill, had hours instead of minutes in which to gain his pony and disappear. Yet the long-range rifle had improved his weapon of retreat until it had become a danger instead of an aid to his cause. Failing so completely to understand the military value of self-sacrifice, that he actually pitied, and slightly despised it, when he saw it resorted to by his enemies, his refusal to risk his life often proved disastrous to his side at times when more resolution might have turned the scale of battle in his favour.

There was much to be admired in the Boer defensive; up to a certain point it was stubborn and dangerous. The musketry from a position, poured upon zones of ground over which the British troops must pa.s.s rather than upon the troops themselves, was heavy and effective, and not easily quelled by bombardment. In battle, artillery may do its work without causing a casualty; but so long as he had cover for his body, the soul of the Boer rifleman was little shaken by the bursting of projectiles; fierce firing came often from portions of a position which appeared to be smothered by shrapnel, and invisible in the reek of exploding lyddite.

[Sidenote: Special habits of fighting.]

Nor did the Boer armies, as regular armies have done, cling to strong positions simply because they were strong. They considered a position as a means to an end, and if it ceased to be the best, they discarded it without hesitation, no matter with what toil it had been prepared.

Nevertheless, on ground of their own choosing, the abandonment without a shot of strong, laboriously entrenched, positions by no means always meant retirement. Much as they dreaded being enveloped, their flanks, or what would have been the flanks of an European army, might be threatened again and again only to be converted each time into new and formidable fronts. The nature of the country, and the comparative mobility of the opposing forces rendered these rapid changes of front easy of execution, but they demanded promptness, and a genius for the appreciation of the value of ground, not only on the part of the Boer leaders, but also on that of the rank and file. In the ranks of the commandos persuasion had to take the place of word of command; the Boer soldier, before he quitted one position for another, had to be convinced of the necessity for a repet.i.tion of the severe toil of entrenching which had apparently been wasted. But his eye was as quick, his tactical and topographical instinct as keen as those of his commander, and if the new dispositions were not selected for him, he often selected them himself.