Ten Months In The Field With The Boers Part 13

After enumerating all the weapons used by the belligerents, it would be an unpardonable omission to say nothing of the famous dum-dum bullets.

Have they been much used? Yes, certainly, and on both sides.

The story that the Boers only used those they had captured from the English is quite inadmissible, for the Mauser rifles, which were used exclusively in the Transvaal, were largely provided with them.

I will try to describe the patterns chiefly used:

1. Section in the nickel casing, leaving the extremity of the leaden bullet exposed; the lead, getting very hot, emerges partly from the casing, flattens at the slightest resistance, and expands.

2. Four longitudinal sections in the nickel casing allow the bullet to flatten at the moment of contact, and to exude lead through the apertures.

These two first patterns, the ones most in use, are made for Lee-Metford and Mauser rifles.

The English also use hollow-nosed bullets, the extremity of which is cut or rubbed off.

The Boers, for their part, have manufactured solid projectiles, which show the lead through a straight section, and have the four longitudinal slits.

A few expansive Lee-Metford cartridges, hollow, and filled with fulminate, certainly existed, but I do not believe that they were ever in general use.

I need not insist upon the terrible injuries inflicted by all these projectiles. I have seen the whole of the back of a man's hand carried away by a bullet entering the palm, where it had only made a hole of the normal dimension.

During this war, in an arid country without any towns, Tommy has suffered terribly. Accustomed to the comfort of English barracks and to abundant meals, he was ill-prepared to spend his nights on the hard ground in cold and rain, with stones that bruised his ribs for his only bed, and half a biscuit for his dinner.

Now that we have inspected the English army, let us see what it has accomplished since our arrival.

First of all in Natal. In January, Ladysmith was still invested. The garrison of nearly 10,000 men and the inhabitants were decimated more by disease than by the occasional sh.e.l.ls the Boers threw into the town every day as a matter of duty. Provisions had become scarce. An officer's ration was two biscuits and 240 grammes of horseflesh a day.

A dozen eggs cost 2 8s.; a dozen tomatoes, 18s.; a tin of preserved meat, 3; a tin of condensed milk, 10s.; a pot of jam, 1 11s.; a quarter of a pound of English tobacco, 3; a case containing a dozen bottles of whisky, 140, nearly 12 a bottle.

Nevertheless, a newspaper published by the besieged, the _Lyre_, is still facetious. It publishes the following notes:

'_Telegram from London_.--A sh.e.l.l thrown by _Long Tom_ fell in the War Office. General Brackenbury received it with resignation.... A good many reputations have been damaged. The 2nd Army Corps has been discovered in the War Office portfolios.'

Meanwhile, Buller was still trying to cross the Tugela and relieve Ladysmith. Without any definite plan, perplexed and irresolute, he runs up and down the bank of the river like a cat afraid of the water.

At last he 'permits' Warren to attack Spion Kop. It is strange indeed to find Warren's 15,000 men (the 5th Division) and Buller's 25,000 setting out without a map, without information, and without a guide.

On January 16 Lieutenant Flood luckily discovered a ford, by which two battalions crossed the river; but then the Engineers were obliged to await the arrival of Lieutenant Mazzari's sailors to make a ferry.

At Trichardt's Drift two pontoon bridges were built, and the whole of Warren's division crossed.

On the 19th this General essays an out-flanking movement in the direction of Acton Homes; but this manoeuvre at the base of escarpments occupied by the enemy is found to be too dangerous; the division falls back upon Trichardt's Drift with its convoys and the 420 bullock-waggons intended for the Ladysmith garrison.

A frontal attack, facing east, is decided upon for January 20. The infantry is engaged 800 yards from the Boer trenches. It is three o'clock; an a.s.sault is about to be made on the position. But a counter-order arrives, the reason for which has never yet been explained.

On the 21st, 22nd and 23rd the English try to gain a few hundred yards.

Clery and Warren confess themselves powerless, and turn the attack towards the south-east.

On the night of the 23rd General Woodgate receives orders to seize Spion Kop. General Woodgate, commanding the 9th Brigade, took part in the Abyssinian campaigns of 1868, the Ashanti campaign of 1873, and the Zulu campaign of 1879. Later he was in command of the English forces in West Africa, during the rising of 1898.

He took with him eight companies of the 2nd Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, six companies of the 2nd Battalion Royal Lancashire Regiment, two companies of the 1st Battalion South Lancashire Regiment, 194 men of Thorneycroft's Mounted Infantry, and a half-company Royal Engineers. To these were added two battalions from General Lyttelton's Brigade.

At 3.30 in the morning, after mounting the hill in silence, Lieutenant Audrey, in command of the advance-guard, took two of the Boer trenches with the bayonet. They were held by Boers of the Vryheid commando, who were few in number, and had been completely surprised.

But the Heidelberg and Carolina commandos, under Schalk Burger, came to the rescue. Urged forward by a German commando and by Ricciardi's Italians, they crossed an open s.p.a.ce under a hail of bullets and lyddite sh.e.l.ls, and established themselves on one of the three spurs formed by the kopje at this point.

The struggle was very fierce. Between nine and eleven the English charged three times with the bayonet and were repulsed. Under the deadly fire of the Mausers and the Maxim-Nordenfeldts they were obliged to fall back gradually, before any serviceable reinforcements had reached them.

Woodgate, mortally wounded, was replaced by Colonel Thorneycroft; the latter received neither orders nor instructions, though it would have been easy to have established optical telegraph communication, as the heliograph was working between Mount Alice and Bester Farm (Redvers Buller and White).[#]

[#] A heliograph _was_ working on the height, but 'the signallers and their apparatus were destroyed by the heavy fire' (_vide_ Sir Charles Warren's report).--TRANSLATOR.

His position had become most critical; a council of war was hastily called, on the decision of which the height was evacuated under cover of night.

On January 25 Sir Redvers Buller, who had hastened to Warren's camp, was informed of this catastrophe, which upset all his combinations. A general retreat was determined on, and the troops recrossed the Tugela.

After this b.l.o.o.d.y check, General Buller's report of the movement is delicious:

'The fact that we were able to withdraw our ox-waggons and mule transports over a river 85 yards broad and with a rapid current, without any interference from the enemy, is, I think, a proof that they have learnt to respect the fighting powers of our soldiers.'

The 'lesson' he had given the Boers had cost him 307 killed, thirty-one of whom were officers; 175 wounded, of whom forty-nine were officers; and 347 prisoners and missing, among them seven officers.

The Boers had 168 men killed. And, as Ricciardi has pointed out, but for the incomprehensible opposition of General Joubert, this retreat across the Tugela would have been, not a proof that the enemy had learnt to respect the fighting powers of the English, but a terrific rout. For General Louis Botha, surrounded by a dozen guns, was watching the English pa.s.sing over their pontoons from the heights he had defended the night before. They were well within range, and the gunners were at their posts. It wanted but an order, the pontoons would have been destroyed, and Warren's division, hemmed in by the river, would have been ma.s.sacred to a man. Why was this order not given?

In March, even before the death of the Generalissimo, a terrible word had been whispered--treason! At any rate, his inaction was highly culpable, for if the struggle seems hopeless now, there was a time when he might have turned it into victory, and made it another Majuba Hill campaign.

We know that Joubert's ignorance was almost incredible, that he could not even use a map, and that he stubbornly refused to learn. His att.i.tude at the time of Warren's retreat and in certain other circ.u.mstances no doubt gave colour to the rumours of poisoning which followed the General's sudden death in March. It is conceivable that some Burgher, carried away by patriotic zeal, did not hesitate to commit a crime that the supreme command might pa.s.s into more faithful or bolder hands....

Later on, when I was a prisoner in the English camp, I said one day in jest to a young sub-lieutenant:

'You lost one of your best generals in March.'

'Who do you mean?'

'Joubert.'

Seeing his air of surprise and annoyance, a superior officer who was present said, with a smile:

'You are right!'

On February 1 the positions of the belligerents had undergone no very notable modification since the beginning of the war. We will recapitulate them for the last time, for English reinforcements were arriving from every side. Lord Roberts had a.s.sumed the supreme command, the besieged towns were shortly to be delivered, and the war was to enter upon an active phase.

In the north, in Rhodesia, General Carrington was at Marondellas, and Colonel Plumer at Safili Camp, near Buluwayo.

At Mafeking, Colonel Baden-Powell is made a Lieutenant-General. 'The Wolf who never sleeps,' as his men call him, is still besieged by Snyman.