Fire Across the Veldt (26 page)

‘I think they’re pullin’ back, anyway.’ Jenkins pointed. ‘They’re goin’ back to the base of the ’ill.’

Simon focused his field glasses. ‘So they are. Maybe they have had enough.’

But it was not so. After a few minutes it could be seen that the Boers were now crawling forward and reverting to their conventional tactics of making the most of whatever cover they could find and firing steadily and accurately. They were, of course, excellent bushmen and they seemed to disappear into the terrain, only the occasional rifle flash revealing their presence.

‘Keep your heads down,’ yelled Fonthill to the defenders ahead of him. ‘Save your ammunition until they charge again.’

As the night wore on the situation lapsed into stalemate, with desultory rifle fire being exchanged between the two sides. It was dangerous now to leave the redoubt, but Fonthill slipped away again to go down to the line to check on the number of casualties and the state of the ammunition. He found that Major Chapman, now embedded in the line with some of his men from the Dorset Regiment, had been wounded in the leg, although not badly. The officer, however, refused to leave the trench for the comparative safety of the redoubt.

The two men briefly discussed the situation. ‘I’ve never know Boers hang on like this,’ confessed Fonthill. ‘Have you?’

Chapman shook his head, grimacing with pain from his shoulder. ‘It’s most strange. But we know that Botha is a most determined chap and I guess this is his last chance of breaking through into Natal. Kitchener is pumping in men all the time to protect the frontier. What’s the state of the ammunition, Colonel? We must be low now.’

‘Not too bad but it all depends how long he keeps pounding us. We have an average of about thirty rounds per man. If—’ He broke off as the first rays of the rising sun lit up the scene. ‘Damn! Here they come again. I’d better get back. We may need our reserve this time.’

From the base of the mountain, men could now be seen running
forward again and, from surprisingly near the trenches, Boers suddenly sprang from their sniping positions and joined in the rush forward. Once again, it was an act of great bravery, for the defenders now had their weapons perfectly adjusted to the range and their volleys swept along the leading ranks of the attackers, cutting them down like a giant scythe reaping a cornfield.

This time the tide surged up almost to the lip of the trench walls and Simon and Jenkins led out their reserve troops to kneel behind the trenches, bayonets presented, to add their close-range fire to that of the troopers before them. Even greater carnage would have ensued but for the fact that the British rifles were now overheating and causing cartridges to explode in the breeches and to jam the guns. As it was, the Boers fell back again and resumed their sniping.

So it continued throughout the long, hot day, for the rain clouds had now completely receded. The courage of both attackers and defenders was undaunted, with the Boers creeping closer and closer between attacks and then rising to their feet with a shout and sprinting once again into the mouths of the British guns. It was clear that they were resolved to wipe away this opposition to their path to the south.

By late afternoon, Fonthill scrambled down again to the line and, in the confines of the trench, conferred with Chapman and the senior officers. Ammunition, they reported, was now down to about ten rounds per man.

Simon wiped his brow. ‘Be sparing now, then,’ he ordered. ‘No reply to sniping. Just keep rounds back to be used only to fight off frontal attacks.’ He had a sudden thought. ‘Are your Zulus armed?’ he demanded of Chapman.

‘Yes. They’ve been firing from the line. But they are awful shots.’

‘That’s not the point. If we have to surrender when the last rounds are fired, then the Boers will almost certainly kill them if they are found in possession of rifles. I think you should let them leave now, if they wish. They should be able to filter out round the back between attacks. I’ll make the same offer to my blacks.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Fonthill scrambled back to the redoubt and sought out Mzingeli and put the proposal to him. The tracker shook his head. ‘I stay, Nkosi,’ he said. ‘Too old to run now. And I never run from Boers before. But I ask my boys.’

He came back shortly with the same answer. ‘They stay,’ he said. ‘They don’t think Boers win here. They want to keep jobs, anyway.’

‘Well,’ reflected Jenkins. ‘I only ’ope they’re right. It’s true we can’t ’ang on much longer.’

Within minutes, Chapman sent back a similar message. Alice, still crouching and writing, made a careful note.

‘Wait a moment.’ Simon raised his binoculars to his eyes, risking to stand up fully erect in the redoubt to get a better view of the base of the mountain. ‘Yes, dammit! I think they’re going. Look.’ He handed the glasses to Mzingeli. ‘My eyes are tired. What do you think?’

Gravely, the black man nodded. ‘Yes, they go now. They are collecting wounded and mounting horses. Yes. They go.’ He handed back the glasses. As he did so, a muffled cheer came from the trenches below them to confirm the fact, and Alice, her blouse stained with perspiration, put her arms around Simon’s neck.

‘Thank God, it’s over,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think I could have stood much more of this carnage.’

Simon kissed her quickly and looked again through the field glasses.
‘Botha must have taken a hell of a beating he couldn’t afford,’ he murmured. ‘He had plenty of men when he arrived here but he must have expended so many lives and so much ammunition with these attacks that I can’t see him still trying to get through to the south. He’ll be on his way back to the Transvaal now, I reckon, if not with his tail between his legs, then at least with it tucked into his pocket.’

He lowered the glasses and turned back to Mzingeli. ‘Get your trackers out to follow them to make sure that this is not a feint, but don’t stray too near. They will be mean and looking for revenge.’ He eased himself over the low stone wall. ‘I must check our casualties and see to the wounded.’

It ensued that the defenders had lost about a quarter of their men but the Boers had inevitably suffered many more casualties. In fact, it was a double defeat for them, because later that day a rider came in from Fort Prospect ten miles away to report that it, too, had resisted a Boer attack and had lost only nine casualties to the Boers’ forty. A party sent to the top of the mountain confirmed that the eighty men posted there had put up a stout defence but had been outnumbered by the Boers and been forced to surrender after two hours. They remained in post but bereft of most of their clothing, taken, as usual, by the enemy.

Fonthill pondered whether to form a pursuit party to harry the Boers’ retreat, but the defenders were exhausted after their long night and day of fighting and he decided against it. Botha must be left to fight again another day.

As indeed he did. Fonthill’s trackers reported that the Boer leader had turned back into the Transvaal with the remains of his commando, passing near the charred remains of his own farm, clearly having given up his attempts to invade Natal. But it was equally clear that he was far from finished as a fighting unit. As Fonthill was himself retracing his footsteps back into the Transvaal, news came through that a reinforced Botha had struck again, much further north. Near Bethal, he had surprised a British column led by Colonel Benson and wiped it out, with the loss of one hundred and sixty-one dead and the colonel himself.

Hearing of the defeat as he rode back with his own column, now depleted again – although Chapmen’s men had borne the brunt of the casualties at the Fort – Fonthill shook his head with disbelief.

‘It’s like fighting the Hydra,’ he told Alice. ‘You cut off one head and another one grows. Will they never give up?’

It seemed not. As the spring wore on the better weather appeared, providing lusher grazing for cattle and horses and, it seemed, giving new heart to the scattered commandos. In the wild country of bush, hills and sunken rivers west and south-west of Magaliesberg in the Western Transvaal, de la Rey pushed the shrewd British General Kekewich to a hard-fought draw and then, a few days later, at Kleinfontein, he decimated the rearguard of General Methuen, capturing supplies and wagons. Just outside Bloemfontein, in the Free State, two hundred British troopers clearing a farm were surprised and completely overwhelmed. In the far south, deep into the Crown Colony, small, independent Boer forces led by Smuts and Kritzinger were reported to be ranging far and wide, not raising active rebel support, to be sure, but winning skirmishes, looting, causing arson, pulling down fences and even flogging and murdering natives.

The one bright spot seemed to be the quietude of de Wet in the Orange Free State – so much so that rumours spread that he had gone mad, was wounded or even dead. Then, he was stung into action by what appeared to be a letter to him from Botha – now himself said to be licking his wounds in the mountains of the far east above Vryheid – suggesting peace overtures again. The campaign that followed culminated in an attack that demonstrated once more that peace was the last thing on de Wet’s mind.

On Christmas Day 1901, a line of blockhouses was being built by the British westward from the town of Harrismith, nestling at the foot of the Drakensberg mountains and near de Wet’s old stamping ground of Reitz. Protecting the work was a battalion of Kent and Sussex Yeomanry manning a hill called Groenkop, near the main road from Bethlehem. British intelligence had reported that there were only
about seventy Boers in the vicinity. But de Wet was watching with a commando one thousand strong. Approaching the hill to reconnoitre, the Boer, completely ruthless as always where natives were concerned, shot a black herder near the British lines. Immediately, the garrison fired their guns, so revealing their positions. De Wet took note, crept away and waited until the garrison had settled down to sleep through Christmas Eve. Then, in stockinged feet, the burghers noiselessly climbed the hill, mounting on a side considered by the British to be too steep to warrant the posting of guards.

Many of the guards on duty, unforgivably, were asleep and, with a whoop, the Boers were among them, sweeping down through tents, horse lines and transport, firing and stampeding the animals. Some soldiers, fresh from their bedrolls, attempted resistance, but within the hour three hundred and forty-eight of the Yeomanry were killed or captured. The entire camp was looted, ‘from plum puddings to clothes and ammunition’, as one report later put it. Typically, de Wet killed twenty-five natives but rode off with his captured Tommies, later to set them free, shivering, on the plains below Reitz.

The news could not have been received at a worse time back in Britain. The constant, pinpricking reverses out on the veldt, the news of farm burnings – the plains were referred to as ‘the flaming veldt’ in some of the public prints – the scandalised reception accorded to Emily Hobhouse’s report, the anti-war campaigning of Lloyd George and other Liberal politicians, all increased the pressure on the British government. Lord Kitchener himself, of course, was far from immune. The word was that he was continually locked head-to-head with the newly ennobled but still fiercely anti-Boer Lord Milner, the chief civilian administrator at his headquarters in Pretoria, and it was
rumoured that he had offered to resign, only to be dissuaded by the prime minister.

Fonthill himself heard about de Wet’s latest triumph as he led his men in an arid pursuit of the Boer General Piet Viljoen east of Pretoria. Viljoen, who had sprung, it seemed from nowhere, to be a threat of the de Wet-Botha-de la Rey stature the year before, now seemed happy to be in full retreat. Fonthill was leading a column, doubled in size, having been promoted to Brigadier by French, much to his amazement and apprehension, and Alice had remained with him. Tired of being a ‘sweeper up of trifles’ from the commander-
in-chief’s
table at Pretoria, she had persuaded her editor to let her send a series of colour pieces back about life in the saddle pursuing the elusive commandos. Kitchener, perhaps impressed by her colourful and balanced account of the defence of Fort Itala, had raised no objections, so now Alice Griffith, whose readers of course had no idea that she was married to the intrepid Brigadier Fonthill she described so coolly, stayed with her husband. Predictably, it was not an arrangement that pleased Fonthill but his objections were swept aside by his wife, strongly supported by RSM Jenkins, now a very busy sergeant major with some five hundred men under his eye.

Fonthill took his command on the heels of Viljoen to the foothills of the Drakensberg, where his scouts told him that the Boer had settled in comfortably at Pilgrim’s Rest, high above, showing no inclination to come down to resume the fight. He reported accordingly back to French and it was with relief, then, that he was ordered to bring his column back to the Free State, where Kitchener was beginning his summer campaign against de Wet.

The commander-in-chief, determined to catch this will-o’-the-wisp
once and for all, had allocated an additional fifteen thousand men to the project. They were divided into fourteen columns and posted around an area extending for one hundred and seventy-five miles south of the Vaal and a hundred miles east of the Central Railway. Simon’s men took up post at a central point south of the town of Frankfort, where the rest of the army was to converge, having set out a net, moving inexorably towards the point in a series of meticulously planned marches, sweeping the Boers before them for five days, ending on the sixth – but with not a single Boer in sight.

Jenkins sniffed. ‘The buggers ’ave watched us every inch of the way, bach sir,’ he said. ‘They will ’ave ’ad ’eliographs all the way along them ’ills, look you, passing the word on where we are an’ probably where we were plannin’ to go tomorrer.’

Fonthill nodded. ‘You have to be right,’ he said. ‘They must have slipped between the columns at dead of night. Typical de Wet!’

And so it went on, in the Cape and all over the vast battlefield of the two Boer republics, with the individual Boer commandos sidestepping the ponderous British columns and striking swiftly, perilously maintaining their positions out in the field by feeding off their enemy’s supplies. Truly, the veldt was now aflame.

Yet it was not all one-way traffic. Kitchener’s long-term strategy of building blockhouses across the plains, linked with barbed wire, and then driving the marauding Boers before the British columns to corral them into the corners, forcing them to fight against overwhelming odds or to surrender, was very slowly beginning to pay off. It was true that the strategy was immensely expensive in terms of time, effort and manpower and it was not foolproof. Inevitably gaps opened up between the ‘beaters’ on the drive, and the Boers often slipped
through at night. But what Kitchener called ‘the bags’ of prisoners taken gradually began to improve.

Fonthill and his enlarged column was involved in these drives and he and his men found them irksome, almost as bad as their
farm-burning
duties in the previous year. The military integrity of Fonthill’s Horse, its
raison d’être
– to operate independently with slim resources, moving quickly and often at night to flush the commandos from their hiding places – was completely compromised by the need to move at the slow pace of the large forces herding the guerrillas before them.

‘Blimey,’ observed Jenkins to Fonthill. ‘We might as well be bleedin’ infantry. We’re wasted, ploddin’ on like this.’

De Wet himself, once again, was nearly caught in these pincer movements. Hampered now by a large body of civilian refugees – for Kitchener had closed the concentration camps to further entries of women and children – plus thousands of cattle and horses, the Boer leader was driven before Kitchener’s cordon of sixty thousand men who were closing in, implacably, all around him.

Eventually, de Wet and his unwelcome huge crowd of hangers-on, a total of some three thousand in all, were seemingly cornered in a remote valley, twenty miles south of Vrede, called Langeveld, Afrikaans for ‘long expectation’. It was a lush, beautiful spot, a shallow basin, surrounded by flat hills and with a little stream, the Hotspruit, running along the bottom. The general would dearly liked to have stayed here for a while to allow the cattle to graze and his people to rest. But the British were all around him and he pushed on through the night, following the course of the stream along the valley bottom and lit by a mellow, full moon. His scouts had told him that a low cleft in the hills ahead to the south offered him an escape from
the basin and he decided to lead his unwieldy caravanserai up the slope to take it.

Fonthill and his men were in the van of the British forces chasing the Boers and he, Jenkins and Alice were beginning the gentle descent into the valley when they saw, far away at its head, the Boer column begin to wind its way up the side of the hill to reach the exit.

‘Now we have him, at last!’ cried Simon. ‘The New Zealanders and Australians are dug in up there and he’s caught in a trap.’

As he spoke, flashes of gunfire lit up the darkness ahead and it was just possible to see the burghers leading the column turn round and retreat down the hill. They met, however, the refugees at the bottom with their wagons and cattle and for minutes all was confusion as the wagons jammed, the oxen and cows impeded the fighting men and the refugees cried out in consternation.

Fonthill turned to his officers. ‘Deploy your squadrons across the mouth of the valley,’ he shouted. ‘They might turn around and try and fight their way out this way. Quickly now.’

Alice looked up from her scribbling. ‘Simon,’ she cried, ‘be careful of the women and children if they try and force their way through here. Surely better to let them through than cause civilian casualties.’

But neither of them needed to worry. As they watched, the tiny figures of the burghers at the head of the column suddenly broke away from the refugees and other fighting men behind them and surged up the hill towards the New Zealand and Australian lines. The noise of gunfire could clearly be heard above the lowing of the cattle and the shouts of the refugees and it was obvious that a fierce gunfight was in progress in the hill cleft. Fonthill stood in his stirrups and focused his field glasses.

‘By God!’ he cried. ‘He’s broken through. I can see them streaming over the pass and disappearing. The bloody man’s got away again.’

Indeed he had. De Wet had stormed through the Antipodean lines with six hundred burghers, President Steyn and his officials once again in their midst, and leaving behind all of the refugees, their wagons and their cattle and a minority of his fighting men. These were all captured by Fonthill and the other troops coming up fast behind him. In all, some eight hundred captives were taken – included de Wet’s son – the biggest success of the guerrilla war to date. But, of course, the ruthless, ever-resourceful de Wet himself had slipped away again.

Yet could this game of hide-and-seek, of pursuit and pursued, attack and retreat continue for very much longer? Fonthill himself now sensed that, despite the defiance of de Wet, the most antagonistic of the Boer generals, there was a sense of exhaustion on both sides. Rumours were spreading that Botha once again was anxious to persuade his fellow guerrilla leaders to agree to negotiate for peace and the news that that great imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, had died seemed to indicate that an era was closing in South Africa.

The war, however, continued on its weary way. Even the confirmation that the Boer leaders were, in fact, gathering at Klerksdorp, under British safe passage, to begin the hugely difficult task of gaining agreement among themselves to sue for peace, did not end the fighting. And de Wet was not the only Boer commander eager to continue the hostilities.

Lieutenant General French had long been stationed in the Cape Colony attempting to pin down Smuts and the other scattered bands of guerrillas, and Fonthill received orders that he was to move his column to Lichtenburg, some sixty miles east of Mafeking in the
Northern Transvaal, and report to General Ian Hamilton, whom Kitchener had appointed to coordinate a great effort to put down de la Rey. The two were both survivors of the Battle of Majuba Hill two decades before and knew each other slightly. On Fonthill’s arrival they shook hands warmly.

‘I’m no peace-at-any-price merchant,’ said Simon, ‘but should we still be fighting on, General, when the Boers are meeting under our auspices to discuss a possible armistice?’

A tall, thin, elegant man, Hamilton had earned laurels for his part in the defence of Ladysmith and Kitchener had promoted him from a desk job to bring de la Rey finally to heel. He now nodded his head firmly. ‘Oh, yes. De la Rey is at this meeting at Klerksdorp but his deputy, Kemp, is a firebrand and we hear he is about to go very much on the warpath. There are about five thousand seasoned burghers hereabouts still wanting to fight. If they give us a knock now, it will give heart to the delegates in Klerksdorp who want to fight on and they could carry the day. If – as will happen – we give them a bloody nose, then that could seriously accelerate the peace talks.’