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CHARGE OF
THE NORTHUMBERLAND FUSILIERS
THE BATTLE OF STORMBERG
From: H. W. Wilson, With the Flag to Pretoria, 1902 |
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Arthur Conan
Doyle,
The Great Boer War
London, Smith, Elder &
Co., 1902
CHAPTER X
The Battle of Stormberg
Some attempt has now been
made to sketch the succession of events which had ended in the investment of
Ladysmith in northern Natal, and also to show the fortunes of the force
which on the western side of the seat of war attempted to advance to the
relief of Kimberley. The distance between these forces may be expressed in
terms familiar to the European reader by saying that it was that which
separates Paris from Frankfort, or to the American by suggesting that
Ladysmith was at Boston and that Methuen was trying to relieve Philadelphia.
Waterless deserts and rugged mountain ranges divided the two scenes of
action. In the case of the British there could be no connection between the
two movements, but the Boers by a land journey of something over a hundred
miles had a double choice of a route by which Cronje and Joubert might join
hands, either by the Bloemfontein-Johannesburg-Laing's-Nek Railway, or by
the direct line from Harrismith to Ladysmith. The possession of these
internal lines should have been of enormous benefit to the Boers, enabling
them to throw the weight of their forces unexpectedly from the one flank to
the other.
In a future chapter it will be recorded how the Army Corps arriving from
England was largely diverted into Natal in order in the first instance to
prevent the colony from being overrun, and in the second to rescue the
beleaguered garrison. In the meantime it is necessary to deal with the
military operations in the broad space between the eastern and western
armies.
After the declaration of war there was a period of some weeks during which
the position of the British over the whole of the northern part of Cape
Colony was full of danger. Immense supplies had been gathered at De Aar
which were at the mercy of a Free State raid, and the burghers, had they
possessed a cavalry leader with the dash of a Stuart or a Sheridan, might
have dealt a blow which would have cost us a million pounds' worth of stores
and dislocated the whole plan of campaign. However, the chance was allowed
to pass, and when, on November 1st, the burghers at last in a leisurely
fashion sauntered over the frontier, arrangements had been made by
reinforcement and by concentration to guard the vital points. The objects of
the British leaders, until the time for a general advance should come, were
to hold the Orange River Bridge (which opened the way to Kimberley), to
cover De Aar Junction, where the stores were, to protect at all costs the
line of railway which led from Cape Town to Kimberley, and to hold on to as
much as possible of those other two lines of railway which led, the one
through Colesberg and the other through Stormberg, into the Free State. The
two bodies of invaders who entered the colony moved along the line of these
two railways, the one crossing the Orange River at Norval's Pont and the
other at Bethulie. They enlisted many recruits among the Cape Colony Dutch
as they advanced, and the scanty British forces fell back in front of them,
abandoning Colesberg on the one line and Stormberg on the other. We have,
then, to deal with the movements of two British detachments. The one which
operated on the Colesberg line - which was the more vital of the two, as a
rapid advance of the Boers upon that line would have threatened the precious
Capetown-Kimberley connection - consisted almost entirely of mounted troops,
and was under the command of the same General French who had won the battle
of Elandslaagte. By an act of foresight which was only too rare upon the
British side in the earlier stages of this war, French, who had in the
recent large manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain shown great ability as a cavalry
leader, was sent out of Ladysmith in the very last train which made its way
through. His operations, with his instructive use of cavalry and horse
artillery, may be treated separately.
The other British force which faced the Boers who were advancing through
Stormberg was commanded by General Gatacre, a man who bore a high reputation
for fearlessness and tireless energy, though he had been criticised, notably
during the Soudan campaign, for having called upon his men for undue and
unnecessary exertion. 'General Back-acher' they called him, with rough
soldierly chaff. A glance at his long thin figure, his gaunt Don-Quixote
face, and his aggressive jaw would show his personal energy, but might not
satisfy the observer that he possessed those intellectual gifts which
qualify for high command. At the action of the Atbara he, the brigadier in
command, was the first to reach and to tear down with his own hands the
zareeba of the enemy - a gallant exploit of the soldier, but a questionable
position for the General. The man's strength and his weakness lay in the
incident.
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Born
18443. Entered the Army in 1862; was Instructor of Military Surveying at
the Royal Military College,1875-9; Deputy-Adjutant and
Quartermaster General with the Hazara Expedition, 1888;served in Burma,
1889;Chitral, 1895; Soudan, 1896; and commanded the British Division at
the Battle of Khartoum; in command of South-Eastern District, 1898;
appointed to command the 3rd Division in South Africa, with the rank of
Lieut.-General, October, 1899. |
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR
WILLIAM FORBES GATACRE, K.C.B., D.S.O.
From: H.
W. Wilson, With the Flag to Pretoria, 1902
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General Gatacre was nominally in command of a division, but so cruelly had
his men been diverted from him, some to Buller in Natal and some to Methuen,
that he could not assemble more than a brigade. Falling back before the Boer
advance, he found himself early in December at Sterkstroom, while the Boers
occupied the very strong position of Stormberg, some thirty miles to the
north of him. With the enemy so near him it was Gatacre's nature to attack,
and the moment that he thought himself strong enough he did so. No doubt he
had private information as to the dangerous hold which the Boers were
getting upon the colonial Dutch, and it is possible that while Buller and
Methuen were attacking east and west they urged Gatacre to do something to
hold the enemy in the centre. On the night of December 9th he advanced.
The fact that he was about to do so, and even the hour of the start, appear
to have been the common property of the camp some days before the actual
move. The 'Times' correspondent under the date December 7th details all that
it is intended to do. It is to the credit of our Generals as men, but to
their detriment as soldiers, that they seem throughout the campaign to have
shown extraordinarily little power of dissimulation. They did the obvious,
and usually allowed it to be obvious what they were about to do. One thinks
of Napoleon striking at Egypt; how he gave it abroad that the real object of
the expedition was Ireland, but breathed into the ears of one or two
intimates that in very truth it was bound for Genoa. The leading official at
Tolilon had no more idea where the fleet and army of France had gone than
the humblest caulker in the yard. However, it is not fair to expect the
subtlety of the Corsican from the downright Saxon, but it remains strange
and deplorable that in a country filled with spies any one should have known
in advance that a so-called 'surprise' was about to be attempted.
The force with which General Gatacre advanced consisted of the 2nd
Northumberland Fusiliers, 960 strong, with one Maxim; the 2nd Irish Rifles,
840 strong, with one Maxim, and 250 Mounted Infantry. There were two
batteries of Field Artillery, the 74th and 77th. The total force was well
under 3,000 men. About three in the afternoon the men were entrained in open
trucks under a burning sun, and for some reason, at which the impetuous
spirit of the General must have chafed, were kept waiting for three hours.
At eight o'clock they detrained at Molteno, and thence after a short rest
and a meal they started upon the night march which was intended to end at
the break of day at the Boer trenches. One feels as if one were describing
the operations of Magersfontein once again and the parallel continues to be
painfully exact.
It was nine o'clock and pitch dark when the column moved out of Molteno and
struck across the black gloom of the veldt, the wheels of the guns being
wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was known that the distance was not
more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and the guides were
still unable to say that they had reached their point it must have become
perfectly evident that they had missed their way. The men were dog-tired, a
long day's work had been followed by a long night's march, and they plodded
along drowsily through the darkness. The ground was broken and irregular.
The weary soldiers stumbled as they marched. Daylight came and revealed the
column still looking for its objective, the fiery General walking in front
and leading his horse behind him. It was evident that his plans had
miscarried, but his energetic and hardy temperament would not permit him to
turn back without a blow being struck. However one may commend his energy,
one cannot but stand aghast at his dispositions. The country was wild and
rocky, the very places for those tactics of the surprise and the ambuscade
in which the Boers excelled. And yet the column still plodded aimlessly on
in its dense formation, and if there were any attempt at scouting ahead and
on the flanks the result showed how ineffectively it was carried out. It was
at a quarter past four in the clear light of a South African morning that a
shot, and then another, and then a rolling crash of musketry, told that we
were to have one more rough lesson of the result of neglecting the usual
precautions of warfare. High up on the face of a steep line of hill the Boer
riflemen lay hid, and from a short range their fire scourged our exposed
flank. The men appear to have been chiefly colonial rebels, and not Boers of
the backveldt, and to that happy chance it may be that the comparative
harmlessness of their fire was due. Even now, in spite of the surprise, the
situation might have been saved had the bewildered troops and their harried
officers known exactly what to do. It is easy to be wise after the event,
but it appears now that the only course that could commend itself would be
to extricate the troops from their position, and then, if thought feasible,
to plan an attack. Instead of this a rush was made at the hillside, and the
infantry made their way some distance up it only to find that there were
positive ledges in front of them which could not be climbed. The advance was
at a dead stop, and the men lay down under the boulders for cover from the
hot fire which came from inaccessible marksmen above them. Meanwhile the
artillery had opened behind them, and their fire (not for the first time in
this campaign) was more deadly to their friends than to their foes. At least
one prominent officer fell among his men, torn by British shrapnel bullets.
Talana Hill and Modder River have shown also, though perhaps in a less
tragic degree, that what with the long range of modern artillery fire, and
what with the difficulty of locating infantry who are using smokeless
powder, it is necessary that officers commanding batteries should be
provided with the coolest heads and the most powerful glasses of any men in
the service, for a responsibility which will become more and more terrific
rests upon their judgment.
The question now, since the assault had failed, was how to extricate the men
from their position. Many withdrew down the hill, running the gauntlet of
the enemy's fire as they emerged from the boulders on to the open ground,
while others clung to their positions, some from a soldierly hope that
victory might finally incline to them, others because it was clearly safer
to lie among the rocks than to cross the bullet-swept spaces beyond. Those
portions of the force who extricated themselves do not appear to have
realised how many of their comrades had remained behind, and so as the gap
gradually increased between the men who were stationary and the men who fell
back all hope of the two bodies reuniting became impossible. All the
infantry who remained upon the hillside were captured. The rest rallied at a
point fifteen hundred yards from the scene of the surprise, and began an
orderly retreat to Molteno.
In the meanwhile three powerful Boer guns upon the ridge had opened fire
with great accuracy, but fortunately with defective shells. Had the enemy's
contractors been as trustworthy as their gunners in this campaign, our
losses would have been very much heavier, and it is possible that here we
catch a glimpse of some consequences of that corruption which was one of the
curses of the country. The guns were moved with great smartness along the
ridge, and opened fire again and again, but never with great result. Our own
batteries, the 74th and 77th, with our handful of mounted men, worked hard
in covering the retreat and holding back the enemy's pursuit.
It is a sad subject to discuss, but it is the one instance in a campaign
containing many reverses which amounts to demoralisation among the troops
engaged. The Guards marching with the steadiness of Hyde Park off the field
of Magersfontein, or the men of Nicholson's Nek chafing because they were
not led in a last hopeless charge, are, even in defeat, object lessons of
military virtue. But here fatigue and sleeplessness had taken all fire and
spirit out of the men. They dropped asleep by the roadside and had to be
prodded up by their exhausted officers. Many were taken prisoners in their
slumber by the enemy who gleaned behind them. Units broke into small
straggling bodies, and it was a sorry and bedraggled force which about ten
o'clock came wandering into Molteno. The place of honour in the rear was
kept throughout by the Irish Rifles, who preserved some military formation
to the end.
Our losses in killed and wounded were not severe - military honour would
have been less sore had they been more so. Twenty-six killed, sixty-eight
wounded - that is all. But between the men on the hillside and the
somnambulists of the column, six hundred, about equally divided between the
Irish Rifles and the Northumberland Fusiliers, had been left as prisoners.
Two guns, too, had been lost in the hurried retreat.
It is not for the historian - especially for a civilian historian -to say a
word unnecessarily to aggravate the pain of that brave man who, having done
all that personal courage could do, was seen afterwards sobbing on the table
of the waiting-room at Molteno, and bewailing his 'poor men.' He had a
disaster, but Nelson had one at Teneriffe and Napoleon at Acre, and built
their great reputations in spite of it. But the one good thing of a disaster
is that by examining it we may learn to do better in the future, and so it
would indeed be a perilous thing if we agreed that our reverses were not a
fit subject for open and frank discussion.
It is not to the detriment of an enterprise that it should be daring and
call for considerable physical effort on the part of those who are engaged
in it. On the contrary, the conception of such plans is one of the signs of
a great military mind. But in the arranging of the details the same military
mind should assiduously occupy itself in foreseeing and preventing every
unnecessary thing which may make the execution of such a plan more
difficult. The idea of a swift sudden attack upon Stormberg was excellent -
the details of the operation are continually open to criticism.
How far the Boers suffered at Stormberg is unknown to us, but there seems in
this instance no reason to doubt their own statement that their losses were
very slight. At no time was any body of them exposed to our fire, while we,
as usual, fought in the open. Their numbers were probably less than ours,
and the quality of their shooting and want of energy in pursuit make the
defeat the more galling. On the other hand, their guns were served with
skill and audacity. They consisted of commandos from Bethulie, Rouxville,
and Smithfield, under the orders of Olivier, with those colonials whom they
had seduced from their allegiance.
This defeat of General Gatacre's, occurring, as it did, in a disaffected
district and one of great strategic importance, might have produced the
worst consequences.
Fortunately no very evil result followed. No doubt the recruiting of rebels
was helped, but there was no forward movement and Molteno remained in our
hands. In the meanwhile Gatacre's force was reinforced by a fresh battery,
the 79th, and by a strong regiment, the Derbyshires, so that with the 1st
Royal Scots and the wing of the Berkshires he was strong enough to hold his
own until the time for a general advance should come. So in the Stormberg
district, as at the Modder River, the same humiliating and absurd position
of stalemate was established.
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MAP OF
THE BATTLE OF STORMBERG
From: H. W. Wilson, With the Flag to Pretoria, 1902
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