Howard C. Hillegas - With the Boer Forces

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All the intelligence of a trained army is centred in the officers; in the
Boer army there was much practical military sense and alertness of mind
distributed throughout the entire force.

Mr. Disraeli once said: "Doubtless to think with vigour, with clearness,
and with depth in the recess of a cabinet is a fine intellectual
demonstration; but to think with equal vigour, clearness, and depth among
bullets, appears the loftiest exercise and the most complete triumph of
the human faculties." Without attempting to insinuate that every Boer
burgher was a man of the high mental attainments referred to by the
eminent British statesman, it must be acknowledged that the fighting Boer
was a man of more than ordinary calibre.

In battle the Boer burgher was practically his own general. He had an eye
which quickly grasped a situation, and he never waited for an order from
an officer to take advantage of it. When he saw that he could with safety
approach the enemy more closely he did so on his own responsibility, and
when it became evident to him that it would be advantageous to occupy a
different position in order that he might stem the advance of the enemy he
acted entirely on his own initiative. He remained in one position just as
long as he considered it safe to do so, and if conditions warranted he
went forward, and if they were adverse he retreated, whether there was an
order from an officer or not. When he saw that the burghers in another
part of the field were hard pressed by the enemy he deserted his own
position and went to their assistance, and when his own position became
untenable, in his own opinion, he simply vacated it and went to another
spot where bullets and shells were less thick. If he saw a number of the
enemy who were detached from the main body of their own force, and he
believed that they could be taken prisoner, he enlisted a number of the
burghers who were near him, and made an effort to capture them, whether
there was an officer close at hand or a mile distant.

No one was surfeited with orders; in fact, the lack of them was more
noticeable, and it was well that it was so, for the Boer burgher disliked
to be ordered, and he always did things with better grace when he acted
spontaneously. An illustration of this fact was an incident at the fight
of Modderspruit where two young Boers saved an entire commando from
falling into the hands of the enemy. Lieutenant Oelfse, of the State
Artillery, and Reginald Sheppard, of the Pretoria commando, observed a
strong force of the British advancing towards a kopje where the
Krugersdorp commando was concealed. The two men saw that the
Krugersdorpers would be cut off in a short time if they were not informed
of the British advance, so they determined to plunge across the open veld,
six hundred yards from the enemy's guns, and tell them of their danger. No
officer could have compelled the men to undertake such a hazardous journey
across a bullet-swept plain, but Oelfse and Sheppard acted on their own
responsibility, succeeded in reaching the Krugersdorp commando without
being hit, and gave to the commandant the information which undoubtedly
saved him and his men from being captured. Incidents of like nature
occurred in almost every battle of the campaign, and occasionally the
service rendered so voluntarily by the burghers was of momentous
consequences, even if the act itself seemed trivial at the time.

A second feature of the Boer army, and equally as important as the freedom
of action of its individuals, was its mobility. Every burgher was mounted
on a fleet horse or pony, and consequently his movements on the
battlefield, whether in an advance or in a retreat, were many times more
rapid that those of his enemy--an advantage which was of inestimable value
both during an engagement and in the intervals between battles when it was
necessary to secure new positions. During the progress of a battle the
Boers were able to desert a certain point for a time, mount their horses
and ride to another position, and throw their full strength against the
latter, yet remaining in such close touch with the former that it was
possible to return and defend it in an exceedingly short space of time.
With the aid of their horses they could make such a sudden rush from one
position to another that the infantry of the enemy could be surrounded and
cut off from all communications with the body of its army almost before it
was known that any Boers were in the vicinity, and it was due to that fact
that the Boers were able to make so many large numbers of captives.

The fighting along the Tugela furnished many magnificent examples of the
Boers' extreme mobility. There it was a constant jump from one position to
another--one attack here yesterday, another there to-day. It was an
incessant movement made necessary by the display of energy by the British,
whose thrice-larger forces kept the Boers in a state of continued
ferment. On one side of the river, stretched out from the south of Spion
Kop, in the west, to almost Helpmakaar, in the east, were thirty thousand
British troops watching for a weak point where they might cross, and
attacking whenever there seemed to be the slightest opportunity of
breaking through; on the other side were between two and three thousand
mounted Boers, jumping from one point to another in the long line of
territory to be guarded, and repelling the attacks whenever they were
made. The country was in their favour, it is true, but it was not so
favourable that a handful of men could defend it against thousands, and it
was partly due to the great ease and rapidity with which the Boers could
move from one place to another, that Ladysmith remained besieged so long.
The mobility of the Boers was again well demonstrated by the retreat of
the burghers from the environs of Ladysmith. After the Krijgsraad decided
to withdraw the forces into the Biggarsberg, it required only a few hours
for all the many commandos to leave the positions they had held so long;
to load their impedimenta and to be well on the way to the northward. The
departure was so rapid that it surprised even those who were in
Ladysmith. One day the Boers were shelling the town as usual and all the
commandos were observed in the same positions which they had occupied for
several months; the following day not a single Boer was to be seen
anywhere. They had quietly mounted their horses by night and before the
sun rose in the morning they were trekking north beyond Modderspruit and
Elandslaagte, on the way to Glencoe. General Cronje's flight from
Magersfontein was also accomplished with great haste and in good order,
but what probably was the finest example of the Boers' mobility was the
magnificent retreat along the Basuto border of Generals Grobler, Olivier,
and Lemmer, with their six thousand men, when the enemy was known to be in
great strength within several days' march of them. After the capture of
Cronje at Paardeberg the three generals, who had been conducting the
campaign in the eastern provinces of Cape Colony, were in a most dangerous
position, having the enemy in the rear, the left and left front, the
neutral Basuto land on the right front, and only a small strip of
territory along the western border of the Basuto country apparently free
of the enemy. The British were in Bloemfontein and in the surrounding
country, and it seemed almost impossible that the six thousand men could
ever extricate themselves from such a position to join the Boer forces in
the north. It would have been a comparatively easy matter for six thousand
mounted men to make the journey if they had not been loaded down with
impedimenta, but the three generals were obliged to carry with them all
their huge transport waggons and heavy camping paraphernalia. The trek
northward was begun near Colesburg on March 12th, and when all the
different commandos had joined the main column the six thousand horsemen,
the seven hundred and fifty transport-waggons, the two thousand natives,
and twelve thousand cattle formed a line extending more than twenty-four
miles. The scouts, who were despatched westward from the column to
ascertain the whereabouts of the enemy, reported large forces of British
cavalry sixty and seventy miles distant, but for some inexplicable reason
the British made no attempt to cut off the retreat of the three generals,
and on March 28th they reached Kroonstad, having traversed almost four
hundred miles of territory in the comparatively short time of sixteen
days. Sherman's march to the sea was made under extraordinary conditions,
but the retreat of the three generals was fraught with dangers and
difficulties much greater. Sherman passed through a fertile country, and
had an enemy which was disheartened. The three generals had an enemy
flushed with its first victories, while the country through which they
passed was mountainous and muddy. If the column had been captured so soon
after the Paardeberg disaster, the relief of Kimberley and the relief of
Ladysmith, it might have been so disheartening to the remaining Boer
commandos that the war might have been ended at that time. It was a
magnificent retreat and well worthy to be placed in the Boer's scroll of
honour with Cronje's noble stand at Paardeberg, with Spion Kop and
Magersfontein.

[Illustration: GENERAL GROBLER]

The Boer army was capable of moving rapidly under almost any
conditions. The British army demonstrated upon many occasions that it
could not move more than two or three miles an hour when the column was
hampered with transport waggons and camping paraphernalia, and frequently
it was impossible to proceed at that pace for many consecutive hours. A
Boer commando easily travelled six miles an hour and not infrequently,
when there was a necessity for rapid motion, seven and even eight miles an
hour were traversed. When General Lucas Meyer moved his commandos along
the border at the outset of the war and learned that General Penn-Symons
was located at Dundee he made a night march of almost forty miles in six
hours and occupied Talana Hill, a mile distant from the enemy, who was
ignorant of the Boers' proximity until the camp was shelled at daybreak.
When General De Wet learned that Colonel Broadwood was moving westward
from Thaba N'Chu on March 30th, he was in laager several miles east of
Brandfort, but it required only several minutes for all the burghers to be
on their horses and ready to proceed toward the enemy. The journey of
twenty-five miles to Sannaspost, or the Bloemfontein waterworks, was made
in the short time of five hours, while Colonel Broadwood's forces consumed
seven hours in making the ten miles' journey from Thaba N'Chu to the same
place. The British column was unable to move more rapidly on account of
its large convoy of waggons, but even then the rate of progress was not as
great as that made by the trekking party of the three generals who were
similarly hampered. It was rarely the case that the Boers attempted to
trek for any considerable distance with their heavy waggons when they were
aware of the presence of the enemy in the vicinity. Ox-waggons were always
left behind, while only a small number of mule-waggons, bearing provisions
and ammunition, were taken, and on that account they were able to move
with greater rapidity than their opponents. Frequently they entered
dangerous territory with only a few days' provisions and risked a famine
of food and ammunition rather than load themselves down with many
lumbering waggons which were likely to retard their progress. After
fighting the battle at Moester's Hoek, General De Wet had hardly three
days' food and very little ammunition with him, yet rather than delay his
march and send for more waggons, he proceeded to Wepener where, after
several days' fighting, both his food and ammunition became exhausted and
he was obliged to lie idle around the enemy and await the arrival of the
supplies which he might have carried with him at the outset of the trek if
he had cared to risk such an impediment to his rapid movements.

One of the primary reasons why the Boer could move more rapidly than the
British was the difference in the weight carried by their horses. The Boer
paid no attention to art when he went to war, and consequently he carried
nothing that was not absolutely essential. His saddle was less than half
the weight of a British saddle, and that was almost all the equipment he
carried when on a trek. The Boer rider and equipment, including saddle,
rifle, blankets, and a food-supply, rarely weighed more than two hundred
and fifty pounds, which was not a heavy load for a horse to carry. A
British cavalryman and his equipment of heavy saddle, sabre, carbine, and
saddle-bags, rarely weighed less than four hundred pounds--a burden which
soon tired a horse. Again, almost every Boer had two horses, so that when
one had been ridden for an hour or more he was relieved and led, while the
other was used. In this manner the Boers were able to travel from twelve
to fourteen hours in a day when it was absolutely necessary to reach a
certain point at a given time. Six miles an hour was the rate of progress
ascribed to horses in normal condition, and when a forced march was
attempted they could travel sixty and seventy miles in a day, and be in
good condition the following morning to undertake another journey of equal
length. Small commandos often covered sixty and seventy miles in a day,
especially during the fighting along the Tugela, while after the battles
of Poplar Grove and Abraham's Kraal, and the capture of Bloemfontein, it
seemed as if the entire army in the Free State were moving northward at a
rate of speed far exceeding that of an express train. The mobility of the
Boer army was then on a par with that of the British army after the battle
of Dundee, and it was difficult to determine which of the two deserved the
palm for the best display of accelerated motion.

A feature of the Boer system of warfare which was most striking was the
manner in which each individual protected himself, as far as possible,
from danger. In lion-hunting it is an axiom that the hunter must not
pursue a wounded lion into tall grass or underbrush lest the pursuer may
be attacked. In the Boer army it was a natural instinct, common to all the
burghers, which led them to seek their own safety whenever danger seemed
to be near. Men who follow the most peaceful pursuits of life value their
lives highly. They do not assume great risks even if great ends are to be
attained. The majority of the Boers were farmers who saw no glory in
attempting to gain a great success, the attainment of which made it
necessary that they should risk their lives. It seemed as if each man
realised that his death meant a great loss to the Boer army, already
small, and that he did not mean to diminish its size if he could possibly
prevent it. The Boer was quick in noting when the proper time arrived for
retreat, and he was not slothful in acting upon his observations.
Retreating at the proper time was one of the Boers' characteristics, but
it could not be called an advantage, for frequently many of the Boers
misjudged the proper time for retreating and left the field when a battle
was almost won. At Poplar Grove the Boers might have won the day if the
majority of the burghers had remained and fought an hour or two longer
instead of retreating precipitately when the individuals determined that
safety was to be found only in flight. At Elandslaagte the foreigners
under General Kock did not gauge the proper moment for retreat, but
continued with the fighting and were almost annihilated by the Lancers
because of their lack of discretion in that respect. The burghers of the
Free State, in particular, had the instinct of retreating abnormally
developed, and whenever a battle was in progress large numbers of burghers
could be observed going in an opposite direction as rapidly as their
ponies could carry them over the veld. The lack of discipline in the
commandos made such practices possible; in fact there was no rule or law
by which a burgher could be prevented from retreating or deserting
whenever he felt that he did not care to participate in a battle. After
the British occupation of Bloemfontein there was a small skirmish about
eight miles north of that city at a place called Tafelkop which sent the
Free Staters running in all directions. The veld seemed to be filled with
deserters, and at every farmhouse there were from two to six able-bodied
men who had retreated when they believed themselves to be in grave danger.

Foolish men attribute all the moral courage in the world to the soldiers
of their own country, but nature made a wise distribution of that gift,
and not all the Boers were cowards. Boer generals with only a few hundred
men time and again attacked thousands of British soldiers, and frequently
vanquished them. General Botha's twenty-five hundred men held out for a
week against General Buller's thirty or forty thousand men, and General
Cronje with his four thousand burghers succumbed to nothing less than
forty thousand men and a hundred and fifty heavy guns under Field-Marshal
Lord Roberts. Those two examples of Boer bravery would suffice to prove
that the South African farmers had moral courage of no mean order if there
were not a thousand and one other splendid records of bravery. The
burghers did not always lie behind their shelter until the enemy had come
within several hundred yards and then bowl them over with deadly accuracy.
At the Platrand fight near Ladysmith, on January 6th, the Boers charged
and captured British positions, drove the defenders out, and did it so
successfully that only a few Boers were killed. The Spion Kop fight, a
second Majuba Hill, was won after one of the finest displays of moral
courage in the war. It requires bravery of the highest type for a small
body of men to climb a steep hill in the face of the enemy which is three
times greater numerically and armed with larger and more guns, yet that
was the case with the Boers at Spion Kop. There were but few battles in
the entire campaign that the Boer forces were not vastly outnumbered by
the enemy, who usually had from twice to twenty times their number of
cannon, yet the burghers were well aware of the fact and did not allow it
to interfere with their plans nor did they display great temerity in
battling with such a foe. When Lord Roberts and his three thousand cavalry
entered Jacobsdal there were less than one hundred armed Boers in the
town, but they made a determined stand against the enemy, and in a
street-fight a large percentage of the burghers fell, and their blood
mingled with that of those they had slain. Large bodies of Boers rarely
attacked, and never resisted the enemy on level stretches of veld, not
because they lacked courage to do so, but because they saw the futility of
such action. After the British drove the Boers out of the kopjes east and
north-east of Bloemfontein the burghers had no broken country suited to
their particular style of warfare, and they retreated to the Vaal without
much effort to stop the advance of the enemy. The Boer generals knew that
the British were equipped with innumerable cannon, which could sweep the
level veld for several miles before them and make the ground untenable for
the riflemen--the mainstay of the Boer army.

[Illustration: SPION KOP, WHERE BOERS CHARGED UP THE HILLSIDE]

When they were on hills the Boers were able to entrench themselves so
thoroughly that the fire of several hundred heavy guns made hardly any
impression on them, but as soon as they attempted to apply those tactics
on level ground the results were most disastrous. At Colenso and
Magersfontein the burghers remained in their trenches on the hills while
thousands of shrapnel and other shells exploded above and around them, but
very few men were injured, and when the British infantry advanced under
cover of the shell fire the Boers merely remained in the trenches until
the enemy had approached to within several hundred yards and then assailed
them with rifle fire. Trenches always afforded perfect safety from shell
fire, and on that account the Boers were able to cope so long and well
with the British in the fighting along the Tugela and around Kimberley.
The Boers generally remained quietly in their trenches and made no reply
to the British cannon fire, however hot it was. The British generals
several times mistook this silence as an indication that the Boers had
evacuated the trenches, and sent forward bodies of infantry to occupy the
positions. When the infantry reached the Boer zone of fire they usually
met with a terrific Mauser fire that could not be stemmed, however gallant
the attacks might have been. Hundreds of British soldiers lost their lives
while going forward under shell fire to occupy a position which, it was
presumed by the generals, was unoccupied by the Boers.

There were innumerable instances, also, of extraordinarily brave acts by
individual burghers, but it was extremely difficult to hear of them owing
to the Boers' disinclination to discuss a battle in its details. No Boer
ever referred to his exploits or those of his friends of his own volition,
and then only in the most indefinite manner. He related the story of a
battle in much the same manner he told of the tilling of his fields or the
herding of his cattle, and when there was any part of it pertaining to his
own actions he passed it over without comment. It seemed as if every one
was fighting, not for his own glorification, but for the success of his
country's army, and consequently there was little hero-worship. Individual
acts of bravery entitled the fortunate person to have his name mentioned
in the _Staats-Courant_, the Government gazette, but hardly any attention
was paid to the search for heroes, and only the names of a few men were
even chronicled in the columns of that periodical. One of the bravest men
in the Natal campaign was a young Pretoria burgher named Van Gas, who, in
his youth, had an accident which made it necessary that his right arm
should be amputated at the elbow. Later in life he was injured in one of
the native wars and the upper arm was amputated, so that when he joined a
commando he had only the left arm. It was an extraordinary spectacle to
observe young Van Gaz holding his carbine between his knees while loading
it with cartridges, and quite as strange to see the energy with which he
discharged his rifle with one hand. He was in the van of the storming
party at Spion Kop, where a bullet passed completely through his chest. He
continued, however, to work his rifle between his knees and to shoot with
his left arm, and was one of the first men to reach the summit of the
hill, where he snatched the rifles from the hands of two British
soldiers. After the battle was won he was carried to a hospital by several
other burghers, but a month afterwards he was again at the front at the
Tugela, going into exposed positions and shouting, "Come on, fellows, here
is a good chance!" His companions desired to elect him as their
field-cornet, but he refused the honour.

Evert Le Roux and Herculaas Nel, of the Swaziland Police, and two of the
best scouts in the Boer army, were constantly engaged in recklessly daring
enterprises, none of which, however, was quite equal to their actions on
April 21st, when the vicinity of Ladysmith had been in British hands for
almost two months. The two men went out on patrol and by night crept up a
kopje behind which about three hundred British cavalrymen were
bivouacking. The men were twenty miles distant from their laagers at
Dundee and only a short distance from Ladysmith, but they lay down and
slept on the other side of the kopje, less than a hundred yards from the
cavalrymen. In the morning the British cavalry was divided into three
squads, and all started for Ladysmith. Le Roux and Nel swept down toward
the last squad, and called, "Hands up," to one of the men in the van. The
cavalryman promptly held up his hands and a minute afterward surrendered
his gun and himself, while the remainder of the squad fled precipitately.
The two scouts, with their prisoner, quickly made a _detour_ of another
kopje, and appeared in front of the first squad, of whom they made a
similar demand. One of the cavalrymen, who was in advance of the others,
surrendered without attempting to make any resistance, while the others
turned quickly to the right and rode headlong into a deep sluit. Le Roux
shot the horse of one of the men before he reached the sluit, loaded the
unhorsed man on one of the other prisoner's horses, and then pursued the
fleeing cavalrymen almost to the city-limits of Ladysmith.

Major Albrecht, the head of the Free State-Artillery, was one of the
bravest men in General Cronje's commando, and his display of courage at
the battle of Magersfontein was not less extraordinary than that which he
made later in the river bed at Paardeberg. At Magersfontein Albrecht and
two of his artillerymen operated the cannon which were located behind
schanzes twenty feet apart. The British had more than thirty cannon, which
they turned upon the Boer cannon whenever one of them was discharged.
After a short time the fire became so hot that Albrecht sent his
assistants to places of safety, and operated the guns alone. For eight
hours the intrepid Free State artilleryman jumped from one cannon to
another, returning the fire whenever there was a lull in the enemy's
attack and seeking safety behind the schanze when shells were falling too
rapidly. It was an uneven contest, but the bravery of the one man inspired
the others, and the end of the day saw the Boers nearer victory than they
were in the morning. At Tafelkop, on March 30th, three burghers were
caught napping by three British soldiers, who suddenly appeared before
them and shouted, "Hands up!" While the soldiers were advancing toward
them the three burghers succeeded in getting their rifles at their
captors' heads, and turned the tables by making prisoners of them. There
were many such instances of bravery, but one that is almost incredible
occurred at the place called Railway Hill, near the Tugela, on February
24th. On that day the Boers did not appear to know anything concerning the
position of the enemy, and James Marks, a Rustenburg farmer, determined to
go out of the laager and reconnoitre on his own responsibility. Marks was
more than sixty-two years old, and was somewhat decrepit, a circumstance
which did not prevent him from taking part in almost every one of the
Natal battles, however. The old farmer had been absent from his laager
less than an hour when he saw a small body of British soldiers at the foot
of a kopje. He crept cautiously around the kopje, and, when he was within
a hundred yards of the men, he shouted, "Hands up!" The soldiers
immediately lifted their arms, and, in obedience to the orders of Marks,
stacked their guns on a rock and advanced toward him. Marks placed the men
in a line, saw that there were twenty-three big, able-bodied soldiers, and
then marched them back into camp, to the great astonishment of his
generals and fellow burghers.

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