Chapter 4

Another fundamental error in many of the indignant letters about the alleged defects of our artillery arises from a misunderstanding of the real value of guns in attacking a fortified position. The most sanguine officer never expects his shells actually to kill or disable any very large number of the enemy if they are protected by deep and well-constructed earthworks. Of course, if a shell falls plump into a trench it is pretty certain to play havoc with the defenders, but, when one considers that the mouth of a trench is some five or six feet wide, it is easy to realise the difficulty of dropping a shell into the narrow opening at a range, say, of 4,000 yards. Moreover, some of the more elaborate Boer trenches are so cleverly constructed in a waving line like a succession of S's, that even if a shell does succeed in pitching into one bit of the curve it makes things uncomfortable only for the two or three men who occupy that portion of the earthwork. No, the real value of artillery in attack is to shake the enemy and keep down his rifle fire. If shells are accurately fired the tops of trenches may be swept by a constant rain of shrapnel bullets, under which the enemy's riflemen will of necessity suffer when they expose their heads and shoulders to take aim over the parapet. But even in this case the shell fire must be extremely accurate if it is to be of any great use. If shrapnel shells burst well, some thirty yards in front of the enemy, the force of the bullets released by the explosion is terrific; if, on the other hand, the shells burst high up in the air, 150 yards in front, you might almost keep off the bullets with an umbrella; and one sometimes hears of these missiles being actually found in the pockets of combatants. At Omdurman our shells played tremendous havoc with the dense masses of the enemy; but here the Dervishes advanced to the attack in broad daylight and over a flat plain absolutely devoid of cover, and with its "ranges" well known and marked out beforehand.

In one of our southward journeys with a load of wounded men we passed, a little below Graspan, through the midst of a swarm of locusts. We pulled up the windows and so kept the wards free from these clumsy insects. At one period they seemed to almost shut out the daylight, and it was easy to realise how unpleasant it would be to meet a flight of locusts when walking or even riding on horseback. Some odd stories are told about these creatures. I have heard it gravely stated that occasionally a train is stopped by the accumulated masses which fall on the metals. My informant evidently believed that the engine in these cases was absolutely unable to force its way through the piled up insects, in the same way as trains are sometimes blocked by gigantic snowdrifts! This, of course, is ridiculous; what really happens is that the rails become so greasy from the crushed bodies of the locusts that the wheels can secure no grip on the metals and spin round to no purpose.

The attitude of the Boers towards the locust is very quaint. If a swarm of these insects settles on a Dutchman's land, the owner will not attempt to destroy them because he regards them as a visitation of Providence. But I have heard that he does not scruple to modify slightly the schemes of Providence by shovelling the unwelcome locusts upon any of his neighbours' fields which may adjoin his own estate!

On this same journey we pulled up, as usual, for a brief interval at De Aar, and just opposite our train was a carriage containing seventeen Boer prisoners, returning to the front. At the battle of Graspan a number of Boer artillerymen were found with the Geneva Red Cross on their arms, and it seems pretty clear that these men had deliberately slipped the badge on the sleeves in order to avoid capture. They were, of course, at once secured and treated as ordinary prisoners of war. But in the hurry of the moment, and very naturally under the circumstances, some seventeen of the Boers who were _bonâ-fide_ ambulance men were arrested on suspicion and despatched with the crafty gunners to Capetown. Here they were examined, and when the authorities realised that they were genuinely entitled to the protection of the Red Cross, and were not combatants fraudulently equipped with this protective badge, the seventeen were forthwith sent back to General Cronje. As they were returning we met them and had a chat with them. Five at least of the number were Scotchmen or Irishmen; two more of them did not speak, and I rather think from their appearance that they too were of English race, and preferred to remain silent. Several of them complained of ill-treatment at our hands, but I must say their complaints appeared to resolve themselves into the fact that on their journeys to and from Capetown their meals had not been quite regular. Three of us gave them some bread, jam and cigarettes, for which they were extremely grateful. They wore ordinary clothes much the worse for wear, and told me that they left their "Sunday" suits at home. On the whole I was most favourably impressed by these fellows, with one exception. The exception was a Free-Stater who spoke English volubly. He loudly declared that he was sick of the war and intended the moment he secured an opportunity to desert and go home to his farm. I felt rather indignant at this person's remarks, and with an air of moral superiority I said: "We don't think any the better of you for saying that; although you are an enemy you ought to stick to your General, and not sneak away from the front". But the Free-Stater was not a bit impressed by my rhetoric, and simply said, "Oh, skittles!"

Some of the prisoners were from the Transvaal and they seemed to me much more keen and enthusiastic than their Free State companions, and evinced no signs whatever of despondency or depression. There was a very pathetic note in the conversation of one of the Transvaalers, a mere boy of seventeen. He said to me in broken English, "It is such a causeless war. What are we fighting for, sir?" and I referred him for his answer to three Johannesburg Uitlanders who were standing by. Accursed as war always is, it is thrice accursed when young boys and old men are called upon to fight. At present every man in the Republic from sixteen to sixty years of age is at the front. The authorities intend as their losses increase to call out children from twelve to sixteen, and every old man from sixty onwards who can still see to sight a rifle. Last and most terrible thought of all, it is an undoubted fact that wives and daughters are everywhere throughout the Republic engaged in rifle practice! May God preserve us from having to fight against women! At present entire families are fighting together. I know one Dutch lady who has no less than six brothers amongst the burghers who have been fighting round Ladysmith, and another who has already lost four sons in the war. In one of our engagements a Boer boy of seventeen was struck down by a bullet; the father, a man of sixty, left his cover and went to the succour of his son, when he himself was shot, and the two lay dead, one beside the other.

A little to the north of the kopjes which formed the scene of the Graspan engagement lies the station of Enslin. Here one of the pluckiest fights of the campaign took place. Two companies of the Northamptons occupied a small house and orchard beside the line. They had thrown up a hurried earthwork and placed rails along the top of the parapet. In this position they were suddenly attacked by a force of apparently 500 Boers--so it was supposed--with one or two field guns. The small garrison lined their diminutive trenches and succeeded in keeping the enemy off for several hours; but had not some artillery reinforcements come up the line most opportunely to their assistance it might have fared badly with the plucky Northamptons. As it was, the Boers finally withdrew with some loss. On December 10th we were delayed for some time at Enslin by an accident and I had a careful look at the position held by our men in this minor engagement. There was scarcely a twig or leaf in the orchard which was not torn by shrapnel and Mauser bullets. The walls of the house were chipped and pierced in every direction, and one corner of the earthwork had been carried off by a shell. Yet in the two companies there were only eight casualties! An almost parallel case was furnished by Rostall's orchard at Modder River, which was held by the Boers, and swept for hours by so fearful a fire of shrapnel that the peach-trees were cut down in every direction and scarcely a square foot behind the trenches unmarked by the leaden hail. Nevertheless, when the guns had perforce to cease fire on the advance of our infantry, the Boers who held the orchard leapt up from behind the earthwork and poured such a murderous fire upon our men that they were forced to withdraw. It was the old story over again--that shell fire, unless it enfilades, does not kill men in trenches.

As everybody called the river crossed by the railway the Modder, Modder let it be. Its real name, however, is the Riet, of which the Modder is a tributary flowing from the north-west and joining the main stream well to the east of the line. As a stream the river does not impress the visitor favourably: its waters were yellow and muddy, and the vegetation on its banks was thin and scrappy. There are no respectable fish in either the Modder or the Orange River; even if the fish could see a fly on the top of the liquid mud, they haven't the spirit to rise at it. Some of our officers, it was said, had managed to land a few specimens of a coarse fish like a barbel which haunts these streams, but I should not think any one, even amid the monotony of camp rations, was very keen about eating his catch, for a good many dead Boers had been dragged out of the river. It was, in fact, a rather grisly joke in camp to remark, _à propos_ of our water supply, on the character of "Château Modder, an excellent vintage with a good deal of body in it"! There was a tap at the station, which by the way is some distance north of the river, but on attempting to fill a bucket I found the tap guarded by a sentry, because, apparently, the water came from the river and was thought to be dangerous.

The water question is always a difficult one in exploring or campaigning. One can do a certain amount with alum towards rendering the water less foul. Rub the inside of a bucket with a lump of alum, and in ten minutes most of the mud sinks to the bottom, and the water is comparatively clear. But besides producing a nasty flavour in the water, if used in any quantity, the astringent alum tends to produce disagreeable effects internally. Of course the only absolute guarantee against the bacilli of enteric fever or other diseases which may be admitted into one's system by drinking, is to boil the waters for five minutes; but it is very provoking, when the thermometer stands at 90° in the shade, to wait until the boiled water cools, and as it is impossible to boil a whole river a few thousand bacilli may quite well get into our food through "washing up".

The Boers have almost raised trench digging to the level of a fine art, and on every occasion when their commandants have found it necessary to withdraw they have had an entrenched position ready for them at some distance in the rear. At Modder River the trenches on either side of the stream were, as far as I saw them, a series of short ditches holding about six riflemen. These small trenches were separated from each other in order possibly to avoid that appearance of continuity which would have rendered their detection more easy to our scouts. In the Modder River fight a new factor is noticeable. For the first time in the campaign the Boers fought on level ground. Hitherto their bullets had come from the summits of the hills, and for this reason had not proved nearly so effective as a sustained fire from rifles raised, say, about four and a half feet from the ground. It is of course very much harder to hit a moving enemy when you aim from above at a considerable angle than when you merely hold your rifle steadily at the level of his chest and fire off Mauser cartridges at the rate of twenty a minute. The enemy's fire was very deadly at the Modder. As Lord Methuen said in his despatch, it was quite unsafe to remain on horseback at 2,000 yards' range. The result was that our infantry were compelled to lie prone on the ground, and, without being able to do much by way of retaliation, were exposed for hours to a scathing fusilade from the trenches beside the river. One poor fellow, of whom I saw a good deal, had been through the battle despite the fact that he was suffering great pain from dysentery. He, together with two friends, lay on the veldt for no less than fourteen hours. They had fortunately descried a slight hollow in the ground some 500 yards from the Boer trenches, and between them they "loosed off" quite 1,000 rounds of ammunition. "Well," I asked him, "did you hit anything?" "I don't think we did," was his reply, "because we never saw a Boer the whole day." When the enemy are firing smokeless powder behind their splendidly constructed earthworks they are practically invisible, a fact born witness to by Captain Congreve, V.C., in his account of the first reverse at the Tugela. Now of course when you can't see your enemy you can't very well hit him, so when we clear our minds of fairy-stories about Lyddite and the universal destruction wrought by concussion, it seems highly probable that there is much more truth in the Boers' returns of their casualties than has been believed at home. Take, _e.g._, the lurid account sent by one of our correspondents about the awful effects of our shell fire upon General Cronje's laager. We were told in graphic language of every space in the laager being torn and rent by the deadly fire of more than fifty field guns, of the trenches being enfiladed and the green fumes of Lyddite rising up from the doomed camp. Cronje emerges with a casualty roll of 170 men, and the only inconvenience from our bombardment experienced by the ladies was the slight abrasion of a young woman's forefinger!

The fact that so many of our Generals have been struck by bullets during the campaign would seem to corroborate what I have heard on good authority, _viz._, that some of the best shots in the Transvaal forces have been told off for long range shooting, and the picking off of our leaders. One of these fancy shots--a German--was captured in Natal and told an officer that he was glad to be a prisoner, as he heartily disliked the task imposed upon him. Some little distance north of the Modder bridge is a small white house. Within this was found a Boer lying on a table stone-dead, with a shrapnel bullet in his skull. His Mauser, still clutched in his stiffened hands, lay on a tripod rest in front of him and the muzzle pointed through a vertical slit made in the masonry of the cottage. Every house in the neighbourhood was more or less injured by shrapnel, and one of them was the scene of a sanguinary conflict which was utterly misrepresented by one of the Cape papers. The misrepresentation was to the effect that at the battle of Modder River the house in question was occupied by a number of Boer wounded from Belmont and Graspan in charge of several attendants. It was alleged that two of the attendants deliberately fired upon our troops, who forthwith entered the house and bayoneted every occupant, wounded and unwounded alike, the bodies being afterwards weighted, with stones and thrown into the river. This terrible story spread like wildfire through the Colony, and Lord Methuen despatched an official denial of the alleged circumstances to Capetown. The Boer General never, as far as I am aware, brought any such charge against our troops, but as it undoubtedly gained considerable credence in the Colony it is perhaps worth while to mention the real facts of the case. The house in question was occupied as an outpost by thirty-six Boers, who fired upon some companies of British troops. About a dozen of our men, chiefly Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders with a lieutenant of the Fifth Fusiliers--for an extraordinary intermingling of various units took place in this engagement--rushed the house. Two of the Highlanders were shot down but the rest took a speedy revenge. The thirty-six Boers clubbed their rifles and fought pluckily, but they were crowded together and could do little against our bayonets. Every man of the thirty-six perished. "I didn't like to see it, sir," said one of the Highlanders to me. This is, of course, a very different story from the disgraceful tale alluded to above. None of the Boers in the house were wounded before our men appeared on the scene, and it is clear that the Boer corpses in the river, with stones tied to their ankles, were put there by their own comrades.

Fair-minded and thoughtful men who have followed the events of the present campaign must long ago have come to the conclusion that non-official news must frequently be received with great caution. Before the war began misrepresentation was rife on both sides, and it has continued ever since. Mr. Winston Churchill may well call South Africa a "land of lies". Various slanders against ourselves have emanated to some extent from the Dutch papers in Cape Colony and the Transvaal, but in a much fuller and more substantial form from the Continental papers, notably the Parisian Press. On the other hand, our own journalists have not been altogether free from this taint. Let us take one or two concrete instances, _e.g._, violation of the white flag, firing on ambulances, the use of "explosive" bullets, looting. Just after the first reverse at the Tugela, a correspondent wired home that the Boers were "shooting horses and violating all the usages of civilised warfare". A man who would write such tomfoolery about horses ought to be kept in Fleet Street, and not sent out as a war correspondent; and as to his sweeping accusations in general, it is worth noticing that he was publicly and severely rebuked by Sir Redvers Buller, who denied his statements, and said that it was dishonourable to malign our brave opponents in this fashion.

As to the _vexata quaestio_ of the white flag, it seems clear that in some instances the Boers have used this symbol of surrender in an absolutely unjustifiable way. Such a misusage of the flag occurred, for example, at Belmont.[A] But, as a Boer prisoner said to me, there are blackguards in every army, and it is utterly unfair to represent the whole Boer army as composed of these treacherous scoundrels--who, by the way, in almost every instance have paid the penalty of their treachery with their lives. Moreover, a white flag--which is sometimes merely a handkerchief tied to a rifle--may, in a comparatively undisciplined force like that of our opponents, be easily raised by a combatant on one side of a kopje, without being ordered or being noticed by his officer or the bulk of his comrades. How easily this may happen can be seen from what occurred amongst our own men at Nicholson's Nek. Here the white flag was raised, according to the published letter of an officer present, by a subaltern, without the knowledge and against the wishes of the officer in command. The officer who raised the flag may quite well--we do not know the circumstances accurately--have wished to save the lives of the men immediately round him, or may have been unable to see what was happening elsewhere on the kopje, and so have imagined that he and his men alone were left.

Something very similar to this appears to have happened at Dundee. A body of Boers standing together raised a white flag when our men approached and were duly taken prisoners, but the rest of their commando were, according to Boer accounts, already engaged in retreating with their guns, and, being either unaware of this unauthorised surrender or completely ignoring it, continued their flight.

I have already spoken of the risks incurred by stretcher-bearers and ambulance waggons which approach close to the firing line. Wounded men have told me again and again that the Boers at Magersfontein did not fire wilfully on our ambulance waggons, except when our troops got behind them in their retreat. Moreover, excitable people in England, who greedily swallow any story about such alleged occurrences, have probably the vaguest idea of what a modern battle-field looks like, and of the enormous area now covered by military operations. It may be extremely difficult to see a small white or Red Cross flag a long way off. At Ladysmith, _e.g._, one of our guns put a shell clean through a Boer ambulance, and Sir George White, of course, at once sent an apology for the mistake. If mistakes occur on one side they may occur on the other. Reuter's agent at Frere Camp reports on 4th December:--

"After the evacuation of Dundee the Boers shelled the hospital and the ambulance until the white flag was hoisted, when their firing ceased. Captain Milner rode with one orderly into the Boer camp with a flag of truce, and was told that the Boers could not see the Red Cross flag. This statement he verified by personal observation."

As to the use of "explosive" bullets, which makes the "man in the street" so indignant, it is worth mentioning that, as far as I am aware, not a single instance of the employment of such a missile came under the notice of our medical staff with Lord Methuen's column. I do not for one instant deny that occasionally such bullets may have been fired at our troops, but it is clear that the utmost confusion prevails about the nature of these projectiles. The Geneva Convention prohibits the use of explosive bullets, _i.e._, hollow bullets charged with an explosive which is fired by a detonating cap on coming in contact with a resisting surface. Now it is almost impossible to render a Mauser bullet "explosive," owing to its extreme slenderness, so that any explosive bullets which may have been used by the enemy must have come from sporting rifles, which are--as all evidence goes to show--extremely rare in their commandos. Expansive bullets are made by cutting off the rounded tip of the bullet, scooping out its point, constructing its "nose" of some softer metal, or simply making transverse cuts across the end. These missiles are not prohibited by the Geneva Convention: nevertheless their employment against white men is altogether unnecessary and reprehensible.

As to looting, we must not forget that all commandeering of goods on the part of the enemy has been so described. But, of course, it is perfectly legitimate according to the usage of modern warfare to seize any property necessary for an army provided receipts are duly handed over to the persons from whom the goods are obtained. The Germans invariably acted in this way during the Franco-Prussian war, and no historian has ever described them as "savages" for this reason. Of course the wanton destruction of property which appears to have been perpetrated by the Boers in Natal is absolutely indefensible.