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 Toulon 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 3000 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 veld, 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
backveld, 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.
