September 15th Was The Date Which Brought Into Force The British
Proclamation Announcing The Banishment Of Those Boer Leaders Who
Continued In Arms.
It must be confessed that this step may appear
harsh and unchivalrous to the impartial observer, so long as those
leaders were guilty of no practices which are foreign to the laws
of civilised warfare.
The imposition of personal penalties upon the
officers of an opposing army is a step for which it is difficult to
quote a precedent, nor is it wise to officially rule your enemy
outside the pale of ordinary warfare, since it is equally open to
him to take the same step against you. The only justification for
such a course would be its complete success, as this would suggest
that the Intelligence Department were aware that the leaders
desired some strong excuse for coming in - such an excuse as the
Proclamation would afford. The result proved that nothing of the
kind was needed, and the whole proceeding must appear to be
injudicious and high-handed. In honourable war you conquer your
adversary by superior courage, strength, or wit, but you do not
terrorise him by particular penalties aimed at individuals. The
burghers of the Transvaal and of the late Orange Free State were
legitimate belligerents, and to be treated as such - a statement
which does not, of course, extend to the Afrikander rebels who were
their allies.
The tendency of the British had been to treat their antagonists as
a broken and disorganised banditti, but with the breaking of the
spring they were sharply reminded that the burghers were still
capable of a formidable and coherent effort. The very date which
put them beyond the pale as belligerents was that which they seem
to have chosen in order to prove what active and valiant soldiers
they still remained. A quick succession of encounters occurred at
various parts of the seat of war, the general tendency of which was
not entirely in favour of the British arms, though the weekly
export of prisoners reassured all who noted it as to the sapping
and decay of the Boer strength. These incidents must now be set
down in the order of their occurrence, with their relation to each
other so far as it is possible to trace it.
General Louis Botha, with the double intention of making an
offensive move and of distracting the wavering burghers from a
close examination of Lord Kitchener's proclamation, assembled his
forces in the second week of September in the Ermelo district.
Thence he moved them rapidly towards Natal, with the result that
the volunteers of that colony had once more to grasp their rifles
and hasten to the frontier. The whole situation bore for an instant
an absurd resemblance to that of two years before - Botha playing
the part of Joubert, and Lyttelton, who commanded on the frontier,
that of White. It only remained, to make the parallel complete,
that some one should represent Penn Symons, and this perilous role
fell to a gallant officer, Major Gough, commanding a detached force
which thought itself strong enough to hold its own, and only
learned by actual experiment that it was not.
This officer, with a small force consisting of three companies of
Mounted Infantry with two guns of the 69th R.F.A., was operating in
the neighbourhood of Utrecht in the south-eastern corner of the
Transvaal, on the very path along which Botha must descend. On
September 17th he had crossed De Jagers Drift on the Blood River,
not very far from Dundee, when he found himself in touch with the
enemy. His mission was to open a path for an empty convoy returning
from Vryheid, and in order to do so it was necessary that Blood
River Poort, where the Boers were now seen, should be cleared. With
admirable zeal Gough pushed rapidly forward, supported by a force
of 350 Johannesburg Mounted Rifles under Stewart. Such a proceeding
must have seemed natural to any British officer at this stage of
the war, when a swift advance was the only chance of closing with
the small bodies of Boers; but it is strange that the Intelligence
Department had not warned the patrols upon the frontier that a
considerable force was coming down upon them, and that they should
be careful to avoid action against impossible odds. If Gough had
known that Botha's main commando was coming down upon him, it is
inconceivable that he would have pushed his advance until he could
neither extricate his men nor his guns. A small body of the enemy,
said to have been the personal escort of Louis Botha, led him on,
until a large force was able to ride down upon him from the flank
and rear. Surrounded at Scheepers Nek by many hundreds of riflemen
in a difficult country, there was no alternative but a surrender,
and so sharp and sudden was the Boer advance that the whole action
was over in a very short time. The new tactics of the Boers,
already used at Vlakfontein, and afterwards to be successful at
Brakenlaagte and at Tweebosch, were put in force. A large body of
mounted men, galloping swiftly in open order and firing from the
saddle, rode into and over the British. Such temerity should in
theory have met with severe punishment, but as a matter of fact the
losses of the enemy seem to have been very small. The soldiers were
not able to return an effective fire from their horses, and had no
time to dismount. The sights and breech-blocks of the two guns are
said to have been destroyed, but the former statement seems more
credible than the latter. A Colt gun was also captured. Of the
small force twenty were killed, forty wounded, and over two hundred
taken. Stewart's force was able to extricate itself with some
difficulty, and to fall back on the Drift. Gough managed to escape
that night and to report that it was Botha himself, with over a
thousand men, who had eaten up his detachment.
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