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.
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.
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