But This Time, At Last, He Had Completely Outmanoeuvred
Them.
He came with the news of his coming, and Broadwood with the
12th Lancers rushed the drift.
The small Boer force saved itself by
flight, and the camp, the wagons, and the supplies remained with
the victors. On the night of the 13th he had secured the passage of
the Modder, and up to the early morning the horses and the guns
were splashing through its coffee-coloured waters.
French's force had now come level to the main position of the
Boers, but had struck it upon the extreme left wing. The extreme
right wing, thanks to the Koodoosdrift demonstration, was fifty
miles off, and this line was naturally very thinly held, save only
at the central position of Magersfontein. Cronje could not denude
this central position, for he saw Methuen still waiting in front of
him, and in any case Klip Drift is twenty-five miles from
Magersfontein. But the Boer left wing, though scattered, gathered
into some sort of cohesion on Wednesday (February 14th), and made
an effort to check the victorious progress of the cavalry. It was
necessary on this day to rest at Klip Drift, until Kelly-Kenny
should come up with the infantry to hold what had been gained. All
day the small bodies of Boers came riding in and taking up
positions between the column and its objective.
Next morning the advance was resumed, the column being still forty
miles from Kimberley with the enemy in unknown force between. Some
four miles out French came upon their position, two hills with a
long low nek between, from which came a brisk rifle fire supported
by artillery. But French was not only not to be stopped, but could
not even be retarded. Disregarding the Boer fire completely the
cavalry swept in wave after wave over the low nek, and so round the
base of the hills. The Boer riflemen upon the kopjes must have seen
a magnificent military spectacle as regiment after regiment, the
9th Lancers leading, all in very open order, swept across the plain
at a gallop, and so passed over the nek. A few score horses and
half as many men were left behind them, but forty or fifty Boers
were cut down in the pursuit. It appears to have been one of the
very few occasions during the campaign when that obsolete and
absurd weapon the sword was anything but a dead weight to its
bearer.
And now the force had a straight run in before it, for it had
outpaced any further force of Boers which may have been advancing
from the direction of Magersfontein. The horses, which had come a
hundred miles in four days with insufficient food and water, were
so done that it was no uncommon sight to see the trooper not only
walking to ease his horse, but carrying part of his monstrous
weight of saddle gear. But in spite of fatigue the force pressed on
until in the afternoon a distant view was seen, across the reddish
plain, of the brick houses and corrugated roofs of Kimberley. The
Boer besiegers cleared off in front of it, and that night (February
15th) the relieving column camped on the plain two miles away,
while French and his staff rode in to the rescued city.
The war was a cruel one for the cavalry, who were handicapped
throughout by the nature of the country and by the tactics of the
enemy. They are certainly the branch of the service which had least
opportunity for distinction. The work of scouting and patrolling is
the most dangerous which a soldier can undertake, and yet from its
very nature it can find no chronicler. The war correspondent, like
Providence, is always with the big battalions, and there never was
a campaign in which there was more unrecorded heroism, the heroism
of the picket and of the vedette which finds its way into no
newspaper paragraph. But in the larger operations of the war it is
difficult to say that cavalry, as cavalry, have justified their
existence. In the opinion of many the tendency of the future will
be to convert the whole force into mounted infantry. How little is
required to turn our troopers into excellent foot soldiers was
shown at Magersfontein, where the 12th Lancers, dismounted by the
command of their colonel, Lord Airlie, held back the threatened
flank attack all the morning. A little training in taking cover,
leggings instead of boots, and a rifle instead of a carbine would
give us a formidable force of twenty thousand men who could do all
that our cavalry does, and a great deal more besides. It is
undoubtedly possible on many occasions in this war, at Colesberg,
at Diamond Hill, to say 'Here our cavalry did well.' They are brave
men on good horses, and they may be expected to do well. But the
champion of the cavalry cause must point out the occasions where
the cavalry did something which could not have been done by the
same number of equally brave and equally well-mounted infantry.
Only then will the existence of the cavalry be justified. The
lesson both of the South African and of the American civil war is
that the light horseman who is trained to fight on foot is the type
of the future.
A few more words as a sequel to this short sketch of the siege and
relief of Kimberley. Considerable surprise has been expressed that
the great gun at Kamfersdam, a piece which must have weighed many
tons and could not have been moved by bullock teams at a rate of
more than two or three miles an hour, should have eluded our
cavalry. It is indeed a surprising circumstance, and yet it was due
to no inertia on the part of our leaders, but rather to one of the
finest examples of Boer tenacity in the whole course of the war.
The instant that Kekewich was sure of relief he mustered every
available man and sent him out to endeavour to get the gun.
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