Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies: Chapter III.

Richard Harding Davis
WITH BOTH ARMIES

Boer Commando.

CHAPTER IX.
The Battle of Sand River

THE next morning we rode out to the Sand River to see the Boer positions near the drift, and met President Steyn in his Cape cart coming from them on his way to the bridge. Ever since the occupation of Bloemfontein, the London papers had been speaking of him as "the late President," as though he were dead. He impressed me, on the contrary, as being very much alive and very much the President, although his executive chamber was the dancing-hall of a hotel and his roof-tree the hood of a Cape cart. He stood in the middle of the road, and talked hopefully of the morrow. He had been waiting, he said, to see the development of the enemy's attack, but the British had not appeared, and, as he believed they would not advance that day, he was going on to the bridge to talk to his burghers and to consult with General Botha. He was much more a man of the world and more the professional politician than President Kruger. I use the words "professional politician" in no unpleasant sense, but meaning rather that he was ready, tactful, and diplomatic. For instance, he gave to whatever he said the air of a confidence reserved especially for the ear of the person to whom he spoke. He showed none of the bitterness which President Kruger exhibits toward the British, but took the tone toward the English Government of the most critical and amused tolerance. Had he heard it, it would have been intensely annoying to any Englishman.

"I see that the London Chronicle," he said, "asks if, since I have become a rebel, I do not lose my rights as a Barrister of the Temple? Of course, we are no more rebels than the Spaniards were rebels against the United States. By a great stretch of the truth, under the suzerainty clause, the burghers of the Transvaal might be called rebels, but a Free Stater—never! It is not the animosity of the English which I mind," he added, thoughtfully, "but their depressing ignorance of their own history."

“I can do nothing with Lord Roberts," he said again, as though the English commander was a disobedient child. "I wrote him calling his attention to the fact that his troops were burning the houses in the Free State, and that such an act was contrary to the usages of civilized war. He replied that my charges were not sufficiently specific, so I wrote again specifying eighteen houses that had been burned, and supplementing my charges with affidavits. His reply was that he was too busy to attend to such details." The President shrugged his shoulders and laughed as much as to say, "What can one do with such a man?" His cheerfulness and hopefulness, even though one guessed they were assumed, commanded one's admiration. He was being hunted out of one village after another, the miles of territory still free to him were hourly shrinking-in a few days he would be a refugee in the Transvaal; but he stood in the open veldt with all his possessions in the cart behind him, a president without a republic, a man without a home, but still full of pluck, cheerful and unbeaten.

The farm-house of General Andrew Cronje stood just above the drift and was the only conspicuous mark for the English guns on our side of the river, so in order to protect it the General had turned it over to the ambulance corps to be used as a hospital. They had lashed a great Red Cross flag to the chimney and filled the clean shelves of the generously built kitchen with bottles of antiseptics and bitter-smelling drugs and surgeons' cutlery. President Steyn gave me a letter to Dr. Rodgers Reid, who was in charge, and he offered us our choice of the deserted bedrooms. It was a most welcome shelter, and in comparison to the cold veldt the hospital was a haven of comfort. Hundreds of cooing doves, stumbling over the roof of the barn, helped to fill the air with their peaceful murmur. It was a strange overture to a battle, but in time I learned to not listen for any more martial prelude. The Boer does not make a business of war, and when he is not actually fighting he pretends that he is camping out for pleasure. In his laager there are no warlike sounds, no sentries challenge, no bugle's call. He has no duties to perform, for his Kaffir boys care for his pony, gather his wood, and build his fire. He has nothing to do but to wait for the next fight, and to make the time pass as best he can. In camp the burghers are like a party of children. They play games with each other, and play tricks upon each other, and engage in numerous wrestling bouts, a form of contest of which they seem particularly fond. They are like children also in that they are direct and simple, and as courteous as the ideal child should be. Indeed, if I were asked what struck me as the chief characteristics of the Boer I should say they were the two qualities which the English have always disallowed him, his simplicity rather than his "cuteness," and his courtesy rather than his boorishness.

The force that waited at the drift by Cronje's farm as it lay spread out on both sides of the river looked like a gathering of Wisconsin lumbermen, of Adirondack guides and hunters halted at Paul Smith's, like a Methodist camp meeting limited entirely to men.

The eye sought in vain for rows of tents, for the horses at the picket line, for the flags that marked the headquarters, the commissariat, the field telegraph, the field post-office, the A. S. C., the R. M. A. C., the C. O., and all the other combinations of letters of the military alphabet.

I remembered that great army of General Buller's as I saw it stretching out over the basin of the Tugela, like the children of Israel in number, like Tammany Hall in organization and discipline, with not a tent-pin missing; with hospitals as complete as those established for a hundred years in the heart of London; with search-lights, heliographs, war balloons, Roentgen rays, pontoon bridges, telegraph wagons, and trenching tools, farriers with anvils, major-generals, map-makers, "gallopers," intelligence departments, even biographs and press-censors; every kind of thing and every kind of man that goes to make up a British army corps. I knew that seven miles from us just such another completely equipped and disciplined column was advancing to the opposite bank of the Sand River.

And opposed to it was this merry company of Boer farmers lying on the grass, toasting pieces of freshly killed ox on the end of a stick, their hobbled ponies foraging for themselves a half-mile away, a thousand men without a tent among them, without a field-glass.

It was a picnic, a pastoral scene, not a scene of war. On the hills overlooking the drift were the guns, but down along the banks the burghers were sitting in circles singing the evening hymns, many of them sung to the tunes familiar in the service of the Episcopal Church, so that it sounded like a Sunday evening in the country at home. At the drift other burghers were watering the oxen, bathing and washing in the cold river; around the camp-fires others were smoking luxuriously, with their saddles for pillows. The evening breeze brought the sweet smell of burning wood, a haze of smoke from many fires, the lazy hum of hundreds of voices rising in the open air, the neighing of many horses, and the swift soothing rush of the river.

These were the men, and this gypsy encampment was the force, which, for six months, had been holding back the "Lion and her cubs." It was holding them back no longer, for the soldiers of the Queen outnumbered the farmers ten to one, and under "England's Only General" had been taught the value of flank movements.

It is not difficult to flank an enemy when you have six men to send around his ends while you attack him in the centre with the remaining four. But the unfairness of the odds was not what impressed one. It was the character of the opposing forces and the causes for which each fought.

On the one bank of the Sand was the professional soldier, who does whatever he is ordered to do. His orders this time were to kill a sufficiently large number of human beings to cause those few who might survive to throw up their hands and surrender their homes, their country, and their birthright. On the other bank were a thousand self-governing, self-respecting farmers fighting for the land they have redeemed from the lion and the savage, for the towns and cities they have reared in a beautiful wilderness.

"An Englishman's house is his castle," and he can defend it accordingly, is the oldest of English adages. The Boer has merely been defending his castle. You can make nothing more of this war than that. The Englishman will tell you there is much more to it than that, he will talk glibly of a franchise which he never wanted, of unjust mining laws and restrictions which are much more generous than those he has instituted in British Columbia, and which he could have avoided had he not found he was growing rich in spite of them, by simply remaining in his own country; he will try to blind you by pleading that the war was forced upon him by the Boers' ultimatum, an ultimatum which came only after he had threatened the borders of the Transvaal with 20,000 soldiers.

He will present every excuse, every sophistry, every reason save one, which is that he covets the Boer's watch and chain, and is going to kill him to get it. It is too late now to go into the injustice of this war. The Boer has lost heart and is falling back, leisurely, as is his wont, but still falling back. Before this is published the end may have come and the English will be pumping the water out of the gold mines they have fought so long and so hard to win.

It is possible that the gold may repay some few of them for their losses, but it will not bring twenty thousand men back to life again; it will not restore the lost prestige of the British Army, nor pay for the ill-feeling of Europe, nor for the loss of what was once Great Britain's hope, an alliance with the United States. “Never envy a man his riches until you know what he did to gain them," is a saying as old as Epictetus; and who will envy England her slaughtered, bleeding republics, now that we see the price they have cost her!

Except for the excellence of her transport service, it has cost her her former place as a military power, her position as a religious nation. Even her Archbishop of Cape Town is today with thumbs down howling in the name of "peace" for the complete and utter extermination of the two prostrate states. It has cost her the right to speak again in the name of Christianity, for the chief loot of her soldiers is the Bibles they find upon the dead bodies of the men they have killed. It has given her a Dreyfus scandal of her own, and by the light of the homes she is burning in the Free State she can read her acts as she read the "Bulgarian atrocities."

This may seem hysterical and unjust, but it is time, now that it is too late, that we should see just what has been taking place while the world sat idly by. We have been misinformed and blinded by a propaganda against the Boer, a manipulation of press and Parliament, which has never been equalled in dexterity of misrepresentation nor audacity of untruth, not even by the boulevard journalists who live on blackmail and the Monte Carlo Sustenance Fund.

The murder and robbery of a Boer on the veldt is no less a murder and robbery than though it had taken place in Whitechapel or on Fifth Avenue.

The Boer has been murdered and robbed; and the fact that before his life was attempted his character was attacked and vilified is not the least of the sins for which the "empire builders" of Kimberley, Johannesburg, and the Colonial Office must some day stand in judgment.

When morning came to Cronje's farm it brought with it no warning nor sign of battle. We began to believe that the British Army was an invention of the enemy's. So we cooked bacon and fed the doves, and smoked on the veranda, moving our chairs around it with the sun, and argued as to whether we should stay where we were or go on to the bridge. At noon it was evident there would be no fight at the drift that day, so we started along the bank of the river, with the idea of reaching the bridge before night-fall. The trail lay on the English side of the river, so that we were in constant concern lest our white-hooded Cape cart would be seen by some of their scouts and we would be taken prisoners and forced to travel all the way back to Cape Town. We saw many herds of deer, but no scouts or lancers or any other living thing, and, such being the effect of many kopjes, lost all ideas as to where we were. We knew we were bearing steadily south toward Lord Roberts, who, as we later learned, was then some three miles distant.

About two o'clock his guns opened on our left, so we at least knew that we were still on the wrong side of the river and that we must be between the Boer and the English artillery. Except for that, our knowledge of our geographical position was a blank, and we accordingly "outspanned" and cooked more bacon. "Outspanning" is unharnessing the ponies and mules and turning them out to graze, and takes three minutes—"inspanning" is trying to catch them again, and takes from three to five hours.

We started back over the trail over which we had come, and just at sunset saw a man appear from behind a rock and disappear again. Whether he was Boer or Briton I could not tell, but while I was examining the rock with my glasses two Boers came galloping forward and ordered me to "hands up." To sit with both arms in the air is an extremely ignominious position, and especially annoying if the pony is restless, so I compromised by waving my whip as I could reach with one hand, and still held in the horse with the other. The third man from behind the rock rode up at the same time. They said they had watched us coming from the English lines, and that we were prisoners. We assured them that for us nothing could be more satisfactory, because we now knew where we were, and because they had probably saved us a week's trip to Cape Town. They examined and approved of our credentials, and showed us the proper trail which we managed to follow until they had disappeared, when the trail disappeared also, and we were again lost in what seemed an interminable valley. But just before nightfall the fires of the commando showed in front of us and we rode into the camp of General Christian De Wet. He told us we could not reach the bridge that night, and showed us a farmhouse on a distant kopje where we could find a place to spread our blankets. I was extremely glad to meet him, as he and General Botha are the most able and brave of the Boer generals. He was big, manly, and of impressive size, and, although he speaks English, he dictated to his adjutant many long and old-world compliments to the Greater Republic across the seas.

It was Christian De Wet, who at Sannahspost, captured one hundred and twenty-eight wagons and their escort without firing a shot. As the wagons entered the pass where his men were concealed he rose from behind a rock and beckoned, saying "Come in" to each driver, and although he was the only Boer in sight the men on the wagons obediently turned their teams in behind the kopje from which he had called to them. Later, when the English in the distant camp saw that the wagons instead of stretching out along the road to Bloemfontein were all huddled together, they sent two hundred of the Irregular Cavalry to learn what was wrong. De Wet allowed these men also to enter the pass and then rose up quite alone, so that he was the only man they saw, and called to them "Hands up. You are surrounded. My men are behind these rocks. You are to tell your officer to come forward." It is a fine picture that this Boer makes standing up alone like Roderick Dhu and bringing two hundred troopers to a halt, warning them at the same time to save their own lives. There must have been something uncanny in it, too, in this one man of giant size suddenly appearing on a barren hill-side, and in the consciousness also that every rock about him concealed a pointed rifle. When the officer in command of the cavalry rode toward him, De Wet repeated: "You are completely surrounded, sir. My burghers are hidden behind these rocks. Go back to your men and tell them to throw down their rifles and hold up their hands. If you say anything but that to them, you will be shot instantly." The officer saluted and turned, and as he rode back De Wet covered him with his rifle. The officer waited until he was within a few feet of his men, and then shouted, "Fall back," and spurred his horse to escape. At the word De Wet shot him between the shoulders, and the hidden burghers drove eighty men out of the saddle.

Since that time General De Wet and General Botha have shown by their daring, and by always taking the initiative, how unfortunate it was for the Transvaal that the aged Joubert and the stubborn Cronje were in command of the Boer forces throughout the most critical portion of the war.

Even after Lord Roberts had occupied Pretoria, the raids and rapid movements of DeWet and Botha and their destructive attacks upon his line of communication have proved them to be cavalry leaders of such eminent ability and spirit as was possessed in a greater degree by our own Southern generals Jackson and Morgan.

We found the people in the farmhouse on the distant kopje quite hysterical over the near presence of the British, and the entire place in such an uproar that we slept out in the veldt. In the morning we were awakened by the sound of the Vickar-Maxim or the "pompom" as the English call it, or "bomb Maxim" as the Boers call it. By any name it was a remarkable gun and the most demoralizing of any of the smaller pieces which have been used in this campaign. One of its values is that its projectiles throw up sufficient dust to enable the gunner to tell exactly where they strike, and within a few seconds he is able to alter the range accordingly. In this way it is its own range-finder. Its bark is almost as dangerous as its bite, for its reports have a brisk, insolent sound like a postman's knock, or a cooper hammering rapidly on an empty keg, and there is an unexplainable mocking sound to the reports, as though the gun were laughing at you. The English Tommies used to call it very aptly the "hyena gun." I found it just as offensive from the rear as when I was with the British and in front of it.

From the top of a kopje we saw that the battle had at last begun and that the bridge was the objective point. The English came up in great lines and blocks and from so far away and in such close order that at first in spite of the khaki they looked as though they wore uniforms of blue. They advanced steadily, and two hours later when we had ridden to a kopje still nearer the bridge they were apparently in the same formation as when we had first seen them, only now farms that had lain far in their rear were over-run by them and they encompassed the whole basin. An army of twenty-five thousand men advancing in full view across a great plain appeals to you as something entirely lacking in the human element. You do not think of it as a collection of very tired, dusty, and perspiring men with aching legs and parched lips, but as an unnatural phenomenon, or a gigantic monster which wipes out a railway station, a corn-field, and a village with a single clutch of one of its tentacles. You would as soon attribute human qualities to a plague, a tidal wave, or a slowly slipping landslide. One of the tentacles composed of six thousand horse had detached itself and crossed the river below the bridge, where it was creeping up on Botha's right. We could see the burghers galloping before it toward Ventersburg. At the bridge General Botha and President Steyn stood in the open road and with uplifted arms waved the Boers back, calling upon them to stand. But the burghers only shook their heads and with averted eyes grimly and silently rode by them on the other side. They knew they were flanked, they knew the men in the moving mass in front of them were in the proportion of nine to one.

When you looked down upon the lines of the English Army advancing for three miles across the plain, one could hardly blame them. The burghers did not even raise their Mausers. One bullet, the size of a broken slate-pencil, falling into a block three miles across and a mile deep, seems so inadequate. It was like trying to turn back the waves of the sea with a blowpipe.

It is true they had held back as many at Colenso, but the defensive positions there were magnificent, and since then six months had passed, during which time the same thirty thousand men who had been fighting then were fighting still, while the enemy was always new, with fresh recruits and reinforcements arriving daily.

As the English officers at Durban, who had so lately arrived from home that they wore swords, used to say with the proud consciousness of two hundred thousand men back of them: " It won't last much longer now. The Boers have had their belly full of fighting. They're fed up on it; that's what it is; they're fed up."

They forgot that the Boers, who for three months had held Buller back at the Tugela, were the same Boers who were rushed across the Free State to rescue Cronje from Roberts, and who were then sent to meet the relief column at Fourteen Streams, and were then ordered back again to harass Roberts at Sannahspost, and who, at last, worn out, stale, heartsick, and hopeless at the unequal odds and endless fighting, fell back at Sand River.

For three months thirty thousand men had been attempting the impossible task of endeavoring to meet an equal number of the enemy in three different places at the same time.

I have seen a retreat in Greece when the men, before they left the trenches, stood up in them and raged and cursed at the advancing Turk, cursed at their Government, at their King, at each other, and retreated with shame in their faces because they did so.

But the retreat of the burghers of the Free State was not like that. They rose one by one and saddled their ponies with the look in their faces of men who had been attending the funeral of a friend, and who were leaving just before the coffin was swallowed in the grave. Some of them, for a long time after the greater number of the commando had ridden away, sat upon the rocks staring down into the sunny valley below them, talking together gravely, rising to take a last look at the territory which was their own. The shells of the victorious British sang triumphantly over the heads of their own artillery, bursting impotently in white smoke or tearing up the veldt in fountains of dust.

But they did not heed them. They did not even send a revengeful bullet into the approaching masses. The sweetness of revenge could not pay for what they had lost. They looked down upon the farm-houses of men they knew; upon their own farm-houses rising in smoke; they saw the Englishmen like a pest of locusts settling down around gardens and farm-houses still nearer, and swallowing them up.

Their companions, already far on the way to safety, waved to them from the veldt to follow; an excited doctor carrying a wounded man warned them that the English were just below them, storming the hill. "Our artillery is aiming at five hundred yards," he shouted, but still

they stood immovable, leaning on their rifles, silent, homeless, looking down without rage or show of feeling at the great waves of khaki sweeping steadily toward them, and possessing their land.

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		Richard Harding Davis, *With Both Armies in South Africa*, 1900 Chapter X: "The Last Days of Pretoria"
		Richard Harding Davis, *With Both Armies in South Africa*, 1900 Table of Contents
		Biography of Richard Harding Davis. "U.S. author of romantic novels and short stories and the best known reporter of his generation."

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