Book: Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899 1900)

A >> A. G. Hales >> Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899 1900)




On the street in front of the house where the widow sat I noticed a group
of niggers. Some of them were merely local "boys," who worked for the
townspeople. They were dressed in the usual nigger fashion, in old store
clothing, patched or ventilated according to the wearer's taste. One fellow
had on a pair of pants that had at some former stage belonged to a man
about four times his size. The portion of those pants which is usually
hidden when a man is sitting in the saddle had been worn into a huge hole,
which the nigger had picturesquely filled by tacking on a scarlet shawl. As
the pants were made of navy blue serge the effect was unquestionably
artistic, especially as the amateur tailor had done his sewing with string,
most of the stitches running from an inch to an inch and a half in length.
Still, he was only one of many in similar case, so that he did not feel in
the least degree lonely. There were other niggers there--"boys" belonging
to the mule-drivers of the army. These "boys" nearly all sported a military
jacket and some sort of field service cap, which they had picked up somehow
in camp. The "side" these niggers put on when they get inside odds and ends
of military wearing apparel is something appalling. They swagger around
amongst the civilian niggers, and treat them as beings of a very inferior
mould, whilst the lies they tell concerning their individual acts of
heroism would set the author of "Deadwood Dick" blushing out of simple
envy.

The nigger girls cluster round these black veterans like flies around a
western water hole in midsummer, and their shrill laughter makes the air
fairly vibrate as they bandy jests with the cheeky herds. The girls are
rather pleasing in appearance, though far from being pretty. As a rule,
they wear clean print dresses and white aprons; they never wear hats of any
kind, but coil a showy kerchief around their heads in coquettish fashion.
They are not particular as to colour, red, blue, yellow, or pink, anything
will do as long as it is brilliant. The skins of the girls are almost as
varied as the headgear. The Kaffir girl is very dark, almost black. The
bushman's daughter is dirty yellow, like river water in flood time. Some of
the other tribes are as black as the record of a first-class burglar, but
they have bright black eyes, which they roll about as a kitten rolls a ball
of wool in playtime.

But whether they are black, brown, or coffee-coloured, they are all alike
in one respect--every daughter of them has a mouth that is as boundless as
a mother's blessing, and as limitless as the imagination of a spring poet
in love. When they are vexed they purse that mouth up into a bunch until it
looks like a crumpled saddle-flap hanging on a hedge. When they are pleased
the mouth opens and expands like an indiarubber portmanteau ready for
packing; that is when they smile, but when they laugh their ears have to
shift to give the mouth a chance to get comfortably to its destination.
They have beautiful teeth, the white ivory showing against the black
foreground like fresh tombstones in an old cemetery on a dark night. It is
amusing to watch them flirting with the soldier niggers. They try to look
coy, but soon fall victims to the skilful blandishments of the
vain-glorious warriors, and after a little manoeuvring they put out their
lips to be kissed, a sight which might well make even a Scotch Covenanter
grin. They suck their lips in with a sharp hissing breath; then push them
out suddenly, ready for the osculatory seance, the lips moving as if they
were pushed from the inside by a pole. The "boys" enjoy the picnic
immensely. As a matter of fact, these "boys" always seem to me to be doing
one of four things. They are either eating, smoking, sleeping, or making
love; and they do enough love-making in twenty-four hours to last an
ordinary everyday sort of white man four months, even if he puts in a
little overtime. One of the most charming things noticeable about a Boer
town is the plenitude of trees in the streets. They are often ornamental,
always useful for purposes of shade. There is no regularity about their
distribution; they seem to have been planted spasmodically at odd times and
at odd positions. There is little about them to lead one to the belief that
they receive over much care after they have been put into the soil. I have
found a very creditable library in pretty nearly every Boer town that I
have visited, and it is a noteworthy fact that all of our most cherished
authors find a place on their book-shelves. One other thing I have also
noticed, which, though a small thing in itself, is yet very significant. In
nearly every hotel, and in many of the public places, portraits of our
Queen and members of the Royal Family have been hanging side by side with
portraits of notable men, such as Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Mr.
Chamberlain, and Mr. Rhodes. During the course of the war all kinds and
conditions of Boers have had free access to the rooms where those portraits
were to be seen, but now I find that no damage has been done to any of
those pictures, excepting those of Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Chamberlain. This has
not been an oversight on the part of the Boers, for I defy any person to
find a solitary picture of the two last-named gentlemen that has not been
hacked with knives. But the Queen and Royal Family photos have in every
case been treated with respect.





BEHIND THE SCENES.

STORMBERG.


I am writing this from Stormberg, a tremendously important military
position, which was taken on Monday, the 5th, by General Gatacre, without a
blow, the enemy falling back cowed by the British general's tactics. Had
they remained here another twenty-four hours Gatacre would have had them in
a ring of iron, but the Boer general is no fool. He saw his danger, and,
like a wise man, he dodged it. Gatacre's generalship was simply superb. Let
the idiotic band of critics who sit in safety in England howl to their
heart's content; Gatacre deserves well of his country. Had he dashed
recklessly into this hornet's nest he would have sacrificed four-fifths of
his gallant officers and a host of his men. Had I to write his military
epitaph to-day I should say that "he won with brains what most generals
would have won with blood."

Strangely enough, I was a prisoner in the very room where I am penning this
epistle only last Saturday night. I left here in the centre of a Boer
commando, with a bandage over my eyes, on Sunday morning, and returned to
the spot surrounded by British "Tommies" a few days later.

All the glory of this bloodless victory does not rest with the general who
commands the column. To Captain Tennant no small meed of praise is due.
This officer was here on secret service before hostilities commenced, and
he did his work so thoroughly that the country is as familiar to him as
paint to a barmaid. He is one of those men, unfortunately so rare in the
British Army, combining dash and dauntless pluck with a cool, level head.
If he gets his opportunity, England will hear more of this officer. I have
been intensely struck by the class of officers by whom General Gatacre is
surrounded. They all look like soldiers. I have not seen a single dude, not
one of those wretched fops of whom I have seen only too many in South
Africa. They speak like soldiers too. No idiotic drawl, no effeminate lisp,
no bullying, ill-bred, coarseness of tongue; they are neither drawing-room
dandies nor camp swashbucklers, but officers and gentlemen--and, I can
assure you, the terms are not always synonymous, even under the Queen's
cloth. I have seen mere lads in this country leading men into action who in
point of brains were not fit to lead a mule to water, and others who, in
regard to manners, were scarcely fit to follow the mule. But, thank God,
the Boers have taught our nation this, if they have taught us nought
else--that it needs something more than an eye-glass, a lisp, a pair of kid
gloves, and an insolent, overbearing manner to make a successful soldier.

But let me get amongst the Boers. I was only a prisoner in their hands for
about a month, yet every moment of that time was so fraught with interest
that I fancy I picked up more of the real nature of the Boers than I should
have done under ordinary circumstances in a couple of years. I was moved
from laager to laager along their fighting line, saw them at work with
their rifles, saw them come in from more than one tough skirmish, bringing
their dead and wounded with them, saw them when they had triumphed, and saw
them when they had been whipped; saw them going to their farms, to be
welcomed by wife and children; saw them leaving home with a wife's sobs in
their ears, and children's loving kisses on their lips. I saw some of these
old greyheads shattered by our shells, dying grimly, with knitted brows and
fiercely clenched jaws; saw some of their beardless boys sobbing their
souls out as the life blood dyed the African heath. I saw some passing over
the border line which divides life and death, with a ring of stern-browed
comrades round them, leaning upon their rifles, whilst a brother or a
father knelt and pressed the hand of him whose feet were on the very
threshold of the land beyond the shadows. I saw others smiling up into the
faces of women--the poor, pain-drawn faces of the dying looking less
haggard and worn than the anguish-stricken features of their womanhood who
knelt to comfort them in that last awful hour--in the hour which divides
time from eternity, the sunlight of lusty life from the shadows of
unsearchable death. Those things I have seen, and in the ears of English
men and English women, let me say, as one who knows, and fain would speak
the plain, ungilded truth concerning friend and foe, that, not alone
beneath the British flag are heroes found. Not alone at the breasts of
British matrons are brave men suckled; for, as my soul liveth--whether
their cause be just or unjust, whether the right or the wrong of this war
be with them, whether the blood of the hundreds who have fallen since the
first rifle spoke defiance shall speak for or against them at the day of
judgment--they at least know how to die; and when a man has given his life
for the cause he believes in he is proven worthy even of his worst enemy's
respect. And it seems to me that the British nation, with its long roll of
heroic deeds, wrought the whole world over, from Africa to Iceland, can
well afford to honour the splendid bravery and self-sacrifice of these
rude, untutored tillers of the soil. I have seen them die.

Once, as I lay a prisoner in a rocky ravine all through the hot afternoon,
I heard the rifles snapping like hounds around a cornered beast. I watched
the Boers as they moved from cover to cover, one here, one there, a little
farther on a couple in a place of vantage, again, in a natural fortress, a
group of eight; so they were placed as far as my eye could reach. The
British force I could not see at all; they were out on the veldt, and the
kopjes hid them from me; but I could hear the regular roll and ripple of
their disciplined volleys, and in course of time, by watching the actions
of the Boers, I could anticipate the sound. They watched our officers, and
when the signal to fire was given they dropped behind cover with such speed
and certainty that seldom a man was hit. Then, when the leaden hail had
ceased to fall upon the rocks, they sprang out again, and gave our fellows
lead for lead. After a while our gunners seemed to locate them, and the
shells came through the air, snarling savagely, as leopards snarl before
they spring, and the flying shrapnel reached many of the Boers, wounding,
maiming, or killing them; yet they held their position with indomitable
pluck, those who were not hit leaping out, regardless of personal danger,
to pick up those who were wounded. They were a strange, motley-looking
crowd, dressed in all kinds of common farming apparel, just such a crowd as
one is apt to see in a far inland shearing shed in Australia, but no man
with a man's heart in his body could help admiring their devotion to one
another or their loyalty to the cause they were risking their lives for.

One sight I saw which will stay with me whilst memory lasts. They had
placed me under a waggon under a mass of overhanging rock for safety, and
there they brought two wounded men. One was a man of fifty, a hard old
veteran, with a complexion as dark as a New Zealand Maori; the beard that
framed the rugged face was three-fourths grey, his hands were as rough and
knotted by open air toil as the hoofs of a working steer.

He looked what he was--a Boer of mixed Dutch and French lineage. Later on I
got into conversation with him, and he told me a good deal of his life. His
father was descended from one of the old Dutch families who had emigrated
to South Africa in search of religious liberty in the old days, when the
country was a wilderness. His mother had come in an unbroken line from one
of the noble families of France who fled from home in the days of the
terrible persecution of the Huguenots. He himself had been many
things--hunter, trader, farmer, fighting man. He had fought against the
natives, and he had fought against our people. The younger man was his son,
a tall, fair fellow, scarcely more than a stripling, and I had no need to
be a prophet or a prophet's son to tell that his very hours were numbered.
Both the father and the lad had been wounded by one of our shells, and it
was pitiful to watch them as they lay side by side, the elder man holding
the hand of the younger in a loving clasp, whilst with his other hand he
stroked the boyish face with gestures that were infinitely pathetic. Just
as the stars were coming out that night between the clouds that floated
over us the Boer boy sobbed his young life out, and all through the long
watches of that mournful darkness the father lay with his dead laddie's
hand in his. The pain of his own wounds must have been dreadful, but I
heard no moan of anguish from his lips. When, at the dawning, they came to
take the dead boy from the living man, the stern old warrior simply pressed
his grizzled lips to the cold face, and then turned his grey beard to the
hard earth and made no further sign; but I knew well that, had the
sacrifice been possible, he would gladly have given his life to save the
young one's.





A BOER FIGHTING LAAGER.

BURGHERSDORP.


Many and wonderful are the stories written and published concerning the
Boer and his habits when on the war-path. Most of these stories are written
by men who take good care never to get within a hundred miles of the
fighting line, but content themselves with an easy chair, a cigar, a bottle
of whisky, and carpet slippers on the stoep of some good hotel in a pretty
little Boer town. To scribes of this calibre flock a certain class of
British resident, who is always full to the very ears of his own dauntless
courage, his deathless loyalty to the Queen and Empire, his love for the
soldier, and his hatred of the Boer. This gallant class of British resident
has half a million excuses ready to his hand to explain why he did not take
a rifle and fight when the war summons rang clarion-like through the land.
Then he grits his teeth, knits his eyebrows, clenches his hands in
spasmodic wrath, throws out his chest, and tells his auditors, in a voice
husky with concentrated wrath and whisky, what he intends to do the next
time the damnable Boer rises to fight. The old British pioneer may have
whelped a few million good fighting stock in his time, but this class of
animal is no lion's whelp; it is a thing all mouth and no manners, a
shallow-brained, cowardly creature, always howling about the Boer, but too
discreet to go out and fight him, though ready at all times to malign him,
to ridicule him as a farmer or a fighter, and it is a perfect bear's feast
to this hybrid animal to get hold of a gullible newspaper correspondent to
tell him gruesome tales relative to Boer fighting laagers.

I had one of this peculiar species at me the other day in Burghersdorp, and
he painted a Boer laager so vividly, between nips at my flask, that if I
had not seen a few laagers myself I should have felt bad over the matter.
He pictured the smell of that laager in language so intense, with gestures
so graphic, that some of his auditors had to hold their nostrils with
handkerchiefs, whilst they stirred the circumambient atmosphere with
cardboard fans, and I could not help wondering, if the portrait of the
smell was so awful, what the thing itself must be like. Flushed with
success, the narrator pursued his subject to the bitter extremity. He
conjured up scenes of half-buried men lying amongst the rocks surrounding
the laager: here a leg, there an arm, further on a ghastly human head
protruding from amidst the scattered boulders, until I had only to close my
eyes to fancy I was in a charnel-house, where Goths and Huns were holding
devilish revelry. The B.R. paused, and dropped his voice two octaves lower,
and the crowd on the balcony craned their heads further forward, so that
they might not miss a single word. He told of the women in the laagers, the
wild, unholy mirth of women, who moved from camp fire to camp fire, with
dishevelled hair streaming down their backs, with tossing arms, bare to the
shoulders, and blood besmeared, not the blood of goats or kine, but the
blood of soldiers--our soldiers. Thomas Atkins defunct, and done for by the
she-furies.

He waded in again when the shudder which shook the crowd had died away, and
hinted, as that class of shallow-souled creature loves to hint, of orgies
under the dim light of the stars, or between the flickering light of
smoking camp fires, until the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah seemed to be
crowding all around us in a peculiarly beastly and uncomfortable fashion.
Then he lay back in his chair and sighed; but anon he sprang upright, and,
with flashing eyes and extended arms, wanted to know what the ---- Roberts
meant by offering peace with honour to such a people. "Mow them down!" he
yelled. "Shoot them on sight--no quarter for such devils! Kill 'em off!
kill 'em off! kill 'em off!" and he half sobbed, half sighed himself into
silence, whilst the audience gazed on him as on one who knew what war,
wild, red, carmine war, was. I broke in on his stillness, as newspaper men
who know the game are apt to do, for I wanted data, I wanted facts, and I
had not swallowed his yarn as freely as he had swallowed my whisky.

"Born in this country?" I asked.

"Yorkshire," he answered laconically.

"Been in Africa long?"

"'Bout five years."

"Where did you put in most of your time before
the war?"

"Johannesburg."

"Mines?"

"No."

"Merchant?"

"No."

"Hotel-keeper, perhaps?"

"No."

"Shopkeeper?"

"No."

"What was your calling, or profession, or business, or means of
livelihood?"

"General agent, sharebroker, correspondent for some local papers."

H'm; I knew the class of animal well--general jackal; do the dirty work of
any trade, and master of none.

"Where were you when the war broke out?"

He scowled savagely: "Johannesburg."

"Have the same hatred for the Boers before the war as you have now?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you pick up a rifle and have a hand in the fighting?"

"I'm not a blessed 'Tommy,' sir! Do you take me for a d---- 'Tommy,' sir?"

"No; oh, no, I assure you I did nothing of the kind. But--er, have you been
in the hands of the Boers since the war started?"

"Yes, until our troops marched in here a day or two ago."

"H'm. Did they rob you?"

"No."

"Did they ill-treat you--knock you about, and that sort of thing?"

"No."

"Why do you hate them so bitterly, then?"

"Oh, I can't stand a cursed Boer at any price. Thinks he's as good as a
Britisher all the time, and puts on side; and he's a cursed tyrant in his
heart, and would rub us out if he could."

"Yes, the Boer thought himself as good a man as the Britishers he met out
this way," I replied, "and he backed his opinion with his life and his
rifle. Why didn't you do the same if you reckoned yourself a better man?"

"Why should I; don't we pay 'Tommy' to do that for us?"

"Perhaps we do; but, concerning those Boer laagers you have been telling us
about: where, when, and how did you see them; what was the name of the
place; who was the Boer general in command, or the field cornet, or
landdrost? I did not know the Boers gave British refugees the free run of
their war laagers, and I'm interested in the matter, being a scribe myself
and a man of peace. Just give me a few names and dates and facts, will
you?"

"No, I won't," he snarled. "You seem to doubt my word, you do, and I'm as
good a Britisher as you are any day, and you think you can come along and
pump information out of me for nothing; but I'm too fly for that--they
don't breed fools in Yorkshire."

"Well, sir, as it seems to suit your temper," I said as sweetly as I could,
"I'll make it a business proposition. I'll bet you fifty pounds to five you
have never put your head inside a Boer laager in war time in your life. If
you have, just name it and give me a few facts."

The B.R. rose wrathfully and muttered something about it being a d---- good
job for me that I was a wounded man and had one arm in a sling, or he'd
show me a heap of things in the fistic line which I should remember for the
rest of my life; but as I only laughed he slouched off, and now, when we
meet in the street, we pass without speaking. But I got his history, all
the same, from one of the Cape Police, who told me the beggar had refused
to join a volunteer regiment when the war broke out, and had remained the
whole time in a quiet little Boer village as a British refugee, and had not
seen the outside, let alone the inside, of a Boer fighting laager in all
his lying life. Yet such cravens at times help to make history--of a kind.

Possibly it may interest Englishmen--and women, too, for that matter--to
know what a fighting laager is like, and as I have seen half a dozen of
them from the enemies' side of the wall, a rough pen and ink sketch may not
be amiss. In war time the Boer never, under any circumstances, makes his
laager in the open country if there are any kopjes about. No matter how
secure he may fancy himself from attack, no matter if there is not a foe
within fifty miles of him, the Boer commander always pitches his laager in
a place of safety between two parallel lines of hills, so that no attack
can be made upon him, either front or rear, without giving him an immense
advantage over the attacking force, even if the enemy is ten times as
strong in numbers. By this means the Boers make their laagers almost
impregnable. If they have a choice of ground, they pick a narrow ravine, or
gully, with a line of hills front and rear, covered with small rocky
boulders and bushes. They drive their waggons along the ravine, and make a
sort of rude breastwork across the gully with the waggons. In between these
waggons the women are placed for safety, for it is a noticeable fact that
very large numbers of women have followed their husbands and fathers to the
war, not to act as viragoes, not to play the wanton, not to unsex
themselves, not to handle the rifle, but to nurse the wounded, to comfort
the dying, and to lay out the dead. I have heard them singing round the
camp fires in the starlight, but it was hymns that they sang, not ribald
songs. I have seen them kneeling by the side of men in the moonlight, not
in wantonness, but in mercy, and many a man who wears the British uniform
to-day can bear me witness that I speak the truth.

The Boer never, if he can help it, allows himself to be separated from his
horse; and these hardy little animals, mostly about fifteen hands high, and
very lightly framed, are picketed close to the spot where the rider
deposits his rifle and blankets. If they allow them to graze on the
hillsides during the day, they run a rope through the halter near the
horse's muzzle, and tie it close above the knee-joint of the near fore-leg.
By this means the horse can graze in comfort, but cannot move away at any
pace beyond a slow walk, and so are easily caught and saddled if required
in a hurry. The oxen and sheep to be used for slaughtering purposes are
driven up close to the camp; a waggon or two is drawn across the ravine
above and below them, and they cannot then stampede if frightened by
anything, unless they climb the rocky heights on either side of them, which
they have small chance of doing, as the Kaffir herdsmen sleep on the hills
above them. Having pitched his laager, the commander sends out his scouts;
some amble off on horseback at a pace they call a "tripple"--a gait which
all the Boers educate their nags to adopt. It is not exactly an amble, but
a cousin to it, marvellously easy to the rider, whilst it enables the nag
to get over a wonderful lot of ground without knocking up. It also allows
the horse to pick his way amongst rocky ground, and so save his legs, where
an English, Indian, or Australian horse would be apt to cripple himself in
very short order. As soon as the mounted scouts set off on their journey,
holding the reins carelessly in the left hand, their handy little Mauser
rifles in their right, swaying carelessly in the saddle after the fashion
of all bush-riders the world over, the foot scouts take up their positions
amongst the rocks and shrubs on the hills in front and rear of the laager.
Each scout has his rifle in his hand, his pipe in his teeth, his bandolier
full of cartridges over his shoulder, and his scanty blanket under his left
arm. No fear of his sleeping at his post. He is fighting for honour, not
for pay; for home, not for glory; and he knows that on his acuteness the
lives of all may depend. He knows that his comrades and the women trust
him, and he values the trust as dearly as British soldier ever did. No
matter how tired he may be, no matter how famished, the Boer sentinel is
never faithless to his orders.

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