July 6—August 10
As the result of this action the 38th Battery, besides a large number of men, had lost all their officers by death or wounds; and, accordingly, Captain Budworth took temporary command of them, with Lieutenant Duncan, also of our Battery, under him; while Major McMicking was for the time C.RA. of Paget’s Brigade. The last two days of the march maybe briefly disposed of. The enemy made no stand of any consequence at all, and our work was confined to the perfunctory shelling of a few ridges.
On the evening of July 5 we encamped in a hollow three miles from Bethlehem. In the rosy dusk there towered ahead of us the conical peak of Wolhuter’s Kop, thrust up from a serrated range of downs. Behind and below that lay invisible Bethlehem, and, beyond again, more hills, leading up to the craggy plum-coloured line of the great Drakensberg range.
At Bethlehem, de Wet stood at bay; sending a contemptuous refusal to the British demand for the surrender of the town, and adding that the blood of the women and children in it would be on our heads. He had, indeed, good reason for his firm attitude, for Bethlehem is an important centre, both strategically and otherwise; and its natural defences are so strong that it took the united brigades of Generals Clements and Paget two days of hard fighting to win it.
Early on the next morning (July 6) we had sauce to our breakfast in the shape of shells— shrapnel bursting neatly over the camp, but too high to be dangerous or even to blunt our appetites; none the less a very pointed challenge to the General to come and do his worst. It is difficult, in the limited space at our command, to describe the two days’ battle of Bethlehem accurately; but we hope to give a clear general view oi what happened, and at the same time to follow the doings of our Battery in particular. The town, as was said, lies in a hollow, surrounded on all sides by hills. Now, the eastern and northern sides may be ignored for the present purpose. The attack was from the west and south (for at the close of our march from Lindley we had glanced aside from our true course), and it is the western and southern defences only that need concern the reader. Immediately to the south of the town rises the conical Wolhuter’s Kop, most conspicuous of all the heights; immediately to the west stands another kopje of less eminence, which, as we are ignorant of its name, we will call A. Radiating westwards from these stretch a series of ridges of more of less marked contour, all of which were suitable for defence as outer works for the innermost strongholds, Kopje A and Wolhuter’s Kop. The outermost was the one behind which we were now encamped, and over whose crest de Wet was wishing us the top of the morning with complimentary shrapnel. He had guns posted at various places, and the whole position was freely entrenched. In the attack on it, roughly speaking, Paget’s Brigade tackled the right and Clements's Brigade the left.
For ourselves the day began by an order to the right section to mount the ridge ahead of us and draw the fire of the Boer guns until Clements’s 5-inch lyddite artillery could come into action and take up the task with greater efficacy. Lieut. Lowe, who was in charge of the section, did what he was told with judgment and promptitude, but the range was too great to admit of effective practice, and he merely kept the Boer gunners amused till the great cow-guns * Weary Willie’ and ‘Tired Tim’ relieved him. He then rejoined the other section, and the united Battery, under Major McMicking, spent the day in working slowly up the right flank, covering the advance of the Monsters and Yeomanry, and repeatedly coming into action; but without any great results, for the hostile guns were hard to locate. We had to put up with some harmless shell-fire, but not till the end of the day with any rifle-fire to speak of. Then, in supporting a spirited assault by the Munsters on a strongly-held ridge, we came under a long-range fire, in which Bombardier Applebee was wounded in the knee by a soft-nosed bullet, and was afterwards invalided home. The Munsters paid dearly for their success with thirty casualties.
A good deal of ground had been won, at considerable cost, during the day, but the inner and strongest of the enemy’s defences were still untouched.
The second day, July 7, was far more effective. The first decisive step was the capture, by storm, of Kopje A by Clements’s Royal Irish and Paget’s Yorkshire Light Infantry. The effect of this was to give the Battery a golden chance, of a sort that rarely occurs. The Boer riflemen, when dislodged from Kopje A, galloped in full retreat towards Wolhuter’s Kop, across the open valley which separates the two hills, thus presenting a fine moving target to our guns, which happened to be stationed within view of the scene. Long as the range was (4,600 yards) for so sudden a call, our gunners made good practice among the flying groups of horsemen, and so disorganised the retreat that the Boers had to abandon a British 15-pounder gun, which had been captured by them months ago at Stormberg, in Cape Colony.
Wolhuter’s Kop now became the main citadel of resistance, and impregnable enough its entrenched crags looked. Lyddite shells, raising clouds of orange dust, were rained upon it for hours to prepare the way for its ultimate assault by Clements’s Royal Irish. De Wet (who is very chary of praising his burghers) recounts that it was principally held by Voetgangers—that is to say, men who had lost their horses from exhaustion or wounds and who had to fight on foot; and he warmly applauds the stubborn pluck with which they faced that deadly rain—an eulogy which all who witnessed it must echo. They sat tight and fired imperturbably, not only from the central eminence, but from lower outlying ridges which had, perforce, to be wrested from them before the Kop could be stormed. The attack of these ridges was entrusted to Paget’s troops—namely, the Monsters, the Yeomanry, and his two field batteries (the 38th and oar own). Of the two, the 38th, under Captain Budworth, was ahead, and had the lion’s share of the work. It is worthy of mention that at one time he was ordered to advance his guns some distance ahead of the Infantry to a ridge which was thought to have been vacated by the enemy. He was prudent enough before carrying out the order to reconnoitre the ground ahead of him in person, and was rewarded by coming upon a party of Boers who had concealed themselves in a mealie field, well in front of their main position, and who received him with volleys at short range. He owed his life to a good horse, galloped back, and thoroughly searched the ground with shell before advancing his battery in the firing-line.
To be brief, the lower ridges were carried without much difficulty, and Wolhuter’s Kop, weakened at last by incessant pounding, was successfully and most gallantly stormed by the Royal Irish; the enemy evacuated the last of his positions, and at four o’clock the town, which had not received a single shell, lay at our mercy below. Already an immense train of Boer waggons could be seen in the distance, wending its way in full retreat for Retief’s Nek.
In his despatches describing the two days’ battle General Paget alluded to the ‘rapid and accurate fire’ of the 38th and H.A.C. Batteries; and the same General, at a dinner given in his honour at the H.A.G. headquarters on his return home from South Africa, presented the regiment with a Boer flag captured on this occasion.
In one sense it was hut a Pyrrhic victory, hot though the fighting had been. De Wet declares that he could have held out longer, and was only prevailed upon to retreat by the approach of General Hunter from the Transvaal with a large accession of force. However that may be, it must be admitted that his retreat was orderly, and that he saved all his transport, not to mention the Free State Government, which rather nebulous entity was then travelling in his train. As usual, we had no cavalry to follow up our success by harassing the retreat and outting up the unwieldy convoys that were now creeping into safety behind the mountains. Hunter’s troops arrived too late to be of any service in that respect, though they were to be the nucleus of a new and important scheme. Bethlehem was ours, but stripped to destitution of war-like stores and supplies; and, moreover, isolated towns in the field of war (witness Lindley) had an uncomfortable way of being reoccupied as soon as they were left. If the truth were known, the most important feature of the Battle of Bethlehem was the increased depression it instilled among the burghers, a depression destined to bear sinister fruit in vacillation and timidity when the new British scheme was translated into action.
They had retreated to the number of 8,000 behind the Roodebergen range, into an extensive basin of fertile country, elongated in shape, and shut in at nearly every point by impassable mountains. This singular region is only accessible at five places where defiles or ‘neks’ pierce the screen. All these neks were Thermopylae, in their way, and fitted for obstinate defence. On the other hand, if they were once forced, the interior, from a secure refuge, became a deadly trap. De Wet relates that the Boers now held a council of war, at which he urged the various leaders not to sacrifice their freedom of action nor risk a gigantic disaster by remaining in this potential trap; and he adds that his view was ostensibly adopted by all present, but that, when the time came for leaving the Roodebergen, he alone, with a fraction of the Boer army, acted on the resolution and escaped in time. The rest, under General Prinsloo, lost heart at the last moment and remained behind. This was precisely what we wanted, for the British scheme, conceived, we believe, by General Ian Hamilton, but carried 4 into effect (owing to an accident to that officer) by General Hunter, was to surround the Roodebergen with overwhelming numbers of troops, to force the neks and drive the Boer army to surrender.
To this end, Bethlehem now became the centre of concentration for many different brigades —Generals Hunter, McDonald, and Broadwood adding their forces to those of Clements and Paget; while these were only a part of the whole body concerned, for Brace Hamilton was to close in from the south-west, and Bundle and Boyes from far away on the Basuto border.
To provision this concourse of columns, numbering about 25,000 men all told, was a gigantic task, requiring time. Bethlehem itself was eighty- one miles from a railway, and convoys to it had to cross unsettled country. Indeed, there was a serious shortage of food for men and horses for several days after the battle. It is impossible to say that there was unnecessary delay; but it is exasperating, nevertheless, to think that had our own column started one day sooner we should have been in time to offer effectual resistance to' de Wet in his escape from the trap.
To return to the Battery.
We spent a week at Bethlehem, posted, cheek by jowl with the faithful Monsters, on the top of a hill overlooking a great valley. Forage was short, food was short; and the time was generally dull (if hungry men can ever be said to be dull!). I should say that this shortage of food was only a matter of proportion, for like most troops operating in these regions we had never yet had the full biscuit ration (without mentioning other details), and rarely obtained it afterwards. On the other hand, fresh meat began to be more plentiful, thanks to the immense flocks of sheep and cattle constantly being captured.
On July 15 came the welcome order to march, and, with Paget’s Brigade, we moved out southward with a huge empty convoy, which was destined to bring back supplies from Senekal for Hunter. The 38th Battery, I should mention, had now been given officers of its own. Our road lay parallel to the mountains behind which the Boers were gathered. Nothing happened during the first day’s march, which led us over a tract of veldt devastated by fire, and black as far as the eye could see. But in the evening scouts reported that a Boer force was in laager eight miles further on. Broadwood’s cavalry brigade was at once sent for from Bethlehem and arrived next day (July 16), when the march was resumed.
It now became clear that the Boer force was de Wet’s, and that it had escaped from the Roodebergen by Slabbert’s Nek, twelve miles on our left—one of the five defiles alluded to above. So certain were our authorities that the Boers intended to await us in their fastness en masse, that this nek was not even watched; and Clements with his whole brigade had passed the mouth of it three days before, on his way to get stores at Senekal. We were now just too late. De Wet’s transport and main body was well away to the west, and the fighting of to-day, severe though it was, was only one of those rear-guard actions, delivered to gain time, in which he was a past master.
We call the scene of it Bultfontein, from a large farm in the neighbourhood.
De Wet’s rear-guard was posted strongly on a rocky flat-topped kopje, sloping to mealie fields. We say ‘posted strongly,’ but all that was apparent at the time was a number of riflemen in these mealie fields, who sent bullets whistling among our column, while we waited for orders. Several men were hit before it was settled that Broadwood’s cavalry should endeavour to turn the left flank, and take the Boers in rear, while Paget’s Brigade made a frontal attack. A small force, including the 38th Battery, was also detached to watch the mountains at our back.
Both sections of our Battery, and some pom-poms also, were brought into action against the kopje at 4,000 yards, fired for fifty minutes, and reduced the Boer riflemen to silence, and, indeed, to invisibility, for not a soul was to be seen on the position, or a sound heard from it. A general advance took place therefore; our sections being respectively on the right and left of the line, with 700 mounted men and some infantry and pom-poms between them. The ground was perfectly open. When the line was about 3,000 yards from the kopje two concealed guns suddenly opened fire from the top, and tw6 shells fell into the middle of the Mounted Infantry, emptying seven saddles. At the same time a third gun on the extreme right began to enfilade our whole line. De Wet, in fact, had been playing an old game of his, that of ‘
Will you walk into my parlour?’; and in we walked with charming innocence.
The surprise was so unexpected, and the target presented by our line so substantial, that some little confusion arose before the mounted troops could retire into safety; for of course they were impotent where they were. Meanwhile our guns were promptly unlimbered and turned on the kopje, the sections closing up to a distance of 300 yards from one another. There followed a period during which we underwent the hottest shell-fire we ever experienced. Of course we were in the bare open, and offered a good mark; but, even so, the Boer practice was excellent, their shells dropping in among the guns in front, and the limbers and waggons in the rear, while some fine sporting shots were made at waggons and teams on the move, in the course of bringing up ammunition. That we only had one man wounded (Gunner Brady) was due, as usual, to the enemy’s bad ammunition ;the shells only bursting on the ground with a destructive radius of barely a yard or two. But making full allowance for that, we had, it must be admitted, extraordinary luck.
Besides being a most hazardous contest for us, it was an absurdly unequal one, for the Boer guns were admirably masked behind the rocky contours of the hill, and probably none of us pretend that we ever exactly located them. It is doubtful whether the General ever intended us to come into action where we did and engage in this quixotic duel; but, however that may be, for an hour and a quarter we pounded doggedly away, and suffered hairbreadth escapes.
It was a strange scene, lonely and almost uncanny to look back upon. The day was dark, the short brown grass was burning in all directions lambent tongues of flame licking across the valley leaving behind them smouldering black tracks. A scanty escort of our staunch Munsters lay smoking and dozing behind some pretence of shelter which a slight undulation afforded. Otherwise not a soul was to be seen, Boer or Briton, anywhere, and only the yelp of the opposing grins was heard.
At the end of an hour and a quarter definite orders came to retire, and it is noteworthy that the limbering-up and hooking-in was done with absolute steadiness, under conditions which were the worst we had yet experienced.
Retiring about 1,400 yards, we began a still more futile bombardment, but not for long, for dark came on, and the whole brigade was gathered into camp. The Cavalry had made no impression on the left flank, and de Wet’s force of 2,600 men (according to his own figures) escaped intact.
There was now a pause of another week, while the plans for surrounding the Boer army were being matured. The bulk of the Brigade, including our left section, under Major McMicking, spent it at Bultfontein, but a force was detached to march on to Winburg with the empty convoy, to fill it with stores and return. With this force went our right section, under Lieutenant Lowe, only rejoining us a fortnight later, when the great coup had been successfully delivered; so that they saw no more fighting in the Orange River Colony.
Allowing for de Wet’s withdrawal, there still were left 5,000 Boers behind the mountains. The various defiles to be forced were now finally allotted to the different generals. Hunter was to take Retief’s Nek; Bruce Hamilton, Naauwport Nek and the Golden Gate; Bundle and Boyes, Commando Nek; and Clements and Paget, Slabbert’s Nek.
During the week of waiting, Slabbert’s Nek was watched carefully by our Brigade, and all was held in readiness for instant departure should a sign of a sortie be seen. The 38th Battery and our own section took it in turns on alternate days to have our teams harnessed and ready to march. On July 22 a reconnaissance in force was made towards the Nek to make sure no Boers were slipping out, and on the 23rd the Brigade definitely set out to assault the Nek, in conjunction with Clements.
There had been a diluvial rain-storm all night, so that few of us had had any sleep and all of us a thorough drenching. Shivering, bat merry, we waited two hoars at the rendezvous for the mounted troops, whose horses had mostly stampeded in the night, and then marched over a rolling plain to the mouth of the Nek, which is just an abrupt gap in the mountains, flanked on each side by towering bastions of rock. These had been elaborately entrenched, while heavy guns, protected by strong earthworks, were posted in the space between, and pom-poms were ensconced among the lower rocks on the left. The position looked tremendously strong; but, on the other hand, we had overwhelmingly superior artillery, Clements’s 5-inch lyddite pieces adding their weight to the field guns; we had infantry whom sangars and rocks had failed to daunt on many another bloody day; and, lastly, we could count on hesitation in the Boers, who had Retief’s Nek away behind them, thundered at already by Hunter and the Highland Brigade.
Nothing decisive occurred to-day. There was little scope for finesse ; it was just a hard persistent workaday fight, the infantry attacking the entrenched heights, and the artillery covering sangars and gun-redoubts alike with shrapnel and lyddite. For a time the fire of the Boer guns was accurate and troublesome, big shells and pom-pom shells falling among the limbers, led horses, etc., in rear of the ridge from which our artillery fired. One, falling close to our waggon- teams, killed six horses, and wounded the Yeoman holding them. By some ‘artful dodging,’ however, the danger was evaded, and the only casualty was again among the unlucky 38th Battery—Captain Kelly, who had recently joined them, being severely wounded.
The Boer guns were never silenced; but in the late evening the Royal Irish gained a valuable footing (at the cost of 40 men) on a spur of the right-hand bastion, and retained it all night. It was long after dark before the rattle of musketry, which had been ceaseless all day, slowly guttered out.
But the defence had in reality been more weakened than we knew. All night the Boer laagers behind the Nek were breaking up, and their transport getting into motion in case of a reverse. Early on the next day (July 24) the Royal Irish, in their own magnificent style, stormed the trenches which were the key to the position on the right, and thence enfiladed the rest. The Wiltshire Regiment backed them up manfully; the lyddite guns, placed in new epaulements built in the night, put the Boer artillery to final rout, and the whole force marched into the captured Nek.
Here there was an unfortunate delay, in order to wait for Hunter, who had had a severe struggle to force Retief’s Nek. He joined us on the next day, and the three united columns moved southward down the valley, pushing the Boers before them deeper and deeper into the trap.
To eyes wearied with monotonous tracts of bleak and blackened veldt this rich and beautiful valley, dotted with thriving farms, and teeming with flocks and herds, was a wonderful change and relief. In sharp contrast to its smiling contours were its grim barriers of rock. On both sides the hills were precipitous, here and there Mwnraing grotesque shapes, with monstrous humps and excrescences; but on the east side and the southern end they rose to a tumbled riot of peaks, tipped at their summits with snow. The pleasure, be it added, was not only aesthetic, for the thriving farms referred to were some of them deserted, and provided a store of the most amazingly fat poultry as a change of diet. On the first evening a luscious row of geese, turkeys, and hens, the fruit of a foray by our mounted gunners, was laid out in the lines and impartially divided by the Adjutant. The same night an aide-de-camp of General Paget bitterly complained to one of our officers that some unknown ruffians had had the audacity to loot the poultry-yard of a very loyal and well- disposed farmer, at whose residence the General had taken up his abode. The officer, though he had shrewd suspicions as to the identity of the said ‘ruffians,’ was, needless to say, indignantly sympathetic. And, after all, there is reason to think that it was principally the nakedness of the General’s larder that caused the storm, and not the alleged loyalty of the farmer t The end was very near now. Every one of the neks had been forced, and the British cordon was slowly tightened till the Boer army was hemmed in—not inextricably, for Olivier and 1,500 men broke out at the very last; bat completely enough to conquer the spirit of the majority. Fouriesburg was occupied on the 26th, and on the 29th General Prinsloo asked for an armistice. It was refused, and thereupon 4,150 Boers laid down their arms. This was the largest capture of Boers made during the war, exceeding by fifty the number taken at Paardeberg. Our guns were left to garrison Fouriesburg, and were not present at the final day’s fighting—which, however, was not at all serious—nor at the actual scene of surrender, much to our disappointment.
At Fouriesburg a great camp was formed for the concentration of the prisoners of war, with a view to their despatch to the railway. Paget’s Brigade was deputed to escort a batch of 2,000 to Winburg, and accordingly, on August 3, we started back on the same road. To many of us it was very interesting to come in contact with these prisoners, and verily the common report among our soldiers at the front, and especially those who had themselves been prisoners, that the Boer, when you knew him, was a very good sort. A curious throng they were—old, middle-aged, and ridiculously young—each with a gay blanket and a little bag of possessions, each mounted on a little mouse of a pony, and leading another one, and sometimes two (a most suggestive hint to us in our struggle for a ‘mobility’ which we never properly attained in the whole course of the war), and all addicted to thunderous hymnsinging in the evening when the column had camped.
On the 4th we turned our backs on the ‘happy valley,’ picking up our right section at Slabbert’s Nek, and marching together again south-westwards. On August 9 we were at Winburg, after a great deal of tedious, sultry marching, and on the 10th, in a veritable blizzard of dust, we gained Smalldeel, a station on the main line, and thence took train for Pretoria.
