The erratic movements of Commandant Erasmus—Attack and capture of Dundee—Retreat of the British, leaving their wounded and baggage—Joubert's generalship at fault—Some anecdotes of the battle-field.
The movements of Commandant Erasmus' column form part of the story of the battle of Talana Hill, and of the British retreat from Dundee. They explain the failure of the Boer plan to completely crush or capture Penn Symons' army, and account for the first big battle-blunder on the Federal side.
The Pretoria, Heidelberg, Standerton, Boxburg, and Ermelo commandoes, under Erasmus' orders, crossed the Buffalo River on the 14th at Newcastle Drift, in all about 3,000 men. They had negotiated the Drakensberg by the Wakkerstroom road in a continuous downpour of rain as a " saddle commando "; that is, with tents and baggage left behind, carrying only rifles and bandoliers, and such food as each man could handle for himself, in a hurried order to march forward; and were suffering from fatigue and exposure on reaching Newcastle. The column started south again on the 17th, with its wagons and tents, accompanied by a battery of artillery, which included a " Long Tom."
The country south of Newcastle drops downward towards Glencoe, having broken ridges to the east and spurs of the Drakensberg to the west, with the picturesque Biggarsberg range of hills crossing from west to east between Glencoe and Ladysmith. A strong patrol was sent ahead to discover the enemy's position, and it was found that Dannhauser, midway between Newcastle and Glencoe, had been evacuated by the English two days previously; the enemy falling back upon their base at Dundee.
Dannhauser was reached and occupied on the 18th, and the burghers were ordered to sleep in their clothes, with horses saddled and everything in readiness for a movement forward in search of the foe, at a moment's notice.
Early on the 19th, amid a heavy rainstorm, the commandoes received orders to reach Impati heights before daylight the following morning, for the concerted joint attack upon the British at Dundee.
The day continued stormy, and, as night approached, a wet fog added to the difficulties of the march. The column wandered about in search of the appointed hill, and off-saddled for a few hours in the evening at the foot of a kopje which was supposed to be a spur of Impati heights. During the night the column climbed the hill, and awaited the morning, which it was hoped would reveal the British camp, with Lukas Meyer and his burghers on Talana Hill opposite.
When the morning of the 20th came, the fog still shrouded everything in obscurity. To add to the disappointment felt by all the burghers, the sound of cannon was heard to the east, indicating the progress of a conflict not many miles away. The fog continued during the whole day. The force descended in the evening, and took up a position for the night on a lower terrace of the hill. The Fusiliers and Hussars who had had an encounter with the Wakkerstroom burghers in the morning, and had retreated into the fog, were met by two bodies of the Pretoria and Ermelo burghers, numbering 300 men, under Trichardt, who were trying to find the locality of the fighting which had been heard away east. The British column numbered 250, and on finding themselves in face of the Boers they retired to an enclosure near by, where they took up position. Trichardt's men surrounded the kraal, and, on sending a couple of shells into the enclosure, the white flag was raised, and the English surrendered after some twelve of them had been killed and wounded.
An interesting incident occurred at the capture of the roaming British by Colonel Trichardt's men. Among the latter were some thirty men of Blake's Irish Brigade, who, contrary to strict orders, had left the main body of their corps at the base, and had followed the Erasmus commando on learning that fighting was about to take place to the south of Newcastle. These Irishmen, who carried a green flag at their head, manifested a special interest in the Dublin Fusiliers, who formed the bulk of the captured British. Nor were the prisoners less interested in the flag and nationality of some of their captors. A little recrimination occurred between the divided Irish, but did not go beyond a few words of reproach addressed by some of Blake's men to fellow-countrymen who could fight against a small and a republican nation for the power which deprived their common country of self-governing liberties. The Fusiliers, on finding that nothing more unpleasant than a political lecture was " to be inflicted upon them for the present, fraternized with the pro-Boers, to whom they related details of the morning's attack upon the Dundee camp.
On Saturday morning, the 21st, Erasmus found himself between Glencoe and Impati, in the very neighborhood where the encounter between Meyer and Penn Symons had taken place on the previous day. He moved forward at once to the heights he had failed to occupy twenty-four hours earlier, and on reaching the hill overlooking the town of Dundee discovered the whole British camp in great disorder. Trichardt's guns, including his " Long Tom," were trained without delay upon the enemy's position.
Here again Erasmus exhibited his blundering incapacity as a general. He had failed already to cooperate with Meyer in what would have been a crushing defeat of Penn Symons' forces, wedged as they would have been between 6,000 burghers and a dozen guns. The prevalence of fog has been given as the explanation of this failure. The same fog hung over the march of the Meyer commandoes, but did not prevent their reaching Talana Hill in time. This reason is put forward by Erasmus' apologists as an excuse for the first military blunder of the war on the Boer side, but the feeling among officers and men, with whom I discussed this question while on the scene of the battle in May, was that Erasmus could have easily reached the appointed rendezvous on the morning of the 20th, after having heard the guns to the east, had he been spurred by any very strong or very earnest desire to get there. His ignorance of the topography can be pleaded for all it is worth, and the fog adduced as an exculpation of his apparent remissness; but he will be blamed notwithstanding in the Boer mind while the memory of this war lives in Afrikander recollection for having been instrumental in permitting the English to escape destruction or capture at Dundee.
On arriving at Impati heights and observing the demoralized condition of the enemy's forces, a general capable of forming an elementary plan of battle would have thought only of the delivery of a crushing blow at the half-beaten foe. He would have established immediate communications with General Meyer, who had inflicted the damage from which the enemy was suffering, and who was no more than two or three hours' ride from Talana, and would have concerted a renewed attack for the following morning under conditions which would have insured a brilliant triumph for the Republican army. Or, he would have asked Joubert for reinforcements from the rear. No such thought of planning a crushing blow found place in the mind of Erasmus. He ordered an artillery fire upon Dundee from his safe position on the hill, and contented himself with looking on while General Yule transferred his menaced camp from its exposed position southward of the railway line, beyond the reach of Trichardt's powerful Creusot gun. The English guns were unable to return the artillery fire with any effect. Their shells fell short of the Boer guns by a couple of thousand yards.
General Yule made no attempt to storm Impati, tho it was far more accessible for the purposes of such an assault than Talana Hill. He had still over 5,000 disciplined men at his command, with three batteries of artillery, but there was no attempt made to grapple at close quarters with Erasmus and his 3,000 undisciplined Boers. Here was a chance for "cold steel," and frontal attack, and a display of British pluck, and all the rest; but the chance was allowed to pass by. The order was not to charge Impati. It was to clear for Ladysmith.
During these hours, when the fate of Penn Symons' army would have been determined by a competent Boer officer, the British Empire was ringing with the news of " the great victory of Dundee"! Majuba was avenged, and another glorious chapter had been added to the annals of England's military glory. These were the tidings of great Jingo joy which London was flashing on its wires to Montreal, to Melbourne, to India. But on that very day, on Saturday, October 21, it was only due to the accident that a man with no military judgment had the command of 3,000 brave and capable burghers; a man who had already failed to carry out the simplest of movements on a momentous occasion—it was owing to this stroke of British good luck that the most damaging blow of the whole war was not struck at 5,000 of the Queen's best troops, at the very spot where the imaginary triumph of the previous day had been won—by the war correspondents and the London editors.
General Yule retreated on Ladysmith after the battle of Talana. He naturally anticipated a junction between Erasmus and Meyer, or the coming up from Dannhauser of the Commandant-General with the reserves from the base of the Boer army, and wisely determined to get away. Further blundering on the part of his foes enabled him to do so. All Saturday was wasted by Erasmus in gazing down from the hill upon the enemy. Joubert was away at Dannhauser, a few miles north of Erasmus, doing nothing in particular with the reserve burghers. Lukas Meyer was a dozen miles away on the Buffalo River, seemingly indifferent to what was taking place at Dundee, while General Kock was actually engaged in fighting 4,000 of the Ladysmith garrison at Elandslaagte with his Johannesburg commando. In a word, 8,000 Boers, within a radius of thirty miles, with a beaten army of 6,000 in between, had no plan, no intercommunication in concerted effort to prevent Yule from carrying his defeated and dispirited troops to the shelter of Ladysmith.
It was the first great opportunity which the war had offered to Joubert for the exercise of his generalship in the field, and he was found wofully wanting in the qualities which the occasion demanded. The result of the fight on Friday, which ended at two in the afternoon, must have been known to the Commandant-General that night. The discovery of Impati Hill by Erasmus, and the consequent break-up of the British camp at Dundee on Saturday, could not be concealed from him, even were it attempted, as he was immediately in the rear of Erasmus' column. He was in touch with Lukas Meyer's men, east of his own position, with no enemy in between, and yet not a single move was ordered by him, either to direct a continued and crushing attack on Yule, or to prevent this all but encircled officer from escaping by the Helpmakaar road to Ladysmith—the only way left for him to retreat by. Nothing, in fact, was done that should have been the obvious and imperative work of the moment in face of the enemy's desperate difficulties, and he was, therefore, allowed to steal away on Sunday night from under Erasmus' guns, practically unmolested.
General Yule's escape through the Biggarsberg passes was one of the most notable performances of the war, and must rank high in the military achievements of the British in the campaign. It was the one and only way in which to save his force from capture. The success of the desperate enterprise of carrying a straggling beaten force of 5,000 men and three batteries of artillery through tortuous gorges and across a range of mountains in a continuous march of three days and nights of wet and frightful weather, where 1,000 Boers could have successfully barred the way, was due, next to his own sagacity and resource, to the lack of cohesive purpose and want of intelligent military direction in his opponent's plans.
Erasmus took possession of Dundee on Monday, October 23. The town was not much injured by Boer shells, owing to the English camp having been placed a mile away towards Glencoe, and to the activity of the Boer guns, both from Talana and Impati, these being directed towards the changed positions of the English artillery. Enormous military stores were found, and among them huge quantities of Mark IV. ammunition—the ammunition which it was declared, in Parliament, in July and October, was not to be used by British soldiers in the event of war breaking out in South Africa!
Two incidents connected-with the capture of Dundee were related to me while standing, a few months subsequently, in the little graveyard in the town where General Penn Symons sleeps oblivious of further battles and bloodshed.
A Dublin Fusilier and a young burgher were lying side by side in one of the extemporized hospitals, awaiting the arrival of the doctors to dress their wounds. Said the Boer:
" Tell me, my friend, do you know why you have been sent out to fight against the people of the Transvaal? "
Dublin Fusilier—" Well, I'll be hanged if I do! "
Boer—" Then I will tell you. It is because Mr. Chamberlain wanted our Government to give the franchise to the Englishmen on the Rand after five years' residence in the country, instead of seven, as President Kruger proposed."
Dublin Fusilier—"Do you tell me so! Why, we have been fighting for a full franchise in Ireland for 700 years, and we haven't got it yet! "
A nephew of General Joubert's who had reached Dundee with the advanced portion of Erasmus' force entered a shed from whence sounds of pain came from a party of wounded British. On pushing open a door which gave admission to the place, he overheard one of the wounded say in tones of fear, " May God have mercy on us, here they come! They will cut our throats! " " Oh, no, we won't," instantly responded Mr. Joubert. " We are Christians like yourselves, and you will be treated just as kindly as our own wounded!"
" Good Lord, Mike," exclaimed the agreeably astonished Fusilier, turning to his companion, " the Boers speak better English than we do in Dublin."
In further conversation with the wounded Tommies, Mr. Joubert found that their minds had been crammed with the usual English lies about the character of the Boers. They were believed to be a compound of uneducated Dutchmen and of savage Kaffir; a treacherous, inhuman foeman, dead to all the better feelings of civilized soldiers; unkempt, cruel, and rapacious. Great and agreeable, therefore, was the astonishment of the British prisoners and wounded at this first encounter with the maligned Boer. They found him the very reverse of the picture which the Rhodesian slanderers in the Cape and London press had drawn of the people whose country was to be ruthlessly despoiled by Imperial forces.