The Regiment Page 10

  ‘Mackinder,’ the colonel gasped. ‘Mackinder!’ he shouted.

  Still holding the wounded man, Murdoch swung round and saw several Boers approaching him, confident that the dragoons would not fire for fear of hitting their own officers. ‘You surrender, eh?’ one called.

  Their rifles were pointing at him, but Murdoch reacted without hesitation. This was the first time he was actually face to face with the men who had shot Tommy Holt. He reached for his revolver and was firing as he brought it up from the holster. The first shot missed; the second cut down the leading Boer, the man who had summoned him to surrender. The third hit the man behind, and he dropped another before his hammer clicked on an empty chamber. By then the other three had thrown themselves behind the nearest rocks, returning fire but with no accuracy, taken by surprise at Murdoch’s unexpected assault.

  Murdoch pushed Edmonds behind some rocks and fumbled for his cartridge pouch as he heard the Boers shouting from all around him. Lucifer had prudently trotted some distance away and was regarding him with a quizzical expression, but Murdoch knew he would never be able to carry the wounded man without them both being hit.

  ‘Mine,’ gasped Edmonds, faint now with loss of blood. ‘Use mine.’ He pressed his revolver into Murdoch’s hand.

  A bullet crashed into the earth beside him, and Murdoch looked up to see several Boers on the rocks above him, aiming their rifles. He fired, and dropped one, then felt a weird sense of shock as a bullet slashed into his leg. There was no pain from this, but a moment later he felt a sharp stab in his chest from another shot cutting through his jacket. Now the colonel’s revolver too was empty. Murdoch rose to his good leg, reached across to the colonel’s dead horse and drew the sword from the scabbard attached to the saddle.

  The Boers stared at Murdoch in amazement as he faced their Mausers with only steel in his hand, but then there was a fusillade of shots from behind them, and Morton appeared over the rise, leading B Troop back to the rescue of their lieutenant, while at the same time Rodgers’ and Shortland’s squadrons came spurring up the defile. The Boers hurriedly withdrew to the protection of their field pieces, and Murdoch dropped to his knees, then, as his right leg gave way, rolled over on to his side, still holding the sword.

  Johnnie Morton stood above him, Caspar beside him. ‘You’re the best material for a hero I’ve ever had,’ the journalist said.

  ‘Yes,’ Morton agreed, for the first time allowing genuine admiration to enter his voice. ‘I think we had better do something about getting you a medal.’

  *

  The regiment withdrew to a defensive position, artillery was brought up from the brigade and the Boers were dispersed. But now there could be no doubt that Cronje knew what was happening and had sent this force to try to check the British advance until he could reorganise his defences. The cavalry thus pushed on even more rapidly than before to gain Klip Drift before it could be fortified.

  Klip Drift was the real goal of the entire manoeuvre, for it was not only due east of the Magersfontein position, but only a dozen miles from Kimberley itself. Their continuing rapid advance surprised a considerable Boer force, who fled before them, abandoning their camp and even several of their wagons—one of which, to the great joy of the parched troopers, was filled with fresh fruit.

  They reached Klip Drift by dusk. French halted again to wait for the main body to come up to them, but that night General Kitchener himself rode into the bivouac, having hurried ahead of the infantry to tell them that the remainder of the army were only now at De Kiel’s Drift, there was a possibility that Cronje might abandon Magersfontein and withdraw to in front of the diamond city itself. So Roberts’ orders were for the cavalry again to move on as rapidly as possible, making a dash to reach the besieged town before the Boers could make up their minds.

  This French accomplished the following afternoon, although at a terribly heavy cost to the already exhausted horses; very nearly two thousand had died in the march from the Modder. But Kimberley had been relieved with hardly fifty human casualties, and the British had at last gained a substantial success.

  Better was to follow soon afterwards, as Cronje and five thousand men found themselves bottled up at Paardeberg. Another of those suicidal frontal assaults on their position—commanded by Kitchener in the temporary absence of Roberts, who was ill—was repulsed with heavy losses. But on the field marshal’s return to command, Cronje was surrounded and made to realise that he would be starved into surrender, whereupon he accepted the inevitable and laid down his arms. The Orange Free State was won, and so, in effect, was the war.

  In these triumphant events Murdoch played no part, except as an observer. He had been very fortunate that the bullet which cut his tunic no more than tore a furrow in his flesh and cracked a rib; the shot in his leg was more serious, but the bullet was extracted easily enough, and as no bones were broken it was estimated, correctly, that he would be back in the saddle within a few weeks. He was thus spared the long journey back to the general hospital in Cape Town, whence poor Colonel Edmonds had been sent to join Craufurd.

  The regiment was left without any of its senior officers. Rodgers was appointed brevet lieutenant-colonel, with the permanent rank of major, Chapman was promoted captain and Morton confirmed in his rank; everyone got a bump up, Murdoch receiving his second star, or pip, to become a full lieutenant, from the hands of General French himself.

  ‘We need you on your feet, Mackinder,’ he said. ‘We have a lot left to do.’

  *

  Indeed there was, even if the victory of Paardeberg and the destruction of Cronje’s army meant the beginning of the end for the Boers. A fortnight after the relief of Kimberley, Buller at last forced his way across the Tugela and reached Ladysmith. In mid-March, Roberts entered Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State, and two months later a flying column of cavalry and mounted infantry relieved Mafeking, where the heroic Colonel Baden-Powell had withstood a siege of seven months. On 24 May 1900, the Orange Free State was annexed to the British Empire.

  Murdoch was pronounced fit to rejoin the regiment the following day, in time to take part in the invasion of the Transvaal. He now was the senior lieutenant, A troop being under the command of Peter Prendergast, one of the replacements out from England to bring the regiment almost back up to strength. Murdoch was welcomed back with three rousing cheers by his veterans, and was present when Lord Roberts invested Trooper Reynolds with the Military Medal for his gallantry in saving Murdoch outside Belmont.

  The invasion of the Transvaal was no more than a formality as the Boer forces were melting away on every side before the now overwhelming British strength. Johannesburg was taken after only a week on 31 May, and Pretoria, the capital, five days later. Roberts’ army and Buller’s army finally met at Vlakfontein on 4 July. By then President Kruger had fled to Holland, and on 3 September 1900 the annexation of the Transvaal was announced. As this officially ended the war, Field Marshal Lord Roberts returned home, handing over the command to General Kitchener to clean up the few pockets of Boer resistance which remained.

  But these few pockets contained all the hard-core fighting men in the Boer armies who resolutely refused to surrender either their arms or themselves. The British soldiers, who had anticipated an early return to a heroes’ welcome in England, received a rude shock as Generals de Wet, de la Rey, Botha and Smuts carried out extensive guerrilla raids, sometimes deep into Cape Colony. Attacking isolated outposts, tearing up railway track, fighting a war entirely of movement, unencumbered now by the requirement to defend any fixed positions or to carry out sieges, they once again asserted their vast superiority in mobility.

  Nor could they be caught. Weary days were spent in the saddle by the dragoons, or by forces of mounted infantry, following Boer tracks which always eventually petered out. Sometimes they felt they were on the verge of success as they chased a commando right into a hamlet of farms. But by the time they got there, the rifles had disappeared and so had all evidence that any
male inhabitant of the settlement had ever left his farm; they were all to be found hard at work with their livestock or sitting by their fireside smoking their pipes, attended by their devoted womenfolk.

  General Kitchener’s first reaction to this unexpected huge-scale guerrilla warfare was wholly defensive. The railway lines had to be protected, and this he did by building blockhouses at regular intervals and stretching miles of barbed wire to deter the Boer cavalry. But these measures seemed to have no effect at all in checking the commando raids.

  Murdoch had no idea how they were ever going to be coped with; he could only envisage a huge British army having to be maintained in South Africa for the next fifty years. He much missed the shrewd observations of Harry Caspar, but the American journalist, supposing like everyone else that the war was over, had returned home. Towards the end of the year Colonel Edmonds was able to resume command of the regiment, and Major Craufurd also returned to duty. But they still mourned the loss of Fielder and many other good men, all it seemed to very little purpose. They all yearned to be able to return home, having been out of England for nearly two years.

  In these circumstances, supporting morale became an all important and increasingly difficult task. During their first month in Africa, outside Cape Town, the regiment had been filled with enthusiasm for the coming struggle, and all problems had been incidental to that goal. During the hard campaigning between October 1899 and the summer of 1900, the troopers had been mostly in a state of exhaustion when they were not actually fighting. But throughout the second half of the year they stagnated, or engaged in fruitless pursuit missions. More seriously, they were in a permanent cantonment on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and they were separated by a great distance from their wives and families.

  The officers could seek the company of those Boer women whose husbands had surrendered, or of the Uitlanders, the expatriate population whose determination to share in the gold of the Transvaal had caused the war in the first place. The men, unfortunately, had to look elsewhere. Liaisons between white soldiers and black girls had to be discouraged as much as possible, not only because it would present a considerable problem were the regiment to return to England with a company of black wives in tow, but because of the high incidence of venereal disease.

  Yet the men had to have some outlet for their energies, and organising football or cricket matches did not always serve this purpose. The numbers of both sick and men up for punishment grew with every day, and commanding the troop became more difficult and less rewarding with every day as well, however much both officers and men understood the other’s problem. When, at the end of January 1901, Queen Victoria died, they began to feel they were forgotten men. There was not a man in the regiment who had been alive when the Queen had come to the throne, more than sixty years before, and it was difficult for most of them to envisage any other situation than ‘serving the Queen’.

  No doubt this feeling spread right through the army, and even reached headquarters level. In the early summer of 1901, General Kitchener called a conference in Johannes-burg, to which every commissioned officer who was not actually on duty was commanded. The general, huge, with massive shoulders and the most military of moustaches, his red shoulder tabs seeming almost like an extra pair of glowing eyes as he stared across their faces, was obviously deeply concerned about the situation.

  ‘The Boer leaders,’ he said, ‘are behaving in a most irresponsible manner. They are fighting entirely for the sake of fighting; there can be no hope of anything they achieve altering the political situation, of their ever regaining control of the Free State or the Transvaal. They have, in short, become mere bandits, encouraged, I may say, by those who have an interest in snarling at the lion’s tail.’ He paused, but everyone knew he was referring to Germany and France, who were arming the guerrillas and openly singing their praises.

  ‘All our efforts to reach an agreement with these thugs having failed,’ Kitchener went on, ‘I have determined to put a stop to their activities once and for all, regardless of the methods I have to employ. I have called you all here today because I wish no one of you to be in any doubt that I mean what I say. Thus far, we have endeavoured to deal with the Boers as gallant enemies who fought honourably and met defeat with fortitude. Now I propose to deal with them as what they are—outlaws, who require to be stamped out of existence.’ Another pause, while his audience waited patiently, but with little conviction; they had supposed for the past six months they were engaged in stamping out the guerrillas by every means they could think of, without success.

  ‘Now, gentlemen,’ Kitchener continued, let us examine the problem with which we are faced. It is simply this: the ability of the Boer commando to melt away when its pursuers come too close, and lose itself amidst the apparently ordinary population. How often have you and your men all but caught up with a commando, chased it into a Boer village and found nothing but apparently innocent civilians? Well, gentlemen, as of this moment, there will be no more innocent civilians.’ He looked across their faces. ‘Neither men, nor women, nor children. All are equally guilty of resisting us. I wish this to be clearly understood.’

  The officers gazed at him. They were not sure they did understand.

  ‘I am not asking any British officer to indulge in indiscriminate massacre,’ Kitchener told them. ‘But I am commanding you to deal firmly with an intolerable situation. To this end, I have commanded the construction of several large camps, prisoner-of-war camps, if you like, outside all the main Boer centres where we now have complete control. From now on, your procedure during a pursuit mission will be as follows: when you follow a Boer commando, and they disappear into a community of their fellows, however large, or however small, you will surround that community, and you will demand the surrender of all fighting men, or men of fighting age. Should that demand be refused, or not complied with to your satisfaction, or should you meet with any resistance at all, you will arrest the entire population of the settlement, down to the smallest babe in arms, and march them off to the nearest camp. We shall call these camps concentration camps, rather than prison camps, because that is what they are going to be, camps for concentrating the Boer supporters until their menfolk have the sense to surrender.

  ‘To impress upon these villains even more firmly that we intend to put an end to their depredations, once the civil population has been rounded up and placed under arrest their farms and houses will be burned to the ground and their livestock appropriated as army property.’ Again he looked across their faces. ‘I trust you have all understood exactly what I have said. I will take it as extreme dereliction of duty should any British officer from this moment allow misguided sentiments of generosity or humanity to interfere with his duty as I have outlined it. Now, gentlemen, are there any questions?’

  Yes, Murdoch wanted to say. Is there any legal basis for what you are commanding us to do? Will such measures not damn us as Cumberland’s butchers were damned in the Highlands of Scotland after the defeat of Prince Charles at Culloden in 1746, for just the same barbarity?

  But, like everyone else in the room, he said nothing. Because Cumberland’s measures had certainly been successful in ending Scottish resistance, and because he knew that to question Kitchener would be the end of his career.

  *

  ‘God damn you, Englander. God damn you to hell,’ shouted the woman. She stood with several others, their children at their sides, tiny hands twined in their mother’s skirts. Beside them, teenage boys glared at the dragoons with faces twisted in hate, and old men plucked their beards and shuffled their feet as if, ancient as they were, they wanted to seek weapons and at least go down fighting. Of men between the ages of sixteen and sixty there were none to be found; they had seized their weapons and escaped when the squadron was seen approaching. News of the new British tactics had spread.

  So now Murdoch and Prendergast and Morton sat their horses, backed by their men in straight lines, rifles resting on hips rather than in scabbards, to quell t
he least sign of resistance, while several troopers ran from house to house in the village, setting each on fire. The flames caught quickly in the tinder-dry wood and thatch, and soon leapt high into the air. Other dragoons were rounding up the livestock to take back to camp. The women and children and old men would have to walk there, surrounded by the soldiers.

  ‘I feel like a reincarnation of Attila the Hun,’ Prendergast muttered. He had arrived too late to see much actual fighting and was clearly horrified by this aspect of war.

  ‘Or Genghis Khan,’ Murdoch agreed. He gazed at the woman who had cursed him—middle-aged, sun-browned and labour-wrinkled, the mother probably of several of the youths and girls who exuded so much hate. Neither she nor her children would ever stop hating the British, he realised. He wondered if Kitchener had considered far enough into the future after he had finally eradicated the guerrillas; or if he dismissed that as a matter for the politicians, his business being to end the war.

  It took them twenty-four hours to gain the camp, with but two brief stoppages, so that by then the prisoners were nearly dead on their feet. It required a supreme act of will not to dismount and give some of the older ones a ride, or the very young ones for that matter. But that would be interpreted as weakness. Nor would conditions be much improved inside the camp—which was already full—where the food was poor and the hygiene virtually non-existent, where there was already fever and typhus, where the wail and the stench of accumulated misery filled the air. All without the slightest indication that the Boer men were preparing to give in, no matter what happened to their families and their farms.

  ‘They do not believe that we will persist in our policy,’ Kitchener wrote in a circular. ‘But we must maintain our course, and they will surrender soon enough.’