Books: Notes of a War Correspondent
R >>
Richard Harding Davis >> Notes of a War Correspondent
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
I--WITH BULLER'S COLUMN
"Were you the station-master here before this?" I asked the man in
the straw hat, at Colenso. "I mean before this war?"
"No fear!" snorted the station-master, scornfully. "Why, we didn't
know Colenso was on the line until Buller fought a battle here.
That's how it is with all these way-stations now. Everybody's
talking about them. We never took no notice to them."
And yet the arriving stranger might have been forgiven his point of
view and his start of surprise when he found Chieveley a place of
only a half dozen corrugated zinc huts, and Colenso a scattered
gathering of a dozen shattered houses of battered brick.
Chieveley seemed so insignificant in contrast with its fame to those
who had followed the war on maps and in the newspapers, that one was
not sure he was on the right road until he saw from the car-window
the armored train still lying on the embankment, the graves beside
it, and the donga into which Winston Churchill pulled and carried the
wounded.
And as the train bumped and halted before the blue and white enamel
sign that marks Colenso station, the places which have made that spot
familiar and momentous fell into line like the buoys which mark the
entrance to a harbor.
We knew that the high bare ridge to the right must be Fort Wylie,
that the plain on the left was where Colonel Long had lost his
artillery, and three officers gained the Victoria Cross, and that the
swift, muddy stream, in which the iron railroad bridge lay humped and
sprawling, was the Tugela River.
Six hours before, at Frere Station, the station-master had awakened
us to say that Ladysmith would be relieved at any moment. This had
but just come over the wire. It was "official." Indeed, he added,
with local pride, that the village band was still awake and in
readiness to celebrate the imminent event. He found, I fear, an
unsympathetic audience. The train was carrying philanthropic
gentlemen in charge of stores of champagne and marmalade for the
besieged city. They did not want it to be relieved until they were
there to substitute pate de foie gras for horseflesh. And there were
officers, too, who wanted a "look in," and who had been kept waiting
at Cape Town for commissions, gladdening the guests of the Mount
Nelson Hotel the while with their new khaki and gaiters, and there
were Tommies who wanted "Relief of Ladysmith" on the claps of their
medals, as they had seen "Relief of Lucknow" on the medals of the
Chelsea pensioners. And there was a correspondent who had journeyed
15,000 miles to see Ladysmith relieved, and who was apparently going
to miss that sight, after five weeks of travel, by a margin of five
hours.
We all growled "That's good," as we had done for the last two weeks
every time we had heard it was relieved, but our tone was not
enthusiastic. And when the captain of the Natal Carbineers said, "I
am afraid the good news is too premature," we all said, hopefully, we
were afraid it was.
We had seen nothing yet that was like real war. That night at
Pietermaritzburg the officers at the hotel were in mess-jackets, the
officers' wives in dinner-gowns. It was like Shepheard's Hotel, at
the top of the season. But only six hours after that dinner, as we
looked out of the car-windows, we saw galloping across the high
grass, like men who had lost their way, and silhouetted black against
the red sunrise, countless horsemen scouting ahead of our train, and
guarding it against the fate of the armored one lying wrecked at
Chieveley. The darkness was still heavy on the land and the only
lights were the red eyes of the armored train creeping in advance of
ours, and the red sun, which showed our silent escort appearing
suddenly against the sky-line on a ridge, or galloping toward us
through the dew to order us, with a wave of the hand, to greater
speed. One hour after sunrise the train drew up at Colenso, and from
only a mile away we heard the heavy thud of the naval guns, the
hammering of the Boer "pom-poms," and the Maxims and Colt automatics
spanking the air. We smiled at each other guiltily. We were on
time. It was most evident that Ladysmith had not been relieved.
This was the twelfth day of a battle that Buller's column was waging
against the Boers and their mountain ranges, or "disarranges," as
some one described them, without having gained more than three miles
of hostile territory. He had tried to force his way through them six
times, and had been repulsed six times. And now he was to try it
again.
No map, nor photograph, nor written description can give an idea of
the country which lay between Buller and his goal. It was an
eruption of high hills, linked together at every point without order
or sequence. In most countries mountains and hills follow some
natural law. The Cordilleras can be traced from the Amazon River to
Guatemala City; they make the water-shed of two continents; the Great
Divide forms the backbone of the States, but these Natal hills have
no lineal descent. They are illegitimate children of no line,
abandoned broadcast over the country, with no family likeness and no
home. They stand alone, or shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles,
or at a tangent, or join hands across a valley. They never appear
the same; some run to a sharp point, some stretch out, forming a
table-land, others are gigantic ant-hills, others perfect and
accurately modelled ramparts. In a ride of half a mile, every hill
completely loses its original aspect and character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed
by the other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value
until its crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this
confusion, the river Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith
as occupying the country through which it will endeavor to throw off
its pursuers. It darts through them as though striving to escape, it
doubles on its tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the
open plain rises to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and
remains motionless on an incline, and on the level ground twists and
turns so frequently that when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he
means he has crossed it once at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad
bridge, and once over a pontoon. And then he is not sure that he is
not still on the same side from which he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or
dark red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him. Indeed, the khaki is
the English soldier's sole protection. It saves him in spite of
himself, for he apparently cannot learn to advance under cover, and a
sky-line is the one place where he selects to stand erect and stretch
his weary limbs. I have come to within a hundred yards of a hill
before I saw that scattered among its red and yellow bowlders was the
better part of a regiment as closely packed together as the crowd on
the bleaching boards at a base-ball match.
Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's
column has been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching,
capturing one position after another, to find it was enfiladed from
many hills, and abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The
greater part of the column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking
in the open. It is a wonderful and impressive sight. At the first
view, an army in being, when it is spread out as it is in the Tugela
basin back of the hills, seems a hopelessly and irrevocably entangled
mob.
An army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a
gun on shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least,
even if it seems the most, important part of it. Before one reaches
the firing-line he must pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs
of men, who are feeding, mending, repairing, and burying the men at
the "front." It is these latter that make the mob of gypsies, which
is apparently without head or order or organization. They stretched
across the great basin of the Tugela, like the children of Israel,
their camp-fires rising to the sky at night like the reflection of
great search-lights; by day they swarmed across the plain, like
hundreds of moving circus-vans in every direction, with as little
obvious intention as herds of buffalo. But each had his appointed
work, and each was utterly indifferent to the battle going forward a
mile away. Hundreds of teams, of sixteen oxen each, crawled like
great black water-snakes across the drifts, the Kaffir drivers, naked
and black, lashing them with whips as long as lariats, shrieking,
beseeching, and howling, and falling upon the oxen's horns to drag
them into place.
Mules from Spain and Texas, loaded with ammunition, kicked and
plunged, more oxen drew more soberly the great naval guns, which
lurched as though in a heavy sea, throwing the blue-jackets who hung
upon the drag-ropes from one high side of the trail to the other.
Across the plain, and making toward the trail, wagons loaded with
fodder, with rations, with camp equipment, with tents and cooking-
stoves, crowded each other as closely as cable-cars on Broadway.
Scattered among them were fixed lines of tethered horses, rows of
dog-tents, camps of Kaffirs, hospital stations with the Red Cross
waving from the nearest and highest tree. Dripping water-carts with
as many spigots as the regiment had companies, howitzer guns guided
by as many ropes as a May-pole, crowded past these to the trail, or
gave way to the ambulances filled with men half dressed and bound in
the zinc-blue bandages that made the color detestable forever after.
Troops of the irregular horse gallop through this multitude, with a
jangling of spurs and sling-belts; and Tommies, in close order, fight
their way among the oxen, or help pull them to one side as the
stretchers pass, each with its burden, each with its blue bandage
stained a dark brownish crimson. It is only when the figure on the
stretcher lies under a blanket that the tumult and push and
sweltering mass comes to a quick pause, while the dead man's comrade
stands at attention, and the officer raises his fingers to his
helmet. Then the mass surges on again, with cracking of whips and
shouts and imprecations, while the yellow dust rises in thick clouds
and buries the picture in a glaring fog. This moving, struggling
mass, that fights for the right of way along the road, is within easy
distance of the shells. Those from their own guns pass over them
with a shrill crescendo, those from the enemy burst among them at
rare intervals, or sink impotently in the soft soil. And a dozen
Tommies rush to dig them out as keepsakes. Up at the front, brown
and yellow regiments are lying crouched behind brown and yellow rocks
and stones. As far as you can see, the hills are sown with them.
With a glass you distinguish them against the sky-line of every hill,
for over three miles away. Sometimes the men rise and fire, and
there is a feverish flutter of musketry; sometimes they lie
motionless for hours while the guns make the ways straight.
Any one who has seen Epsom Downs on a Derby day, with its thousands
of vans and tents and lines of horses and moving mobs, can form some
idea of what it is like. But while at the Derby all is interest and
excitement, and every one is pushing and struggling, and the air
palpitates with the intoxication of a great event, the winning of a
horse-race--here, where men are killed every hour and no one of them
knows when his turn may come, the fact that most impresses you is
their indifference to it all. What strikes you most is the bored air
of the Tommies, the undivided interest of the engineers in the
construction of a pontoon bridge, the solicitude of the medical staff
over the long lines of wounded, the rage of the naked Kaffirs at
their lumbering steers; the fact that every one is intent on
something--anything--but the battle.
They are wearied with battles. The Tommies stretch themselves in the
sun to dry the wet khaki in which they have lain out in the cold
night for weeks, and yawn at battles. Or, if you climb to the hill
where the officers are seated, you will find men steeped even deeper
in boredom. They are burned a dark red; their brown mustaches look
white by contrast, theirs are the same faces you have met with in
Piccadilly, which you see across the tables of the Savoy restaurant,
which gaze depressedly from the windows of White's and the Bachelors'
Club. If they were bored then, they are unbearably bored now. Below
them the men of their regiment lie crouched amid the bowlders, hardly
distinguishable from the brown and yellow rock. They are sleeping,
or dozing, or yawning. A shell passes over them like the shaking of
many telegraph wires, and neither officer nor Tommy raises his head
to watch it strike. They are tired in body and in mind, with cramped
limbs and aching eyes. They have had twelve nights and twelve days
of battle, and it has lost its power to amuse.
When the sergeants call the companies together, they are eager
enough. Anything is better than lying still looking up at the sunny,
inscrutable hills, or down into the plain crawling with black oxen.
Among the group of staff officers some one has lost a cigar-holder.
It has slipped from between his fingers, and, with the vindictiveness
of inanimate things, has slid and jumped under a pile of rocks. The
interest of all around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder.
The Tommies begin to roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of
the men below them, and half the kopje is obliterated. They are as
keen as terriers after a rat. The officers sit above and give advice
and disagree as to where that cigar-holder hid itself. Over their
heads, not twenty feet above, the shells chase each other fiercely.
But the officers have become accustomed to shells; a search for a
lost cigar-holder, which is going on under their very eyes, is of
greater interest. And when at last a Tommy pounces upon it with a
laugh of triumph, the officers look their disappointment, and, with a
sigh of resignation, pick up their field-glasses.
It is all a question of familiarity. On Broadway, if a building is
going up where there is a chance of a loose brick falling on some
one's head, the contractor puts up red signs marked "Danger!" and you
dodge over to the other side. But if you had been in battle for
twelve days, as have the soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells
would interest you no more than do passing cable-cars. After twelve
days you would forget that shells are dangerous even as you forget
when crossing Broadway that cable-cars can kill and mangle.
Up on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General
Buller and his staff. The hill is all of rocks, sharp, brown rocks,
as clearly cut as foundation-stones. They are thrown about at
irregular angles, and are shaded only by stiff bayonet-like cacti.
Above is a blue glaring sky, into which the top of the kopje seems to
reach, and to draw and concentrate upon itself all of the sun's heat.
This little jagged point of blistering rocks holds the forces that
press the button which sets the struggling mass below, and the
thousands of men upon the surrounding hills, in motion. It is the
conning tower of the relief column, only, unlike a conning tower, it
offers no protection, no seclusion, no peace. To-day, commanding
generals, under the new conditions which this war has developed, do
not charge up hills waving flashing swords. They sit on rocks, and
wink out their orders by a flashing hand-mirror. The swords have
been left at the base, or coated deep with mud, so that they shall
not flash, and with this column every one, under the rank of general,
carries a rifle on purpose to disguise the fact that he is entitled
to carry a sword. The kopje is the central station of the system.
From its uncomfortable eminence the commanding general watches the
developments of his attack, and directs it by heliograph and ragged
bits of bunting. A sweating, dirty Tommy turns his back on a hill a
mile away and slaps the air with his signal flag; another Tommy, with
the front visor of his helmet cocked over the back of his neck,
watches an answering bit of bunting through a glass. The bit of
bunting, a mile away, flashes impatiently, once to the right and once
to the left, and the Tommy with the glass says, "They understand,
sir," and the other Tommy, who has not as yet cast even an interested
glance at the regiment he has ordered into action, folds his flag and
curls up against a hot rock and instantly sleeps.
Stuck on the crest, twenty feet from where General Buller is seated,
are two iron rods, like those in the putting-green of a golf course.
They mark the line of direction which a shell must take, in order to
seek out the enemy. Back of the kopje, where they cannot see the
enemy, where they cannot even see the hill upon which he is
intrenched, are the howitzers. Their duty is to aim at the iron
rods, and vary their aim to either side of them as they are directed
to do by an officer on the crest. Their shells pass a few yards over
the heads of the staff, but the staff has confidence. Those three
yards are as safe a margin as a hundred. Their confidence is that of
the lady in spangles at a music-hall, who permits her husband in
buckskin to shoot apples from the top of her head. From the other
direction come the shells of the Boers, seeking out the hidden
howitzers. They pass somewhat higher, crashing into the base of the
kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their own ignominious
graves. The staff regard them with the same indifference. One of
them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel Stuart-Wortley is seated,
another destroys his diary. His men, lying at his feet among the red
rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does not shift his
position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.
On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts
were sent out to take a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack
was one of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new
weapons, have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to
the prestige of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the
prestige of the men by whom the attack was ordered. The result of
this attack was peculiarly disastrous. It was made at night, and as
soon as it developed, the Boers retreated to the trenches on the
crest of the hill, and threw men around the sides to bring a cross-
fire to bear on the Englishmen. In the morning the Inniskillings
found they had lost four hundred men, and ten out of their fifteen
officers. The other regiments lost as heavily. The following
Tuesday, which was the anniversary of Majuba Hill, three brigades,
instead of a regiment, were told off to take this same Railway Hill,
or Pieter's, as it was later called, on the flank, and with it to
capture two others. On the same day, nineteen years before, the
English had lost Majuba Hill, and their hope was to take these three
from the Boers for the one they had lost, and open the way to Bulwana
Mountain, which was the last bar that held them back from Ladysmith.
The first two of the three hills they wanted were shoulder to
shoulder, the third was separated from them by a deep ravine. This
last was the highest, and in order that the attack should be
successful, it was necessary to seize it first. The hills stretched
for three miles; they were about one thousand two hundred yards high.
For three hours a single line of men slipped and stumbled forward
along the muddy bank of the river, and for three hours the artillery
crashed, spluttered, and stabbed at the three hills above them,
scattering the rocks and bursting over and behind the Boer trenches
on the crest.
As is their custom, the Boers remained invisible and made no reply.
And though we knew they were there, it seemed inconceivable that
anything human could live under such a bombardment of shot, bullets,
and shrapnel. A hundred yards distant, on our right, the navy guns
were firing lyddite that burst with a thick yellow smoke; on the
other side Colt automatics were put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets;
the field-guns and the howitzers were playing from a hill half a mile
behind us, and scattered among the rocks about us, and for two miles
on either hand, the infantry in reserve were firing off ammunition at
any part of the three hills they happened to dislike!
The roar of the navy's Four-Point-Sevens, their crash, their rush as
they passed, the shrill whine of the shrapnel, the barking of the
howitzers, and the mechanical, regular rattle of the quick-firing
Maxims, which sounded like the clicking of many mowing-machines on a
hot summer's day, tore the air with such hideous noises that one's
skull ached from the concussion, and one could only be heard by
shouting. But more impressive by far than this hot chorus of mighty
thunder and petty hammering, was the roar of the wind which was
driven down into the valley beneath, and which swept up again in
enormous waves of sound. It roared like a wild hurricane at sea.
The illusion was so complete, that you expected, by looking down, to
see the Tugela lashing at her banks, tossing the spray hundreds of
feet in air, and battling with her sides of rock. It was like the
roar of Niagara in a gale, and yet when you did look below, not a
leaf was stirring, and the Tugela was slipping forward, flat and
sluggish, and in peace.
The long procession of yellow figures was still advancing along the
bottom of the valley, toward the right, when on the crest of the
farthermost hill fourteen of them appeared suddenly, and ran forward
and sprang into the trenches.
Perched against the blue sky on the highest and most distant of the
three hills, they looked terribly lonely and insufficient, and they
ran about, this way and that, as though they were very much surprised
to find themselves where they were. Then they settled down into the
Boer trench, from our side of it, and began firing, their officer, as
his habit is, standing up behind them. The hill they had taken had
evidently been abandoned to them by the enemy, and the fourteen men
in khaki had taken it by "default." But they disappeared so suddenly
into the trench, that we knew they were not enjoying their new
position in peace, and every one looked below them, to see the
arriving reinforcements. They came at last, to the number of ten,
and scampered about just as the others had done, looking for cover.
It seemed as if we could almost hear the singing of the bullet when
one of them dodged, and it was with a distinct sense of relief, and
of freedom from further responsibility, that we saw the ten disappear
also, and become part of the yellow stones about them. Then a very
wonderful movement began to agitate the men upon the two remaining
hills. They began to creep up them as you have seen seaweed rise
with the tide and envelop a rock. They moved in regiments, but each
man was as distinct as is a letter of the alphabet in each word on
this page, black with letters. We began to follow the fortunes of
individual letters. It was a most selfish and cowardly occupation,
for you knew you were in no greater danger than you would be in
looking through the glasses of a mutoscope. The battle unrolled
before you like a panorama. The guns on our side of the valley had
ceased, the hurricane in the depths below had instantly spent itself,
and the birds and insects had again begun to fill our hill with
drowsy twitter and song. But on the other, half the men were
wrapping the base of the hill in khaki, which rose higher and higher,
growing looser and less tightly wrapt as it spun upward. Halfway to
the crest there was a broad open space of green grass, and above that
a yellow bank of earth, which supported the track of the railroad.
This green space spurted with tiny geysers of yellow dust. Where the
bullets came from or who sent them we could not see. But the loose
ends of the bandage of khaki were stretching across this green space
and the yellow spurts of dust rose all around them. The men crossed
this fire zone warily, looking to one side or the other, as the
bullets struck the earth heavily, like drops of rain before a shower.
The men had their heads and shoulders bent as though they thought a
roof was about to fall on them; some ran from rock to rock, seeking
cover properly; others scampered toward the safe vantage-ground
behind the railroad embankment; others advanced leisurely, like men
playing golf. The silence, after the hurricane of sounds, was
painful; we could not hear even the Boer rifles. The men moved like
figures in a dream, without firing a shot. They seemed each to be
acting on his own account, without unison or organization. As I have
said, you ceased considering the scattered whole, and became intent
on the adventures of individuals. These fell so suddenly, that you
waited with great anxiety to learn whether they had dropped to dodge
a bullet or whether one had found them. The men came at last from
every side, and from out of every ridge and dried-up waterway. Open
spaces which had been green a moment before were suddenly dyed yellow
with them. Where a company had been clinging to the railroad
embankment, there stood one regiment holding it, and another sweeping
over it. Heights that had seemed the goal, became the resting-place
of the stretcher-bearers, until at last no part of the hill remained
unpopulated, save a high bulging rampart of unprotected and open
ground. And then, suddenly, coming from the earth itself,
apparently, one man ran across this open space and leaped on top of
the trench which crowned the hill. He was fully fifteen yards in
advance of all the rest, entirely unsupported, and alone. And he had
evidently planned it so, for he took off his helmet and waved it, and
stuck it on his rifle and waved it again, and then suddenly clapped
it on his head and threw his gun to his shoulder. He stood so,
pointing down into the trench, and it seemed as though we could hear
him calling upon the Boers behind it to surrender.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12