Books: Notes of a War Correspondent
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Richard Harding Davis >> Notes of a War Correspondent
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That first day in Ladysmith gave us a faint experience as to what the
siege meant. The correspondents had disposed of all their tobacco,
and within an hour saw starvation staring them in the face, and raced
through the town to rob fellow-correspondents who had just arrived.
The new-comers in their turn had soon distributed all they owned, and
came tearing back to beg one of their own cigarettes. We tried to
buy grass for our ponies, and were met with pitying contempt; we
tried to buy food for ourselves, and were met with open scorn. I
went to the only hotel which was open in the place, and offered large
sums for a cup of tea.
"Put up your money," said the Scotchman in charge, sharply. "What's
the good of your money? Can your horse eat money? Can you eat
money? Very well, then, put it away."
The great dramatic moment after the raising of the siege was the
entrance into Ladysmith of the relieving column. It was a
magnificent, manly, and moving spectacle. You must imagine the dry,
burning heat, the fine, yellow dust, the white glare of the sunshine,
and in the heat and glare and dust the great interminable column of
men in ragged khaki crowding down the main street, twenty-two
thousand strong, cheering and shouting, with the sweat running off
their red faces and cutting little rivulets in the dust that caked
their cheeks. Some of them were so glad that, though in the heaviest
marching order, they leaped up and down and stepped out of line to
dance to the music of the bagpipes. For hours they crowded past,
laughing, joking, and cheering, or staring ahead of them, with lips
wide apart, panting in the heat and choking with the dust, but always
ready to turn again and wave their helmets at Sir George White.
It was a pitiful contrast which the two forces presented. The men of
the garrison were in clean khaki, pipe-clayed and brushed and
polished, but their tunics hung on them as loosely as the flag around
its pole, the skin on their cheek-bones was as tight and as yellow as
the belly of a drum, their teeth protruded through parched, cracked
lips, and hunger, fever, and suffering stared from out their eyes.
They were so ill and so feeble that the mere exercise of standing was
too severe for their endurance, and many of them collapsed, falling
back to the sidewalk, rising to salute only the first troop of each
succeeding regiment. This done, they would again sink back and each
would sit leaning his head against his musket, or with his forehead
resting heavily on his folded arms. In comparison the relieving
column looked like giants as they came in with a swinging swagger,
their uniforms blackened with mud and sweat and bloodstains, their
faces brilliantly crimsoned and blistered and tanned by the dust and
sun. They made a picture of strength and health and aggressiveness.
Perhaps the contrast was strongest when the battalion of the Devons
that had been on foreign service passed the "reserve" battalion which
had come from England. The men of the two battalions had parted five
years before in India, and they met again in Ladysmith, with the men
of one battalion lining the streets, sick, hungry, and yellow, and
the others, who had been fighting six weeks to reach it, marching
toward them, robust, red-faced, and cheering mightily. As they met
they gave a shout of recognition, and the men broke ranks and ran
forward, calling each other by name, embracing, shaking hands, and
punching each other in the back and shoulders. It was a sight that
very few men watched unmoved. Indeed, the whole three hours was one
of the most brutal assaults upon the feelings that it has been my lot
to endure. One felt he had been entirely lifted out of the politics
of the war, and the question of the wrongs of the Boers disappeared
before a simple propostiton of brave men saluting brave men.
Early in the campaign, when his officers had blundered, General White
had dared to write: "I alone am to blame." But in this triumphal
procession twenty-two thousand gentlemen in khaki wiped that line off
the slate, and wrote, "Well done, sir," in its place, as they passed
before him through the town he had defended and saved.
III--THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE
The Boer "front" was at Brandfort, and, as Lord Roberts was advancing
upon that place, one already saw in the head-lines, "The Battle of
Brandfort." But before our train drew out of Pretoria Station we
learned that the English had just occupied Brandfort, and that the
Boer front had been pushed back to Winburg.
We decided that Brandfort was an impossible position to hold anyway,
and that we had better leave the train at Winburg. We found some
selfish consolation for the Boer repulse, in the fact that it
shortened our railroad journey by one day. The next morning when we
awoke at the Vaal River Station the train despatcher informed us that
during the night the "Rooineks" had taken Winburg, and that the
burghers were gathered at Smaaldel.
We agreed not to go to Winburg, but to stop off at Smaaldel. We also
agreed that Winburg was an impossible position to hold. When at
eleven o'clock the train reached Kroonstad, we learned than Lord
Roberts was in Smaaldel. It was then evident that if our train kept
on and the British army kept on there would be a collision. So we
stopped at Kroonstad. In talking it over we decided that, owing to
its situation, Smaaldel was an impossible position to hold.
The Sand River, which runs about forty miles south of Kroonstad, was
the last place in the Free State at which the burghers could hope to
make a stand, and at the bridge where the railroad spans the river,
and at a drift ten miles lower down, the Boers and Free Staters had
collected to the number of four thousand. Lord Roberts and his
advancing column, which was known to contain thirty-five thousand
men, were a few miles distant from the opposite bank of the Sand
River. There was an equal chance that the English would attempt to
cross at the drift or at the bridge. We thought they would cross at
the drift, and stopped for the night at Ventersburg, a town ten miles
from the river.
Ventersburg, in comparison with Kroonstad, where we had left them
rounding up stray burghers and hurrying them to the firing-line, and
burning official documents in the streets, was calm.
Ventersburg was not destroying incriminating documents nor driving
weary burghers from its solitary street. It was making them welcome
at Jones's Hotel. The sun had sunk an angry crimson, the sure sign
of a bloody battle on the morrow, and a full moon had turned the
dusty street and the veldt into which it disappeared into a field of
snow.
The American scouts had halted at Jones's Hotel, and the American
proprietor was giving them drinks free. Their cowboy spurs jingled
on the floor of the bar-room, on the boards of the verandas, on the
stone floor of the kitchen, and in the billiard-room, where they were
playing pool as joyously as though the English were not ten miles
away. Grave, awkward burghers rode up, each in a cloud of dust, and
leaving his pony to wander in the street and his rifle in a corner,
shook hands with every one solemnly, and asked for coffee. Italians
of Garibaldi's red-shirted army, Swedes and Danes in semi-uniform,
Frenchman in high boots and great sombreros, Germans with the sabre
cuts on their cheeks that had been given them at the university, and
Russian officers smoking tiny cigarettes crowded the little dining-
room, and by the light of a smoky lamp talked in many tongues of
Spion Kop, Sannahspost, Fourteen Streams, and the battle on the
morrow.
They were sun-tanned, dusty, stained, and many of them with wounds in
bandages. They came from every capital of Europe, and as each took
his turn around the crowded table, they drank to the health of every
nation, save one. When they had eaten they picked up the pony's
bridle from the dust and melted into the moonlight with a wave of the
hand and a "good luck to you." There were no bugles to sound "boots
and saddles" for them, no sergeants to keep them in hand, no officers
to pay for their rations and issue orders.
Each was his own officer, his conscience was his bugle-call, he gave
himself orders. They were all equal, all friends; the cowboy and the
Russian Prince, the French socialist from La Villette or Montmartre,
with a red sash around his velveteen breeches, and the little French
nobleman from the Cercle Royal who had never before felt the sun,
except when he had played lawn tennis on the Isle de Puteaux. Each
had his bandolier and rifle; each was minding his own business, which
was the business of all--to try and save the independence of a free
people.
The presence of these foreigners, with rifle in hand, showed the
sentiment and sympathies of the countries from which they came.
These men were Europe's real ambassadors to the Republic of the
Transvaal. The hundreds of thousands of their countrymen who had
remained at home held toward the Boer the same feelings, but they
were not so strongly moved; not so strongly as to feel that they must
go abroad to fight.
These foreigners were not the exception in opinion, they were only
exceptionally adventurous, exceptionally liberty-loving. They were
not soldiers of fortune, for the soldier of fortune fights for gain.
These men receive no pay, no emolument, no reward. They were the few
who dared do what the majority of their countrymen in Europe thought.
At Jones's Hotel that night, at Ventersburg, it was as though a jury
composed of men from all of Europe and the United States had gathered
in judgment on the British nation.
Outside in the moonlight in the dusty road two bearded burghers had
halted me to ask the way to the house of the commandant. Between
them on a Boer pony sat a man, erect, slim-waisted, with well-set
shoulders and chin in air, one hand holding the reins high, the other
with knuckles down resting on his hip. The Boer pony he rode, nor
the moonlight, nor the veldt behind him, could disguise his seat and
pose. It was as though I had been suddenly thrown back into London
and was passing the cuirassed, gauntleted guardsman, motionless on
his black charger in the sentry gate in Whitehall. Only now, instead
of a steel breastplate, he shivered through his thin khaki, and
instead of the high boots, his legs were wrapped in twisted putties.
"When did they take you?" I asked.
"Early this morning. I was out scouting," he said. He spoke in a
voice so well trained and modulated that I tried to see his shoulder-
straps.
"Oh, you are an officer?" I said.
"No, sir, a trooper. First Life Guards."
But in the moonlight I could see him smile, whether at my mistake or
because it was not a mistake I could not guess. There are many
gentlemen rankers in this war.
He made a lonely figure in the night, his helmet marking him as
conspicuously as a man wearing a high hat in a church. From the
billiard-room, where the American scouts were playing pool, came the
click of the ivory and loud, light-hearted laughter; from the veranda
the sputtering of many strange tongues and the deep, lazy voices of
the Boers. There were Boers to the left of him, Boers to the right
of him, pulling at their long, drooping pipes and sending up big
rings of white smoke in the white moonlight.
He dismounted, and stood watching the crowd about him under half-
lowered eyelids, but as unmoved as though he saw no one. He threw
his arm over the pony's neck and pulled its head down against his
chest and began talking to it.
It was as though he wished to emphasize his loneliness.
"You are not tired, are you? No, you're not," he said. His voice
was as kindly as though he were speaking to a child.
"Oh, but you can't be tired. What?" he whispered. "A little hungry,
perhaps. Yes?" He seemed to draw much comfort from his friend the
pony, and the pony rubbed his head against the Englishman's shoulder.
"The commandant says he will question you in the morning. You will
come with us to the jail now," his captor directed. "You will find
three of your people there to talk to. I will go bring a blanket for
you, it is getting cold." And they rode off together into the night.
Two days later he would have heard through the windows of Jones's
Hotel the billiard balls still clicking joyously, but the men who
held the cues then would have worn helmets like his own.
The original Jones, the proprietor of Jones's Hotel, had fled. The
man who succeeded him was also a refugee, and the present manager was
an American from Cincinnati. He had never before kept a hotel, but
he confided to me that it was not a bad business, as he found that on
each drink sold he made a profit of a hundred per cent. The
proprietress was a lady from Brooklyn, her husband, another American,
was a prisoner with Cronje at St. Helena. She was in considerable
doubt as to whether she ought to run before the British arrived, or
wait and chance being made a prisoner. She said she would prefer to
escape, but what with standing on her feet all day in the kitchen
preparing meals for hungry burghers and foreign volunteers, she was
too tired to get away.
War close at hand consists so largely of commonplaces and trivial
details that I hope I may be pardoned for recording the anxieties and
cares of this lady from Brooklyn. Her point of view so admirably
illustrates one side of war. It is only when you are ten years away
from it, or ten thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull
places, and only the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque,
and momentous. We have read, in "Vanity Fair," of the terror and the
mad haste to escape of the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo.
That is the obvious and dramatic side.
That is the picture of war you remember and which appeals. As a
rule, people like to read of the rumble of cannon through the streets
of Ventersburg, the silent, dusty columns of the re-enforcements
passing in the moonlight, the galloping hoofs of the aides suddenly
beating upon the night air and growing fainter and dying away, the
bugle-calls from the camps along the river, the stamp of spurred
boots as the general himself enters the hotel and spreads the blue-
print maps upon the table, the clanking sabres of his staff, standing
behind him in the candle-light, whispering and tugging at their
gauntlets while the great man plans his attack. You must stop with
the British army if you want bugle-calls and clanking sabres and
gauntlets. They are a part of the panoply of war and of warriors.
But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg that night, only a few cattle-
breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had won from
the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of gentleman
adventurers--gathered around a table discussing other days in other
lands. The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the
people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming
in the distance, or as one sees it in "Shenandoah," where aides
gallop on and off the stage and the night signals flash from both
sides of the valley. That is the obvious and dramatic side; the
other side of war is the night before the battle, at Jones's Hotel;
the landlady in the dining-room with her elbows on the table,
fretfully deciding that after a day in front of the cooking-stove she
is too tired to escape an invading army, declaring that the one place
at which she would rather be at that moment was Green's restaurant in
Philadelphia, the heated argument that immediately follows between
the foreign legion and the Americans as to whether Rector's is not
better than the Cafe de Paris, and the general agreement that Ritz
cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being robbed. That
is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle. We heard no
galloping aides, no clanking spurs, only the click of the clipped
billiard balls as the American scouts (who were killed thirty-six
hours later) knocked them about the torn billiard-cloth, the drip,
drip of the kerosene from a blazing, sweating lamp, which struck the
dirty table-cloth, with the regular ticking of a hall clock, and the
complaint of the piano from the hotel parlor, where the correspondent
of a Boston paper was picking out "Hello, My Baby," laboriously with
one finger. War is not so terribly dramatic or exciting--at the
time; and the real trials of war--at the time, and not as one later
remembers them--consist largely in looting fodder for your ponies and
in bribing the station-master to put on an open truck in which to
carry them.
We were wakened about two o'clock in the morning by a loud knocking
on a door and the distracted voice of the local justice of the peace
calling upon the landlord to rouse himself and fly. The English, so
the voice informed the various guests, as door after door was thrown
open upon the court-yard, were at Ventersburg Station, only two hours
away. The justice of the peace wanted to buy or to borrow a horse,
and wanted it very badly, but a sleepy-eyed and sceptical audience
told him unfeelingly that he was either drunk or dreaming, and only
the landlady, now apparently refreshed after her labors, was keenly,
even hysterically, intent on instant flight. She sat up in her bed
with her hair in curl papers and a revolver beside her, and through
her open door shouted advice to her lodgers. But they were
unsympathetic, and reassured her only by banging their doors and
retiring with profane grumbling, and in a few moments the silence was
broken only by the voice of the justice as he fled down the main
street of Ventersburg offering his kingdom for a horse.
The next morning we rode out to the Sand River to see the Boer
positions near the drift, and met President Steyn in his Cape cart
coming from them on his way to the bridge. Ever since the occupation
of Bloemfontein, the London papers had been speaking of him as "the
Late President," as though he were dead. He impressed me, on the
contrary, as being very much alive and very much the President,
although his executive chamber was the dancing-hall of a hotel and
his roof-tree the hood of a Cape cart. He stood in the middle of the
road, and talked hopefully of the morrow. He had been waiting, he
said, to see the development of the enemy's attack, but the British
had not appeared, and, as he believed they would not advance that
day, he was going on to the bridge to talk to his burghers and to
consult with General Botha. He was much more a man of the world and
more the professional politician than President Kruger. I use the
words "professional politician" in no unpleasant sense, but meaning
rather that he was ready, tactful, and diplomatic. For instance, he
gave to whatever he said the air of a confidence reserved especially
for the ear of the person to whom he spoke. He showed none of the
bitterness which President Kruger exhibits toward the British, but
took the tone toward the English Government of the most critical and
mused tolerance. Had he heard it, it would have been intensely
annoying to any Englishman.
"I see that the London Chronicle," he said, "asks if, since I have
become a rebel, I do not lose my rights as a Barrister of the Temple?
Of course, we are no more rebels than the Spaniards were rebels
against the United States. By a great stretch of the truth, under
the suzerainty clause, the burghers of the Transvaal might be called
rebels, but a Free Stater--never! It is not the animosity of the
English which I mind," he added, thoughtfully, "but their depressing
ignorance of their own history."
His cheerfulness and hopefulness, even though one guessed they were
assumed, commanded one's admiration. He was being hunted out of one
village after another, the miles of territory still free to him were
hourly shrinking--in a few days he would be a refugee in the
Transvaal; but he stood in the open veldt with all his possessions in
the cart behind him, a president without a republic, a man without a
home, but still full of pluck, cheerful and unbeaten.
The farm-house of General Andrew Cronje stood just above the drift
and was the only conspicuous mark for the English guns on our side of
the river, so in order to protect it the general had turned it over
to the ambulance corps to be used as a hospital. They had lashed a
great Red Cross flag to the chimney and filled the clean shelves of
the generously built kitchen with bottles of antiseptics and bitter-
smelling drugs and surgeons' cutlery. President Steyn gave me a
letter to Dr. Rodgers Reid, who was in charge, and he offered us our
choice of the deserted bedrooms. It was a most welcome shelter, and
in comparison to the cold veldt the hospital was a haven of comfort.
Hundreds of cooing doves, stumbling over the roof of the barn, helped
to fill the air with their peaceful murmur. It was a strange
overture to a battle, but in time I learned to not listen for any
more martial prelude. The Boer does not make a business of war, and
when he is not actually fighting he pretends that he is camping out
for pleasure. In his laager there are no warlike sounds, no sentries
challenge, no bugles call. He has no duties to perform, for his
Kaffir boys care for his pony, gather his wood, and build his fire.
He has nothing to do but to wait for the next fight, and to make the
time pass as best he can. In camp the burghers are like a party of
children. They play games with each other, and play tricks upon each
other, and engage in numerous wrestling bouts, a form of contest of
which they seem particularly fond. They are like children also in
that they are direct and simple, and as courteous as the ideal child
should be. Indeed, if I were asked what struck me as the chief
characteristics of the Boer I should say they were the two qualities
which the English have always disallowed him, his simplicity rather
than his "cuteness," and his courtesy rather than his boorishness.
The force that waited at the drift by Cronje's farm as it lay spread
out on both sides of the river looked like a gathering of Wisconsin
lumbermen, of Adirondack guides and hunters halted at Paul Smith's,
like a Methodist camp-meeting limited entirely to men.
The eye sought in vain for rows of tents, for the horses at the
picket line, for the flags that marked the head-quarters, the
commissariat, the field telegraph, the field post-office, the A. S.
C., the R. M. A. C., the C. O., and all the other combinations of
letters of the military alphabet.
I remembered that great army of General Buller's as I saw it
stretching out over the basin of the Tugela, like the children of
Israel in number, like Tammany Hall in organization and discipline,
with not a tent-pin missing; with hospitals as complete as those
established for a hundred years in the heart of London; with search-
lights, heliographs, war balloons, Roentgen rays, pontoon bridges,
telegraph wagons, and trenching tools, farriers with anvils, major-
generals, mapmakers, "gallopers," intelligence departments, even
biographs and press-censors; every kind of thing and every kind of
man that goes to make up a British army corps. I knew that seven
miles from us just such another completely equipped and disciplined
column was advancing to the opposite bank of the Sand River.
And opposed to it was this merry company of Boer farmers lying on the
grass, toasting pieces of freshly killed ox on the end of a stick,
their hobbled ponies foraging for themselves a half-mile away, a
thousand men without a tent among them, without a field-glass.
It was a picnic, a pastoral scene, not a scene of war. On the hills
overlooking the drift were the guns, but down along the banks the
burghers were sitting in circles singing the evening hymns, many of
them sung to the tunes familiar in the service of the Episcopal
Church, so that it sounded like a Sunday evening in the country at
home. At the drift other burghers were watering the oxen, bathing
and washing in the cold river; around the camp-fires others were
smoking luxuriously, with their saddles for pillows. The evening
breeze brought the sweet smell of burning wood, a haze of smoke from
many fires, the lazy hum of hundreds of voices rising in the open
air, the neighing of many horses, and the swift soothing rush of the
river.
When morning came to Cronje's farm it brought with it no warning nor
sign of battle. We began to believe that the British army was an
invention of the enemy's. So we cooked bacon and fed the doves, and
smoked on the veranda, moving our chairs around it with the sun, and
argued as to whether we should stay where we were or go on to the
bridge. At noon it was evident there would be no fight at the drift
that day, so we started along the bank of the river, with the idea of
reaching the bridge before nightfall. The trail lay on the English
side of the river, so that we were in constant concern lest our
white-hooded Cape cart would be seen by some of their scouts and we
would be taken prisoners and forced to travel all the way back to
Cape Town. We saw many herds of deer, but no scouts or lancers, and,
such being the effect of many kopjes, lost all ideas as to where we
were. We knew we were bearing steadily south toward Lord Roberts,
who as we later learned, was then some three miles distant.
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