NationStates Jolt Archive

"Southern Africa stands on the eve of a frightful bloodbath out of which our volk shall come ... either as hewers of wood and drawers of water for a hated race, or as victors, founders of a United South African Federation ... an Afrikaner republic in southern Africa stretching from Table Bay to the Zambezi" -General Christian Ludolph de Wet du Toit, Chief of General Staff, Dominion Defense Forces

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Dramatis Personae:

Bittereinder:
President Hendrik Balzaser Klopper
Lieutenant-General Andries Jacob Eksteen Brink
Lieutenant-General Christian Ludolph de Wet du Toit
Major-General Isaac P. De Villiers
Ambassador William Henry Evered Poole

Victoria West:
Field Marshal George Osborn De Renzy Channer
Major-General Ambrose Neponucene Trelawny Meneces
Major-General Sir John Drummond Inglis
Brigadier Cecil Arthur Harrop Chadwick
Ambassador F.L.A Buchanan

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By the first week of July, Kroonstad was already half deserted. Most of the burghers had gone to Natal. Even the station, awah with cheering crowds and refugees only a week before, was now empty except for a few stragglers. On the stoep (veranda) of his small, whitewashed house on Church Street, the ol President watched in silence, sitting there in the twilight, puffing at his pipe, while his wife milked the cow in the yard, as though they were a couple of Boers from the backveldt. Outwardly, the old President seemed as immovable as ever. That week, a reporter had interviewed Klopper at his office before he himself went down to the Natal frontier, and asked if there was any prospect for peace. "Nee!" roared the old man, "Unless Channer changes his tune!" Yet, til the final month of the crisis, Klopper had in fact struggled for a settlement. It was his own tragedy that Kruger understood Channer as little as Channer understood Klopper ...

The rains had come early to the veldt that spring, dappling it green and scattering stripes of daisies beside the railway line at Sandspruit. It was here, at the station, twelve miles from the frontier, that Christian Ludolph de Wet du Toit and his army had been waiting impatiently for Klopper's ultimatum. For the last week the Kroonstad troop-trains had emptied their loads there: a dozen trains every day, monstrous, slow centipedes of trains; carriages full of men and boys, carrying their rifles slung over their Sunday clothes; cattle trucks loaded with Creusot and Krupp artillery, hugger-mugger with ox-wagons and oxen, wives and African servants.

There were no straight lines in the Boer army. For miles the sandy plain was dotted with ponies and oxen and covered wagons. At night the camp-fires glowed like the lights of a city, and bearded old men sat around the fires singing Dutch psalms with their wives and children. Side by side with these trekboers from the backveldt were the burghers from Pretoria, Kroonstad, and the Randt. They were cleanshaven; they sounded almost like regular soldiers as they sang ribald songs around the campfire.

In the artillery laager at the center of the plain, a large white marquee served as the HQ of du Toit, the Commandant-General. He seemed a splendidly confident figure: flashing dark eyes and a flowing beard. In fact, du Toit was anxious, as usual. He was grateful for the rains; though down here, on the Victoria West border, the veldt was only starting to flush green. Everything else had gone wrong during the last fornight. The arrangements with the Northern Transvaal, hold-ups on the railway, the ox-wagons - everything. All the time the thought haunted du Toit: was the war necessary at all?

As the leader of the Progressive bloc in the Raa and Klopper's principal political opponent, du Toit had always asserted that a deal could be made with the Uitlanders to the south. Klopper had stubbornly found no alternative to war. And now war was inevitable. If du Toit blamed Klopper for breaking off negotiations, he could only blame himself for the near-collapse of the arrangements for mobilization. Many of the men ha dno tents or even macintoshes to protect them against the rain; the mules supplied by dishonest contractors could hardly stand up; the wheels of the wagons were already falling to pieces. It was left to the fifteen thousand Bittereinder burghers on the roll - of whom only about nine thousand had yet turned up - to improvise as best they could.

One responsibility, at any rate, du Toit was spared: that of disciplining the burghers. Apart from the eight-hundred-strong grey-uniformed artillery corps, they were a people's army. As a professional soldier, the Commandant-General was supposed to supply them with the materials of war - Creusot and Krupp artillery, rifles, ammunition, tents, food and so on - and to coordinate strategy. Their elected civilian leaders were made commandants - appointed, that is, to lead the five hundred to two thousand burghers of each commando in battle. In this commando system, it was no one's job to train the burghers. Apart from the annual wappenschauw (shooting practice), the men were left to fight as they had always fought - with the tactics of the mounted frontiersmen. If the enemy were superior in numbers, they would provoke the enemy's attack, dismount, take cover and shoot, remount and ride away. In military manuals it was a formula known as "strategic offensive, tactical defensive." The Boers had never seen the manuals. But the tactics had served them well in countless wars against the black Africans and against Victoria West eighteen-years prior. They had hardly lost a battle since Boomplatz fifty-one years ago, when Sir Harry Smith had thrashed General Pretorius. In fact, du Toit, sitting there on his horse, commanded an army that was probably the largest body of mounted riflemen every assembled in Africa.

Beyond the broad valley of Sandspruit was the town of Volksrust, a simple place of tin roofs and blue gum-trees, like so many other towns on the velt. A few miles beyond Volksrust were the misty hills of Natal: Laing's Nek and Majuba. How well du Toit knew all that country! He had led the Bittereinder forces here, eighteen years before, in attacking General Chadwick. His victory against four hundred Victorians had echoed round the world. Could he achieve the same today against an army forty times as strong?

Today was Koppler's birthday, July 10. Commando after commando filed past the Commandant-General: ranchers from the bushveldt down at Middelburg; clerks and solicitors from Kroonstad; a thousand Dutch and German settlers from the Rand; a hundred Irish settlers. All the burghers were mounted. As each man passed du Toit, he waved his hat or his rifle, according to his idea of a salute. The commandos then formed into a mass, and galloped cheering up the dry, grassy slope where du Toit sat his horse under an embroidered banner. He rose in his stirrups to address them, but his words were lost in the crowd. He pointed across the valley at Majuba. There lay Natal - Natal stolen from the voortrekkers, Natal the Promised Land, that was theirs for the taking.

He saw the quiver in the ranks as word was passed from man to man. The excitement was immense. People stood in their stirrups and shouted themselves hoarse. Du Toit and his retinue had to fight their way back through the crowd. There was singing and shouting from the laagers until dawn. In the small hours, the Boers struck camp and du Toit's columns began to move forward - a weird opening scene to a great drama, an endless procession of silent misty figures, horsemen, artillery, and wagons, filing past in the dark, cold night along the winding road that led to where the black shoulder of Majuba stood up against the greyer sky. It was war!

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OOC: This war is between Bittereinder and Victoria West, both located in South Africa. There are numerous other republics in the region, and this is an approximate map: http://img73.exs.cx/img73/1416/southafrica1fa.jpg

Feel free to make comments or join in as I and Victoria West go along.

It was 5 a.m. and a damp kind of dawn. There was a curtain of mist hanging low on the sholders of Mount Impati, to the north of the town of Dundee. It was from the north that du Toit's main army were known to be advancing. In the valley below, Chadwick's garrison of four thousand men was already on paradein full battle gear, a somberly warlike spectacle: the 2nd Cape Fusiliers, the 1st Royal Cape Fusiliers, the 60th Rifles and the 1st Leicesters, arranged in a chequerboard of anonymous khaki; brown paint over buckles and bayonet scabbards, with only the small coloured badges on the khaki helmets to tell the four battalions parat. The officers carried swords, knives, revlovers, field-glasses, and whistles. They looked as drab as the men.

The men were told to fall out, and one of Chadwick's staff came round with the day's orders: prepare for infantry training. Some officers of the 18th Beaufort - the air cavalry regiment sent to Dundee along with the four infantry battalions - were strolling across to the mess tent for a cup of tea. A sudden shout: "There they are!" Everyone laughed. For days people had talked of little else but the coming scrap, but the idea of a couple of thousand Boers attacking an entire Victorian brigade seemed comic. Anyway, the expected threat was from Impati, and the north.

From inside his tent, Lieutenant Maurice Crum, the senir subaltern of the 60th rRifles, heard the shouts and the laughter. He ha spent four months in Natal training for this battle, four months of the warscare alternating with depressing rumors of peace, and was desperate not to miss the scrap. But today he was lying on his blanket with a mild dose of fever.

"What's them 'ere blokes on that blomin' hill?" he heard a man shout. Crum crawled from his tent. Out came the binoculars. The whole camp was now staring across the valley at the steep ridge, two miles east of the town about Piet Smit's Farm: Talan Hill, as the natives called it. Intermittently, in the mist, Crum saw groups of figures notching the smooth line of the pale eastern sky, crowds of riflemen with three field-guns. Commandos. Boers. The officers were still staring in astonishment a quarter of an hour later when the first Creusot 75-mm shell swept with a whirr and a scream high across the valley. The second shell, better aimed, splashed into the wet earth behind the rear file of the Cape Fusiliers.

All three Victorian batteries - six guns to a battery - were ordered to open fire. Small white stars of shrapnel smoke spangled the skyline, as the 67th Battery began to thunder away from its position in the gun park. The 69th and the 13th Batteries were slower off the mark; the drivers had just been sent down to fuel their trucks.

The batteries limbered up and jingled off in pairs through the town, then bumped across the railway line, and unlimbered two miles from the enemy's position. "Battery fire 15 seconds. Fuse 35." Within twenty minutes, the 69th opened up. Ten minutes later, the 13th joined them, the guns lined up as neatly as on a field day, the gunners counting out loud after each shot to give the regulation interval of fifteen seconds between the firing of each gun.

Chadwick himself was just about to have his breakfast when the first Creusot shell landed. The CO of the air cavalry, Colonel B. D. Moller ran to his tent to get orders. Loose horses were galloping along the picket lines, sending mud flying. Men were cowering behind the walls of canvas. Orderlies struggled to get the horses under control. Chadwick's tent was unmistakable: outside, on a high mast, flew a huge Union Mark; inside, the General was smoking a cigarette and issuing orders. Shells continued to splash into the ground nearby. Damned impudence to start shelling before breakfast.

Within twenty minutes, the enemy shelling had ended. The Boer guns had never had much chance. Three guns against eighteen. Not that Brother Boer, as the officers called the enemy, had proved himself much of a gunner. Many of the Boers' shots had gone wide, and of those that hit the mark, most had percussion fuses, and the shells had failed to explode in the rain-sodden ground. There were virtually no casualties, apart from poor Trumpeter Horn of the 69th Battery, whose head was smashed, and a grey mare on which was scored a direct hit.

Even before the artillery duel was over, Chadwick had issued his battle orders to the commanding officers. Despite his interrupted breakfast, he was anxious to get the battle started. His plan was a simple one, in keeping with his ideas on strategy. To attack the enemy, the enemy must have first been allowed to concentrate. Yet the eastern commandos must not be allowed to link up with the main Boer army under du Toit. According to the intelligence reports, the vanguard of du Toit's army was now close behind Mount Impati and miht link up with the commando column in a few hours. So there was not a moment to be lost in letting loose the infantry.

Chadwick had already stuied the Boer position through his field-glasses. To the naked eye the long hog's-back rige looked almost featureless. Through the field-glasses, it seemed, tactically, more promising. The ridge was, in fact, made up of twin hills (600-foot high Talana to the north, 550-foot high Lennox Hill to the south) and, like most kopjes, the hillsides were terraced by erosion and strewn with red volcanic rock, aloes, and acacia-thorn. Directly below the summit of Talana was a euclayptus wood and Smit's Farm: a group of white farm buildings and pink stone walls. Here was the place, Chadwick decided, from which to launch a concentrated infantry attack. He was oing to use the conventional tactics, the Aldershot set-piece in three acts. First, the artillery duel and the preparation of the ground. Second, the infantry attack and the infantry charge. Third, the air cavalry to cut off the enemy's retreat.

Chadwick believed in the well tried virtues of close order and concentration. He had decided to leave his artillery to cope with the southern part of the ridge, Lennox Hill. He would concentrate his forces in the few hundred yards covered by the stone walls and the wood directly below Talana, and then storm it with overwhelming strength. He wanted to deal a knock-out blow and there was no time for maneuvering, so he believed, if he was to crush the commandos before they would join hands with du Toit.

By contrast to his belief in the traditional virtues of concentration and close order for infantry, Chadwick had unconventional, if not reckless, ideas on the handling of cavalry. He told Colonel Moller not to wait for the infantry but to act on his own if he saw the chance. Hence, Moller took his small grouup of cavalry and flew around to the back of Talana to cut off the enemy's line of retreat. Chadwick had found this tactic effective on the North-West Frontier.

The artillery duel was well finished. Time for the second act of the Aldershot set-piece - the infantry attack. The infantry lined up in the sandy bed of a river to the east of Dundee. In the bed of the stream, the men waitied for orders. Chadwick studied the position. It was a calculated risk to throw almost everything he had into the battle - three battalions of infantry, two batteries of artillery and all the helicopters. This left only the Leicesters and the 67th Battery to defend the camp if du Toit launched a flank attack, which Chadwick was well aware might happen. But it seemed to him the only chance of giving it to the Boers straight on the jaw.

"Capes first line. Rifles second. Fusiliers third." It was a nervous movement. As the men had marched through the town there had been scenes of hysteria: some of the townspeople were laughing, others crying, and a woman rushed forward to kiss one of the NCOS of the Rifles, shouting, "God bless you, lad!" The men blustered and joked, but many looked pale, swallowing hard and trying not to show it. After all, few of these short-service soldiers had ever seen action.

A sudden hush fell on the ranks of the 60th Rifles. This was the regiment whose 3rd Battalion had been almost annihilated at Majuba, and the men regared the present war as a personal duel to settle that debt of honor. The Colonel, Bobby Gunning, called the NCOs together. "Now quietly, lads. Remember Majuba, od, and our country." Then the order was taken up along the line. "Forward, men." And over the top they went.

A few unlucky men dropped, hit by the invisible riflemen firing down from the misty hilltop. The casualties were scooped up by stretcher-bearers of Major Donegan's field hospital, and carried back in green doolies to the dressing-station by the post office. Most of the infantry reached the wood. Here the panting men were now less than a mile from the crest of Talana, and above their heads the eucalyptus trees fell in swatches, cut by bullets.

But how to advance beyond the wood? On the farther side was a stone wall, a small ap and then a quick-set hedge covered in brambles. Beyond that was open ground. Major Bird and most of the Capes worked their way out of the wood and crawled up a ditch, but were soon pinned down and unable to make progress. Lieutenant-Colonel R.F.C. Carleton sent his Fusiliers to line the stone wall on the left. Others remained jumbled together in the woo, now heavy with fumes and the smell of crushed eucalyptus. For an hour, the unforuntunate Chadwick tried to organize the assault. The men were unwilling to brave the invisible curtain of bullets beyond.

Chadwick approached through the drizzle, motoring up to the woods in a jeep. He had already sent two of his staff officers to order the assault. What had caused the delay? Carleton explained that there was still a tremendous fire coming from Talana, despite the pounding they had recieved from the shrapnel of the eighteen field-guns. Carleton suggested that it would be sensible to postpone the infantry attack until the artillery had finished its job. Chadwick refused. His strategic anxieties were too great. No more delay. Everything depended on attacking before du Toit arrived. Depsite the protests of his staff, Chadwick dismounted and strode through the wood and to the gap in the stone wall.

After a few moments, he returned through the gap in the stone wall and stiffly remounted, with the held of his ADC. When Chadwick was out of sight of the troops, he let himself be taken by the stretcher-bearers to the dressing-station. He was mortally wounded in the stomach. "Tell me, have they got the hill?" was all he could say.

Some men had begun to push forward on the west side of the wood. Despite that deafening tempest of rifle fire - the drumming, roaring, hammering, griding sound of hundreds of rifles fired simultaneously, and of bullets ricocheting off the red rocks, and splashing into the ground like a storm of rain on a lake - the infantry began to make some ground. Casualties they suffered in plenty. After the better part of an hour, they had reached the main terrace below the crest line, a terrace bounded and protected by a second stone wall, running parallel to the hillside. Within thirty minutes swarms of men from all three battalions coul be seen firing from behind this second stone wall, and their presence gave the rest of the infantry new heart to leave the wood.

Down in the valley, the two batteries of artillery had been having the best of the battle. The townspeople treated the gunners to a late breakfast of bread and butter, tea and coffee. "Here goes to finish this little snack - in case I loose it" was gunner Netley's jaunty comment. "The rifles are singing ... the must be crack shots for they only hit one man in the battery." In the 69th Battery, Lieutenant Trench received the orders to close up to fourteen hundred yards. As the twelve guns opened up on the hill, the shrapnel bursting in balloons and red dust, Netley saw the infantry charge.

But at that moment a new misfortune occured. Netley and the gunners of the 13th Battery could see the Victorian soldiers clearly. But Trench and the 69th did not. The ground in front of the men on the hill was literally rising in dust from the bullets, and the din echoing between the hill and the wood below and among the rocks from the incessant fire of the Boer rifles seemd to beldn with every other sound into a long drawn-out hideous roar. Suddenly, a shrapnel shell burst overhead. They could see their own artillery on the plain below 1500 yards off. With a scream and a crash a shrapnel shell burst just behind them.

Fortunately for Chadwick's men, the Boers did not attempt to exploit the artillery's error. They crept away down the reverse side of the hill, where their ponies were tethered, and rode away.

The hill had been won. But what a sight greeted the victors. Each battalion had lost half a dozen officers killed and wounded; the total loss to the Victorians mounted to 51 dead or dying, 203 wounded. And if the hill had been won, what else had been won with it?

Beyond the ridge, the commandos were streaming across the veldt towards the Buffalo River. It was the moment for Act Three of the Aldershot setpiece: the rout of the enemy. But Moller and the cavalry had taken Chadwick at his word and vanished behind Impati hours earlier. Still, the enemy were well within artillery range. After some hesitation, the enemy were well within artillery range. After some hesitation, the gunners were ordered up the road between the crests of Talana and Lennox Hill. Here the gun crews of the two batteries unlimbered - and waited. In the mist and drizzle the fleeing Boers had disappeared. In a matter of minutes, the three thousand commandos had rode swiftly beyond the curtain of rain.