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CHAPTER XII COLUMNS AND BLOCKHOUSES T was now quite evident that the Proclama­ I tion of August 6th had failed, and there­ fore fresh measures must be adopted if peace was to be attained. The Boers were directing their energies towards evading any decisive engagement, aiming rather at harassing and annoying us in every possible way, in the vain hope of thereby wearing out our resources, our spirits, and our patience. Their training, together with the nature of the country and their intimate knowledge of it, combined to favour this irregular mode of war­ fare, and it was no easy task for us to cope with opponents who, whenever the odds were against them, could speedily disperse their forces, large or small, and reassemble at any given spot miles away. To meet these difficulties Lord Kitchener at first tried the plan of increasing the numbers and mobility of the columns, but as time went on and the guerilla warfare still raged, it was determined to perfect the system of block­ houses already in operation. 176 MATERIALS FOR A BLOCKHOUSE FINISHING A BLOCKHOUSE (NO . 27) Tofacep . 176 COLUMNS AND BLOCKHOUSES 177 Before the blockhouse lines were fairly started, CollllWIS. the columns used either to w@rkindependently of each other or several would combine, con­ ve,rging simultaneously on a common centre, with a view to inclosing the Boers within a given area. The Boers, however, soon learned to foresee and forestall these manceuvres, and before the circle closed they would slip through and retreat to their hiding-places, of which there were many. In the Witkopjes in particular there were strongholds and caves approached by impregnable passes that could easily be held by a few determined men against a large force ; and so well were these retreats concealed that an army might have passed quite close without discovering the proximity of the enemy. Towards the middle of October Louis Botha went south with his army, and General Walter Kitchener with a big force followed him up, while all the available troops blocked the points at which Botha could get north again. As many men as could be spared from V olksrust, W ak­ kerstrom and I ngogo held the neks round about, and at the same time parties of our men held Barsfield, Molls N ek, De Jagers N ek and W ak­ kerstrom N ek. Some personal records of hold­ ing the last named position are given here. " We had plenty of alarms, and on W ednes­ day, October 16th, I and thirty of our men were sent out to Wakkerstrom Nek with orders to N 178 YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT Holding stop Louis Botha and his commando getting Waltlterstrom h h Nelt. t roug . " We started that day, each man with one waterproof sheet and one blanket only. After a very hot march of thirteen miles we reached the nek just as it was getting dark, and then had to make dispositions to hold the place. The country on both sides of the nek is tremend­ ous, full of positions commanding each other, - . ::. _.c::::=:,::;::: ,., _-.- _(<- ~ BIVOUAC: WAKKERSTROM HILL. and to which the enemy might have come and sfliped in order to attract our attention, while their main body went through the nek. "As there were many empty farms in the neighbourhood where they could shelter during the night, it was thought probable they would attempt to get through the nek at daybreak. We had posts on the most exposed places on the high hills north-east and north-west of the nek, and just as we were standing to arms early COLUMNS AN.D BLOCKHOUSES 179 on Thursday morning, we heard firing on the Holding hill north-west of the nek, at a post held by the ::.kerstrom 8th Hussars. A party of twenty Boers had crept up the hill trying to get round the post, who, however, returned the enemy's fire and prevented their advance, though they wounded the sentry. Had the Boers succeeded in taking this hill, they would have commanded the nek ; we should then have had great difficulty in ousting them, as it was a very stiff e]imb from our side, and we should have been under their fire all the way up. "The rest of that day was spent in sangar­ making and fortifying our position as best we could. We built little round forts for each of the isolated outposts, and a bigger sangar for the main reserve party. As before, when on Wakkerstrom Hill, we were mostly in the clouds, and the nights were too cold to allow us much sleep. We were, therefore, not sorry when on Tuesday, 22nd, we received orders to return to V olksrust, which we did that afternoon, reach­ ing camp at 6 p.m. after a four hours' march. All our other parties came in the same day, as Louis Botha and most of his commando had somehow slipped away from the pursuing force and gone north." Failures of this sort were frequently occur­ ing, and the columns alone proved insufficient to prevent them, so the blockhouse system was 180 YORK .AND LANCASTER REGIMENT Blockhoale&. begun in real earnest. These blockho11$e8were stretched in lines across the country to form barriers against which our columns could force the Boers, and were erected at intervals ranging from 500 to 3,000 yards apart. The distances between varied according to the nature of the ground, the object being .to leave no bit of so-called dead ground along the line through which the Boers could pass unobserved by the blockhouse garrisons. The length of the lines and the limited number of men sometimes pre­ vented this object from being attained. The designs for blockhouses were all sent in sealed packets from Head Quarters at the base. There was not much v~ety amongst them, though the roofs occasionally differed ; some of these were flat and round, while others had high gabled tin roofs, with trap-doors at each end for wiJ?,dows. This latter design afforded more space and light, but too much air came in on cold nights, when the loopholes alone, without the trap-doors, gave quite sufficient ventilation. One of the first blockhouses was erected at Opperman's Kraal, thirteen miles north ofVolks­ rust. It was built of stone, two stories high, and was altogether on a much more expensive scale than the subsequent ones, which were principally made of corrugated iron with stone I ballast between. \ Barbed wire entanglements were stretched I I COLUMNS AND BLOCKHOUSES 181 round and between the blockhouses. When the Wire en• . d tanglements. Boers were hemm ed between t hese barr1ers an a column, they were obliged either to break back through the columri or attempt to cross our lines. Although De Wet has called our blockhouse policy a "blockhead policy," the Boers have confessed that they did not like facing these entanglements, since it usually meant having to ONB OF TUB FIRST BLOCKHOUSES. cut the wires while under fire from a blockhouse on either side. When they had once run the gauntlet of this fire, they hesitated before facing it again in order to re-cross our lines, even when, as often happened, there lay on the other side the country which they knew, and where the Kaffirs would cook and cater for them, and lo'ok after the horses. 182 YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT Wire en• Between columns and blockhouses, the Boers tanglements. got little rest; hardships such as the pangs of hunger, scarcity of food, clothes and horses, · added to the constant feeling of insecurity, sapped even their courage, and in the long run tired them out,just as they had meant to tire us out, with their continual sniping and their guer­ illa warfare. The bits of dead ground out of sight of our forts were naturally chosen by the Boers as the safest spots for breaking through our lines. This they sometimes succeeded in doing by driving big herds of cattle up to the entangle­ ments, exciting them to make a wild rush, and by sheer force of the onset breaking down the barbed wires, the Boers galloping through the openings made by the poor beasts, who were by that time nearly mad with fright and the injuries inflicted by the terrible barbs. To guard as much as possible against this ruse, we made these bits of dead ground more impassable by digging broad trenches on both sides of the wire barricades. We also added a tell-tale wire which, when cut, allowed a large stone to drop on to a piece of corrugated iron, thus making noise enough to warn our men in the blockhouses, who then opened fire down the wire towards the spot where the Boers were getting through. Without some such device, it was impossible for those inside the blockhouses COLUMNS AND .BLOCKHOUSES 183 to hear what was going on a few hundred yards ve_nteschief away, when the wind was howling and the rain Bnd'e. and hail descending in torrents. Nothing particular occurred until Sunday, November I 7th, when rumours reached us of a Boer party intending to break through close by, so we had to line the railway, and a party of about twenty of our men and one officer was sent to a spot seven miles away, where we lay . out on the wet ground all night, keeping watch for the Boers who never came. Lieutenant Nash, Leicestershire Regiment, who was at­ tached to us in command of a small detachment of sixteen men at V enteschief Bridge, took out a patrol along the railway line, and was wounded in the left arm by two Boers lurking near the line, evidently waiting for an opportunity to cross.

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