HISTORIC RIVALRY IN THE BOER WAR By Major P A J Wright, OBE Formerly Grenadier Guards
The historic rivalry between the Grenadier and Coldstream Guards has taken many different forms. One of the most unusual was an incident in the Boer War when the Commanding Officers of 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards and of 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards debated which of their handkerchiefs should be used to surrender to the Boers.
3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards officers in South Africa. Colonel Crabbe is seated on the right. Lieutenants Lygon (without headdress) and Trotter are standing behind him third and fourth from the right.
On Thursday 22nd March 1900, Lieutenant Colonel E M S Crabbe, commanding 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards at Bloemfontein, was ordered to join 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel A E Codrington, at Glen Siding, a railway bridge over the Modder River eighteen miles to the north The assembled force, which included some Colonial Mounted Infantry and a party of Engineers, was instructed to repair the railway bridge, which had been sabotaged on 18th March, and to search the countryside for arms and ammunition.
Lieutenant Colonel E M S Crabbe, Grenadier Guards The following morning Crabbe and Codrington set out to effect this order. They were accompanied by Lieutenant G F Trotter, Transport Officer, and Lieutenant and Adjutant the Hon E H Lygon, both of 3rd Battalion, together with an orderly, Private Turner, of 1st Cape Volunteers. All were mounted and armed with Lee-Metford rifles, except for Codrington, who carried a Mauser pistol.
Lieutenant Colonel A E Codrington, Coldstream Guards
After crossing the river, they rode for about eight miles along the west side of the railway as far as the Karee Siding. A few arms were found and three farms visited on the way. The party had ridden out of the station and was approaching Maas Farm. A farmer lived there who had already given in his arms. Four mounted Boers were sighted on a ridge ahead. Crabbe said: “Come on, let’s round them up.” He, Codrington and Turner rode to the left and Trotter and Lygon to the right in an attempt at encirclement. However, the Boers had been joined by three other Dutchmen and, having left their horses behind the ridge, opened fire from behind some iron-stone boulders.
The medals of Brigadier General Crabbe CB Crabbe, whose horse was killed by the first shot, was wounded in the arm and leg. Codrington was injured in the thigh as he lay on the ground attempting to return fire. Meanwhile firing on the other flank continued for a few minutes, until Lygon, who had dismounted and was running forward to the cover of an anthill, was shot through the heart. Death was instantaneous and Trotter was unaware of it until he turned round, receiving at the same moment an exploding bullet through the elbow. Turner was also wounded in the ankle.
Boer commandos
With the whole of the party either dead or wounded and further resistance useless, Crabbe and Codrington, while lying prone on the ground, invited each other to display a white handkerchief. Codrington refused on the grounds that his handkerchief was a crimson one. Crabbe maintained his handkerchief was British and not manufactured to wave at the Boers. However, he was finally persuaded by Codrington to wave it in surrender.
The Boers immediately ceased fire and came down into the open. They behaved with great courtesy and did all they could to bind up the wounds. The tourniquet applied to Trotter’s arm undoubtedly saved his life. The wounded were carried to Maas Farm and, having taken their arms and saddlery, the Boers left them to send a message to the camp at Glen for ambulances. These arrived in the afternoon, but the doctor would not allow the wounded to be moved until dawn. The next morning they were all taken by buck-wagon to the railway and then by rail to Bloemfontein.
A funeral party came and took Lygon’s body, which had been covered by sacks, back to Glen. Under a setting sun on Saturday 24th March, he was buried in the presence of the whole Battalion. Crabbe attended despite his injuries. The grave was on a knoll a short distance from the wrecked bridge spanning the Modder River, which stood out against a background of shrubs and trees. Guards Brigade Orders of 1st April, under the heading “PRECAUTIONS”, warned as follows: “Lord Roberts directs special attention to the needless risk which individuals incur who cross the outpost line, either singly or in small parties, without being ordered to do so, or who carry out such duties as foraging, reconnoitring, or signalling in a slack and unobservant manner. We are in the presence of a watchful enemy to whom every turn of the ground is familiar, and neglect of this order is sure to bring with it its own punishment. It must further be borne in mind that Officers and Men who become ineffective through their own carelessness are guilty of an unsoldierly act.
Trotter’s right arm was amputated at Bloemfontein on Sunday 25 March. Codrington, who when he had been shot in the ankle three months previously, had observed: “Outer, low right.” spent three months in hospital at Deelfontein. He and Trotter were invalided back to England. Crabbe, despite his two wounds (his fourth since the war began), recovered well. He felt himself responsible for what happened and would blame himself for the rest of his life, as he had given the order for the pursuit without consulting anyone. He was very fond of Lygon, who he said was like a younger brother to him.
Danie Theron, the Boers’ finest reconnaissance scout, was killed in 1900
Crabbe had not been aware that earlier that month General de Wet had appointed Commandant Danie Theron to establish a commando of intelligence scouts. The Theron se Verkenningskorp (TVK; Theron Reconnaissance Corps), consisted of 80 men who specialised in reconnaissance and guerrilla attacks. Crabbe’s deadly encounter had not been with Dutch farmers, but with seven highly skilled TVK horsemen and marksmen. One of the TVK’s first acts of sabotage had been the destruction of the Modder River railway bridge. A month later, Lord Roberts described Theron as “the hardest thorn in the flesh of the British advance”. South Africa later named its School of Army Intelligence after him.
Crabbe and Codrington had been at Harrow together and both had taken part in the Anglo-Egyptian war of 1882. In this unfortunate incident in South Africa they discovered to their cost that the Boers were a very different enemy. However, neither their subsequent careers nor Trotter’s suffered as a result. In 1909, Codrington was appointed Major General commanding the Brigade of Guards and GOC London District and later on commanded a reserve army during the Great War. He became Colonel of the Coldstream Guards in 1918 and was appointed GCVO and KCB. Trotter was wounded again in the Great War and commanded 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. He was promoted to Brigadier General in 1916, ending up with a fine row of decorations: CB, CMG, CBE, MVO and DSO.
Trotter, the one-armed survivor, leading Grenadier Boer War veterans on a parade during the First World War
Crabbe was back on duty after a few weeks. In May 1900, Conan Doyle described an encounter with him “A burly, broad-shouldered man with full, square, black beard over his chest, his arm in a sling, his bearing a medieval knight-errant. It is Crabbe, of the Grenadier Guards. He reins his horse for an instant while his Guardsmen stream past him. “I’ve had my share – four bullets already. Hope I won’t get another today.” “You should be in hospital.” “Ah, there I venture to disagree with you.” He rides on with his men.” He gave invaluable service in command of a mobile column during the great hunt for De Wet and his fellow commando leaders. His most notable success was the capture of the Boer leader Kritzinger in December 1901 and he was appointed CB for distinguished service.
In April 1903, he was appointed Chief Staff Officer, 4th Army Corps at Aldershot, with the rank of Brigadier General, where he served until his death from heart failure on 8th March 1905. He completed the narrative of 3rd Battalion’s history in South Africa two days before he died. It had been his intention to write a preface emphasising that it had been written without apportioning either “any criticism of the operations” or “praise to any particular individual”. It would be wrong to infer these two points were in any way influenced by the memory of losing the argument to his opposite number in the Coldstream Guards, as to whose handkerchief should be waved in surrender.