Note 8 — Chapter VII · GENERAL RUNDLE’S MARCH TO SENEKAL

While dealing with the matter it is due to General Colvile to repeat the statement made by himself at the end of the year to a representative of Reuter’s Agency:—

“I am accused of being chiefly responsible for the surrender of the Yeomanry at Lindley. In my opinion the primary cause of this surrender was the insufficient information given by the headquarters staff to Colonel Spragge and myself. Had I been informed of Lord Roberts’s intentions and of the intended movements of Colonel Spragge, who was in command of the Yeomanry, and had Colonel Spragge been made acquainted with the orders I received from Lord Roberts, this disaster would never have happened. The following details will make it clear that the loss of the Yeomanry was primarily due to bad staff work. On May 20 I received a telegram from the chief of the staff ordering me to concentrate my troops, consisting of the Highland Brigade, the Eastern Province Horse, a field battery, and two naval guns, at Ventersburg on May 23, to leave that town on the 24th and to march to Heilbron, via Lindley, arriving at Lindley on May 26, and at Heilbron on the 29th. I was informed that I should be joined at Ventersburg by the 13th Imperial Yeomanry and Lovat’s Scouts.

“On arrival at Ventersburg, finding that neither the Yeomanry nor the Scouts were there, I informed the chief of the staff by telegraph, but received no answer from him at the time, though his reply was handed to me more than a month later, among a bundle of undelivered telegrams. This telegram was worded as follows: ‘May 24. Yeomanry are so late they cannot catch you at Ventersburg. You must march without them. They will join you later via Kroonstad.’ As I did not receive the telegram till the march was over it did not affect my action, but had I received it at the time its wording would have led me to suppose that the Yeomanry would join me at Heilbron, as was actually the case with Lovat’s Scouts. At this time Lord Roberts’s army was disposed roughly as follows: General Hunter’s Division on the Kimberley-Mafeking Railway, Lord Methuen on the Vaal River, headquarters and General Pole-Carew’s Division on the Bloemfontein-Johannesburg Railway, General Ian Hamilton’s column at Heilbron, and General Rundle and Brabant to the south-east of me. It was, therefore, extended across the Free State, and I assumed that Lord Roberts intended to advance in this formation, sweeping all before him till he got within striking distance of the Vaal, thus forcing the enemy to extend, and that he would then select one point for forcing the passage of the river. I also supposed that Heilbron, which is the head of a short line of railway, would be the supply depot for the columns to the east, as Winburg had been.

“My very definite orders, and the fact that I was not to move till the last possible moment, which necessitated my averaging seventeen miles a day, strengthened the assumption that I was taking part in a combined movement, in which great exactitude in conforming to the time table is, of course, of the utmost importance. In a telegram which Lord Roberts had sent to General Hamilton a short time before on a similar occasion he had impressed on him the importance of columns arriving simultaneously. As I had been officially informed that General Hamilton was in occupation of Heilbron, I assumed that my orders to be there on the 29th indicated that that was the day on which he would be required to take part in the general advance, and that any delay on my part would either retard the advance and upset the Commander-in-Chief’s calculations, or that by leaving Heilbron unoccupied I should hand over an important supply depot to the enemy. I have thus explained why in no circumstances should I have felt myself justified in disobeying Lord Roberts’s orders, which I simply carried out from first to last. I now proceed to recite the circumstances in which I became acquainted with Colonel Spragge’s difficulties, and the action I took.

“I left Ventersburg on May 24 as ordered, and on the 26th, after a fight outside Lindley, entered it, finding that the place had been vacated by us, a fact of which no notification had been given me, though I had been informed of our occupation of it. Marching at daylight on the following morning we crossed the Rhenoster River just before sunset, having been engaged the greater part of the day, and on the morning of the 28th I received the following message: ‘Colonel Spragge to General Colvile. Found no one in Lindley but Boers. Have five hundred men, but only one day’s food. Have stopped three miles back on Kroonstad road. I want help to get out without great loss.—B. Spragge, Lieutenant-Colonel, May 27, 1900.’ I asked the orderly who Colonel Spragge was, and on hearing from him that he was the officer commanding the Yeomanry I learned for the first time that these troops were following me. The statement, which I have seen several times repeated in the papers, that I had urged the Yeomanry to hurry after me, is absolutely untrue. I have reason to believe that this baseless newspaper report has obtained credence in some high official quarters. I have already expressed my views of the necessity of being at Heilbron at the time ordered, and as it is a recognised rule of war that the lesser must be sacrificed to the greater interest, I should in any circumstances have considered it my duty to push on even had I been sure that such action would have entailed the loss of the Yeomanry. But in this case I had two additional reasons for doing so. First, that, as Colonel Spragge had succeeded in retiring three miles on the Kroonstad road I was convinced that he would have no difficulty in making good his retreat, though possibly with loss, as the colonel himself had said; secondly, that I had then only two days’ more food for my force, and had I fought my way back I should not only have reduced the Highland Brigade to the verge of starvation, but should certainly have had insufficient supplies to take me back to Heilbron.”