Past Caring by Robert Goddard Read Free Book Online Page B

end of October amidst a scene of some consternation , the Boers having by now invested Kimberley and Mafeking and, shortly thereafter, Ladysmith. Even to a novice such as I then was, there was a lack of conviction in the dispositions made by General Buller to cope with this emergency. He split his force into three and sought to raise all three sieges at once, a division of effort which proved disastrous. Couch and I accompanied Buller as junior adjutants north towards Ladysmith. I confess that I for one was so busily engaged in adapting to the military life in a strange country that I had little time to spare for assessing our strategy, but my instinct that it was miswrought proved sound. Buller convinced himself that the Boer forces around Ladysmith were too strong for him to lift the siege and he was right. But news of Gatacre’s defeat at Stormberg and Methuen’s at Magersfontein stung him into a frontal assault upon the Boer positions at Colenso on the Tugela River on December 15, only three days after reporting that a direct attack would prove too costly. That cost was a comprehensive defeat, a thousand men dead, his own command forfeited and the creation in the public mind at home of the doleful phenomenon of “Black Week,” which stilled, for a moment, the bellicose clamour of the music halls.
    Unhappily, the defeat at Colenso carried a bitter personal lesson for me. A battlefield far from home is no place to learn that one’s trusted friend is a coward, but this conclusion was forced upon me by Gerald Couchman’s conduct that day. In an action to save the ten guns that were ultimately lost, Buller took a personal hand and, therefore, we adjutants with him. In this action , the general was himself wounded and the only son of Lord Roberts was killed. I did what little I could with what fortitude I could muster, but Couch held back and, in an incident overlooked by all but me, quitted the scene in a craven act of self-preservation. I did not despise him for it, for any sane man would have felt fear that day, but I was chastened to learn that he could leave my side at such a crucial time. I did not reproach him afterwards, yet he knew that I had seen , and matters were never again the same between us.
     

P A S T C A R I N G
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    When Lord Roberts was appointed as the new C-in-C, Buller despatched Couch and me to Capetown to await his arrival and perform what services we could in a staff capacity. We passed a long, silent, grudging journey back, Couch perhaps appalled by his own discovery about himself, perhaps resenting my silence as a reminder of it, I saying too little for fear of saying too much and reflecting that perchance the censorious Threlfall had been right all along. It might have cheered us to know that Colenso was the first and last action either of us was to see in South Africa. It might, but I must take leave to doubt it.
    Lord Roberts reached Capetown in the middle of January 1900, with the redoubtable Kitchener as his chief of staff. He at once overhauled the organization of the whole campaign and it was this greater attention to matters of supply, transport and communication that not only effected a transformation of the army’s fortunes but also detained me in the Cape for the rest of my time in South Africa. My political reputation , such as it was, had evidently gone before me, for I was directed to devote some of my time—when it was not consumed in ordinary staff duties—to a tentative exploration of popular feeling in the Cape, most especially to a cultivation of the Dutch community, with an assurance of happy internal relations, when the war was over, the ultimate objective. I made little enough progress in this direction , but did what I could and always found contact with the citizenry of the Cape—its elected representatives, its magistrates and landowners, its journalists and businessmen—interesting and instructive. Couch was, at this time, engaged in the coordination of supplies,