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Updated: May 3, 2025
Major-General Gatacre, as usual, rode out with them to the bivouac, and then galloped back to camp. The troops were in great glee at setting off. The men marched briskly, their officers tramping beside them. On the whole, the track was tolerable, mostly compact sand and gravel.
This is a tiny force with which to clear an invaded and disaffected area of twelve thousand square miles. We may be perfectly certain that Sir William Gatacre will do the best that can be done with his force, and if that should be more than his numbers alone would lead us to expect the reason will be that Lord Methuen's victories will have made the Free State Boers uneasy about their road home.
Major-General Gatacre wished to go part of the way the same day, in order to reduce the distance to be marched, but the Sirdar put his veto thereon, observing that if the "Tommies" could not do a little march of 13 miles, they could not walk any distance.
Generals Rundle, Gatacre, and Hunter then stepped forward and congratulated the Sirdar upon the successful completion of his task, and the commanding officers and others, following their example, did the same. Sir Herbert acknowledged their greeting, and announced that the men would be allowed to break off for half an hour or so to go over the ruins and gardens if they wished.
This seems to be entrusted to General Forestier-Walker's forces, reduced to two battalions, and to General Wauchope's Highland brigade. One battalion only is with General Gatacre at Queenstown, and two battalions of General Lyttelton's brigade which have reached Cape Town are as yet unaccounted for in the telegrams.
British soldiers with donkey heads marched past Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales; the venerable Queen Victoria is pictured plucking the tail feathers from an ostrich which she holds across her knees; the three generals, Methuen, Buller, and Gatacre, take off their faces to discover the heads of an ass, a sheep, and a cow; Chamberlain is depicted as the instigator of the war, with his pockets and hands full of African shares; a parade of the stock-exchange volunteers depicts them as all Jews, with the Prince of Wales as a Jew reviewing them; the Prince of Wales is pictured surrounded by vulgar women, who ask, "Say, Fatty, you are not going to South Africa?" to which the Prince replies, "No, I must stay here to take care of the widows and orphans!"
He did not see, however, that the Boers derived little or no strength from their towns, which were rather a source of weakness; they were men of the veld and the veld was their strength. De Wet's guerilla advanced Chermside to the command of the IIIrd Division, in place of Gatacre sent home.
Of the second brigade General Gatacre said that a better body of troops could not be wished for by any general. I rode out to several of the brigade field-days, or rather, mornings, for there was plenty of drilling and field exercises for Lyttelton's men. The brigade was repeatedly practised in attack formation against imaginary bodies of dervishes, as well as at assaulting supposed works.
General Gatacre was nominally in command of a division, but so cruelly had his men been diverted from him, some to Buller in Natal and some to Methuen, that he could not assemble more than a brigade. Falling back before the Boer advance, he found himself early in December at Sterkstroom, while the Boers occupied the very strong position of Stormberg, some thirty miles to the north of him.
He galloped himself to the British division conveniently halted by General Gatacre on the northern crest of the ridge and ordered Lyttelton with the 2nd Brigade to form facing west on Maxwell's left south of Surgham, and Wauchope with the 1st Brigade to hurry back to fill the wide gap between Lewis and MacDonald.
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