There were still some futile diplomatic gestures in the final weeks before the hostilities began. Just as on the British side it had been the commander-in-chief in South Africa, General Butler, who had striven for peace, so among the Boers it was the commandant-general, Piet Joubert, hero of Majuba, who tried at the last minute to stave off the war. He wrote a long missive to Queen Victoria entitled “An Ernest Representation and Historical Reminder to Her Majesty . . . in View of the Prevailing Crisis.” He sent copies to the Kaiser and the Czar. The Queen of the Netherlands also wrote to Queen Victoria, pleading with her to use her influence to prevent war in South Africa, but Queen Victoria replied, “If President Kruger is reasonable, there will be no war, but the issue is in his hands.”
No one had worked harder to preserve the peace than Marthinus Theunis Steyn (1857-1916), who knew that when Britain went to war with the Transvaal his own country would inevitably become involved, not only because of the mutual defence pact between the two republics but also because of the sentiments of his own people and the certainty that if the Transvaal fell the Orange Free State could not long survive as a republican island surrounded by British colonies. He wrote an urgent plea for peace and asked Milner to send it to London. Milner reluctantly agreed to relay it; then, without Steyn’s knowledge, he cut out portions of the message—because of its “enormous length.” Steyn also sent off a message to President William McKinley pleading for American intervention. But the United States had just concluded an imperialistic war of its own in which it had acquired the Philippines, and since the Filipinos liked the Yankees no better than they had liked the Spaniards and wanted their freedom, the Americans were occupied in suppressing them. Besides, Britain had sided with the United States in the war with Spain and had in many little ways been helpful. The South African republics were not likely to find help in this quarter.
On 17 June 1899 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, ingenuously looking only at the facts, declared that there was nothing in the South African situation to justify preparing for war. But as John Adams had said more than a century before, “A Torrent is not to be impeded by Reasoning.” The lust for war is not to be controlled by logic nor its gratification deterred by facts.
The War Office apparently agreed with Campbell-Bannerman and, despite repeated warnings from Lord Wolseley, the commander-in-chief, continued to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what was going on in the nation and declined to bestir itself sufficiently to prepare for a major conflict. No plan for a campaign in South Africa existed.
In June the British had only about 10,000 regulars and 24 field guns in all South Africa. On 8 June Lord Wolseley recommended the mobilization in England of an army corps and a cavalry division under the command of a general who would take it to South Africa if needed. However, as a Royal Commission discovered after the war, “This was never seriously entertained by the Government.” Two weeks later two officers were sent to South Africa to buy 1,340 animals (less than 1 percent of the number which would actually be required), but the secretary of state for war refused to authorize remount buyers to be sent to Italy and Spain.
While Milner was stirring the pot and keeping it boiling in South Africa, the generals were growing uneasy, and General Sir Redvers Buller, who had been selected to take an army to South Africa should it be required, wrote direct to the prime minister, telling Salisbury that “before the diplomatist proceeds to an ultimatum the military should be in a position to enforce it.... So far as I am aware, the War Office has no idea of how matters are proceeding, and has not been consulted.” On the same day, 5 September, Wolseley wrote in a minute: “The Government are acting without complete knowledge of what the military can do, while the military authorities are equally without full knowledge of what the Government expects them to do, nor are they given authority to make such antecedent preparations as will enable them to act with the least possible delay.”1
On 16 September, with war less than a month away, Milner sent a request for “speedy reinforcements of troops and men of war.” Only then did the government agree to send out reinforcements from India and to order Lieutenant General Sir George White, V.C., out from England to take command in Natal. By the time hostilities actually began, the British had mustered only about 22,000 men and 60 guns in South Africa; more than a quarter of the men had been locally recruited and were largely untrained. Just over half of these were stationed in Natal.
The British army, as was soon to be revealed, was not adequate to the strain which was about to be put upon it. The Empire had grown enormous and at a rapid rate; while the army, too, had expanded, it had, through no fault of its own, not grown large enough to handle all of the wide-flung commitments expected of it and to fight a major war at the same time. On paper, at least, there were 249,466 regulars and about 90,000 reservists, but only 70,000 were available for service in South Africa, even including those intended for home defence. In spite of this shortage of soldiers, the government made a decision which deliberately deprived the army of one of its greatest sources of trained manpower.
It was decided that the war in South Africa was to be a “white man’s war,” the experienced Indian army would not be used, and the Bantu and other Coloured races in South Africa would not be formed into combat units or employed as local levies. As L. S. Amery put it in The Times History, “it was held inadvisable to make use of any but white soldiers in a war fought between white men in a country where the black man presents so difficult a problem.”2 The Boers had similar views, so the white men on both sides warned the Basutos, Zulus, Swazis, and other Bantu to stay out of their war.
However, if the war was to be fought exclusively by white men, Britain would have to find more. There was no lack of volunteers. Even before the war began, in July and August, the Australian colonies and New Zealand offered to send men, and the day after war was declared Canada offered 1,000 volunteers. Offers of men to fight the war came from all corners of the globe. Indian princes offered men, horses, and material; the Malay States wanted to send 300 Malay States Guards, the governor of Lagos 300 Hausas, and small groups of Englishmen everywhere proposed to rush to the Empire’s aid.
The military authorities were cool to these offers: colonials, they felt, would be difficult to manage and probably troublesome. Nevertheless, it was thought to be a generous gesture, and it seemed politically wise to allow the “white colonies,” as a favour, to participate in the war. Pressure was put on the War Office, and on 3 October the colonies were told by telegraph that they could contribute some volunteers, but “in view of the numbers already available, infantry most, cavalry least serviceable.” This telegram was much cited—usually misquoted in the form of “dismounted men preferred”—as evidence of how little the generals knew about the nature of the war they were to fight.
Before the war was over, some 25,000 Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians were gratefully accepted—“All independent, queer an’ odd, but most amazin’ new,” Kipling wrote. And so they must have seemed to the British regular, for the army he lived in was a closed little world of its own. British officers formed almost a separate caste; most were the sons of officers, civil servants, Anglican clergymen, squires, or professional men; few were the sons of businessmen, and fewer still were the sons of artisans or labourers. The common soldiers were drawn from the lowest classes; more than two-thirds were poor Scots and Irish; many were illiterate. From Irish bogs and Glasgow slums they turned to the army as the only escape from starvation and dulling poverty. Officers did not expect much of them. Lieutenant Colonel Forbes Macbean, who became commanding officer of the Gordon Highlanders, described his recruits:
It is natural not to expect much in the way of individual intelligence either from the recruit who comes from the part of the population which is poorest, worst fed from infancy, least educated, and brought up largely in crowded towns, or from the recruit who, though a country lad, is not naturally a man gifted with intelligence.3
Unlike the Boers, who enrolled bo
ys and old men, the British infantrymen and calvarymen initially sent to South Africa were all at least twenty years old with one year’s service; artillerymen had to be nineteen years old with nine months’ service. Officers excepted, there were few soldiers in South Africa over thirty-five; most were between twenty and thirty.
It was easier for the British to find the men than the necessary supplies. Economy had ever been in the minds of the members of Parliament when examining the military estimates; the nation was now to pay dearly for it. After the failure of the Bloemfontein conference Wolseley had recommended that stores, ordinance, and transport be accumulated in South Africa, but the Cabinet had rejected the idea. Now, three months later, with war almost upon them, the army found itself woefully unprepared: in the army depots there were only scarlet and blue uniforms, none of the new khaki adopted for field service in the Sudan campaign of 1898; there were no reserves of horses, saddles, or horseshoes: the rifles in the reserve all had defective sights; and there were only eighty cavalry swords to spare. Worst of all, the supplies of ammunition were inadequate: there were only 200 rounds per gun for the horse, field, and mountain batteries; of 151 million rounds of rifle ammunition in stock, 66 million were Mark IV, commonly called dumdums (bullets with a slightly cylindrical cavity at their head covered by a hard envelope which expanded on contact and created dreadful wounds). The First Peace Conference, held at The Hague, had just ended 12 July, and twenty-six nations, including Britain, had agreed that dumdums were too barbarous to use. How many were actually fired during the war in South Africa is unknown, but both sides indignantly accused the other of using them, and there is ample and reliable evidence that both sides did.
Not only was there a shortage of everything that would be needed to wage war, but no one at the War Office thought to alert armaments manufacturers until sometime in October that they might expect increased demands on their facilities; in other words, not until a few days before, or perhaps after, the war began. Either the makers of arms, ammunition, and other war supplies did not think there would be a war or, if they did, it appears not to have occurred to them that war would create an increased need for their products. They were, in any case, as unprepared for war as was the army.
Even more serious than the shortage of men and supplies was the fact that the army was neither organized nor trained to fight a major war against an enemy armed with modern weapons. There was no general staff; the mobilization plan was crude; none of the units later thrown together into brigades and divisions had ever worked as a unit; the regular army, militia, yeomanry, volunteers, and colonial forces had no organic connection with each other. Ammunition and money had been saved by trimming musketry training, and the result was that British soldiers could march better than they could shoot; mounted troops were given no musketry training at all, although they were issued carbines.
Money had been saved as well by skimping on the Intelligence Department. Considered not a very important unit, it worked out of an old house in Queen Anne’s Gate on a budget of £18,000. This at a time when the German army’s intelligence unit operated with a budget of £270,000 and a staff that included 300 officers. At Queen Anne’s Gate the entire Foreign Intelligence Section, including clerks, numbered fourteen. The mapping section numbered only 30 persons—versus 230 in the French army’s equivalent—and the lack of maps of South Africa was to prove a costly economy. In spite of these handicaps the Intelligence Department did collect some valuable information, but almost none was passed on to those who were to command in South Africa.
General F. W. Forstier-Walker, Butler’s replacement, who arrived in South Africa just five weeks before the shooting started, later complained that he had received no instructions from the War Office other than to take command: “As to the actual state of affairs and the imminence of war, practically nothing was known beyond the reports which appeared in the daily press.” Sir George White left England to take command of the forces in Natal on 16 September—less than thirty days before war was declared—yet neither the military authorities nor any of the politicians explained the situation to him, outlined British policy, or discussed possible strategies. He did not think of talking with Military Intelligence, nor did anyone suggest it.
The Boers were almost as ignorant of the British army as the British were of theirs, and they had given as little thought to their war plan. However, they began the war with a number of distinct advantages: they were familiar with the country; they had interior lines of supply and communication; their forces in the theatre of operations outnumbered the British; they possessed superior weapons; their organizational structure was simpler and better suited to the type of war they would have to fight; and their fighting men knew how to ride and shoot.
The Boer armies of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, numbering between fifty and sixty thousand (although it is doubtful if more than forty thousand were ever in the field at one time), consisted simply of every able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and there were many above and below those ages who also served. Except for the small numbers in the police force (some units of which fought in the army) and the artillery, it was an army without uniforms, medals, bands, insignia of rank, or pay: there were none of the trappings usually considered necessary to encourage men to become soldiers, and there were none of the rules and regulations usually considered necessary to turn men into fighting machines. There was no marching, drilling, or saluting, and no formal training. In each electoral district (eighteen in the Orange Free State and twenty-two in the Transvaal) there were from two to six “wyks,” or wards, under an elected field cornet. The men of each district formed a commando of indeterminate size under a commandant, also elected. Some of the larger field cornetcies were broken down into corpo-ralships or “seksies” (sections). Each republic had an elected head of its army—a commandant-general in the Transvaal and a commander-in-chief in the Free State—and later there were lesser ranks of generals: assistant commandant-generals and vecht (fighting) generals. Mobilization was a simple matter: the field cornet in each wyk called up the local burghers and they assembled in a nearby town or on a convenient farm, each man with his horse, bridle, saddle, rifle, thirty or more cartridges, and eight days’ provisions. They were then ready to move and to fight.
An exception to the undisciplined, slouching horsemen in the commandos was the staatsartillerie (state’s artillery). This was in both republics well organized, disciplined, and trained by officers who had served in the German army. They wore German-style uniforms, and on parade they marched with the goose step. These few uniformed artillerymen (about 400 in the Orange Free State and 800 in the Transvaal) were in striking contrast to the rest of the Boer army, who went to war clothed in whatever each man deemed appropriate; many from the towns wore business suits and neckties; some of the older men, particularly officers, wore high-crowned hats and frock coats with clawhammer tails; but the most characteristic attire was marked by a broad-brimmed hat, corduroy pants, and a bandolier of ammunition slung over the shoulder.
The only item of equipment which the Boer governments provided was the Mauser rifle. Like the British Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield, the Mauser had a five-cartridge magazine, but there was an important difference: the magazine of the British rifles had to be loaded one cartridge at a time and the soldiers carried their bullets loose in ammunition pouches; the Boers carried their cartridges in clips, and a five-round clip could be inserted quickly by a push of the thumb. Thus, while a British soldier could fire five rounds as fast as a Boer, the latter could fire fifty rounds faster than the soldier could fire twenty because of the speed at which he could reload. The Mauser also had fine and exact sights, and it could kill at 2,200 yards. It was, then, altogether a better weapon than the British rifle. In this rifleman’s war the superiority of the quick-firing Mausers made an immense difference on the battlefield, and the British were soon made aware of it, but in the course of the war no improvements were made in their rifles; no one sugge
sted buying better ones or even using captured Mausers.d
The laws provided penalties for failure to heed the summons to join a commando when called and for desertion, but in actual fact these penalties were rarely imposed. If a man did not like his field cornet or commandant, he simply left his unit and joined another. A burgher was supposed to obtain permission from his officers to go on leave, but frequently, when a man’s wife or his cow took sick, or he himself became homesick, he simply left the war and went home. This unauthorized leave-taking was the bane of every Boer general’s existence.
There were military advantages to this independence. Accustomed to thinking for himself, the Boer was capable of acting in emergencies without waiting for orders. The officers knew that the men with them were highly motivated and trusted them. Battle plans were agreed upon at krygsraads, and each man knew the plan and could act independently to carry it out. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval officer and historian, noted: “Every Boer organization seems susceptible of immediate dissolution into its component units, each of independent vitality, and of subsequent reunion in some assigned place.”4 The British found this disconcerting; Sir Redvers Buller was to complain that Boer units were like those living organisms which can be cut apart without destroying the individual life of the fragments.
Every Boer rode a horse, and with the exception of the staatsartillerie, the entire Boer force consisted of what was essentially mounted infantry. From early childhood most of the men had been raised with horses and oxen: they understood their management. Unlike the British soldiers, they knew how to take care of themselves on the veld and how to take advantage of its terrain. Many of the British soldiers, officers and men, found it difficult to estimate distances in the clear air of the high veld, and this affected their sighting; this was the natural element of the Boer, and he was very good at judging distances; he was familiar with the veld’s bushes, anthills, and kopjes; from his experiences in hunting and in fighting Bantu he knew how to take advantage of cover, both for offence and for defence. To his opponents, coming from the cities and towns of Britain, and even to British farm lads, the veld was strange, its kopjes different from the hills with which they were familiar, its flora and fauna alien and exotic.
Great Boer War Page 7