The Orange Free State still had some outmoded cannon, but the staatsartillerie of the Transvaal was equipped with sixty or seventy modern guns of the latest design: from France the Transvaal government had bought 75mm and 155mm Creusot guns equipped with recoil mechanisms (the latter came to be known as “Long Toms”); from Germany they purchased 120mm Krupp howitzers; and from England—yes, England—twenty-two or twenty-three 37mm Vickers-Maxim automatic quick-firing guns (called pompoms from the sound they made) which fired a belt of ten 1-pound shells at a rate of one every two seconds and had a range of about 4,000 yards. The pompom had been designed for naval use, but the Boers thought it would be a handy weapon on the veld, as indeed it was. All of these guns used smokeless powder, which made them difficult to locate. Seeing how valuable a weapon the pompom was in the hands of their enemy, the Royal Artillery finally ordered some for themselves.
Both sides used machine guns, mostly .303-inch Maxims, although their proper employment was not understood. They were mounted on carts, and men could not seem to make up their minds whether they were infantry weapons or artillery pieces. It is curious that neither side used mortars. This uncomplicated weapon was known to earlier generations of soldiers, and a lightweight mortar would have been most useful and practical, but apparently no one ever thought of it. Hand grenades were not used either, except for some homemade varieties.
Both the telephone and the telegraph existed in 1899—Johannesburg had a telephone exchange in 1895—but their use on the battlefield was limited, commanders not understanding their full potentiality. Before the war was over, a wireless message had crossed the Atlantic, but none crossed the veld.
Observation balloons, made of goldbeater’s skin, were employed by the British, but there is no evidence that a commanding officer ever went up in one, and often they were not sent up when they would have been most useful. It does not appear that anyone ever thought of equipping the observer with a telephone; he reported his observations by signals.
The British had a small photographic unit, but their generals preferred to rely upon the more familiar sketches made by officers. It is curious that the provincial and pastoral Boers used every modern device they could lay their hands on and were not afraid of innovation while the British officers, representing one of the most technologically advanced nation in the world, scorned the fruits of technology and were hidebound traditionalists.
The Boers were no longer quite as homogeneous as they had been in the early voortrekker days; there were now greater economic and cultural differences. There were town Boers, many of whom had been educated in Europe; trekboers who continued the roving life of the voortrekkers; a few primitive “wild Boers”—often called takhaaren from their custom of trimming their hair around a bowl—mostly nomadic big-game hunters from the Zoutpansberg area; but most were still simply farmers. Indeed, the farm was always the Boer’s status symbol: even the town Boers, and certainly politicians, including intellectuals such as Jan Smuts, possessed a farm.
Most visitors to South Africa who met the Boers for the first time found themselves admiring them. Richard Harding Davis, the American war correspondent and novelist, wrote his mother from the Transvaal that “personally I know no class of men I admire so much or who to-day preserve the best and oldest ideas of charity, fairness and good-will to men.”5 Even the British correspondents were impressed, or many of them. G. W. Steevens wrote:
They are big, bearded men, loose of limb, shabbily dressed in broad brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter easy and erect; unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness.... their bearing stamps them as free men. A people hard to rouse, you say—and as hard, when roused, to subdue.6
By September 1899 the Boers had girded up their loins for war. They knew what they would be fighting for: their independence. The British were not only unprepared, they were still not quite certain why they were going to fight, at least not officially. Chamberlain told Milner that although “the casus belli is a very weak one” the Cabinet had agreed to send the Transvaal an ultimatum. This decision was reached on 29 September; on the same day the volksraad passed a resolution giving immediate and full rights to all foreigners who were willing to fight for the country’s independence. Chamberlain thought that the British public had now been sufficiently propagandized to accept the war, and he told Milner that “the majority of the people have recognized that there is a greater issue than the franchise or the grievances of the Uitlanders at stake and that our supremacy in South Africa and our existence as a great Power in the world are involved.... Three months ago we could not—that is, we should not have been allowed to—go to war on this issue. Now we shall be sufficiently supported.”7
The first week of October, with Boer and Briton poised on the brink of war, both sides were silent. No words, written or spoken, were exchanged between the tense men in London and Pretoria. It was, as Anthony Nutting said, “As in a motion picture when the reel is stopped, the characters in the drama were frozen into immobility.”8 A New York newspaper cabled Kruger to ask if the Boers would really fight. Smuts replied for him: “Yes. It will be a fight that will stagger humanity.”
The British ultimatum as approved by the Cabinet demanded “a complete surrender on the part of the Boers either by agreement or by war.” Among its demands were that the Transvaal repeal all legislation passed since 1881 which affected the rights of the uitlanders, that it grant home rule to the inhabitants of the Rand, that there be arbitration without third parties in disputes, that the Transvaal “surrender” its rights to import arms through Mozambique, and, just to make sure that their ultimatum would be rejected, the British demanded that the Transvaalers disarm.
In the end it mattered very little what the British ultimatum said. For incomprehensible reasons it was not telegraphed but sent by mail steamer to South Africa, and in the meantime the Boers had been busy drafting their own ultimatum and they delivered theirs first: on 10 October 1899, Kruger’s seventy-fourth birthday, the Transvaal ultimatum, largely drafted by Jan Smuts but signed by F. W. Reitz as state secretary, after reminding the British of the terms of the London Convention respecting uitlanders, demanded that Britain withdraw her troops from the border, remove from South Africa all troops that had arrived since 1 June, and send back the troops now on the high seas bound for South Africa. Unless “an immediate and affirmative answer” to these demands was received by five o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, 11 October 1899, the Transvaal would consider the British to have declared war. A British government Blue Book was to call this “the most egregious document ever addressed to a great Power by a petty state.”
De Tocqueville said that “in a political democracy the most peaceful of all people are the generals.” So it was in the Transvaal. When the ultimatum was approved by the volksraad in secret session, four of the seven dissenting votes were cast by Piet Joubert, Koos de la Rey, Lucas Meyer, and Louis Botha—all future leaders in the Transvaal army and destined to play principal roles in the fighting. De la Rey, addressing the members, declared that it was foolish even to talk of war with Great Britain, but added, “I shall do my duty as the Raad decides.”
President Steyn of the Orange Free State was still making frantic efforts to prevent the inevitable. He wrote pleading but futile letters to both Kruger and Milner. Kruger replied: “Peace is entirely out of the question.” Milner ignored him. When all about him have gone mad, the man of reason is helplessly ineffectual.
“They have done it!” exclaimed Chamberlain with delight when he received news of the Transvaal’s ultimatum. “Accept my felicitations,” Landsdowne wrote him. “I don’t think Kruger could have played our cards better than he has.... My soldiers are in ecstasies.”
The Free Staters quickly cast their lot with the Transvaalers. President Steyn, bowing to the inevitable, told the Free State volksraad, “I believe that nothi
ng happens without the will of the Almighty and that He, who helped our forefathers in such a marvelous way, will take pity on us. In any case, His will be done.”
ACT I
7
WAR BEGINS
At five o’clock on 11 October 1899—just at tea time, noted The Times—the war officially began. The time of trying to make sense of the muddled issues was over. Slogans would do now: “Independence!” for the Boers; “Avenge Majuba!” for the British. A declaration of war is an abandonment of reason; the time for negotiations which end only in exasperation is past; there is an end to argument and the kind of suspense which debate generates. The hopes and fears of compromise are in an instant wiped from the mind. Suspense is ended in the relief of action, the comfort of a decision taken.
The declaration of war told every man, woman, and child capable of understanding in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State that they had all been launched upon an momentous enterprise. None knew just how momentous. Dangerous it surely would be, but none knew how dangerous, nor did any suspect the tragic effect the war would have upon the women and children. The beginning of a war is like the setting out on a perilous journey to an unknown land: reactions vary from fear to delight; between these emotional poles, varying degrees of anxiety and excitement surge through the populace.
As a people the Boers faced the war with confidence and determination; their morale was high, their cause was just, and surely God would help them, provide miracles, and give them ultimate victory. Still, a declaration of war becomes a personal matter, and each considers what he or she might lose and in what ways life will be altered: the strange becomes familiar; the familiar strange.
In the eastern Free State three of the Pohl boys were on their way home from a swim when they met their sister Sophia running breathlessly towards them calling out that the war had begun. Almost immediately a young neighbour came riding up with orders for Stephen and Frederick Pohl to join the Ladybrand Commando which was assembling at Van Rooyen’s farm. All the older Pohl boys had, like the other burghers, been issued Mauser rifles; one had even been given to thirteen-year-old Victor.
The two oldest boys left at first light the next morning. They tried to appear calm as they left, forcing their impatient ponies to a seemly walk until they were out of sight of home and those waving good-bye. Then they dashed off to Van Rooyen’s farm. When the commando assembled, there were speeches, a prayer, and then they all sang a hymn: “Slechts vertrouwen dat is al” (Simply trusting, that is all).
It was a scene repeated in every town and throughout the countryside in every district of the two republics. The field cornets sent out the assembly orders; the women hurried to bake bread, pack biltong, prepare clothing for their menfolk; the men looked to their horses, harnesses, and rifles; then there were the farewells and the men rode off. Once assembled, the commandos set off for the frontiers, the jumping-off points for the invasion of Cape Colony and Natal.
It was all simple and very informal. Another Pohl boy, Willie, was visiting in the Transvaal when war was declared; he did not bother to return to the Free State, but simply joined a Transvaal commando with his brother-in-law. Both were soon fighting on the Natal front. Hjalmar Reitz, eldest son of the Transvaal’s state secretary, was even further away, studying law in the Netherlands, but he at once left his studies to hurry back for the war.
Alida Badenhorst rose early the morning of the day her husband was to leave to join his commando. She had his packing to do and much to occupy her, but she stood for a moment looking down at the great bearded man still asleep in the bed. A revelation came to her such as comes to many women in wartime, and through the long years of the war she never forgot the moment: “Have I then,” she thought, “always had this great treasure in the house and not before fully known it?”
For the young, excitement usually crowded out other emotions. Freda Schlosberg, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Russian immigrant in the boarding school of the Loreto Convent in Pretoria, wrote in her diary on 25 September 1899:
There is not much study going on. Everybody is excited, expecting war to break out, and almost every class is divided into pro-Boers and pro-Britishers. We discuss, argue and quarrel, and sometimes almost fight. Our Lady Superior called us together and told us that in future the discussion of politics was forbidden. But who can stop us talking politics?1
Just before the declaration of war Freda was taken from the convent to her parents’ farm at Bronkhorstspruit, where she saw trains being loaded with horses and men for the journey to the front and watched the resolute farewells of the mothers, wives, and sweethearts gathered to see their men off. “Few, very few tears were shed by the women at the station. Why should they weep? The war will not last long and their men would return triumphant, having driven the English into the sea and taken over their farms and homes.”2 When a commando bivouacked at the farm one day, the convent-raised young girl delightedly discovered another aspect of war: “These young commandos are very audacious and seem always to be looking at me.”
Friends and relatives, even members of the same family, sometimes found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Shortly after the war started, T. N. Leslie visited the home of a family he knew in Heidelberg and found a mother with her two daughters: the husband of one daughter was fighting with the British; the husband of the other daughter and the father of the family were with Boer commandos. There were many such divided families in Cape Colony.
Loyalist Cape Colony families living near the border were fearful of a Boer invasion, but few had any definite plans in case it really occurred; most were unable to make up their minds to any course of action. Dr. G. A. “Jack” Heberden, a thirty-nine-year-old district surgeon at Barclay West, knew exactly what he wanted to do. “Every Englishman strong enough ought to offer his services for the Queen,” he told his young wife Winifred, and they rode off to Kimberley, their three-year-old son tied to the doctor’s back by a blanket.
The British, if not ready, were eager; in England there was wild enthusiasm for the war. The disgrace of Majuba Hill, the humiliating peace terms of the first war, the fiasco of the Jameson Raid, could all be put behind them; there would be no more shilly-hallying. Britain was, after all, the greatest Power (always capitalized) in the world, and the world would be made to know it. These last years of Queen Victoria’s reign have been called the “braggart years,” and indeed the British had never before so preened themselves: never before, nor since, had Britons swelled with such an intensity of imperial pride.
Their Empire was growing by leaps and bounds: in the preceding thirty years alone nearly 5 million square miles of land and some 88 million people had been added to it. There was a firm, unshakable belief that Britain had not only the capability but the right to rule over such vast dominions. That in sixty years it would all disappear would have been thought an impossibility. Even the Queen seemed indestructible: she had sat on the throne for sixty-two years and most people could not remember living under any other sovereign. For the Queen and Empire then; for the enfranchisement of the uitlander and for British paramountcy, to avenge Majuba and protect the natives, and from sheer national pride, the British people went joyfully into war.
Scarcely anyone believed that the war would seriously strain Britain’s resources or that it would last more than six months. Most would have agreed with the member of Parliament who told the House of Commons: “I believe the war will be brief and that we will be victorious and that such a result will be to the advantage of the Boers, the blacks, and the British alike.”3 There were, however, a few unbelievers. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, that singular Englishman, vociferous in his hatred of the British Empire, wrote in his diary on the first day of the war: “I look upon the war as perhaps the first nail driven into the coffin of the British Empire. I believe that if the Boers can hold out for six months Europe will intervene.”4
More typical was the reaction of Rudyard Kipling, who embraced the war with fervour. He formed a volunte
er company in the village of Rottingdean, near Brighton, and then turned to raising money for the Soldiers’ Families’ Fund. Of the more than two dozen poems the war inspired him to write, “The Absent Minded Beggar,” his plea for the Fund, was the most celebrated at the time. It began:
When you’ve shouted “Rule Britannia,” when you’ve sung “God Save the Queen,”
When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth,
Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine For a gentleman in kharki ordered south?
He’s an absent minded beggar, and his weaknesses are great—But we and Paul must take him as we find him—
He is out on active service, wiping something off a slate—And he’s left a lot of little things behind him! Duke’s son—cook’s son—son of a hundred kings—(Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!)
Each of ’em doing his country’s work (and who’s to look after their things?)
Pass the hat for your credit’s sake, and pay—pay—pay!
Great Boer War Page 8