Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  There came towards the end of that hot afternoon a kind of neutral time. The guns were silent. The British had nearly completed their withdrawal; the Boers had not yet left their trenches. Overhead the vultures swung in great arcs waiting for their banquet hall to be cleared of the butchers. It was then that there occurred one of this day’s last bizarre, inexplicable events. An old man, unarmed, in civilian clothes, mounted on an artillery horse, appeared alone on the battlefield. There was something strange, evasive, and wild about him as he wandered about. Was he a Boer? Some soldiers brought him in. His saddlebags were found to be stuffed with curious loot he had picked up on the field: bits of broken harness and worthless scraps of militaria. Then someone recognized him: he had once been a British officer. John Atkins saw him and asked for an explanation. Where had he come from? Why had this crazy old war horse, this remnant of a man, returned to this field of battle? “Oh, sunstroke in India or something of that sort, you know,” he was told.

  The day of madness ended with a lone madman being led from the battlefield.

  17

  BLACK WEEK

  “The God of our fathers has today granted us a brilliant victory.” So Louis Botha began his dispatch to President Kruger describing the battle and the capture of Long’s guns, those “big, beautiful cannons,” and of “about 170 of their best men.” He estimated his own casualties at “about 30 killed and wounded”; as for the British, “the enemy’s losses must have been terrible”—he thought about 2,000—but he had not ordered a body count; this, he felt, would be too callous. (The real figure appears to have been 38 for the Boers, of whom 8 were killed.) Botha asked the government “to proclaim a general day of prayer to thank Him who gave us this victory.” This was done, for the following day was Dingaan’s Day when, exactly sixty-one years earlier, this same breed of men had driven off Dingaan’s Zulu hordes; now they had repelled the British host. The God of their fathers and grandfathers did indeed seem to be watching over them. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State there was rejoicing, but there was neither the wild jubilation that such stunning victories would have provoked in other countries nor was there surprise, for they believed their cause just and it seemed only natural that the stern, just God they worshipped should guide the bullets of their Mausers to the breasts of the kakies.

  At Colenso the British asked for an armistice to bring in their dead and wounded, and this was agreed to until midnight on the 16th. All day long on that day the ambulances and bearers were busy, and on into the night, in spite of a full eclipse of the moon which hampered their work.

  Although Joubert, who visited the battlefield three days after the fight, saw some of the British dead still on the field and exposed to the vultures, most of the bodies had by then been collected and buried. It was a heavy, loathsome task; burial services were brief and one service did for many, for there is no more sickening sight than raw corpses that have been left exposed to an African sun, and no smell more nauseous. As soon as a row of graves had been dug, field ambulances brought up the dead. Great clouds of blue flies swarmed out when the canvas curtains were thrown back, and the ceremonial burial parties shrank back, sickened by the stench of yesterday’s cheerful, brave companions.

  The wounded were carried to four field hospitals where the busy surgeons worked long and hard. Sir William MacCormac described them:

  Each of the three operating tents contained two operating tables, and as fast as a patient was taken off a table another took his place. Awaiting their turn, the wounded were lying outside in rows, which were continually being augmented by the civilian bearers coming in from the field. As each man reached the hospital he was served with a hot cup of Bovril, large cans of which were boiling outside the tents.... The Royal Army Medical Corps officers of these hospitals had started their surgical work about 3 A.M., and when I visited them in the evening they were still hard at it, having had no food meanwhile and no time for rest, and the work went on for hours afterwards. Altogether some 800 patients passed through the field hospitals during the day. The men showed the utmost pluck and endurance.1

  A drummer boy of about fourteen, his left arm shattered, sat on the back of an ambulance eating a biscuit while waiting his turn on the surgeon’s table. An officer, pitying him and admiring his fortitude, walked up and, in what seems today a curious expression of sympathy, offered him half-a-crown. The money—a day and a half’s pay for a private soldier—was appreciated: “Thank you,” said the boy, “but would you mind putting it in my pocket? I mustn’t let go of the biscuit.”

  A hospital train shuttled between the field hospitals at Colenso and a general hospital at Chievely. Lieutenant Roberts was brought into 4th Brigade Field Hospital in the evening and the next day was sent on to Chievely, where he died that night. The death of Field Marshal Lord Roberts’s only son had a profound effect upon Englishmen everywhere. In Ladysmith Lord Rawlinson wrote in his journal:

  Today I had news which affected me more than any since the beginning of the war. Little Freddy Roberts was killed at Colenso. The helio message says “He was shot in the groin whilst gallantly trying to save the guns.” He was such a charming and fine lad, and I fear to think of the effect his death will have on his family.2

  Joubert wrote a letter of condolence to his parents. So too did Queen Victoria, and to her they replied: “Our loss is grievous, but our boy died the death he would have chosen.”

  The Queen learned of the disaster at Colenso when she went to breakfast on 16 December and was handed “a very unsatisfactory telegram” which the War Office had received from Buller. It had been sent at eleven fifteen the night before and it began: “I regret to report serious reverse....” He calculated that the Boers must have 145,000 men in the field of whom 85,000 were Transvaalers, but Lansdowne noted that the entire population of the Transvaal—men, women, and children—was only 90,000.

  Buller could hardly face the enormity of his failure; he blamed Hart and particularly Long. But the fault lay not with others, but with himself. He was a Victorian Hamlet, wanting action, provoking it, yet afraid of the consequences of acting on his own judgement. He did not, like Hamlet, contemplate suicide, but he did that which for a general is worse: he expressed his conviction that he could not win. He advised the War Office that he considered himself incapable of relieving Ladysmith, and he sent off two extraordinary messages by helio to White in the besieged town saying, “The enemy is too strong for my force ... I cannot break in,” and suggesting that he fire off as much ammunition as he could, destroy his cypher books, and make the best terms possible with the Boers. White could not believe the message was genuine. He thought the Boers had sent it. When it was confirmed he signalled back: “The loss of 12,000 men here would be a heavy blow to England. We must not think of it.”

  It was mid-winter and a thick cold fog hung over England; London in particular was submerged in a dense, dark mist. To those living in this dim and dismal land there came daily news from the southern hemisphere where their soldiers were fighting and sweating under a hot sun. The news they received that second week in December was all bad, and it arrived in profusion: Stormberg on 10 December, Magersfontein on the 11th, and Colenso on the 15th. “What a national fiasco so far!” exclamed Lord Esher. “The gloomiest week in our history for close upon a hundred years,” said Prevost Battersby. Conan Doyle wrote: “The week which extended from 10 December to 17th December, 1899, was the blackest one known during our generation, and the most disastrous for British arms during the century.”3 The Times History noted: “There were no outward signs of panic.... All the same, the nation was more deeply stirred, more profoundly alarmed, than perhaps at any period since the eve of Trafalgar.”4

  “Our generals,” said Herbert Asquith, “seem neither able to win victories nor to give convincing reasons for their defeats.” Throughout the world Britain’s enemies rejoiced. Her famed military might had, not once, but three times in less than a week, gone down to defeat before the rifles of a collection of r
ustics from a pair of tenth-rate republics. Prince Bernhard von Bülow, Germany’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, wrote: “The vast majority of German military experts believe that the S.A. war will end with a complete defeat of the English.” Englishmen living amidst strangers felt this gleeful hostility most. Cecil Spring Rice in Persia wrote (20 December 1899):

  Life is a prolonged nightmare now. The daily telegrams are a horror and working in the morning or late at night is a terrible thing; one lies alone with a living and growing fear staring one in the face. But after all, I have some faith left in the strength and determination and courage of the people and the colonies. And the fellow feeling of America is a real and constant delight.... But, oh, the present horror of it—and out here with vindictive and sneering faces—and the utter helplessness.5

  The New York Journal tried to explain the feelings of the British to its American readers:

  The bewildering thing to the British mind has been the mauling received at the hands of bewhiskered farmers by many regiments which were favorites, whose records so blazed with glory that they were popularly accounted invincible. For instance, “The Black Watch” ... has traditions which are superior to that of any regiment in the world perhaps. Very well—an unimposing body of men who don’t wash very often batter this regiment out of shape.6

  The British were indeed humiliated, but no people on earth bear up under military disaster more stoutly. Their resolve stiffened. When Arthur Balfour mentioned the disasters of Black Week to the Queen she cut him short: “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.” From the Queen to the poorest commoner there developed a determination that this time there would be no giving in as after Majuba. In fact, in the popular mind the uitlanders and their problems were already forgotten and the reason for the fighting was reduced to the slogan: “Avenge Majuba!”

  F. I. Maxse once noted that “Britons do not give personal service to the State until a war is half lost.” Now men from every station in life clamoured to enlist. At the outbreak of the war many prominent men had offered to raise, some even at their own expense, volunteer units for active service, but the authorities at the War Office, contemptuous of military amateurs, repeatedly declined these offers, declaring they would not be needed; besides, there was no War Office staff to handle this function. However, on 18 December, three days after Colenso, the government, purely as a political measure to provide an escape valve for the pent-up enthusiasm of the nation, reluctantly announced that it would permit twelve battalions of militia and some 20,000 selected volunteers from the yeomanry to go to South Africa.

  Tens of thousands of men besieged the recruiting depots, and it was now that the most famous of the English volunteer units was formed: the City of London Imperial Volunteers, universally known as the CIV. It was raised by Sir Alfred Newton, Lord Mayor of London, under Royal Warrant dated 24 December 1899. Although rifles were drawn from the Tower, all of the equipment and clothing, including the smasher slouch hats turned up on one side, as well as a Maxim machine gun and six 12½-pounder quick-firing guns of the latest pattern bought from Vickers, were paid for out of a special Mansion House Fund to which the public subscribed £100,000.

  The CIV was in many respects remarkable. In addition to the battery of artillery, it contained a battalion of infantry and two companies of mounted infantry, 1,550 men in all—almost a miniature army in itself. Its commanding officer, Colonel W. H. Mackinnon, was a regular army officer, as were most of his staff; there were a few regular army noncommissioned officers, but most of the unit, officers and men, had had no previous military experience. Even Colonel Mackinnon, a half-pay guardsman, had seen no active service during his thirty years in the army.

  For the first time in British history social classes other than the highest and the lowest were part of the fighting force: the CIV included an officer of the crown, nine barristers, seven architects, two bankers, thirty civil servants, four schoolmasters, and a ship owner. Tom Cockrane was elected to Parliament while serving in its ranks. Colonel Mackinnon was astonished and amused by the quality of his men. Inquiring of a sentry what his profession was, he was told: “I have none, sir, but my amusement in life is archaeology.” On shipboard, he inquired about a sergeant who in rough weather was exceptionally steady on his feet, and was told that he owned a yacht. Their manners, while impeccable, were incongruously civilian, and Mackinnon had cause to complain of his sergeants: “The conversational style in which some of them give commands to strong squads is not conducive to efficiency.”

  The CIV was hastily raised. The first men were sworn in on 1 January 1900, and less than two months later the first detachment, about 500 strong, embarked for South Africa. Within a month all had sailed. Friends gave the unit 2,000 bottles of whiskey and enough beer to issue five gallons to every man.

  A popular magazine reported: “The sole fear of the soldiers who are going out late is that the war will be over before they arrive and have a chance to win a medal.”7 It was said that “many young men about town justified their existence for the first time.” There were other volunteer units besides the CIV. Twenty-two peers of the realm and twenty-seven members of Parliament volunteered, most of them in the yeomanry. Among the regulars there was some dissatisfaction because the volunteers were paid more, but the men in a unit known as the Duke of Cambridge’s Own were all men of substance who paid their own way, equipped and provisioned themselves in style, and donated their pay to the Widows and Orphans Fund. By the end of February some 4,900 of these ill-trained volunteers had sailed for South Africa, some being shipped out free of charge by the steamship lines.

  This surge of jingoism was not confined to Britain. Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians sank their complaints about the mother country in a fierce pride in the Empire. The prime minister of New Zealand expressed the sentiments of most colonials when he said:

  The war is only nominally with the Boers; actually it is with all who are jealous of the growing power of the British Empire, and who, rejoicing in our reverses, are aiding and abetting the Boers. The reverses suffered are only temporary; they will be followed by the invariable, inevitable success of British arms.

  An innocent victim of the fervid patriotism stirred up by Black Week was Sir William Butler. He who had done so much to try to prevent the war was now viciously attacked in the press. He pleaded with the War Office either to defend his character or to allow him to defend it himself, but he received a cold reply from Lansdowne: “I am to state that it is not desirable that officers should take note of criticisms in the Press as to the manner in which they have discharged their duties.”

  Many thoughtful Britons deplored the war but were convinced that it had to be fought—and won. Lord Grey was one such, and in a letter to Katherine Lyttelton, Sir Neville’s wife, written shortly after the war started, he said:

  I am depressed about this war: I admit the necessity of it and that it must be carried through, but it has no business to be popular, and the cry of “Revenge Majuba” dishonours us and destroys our reputation for good faith. I should like to break the heads of all the Music Halls first and then go out and teach the Boers gravely and sternly the things which they do not know.8

  A small but literate and vocal minority opposed the war from the beginning to the end. It included W. T. Stead, one of the most famous journalists and publishers of the period, who began a weekly paper called War Against War in South Africa; Beatrice Webb, mother of modern socialism; Leonard Courtney, a member of Parliament who headed a “Stop the War Committee”; and two future prime ministers: Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and David Lloyd George. Few went as far as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who was actually pro-Boer and openly jubilant in the midst of Black Week. In his diary for 17 December he wrote: “The Boers are making a splendid fight for their freedom, and are winning all along the line. Every honest man, English or not, ought to rejoice.”9

  Beatrice Web
b had ambiguous feelings, for, as she said, “Any criticism of the war at present is hopelessly unpopular.... And who can fail to be depressed at the hatred of England on the Continent: it is comforting to put it down to envy and malice, but not convincing.”10 Indeed, the flood of hatred for the British which swept Europe was deeply felt, but it helped to increase British solidarity. The Boers were encouraged by all this pro-Boer, anti-British sentiment to hope that one or more of the European powers would intervene, but this was an ignis fatuus, for as Winston Churchill later said in his maiden speech in the House of Commons: “No people in the world received so much verbal sympathy and so little support.”11

  Many Americans and many Boers made a comparison between the war in South Africa and the revolution of the colonists in North America 120 years earlier. The bulk of popular sentiment in the United States favoured the Boers, but President William McKinley and the American government were well aware of the embarrassing moral position of the United States at that moment. The country had just finished an imperialistic war of its own with Spain, a war in which Britain had taken a position actively friendly to the United States. Furthermore, the Americans had taken the Philippines as part of their booty, and the American army was actively engaged in suppressing those Filipinos who wanted their freedom. It would obviously be contradictory, not to say hypocritical, of the American government to express sympathy for the Boers struggling for their independence while shooting Filipinos who were struggling for theirs. The pro-Boer American consul in Pretoria was replaced by Adalbert Hay, son of the secretary of state, whose sympathies were with the British; the Americans undertook to look after British interests in the Transvaal, and young Hay was particularly solicitous for the welfare of British prisoners of war. Before it ended, the war was to see many Americans fighting on both sides.