Hannay appears to have been in a state of nervous exhaustion. The strain of the past few days had been great, and Kitchener had added to it by goading him unmercifully; with this last infeasible order Hannay reached his breaking point. He sent his staff away, hastily gathered up 50 mounted men, and led them in a wild charge straight at the Boer lines. Those who followed him were shot from their saddles; Hannay kept his until he fell riddled with bullets just inside the Boer position.
Hannay’s dramatic, desperate act of self-immolation had a profound affect upon the officers and men, all of whom recognized it as a protest against Kitchener’s ruthless indifference to the lives of his soldiers. Kitchener himself, completely unmoved, continued to throw his regiments at the enemy positions: three companies of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry made a gallant charge, their colonel cheering his men on as he fell mortally wounded; the Canadians, too, attempted a charge. By the end of the day the exhausted troops could do no more. Many had had nothing to eat since the night before, and their water bottles had long been empty. An Oxfordshire soldier wrote: “I dreamed of a battle the night before, but I never thought it could be as terrible as this. We were mad with thirst and our officers flopped down like ninepins.”4 When the sun set on the bloody battlefield, even Kitchener was forced to give it up.
The Boers too were exhausted. Caught like animals in a trap, all were anxious, many were frightened. The laager was a scene of destruction and confusion. Wagons had been blown up or set on fire by the British guns. The ground was covered with debris; bits and pieces of boxes, bundles, casks, and broken wagons were everywhere. Hundreds of dead oxen and horses lay about. There were no doctors; the women, with faces pale and drawn, were doing what they could for the wounded amid the smoke and fire and din of exploding shells, while terrified children crouched whimpering in holes in the earth.
At the end of the first day Kitchener sent off a message to Roberts reporting that the laager was not yet taken and that casualties had been great, but he hoped to “do something more definite” the next day. Kitchener’s furious assaults of 18 February had indeed produced high casualties for the British: 1,262 in all, including 20 officers and 300 men killed or mortally wounded.
When Roberts read Kitchener’s report he decided that he must take over the conduct of the battle himself, and at once. Rising from his sick bed, he left Jacobsdal at four o’clock in the morning and reached Paardeberg six hours later. He found Kitchener, in spite of the objections of all his subordinate commanders, planning to renew the infantry assaults. Roberts, appalled by the losses on the previous day, wished to avoid “a further loss of life which did not appear . . . to be warranted by the exigencies of the situation.” He was sure that Cronjé could be pounded into submission by his artillery without risking additional casualties in bloody bayonet charges. Kitchener was sent away—Roberts ordered him to expedite the repair of the railway and its bridges.
Cronjé asked for an armistice to bring in the wounded and bury the dead, but Roberts rejected this and sent him a demand for unconditional surrender. Cronjé’s reply in Dutch was translated as: “Since you are so unmerciful as not to accord the time asked for, nothing remains for me but to do as you wish.”5 Roberts understandably assumed that this meant Cronjé had surrendered, and he sent troops marching towards the river to collect the prisoners. They were quickly driven back by a sharp fire from the Boers. Far from being a surrender, Cronjé’s message had been one of defiance and correctly translated read: “... nothing remains for me to do. You do as you wish.” He made himself clearer in a further exchange: “During my lifetime I will never surrender. If you wish to bombard, fire away. Dixi. ”
Fire away is what the British did, shelling the Boer positions with every gun they possessed. At first Roberts did not realise that the laager contained women and children, but as soon as he learned of their presence he offered them a safe conduct out. Cronjé for unknown reasons refused this and so these innocents too were exposed to the full fury of the British artillery.
Nearly fifty British guns of all sizes were trained on Cronjé’s laager and his positions along the river, while he had only four guns and a pompom with which to reply. All day long, every day, the lyddite shells rained on the immobile Boers. The gunners could hardly miss this easily defined target. Wagon after wagon was set afire and burned down to a pile of blackened scrap iron and smouldering wood ashes. The losses among the cattle and horses were enormous. It was impossible to bury them all; many were thrown into the river, but the current was not strong enough to carry them away. A Boer diarist recorded the conditions:
Bombardment heavier than usual. The burghers are recalcitrant and in consequence the General’s authority wanes rapidly. There is hardly any food. ... The stench of the decomposed oxen and horses is awful. The water of the river is putrid with carrion.... The sufferings of the wounded are heartrendering. Little children huddled together in bomb-proof excavations are restless, hungry and crying. The women are adding their sobs to the plaintive exhortations of the wounded. All the time the shelling never abates.... Nearly every man, woman and child is lyddite-stained.... It is too much for flesh and blood.6
News of Cronjé’s plight spread rapidly. Throughout the republics there was anxiety. Kruger conducted a night-long vigil in the Dopper church in Pretoria, and similar services were held throughout the Transvaal. Out on the veld around the British encirclement hovered Boer commandos. In most of these there was much hand-wringing, but the leaders were uncertain and afraid. French in his dash from Kimberley had, unknown to him, frightened off J.S. Ferreira and his Free Staters who had intended to link up with Cronjé. The Transvaalers in the area hung back and sent a wire to Joubert in Natal asking what they should do. Joubert sent them a blistering reply:
How is this possible? Are there not instructions enough from the banks of the Modder, whence for so many days already General Cronje has been calling in his agony “Come relieve me”? What other instructions can now be given or demanded than, with one voice and one mouth, “Burghers of South Africa, go and help deliver your general from the might of the tyrant”? ... Relieve Cronje, cost what it will.... trust firmly in God and He will give you strength. Relieve Cronje.7
Only Christiaan de Wet acted promptly with courage and resolution. On the south bank of the river was a hill which the British had christened Kitchener’s kopje. The detachment of Kitchener’s Horse stationed there were not actively engaged in the fighting, and on the afternoon of the 19th they rode to a nearby farm for water. Without warning De Wet pounced. With 500 burghers he captured the detachment and then occupied the hill. A quick-witted British staff officer gathered up some mounted infantry and three companies of the Gloucestershire Regiment and interposed them between Kitchener’s kopje and the Yorkshires who were facing Cronjé’s laager. Dusk found the British fighting back to back on this portion of the battlefield.
De Wet wrote a message to Cronjé urging him to abandon his laager and everything in it and fight his way out at night. If he would only move, De Wet stood ready to help in the breakout and to cover his retreat. The bearer of the message was Danie Theron, who was to become the most famous of the Boer scouts and a popular hero whose exploits are still remembered. (There is a Regiment Danie Theron in the South African army today.)
Carrying De Wet’s message, Theron successfully inched his way through the British lines to Cronjé’s laager and then made his way back again. Of this feat De Wet said: “He had performed an exploit unequalled in the war. Both in going and returning he had crawled past the British sentries, tearing his trousers to rags during the process. The blood was running from his knees, where the skin had been scrapped off.”8
The mission was unsuccessful. Neither De Wet’s message nor Theron’s pleading could persuade the stubborn Cronjé to break out. A few burghers managed to slip away and join De Wet, including Commandant (later General) C. C. Froneman and that curious Boer prophet, Niklaas van Rensburg. De Wet fought to hold his position as long
as possible, but he could not long remain without becoming surrounded himself. He got away just in time. The British could not then have known it, but the capture of De Wet would have been a more significant blow to the Boer cause than the defeat of Cronjé.
Conditions in the British camps did not compare with the frightful conditions in the Boer laager, but they were not pleasant. The polluted Modder was the only source of water, and it would appear that care was not taken to see that all water was drawn upstream. The soldiers called the water “dead horse soup.” On 24 February Captain Slocum in his dispatch to the United States War Department reported: “But strange to say ... there have been only 126 cases of enteric or typhoid fever, and those of a mild type.” This favourable situation was not to last long.
Most of the sick and wounded had to lie on the ground exposed to sun and rain, for most of the tents had been left behind to reduce the baggage. Mr. Wilson Cheyne, a surgeon, had difficulty getting sterilized water and was short of dressings, but he made light of the sufferings of his patients, later testifying, “I think the hardships of the sick and wounded at Paardeberg was of very little consequence.... I do not think that the fact of the patients being in the open affected them a bit.”9
On 26 February, after nine days of bombardment, Cronjé sent word to Roberts that he was ready to surrender. Conditions in the laager had become unendurable. Roberts’s guns had done their work. Early on the morning of 27 February, the nineteenth anniversary of the battle of Majuba, Cronjé, accompanied by his wife and his secretary, rode out of the laager. General Sir George Pretyman and a small escort came to meet them and conduct them to Roberts’s camp.
A crowd of officers and newspaper correspondents came to watch but stood respectfully back as Cronjé, alone on a bony grey pony, rode forward. One observer described him as “a great heavy bundle of a man. ... Great square shoulders, from which the heavy beard was thrust forward so that he seemed humped; a heavy face, shapeless with unkempt, grey-tinged, black hair; lowering under heavy brows, from under which small, cunning, foxy eyes peered shiftily.”10 Another remarked that he was “rather fat, red-faced above his beard, a hard looking man.”11 Battersby told readers of the Morning Post that he “looked like nothing as much as a Welsh farmer going round his stock.” Although observers disagreed as to whether his tattered coat was yellow, green, or brown and whether his blue trousers were serge or frieze, all agree that he wore a wide-brimmed, grey slouch hat and carried a sjambok.
In striking contrast to the shabby, hulking Cronjé was the dapper little field marshal who stepped out to greet him as he dismounted from his pony. Roberts, simply and neatly dressed in khaki, without any badge of rank but carrying the splendid presentation sword given him for his famous Kabul-to-Kandahar march, walked up and extended his hand.
“I am glad to see you,” he said. “You have made a gallant defence, sir.”
Roberts led Cronjé to his tent and offered him breakfast, but he refused. Later he took lunch and was given champagne; a staff officer sent him a cigar. The British stared at these unhappy people-Cronjé, his wife, and his secretary—with unabashed curiosity. The presence of Mrs. Cronjé in their camp seemed especially strange. Colonel N.J. C. Rutherford described her as “a small, dark, dried-up looking woman,” and a newsman saw “a thin, decrepit woman,” who “in her rough straw hat and dirty old black dress, without cloak or shawl of any sort, presented a hopelessly miserable, draggled and woebegone appearance.” Still another found her “a motherly little old woman” with a toothless grin.
The arrangements for the surrender were soon made. The sixty-five-year-old Cronjé, who spoke little English, said almost nothing but sat tary (who was also his nephew) spoke for him. Defeat was bitter indeed for the “Lion of Potchefstroom.” “His set, hardened face only suggested that the bitterest hour of his life was being barely endured,” reported The Times correspondent.
All accounts of the surrender mention that Cronjé requested that his wife and secretary be permitted to accompany him into captivity. That a man of Cronjé’s character, his mind numbed by horror and humiliation, would have made so personal a request seems unlikely. It is more probable that the request was prompted by his wife and made by his nephew without his knowledge. It may well have been a surprise to him to find his wife and nephew beside him when he set off in a closed carriage under guard for Cape Town.
The British watched with amazed curiosity as the rank-and-file Boers, escorted by a battalion of the Buffs, shambled out of their trenches and away from their foul and smoking laager, a nondescript crowd of about 4,000 burghers, many with weeping wives and children, their belongings done up in coloured handkerchiefs or striped blankets; many clutched their Bibles. A girl carried her arm in a stained sling, her pale face disfigured by a red scar almost hidden by her sunbonnet. “Clad in ill-fitting garments of extraordinary incongruity, laden with parasols, bundles, teapots, and bottles; many with umbrellas and many with galoshes ... in appearance a mob of frowsy vagrants.”12 One observer thought them “the most singular lot of people to be seen at that moment upon earth.”13 “They are the worst-looking men I have ever seen,” wrote Julian Ralph. “They are wild-eyed, savage, dull-witted, misshapen. Those who show symptoms of a brain appear to be unbalanced.” Such were the impressions made by Cronjé’s folk on the civilians present.
The soldiers who had fought these brave, resolute people reacted differently. “It was a great sight and they were a fine-looking lot of men,” said Seymour Vandeleur. A tall Australian soldier ran up and kissed all the babies. “He did it,” said Prevost Battersby, “with the indulgence of a man long deprived of such a pleasure, and the women seemed quite to understand.”14 Captain Slocum, the American military observer, wrote:
I do not know what history will say of these people, but personally, words fail to express adequately my admiration for their tenacious and brave defense under the conditions in which they were placed.
The women were at once given safe-conduct by Lord Roberts to go anywhere they wished, the wounded immediately cared for by the British doctors, and rations distributed to all.15
About two-thirds of the prisoners were from the western Transvaal; the rest were Free Staters. It would appear that they were fairly representative of the general Boer population: out of 1,000 prisoners, one in seven had one of the nine most common Afrikaner names. There were 21 named Pretorius, 23 named Van Vuren, and 19 Van der Merwe; there
The British entering the Boer laager were horrified. Battersby found the smell overwhelming:
Camping on the battlefield one became acclimated to the scent of death. But no human soul could have grown used to the reek of that slaughter-house. It was appalling. Shrapnel had scattered the bodies of beasts; lyddite had turned them inside out. Cattle, twisted out of the likeness of kine, stripped to a red and skinless horror, rent into mounds of broken pieces, lay on every hand and had lain there for weeks, under a sun that turns meat sour almost between the plate and the mouth.16
A subaltern wrote to his wife:
Three horses lay piled one upon another.... Terrible was the agony expressed in the contortion of the topmost horse. His glossy bay neck, down which a thin crimson stain was oozing, curved back in a splendid arch, propped against the wither of the horse below. The lips were drawn back from the gums, and the glistening teeth clenched convulsively in the black mane of his prostrate comrade. 17
James Barnes went among the prisoners and talked with them. A pretty girl in a sunbonnet with a tear-streaked face came up to him: “What are you going to do with us?”
Barnes, an American, answered, “Why, send you back to your homes safe and sound. What do you think the British are?”
One man asked Barnes if he thought he would be able to keep his cart and horse, as he had his old mother with him and she was unable to walk far. Barnes was astonished: “His old mother, forsooth! I thought to myself that a laager was a nice place to bring one’s old mother, but I did not say so.”18
Th
e able-bodied men were sent off to Cape Town, the first stage of their long journey to the prisoner-of-war camp the British had established on the island of St. Helena. Some of the women were allowed to accompany their men as far as Cape Town. The wounded were sent to the Boer hospital in British-occupied Jacobsdal. Dr. H. Küttner, a German doctor with the Boers, described their condition:
The wounded at Cronjé’s laager ... were almost all infected to some extent. So, whereas we should have had little operating to do, we now operate daily on many of the wounded, amputating, which would not have been necessary but for the sepsis from which many would have died, as some have, from tetnus.19
The surrender of Cronjé spread consternation among the Boers. De Wet spoke of the “indescribable panic throughout ... all the laagers on the veld.... If the famous Cronjé were captured, how could any ordinary burgher be expected to continue his resistance!” It was the Boers’ first major defeat, and it marked a turning point in the war. News of the disaster spread through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. At Vereeniging, a small town on the Vaal River 35 miles south of Johannesburg, Dr. T. N. Leslie wrote in his journal:
On the 29th [February] we heard of a big battle in which Cronje had been made prisoner and his entire army either killed or made prisoners. All the Boers from this district were in this commando and a week later when the news began to filter among the farms, it was pitiable to see the women and children; and the scenes at the post office were indescribably pathetic.... all the women from that part, were crying and fainting.20
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