Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  But the war was not about to end, and although Roberts certainly did not want to dally at Bloemfontein, logistics and infection caught up with him and his stay was longer than he or anyone else anticipated.

  Stores, supplies, remounts, and men were pouring into South African ports at a prodigious rate. The Royal Navy had organised the movement of men and supplies in an exemplary manner, proving to the world Britain’s ability to project its power 7,000 miles from its homeland. Reinforcements were arriving in South Africa at the rate of 30,000 per month, and there was no lack of food or fodder. But it was not easy to move men, animals, gear, and supplies into the interior where they were needed. East London, the nearest port, was 400 miles from Bloemfontein; Port Elizabeth was 450 miles away; and Cape Town, the main base, was now 750 miles from Roberts and his army. The railways were straining, but the last 90 miles, from Springfontein to Bloemfontein, were served by only a single track. Two trains of twenty-four trucks each were required daily simply to keep Roberts’s army supplied with food—and in addition he badly needed horses, fodder, and equipment of all sorts. By the time he reached Bloemfontein he had only five days’ supply of breadstuff for his 34,000 men; for his 11,500 horses there was practically no fodder at all. Colonel Richardson managed to secure twenty-seven days’ additional rations and some fodder in the town, but the situation was critical. Through traffic on the railway was not open until 29 March, and from then until 7 April Roberts was able to obtain only 286 truckloads, scarcely more than half the number he needed.

  Although the British had made some use of steam road transport, it was the horse, the mule, the ox, and the locomotive that were the decisive factors in the war. The shortage of horses was serious, for the value of mounted troops against a mounted enemy was becoming increasingly apparent. British purchasing agents had been sent to the United States, Argentina, Spain, Italy, and Hungary to buy horses and mules, but they could never get enough. The loss of horseflesh in the war was appalling. By the time French reached Bloemfontein he had killed two-thirds of the horses in his command. During the course of the war the British purchased 520,000 horses and 150,000 mules; of these, two-thirds of the horses and a third of the mules perished. The British, a horse-loving people, were horrified by these losses, and there were anguished cries in Parliament and in the press, but the mismanaged Remount Department, filled with officers who were overage or who had failed in the field or who were simply officers for whom no other place could be found, was not entirely to blame. There were never enough animals, and the urgent calls from the front for more and more, and quickly, required them to send forward horses and mules unaccustomed to the climate and the herbage; often animals were sent even before they had recovered from their long sea voyage, and the hard usage to which they were subjected on the veld killed them off rapidly. Cavalry horses also bore unnecessary burdens:

  The amount of impedimenta strapped on and hung round each saddle was enormous. The saddles themselves ... were of the heaviest cavalry pattern, the framework being made of iron....

  Saddle, and all upon it, swayed and rattled at every motion of the horse; and the noise made by a squadron at the gallop was like an iron-monger’s shop let loose.9

  The Boers, too, found that their horses and ponies did not always adapt to the changes in climate and herbage required of their far-ranging commandos. And their horses as well were subjected to hard usage. Roland Schikkerling wrote in his diary: “Will God forgive us for so torturing our willing horses? Their being so obedient and responsive makes our usage of them the more agonizing to us.”10

  A dead horse is difficult to bury or otherwise dispose of. Dead oxen and mules equally so. Already the veld was strewn with thousands of dead and putrefying animals in the wake of the contending warriors, and, plentiful as vultures were, there were not enough to consume all the carcasses. Many animals had died in or were thrown into rivers and spruits. And one dead mule could contaminate a stream for many miles and for many days. The germs of enteric (typhoid and paratyphoid) acquired in the field, particularly at Paardeberg, now flourished in the bodies of Roberts’s soldiers. As reinforcements followed the path of the main army and drank the same water, disease also followed. It had not yet been learned that an unsanitary camp could be more dangerous than the most determined foe, more fatal to strategy than a major defeat on a field of battle.

  There was no known cure for enteric fever; the treatment was merely symptomatic. The British army in South Africa suffered more casualties from this disease than had any other army before (as far as is known) or since. Of the 13,250 deaths from disease, most were from enteric; 31,000 men had to be invalided home because of it. Among the 30,000 troops Roberts had at Bloemfontein, Dr. Conan Doyle estimated that there were between 8,000 and 9,000 cases of the disease.

  Water was a major problem for the British throughout the campaign. In his second dispatch, written in Jacobsdal on 16 February, Roberts had complained that there were not nearly enough water carts and that the ones he had were inadequate: “Moreover, these carts cannot follow the troops over strong or unbroken ground, and I have, therefore, asked for 2,000 bheesties, with a due proportion of mussacks and pokholes to be sent here from India.”i11 Colonel W. D. Richardson later testified: “Probably nothing harbours germs and disease more than our present type of wooden barrel water cart.” Even if the water was drawn from a pure source and reached the soldier uncontaminated by the water cart, he still had little chance of tasting pure water, for his water bottle was also a source of contamination. As Richardson said: “After a few months’ use the interior of the service water bottle is often covered with mould, which smells offensively and is very probably a fertile source of disease.”

  There were standing orders that water must be boiled, but fuel was usually insufficient and the orders were generally ignored. Besides, as Sir William Wilson, the principal medical officer in South Africa, stand: the troops “have a great objection to the boiled water as they say it is insipid and they do not like it.”12 Conan Doyle wrote: “It is heartrending for the medical man who has emerged from a hospital full of water-borne pestilence to see a regimental water-cart being filled, without protest, at some polluted wayside pool.”13

  Inoculation against enteric was known, but it was a new thing——it was first used by Sir Almroth Wright in 1896. It was offered to most of the troops sent to South Africa while they were on shipboard, but it was not compulsory and only about 20,000 men (less than 5 percent of the force sent out) received the injection. As the inoculation was given in one huge dose, all who received it became violently ill, though none seems to have died from it. John Atkins described its effects: “Each of us was stabbed in the side with the hypodermic syringe dipped in the typhoid serum. ... My own symptoms after receiving the minute wound were the symptoms of others—first an Elysian lassitude, and then headache and fever for perhaps twenty-four hours.”14 Inadequate records were kept, and at the end of the war the value of the inoculation was deemed “doubtful.”

  Buller, ever solicitous for the welfare of his soldiers, carried tents—and was much criticised for so pampering his men. Churchill wrote:

  I have never before seen even officers accommodated with tents on service. ... But here today, within striking distance of a mobile enemy, every private soldier has canvas shelter, and other arrangements are on an equally elaborate scale. The consequence is that roads are crowded, drifts are blocked, marching troops are delayed, and all rapidity of movement is out of the question.... It is a poor economy to let a soldier live well for three days at the price of killing him on the fourth.15

  Roberts’s men had no such luxury and camped in the open, rain or shine. The blankets issued, however, had eyelet holes along the sides so that they could be laced together to form some shelter; the bottom edges could be pinned down and rifles used as uprights. No other shelter was provided for officers or men.

  When Roberts’s army entered Bloemfontein he had with him ten small hospital units and ten bearer com
panies carrying 200 sick and wounded. Three days later there were 327 men in hospital; in ten days there were 1,000; by 1 June there were 3,965 patients. Even this number does not accurately reflect the size of the epidemic that struck the army, for two hospital trains worked continuously carrying out the sick, and regular trains too carried out all who could be safely moved. The sick lay, many on the bare ground, in tents, and on the floors of makeshift hospitals in “Bloeming-typhoidtein,” as Kipling once called it.16

  The medical facilities accompanying the army, designed to accommodate not more than 4 percent of the force in hospital at one time, were engulfed; the medical staff, helpless, was unable to cope with the flood of sick. Every public building in Bloemfontein was converted into a hospital, including the Raadzaal itself, where beds were placed on the floor of the legislative chambers; schools and convents were pressed into service, although not the hotels where the staff officers stayed.

  By the end of March fifty-six nursing sisters had arrived and by mid-April sixty-four more had come, but there were Victorian difficulties connected with employing female nurses. Sir William Wilson explained:

  We can get any amount of good trained nurses.... the great difficulty is to get accommodation for them. A woman or a lady will always require a certain amount of accommodation; she must have all the bedroom equipment and everything else, and she must have servants. It was absolutely impossible to get female servants in South Africa as they are not to be had.17

  The Army Nursing Service had been part of the regular establishment of the British army since the Crimean War, but its female complement at the beginning of the Anglo-Boer War was only one “lady superintendent” and fifty-six nursing sisters. The reasons given for this paucity of trained women nurses were numerous: it was cheaper to use untrained male orderlies, it was unsuitable to send women to the savage lands where most Victorian wars were fought, and, finally, it was unthinkable to ask females to care for soldiers with venereal diseases, and these made up a large portion of the hospital cases in peace time. Army doctors were still almost as prejudiced against women nurses as they had been when Florence Nightingale had gone out to Turkey nearly fifty years earlier. Miss Nightingale was still alive, age eighty, and much interested in sanitation problems, but she was not consulted about South Africa, although she was interested and made a financial contribution to one of the nine privately endowed hospitals that were sent out. With these were a number of women, venturesome and generous, though often ill-trained, who served as nurses. When criticism of the medical services erupted in England, two highly respected medical authorities maintained that the standard of service given the soldiers was excellent in spite of “a plague of flies and a plague of women.”

  By the middle of April there were two general hospitals—No. 8 and No. 9—and three private hospital units in Bloemfontein—Langman, Portland, and Irish. For three months (2 April to 5 July) Dr. Conan Doyle, already famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, practised at Langman Hospital, which set up shop in the Bloemfontein Club. The hospital was equipped to handle 100 patients but took in 150. “We had neither beds nor utensils enough to treat such a number properly,” said Conan Doyle.18

  In March 1900 there were 207,000 troops in South Africa but only 800 doctors and an equal number of nurses. General hospitals were equipped with 520 beds, but No. 8 General Hospital once had as many as 1,398 patients and No. 9 at one time had 1,644. There were never enough nurses, and convalescents were pressed into service as orderlies. While conscientious orderlies were overworked, others were simply inattentive, some were rough, some stole comforts and stimulants and were often drunk, and a few were actually brutal. In No. 8 General Hospital in the month of May more than 10 percent of the patients died.

  Sir William MacCormac, five times president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Frederick Treves, an appendectomy pioneer who two years later won fame and a baronetcy for successfully removing the appendix of King Edward VII just before his coronation, had been out to South Africa to inspect the medical arrangements, and Treves had actually worked there. Back in London they were given a dinner at the Reform Club, where Sir William said that “it would not be possible to have anything more complete or better arranged than the medical service in the war.” Although at the time Treves did not dissent, he later told a royal commission that the supplies furnished the Medical Department “were certainly antiquated, and we were carrying about with us instruments which I should have thought would only be found in museums.” There were also medicines which had been in their bottles “for 20 years possibly.” 19 MacCormac and Treves had left South Africa just before the enteric epidemic. MacCormac’s glowing description of the medical service was soon contradicted by a stream of letters home from the soldiers. Private T. G. P. Humphreys of the 14th Middlesex wrote: ”All the stuff that has been written about the military hospitals and the care taken of the sick and wounded, is lies. It may be all right—in fact it no doubt is —for the officers; but as for Tommy Atkins, no one cares a straw whether he lives or dies.“20 Private Humphreys died of enteric.

  The regular establishment of the Royal Army Medical Corps was of course insufficient for the needs of the great army Britain had hastily assembled for the war, and a number of civilian doctors had been taken in or contracted for. There was often conflict between these civilians in khaki and the regular RAMC officers. Surgeon Captain Morison from West Hartlepool wrote home:

  Believe everything you hear as to mismanagement and even incapacity and wilful neglect.... Certainly if I were ill or had been wounded, I would not care to be left to the tender mercies of the majority of the men I have come across. ... You would be surprised how the “Tommies” cringe from me because they see the R.A.M.C. badges on my shoulder, until they know that I am what is called an irresponsible civilian, or, as I have been called by senior officers in the R.A.M.C., a “broken down practitioner.”21

  Alfred Downing Fripp, a distinguished surgeon, took out a hospital that included a dentist (the only dentist for the entire army), a masseur, and a steam disinfector—all novelties. The regular RAMC officers scoffed, but Fripp was appalled to find that no systematic disinfectant procedures had been established. “I was roared at,” he said, for bringing out the disinfector, “but very soon they sent them out to as many hospitals as they could get them to.”22

  Because of the many conflicting accounts, The Times sent out as a special correspondent W. L. A. B. Burdett-Coutts, a member of Parliament, to find out what the medical situation really was and to report on what he found. His first articles were temperate; then, after three weeks in Bloemfontein, he sent back a report which shocked the country:

  Men were dying like flies for want of adequate attention.... On that night (Saturday, the 28th of April) hundreds of men to my knowledge were lying in the worst stages of typhoid, with only a blanket and a thin waterproof sheet (not even the latter for many of them) between their aching bodies and the hard ground, with no milk and hardly any medicines, without beds, stretchers, or mattresses, without pillows, without linen of any kind, without a single nurse amongst them, with only a few ordinary private soldiers to act as “orderlies”, rough and utterly untrained to nursing, and with only three doctors to attend on 350 patients. ... The tents were bell tents ... affording accommodation for from six to eight men when working and in sound health. In many of these tents there were ten typhoid cases lying closely packed together, the dying against the convalescent, the man in his “crisis” pressed against the man hastening to it. There was not room to step between them.... The ground is hard as stone, and at night the temperature falls to freezing point.... The heat of these tents in the midday sun was overpowering, their odours sickening. Men lay with their faces covered with flies in black clusters, too weak to raise a hand to brush them off, trying in vain to dislodge them by painful twitching of the features. There was no one to do it for them.23

  The Times also published an anonymous article which first appeared in the Cape Times headed �
��Seamy Side of War.” It was written by W. A. Saunders, a former newsman from New Zealand, who had been in No. 9 General Hospital. He had seen money and valuables stolen by orderlies who threatened any man who complained. Although Saunders had enteric, he was placed in a ward for venereal cases:

  The medicine glass was a broken measure glass, and I am sure it had not been washed for weeks, for all round the outside edge there was a thick rim of dried saliva and the discharge from sore lips, etc., making it a disgusting thing to take in one’s hands, let alone one’s lips. All sorts of medicines were administered out of the same glass, and even the thought of it made me sick.24

  There was an outcry in England, and angry questions were asked in Parliament. Lord Roberts was asked to explain, and he replied:

  It is obvious that a certain amount of suffering is inseparable from the rapid advance of a large army in the enemy’s country, when railway communication has been destroyed.... I can quite understand that people who have no practical experience in such matters are much concerned to hear [of] the hardships which sick and wounded soldiers have to undergo in time of war.25

  But the storm was not to be stilled, and eventually a royal commission was appointed to look into the matter. By the time the commission arrived in South Africa (August 1900) the worst of the epidemic was over; medical supplies had been rushed forward and improvements made in the medical arrangements. Still, the commission collected evidence from doctors, nurses, patients, and others who had seen the conditions at Bloemfontein in the terrible months of May and June when the epidemic was at its height.