Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  European officers with impressive military credentials who had volunteered their services were told that if they could ride and shoot they could join a commando; their advice was not needed. Only the ambulance units sent by the French, Germans, Russians, and Dutch had called forth any expressions of gratitude. Since then the foreigners had proved themselves, for the most part, both useful and brave; besides, the republics now very much wanted help. Captain Carl Reichmann, the American military observer with the Boers, made some interesting observations on the foreign volunteers in his report to the United States War Department:

  Volunteers, generally, have played a considerable part in this war; they were mostly foreigners, adventurers, amateurs, active, retired and ex-officers of foreign armies. Generally they behaved with much gallantry, and for that very reason failed to gain success. The Boers are hunters rather than soldiers, they are not much given to holding a position to the last unless their instincts tell them that the position is a safe one to hold. The foreigners, on the contrary, once posted would hold their ground.... Owing to lack of proper general staff service, the foreigners were frequently not informed when the burghers withdrew, remained in the position and lost heavily or were cut off. Owing to their offensive spirit, which is totally lacking in the burgher, the foreigners were particularly well suited for reconnaisance service. Whenever offensive operations were undertaken, the foreigners had to bear the brunt of the fighting.6

  Comte Georges Henri Anne Marie Victor Villebois de Mareuil (1847-1900), sometimes called “the Lafayette of South Africa,” was raised to the rank of vechtgeneraal and given command of the new corps. With his waxed moustaches and monocle he was the best known of the foreigners, though his name was usually misspelled. Certainly he was the most vocal and the most critical of the Boers’ lack of discipline and of their dilatory strategies. He had moved about among the laagers from Ladysmith to Kimberley, criticising and offering his advice (largely unheeded) to Cronjé, Joubert, and Botha. Basil Williams in The Times History referred to his “quixotic nature”; Dr. James Kay called him “that notorious mercenary and swashbuckler.” He was, however, the only foreigner among the Boers who had any real military reputation. He had had a distinguished career in the French army and had once commanded the 1st Regiment of the French Foreign Legion.

  More than a dozen nationalities were represented among the foreigners. Cor van Gogh, brother of the painter, was one. (Captured, he committed suicide.) A few were noblemen, such as Count Pecci, a nephew of Pope Leo XIII; Prince Louis d’Orléans et Braganza, cousin of the French pretender; Baron von Goldek from Hungary; Count von Zeppelin, a relative of the inventor. Many had served in other armies in other places: the French Foreign Legion, the Dutch army in the East Indies, in South American revolutions, with the Americans in Cuba or against them in the Philippines. Some had come to South Africa specifically to fight and some had been there when the war began, uitlanders who, although not burghers, chose to fight for the Boers. Some were toughs looking for adventure and loot. Young Freda Schlosberg at Bronkhorstspruit recorded:

  Members of the Uitlanders Korps have been arriving all day.... The detachment consists of two or three hundred mercenaries—Hollanders, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, Italians, Hungarians, Portuguese—all rough-looking, common men, evidently from the lowest classes. They are armed not only with the usual rifles and revolvers, but also with swords, daggers, etc., the Italians specially with home-made stilettos....

  The first thing they did after settling down was to steal some of our fowls, geese and ducks; then they took most of the wood lying in our yard without even asking permission. They are undisciplined and unprincipled, and under no control whatever by their officers....

  Their presence so near our house is terrifying... 7

  There were also a few Britons to be found with the Boers, some of them deserters from the British army. Lieutenant David Miller in a letter home spoke of several fights in which he had taken part: “The leader in one case was a Glasgow man—and many of those who attacked our regimental outposts were Scotch and English.”

  Queen Victoria was particularly incensed when told that fifty German officers and noncommissioned officers had landed at Delagoa Bay and were on their way to the Transvaal. She instructed Lord Salisbury “to remonstrate at the presence of so many German officers and men with the Boers. It is monstrous.” She herself wrote to the Kaiser, and in reply he assured her that no regular serving officers were in South Africa, which was not true.

  Most of the foreigners were scattered throughout the Boer forces, but there were a number who from the first formed nationality units of their own. The German and Dutch contingents had been the largest, numbering perhaps 200 men each, but they had suffered severely at Elandslaagte. The Scandinavian unit had fought bravely but recklessly at Magersfontein and had been practically exterminated there. One of the best of the foreign units was the Italian contingent (which also included a few Frenchmen), led by an adventurer named Cumillo Richiardi. He had recently fought against the Americans in the Philippines, and he favoured a policy of taking no prisoners. In the later part of the war he specialised in blowing up bridges.

  Most of the Americans with the Boers either had been born in Ireland or were of Irish extraction. Roland Schikkerling noted that whereas the Germans and Hollanders were closer in blood to the Boers they looked “out of place,” but that “you could not pick Patrick out of a herd of the wildest Boers. There were field cornets bearing the names Kelly and O’Brien. This little band of men could curse like heretics, and their profanity was at times quite picturesque.”8 When one group of Irish Americans from Chicago, members of a Red Cross unit, reached the Transvaal, 46 out of 53 doffed their Red Cross brassards and picked up rifles, thus creating a scandal of international proportions. Most of them joined a unit led by John Y. Fillimore Blake, a huge American who habitually dressed in cowboy costume. Born in Missouri, he had graduated from West Point in 1880 and served with the 6th United States Cavalry in the Far West. He called himself “colonel,” although he had never risen above the rank of first lieutenant in the American army. Unlike most foreign volunteers, who went home after a few months, Blake stayed on and fought to the end.

  Blake’s second-in-command was John MacBride, whom Deneys Reitz described as “a brave but ugly, red-headed little man.” After the war he married Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary, took part in the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, and was executed by the British. Among other Americans were J. H. King, known as “Dynamite Dick,” and James Foster, the “Arizona Kid,” described as “a typical cowboy ... frolicsome, lithe and reckless, always ready for any excitement, to take part in any sort of enterprise no matter what desperate chances were involved.”9

  The Arizona Kid, like many American volunteers on both sides, had come to South Africa with a shipment of mules. British purchasing agents buying horses and mules in the American Far West regularly advertised for men to tend the animals on the long voyage to South Africa, offering to pay a round-trip passage, New Orleans-Cape Town, and $15. Many men made it a one-way trip. An entire squadron of the South African Light Horse was composed of Texas cowboys and muleteers. One man who had served with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba wrote to his former commanding officer from South Africa: “Dear Teddy—I came over here meaning to join the Boers, who I was told were Republicans fighting Monarchists, but when I got here I found the Boers talked Dutch, while the Britishers talked English, so I joined the latter.”10

  Hassell’s American Scouts, formed by J. A. Hassell, an American who had been given full citizenship by the Transvaal volksraad in recognition of his services during the Jameson Raid, saw action in a number of small battles and skirmishes. On 14 June 1900 they successfully attacked a party of British engineers working on a bridge across the Zand River. Among those killed by Hassell’s Americans in this engagement was Louis Irving Seymour, thirty-nine, who, as his tombstone still proclaims, was a “Citizen USA, Major in Her Britannic Majesty’s
Railway Pioneer Regiment.” Lieutenant Joseph Clement, another American, was killed in the same engagement.

  At the Kroonstad krygsraad Villebois de Mareuil was given permission to try blowing up the bridge over the Modder River at Boshof. With about 100 foreigners, mostly Frenchmen, and Germans (Captain Reichmann was amused to see them sitting together one evening alternately singing the “Marseillaise” and the “Wacht am Rhein”), and 25 Boers, he set off for Boshof under the impression that it was lightly defended. So it had been, but on the very day he and his men arrived in the area Methuen had concentrated six and a half battalions of infantry, a thousand mounted men, and twenty-two guns there. Methuen was alerted and dispatched 750 troopers and a battery to take him. The Boers bolted before they were surrounded; the foreigners stayed and fought until Villebois de Mareuil fell mortally wounded by a shell fragment. Methuen buried him with full military honours.

  The affair at Boshof was only one of a series of small engagements that would continue to be fought over a vast area. The battleground widened, and the days of the big set-piece battles were almost over.

  28

  THE BOER REVIVAL

  To the British, both in South Africa and in Britain, the end of the war appeared near at hand, the final outcome certain; nothing more was required other than a bit of final mopping up in the conquered areas. While waiting for his stocks of supplies to build up at Bloemfontein, Roberts sent Kitchener off to put down an incipient rebellion in the western Cape, and he dispatched small columns into the southern part of the Orange Free State. On 15 March he issued a proclamation to the burghers of the Free State offering to allow all those willing to give up their arms and take an oath of neutrality to return to their homes unmolested. Many did, although the British noted how few Mausers and how many venerable hunting pieces and antiques from the Kaffir wars they collected. At the end of the month Roberts made a preliminary movement north along the railway, and on 29 March his troops fought a small battle at Karee Siding that was witnessed by Kipling.

  Although he had written much about soldiers, this was the first battle Kipling had ever seen. He was astonished to see how the “enormous pale landscape swallowed up seven thousand men without a sign,” and it was strange “seeing nothing in the emptiness and hearing only a faint murmur as of wind along gas-jets, running in and out of the unconcerned hills.”1

  Karee Siding was not a very well managed battle,: the attack of the infantry was not well prepared and the flanking movements of the cavalry were too slow. Still, at a cost of 189 casualties to the Boers’ 34 the British dislodged their enemy from positions astride the railway. The first stage of the route north to Pretoria was now secure. But new and unexpected problems developed.

  The war might indeed have been brought to a close as quickly as Roberts anticipated had it not been for one of the most remarkable men to emerge from the Boer ranks, a leader who did truly become a legendary figure in his own time: Christiaan de Wet. Born of voortrekker parents on a farm near Dewetsdorp, a Free State village named after his father, he had as a young man taken part in one of the wars against the Basuto, and in the First Anglo-Boer War he had joined the Transvaal forces and had been with the party that captured Majuba. Most of his life had been spent as a farmer—and he looked like one. Now forty-six years old, of medium height, with sloping shoulders, straight brown hair, and a small moustache and beard, he spoke with a slight lisp. “I can’t help laughing at the idea of his being a general,” said Count Sternberg, a foreign volunteer. He was married and the father of sixteen children. Three of his sons—Kootie, Isaac, and Christiaan—accompanied him when, as a simple burgher in the Heilbron Commando, he set out again to fight the British. He served first on the Natal front, where, after his commandant took sick, he was elected to succeed him. He led the attack near Nicholson’s Nek and shortly after was made a vechtgeneraal. After Piet Cronjé’s capture at Paardeberg, he was made commander-in-chief of the Free State forces.

  Just at dusk on the evening of 28 March De Wet led a column of 1,600 men with five guns, a Maxim machine gun, and a pompom out of Brandfort. He had recalled his men from their furloughs, and many had rejoined him, rested and ready again for battle. The commandos with him were under good leaders; A. P. Cronjé, J. B. Wessels, C. C. Froneman, and his brother, Piet de Wet. Beginning a practise he was to continue for the rest of the war, he told no one his plans. Leaving Brandfort in a northeasterly direction, he turned abruptly south during the night. He rested most of his force the following day and that evening moved out to a position 17 miles north of the waterworks pumping station on the Modder River that supplied Bloemfontein with its water.

  Here he had an altercation with one of his commandants, Frans Vilonel. De Wet was determined to enforce the decision reached at the Kroonstad krygsraad to limit the number of wagons. “I made up my mind,” he said, “to hold the reins of discipline with a firmer hand.” When Vilonel refused to obey his order to abandon his wagon, De Wet took the unprecedented step of relieving him of his command and reducing him to the ranks, appointing a field cornet to replace him as commandant.

  This internal problem solved, he turned to the project at hand. It was his intention to capture the waterworks, which he knew to be guarded by only 200 men. He discovered, however, that Brigadier General R. G. Broadwood, an experienced and able cavalry commander, had just arrived on the scene with 1,800 cavalry and mounted infantry on his way to Bloemfontein from Thaba ’Nchu. As Broadwood was ignorant of his presence, De Wet changed his objective from the mere capture of the waterworks to something grander, and he decided upon a bold and clever course of action.

  The battlefield can be imagined as being roughly in the shape of the letter A, pointing north, the east side being formed by the Modder River, on the west bank of which stood the waterworks, and the other by the Koornspruit, which flows into the Modder several miles north. Between them, forming the crossbar of the A, ran a road which crossed the Koornspruit at a drift, and, roughly parallel to the road, ran a partly constructed railway line. The distance between the Modder and the Koornspruit at this point is about two and a half miles. About three-quarters of a mile from the Koornspruit on the unfinished railway line were three buildings that formed what was called Sanna’s Post.

  De Wet positioned his brother Piet with most of his men and all his guns in kopjes on the east bank of the Modder opposite the waterworks. He himself with only 350 men lay concealed along the steep banks of the Koornspruit near the drift. He planned a partridge shoot. His brother Piet and his men would drive the British towards the blind, but instead of shooting his game, he planned a wholesale capture. The men with him were given strict orders not to fire until he gave the command.

  The British sent out no patrols until morning and relied simply on a few sentries close to their bivouac. About six o’clock on the morning of 31 March, just as the troops were breaking camp, a lieutenant who had led a patrol across the Modder reported that he had been fired upon. Not much importance was attached to this, but twenty minutes later a Boer gun banged out a shell; it was followed by others, which fell among Broadwood’s transport.

  Although Broadwood’s patrols had failed to uncover the trap laid by De Wet, there was one man who had: behind the Boer lines Major Frederick Russell Burnham, an American who had come all the way from Alaska to be Roberts’s chief of scouts, was hurriedly scrambling up a kopje. He had discovered De Wet’s trap too late to slip through the Boer lines and warn Broadwood, but he had hopes of giving an alarm. Mounting a rock in full view of both forces he stood waving a red handkerchief he habitually used as a signal. If anyone in the cavalry brigade had noticed the figure frantically waving on the hillside the brigade might have been saved, but no one did. None of the British, that is. The Boers saw him and captured him.

  When the first shells from Piet de Wet’s guns fell among Broadwood’s wagons the transport drivers quickly inspanned and in some confusion fled west, away from the guns, towards the Koornspruit drift and into the waitin
g arms of Christiaan de Wet. The drive had begun.

  De Wet himself stood at the top of the drift with two of his commandants as over the brow of the rise of land came the first wagons and carts. The drivers were met by a quiet “Hands up!” and an order to keep silent and not to give any alarm. Wagon after wagon rode into the trap. Dozens of them. Then came soldiers, and some 200 were disarmed before they knew what was happening. “The discipline among the burghers was fairly satisfactory until the disarming work began,” said De Wet:

  If my men had only been able to think for themselves, they would have thrown the rifles on the bank as they came into their hands, and so would have disarmed far more of the English than they succeeded in doing. But as it was, the burghers kept asking:

  “Where shall I put this rifle, General? What have I to do with this horse?”

  That the work should be delayed by this sort of thing sorely tried my hasty temper.2

  Broadwood knew that a Boer force of 5,000 men under Cornelius Hermanus Olivier was in the vicinity, and he assumed that it was this force, vastly larger than his own, which was now attacking him. His guns tried to reply to the Boer artillery across the river, but the enemy was beyond the range of his 12-pounders, and he ordered the battery commanders to limber up and follow the wagons. “U” and “Q” batteries, Royal Horse Artillery, were ordered to cross the Koornspruit and take up a position on a kopje beyond to cover his retreat. They trotted off, “U” Battery in the lead, towards the drift where De Wet and his men were busily and quietly capturing wagons and men.