The Boers wanted desperately to stop Roberts’s steamroller advance, but they lacked any sound plan for doing so and relied only on what The Times History called “an almost unreasoning and obstinate patriotism.” In Pretoria on 7 May the last session of the Transvaal volksraad opened. Although the bayonets and sabres of the invaders glistened on the frontiers, this last session was begun with all the usual ceremony. Foreign consuls and attaches were there in uniforms or formal dress, and Kruger wore his white gloves and sash of office. Over the chair of the captured Cronjé the Vierkleur was draped, and over the chairs of Joubert, Kock, and other dead volksraad members hung strips of black crepe and wreaths of immortelles. The volksraad sat for three days without accomplishing much of importance except the confirmation of Botha as commandant-general.
If the Boers could not stop Roberts, they could and did harass him and slow him down. He had to halt for ten days at Kroonstad to attend to his supply situation, for he had always to be looking over his shoulder at his long, tenuous, vulnerable line of communication to Cape Town. On just the 128 miles of railway between Bloemfontein and Kroonstad the Boers had cut the line in seventeen places, blowing up bridges and culverts or tearing up track in 1,000-yard stretches.
While waiting at Kroonstad, Roberts sent Ian Hamilton to take Lindley. After a short skirmish Hamilton entered the town, but he did not stay long and the Boers at once reoccupied it. Lindley, named after an American preacher who had ministered to the spiritual wants of the voortrekkers, was a storm centre of Boer resistance in the Free State, and it was to change hands more than half a dozen times in the next few weeks.
On 22 May Roberts resumed his march northward. Two days later part of French’s cavalry crossed the Vaal into the Transvaal, and on this day, the Queen’s birthday, Roberts issued a proclamation annexing the Orange Free State and changing its name to Orange River Colony. Roberts now girded his loins for an attack on Johannesburg, where he expected to encounter stiff resistance. French was sent off to the west to find the Boer right flank, and Hamilton followed behind with his infantry. On 28 May French found the flank near Doornkop, within sight of the Rand’s gold mines, and started to move around it. This drew off some of the Boers, and Hamilton launched his Gordon Highlanders in a gallant charge across open country at the Boer positions. At a cost of 9 officers and 84 men killed and wounded they carried the position and routed the enemy. A jubilant Hamilton congratulated them on the battlefield and assured them that within hours all Scotland would be cheering their exploit. The next day the ubiquitous Winston Churchill, who had transferred himself here from the inactive Natal front, rode over the battlefield:
Near a clump of rocks eighteen Gordon Highlanders lay dead in a row. Their faces were covered with blankets, but their grey stockinged feet—for the boots had been removed—looked very pitiful. There they lay stiff and cold on the surface of the great Banket Reef. I knew how much more precious their lives had been to their countrymen than all the gold mines the lying foreigners say this war was fought to win. And yet, in view of the dead and the ground they lay on, neither I nor the officer who rode with me could control an emotion of illogical anger, and we scowled at the tall chimneys of the Rand.5
Johannesburg, the city of gold, was now at Roberts’s feet. Although it was half deserted after the flight of the uitlanders, many of the foreigners had sought and received permission to stay, but The Times History said that “a large proportion of the normal inhabitants still left in Johannesburg were either very poor or very rascally.” The only real excitement in the city since the beginning of the war had been on 24 April when Begbie’s Foundary and Engineering Works, which had been making munitions for the Transvaal forces, blew up. The Boers thought this was a deliberate effort on the part of the British, but more probably it was simply the result of the workmen’s carelessness.
For most of those remaining in “Joburg” it was business as usual. The Standard and Diggers News was still publishing, and its pages were filled with the usual advertisements: the Continental Restaurant offered lunch for three shillings and dinner for four shillings; W. Reuter, an attorney, was looking for a cook-housekeeper; R. H. Akers was seeking his lost greyhound, offering a reward for its return while adding a threat to anyone found keeping it. There were advertisements for “Mr. W. Gold-stuck’s valuable remedy for dysentery,” “Victoria’s brand bacon and hams,” and a timely one from W. S. Duke & Co.:
THE GOLDEN THREAD CIGARETE [sic]
Draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher and shuts up the mouth of the foolish. This is the kind of cigarette appreciated in such critical times.
The British were only a few miles away, but on 18 May the Alberti brothers’ “Italian String Quartette’s Best Band” gave a concert with mandolin, violin, flute, and harp; H. Simpson was still selling wedding rings; J. Gau was peddling insurance for the Manchester Assurance Company and the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York; Doctors S. C. Smith and L. S. Rubinsohn were still operating the City Dental Institute (“Painless Extraction of Teeth a Specialty. Artificial Teeth Made while you wait. Teeth filled with Gold and other Material on the latest American systems”); and Miss A. Lindblom (“Specialist in all kinds of Massage and Midwifery”) continued to ply her trade.
Knowing of the existence of the Johannesburg forts, which the Boers had constructed at great expense, Roberts had ordered huge siege guns brought out from England, and these, with their “armour-piercing, deferred-explosion” shells, had been carried over seas and land for 7,000 miles and were now at hand. They were not needed. The Johannesburg forts were not manned and the Boers had long since removed all their guns; the burghers preferred to trust to their mobility, and they had no intention of allowing themselves to be caught cooped up in forts. When Roberts had the town almost surrounded, he sent in a demand for its surrender. Dr. Fritz Krause, governor of the town, rode out with a member of the volksraad to talk with him about the situation. There were still some die-hard burghers in town, and Krause was afraid that if the British occupied it they would resist; there might be women and children killed —and even property destroyed. Roberts, worried about the safety of the as yet undamaged gold mines, made an extraordinary deal: Krause promised to hurry the commandos out of town and to protect the mines, while Roberts agreed to delay his entry to allow the fighting burghers to escape.
On 31 May 1900 Roberts formally marched into a quiet Johannesburg where “the motley crowd of white foreigners and blacks gave little appearance of animation.”6 But in the middle of a road off the main street four old burghers knelt in prayer, asking God to forgive the sins of their people arid to restore their country to them. One patriarch with a white beard, leaning on the shoulder of a friend, sobbed as if his heart had broken.
Roberts felt that the taking of Johannesburg, the place where all the uproar over the franchise and the rights of the uitlanders had originated, was a milestone in the war, and he celebrated with a repetition of the ceremony at Bloemfontein. The troops paraded, Lady Roberts’s silk Union Jack was raised over the courthouse, and there were the usual three cheers for the Queen. The ceremony was witnessed by the troops and an interested crowd of Bantu and European civilians, but Prevost Battersby reported that “the entry of the troops into Johannesburg was no account as a spectacle.”7 There was a brief scuffle when a uitlander, outraged by a burgher who refused to take off his hat when the Union Jack was run up, tried to snatch it off his head. One of the soldiers put a quick end to it. “Leave him alone,” he said. “He fought for his flag. You fight for none.”
England received the news of the capture of Johannesburg calmly with none of the enthusiastic celebrations which had marked earlier victories. Many were more interested in the results of the Epsom races. Roberts’s triumphal march towards Pretoria had been anticipated, his successes expected. It seemed clear to all that the war in South Africa was nearly ended and that there was no longer any danger of a major setback. There was much anxiety over the fate of the little garrison at
Mafeking, but for the rest the suspense was over, the drama gone; the remaining steps to victory seemed well defined and public interest turned to other wars in other places. The third war against the Ashantis was being fought on the Gold Coast, and in China the Boxer Rebellion had broken out and the fate of those in the European legations at Peking was more engrossing than the bloodless capture of Johannesburg. But the Boers were still capable of delivering surprises and shocks, and one jolt was delivered on the very day Roberts marched into Johannesburg.
Following behind Roberts’s main advance and sweeping the country in wide swathes were other bodies of troops. One of these was Colvile’s division, which had been marching behind Ian Hamilton to support him if need be. On 17 May Colvile was ordered to extend his lines across the eastern Free State. On 22 May he marched out of Winburg towards Ventersburg, where he was ordered to concentrate his forces and where Kitchener told him he would be reinforced by the 13th Battalion of Imperial Yeomanry. His orders also stated that he was to reach Lindley on the 26th and Heilbron on the 29th. When the yeomanry failed to show up on the 24th, he marched out of Ventersburg without them. He fought a short battle near Lindley on the 26th and the next day continued his march north. Early on the morning of the 28th he received a message from the missing yeomanry:
Found no one in Lindley but Boers—have 500 men but only one day’s food, have stopped three miles back on the Kroonstad road. I want help to get out without great loss.
-B. Spragge, Lieutenant-Colonel
27.5.1900
Colvile’s first reaction was to lift his nose and ask, “And who is Colonel Spragge?” Even when told that he was the colonel of the yeomanry who were supposed to be under his command, he declined to turn back and rescue him; it was more important, he felt, to keep to his timetable. The 13th Yeomanry, surrounded by 2,000 burghers under Piet de Wet, surrendered after suffering 80 casualties.
The Times History said “this incident acquired a somewhat undue importance at the time.” Yes indeed. There was an uproar in Britain, particularly when it was learned that one company of the 13th Yeomanry consisted of “men of gentle birth and wealth” who had bought their own equipment, paid their own way to South Africa, and donated their pay to the Widows and Orphans Fund. The man blamed for the disaster was Lieutenant General Sir Henry Colvile, and Roberts “awarded him a bowler”—he was relieved of his command and sent home.
Four days after the capture of the 13th Yeomanry Christiaan de Wet succeeded in sweeping up a small convoy of 56 wagons and 160 men carrying supplies to Colvile’s column. These activities of the De Wet brothers were more than annoying to Roberts, particularly as they were taking place in his rear, but they did not slow his advance to Pretoria. He did not foresee—nor did anyone else at the time—that these isolated attacks by mobile commandos adumbrated the new style in which the war was to be carried on.
30
MAFEKING
Exactly two weeks before Roberts marched into Johannesburg and the 13th Imperial Yeomanry surrendered to Piet de Wet, an important event took place in the small town of Mafeking 160 miles due west of Pretoria. It was not important strategically or because what took place there had any effect on the course of the war, but because Britons everywhere thought it was important. Roberts’s march to Pretoria may have lacked suspense, but there was drama enough in the events surrounding the siege of Mafeking, or so it seemed, and the garrison commander, Colonel Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, displayed exactly those qualities Britons of all classes delighted in. Brian Gardner called it “the most ... jauntily withstood siege in modern history,”1 and Baden-Powell set the tone with his first message to the outside world: “All well. Four hours bombardment. One dog killed.” Britons everywhere had a good laugh; they were captivated. But as the siege dragged on to become the longest of the war, anxiety grew in spite of the plucky resolve expressed by Baden-Powell. When, then, word reached London that the tiny garrison, after withstanding a siege of 217 days, had at last been relieved, England went wild with joy. Londoners staged the greatest, most hysterical, spontaneous celebration ever seen in Britain. For years afterwards, “to Maffick” meant to celebrate uproariously.
Mafeking Night began in London when at 9:17 P.M. on 18 May the Reuters News Agency received a message from its correspondent in Pretoria saying that it had been officially announced by the Transvaal government that the Boers had abandoned the siege. Eighteen minutes later a footman at Mansion House ran out to post a placard: MAFEKING RELIEVED. As the news was shouted through the streets the excitement spread over the city. Squares and thoroughfares were rapidly filled with hysterically cheering, shouting, singing men, women, and children. The Lord Mayor appeared on the balcony to say: “I wish the music of your cheers could reach Mafeking. British pluck and valour, when used in the right cause, must triumph.” But the crowds did not want speeches; they were in a mood for singing and exultation. Policemen rushed from their stations to control the crowds, but there was no controlling the mobs of deliriously joyous people. There was much hugging and indiscriminate kissing, and one constable said later: “I wouldn’t go through that kissing again for something. Right in the public street it was.”
At the Royalty Theatre Mrs. Patrick Campbell, whose husband had been killed six weeks earlier at Boshof, announced the news from the stage and led the audience in singing “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen.” At Covent Garden, where the Prince and Princess of Wales were watching a performance of Lohengrin, someone shouted, “Mafeking is relieved!” The audience got to its feet, cheered, and lustily sang “God Save the Queen,” while the Prince beat time on the ledge of his box. It was, said Punch, “Best operatic chorus ever heard!”
Although people talked for years of Mafeking Night as if the celebrations stopped at daybreak, they actually went on sporadically for five days. One reporter called it the “most wonderful and harmless saturnalia of the century.”2 Generally good-humoured, in a few places the crowds turned rowdy, attacking the homes and shops of people thought to be pro-Boer.
The name that the crowds shouted in the street was not Mahon or Plumer, the rescuers of Mafeking, but Baden-Powell, the town’s plucky defender. Mafeking’s hero inspired a rash of musical compositions. There was “Our Hero B-P,” “The Baden-Powell Schottische,” and “Major-General British Pluck.” Pictures of Baden-Powell, usually showing him wearing the felt campaign hat later to become familiar to millions of Boy Scouts, appeared everywhere. He was an instant hero.
Scenes similar to those in London on Friday night took place in every town in Britain. At Newcastle-Upon-Tyne the Chronicle sent up rockets; at Bedford the factory sirens were sounded; in Glasgow all the church bells were rung. Everywhere there were cheering, singing, Hag-waving crowds. The St. Pancras Orphan School at King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, in an astonishing burst of generosity, gave each of its 150 orphan boys twopence to spend as he pleased. Seven-year-old William Wright bought a farthing’s worth of matches and firecrackers and joined the celebrations. One of his firecrackers, thrown into a shop door on the high street, set the store alight. Identified by one of the villagers as the culprit, William celebrated the next day on the raised platform of the orphan school, where he was given “six of the best” on his bare buttocks.
As the news reached Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the Empire there were scenes similar to those in Britain. In Montreal and Melbourne salutes were fired and church bells rung; in Brisbane and in New Zealand public holidays were announced; in the hills around Wellington huge bonfires were lit; and in Singapore all business came to a halt.
Four minutes after the news reached the London office of Reuters the Associated Press in New York received the same message. Crowds hungry for more details formed around newspaper offices, but Americans received the news more calmly. That very day President McKinley had met with his cabinet in Washington to discuss the possibility of the United States offering its good offices to the combatants, but the decision taken had bee
n “to hold absolutely aloof.” Americans remained divided in their sentiments.
Naturally the news was received somewhat differently in the Transvaal. The Standard and Diggers News reported the event in a matter-of-fact way but devoted more space to the trial in New York of Olga Nethersole, who had appeared in a play called Sapho which the police considered indecent. It is pleasant to report that Miss Nethersole, who appeared in court “attired in a robe of heliotrope silk, trimmed with mink fur and lined with white silk satin,” was acquitted.
The prologue to the drama at Mafeking and the wild celebration of Mafeking Night may be said to have begun some three months before the war started when the War Office decided to send a handful of “special service officers” to South Africa to raise local regiments among the colonists. Colonel Baden-Powell (he pronounced his name to rhyme with “maiden noel,” but most people called him simply B-P) was taking lunch at the Naval and Military Club in London on Monday, 3 July 1899, when he was summoned by Lord Wolseley.
“I want you to go to South Africa,” said Wolseley.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, can you arrange to go Saturday next?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no ship on Saturday, but I can go on Friday.”
This account of the interview was told by B-P—many times—and it is typical of his theatrical sense.
Great Boer War Page 40