The day after his entry into Pretoria Roberts sent a brigade to free the rank-and-file prisoners. Originally the British other ranks had been held at the race course, where Jameson’s men had also been confined, but after a few months they had been moved into an enclosure prepared for them about 12 miles outside of town. Sergeant W. J. Wade of the 2nd Devonshire Regiment, who had been captured during the fighting on the Tugela, wrote home from there:
I daresay you know I have been taken prisoner, and am in Pretoria, where I am safe till the end of the war; so you need not be in any way about me, as I shall have no more fighting to do, and they are treating us very well indeed. We are not confined in Pretoria but in an enclosure fenced round with wire, with long rows of iron sheds.... How thankful I shall be to get home.... I have had only two letters since we left England.14
Later, when enteric broke out, one contemporary British historian, H. W. Wilson, had bitter words to say about conditions: “It was Andersonville, with all its nameless horrors, over again, and without the faintest shadow of excuse. Meanwhile the Boer prisoners in the hands of the British were living in plenty and comfort at St. Helena.”15 Wilson exaggerated. The St. Helena camps were not really that grand, nor was the Transvaal camp that bad.
With the approach of Roberts’s army the Boers had made an effort to move their prisoners away, but they had managed to evacuate only about 1,000; there were still 3,000 left in the camp. To prevent the rescue of these De la Rey had taken up positions nearby with 2,000 men and four guns. As the British brigade moved out of Pretoria towards the prison camp, accompanied by a train to carry back the men they hoped to free, a squadron of the 2nd Dragoons (Scots Greys) trotted ahead, driving in a Boer outpost. When the dragoons came in sight of the prison enclosure an extraordinary event took place.
The prisoners knew that Roberts had taken Pretoria and they were in a state of high excitement as they waited impatiently to be delivered. Their guards, about 300 old men and young boys, were nervous, frightened, and uncertain. When prisoners posted on the roof of their barracks saw the dragoons trot into view they raised a cheer, and at once the men below turned into an excited mob. Snatching up their belongings, they pushed past their bewildered guards, climbed the fences, and surged across the veld. De la Rey saw them and fired a few warning shells, but he did not, as he easily could have done, advance and mow them down. Perhaps, as the British believed, De la Rey assumed there was a cloud of cavalry behind the dragoons; perhaps, as the Boers believed, he was too humane to butcher the unarmed jubilant men. In any event, the prisoners streamed away towards the waiting train with their bundles under their arms, and the British suffered only one casualty.
While Roberts was enjoying his triumph in Pretoria many of the disheartened Boer leaders, mostly Transvaalers, were meeting in a whiskey distillery only a few miles away. Neither Steyn nor De Wet was present. Botha had called them together to discuss their next step, and there were some who thought it might have to be surrender.
Even before Roberts crossed the Vaal and entered the Transvaal Kruger had begun to have doubts concerning the wisdom of continuing the war. He had discussed the situation with his close friend Samuel Marks (1850-1920), a Russian Jew who had come to South Africa as a young man and had amassed a fortune. Marks suggested that the Boers lay down their arms “under protest,” avoiding the hated word “surrender.” Kruger had laid this suggestion before Steyn, who indignantly rejected it, reminding Kruger of the rebels from Cape Colony whom they had urged to join them and who in the event of defeat faced the possibility of being shot as traitors. They had a responsibility to these men, Steyn insisted. When, two weeks later, with Roberts about to capture his capital, Kruger again sounded out Steyn about making peace, he received a blistering reply:
1st June 3 A.M. I have received your telegram with amazement.... Only a small part of the Transvaal is in the hands of the enemy; nearly all our land lies under his heel. Fourteen days ago I made plain my opinion to Your Honour, and now Your Honour comes with the same proposal again. My policy remains unchanged. We must fight to the bitter end.16
Still, the facts were plain: Buller had begun to stir in the east and Roberts was marching steadily north; there was no Boer army large enough to bar the way of either; further resistance could not bring victory. The war could not be won. This was evident to most of those who answered Botha’s call and assembled at the whiskey distillery on Sammy Mark’s model farm. Botha opened the meeting with a prayer, and then they all spoke their minds. Gloom hung over them. Smuts was later to recall their mood:
I shall never forget the bitter humiliation and despondency of that awful moment when the stoutest hearts and strongest wills in the Transvaal army were, albeit but for a moment, to sink beneath the tide of our misfortune. What we all felt so deeply was that the fight had gone out of the Boers, that the heroes who had stood like a stone wall on the Tugela and the Modder River, who had stormed Spion Kop and Ladysmith and many other forlorn hopes had lost heart and hope, had gone home and forsaken their officers. It was not Lord Roberts’s army that they feared, it was the utter collapse of the Boer rank and file which staggered these great officers.17
There was talk of surrender even from Botha, and De la Rey, listening, grew so angry that, like the belligerent voortrekkers of old, he threatened to go off and found his own republic. In the end it was decided to postpone the inevitable a bit longer, to wait a few days. Perhaps a miracle would happen. Meanwhile, it would be best to find out what terms Roberts would give them.
It is not clear whether it was Marks’s manager or Annie Botha who first made it known to Roberts that the Boer leaders wanted to discuss peace, but it was Annie Botha certainly who acted as intermediary. When she proposed a meeting Roberts quickly agreed and suggested that it be held the following morning. Mrs. Botha took the message to her husband, but the meeting did not take place, for just at this crucial juncture word was received of De Wet’s successes at Sanna’s Post and Mostert’s Hoek. Though they were not major victories, they were good enough to send the hopes of the Boers soaring and they provided excuse enough to fight on. The conduct of the war was placed entirely in the hands of Louis Botha. There were to be no more krygsraads, and Botha determined to attack Roberts.
There were at this time probably not more than 20,000 Boers still in the field, and they were widely scattered. The largest concentration was a force of about 7,000 under Botha and De la Rey which had taken up strong positions 15 miles from Pretoria astride the railway that ran from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay.
Roberts’s army was camped in and around Pretoria, which was to remain until the end of the war the headquarters for the army. Here, as at Bloemfontein, there was enteric, but medical arrangements were much improved; there were no further complaints of inadequate facilities or lack of medical personnel. Dr. James Kay visited three of the hospitals in the area and said: “No critic, however captious, could find fault with these three hospitals.” The Welsh hospital even boasted a French chef from the Hotel Cecil.
Except for the soldiers, the town was largely inhabited by the wives and children of men who were British prisoners, fugitives, or on commando. And some women were widows now, and some children orphans. Gezina Kruger, the president’s wife, was allowed to remain in the Presidency, a guard of honour posted at her door, until on 20 July she died of pneumonia. Boer women helped nurse the soldiers in the hospitals, and relations between Annie Botha and the British officers were cordial indeed: she even sang for them at a party, and once Roberts lent her a military band for a garden party she gave.
Still, there was no lack of martial spirit on the part of most women. It was forbidden to fly the Vierkleur or to display its colours, but many defiantly sported ribbons of red, white, blue, and green. Lord Roberts, out riding one day, spied Helen Botha, the commandant-general’s young and pretty daughter, with a Vierkleur ribbon around her hat. He stopped and asked why she was wearing it. To honour her father and to show her admiration for his cause, she said
. “Good show,” said Roberts, and rode on.
James Archibald noted that “the women of Pretoria were intensely bitter against the British, and did not scruple to show it.” Many of the men who broke their oath of neutrality and took up arms again did so to escape the taunts of their women. One woman had a half dozen tiny branding irons made in the shape of a cross; with these she wanted the foreheads of traitors branded. Major George Younghusband wrote: “The Boer women hated us with a pure and unalloyed, albeit carefully concealed hatred.”
In May, just before Roberts’s arrival in Pretoria, an attempt had been made by some of the younger women to form an Amazon Corps. Several of them wearing riding skirts had their photographs taken with rifles in their hands, but the scheme went no further. Still, if women could not ride and fight beside their men, there were other ways in which they could be useful. Dr. Kay wrote in his diary: “The Boer women are so bitter that they would be willing to run any risk to assist their people.... That Pretoria is full of active spies and zealous over-sympathisers with the enemy is beyond dispute and yet no steps are taken against them.”18
There was indeed a good bit of amateur spying done by the women. J.J. Naude, a twenty-two-year-old Boer, made frequent visits to Johannesburg and Pretoria disguised as a British officer in order to bring out the information they had collected. Jan Smuts’s wife Isie rolled up secret documents and stuffed them in hollow curtain rods. Both Hansie van Warmelo and her mother busily wrote messages with lemon juice and sent them out concealed in match boxes, behind picture frames, in tins of insect powder, and once even in dolls. They also sent letters to pro-Boer newspapers in England.
Young Hansie van Warmelo sometimes found her position difficult. Her brother, who had been a student in Holland before the war, had been captured by the British and was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Johannesburg. Hansie had no trouble obtaining passes to visit him from General John Maxwell, the military governor of Pretoria. Maxwell was uniformly courteous and kind and did many favours for the Van Warmelo women. Hansie once rebelled against her role and returned from British headquarters determined never to go again. “The English must not be so good to us!” she told her mother. “It is not right to accept favours at their hands, for it places us in a false position.”19
When caught, women spies were treated leniently: Miss Maggie Joubert, an attractive Afrikaner girl in Cape Town, was sentenced to only six months in prison for sending secret messages to her cousin in Pretoria. Of course spying women were not confined to the cities; women on farms gave such help as they could to local commandos.
Roberts was well aware that the Boers were kept informed of his strength and his movements. While at Bloemfontein he had written to Landsdowne: “We are all working at great disadvantage owing to the enemy knowing exactly what we are doing from day to day, where our troops are, what their strength is, in fact, everything about us, while we are in great doubt, and at times in total ignorance of their plans and movements.”20
At last Roberts decided that he could at least rid himself of one segment of his problem, and he wrote to Botha telling him that he intended to ship all the women whose husbands were still fighting into the Boer lines. In a letter dated 4 September 1900 Botha replied: “The pretext mentioned by you, viz., that by such action you wish to protect yourself against any information being brought over to us, is doubtless a delusion.... It is unnecessary to add that we have never received any information through women and children with regard to military operations.” 21 That this was not true, everyone knew, but Botha wanted the women and children no more than did Roberts, for with them on his hands his mobility would be disastrously impaired. Roberts did indeed send thousands of women and children to the Boers, thus marking the beginning of that phase of the conflict in which the women and children were to be the war’s chief losers.
Women do not seem to have taken any part in the terrorist plots that were hatched in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Indeed these were mostly the schemes of foreigners. The first plot was uncovered only two months after Roberts entered Pretoria. The plan was to set fire to several houses and in the confusion to kidnap Lord Roberts and kill several senior officers. Thanks to an American informer, fifteen men, all foreigners, were arrested. The ringleader (or at least the man against whom the evidence was strongest) was a twenty-three-year-old German, Hans Cordua. Tried and convicted by a court-martial, he was shot by a firing squad in the garden of the Pretoria gaol. The other plotters were deported. Cordua was the first man to be executed by either side, although as the war grew increasingly nasty executions became a regular feature.
In addition to the spying and the plots there was also sabotage, or so the British believed. In July Roberts expelled a number of pro-Boer foreigners, including most of the Hollanders who were key employees of the railway, for they refused to work for the British.
Roberts’s problems were increased by the inadequacies of his staff. He was not alone in his failure to understand how to select, organise, and use a staff. There was perhaps no British general who did. When Buller, arrived in South Africa his designated chief of staff was shut up in Ladysmith; he never bothered to replace him. In spite of the heavy price paid fifty years earlier during the Crimean War for having the most complex and unworkable arrangements imaginable for supplying an army with its needs, the British staff system was still primitive. At the highest level there was no general staff, and generals in the field had staffs no better than and little different from that employed by Wellington a hundred years before.
There were about seventy officers on Roberts’s staff. Some were quite capable men whom he had known in India and Afghanistan, while others were “pleasant aristocrats” such as the dukes of Norfolk, Westminister, and Marlborough. Something might have been made of this collection of officers had there been a proper staff system, but there was almost none. Kitchener was technically chief of staff, but he never functioned as such, even when he was at Roberts’s headquarters. Roberts habitually transmitted his orders through the person nearest to him at the time, a secretary, a deputy assistant adjutant general, or an aide-de-camp. It was only due to Roberts’s good memory and his constant attention to detail, as well as the presence of a number of conscientious and able officers with some initiative, that the headquarters of the army in South Africa was able to function as well as it did, but there was considerable confusion.
At one time it was discovered that for nine days no one had been in charge of the vital railway line from Bloemfontein to the front. Roberts had ordered Colonel Rainford Hannay to be placed in command, reporting direct to army headquarters, but Hannay, unknown to Roberts or his staff, was in hospital.
Worst of all the staff operations was the handling of intelligence. The British army in general had a low opinion of intelligence activities. As Captain (later Field Marshal) E. R. Robertson said, “The intelligence branch was treated as a separate, not very important part of the War Office organization.” Colonel Henderson, who had gone out with Roberts to be his intelligence officer, was taken ill at Bloemfontein and invalided home. His successor, Lieutenant Colonel C. V. Hume, had served in a similar capacity in Burma, but he did not know South Africa. Nevertheless Hume was conscientious and intelligent, and in July 1900 he made a number of wise recommendations for putting intelligence gathering on a sounder, more effective basis, urging that all columns, regardless of their size, should have an intelligence officer assigned to them, that intelligence gathering should be coordinated, and that the army should have a counterespionage unit. His ideas seemed too radical at the time, although eventually most of the proposals were adopted. Eighteen months later there were 132 intelligence officers; not many, but more than the British army had ever had in its long history. None, however, had received any training in his duties. Even when a rough intelligence department was organised and began to pass on useful information, it was largely ignored.
One newly arrived officer was told by his commander how simple staff work was: “The right pocket
will be a receptacle for ‘business’ telegrams, the left one for ‘bunkum.’ ” “It is superfluous,” the officer recorded, “to mention that the whole of the messages sent by the local Intelligence Departments were dismissed as ‘bunkum.’ ”
Lack of adequate knowledge of the dispositions and strength of the enemy was to plague the British to the end of the war, and their failure to organise a sophisticated intelligence system enabled the Boers to make frequent unexpected strikes on the long lines of communication. One such strike took place just two days after Roberts’s occupation of Pretoria.
32
AFTER PRETORIA: ROODEWAL AND BRANDWATER BASIN
On 6 June 1900 De Wet divided his force into three parts for a three-pronged attack on the railway line about 30 miles northeast of Kroonstad: at Vredefort, Rhenoster River, and Roodewal. The next day all three forces struck simultaneously. The northern column, 300 men and a Krupp gun under Commandant Lucas Steenekamp, overwhelmed the small garrison at Vredefort but then became engaged in a running fight with British reinforcements under Major Douglas Haig that came hurrying up by rail. The largest force, under the command of C. C. Froneman, launched an attack on positions held by seven companies of the 4th Derbyshires at Rhenoster River.
The 4th Battalion of the Derbyshire Regiment was a militia unit. The militia, unlike the yeomanry, was composed of men from the working classes who possessed few useful military assets and were ill-trained. In this war they were largely employed in guarding the lines of communication, and the 4th Derbyshires guarding the railway bridge on the Rhenoster River were destined to be the only militia unit of any size to be seriously engaged in the course of the war. Miners and farm labourers for the most part, they had been in South Africa only four months, and, as Conan Doyle said, they “had never seen more bloodshed than a cut finger in their lives.” Then, without warning, at dawn on the winter morning of 7 July the shells of Froneman’s four field guns fell upon them and a pompom scattered its 1-pound shells in their midst. Raw as they were, they put up a gallant fight, but by ten o’clock in the morning, having lost 36 killed and 104 wounded, they surrendered. Froneman then destroyed the bridge which the Royal Engineers had just finished repairing.
Great Boer War Page 44