Roberts was now appointed commander-in-chief of the army, replacing Wolseley. It was a popular appointment, for, as usual, the War Office was blamed for all the disasters and the lack of preparedness and had to shoulder not only its own mistakes but those of the politicians as well. A cartoon advertising “Monkey Brand,” a popular soap, aptly summed up public sentiment. Depicting an oversized monkey dressed in evening clothes in front of the War Office handing a box of soap to Lord Roberts, it was captioned, “Clean up that place, my lord.”
Sir Redvers Buller also returned to England, arriving in Southampton on the Dunvegan Castle exactly thirteen months from the day he had left. He was loudly cheered by the public, but the official honours given so generously to Roberts were not accorded him. When a grateful Parliament awarded Roberts £100,000 and nothing at all to Buller, a large crowd gathered in Hyde Park to protest. It seemed that nothing could diminish his popularity. Even when his message to White suggesting surrender was revealed and newspapers made the most of the disclosure, he was still cheered when he appeared in public, and at Exeter an equestrian statue of him was erected, an honour unprecedented in England for a living general. But Buller’s days as a soldier were soon ended. When he tried to explain away his surrender message to White in a public speech, the War Office retired him.
Along with the generals, most of the swarm of war correspondents also left South Africa, and thousands of troops were sent home in the belief that they would no longer be needed; local South African units were disbanded.
Almost equally disastrous for the future operations of the British in South Africa was the dismantling of its remount organization. The officers engaged in buying horses and mules in Europe, South America, and the United States were ordered back to England. The flow of remounts to South Africa dried up. Certainly no greater evidence of overconfidence could be offered than the assumption that no more horses would be needed to round up the elusive mounted burghers ranging the veld.
This illusory end of the war was a time for adding up the cost. In flesh and blood, 4,185 British officers and men had been killed in action or died of wounds, but the total death toll was 10,678, for 6,493 had died of disease (mostly enteric) or from accidents. In addition, 34,499 sick or seriously wounded men had been invalided home. Of these, 208 died and 1,030 had to be discharged as unfit. No one imagined that only half the blood price had been paid.
There was also a counting of deeds of valour, or rather the awards given for such deeds. Twenty-five Victoria Crosses had been awarded, thirteen to officers. Of the eleven given to the infantry, five went to men in one regiment: the Gordon Highlanders. In addition to the Victoria Crosses and a sprinkling of Distinguished Service Orders, there was another, a singular award never before or since given. Queen Victoria before her death crocheted five scarves of khaki-coloured Berlin wool with the initials VRI on one of the knots to be presented to a British, an Australian, a New Zealand, a South African, and a Canadian soldier voted by his comrades to be “the best all-round man taking part in the South African campaign.” The South African scarf was presented to Trooper Chadwick of Roberts’s Horse, an American who had served in the United States Navy during the Spanish-American War.
There were many who thought that Lord Roberts, although a fine general, had been too easy on the Boers, too humane and magnanimous. It had been a mistake, they felt, to allow so many to lay down their rifles, take an oath, and ride back to their farms, and the large number of burghers who broke their oaths and returned to their commandos enraged them. It was believed that Kitchener, who was left in South Africa to wind up the war, would adopt sterner policies. Black and White Budget said: “Now that Lord Roberts has left, it is to be hoped that these people will be dealt with in the proper and only way. For months they have treated the British nation as a people of ‘Jugginses.’ Now is the time to show the mercy exhibited at Culloden.”9
Captain David Miller of the Gordon Highlanders reflected a popular view among the soldiers when he wrote to his mother: “The Government should declare the war over and shoot anyone found with arms—this is the way to treat them.”10 Even later, when the war was finally and truly over, another officer, George Younghusband, wrote: “There is only one thing the Dutchman understood in the war, and that was the fist, the almighty fist, and an exceedingly heavy fist.”11
This feeling appears to have been even stronger among the civilians in Natal and Cape Colony. Roberts’s fair-minded treatment of his enemies was much criticised; in Cape Town notices of a mock performance appeared that included “A Lecture on ‘Magnanimity and How to Fight with Kid Gloves’ by Field Marshal Lord Roberts (Bobs).”
But now Kitchener was in charge. He would take off the kid gloves. Kitchener had the “almighty fist” to pound the Boer into his place. Kitchener knew how to deal with these people.
Transvaal Boers off to war with their families (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Three generations in arms, 1900 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Our commanders in South Africa (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
President Paul Kruger (Government Archives, Cape Town)
Prewar Boer Staatsartillerie (Kenneth Griffiths)
The Battle of Colenso, 1900 (Mansell collection)
General Joubert and his staff at Newcastle 1899 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
General Sir Redvers Buller (Government Archives, Cape Town)
Lord Roberts in his travelling headquarters waggon preparing for the Great Flank March (Paul Popper Ltd)
A signalling station on the top of a kopje. On the right is a heliograph and centre a field telephone (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A Boer picket on Spion Kop (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A 6-inch naval gun on a railway truck which is being sent forward from the Modder River Station for Lord Roberts’s advance (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A rest during the Great Flank March (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Wounded inside a waggon house at Klip Drift (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
The arrival of Christmas mail for the British forces (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Staff headquarters at Paardeberg Drift (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A field hospital at Paardeberg (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
British soldiers looting the Boer laager at Paardeberg (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Bullock waggons loaded with loot crossing the drift from the Boer laager at Paardeberg (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Cronje with Lord Roberts’s staff after his surrender (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A bird’s eye view of the siege of Ladysmith (National Army Museum)
Boers with a Long Tom. Long Toms were used in both the Mafeking and Ladysmith sieges (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A Boer commando manning the trenches outside Mafeking (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Attending the dead and injured after the battle at Driefontain (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
A Begbie lamp and heliograph station at Bloemfontein (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Jan. Smuts in 1900 (Government Archives, Cape Town)
A commando under Christiaan de Wet crossing a drift on the Orange River (Government Archives, Cape Town)
Boer prisoners at the Wynberg Hospital (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
The first meeting between the British commander and Boer envoys at Middelburg. Sitting from left to right are de Wet, Botha, Kitchener and an unknown officer (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
Cronje with his family in exile on St Helena (Paul Popper Ltd)
A section of Deadwood Camp, St Helena (author)
ACT III
35
COMMANDOS IN CAPE COLONY
In only two actions, at Paardeberg and the Brandwater Basin, had the British done more than simply drive the Boers from their positions. Both of these defeats had been i
nflicted on the Free State’s army, the smaller of the two, and even so De Wet was still at large. The Transvaalers had suffered no serious defeat involving mass surrenders. The Boers had little need for cities or towns; they could do without their railways. Their home was the veld, and the veld had not yet been conquered. Out on those vast open spaces, free and armed, roamed men determined to fight. And these were the very best fighters, serving under strong and able leaders. The old generals who had begun the war—Cronjé. Joubert, and Prinsloo—were gone now, dead or in captivity. In their places were Botha, De la Rey, De Wet, and new, as yet untried, younger men such as Jan Smuts, Barry Hertzog, Ben Viljoen, and Christoffel Kemp, who were to prove themselves equally capable—a new, tough, vigorous, stubborn, clever breed. Kruger was gone, but Steyn was still free on the veld, and his strong voice, his very presence, encouraged the burghers to fight on.
The British would not be cruel masters—at least not deliberately. Most Boers knew this. But the flame of independence burned within them as brightly as it had in their voortrekker forefathers. No people ever desired their independence more. No people in history, not faced with the alternative of death or cruel tyranny, ever fought so hard for so long with so little hope of ultimate success.
From the seizure of Komatipoort until the close of the year the British were so busy ending the war—sending generals and troops home, reorganising their reduced army, and dismantling their supply structure—that they were incapable of undertaking offensive operations and the Boers were given a much needed respite. They were able to pull themselves together, to rorganise and consider how they could best carry on the war. They also demonstrated their ability to strike and to hurt.
During the month of October 1900 they launched attacks on a number of small towns. Near Vlakfontein they tore up railway track in several places and cut up the work parties dispatched to repair the breaks. There were numerous small engagements: Mahon was attacked at Geluk; Methuen fought three small, sharp battles; De Wet was active, although General C. E. Knox, soon to emerge as one of the better guerrilla hunters, was busy chasing him and came so close that he captured some of his guns and wagons. These engagements were not, as the British believed, the last struggles of a defeated and dying enemy. They marked the beginning of the kind of combat the Boers would engage in for the next year and a half. It was the start of a whole new war, a war in which the British would suffer more men killed in action than in all the previous battles. There would be no more set battle pieces; henceforth there would be dozens of small actions, the Boers striking unexpectedly at widely separate locations, snapping up a convoy here, attacking small garrisons there, destroying railway bridges, blowing up locomotives, sniping. It was guerrilla war, and the Boers were to prove themselves most adept at this kind of fighting.
They had no overall strategy, no master plan for winning the war. The activities of the various commandos were not coordinated, and there was not even a statement of policy regarding purposes or objectives. From first to last the Boers were always long on tactics and short on strategy. Each independent commander was left to harass the British as he thought best. The general effect of Boer operations was of a blind lashing out in all directions by stubborn men who found in guerrilla activities not a way to win the war but simply their only alternative to surrender.
Guerrillas by themselves cannot win wars, not in the military sense. They can keep their enemies from winning; they can hope that in time their strength will increase to the point where they can put orthodox armies in the field to confront and defeat their enemies in conventional battles; they can hope to so wear down, annoy, exasperate their foes that they will wring concessions from them; or they can hope for foreign intervention.
In the face of the massive British army arrayed against them, still many times larger than their own in spite of troop reductions, the Boers had little hope of again amassing an army sizable enough to face the British in open battle; remembering what Gladstone had done after the First Anglo-Boer War and listening to the antiwar voices in England gave hope to some that if they fought on long enough the British might quit and perhaps give them back their independence, but those in power in Britain gave no such encouragement. After scorning foreign aid at the beginning of the war, the Boers now made feeble efforts to enlist active foreign intervention—delegations were sent to Europe and the United States, and Dr. Willem J. Leyds, a Hollander who had been state secretary of the Transvaal before the war, put forth a stream of propaganda—but it was all amateurish, and only the most optimistic could bring themselves to believe that foreign armies would actually march to their defence; the United States even refused its good offices.
There was little hope to be found by a reasoning man in the Boers’ plight. But it was not facts or logic that kept the burghers fighting; it was something more impellent than either. In spite of hardships, which steadily increased, the idea of surrender seemed to these strong, freedom-loving men an impossible alternative as long as they had rifles in their hands, horses under them, and the vast open veld in which to roam.
Their struggle was indeed without hope of success, at least of the kind they could imagine. Their deliberate, hopeless prolongation of the war resulted in the deaths of additional thousands of brave men. It resulted in the destruction of their farms, which they and their fathers and grandfathers had worked so hard to build, and in the slaughter of their herds of cattle and sheep on which their future existence and way of life depended. Worst of all, it resulted in the decimation of their women and children.
These proud, stubborn men had much to answer for.
Their struggle did not in any way produce tangible military results commensurate with the hardships, sufferings, and deaths they exacted, but it did engender in their adversaries a grudging but genuine admiration for their stubbornness and bravery, qualities which the British have always admired. More importantly, there emerged among the Boers a consciousness of their own vitality and identity, for in the fire of their desperate struggle was forged the Afrikaner character. As long as they were alive and active, it was the fighting burghers, not those reasonable men who saw the futility of the fight, who provided South Africa with its leadership. Their spirit and character live on to this day in the Afrikaner and his leaders—and their concepts and prejudices too, making them in some ways anachronisms in today’s world. When sixty years after the war Harold Macmillan tried to tell them of the wind of change blowing through the world, it seemed to the Afrikaner but a far-away breeze compared with the hot blast from the fire generated by the guerrilla warriors which blows upon them still.
The military history of the last eighteen months of the war is the story of innumerable small engagements which took place in widely scattered parts of the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Cape Colony, even some in Natal. Few had by themselves any special significance. They were important because they indicated continuing vigour on the part of the Boers, and because their cumulative effect was to sustain the concept of legitimate belligerents fighting on behalf of republican governments which, in fact, no longer existed.
Statistics can sometimes be more eloquent than words. Perhaps the best index of Boer guerrilla activity in the twelve months after Komatipoort is a simple list of the number of times the railway line was cut:
October 1900 32
November 30
December 21
January 1901 16
February 30
March 18
April 18
May 12
June 8
July 4
August 4
September 21
The Boers did not concentrate their efforts on destroying British communications, which in the early stages of the guerrilla war they might have done. Even so, there were enough attacks on the railway to worry the British. After July 1900 all night running stopped between Bloemfontein and the Vaal, and three months later between Bloemfontein and the Orange. For a time in January 1901 the British did not dare run a train
at night anywhere in the conquered territory.
Instead of trying to strangle the British army by a complete disruption of its supply lines, the Boers looked to Cape Colony with its large Afrikaner population for support. From a strictly military point of view this was a mistake, although had the Boers cut off Roberts’s supplies and kept the line broken they could only have prolonged the war; military victory was from the beginning an impossibility. Victory was possible only in political terms, and the well-developed Boer political instincts told them that their best hope of success lay in rousing the Afrikaners in the Cape to stage a massive demonstration of their support.
Great Boer War Page 48