Six of Maritz’s men also rode to the sea and made their way along the coast to Darling, where they saw a British warship lying at anchor near the shore in Lambert’s Bay. It was an irresistible target, and they loosed a few rounds at its steel sides. When the ship’s crew returned the fire, using their guns, they bolted, happy to be able to boast of having fought the only naval action of the war.
But this was not the first time the Royal Navy had had a chance to fire on the Boers from a man-of-war. Earlier, in January 1901, some of Hertzog’s men had reached this same point in the hope of finding a ship from Europe bringing them supplies and foreign volunteers. It was a scheme that went awry: instead of the friendly ship they expected they found HMS Sybille anchored there. As Erskine Childers in The Times History said, the ship “saluted the raiders with a volley of shell as a reminder that they had reached the element where Britain, under Providence, was undisputed mistress.”13
Smuts now felt himself strong enough to undertake offensive operations, and he moved against three fortified British posts some 150 miles to the north: Springbok, Concordia, and O‘okiep. The first two were captured without difficulty, thanks to some homemade hand grenades manufactured out of dynamite found in a nearby copper mine, but O’okiep proved difficult and Smuts laid siege to it. It was while engaged in this operation in April 1902 that he received under a flag of truce a message from Kitchener saying that a meeting had been arranged between the Boer and the British leaders at Vereeniging to discuss peace. He was invited to attend.
37
FIGHTING THE GUERRILLAS
The guerrilla phase of the war called for new strategy and new tactics on the part of the British, and Kitchener was not slow to develop these once he realised that the war had not ended and that more than just police actions were required. He did not hesitate to employ most of the ruthless methods necessary to fight guerrillas, but he was slow to see their political and psychological implications, to understand that, however justifiable militarily, many of his methods were politically unsound and that military measures alone cannot conquer guerrillas.
The nature of guerrilla warfare has changed little since it was first used in modern times by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Peninsular War, for in spite of technology, it remains a primitive form of warfare and its concepts, tactics, and strategy remain very much the same in all eras. The methods by which guerrillas are overcome are, for humane men, unpalatable because they involve making war upon entire populations, upon those who in orthodox warfare are considered noncombatants. But as guerrillas are dependent upon the noncombatant population for supplies, information, and other necessities, and the passive, if not active, support of the people among whom they move is essential, these people —housewives who count the men and guns in the passing column, small boys who have seen the hiding soldiers in their ambush, old men who know forgotten paths—become a danger to the counter-guerrilla forces and minatory action is taken against them. So terrorism becomes a standard feature of guerrilla wars.
Terrorism is a tool for coercion. To achieve maximum effectiveness the usual devices of terrorism—executions, destruction of property, imprisonments, torture, et al.—must be employed brutally and indiscriminately without regard to fairness or justice. It requires the willing suspension of humane feelings and all sense of fair play. The British by temperament have usually been incapable of this.
“Humane” was never an adjective applied to Kitchener, but before describing the measures he actually employed it is only fair to say at the beginning that the British did not use one of the oldest, usually effective, but most repulsive techniques, one which in the past fifty years has been a common feature of guerrilla wars: the use of torture to obtain information. Although rarely acknowledged as an instrument of policy, torture is frequently countenanced by higher commanders or, even when it is not, is indulged in by at least some subordinate commanders. The temptation is often strong. It is a remarkable thing that in this war there is not a single recorded instance of this ever having taken place. As far as is known, no one even suggested it. Amid all the angry charges flung by each side against the other, neither Boer nor Briton ever claimed that physical torture was used.
Torture can be mental as well as physical, of course, but the only recorded incident of the deliberate infliction of mental anguish is the story told by Captain James Seeley (later Lord Mottistone), who apparently never felt that he had done anything reprehensible. He had ridden all night with 20 men to capture Boers who he had learned were at a farm owned by a man named Greyling in the Orange Free State. He surrounded the farm and three Boers rode out; all of them managed to escape. After a futile pursuit, he led his troopers back to the farm, now occupied only by a boy, Jappie, his mother, and two sisters. Singling out the boy to question, he demanded to know where his father had gone. All of his questions were met with silence; the boy refused to talk. Determined to break him, Seeley ordered up a firing squad, stood him in front of it, and threatened to order it to shoot; still the boy refused to betray his father. In the face of such resolution it was Seeley who broke, called off his bluff, and shook the boy’s hand, telling the terrified mother that she had a son to be proud of, one it had been a privilege to meet. Then he mounted and rode off with his men. Telling the tale in later years, he wrote: “As long as I live, I shall never forget that wonderful moment when love of father, home and country triumphed over certain death. Never shall I forget the expression on the face of that Boer lad when, lifting his head, he said to me with glistening eyes: I shall not tell!”1
The Anglo-Boer War has been called the last gentlemen’s war, but then, so has the Crimean War. It is debatable whether any war can be so described, but certainly few wars, and no guerrilla wars, have been fought with so many of the leaders on both sides personally displaying so much humanity, even when carrying out policies which were sometimes far from humane.
Both sides neglected one of the most valuable, perhaps the most valuable, guerrilla warfare weapon. As fifteen years later T. E. Lawrence discovered, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.” Kitchener had all the printing presses in his hands, but he failed to make full use of them.
Although Kitchener disdained to use torture and was ignorant of the power of propaganda, he made use of every other tool available to him for use against the Boer guerrillas: destruction of the enemy’s sources of supply through farm burning and the slaughter of livestock; control of the population by a pass system and by herding noncombatants into concentration camps; protection of his own supply routes and restriction of the enemy’s movements by lines of blockhouses; continual pressure on the enemy by mobile columns and drives; and demoralisation through the use of “traitors.”
That the railways were vital to the British forces in South Africa had been obvious to all commanders from the beginning, and they obviously had to be protected. To this end a number of strong points were established along the way by constructing a series of blockhouses. The first line of blockhouses was built between Jacobsdal and Ladybrand, and it was found that not only did it protect the railway, but it served as a barrier of sorts which restricted the mobility of the Boer commandos. Kitchener saw that his task would be made easier if he could prevent the Boers from freely moving about, if he could prevent them from combining forces and hinder their communication with one other. By extensive use of the blockhouses along the railway he could divide the sea of the population in which the guerrillas swam (to use Mao Tse-tung’s analogy) into polders which could be drained of supplies and population and in which the fighting burghers might more easily be caught. So the blockhouse system was extended until some 8,000 were built, stretching for 3,700 miles along the railways. By November 1901 some 14,700 square miles of the Transvaal and 17,000 square miles of the Orange Free State were enclosed. The construction, once started, was continued right up to the last day of the war. Although De Wet contemptuously referred to the policy of blockhouses as “the policy o
f the blockhead,” it played an important part in reducing the mobility and thus the effectiveness of the commandos.
Some of the first blockhouses were of stone, but such substantial structures were expensive and time-consuming to build. It was not until the invention by a Royal Engineer officer of a cheap model capable of being easily and quickly constructed that the use of blockhouses on a large scale became practicable. Two cylinders of corrugated iron 6 feet high, one 2 feet smaller in diameter than the other, were used. The smaller, 12 feet in diameter, was placed inside the larger and the gap between them filled with earth or stones. A 4-foot-square door and a dozen loopholes were punched and an overhanging pitch roof added. Placed quite close together, seldom more than a mile apart and often separated by only a few hundred yards, they were surrounded by barbed wire and along both sides of the tracks wire festooned with tins containing pebbles was strung to give warning when anyone tried to cross. Sometimes there were also ditches and stone walls. Telephones and telegraphs were used to maintain communications, and armoured trains with guns and searchlights patrolled the tracks.
The idea of hampering the movement of guerrillas by using fortified lines was not new; the Spanish army in Cuba had tried a similar system, throwing trochas from coast to coast across the width of the island. It had not worked well for the Spanish, but if Kitchener knew of the experience he did not allow it to discourage him.
The principal objection to the blockhouse system was that it tied down to fixed defences an enormous number of men, so many in fact that Kitchener never had more than 50,000 troops actually available for offensive operations. In the beginning the employment of infantry on blockhouse duty was not a serious drain on effective manpower, for there was little other use to which infantry could be put; soldiers on foot tramping about the veld trying to catch nimble horsemen were ineffectual, although this was a use to which they were often put. As the lines of blockhouses were extended, however, more and more men were needed.
No special skills or powers of endurance (other than the ability to endure boredom) were needed for blockhouse duty; it was for the most part a tedious and lonely life. J. F. C. Fuller, who served as a subaltern, wrote:
The worst feature of blockhouse life was its demoralizing influence on the soldier. Apart from sentry duty and minor fatigue work, there was absolutely nothing to do except talk, smoke and gamble. Frequently no sign of civilization, or even of life, except for the two neighboring blockhouses, could be seen for miles around, and this utter blankness of life carried with it a bad moral influence. ... Though they were in complete safety, men would become jumpy and bad-tempered. 2
The temptation to use the great numbers of idle Bantu and Coloureds for this irksome task and thus free soldiers for other duties proved irresistible, and the British laid aside their scruples about not arming “natives,” gave them guns, and employed them on blockhouse duty. Soldiers facetiously called these guards “the Black Watch.” The experiment was not a success, for the undisciplined men were not always vigilant, and British officers testing the system once “captured” with ease several blockhouses whose Coloured guards were absorbed in playing cards.
The simple cylindrical blockhouses would not have been able to withstand artillery fire, but in the later stages of the war the Boers had few guns: most had been captured, destroyed, or buried when the ammunition ran out—and besides, they found that guns, like wagons, hampered mobility and were often more of an impediment than they were worth. Occasionally blockhouses were attacked with homemade grenades or dynamite charges, but usually they were left alone and the Boers attempted crossings at night by cutting the wires between them.
A commando crossing a railway was not a common occurrence. Many soldiers spent their entire tour of duty in South Africa without ever seeing a hostile burgher. This lack of activity made for a relaxation of vigilance that often enabled the Boers to slip through, although at times the guards became jumpy and nervous, firing at any noise they heard. Wild animals stumbling into the wire at night provoked outbursts of musketry, and, as firing from one blockhouse usually caused neighbouring blockhouses to open fire, a chain reaction was sometimes created which, once started, was difficult to stop. In one instance the firing spread along a hundred miles of track and thousands of bullets were sent off into the dark and empty veld. Fuller remembered lying in bed listening “to a battle on the railway line between Kaffir watchmen who were blazing away at each other,.”3
For offensive operations the traditional combat units—battalions, brigades, and divisions—were no longer practical and the fighting unit became the column. Although sometimes infantry was included, the most effective columns consisted of mounted infantry, sometimes cavalry and a few guns. Their size varied between 200 and 1,500, but typical was the description by Kipling in “Columns”: “A section, a pompom, an’ six ’undred men.”4
Columns were used not only to hunt down Boer commandos but also to plough furrows of destruction through the former republics. The two functions did not complement each other: one being the swift pursuit of a mobile enemy and the other the slow process of systematic destruction. It was cruel logic that dictated the burning of farms and the slaughter of livestock, and it aroused deep and long-lasting resentment. At first farms were burned only when British troops had been fired on from them. Then Roberts ordered that farms lying nearest any spot where Boers had cut a railway or telegraph line were to be burned. These were punitive measures, of course, but Roberts was careful to issue orders (18 November 1900) that farm burning was to be strictly limited to the stated offence: “The mere fact of a burgher being on commando is on no account to be used as reason for burning the house.”
Roberts knew all about farm burning, for it had been a common practice on India’s Northwest Frontier where he had long served, but he did not like it; he knew, as he told the House of Lords, that it would result in “a rich harvest of hatred and revenge.” Nineteen years after the war (27 January 1921) Field Marshal William Robertson wrote to T. W. Mackensie, editor of The Friend (Bloemfontein):
I had been greatly struck when serving on the staff of Lord Roberts in South Africa with the way in which he always kept in view that the two Republics might one day become members of the British Empire and throughout the operations insisted upon the people being treated with every possible consideration consistent with military requirements.5
Many soldiers thoughts Roberts was too soft. Lieutenant David Miller wrote to his mother:
The great mistake they are making here, as far as I can see, is that they leave all the farms and small tenure standing. The result of this is that the Boers have always means of getting fresh supplies. I would burn all the farms in the disaffected parts, and also all the towns which we are not occupying, sending the women and children out to the nearest commando.6
Lieutenant Miller got his wish when Kitchener took command. The new commander-in-chief undertook deliberate, thorough, wholesale destruction of farms: all buildings burned to the ground, all crops set alight, all animals slaughtered, hundreds of square miles turned into a wasteland. An estimated 30,000 farms were burned and 3,600,000 sheep slaughtered. “Our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night,” wrote one soldier with a British column. “We usually burn from six to twelve farms a day.”7 All who travelled through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal commented on the desolation they saw. Miller, who was now seeing the results of the policy he had advocated, wrote his mother: “The country is now almost entirely laid waste. You can go for miles and miles—in fact you might march for weeks and weeks and see no sign of a living thing or a cultivated patch of land—nothing but burnt farms and desolation.”8
Miller was writing of conditions as he saw them in September 1901. One month later, young Freda Schlosberg, travelling with her parents from Rhenosterkop to Bronkhorstspruit, wrote in her diary, “On the road there are many burned houses or ruins of former dwellings which the British had bur
nt. There was not a sign of life for miles, nothing but black ruins and endless stretches of bare dry veld.”9 Smuts, making his perilous way south through the Free State to invade Cape Colony, wrote in his diary, “Dams everywhere filled with rotting animals. Water undrinkable. Veld covered with slaughtered herds of sheep and goats, cattle and horses. Hungry lambs run bleating around.”10
There was an outcry in England—even Churchill condemned the policy as “a hateful folly”—and Campbell-Bannerman, leader of the opposition and future prime minister, created an uproar when at a dinner of the National Reform Union on 14 June 1901 he referred to Kitchener’s activities as “methods of barbarism.” The British, who for the past two hundred years at least had regarded themselves as the most civilised people on earth, were more horrified by Campbell-Bannerman’s calling them barbarians than by Kitchener’s methods. Explaining himself to the House of Commons, Campbell-Bannerman protested that he intended no calumny against the army, but he stuck to his conviction that Kitchener’s policy was barbarous, and in a subsequent speech at Stirling he said:
The farms are burned, the country is wasted. The flocks and herds are either butchered or driven off; the mills are destroyed, furniture and instruments of agriculture smashed. These things are what I have termed methods of barbarism. ... If those are not the methods of barbarism, what methods did barbarism employ?11
Great Boer War Page 52