Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  At another farm a small girl interrupted her preparations for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at us on an old piano. We were carting the people off. It was raining hard and blowing—a miserable hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing along her children to the ox wagon outside, and this poor little wretch in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final defiance. One smiled but it was rather dramatic all the same, and exactly like a picture.6

  Many went about their work of destruction without enthusiasm and without guilt or rancour, impersonally, with little feeling for or against the folk whose ruin they were accomplishing. Corporal Murray Cosby Jackson of the 7th M.I. described how his company carried out its task:

  We wetted all the grain, burnt the forage, and killed the livestock, leaving merely enough for the family. The women couldn’t quite make Tommy out, I think. A soldier, hot and grimy from burning their best haystack, and bloody with the blood of the old frou’s pet Minorcas and Anconas, would go up to the back door without a trace of ill feeling and ask very civilly for a glass of milk, and then proceed to kill the pig.7

  Such workaday attitudes did not always prevail. It is unhealthy for an army to be put to such work, for it tends to corrupt and to brutalize. Captain Phillips wrote:

  Soldiers as a class (I take the town bred majority) are men who have discarded the civil standard of morality altogether, they simply ignore it.... Looting, again, is one of his perpetual joys. Not merely looting for profit ... but looting for the sheer fun of the destruction; tearing down pictures to kick their boots through them; smashing furniture for the fun of smashing it, and maybe dressing up in women’s clothes to finish with, and dancing among the ruins they have made. To pick up a good heavy stone and send it wallop right through the works of a piano is a great moment for Tommy.8

  Although their mission was simply to destroy, the temptation to loot was sometimes irresistible: Why not take and use what otherwise would be burned? Some soldiers talked openly of this, and Private Stanley from New South Wales wrote a letter home that was published in the Sydney Telegraph:

  When within 800 yards of the farm we halted, and the infantry blazed a volley into the house; we broke open the place and went in. It was beautifully furnished and the officers got several things they could make use of. There was a lovely library—books of all descriptions, printed in Dutch and English. I secured a Bible, also a rifle, quite new. After getting all we wanted out of the house, our men put a charge under and blew it up. It seemed such a pity, it was a lovely house.

  Farmhouses were not the only buildings looted. The predikant at Schweizer-Reneke complained that a British officer had carried off the communion plate, and at Witpoort a Boer woman declared she had seen the soldiers carry away all of the church plate.o

  Sarah Raal saw a spot where soldiers had chased a large flock of sheep into tall, dry grass, encircled the area, and then set fire to the grass:

  It was dreadful to see the groups of animals. Those which had not been burned to death had twisted legs. They crept on their knees, and others had their eyes bursting out of their heads, and some had lips curled up above the teeth. I could never have believed that there are such cruel people if I had not witnessed it myself.9

  Cavalry came to the homestead of Hans Botha, an old burgher who had fought and been wounded in the First Anglo-Boer War but was too old for this one. He was away when the cavalry came, and only his wife, seventy years old, and two small grandchildren were at home. They were given three pillows and three blankets and told to leave. The three went off a way and then stood, the old woman with her grandchildren beside her, looking back as the smoke curled up from the house in which she had lived most of her life and which contained all the possessions she cherished.

  The 7th M.I. came to destroy one farm and found only a lone woman who did not realise what the soldiers were going to do when they put her in a wagon. As they were driving off she saw smoke coming from her house. What was happening? “Oh, that’s your house going up,” she was told. She screamed, leaped from the wagon, and ran back to rescue her husband hidden under the floor.

  Lieutenant Cyril Rocke, occupying a group of kopjes one day while on outpost duty with a farm-burning column, sat helplessly on his horse and watched a farm being burned. “I could have sobbed,” he said. “In fact I think I did.”

  A few months earlier he had lain in one of the bedrooms there recovering from a broken shoulder and from head injuries sustained when his horse had thrown him during a skirmish nearby. The two women who lived there alone, a grey-haired Boer matron and her young and attractive niece Anna, had cared for him tenderly. It had been Anna’s fiance, Piet, and his brother who had picked Rocke up unconscious from the veld and brought him there. “We couldn’t leave you for the vultures,” they said laughing.

  In spite of their kindness, Rocke had no doubt he was a prisoner; the two young Boers were fighting burghers, probably part of the group he had been skirmishing with. When they returned one day, this time with a cart driven by a Zulu boy, and told him, “You’re leaving here today,” he was sure he would be taken to a Boer laager and that his days of real captivity had begun. The young men helped him dress and helped him into the cart. He said good-bye to his nurses, the elder woman refusing the watch he offered her, and the cart moved off.

  After a jolting and, to Rocke, painful three-hour ride they stopped at a fork in the road. “Get down, please,” Piet said. “This is where we part. Standerton is about ten miles in that direction. We are going the other way.”

  War tells strange stories, and one such unfolded for Lieutenant Rocke as he watched the burning farm. Snipers had been firing on the soldiers as they did their work of destruction; one had been captured and was brought to him. It was Piet. Rocke dismissed the soldiers who had brought him in, and the two men looked at each other. Rocke owed this young burgher much. He knew that, unlike most prisoners of war, Piet was in a perilous position: born and raised in Natal, he was a British subject, a rebel who could be shot. Still, he had been caught sniping at his own men. Rocke hesitated. Then, “Take my horse and go,” he said.

  The two met still another time eighteen months later when Rocke watched De la Rey lead his ragged, dirty, unbowed veterans into Balmoral to surrender. Standing among the “irreconcilables” (those who chose exile rather than signing an oath of allegiance to the King) was Piet. Rocke went up to him, eager for news. Rocke’s horse had served him well, Piet said, until it died of horse sickness. His aunt had died in a concentration camp; he did not know what had become of his brother, but he thought he was dead. Was that all, Rocke asked. In a flat voice Piet said, “You killed my Anna.”

  Telling the story many years later, Cyril Rocke still remembered the shock: it was, he said, as if he had been lashed with a whip.

  Captain Francis Fletcher Vane was with a column in the northern Free State trying to catch Hertzog when one day he surrounded a farmhouse and captured six Boers. One of them, Vane was astonished to discover, was a slender, blue-eyed, attractive girl dressed as a man and carrying a rifle and bandolier. She was Ella Jacobs, who had been with her mother in a concentration camp at Springfontein before she ran off with another girl to find her brothers, Hendrik and Gideon. For six months she had been fighting in Hertzog’s commando.

  “It had never fallen to my lot to have the honour to capture a fighting girl,” said Vane. “It was not the sort of thing one expected ... and it was embarrassing.” He did not know what to do with her, for to send her to a prisoner-of-war camp was unthinkable. According to Vane, he sent her under escort to her farm; according to her son, S. Marais, now a farmer in Trompsburg, Orange Free State, she was returned to the concentration camp.

  Not long after the war Vane looked up Ella Jacobs and arrived at her parents’ farm on the day she was to be married. He stayed for her wedding dinner and gave her a miniature of his Queen’s South African Medal; she gave him
a photograph of herself. She had become one of the war’s heroines, known as the “Boer Joan of Arc,” and only she, it would seem, was unimpressed with her fame: in later years she always referred to her days as a fighting burgher as “the follies of my youth.” She died in 1969 at the age of eighty-five. Ella Jacobs made a lasting impression on Vane, for she gave him “the first inkling of what women could do when they believe themselves oppressed.”

  Captain Herbert James had a less pleasant experience. He rode up to a Boer farm one day and, without dismounting, asked a young woman for a glass of milk. She brought the milk, but as James reached down for it, she dashed it in his face and doubled over with laughter as two men with rifles stepped out of the farmhouse doorway and shouted, “Hands up!” James dug his spurs into his horse and made a successful dash for safety.

  Even in the final, bitter phase of the war, decency and humanity did not entirely disappear, and there were numerous occasions when it was exhibited. No man on either side showed finer qualities of civilised manhood than Koos de la Rey, the skilful and fierce fighter who looked like a patriarch and behaved like a gentleman in the very best sense of that term.

  Major Tudor C. Trevor was leading a patrol of 60 men in the Klerksdorp district when he was attacked by 200 Boers under De la Rey who fell upon his patrol like a whirlwind. Within minutes twenty of his men were down. One, a young subaltern, was badly wounded, shot in the chest. There was little Trevor could do but put his hat over his face to ward off the sun. Then he had to make a dash for it; he had almost lingered too long; the Boers were upon him, sweeping over the position, and he had barely time to throw himself on his horse. He galloped away in a hail of bullets, and it later seemed to him strange that not a shot had been fired at him until he had reached his horse. Over a rise in the ground he met the main body of his column, which wheeled in the direction of the enemy, back to the site of the skirmish.

  The Boers had disappeared like the wind; the wounded were still on the ground, including the young subaltern. Trevor bent over him and the young man said something inexplicable: “If you ever meet De la Rey again, give him the best hat money can buy for me.”

  The subaltern died in hospital, but from one of his nurses Trevor heard his story. When the Boers had overrun the position, they had immediately begun to strip the dead and wounded of their clothing and equipment. One had taken the young man’s hat, and he cried out in protest. De la Rey, nearby, had ordered the hat restored and had seen that he was given water and made comfortable.

  It was not until after the war when De la Rey passed through Cape Town that Trevor was able to comply with his dead subaltern’s request. He bought a splendid black silk top hat (it still exists) and presented it to him. He also used the occasion to ask why he had not shot him before he mounted his horse, as he easily could have done. De la Rey answered, “You don’t shoot partridges on the ground, do you? Neither do I.”

  Lieutenant David Miller was with a column under Colonel James Spens when it descended on a farm named Buffleskloof. It was an ordinary Boer farm: house and outbuildings set down in a clearing on the open veld. The owners fled at the column’s approach. Before setting fire to the buildings a search was made for anything living, and a soldier found a newborn puppy. He presented it to Miller, who put it in his tunic pocket, hardly thinking it would live. When the farm had been fired the column moved on. That evening he nursed the pup with milk from the fingers of a glove. Buflles, named after the farm, thrived and grew into a strongly built Labrador retriever that outlived its master.

  Dogs are always acquired somewhere, somehow, in the course of every campaign. In South Africa the New South Wales Bushmen had a sheepdog and the 2nd Middlesex Regiment had a collie that followed them when they marched out of Estcourt (and so it was named Estcourt). Nell, the terrier of the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, gave birth to twins during the battle for Caesar’s Camp and Wagon Hill; the pups were named Shot and Shell.

  There were other pets as well: the Scots Guards had a goat, always called “Billy Muffit’s Goat,” which was found in the Boer trenches at Magersfontein; the 2nd West Yorkshires had a baboon; several units had monkeys, usually named Jock; the 2nd Shropshire Light Infantry was given an ostrich by a friendly farmer (or so they said); one battalion of the CIV had a white kitten named Emergency Ration. The ammunition column of the Third Cavalry Brigade had a pet hen which had been found in Cronjé’s laager at Paardeberg; it travelled in a box on a limber and gained such fame that it was suggested “the Zoological Society should find it a home.” Pets did not escape the dangers of war: Estcourt was with his regiment on Spion Kop; a monkey belonging to an Imperial Yeomanry battalion saw action at Nooitgedacht and survived being hit three times by bullets.

  The fighting burghers had fewer pets, but Schikkerling tells of a baboon belonging to a gun section of the Transvaal staatsartillerie which always rode the gun on the march until the gun was buried when its ammunition was exhausted.

  Kitchener’s policy of deliberate wholesale destruction was intended to deprive the guerrillas of supplies, and in this he was successful. Even De Wet, ever scornful of British tactics, admitted that “had not the English burnt the corn by the thousand sacks, the war could have been continued.” Although the generals on both sides understood the underlying reason for the farm burning, it was widely believed among the Boers, and among many Britons as well, that the policy was intended to intimidate the Boers; in fact it only provoked anger and bitterness; it did not lessen their will to resist, only their means for doing so.

  Roland Schikkerling with the Johannesburg Commando recorded his reaction. He was on his way to attack a train near Bothasberg in the Transvaal when he came across a woman and her buxom, rosy, eighteen-year-old daughter living among the blackened ruins of their home. He listened with rising indignation to their story: how the British had visited their farm and applied “the Torch of Civilization.” Schikkerling promised the woman that if his commando was successful in its attack on the train (it was not) he would “spare no pains and shun no danger” to get them some sugar and coffee; a promise he later regretted, reflecting wryly: “What a pity that heroism must always be accompanied by risk, charity by expense, and politeness by discomfort.”

  For the British, life on the veld became a dull routine and even the fighting was seldom exciting. David Miller tried to answer his mother’s questions about what his life was like:

  There is so little to describe. The infantry soldier sees nothing except the men on either side of him and the enemy in front. He hears the crackle of the enemy’s fire somewhere—he does not know where—and he hears the whit! whit! of the bullets, and every now and then he knows vaguely some one near him is hit—he feels the smell of the powder (cordite) and the hot oily smell of his rifle. He fires at the range given, and at the given direction, and every now and then he hears “Advance!” and he gets up and goes on and wonders why he is not hit as he stands up. That is all. Then the bullets cease to come and the action is over ... he marches to the chosen camping ground and perhaps goes on picket—very tired and dirty—and he does it all again next day. That is the infantry soldier’s battle—very nasty—very tiring—very greasy—very hungry—very thirsty—everything very beastly. No glitter—no excitement—no nothing. Just bullets and dirt.10

  “Eternal damnation on Steyn and De Wet for keeping us out!” exclaimed Major George Younghusband. There seemed no end to the hard marching and little fights:

  “Where are you and what have you been doing?” was the burden of our letters from home. And echo answered “where” and “what” indeed? Perhaps Kitchener knew, though I doubt it.... to the rank-and-file the past was merely an endless vista of double treks. Reveille at 3:30 A.M., trek from dawn till noon; grazing the horses in the blazing sun or driving rain till 2 P.M.; up saddle and then trek on till dark. Now and again a “scrap” with brother Boer, and now and again a small town passed. But on the whole a weary dreary nightmare, and not worth writing about.11

/>   Younghusband was a professional soldier, an officer; the volunteers and the common soldiers were even less keen. Back in Britain enthusiasm for the war waned as dispatches from the front increasingly recorded captures of sheep and cattle rather than of armed Boers. There was a noticeable drop in the quality of the men who enlisted and a drop in the number who reenlisted. All the defeats of the first three months of the war had not dampened British ardor, all of Buller’s blunders had failed to quench the fighting spirit of the troops, but the guerrilla war did. Soldiers complained that they were “fed up,” and it was said that never before had homesickness been so manifest in a British army.

  There were less generous feelings towards “brother Boer.” Atrocity stories began to appear. Edgar Wallace, not yet famous for his novels, first began trying his hand at fiction in his news dispatches. The Daily Mail carried one of his stories, accompanied by a lurid sketch of Boers bayoneting British wounded:

  Abandoning the old methods of dropping the butt end of a rifle on the wounded soldier’s face when there was none to see the villainy, the Boer has done his bloody work in the light of day, within sight of a dozen eye-witnesses, and the stories we have hardly dared to hint, lest you thought we had grown hysterical, we can now tell without fear of ridicule. The Boers murder wounded men.12

  His story created a sensation in Britain. Kitchener, asked to investigate, reported that it was without any foundation in fact.