Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  Black and White Budget published a letter purporting to be from “an officer writing from camp near Pretoria”: “One of our native scouts was caught by the Boers the other day. They cut the lad open alive and took his insides out. A Boer woman put a little black boy’s head in a carpenter’s vice and twisted it round until his neck was broken. They really are for the most part savages.”13

  The Boers too at this stage of the war had their atrocity stories, the brutal treatment of Boer women by British soldiers being a favourite theme. In Cape Colony the editor of Ons Land was fined £100 for publishing “a seditious libel attributing atrocities to British troops.”

  Boers were increasingly accused of using explosive or expansive bullets, firing from behind women, wearing British uniforms to deceive, using the red cross or white flag as a ruse, whipping prisoners, robbing or killing wounded, and violating their oaths of allegiance.

  The charge of using improper bullets was one left over from the early days of the war when both sides were guilty of the practice; they were seldom used during the last two-thirds of the war. That the Boers ill-used prisoners or wounded was largely untrue, but of course there were exceptions, and De la Rey once had some of his men flogged for ill-treating prisoners. There is no evidence of burghers deliberately hiding behind women to shoot, but there were “women’s laagers” on the veld and occasionally women with commandos; sometimes they did get in the way of the fighting males. It was certainly true that thousands of Boers who had given up the fight and had taken the oath of neutrality or oath of allegiance to the crown later took up arms again and joined commandos, a practise which undoubtedly incensed the British.

  The wearing of British uniforms was indeed common, and not infrequently Boer commandos pretended to be British, riding like British soldiers in formation. Most burghers, if reduced to wearing captured British uniforms, kept their own easily identifiable wide-brimmed slouch hats, but it became difficult indeed to tell friend from foe when many British units adopted the practical and comfortable Boer hat. Some Highland units, which kept their kilts but exchanged their helmets for slouch hats, were described as being “Boer above and bare below.”

  Misunderstandings and mistakes about the use of the white flag did not diminish, and the belief was widespread among the soldiers that the Boers deliberately and regularly lured soldiers to their deaths with white flags. An Australian trooper wrote home:

  There was a most impressive scene at the burial of Lieutenant White, near Lichtenburg. He was treacherously shot at Manana, four miles east of Lichtenburg, while going to answer the white flag displayed by the Boers.... At the funeral his comrades replaced their hats on their heads, and joined hands together and swore most solemnly never to recognize the white flag.14

  Ceremonies of this sort were repeated elsewhere, and the war became crueler. There is evidence that soldiers did sometimes ignore the white flag, and the Boers collected sworn statements from witnesses.

  Colonials, towards whom Englishmen have usually exhibited a supercilious disdain, had never stood so high in the public estimation in Britain; it was expected that South Africans would fight, but the way in which the Australians, New Zealanders, Tasmanians, and Canadians volunteered to aid the cause of Empire inspired new feelings of brotherhood,p a sentiment not widely shared by the British regulars, who resented the higher pay the colonials were given. For their part, the colonials, an independent lot, chafed under British army discipline and red tape, and they resented having British regular officers placed over them.

  On the night of 12 June 1901 some 120 Boers completely routed 350 Australians (Victorian Mounted Rifles) at Wilmansrust, between Middelburg and Ermelo, looting their camp and carrying off a pompom. The Victorians had been easy prey that night because they had neglected properly to post sentinels and pickets. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Beatson, in charge of the column to which they were attached, was enraged; he assembled the remains of the unit and not only told them that they were “a lot of wasters and white-livered curs” but added some unpleasant opinions about Australians in general. The Victorians mutinied. They had always disliked Beatson and had resented his attempts to infuse some discipline into them; now they swore they would never serve under him again. Three of the leaders were court-martialled and condemned to death; Kitchener commuted the sentences to three years’ imprisonment, but the Victorian government protested even this sentence and the three were pardoned.

  Volunteers from Britain also complained of their treatment at the hands of regular officers. In general, both the British and the colonial volunteers, once trained, made better soldiers than the regular rank and file who were recruited from the poorest, least intelligent, and least skilled, but regular officers, unaccustomed to dealing with higher-calibre men, did not always know how to handle them.

  Tommy Atkins had never enjoyed such esteem in Britain, but the correspondents and officers who saw the regular in South Africa were aware of his deficiencies. Praise for him was sometimes backhanded. Herbert Lionel James wrote: “Know, therefore, that there is no keener judge of human character and human mind than the cherub of the gutter. It is from these gutter-snipes, grown into men, that the fighting ranks of the great British army are filled.”15

  Captain Slocum made a comparison of the British regular with his American counterpart. “The British soldiers have not the individuality or resources of our men, but for indomitable courage, uncomplaining fortitude and implicit obedience, they are beyond criticism.”16

  John Atkins would have agreed, but he thought that the sturdy discipline of the British regulars was “matched with an equally sturdy want of natural resource, intelligence, or eye for the country.” And Churchill, now a young and reckless politician, dared to say that “the individual Boer, mounted in suitable country, is worth three to five regular soldiers.” After the war most of the officers who testified before the Commission on the War in South Africa admitted that the average British regular was inferior in intelligence and ability to the colonials and to the Boers. The Times History passed a harsh but true judgement: “They were indifferent shots, careless of cover, slow to comprehend what was taking place or to grasp the whereabouts of the enemy, always getting surprised or lost, helpless without their officers. In a word, the British soldier was well disciplined but ill-trained—one might almost say untrained.”17

  The ability to endure was the regular’s most signal feature. General Hector Macdonald, a Scotsman who had himself served for nine years in the ranks, appreciated this: “Poor fellows, the work is hard, hard indeed; but not a growl among them all. They march, march, hour after hour, day after day, sometimes without boots or shoes, and often in rags, but they are always cheery and never complain.” In all of the previous wars of the Victorian era the stolid qualities of the British regular had made up for his inadequate training and lack of skills. It was only in this war, for the first time, that bulldog tenacity, blind obedience, and brave endurance did not suffice.

  Not much is known of what these simple, illiterate men thought or felt. They did not write books or articles, and few writers of books and articles considered their thoughts or feelings worth recording. Most of what we know about life in the ranks comes from literate volunteers.

  James Barnes saw the body of a soldier being brought in after a skirmish. Walking beside the stretcher was a tall comrade, his bronzed face drawn with grief, who kept a hand on the stretcher to steady it, as if he felt the dead man could be hurt by the jolting. A trooper came up to commiserate. “Was he your pal?” he asked.

  “Aye!” he said brokenly. “And man! You should ’ave ’eard ’im play the penny whistle!”

  It is only in such casually observed or overheard bits that we catch a glimpse of the regular army soldier. Neither officers nor newspaper correspondents made any real attempt to understand him. His bravery and endurance were praised, his military deficiencies were deplored, but there was no attempt to discover what he felt. For this we must turn, curiously, to fiction and t
o poetry—the work of a man who never spent a day in the army. That the work of Rudyard Kipling hit the proper note for the rank and file is attested by the thousands of crudely spelled letters he received from men in the ranks and by their lusty cheers whenever he appeared among them. In fact, Major General George Younghusband maintained that Kipling created the British soldier:

  I myself had served for many years with soldiers, but had never once heard the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling’s soldiers used. Many a time did I ask my brother officers whether they had ever heard them. No, never. But sure enough, a few years after the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly like Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories! He would get a stray word here, or a stray expression there, and weave them into general soldier talk, in his priceless stories. Rudyard Kipling made the modern soldier....

  My early recollections of the British soldier are of a bluff, rather surly person, never the least jocose or light-hearted, except perhaps when he had too much beer. He was brave always, but with a sullen, stubborn bravery.18

  More than anything, perhaps, this passage illustrates how little officers associated with or even spoke to their men. A wide, insurmountable social and cultural gulf divided officers and other ranks. They shared the dangers of campaigns, but little else; they lived in different worlds. Kipling did not so much create the British soldier as open his officers’ eyes to him.

  It is extraordinary that Kipling, who was certainly not of a class from which private soldiers were recruited, who had never been in the army himself, and whose contacts with soldiers were not really extensive, could so vividly and accurately portray their feelings and attitudes in such a variety of situations. He made three trips to South Africa during the war, staying each time for several months, but only once—and that only for about ten days—did he ever leave Cape Colony and see the fighting soldiers at work. Only a genius with an exceptional ear for language and an extraordinary empathy could have written of the soldier’s life in South Africa as he did.

  He wrote only three full-length stories about the war but more than two dozen poems. The most famous at the time was “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” but perhaps the best known today is “Boots.” “The Islanders,” a passionate plea for conscription, is remembered now for the phrase that caused an uproar among his sports-loving countrymen: “the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.” Poems such as this and “A Song of the White Men” were political; more interesting today are those which describe the lives and feelings of ordinary soldiers, poems such as “M.I.,” “Columns,” “Half-Ballad of Waterval,” and “Two Kopjes.” These poems are written without any concessions to the uninitiated reader, to those unfamiliar with the war as seen by the soldiers. They bristle with jargon and slang and Afrikaans words, and today need either footnotes or an understanding of the war in South Africa to be entirely comprehensible.

  Kipling was passionately patriotic and convinced that the British cause was a just one, but he was incapable of a blind hatred for the enemy. He wrote a poetic tribute to Joubert when he died, and in “Piet” (as, earlier, in “Fuzzy-Wuzzy”) he reflected the soldier’s respect for his foe:

  Ah there, Piet!—Picked up be’ind the drive!

  The wonder wasn’t ’ow ’e fought, but ’ow ’e kep’ alive,

  With nothin’ in ’is belly, on ’is back, or to ’is feet—

  I’ve known a lot o’ men behave a dam’ sight worse than Piet.19

  This was an attitude more prevalent in the first half of the war than the last half, and it is significant that Kipling took pains to explain that the speaker is not a colonial or a volunteer but a “Regular of the Line.”

  In the beginning there had been a number of gentlemen rankers, but in the guerrilla phase of the war these had largely disappeared, gone home when their time was served. The social level of the volunteers declined, and there were no longer architects, barristers, or even bank clerks in the ranks. Recruits came from the working class. Perhaps the best explanation of why they enlisted after the glamour of the war had worn thin can be seen in an anonymous article published in a working-class magazine:

  Here I was cooped up in a city warehouse a strong active fellow full of high spirits and a desire to see the world. What more to the taste could there be than a few months in a different land.... to see life and to escape the continual sameness inseparable from trade in the city.... it was to escape for a time the monotony of existence, and if other volunteers were to speak the truth they would tell you the same thing.20

  Although the quality of the British soldiers decreased and their enthusiasm waned, the situation among the Boers was the reverse. Their numbers in the field grew ever fewer, but those remaining were the best fighters; they were those most enthusiastic for their cause, those most skilled in the arts of survival—the hardest to catch and kill.

  39

  GUERRILLA LIFE

  Britons and Boers both inhabited the veld, playing the same deadly game; the same sun and the same rain fell on both, but life was not the same for the hunted as for the hunters. The British had bases to draw upon, inexhaustible supplies, overwhelming force; the Boers’ sources of men and supplies steadily dwindled. In one sense time was on the side of the British, for the Boers could not continue indefinitely. Yet, in another sense, time was on the side of the Boers, for the nature of guerrilla warfare makes the objectives of the war different for the two contestants. In order to win, the British had either to kill or to capture all their foes or force them to capitulate; the Boers on the other hand needed only to exist, they needed only to stay alive on the veld to deny the British their victory. They could not win, but they could keep the British from winning. The guerrilla phase was a war of wills, an endurance contest. Each week that the Boers prolonged the struggle added to Britain’s embarrassment, for while each minor victory of the Boers was a humiliation for their enemy, British victories, using crushing force on small bands of exhausted burghers, were without glory and added no credit to the army or the Empire.

  The average British soldier could not understand why the Boers kept on fighting when they were certain to lose. A prisoner once asked young Reitz why they persisted: “Oh, well, you see,” said Reitz, “we’re like Mr. Micawber. We are waiting for something to turn up.”

  Back-veld Boers, like British Tommys, did not keep diaries or write many letters; most of what we know of the guerrilla life led by the fighting burghers comes from the pens of town Boers, the best accounts being those ofDeneys Reitz from Pretoria and Roland Schikkerling from Johannesburg. But educated young townsmen and wild, bearded Boers from the Zoutpansberg, diverse as they might be, lived and fought under the same conditions, nor was the life of a commandant or general much different from theirs; guerrilla life rubbed men down to essentials.

  With Kitchener’s columns sweeping the country clean of livestock and burning the crops, food grew ever more scarce and the fighting burghers were forced to live frugally indeed. Daniel Morgan, guerrilla leader in the American Revolution, put his finger on the fundamental requisite of a guerrilla: he had in his unit a number of “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a stock not unlike the Afrikaners. “As for fighting,” he said, “the men of all races are pretty much alike.... But sir, for the grand, essential composition of a good soldier, give me a ‘Dutchman’—he starves well.”

  There was a wide variety of game on the veld, and the British could not denude the country of all animal life. If the burghers were left in peace long enough and could spare the ammunition, they hunted antelope and other game, jerked it, and made biltong. The great staple was mealies (maize), which grew in such profusion that they were seldom without it. It was eaten boiled, roasted, and green, made into porridge and ground up for flour. It was even toasted and used to make an ersatz coffee. Schikkerling was probably not exaggerating when he said of mealies: “Take it away and we could not remain in the field ten days longer. Without it we would have had to abandon the war mor
e than a year ago. A mealie cob should be on our coat of arms.”1

  There was also food to be had from the British, sometimes in quantity when they successfully attacked and captured a goods train or supply convoy, but with no safe place to establish depots they were able to use only what they could carry with them or eat on the spot. Some of it was too strange for the unsophisticated back-veld Boers. One old burgher, having pried open a tin of oysters, asked plaintively, “Who will give me some jam for this little tin of bird’s bellies?”

  THE WOUNDED WERE TENDED ON THE BATTLEFIELD AT A COLLECTING

  STATION BEFORE BEING TAKEN TO A FIELD HOSPITAL.

  Hunger sometimes drove the Boers to raid Bantu kraals, and this led to retaliatory attacks. The Bantu were not slow to see who was winning the war; their fears of the Boers decreased and they became bolder. Their increasingly hostile attitude made the Boers feel freer to make raids on them for food. This bad feeling between Boer and Bantu, particularly in the Transvaal, increased the dangers the burghers faced.

  As the war dragged on, clothing became increasingly scarce. Cloth had never been manufactured in the republics, and after the capture of Komatipoort by the British the Boers received no more imports. Commandos operating in the Cape suffered less than did those in the north, and some even developed a kind of uniform with their own distinctive hat bands: Scheepers’s men wore white bands, Willem Fouché’s men yellow, and Wynand Malan’s men blue with white polka dots.

  Deneys Reitz was not the only one to discover that grain bags could be made to serve as clothing. Schikkerling, writing in August 1901 from the Transvaal, said: “The local farmers have better clothes than we of the Johannesburg Commando. The material is from a better class of grain-bag, more closely knit, and without names and advertisements on. They, however, betray their bad taste and vanity by the goat-skin, and clashing colours of their patches.”2