Some camps produced newspapers. On St. Helena there was De Krijgsgevangene (The War Prisoner) and in Ceylon the Diyatalowa Dum-Dum, printed “by means of a gelatine copying apparatus.” The prisoners on Burt’s Island in Bermuda published Die Burt’s Trompet.
European and American sympathisers sometimes sent gifts. Americans took a special interest in the prisoners on nearby Bermuda, particularly after Joubert Reitz smuggled out a letter that was published in the Boston Globe asking for food and clothing. A number of pro-Boer organisations in the United States, notably the Lend a Hand Society of Boston, the Boer Relief Fund of New York, and the American Transvaal League of Paterson, New Jersey, sent packages. So many rumours and horror stories about the treatment of prisoners and the conditions of the camps circulated in the United States that several Americans went to Bermuda to see for themselves. The Reverend W. S. Key of the Lend a Hand Society was appalled by the food (the standard field ration of the British army), but Frank Vizetelly, author and traveller, wrote: “So far as general care is concerned ... there must be many people in our own cities who would gladly exchange their present surroundings ... to share the life of the burghers.”15 Dr. J. B. Mattison of Brooklyn, probably a reliable source, wrote a letter (dated 17 February 1902) which was published in the New York Tribune: “I talked with many, noted their food, their clothing, their sanitary and hospital conditions, and must say that stories started by sensation mongers about poor food, bad clothes, much sickness and great mortality among the Boers in Bermuda are not true.”
In Bermuda an energetic Englishwoman, Miss Katherine Elwes, formed an Association for Boer Recreation that provided books, magazines, fishing tackle, and playing cards. Another local group, headed by Miss Anna Maria Outerbridge, was called the Boer Relief Committee and was said to have German connections. Its members harboured pro-Boer sentiments and even aided prisoners who tried to escape.
Politics, their own local politics, absorbed the men in the camps as it had at home. They held elections for landdrosts, judges, public prosecutors, and other officials, establishing little republics in each camp. The most contentious issue, of course, was whether they should accept the inevitable and take the British oath of allegiance. The irreconcilables exhibited a rancour towards those who took the oath such as they never showed the British.
So serious was the division that in Bermuda as elsewhere those who took the oath had to be separated from the rest. On the other hand, prison forged closer bonds between the Boers and the foreign volunteers. On St. Helena, when the British tried to separate the foreigners from the others, the prisoners protested and the camp newspaper declared: “Fellow warriors who have fought with us and shared our trenches in the veld are just as much Boers as we are.”
Only Cape rebels were handled differently from all others. Tried by military courts and sentenced to from three years’ hard labour to life imprisonment, they were kept apart, wore the broad arrow on the backs of their jackets, and were treated not as prisoners of war but as common criminals.
Well cared for though they were, to be a prisoner was a hard, sad lot for most; men suffered keenly the loss of freedom and their exile from country and family; news that came in eagerly awaited letters was frequently tragic. Frikkie Badenhorst, writing to his wife in the Klerksdorp concentration camp, eloquently expressed the longing most felt:
You wrote of the weeping in the night. We hear no one cry, notwithstanding that many tears arise.... Many men have had letters to tell them that their wives are dead and also their children, so by this you know that here also is sorrow. But in the night all is silent save the night watch, who calls from time to time: “All’s well.” It will be wonderful for us when once again we hear women and children weep!16
At Simonstown those who received letters mounted a stone and read them out; they were sure to contain news of other families and of friends, so men crowded around to hear. The prisoners themselves tended to write more and more often: on St. Helena outgoing letters and cards increased from 14,000 a month between January and September 1901 to nearly 16,000 during the same months in the following year. The men were given envelopes and paper and there were no restrictions on the number they could send, but they had to buy their own stamps and all letters were censored. When it was discovered that some prisoners wrote secret messages under the stamps, letters had to be turned in unsealed with the stamp placed loose inside. Cleaver, in Ceylon, once added a postcript to a letter: “Five pounds reward for the man in de Wet’s commando who captures this letter out of the post before it reaches Johannesburg.” 17 But the letter was delivered.
There were a number of escapes. Most of the successful ones were made at Green Point and Simonstown before the prisoners were shipped out of South Africa. At the Simonstown camp the prisoners were frequently taken to the beach to wash and swim in the sea, and on one of these occasions Hjalmar Pettersen-Janek, one of the Scandinavians captured at Magersfontein, had himself buried in the sand with a reed to breathe through. This ruse worked, and he made his way from Cape Town to Lourenço Marques and back into the Transvaal, where he joined the Lichtenburg Commando.
There were several escapes in India, but all of the escapees were recaptured. No one escaped from St. Helena, although Sarel Eloff and some friends stole a boat and made an attempt. One man tried to escape from Bermuda by putting a box over his head and paddling off in broad daylight. An alert guard took an interest in the box that was making such steady headway against wind and tide, and a party of soldiers was waiting for it when it reached the shore.
Escape from Bermuda was made feasible by the SS Trinidad, which plied regularly between Hamilton and New York. If a prisoner could reach this ship and hide on board he could find freedom in the United States. The first successful escape was by this method: on 5 July 1901 David du Plooy stowed away on the Trinidad and was not discovered until the ship reached New York. A few days later four prisoners from Darrell’s Island tried to duplicate his feat but were caught.
In September 1901 three men swam from Darrell’s Island to the Warwick shore and walked around to Hamilton. One went to seek the help of Miss Outerbridge and was captured at her garden gate. The other two, explaining their moist and bedraggled appearance by saying they were sailors whose boat had been swamped by a sudden gust of wind, boldly hired a horse and carriage to take them to the Trinidad; they too were caught. It was soon after this that the Bermuda government belatedly passed a law against harbouring escapees and offered a £3 reward for information leading to the capture of an escaped prisoner.
The war was over and peace was signed when on the night of 25 June 1902 F.J. du Quesne and a man named Du Toit swam off their island and made their way to Miss Outerbridge. For some unexplained reason she agreed to help one if the other would surrender. This was agreed to, and Du Toit voluntarily gave himself up while Du Quesne, with the help of Miss Outerbridge, escaped and lived to become a secret agent for German naval intelligence during World War I. Adolphus de Wet, a nephew of the Free State general, also escaped from Bermuda and eventually made his way to Peru, where he went to work for a mining company.
A German named Albrecht was actually assisted by the British in making his escape. He made a long swim, stopping to rest on various islands, and he was picked up, wet and exhausted, by a British search party. They readily believed his inspired story that he was a stoker off the Trinidad; they were looking for two other escapees. He was delivered to the ship and reached New York with ease.
As far as is known, only five prisoners of war ever escaped after being sent out of South Africa and succeeded in returning to their homeland to fight again.
On 10 January 1901 the Catalonia entered the harbour of Colombo, Ceylon, with a load of prisoners of war, among them five young men bent on escape: Willie Steyn, Pieter Botha, Ernest Hausner (a German), and two brothers, George and Lourens Steytler. When a Russian troop ship, the Kherson, commanded by Captain Vladimir Petroff Kissimoff, also entered the harbour the five young men slipped o
ver the side of the Catalonia in the dark and swam to it through the shark-infested water. The Russians took them up, gave them dry clothes and hot tea, and Captain Kissimoff at once weighed anchor and steamed away. At Aden, where the Kherson had to stop for coal, the British tried to search the ship, but Kissimoff hid the Boers in one of the ship’s funnels.
They had intended to disembark at Port Said and make their way somehow from there to Lourenço Marques, but Kissimoff learned that the British were anticipating this move and he persuaded them to stay on board until he reached a Russian port.
From the moment the Kherson docked at Feodosiya in the Crimea on 2 February the young Boers were treated as heroes. They travelled by troop train to St. Petersburg, pampered all the way by the Russian officers; crowds waited at each station to catch a glimpse of them. They were lionized in St. Petersburg, presented with money and clothing, and whirled through a round of entertainments before setting off for Berlin and then on to Utrecht, where President Kruger greeted them jovially with: “Are you the five swimmers?”
Kruger arranged for them to be provided with money and passports, and after purchasing Mausers, ammunition, and other supplies, they took a German ship to what was then German West Africa. With some difficulty they made their way overland to South Africa and again became fighting burghers. Their odyssey had lasted nearly a year and they had travelled some 20,000 miles.
43
VEREENIGING: THE BITTER END
It could not go on. The British had an almost inexhaustible supply of
men; every day saw the numbers of the Boers diminish. The war slithered
to a stop. A meeting between Kitchener and the Transvaal leaders on 12
April 1902 in Kitchener’s quarters in Pretoriar marked the beginning of
the end.
The British had not exactly asked for the meeting, but Kitchener found a way to let the Boer leaders know that he thought it would be a good idea. On the day of Methuen’s defeat at Tweebosch (7 March 1902) but probably before he had heard of it, he sent Botha and Schalk Berger copies of correspondence between the governments of Britain and the Netherlands concerning the Dutch government’s proposal that it lend its good offices to arrange a peace. Britain had refused the offer, and Lord Lansdowne had told the Dutch: “The quickest and most satisfactory means of arranging a settlement would be by direct communication between the leaders of the Boer Forces in South Africa and the Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Forces.” Although Kitchener sent these papers without any covering letter or comment, the Boers got the point: it was an unspoken invitation to come in and talk.
The meeting opened with Schalk Burger solemnly reading, article by article, a long proposal drawn up by the Boer leaders. Kitchener listened in amazement, for it seemed as if time had stopped two and a half years ago; Burger was covering all the issues which had been discussed at the Bloemfontein conference, issues which the British had long since forgotten or in which they were no longer interested. Now it appeared that the Boers were willing to agree to nearly all that the British had then asked for—a franchise for the uitlanders; customs, postal, and railway unions; English as well as Dutch to be used in the schools; disputes to be settled by arbitration; and, in what The Times History sneeringly called the “sublimest touch of all,” they agreed to demolish the forts at Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Bloemfontein.
Considering their plight at this moment, it certainly was ingenuous and, from the British view, impertinent for the Boers seriously to bring forth such proposals. Kitchener interrupted Schalk Burger’s reading: “Must I understand from what you say that you wish to retain your independence?”
“Yes,” said Steyn. “The people must not lose their self-respect.”
A futile discussion followed. At the insistence of the Boers, the proposal—“in all its naked absurdity,” as The Times History put it—was telegraphed to London. The reply, of course, was that His Majesty’s Government could not “entertain any proposals based on the continued independence of the former Republics which have been formally annexed to the British Crown.” On 14 April they met again, this time and henceforth with Milner in attendence.
It would appear that neither side realised that the Boers had just won their first concession. The presence of Milner at the negotiating table meant that the conference was not to be the meeting of opposing military commanders on the battlefield that Lansdowne and the government in London had envisaged, not simply a meeting to arrange an Appomattox-type surrender, but a meeting of the representatives of Great Britain with the representatives of two other nations, neither of whose existence Britain recognized.
The Boer leaders did not think of themselves as professional soldiers; they were, and had always been, politicians: almost all had at some time been elected to public offices; they easily switched from their temporary role as warriors to their political roles, and it was as representatives of their people, not as military commanders, that they wanted to meet with the British. Kitchener, a professional soldier who had never held a public office, had little interest in the political issues; he was interested only in a satisfactory conclusion of the hostilities. Instead of insisting that the discussions be kept on the military level, the British sent Milner to discuss the very issues which most interested their opponents. Milner tried to sidestep these and to keep the discussions on a military level, for he was not enthusiastic about meeting with the Boers for any purpose other than to arrange for their unconditional surrender.s He felt that “every concession we make now means more trouble hereafter.” In his terms, he was right. Steyn, Burger, and the rest were technically rebels and outlaws; the people they claimed to represent were British colonials. But even Milner seems to have realised that the British could not be too stiff about this.
During these first talks it became evident to the Boers that Milner and Kitchener did not share the same views, Kitchener being more willing to compromise, not so prone to stand on technicalities, and quite willing to forget the earlier proclamations banishing the Boer leaders. For their part, the British could see a schism between the Free Staters and the Transvaalers, Botha and Burger being more interested in making peace than were Steyn and De Wet.
At the 19 April meeting the Boers asked for an armistice so that they could consult with all the scattered guerrilla leaders. They did not receive an immediate answer, but at a subsequent meeting Kitchener, while refusing to grant an armistice, agreed to arrange for the Boer leaders to meet at Vereeniging, a sleepy little town with a population of about 2,000 whites and 3,000 nonwhites on the Free State-Transvaal border, and he promised immunity from capture to the leaders chosen to attend as from 11 May. It was to be an extraordinary convention. Nothing quite like it had ever taken place before, and it remains a unique historical event. To the Boers it seemed a natural thing to do, conforming to all their political instincts, but already the peace talks were becoming more political than the British had ever envisioned.
It was certainly a bizarre proceeding to be taking place inside a British colony: Kitchener provided all facilities for his rebel enemies to hold a closed, secret meeting; furthermore, he granted immunity to all their leaders, military and political, the very men he had been trying to catch and imprison. Not only was the meeting an acceptance by the British of the Boers’ contention that the republics still existed, but it was an acceptance of the fact—made a fact by the character of the meeting itsetf—that it was the fighting burghers in the field, and they alone, who spoke for the Afrikaner people. There was not even a suggestion that the prisoners of war or the men in the concentration camps or the hands-uppers or the National Scouts or anyone else should have any say in the matter. The “representatives of the people” were to be the leaders, for the most part generals and commandants, selected by the fighting burghers, together with their acknowledged political leaders.
Kitchener did not care about diplomatic forms; the Boers could be as politically peculiar as they liked as long as he achieved his own ends, and he fel
t quite sure the meeting of the delegates at Vereeniging would result in an end to the war. His optimism was reflected in a letter he wrote on 20 April to Lady Cranborne: “It is quite exciting to think that by the 20th of next month we may have peace. It would be such a good thing for all if it came before the Coronation. How I would like to see Botha, De Wet and De la Rey in the procession; it is quite in the cards, and it would do them a world of good to see the crowds.”1
The Boer leaders had no thoughts of marching behind Kitchener’s chariot in a triumph when they made their way to this remarkable meeting on the banks of the Vaal. From all over the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Cape Colony the delegates came, many riding without charge on British ships and trains, to meet at Vereeniging and there decide on peace or the continuation of the war. And if for peace, on what terms. The destiny of their people was in their hands.
It was said that many a British officer thought he had made an important capture before his prisoner produced his pass. One young subaltern, the story goes, fancied for a few heady moments that he had captured the much-hunted De Wet.
Smuts, like the other Boer leaders, was told he could bring to the meeting an aide and an orderly. He chose Deneys Reitz as one of these, asking him in which capacity he preferred to go. Young Reitz, not knowing the difference, chose to be the orderly and found himself riding in an open truck with the baggage while a laughing companion designated as the aide rode in a first-class carriage with Smuts.
Steyn was seriously ill, but he went to Vereeniging, travelling with Cornelis (“Corneels”) du Preez as his aide and Ruiter, his Coloured servant, as his orderly. Ruiter had not been killed, as Steyn had feared, when he tumbled from his horse at Reitz. He had simply thought it prudent to stop when shot at. When the train drew up at Vereeniging station Steyn looked out the window and saw the tents of the concentration camp there. “Corneels,” he called. “Look at that!”
Great Boer War Page 64