Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  Steyn’s physical condition worsened at Vereeniging, and he was not made any better by the reports he received of the deliberations. Lying helpless in his tent he must have sensed the slackening resolve of the delegates pledged to continue the war and the slipping away of his country’s independence. It was finally decided that he must be moved to Krugersdorp where he could be properly cared for; De Wet was appointed acting president. After an emotional farewell to his officers, Steyn was taken to the station and carried on board a train, his health broken, his cause lost, his career ended.

  In Cape Colony the war wound down while the peace conference was in progress, and near Springbok some of the Boers under Manie Maritz played football with a British unit under Major Clement Edwards. But this slackening of military operations was not typical, and elsewhere the fighting continued unabated. Ian Hamilton was engaged in a final drive in the western Transvaal and fought the last major engagement of the war at Roodewal. He thought it a marvellous battle with which to end the war:

  And what a sequel to shake hands upon! There’s been no better in the birth of nations bar perhaps the battle of Hastings.... F.J. Potgieter, foremost of the brave.... Potgieter in his blue shirt leading the line of 1200 Boers—the pick of the back-veld-at a steady cantor, over ground that could not give cover to a mouse; straight—a mile and a half in bright sunlight—at a massed column of 1500 British bayonets and another similar column standing by in support. Every rifle, pom-pom and field gun that can be brought to bear is firing for dear life. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was child’s play to this. Miraculously—incredibly—on and on they came until Potgieter falls with a bullet through his brain only seventy yards from the centre of the Scottish Horse.

  When we buried these heroes we did so reverently as if they had been our comrades.7

  On 29 May, only two days before the peace treaty was signed, some Boers made a cattle raid near Frederikstad in the southwestern Transvaal; a handful of mounted infantry gave chase and were ambushed. Most of the troopers managed to escape, but Second Lieutenant Sutherland, a boy still in his teens, fresh out of Eton into the Seaforth Highlanders, lost his horse. He scrambled to his feet and, firing as he ran, tried to break his way free. It was impossible; he was outnumbered and surrounded, but he refused to surrender. Finally the circling Boers shot him down. Conan Doyle thought this a glorious death: “It is indeed sad that at this last instant a young life should be thrown away, but Sutherland died in a noble fashion for a noble cause, and many inglorious years would be a poor substitute for the example and traditions which such a death will leave behind.”8

  Reactions to the peace varied. Not all the soldiers in South Africa were glad to see the war end. Lieutenant J. F. C. Fuller, twenty-three years old, was on blockhouse duty. He was riding to Kroomdraai to get the mail on 1 June when he encountered another officer who rode up and said, “Have you heard? Peace was proclaimed last night!”

  “Well, I am sorry,” Fuller replied, and, telling of this later, he added, “And so I was.”

  Murray Cosby Jackson, now a sergeant, was given news of the peace at church parade on the same day: “We gave the regulation cheer. I don’t know that I was much elated though, on the whole. We had had a pretty good time all round and will probably never get the same experiences again.”9

  One Englishman who was glad to see the war ended and who lost no time in hurrying home was Lord Kitchener. On 20 June he turned over his command of the forces in South Africa to General Neville Lyttelton and three days later sailed for England. He took with him four bronze statues of Boers, the creation of sculpter Anton van Wouw, and President Kruger’s stinkwood ox wagon. He gave two of the statues to the Royal Engineers and kept the other two for himself; Kruger’s wagon he presented to the City of London. Eventually, after Kitchener’s death, his heirs, the Royal Engineers, and the City of London were persuaded to return this booty. The ox wagon is now in the Kruger museum, and the bronze figures stand where they were intended to be placed around the statue of Kruger in Church Square, Pretoria.

  In Britain there was general rejoicing at the news of the peace, except among the pro-Boers. When Kipling’s Aunt Georgie (Lady Burne-Jones, née Georgiana Macdonald), who did not share her nephew’s jingoistic attitudes, heard of the surrender she hung a black cloth from the window of her cottage at Rottingdean and put up a large notice that read: WE HAVE KILLED AND ALSO TAKEN POSSESSION. Kipling had to rescue her from a band of angry young patriots.

  It had been hard indeed for the delegates to the peace conference at Vereeniging to bring themselves to agree to the British terms; now they had the unpleasant task of returning to their commandos to explain to their burghers what they had done and why. Equally unpleasant was the task of arranging for their men to surrender their arms and take the oath of allegiance. Major General E. Locke Elliot described the procedure:

  On receipt of a signal that the commando had assembled I proceeded with my personal staff to the meeting. On arrival, General De Wet introduced the generals and commandants, the latter their field cornets.... The men were then fallen in, counted, and had their arms collected in convenient places. Passes were given to each burgher to the effect that they had surrendered.10

  De Wet also wrote a description:

  I left Pretoria on the 3rd of June with General Elliott [sic] who had to accompany me to the various centres to receive the burghers’ arms.

  On the 5th June the first commando laid down their weapons near Vredefort. To every man there, as to myself, this surrender was no more and no less than the sacrifice of our independence. I have often been present at the death-bed and at the burial of those who have been nearest to my heart—father, mother, brother and friend—but the grief which I felt on those occasions was not to be compared with what I now underwent at the burial of my Nation!11

  In all, 21,256 burghers and rebels surrendered: 11,166 in the Transvaal, 6,455 in the Free State, and 3,635 in Cape Colony. Their reactions to the surrender varied, but for none was there joy. Some cried, a few fainted. Some were relieved, many were bitter. When Smuts spoke to his men, one burgher cried out, “Jan Smuts, you have betrayed us!”

  As the shaggy, unkempt burghers came off the veld and into the towns, soldiers, women and children, black and white, stood along the sides of the roads to stare at them; some produced cameras and took their pictures. They rode to surrender locations, these proud, hardy veterans, led by their leaders. They rode with the easy slouch of men long accustomed to living in the saddle; most were dirty, their clothing a stained assortment of rags, skins, grain bags, and captured British uniforms. They had fought long and hard and well, holding at bay an army more than ten times their number. The world had watched and wondered at such warriors. They had been defeated, but their spirit remained unbroken, their pride unbent.

  Many burghers fired off their ammunition and smashed their rifles on rocks before turning them in. Some irreconcilables refused to sign the oath of allegiance, preferring exile.

  Of the 30,000 prisoners of war held by the British at the war’s end, some 24,000 were in camps outside South Africa. Many of these refused to believe that peace had been signed, suspecting that the news was simply a British trick. When peace was definitely confirmed and the news could not be denied, many still refused to sign the oath of allegiance, even though refusal meant they would not be repatriated. The form each man was asked to sign read:

  I ... [name and home address] adhere to the terms of the agreement signed at Pretoria on 31 May 1902, between my late Government and the representatives of His Majesty’s Government. I acknowledge myself to be a subject of King Edward VII and I promise to own allegiance to him, his heirs, and successors according to law.

  There were so many prisoners in India and Ceylon who refused to sign that finally, at the end of 1903, the British had to ask De la Rey to go there and personally persuade some 500 of them that the war was really over and that they ought to take the oath and go home. In November 1902, six mo
nths after the end of the war, there were still 376 irreconcilables in Bermuda. In December the British asked the leading Boer generals to send them letters advising them to sign the oath. This was done, but in August 1903, more than a year after Vereeniging, there were still 63 stubborn men who refused.

  The British were in a quandary. The prisoners refused to work, refused to take the oath, and even refused the offer of free passage to any country they chose. Finally seven of the most recalcitrant were simply dumped on the wharf in Hamilton. They immediately established a “laager” in the sheds on the waterfront and, ever faithful to the democratic process, proceeded to elect a leader. The city fathers of Hamilton then debated the wisdom and legality of lodging a charge of vagrancy against them. A month later the police evicted them from the sheds and left them sitting on their boxes and bundles in the street with orders to be off by nightfall. They drifted off; no one seemed to know or care where.

  This procedure having worked, the military authorities then unloaded the remainder of their prisoners onto the city of Hamilton. This time, when they were put on the wharf, the police were ready and promptly arrested them for loitering. Sent to gaol, they refused to work and were put on bread and water. Still they held out. When after ten days they were released, they simply sat in the street outside the gaol until they were rearrested.

  Eventually some took the oath and some drifted away from Bermuda, but there were a few who never signed and never left. They found work and became part of the population; two married local girls. It is not known when the last one died, but twenty-five years after the war there was at least one irreconcilable left there, still proclaiming himself a citizen of a republic which no longer existed.

  While most of the prisoners of war eventually returned to South Africa, those who had fought to the end but still refused to sign the oath were deported, and for a time there were Boers scattered all over the world. Deneys Reitz went to Madagascar; Francis Reitz, Ben Viljoen, and many others went to the United States, where some of them accepted the offer of free land made by a number of western states; others were scattered about Europe; some went to South America, and in remote Patagonia there is to this day a Dutch Reformed Church and a group of Spanish-speaking Argentines called Juan or Pedro with Afrikaner surnames.

  Wherever they went the Boers were welcomed, for men admire bravery and endurance and the Boers had earned the admiration of the Western world. Theirs seemed such an incredible military achievement that even they themselves were a bit awed by it. De Wet saw the hand of God behind it all:

  England’s great power pitted against two republics, which, in comparison with European countries were nearly uninhabited! This mighty Empire employed against us, besides their own English, Scotch, and Irish soldiers, volunteers from the Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African Colonies, hired against us both black and white nations, and, what is worst of all, the National Scouts from our own nation. Think, further, that all harbours were closed to us, and that there were therefore no imports. Can you not see that the whole course of events was a miracle from beginning to end? A miracle of God in the eyes of every one who looks at it with an unbiased mind, but even more apparent to those who had personal experience of it.12

  The British did not believe in miracles, but they recognised courage, stamina, and stubborn persistence when they encountered it, and they joined the world in admiration of their former enemies. L. S. Amery best expressed their attitude at this time:

  The decision of the Boer leaders to prolong the war was an assertion of individual and national character over mere calculating reason. In the long, heroic struggle that followed that character was strengthened, purified and chastened.... The Boers, surrendering when they did and as they did, were a greater asset to the British Empire than they would have been if they had surrendered two years earlier.13

  And so it all ended. But in history there can be no end, and what we call endings are also beginnings, for life goes on, leading to new endings and new beginnings for ever and ever.

  44

  EPILOGUE: THE DUST SETTLES

  If a chief villain is to be selected, a man most responsible for the tragedy of the war in South Africa, all fingers must point to Milner. The Boers had hated Rhodes (who died just before the war ended), and they detested Jameson, Kitchener, and Chamberlain, but above all they entertained an implacable hatred for Milner. To them it seemed particularly humiliating, the grossest insult, that he should have been selected to be Britain’s proconsul, the man who would now rule over them. Churchill too thought the appointment unwise: “After the Peace of Vereeniging no more unsuitable agent could have been chosen to discharge the functions of High Commissioner.”

  Certainly there could have been no greater contrast in temperament than that of Milner and the people he was to govern. The Boers were an unpretentious people; Milner was proud and clothed in an impervious arrogance. The Boers had a passion for politics and debate; Milner distrusted democratic processes, and since it was nearly impossible for him to understand how anyone could disagree with him, he regarded debate as an empty form, a sheer waste of time. The Boers’ dislike of Milner was reciprocated; he disliked and distrusted them. Yet, having said this, it must also be said that Churchill was wrong and the Boers were shortsighted. In those first postwar years South Africa in general and the Boers in particular were fortunate indeed to have had the services of Lord Milner.

  “The unsettling of a nation is easy work; the settling is not”—so Vincent Gookin had said 250 years before. He was speaking of Ireland, but his words were no less true when applied to the former Boer republics. All of the institutions of Boer society were in disarray if not completely shattered. The economy of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had rested upon agriculture and mining. This economy was now in ruins. The people, both black and white, who had supplied the labour for the farms and mines had been uprooted and were now scattered about the world or huddled in concentration camps. To restore the economy, to repatriate the people, and to re-create their institutions in a new society—these were the urgent tasks that faced the new rulers. To accomplish this—and quickly—the British resorted to that least desirable but most efficient form of government: a dictatorship, and a dictatorship of the most difficult kind: a temporary one, intended to lead to eventual self-government. The man chosen to head such a government had to possess an extraordinary combination of talents and abilities: Milner was such a man and Britain was fortunate in having him at hand, for he was also a man she could trust, just as forty-three years later the United States was fortunate to have a remarkably similar autocrat in Douglas MacArthur to rule Japan. Both were born dictators completely dedicated to the service of democratic governments.

  Milner was not in the least daunted by the immensity of the tasks before him; he rubbed his hands with delight at the prospect of reassembling the pieces of the two republics in a new way; he was at last in his element. He set about his great work of “restarting the new colonies on a higher plane of civilization” with energy, enthusiasm, and determination, and to assist him he assembled a personal staff of young men who were copies of himself—clever, energetic, cocksure. Most were but a few years out of the university; most came from Oxford, and many, like Milner, from Balliol. And all, like Milner, were bachelors. They came to be known collectively as “Milner’s kindergarten.”

  In spite of opposition from man and nature, Milner accomplished much in a relatively short time. Nothing escaped his zeal: he completely reorganised the police and prison administrations, developed a government hospital in Pretoria, established asylums for the insane, founded leper colonies, reformed the labour laws and the whole machinery for the administration of justice, formed a public health department, built the finest zoo in Africa, enlarged and improved the railway system and the telephone and telegraph service, constructed public buildings, and, using the schools started in the concentration camps as his foundation, established farm schools wherever a group of children could
be collected (more than two hundred of these schools were started in 1903 alone). Milner’s approach to problems was not only intelligent but often imaginative, as when he sent groups of former prisoners of war on tours of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to study new crops and new methods of cattle raising.

  The greatest of his labours was the resettlement of the land and the reestablishment of the agricultural base of the economy, to put the people back on the farms. The problems involved in repatriation, of resettling men, women, and children, black and white, on a devastated land, were tremendous. There were, in round numbers, 200,000 whites and 100,000 Bantu to be put back on the land and given the means for survival. This included not only 30,000 prisoners of war and 110,000 people in concentration camps, but also the 4,500 South Africans who were discharged from the British army and some 30,000 others, remnants of the Boer nations, still at large, homeless on the veld.

  Nature itself seemed to conspire against Milner in his great repopulation effort. The winter that immediately followed the peace at Vereeniging was the most severe in South Africa’s recorded history, bitterly cold and punctuated by violent storms. Then came drought, epidemics of cattle diseases, and a plague of locusts.

  Milner attacked his major problem by establishing a Repatriation Department, using the concentration camps as bases from which families were dispatched to what was left of their farms. Thus, the concentration camps remained in existence for nearly nine months after the end of the war. The Repatriation Department worked hard, but there were innumerable difficulties with which it could not cope, and problems seemingly without end.