by Paul Terry
As the British shelled a column of Boers making for the hills, Paterson and two other press men competed to become the first Britons to enter Bloemfontein. Unsure whether any defenders remained to fire upon them, the correspondents galloped over a beautiful green flat and into the town. Paterson’s Australian-bred black colt was a superb animal and it carried him first into Bloemfontein, his two colleagues following closely behind. As they rode into town they were welcomed by the residents, who ‘all shook hands with us, and hoorayed as though they liked having their town captured’. Paterson overcame his usual modesty to describe this remarkable incident in a short but powerful paragraph to his Australian readers:
I don’t like to say too much about the race into Bloemfontein, but when we three correspondents decided to go into the town there was considerable risk of capture, but we were so anxious to be first in that we raced with whips going for at least three-quarters of a mile, and my black horse landed me first in Bloemfontein, a distinction to be proud of, and one that there are many claimants for, but the fact remains that we were the first to be seen in the town, and we guided the Mayor out to see Lord Roberts and surrender the town.
Later that month, Paterson met the great English poet and writer, Rudyard Kipling in Bloemfontein. It sparked in Paterson a lifetime of admiration for Kipling, ‘a little, squat figured, sturdy man . . . [with] nothing of the dreamer about him’. The great writer was a bundle of nervous energy who talked in a rapid chatter about the war and the future of South Africa. Three days later, Paterson attended a correspondents’ dinner in honour of Lord Roberts. Paterson was seated that night next to Kipling, and as they dined, Paterson asked the Englishman for a memento of their meeting. Kipling scribbled down extracts from two of his poems, ‘The Long Trail’ and ‘The Flowers’ on the menu for the evening meal. According to Paterson’s granddaughters, Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie, the former poem was their grandfather’s favourite, and the autographed menu became one of his most treasured possessions.
At around this time, Paterson met a young newspaper correspondent who was destined to become one of the greatest men of the century. His name was Winston Churchill, an aggressive, aristocratic young man, who ‘drank a big bottle of beer for breakfast every morning’. An aspiring politician, twenty-five-year-old Churchill had had one unsuccessful run at parliament in Britain and told Paterson he had only become a newspaper correspondent to gain enough public recognition to be elected when he ran again. A ‘man to be feared if not liked’, Churchill told Paterson he intended to plaster The Morning Post with cables of his own heroics and ‘when I go up for parliament again, I’ll fly in’.
Churchill had graduated from Sandhurst as a junior cavalry officer but was never popular with his superiors. The army, Paterson recalled, was prepared to bet that Churchill would either go to jail or become prime minister:
Churchill was the most curious combination of ability and swagger. The army could neither understand him nor like him; for when it came to getting anywhere or securing any job, he made his own rules. Courage he had in plenty . . . but, like the Duke of Plaza-Toro, he felt that he should always travel with a full band. As one general put it, ‘You never know when you have got Churchill. You can leave him behind in charge of details and he’ll turn up at the front, riding a camel, and with some infernal explanation that you can’t very well fault.’
The British continued their northward march and captured Johannesburg on 31 May 1900. On 6 June, Pretoria—the capital of the Transvaal—fell in another relatively easy victory. Many observers thought the taking of the city meant an imminent end to the war. They were soon proved wrong. The British might have the population centres, but the hard core of the Boer resistance had not been defeated and the nature of the war was changing. Steadily retreating into the rugged north, the Boers gave up on set-piece battle and started to become highly effective guerrilla fighters. It meant that British tactics would eventually have to change.
Paterson had caught an early glimpse of how those tactics might evolve when he wrote in April that the Boers would give up if their farms were tightly squeezed. If the government gave notice that all stock would be confiscated from farms where the owner was absent—fighting the British—then the men would return from their commando units in the wilds, and the war would come to an end. It was a harsh observation that he had cause to regret in June, when he saw the British burn down the house of a Boer commandant:
. . . when you see it done it is a different matter. When you really see women and children turned, homeless and crying, out on the open veldt—well, you want to be home and done with the war. Let us hope that it may be the means of bringing the war to an end.
In his last dispatch from the war, dated 11 August, Paterson said the Boers were heartily sick of the war and hundreds would surrender if not for the new policy of sending prisoners overseas to Colombo or St Helena—a fate they dreaded. Earlier prisoners had been treated too leniently when they were allowed to return to their farms because many had simply taken up arms again to re-join the commandos in the veldt, he wrote. Many on the British side thought the answer was to ensure no Boers should be left on farms while the war continued. Sterner measures were needed against those who laid down their arms only to take them up again, and Paterson expected those steps to begin sooner rather than later. He could not have known then that the British commander, Lord Kitchener, would eventually end the war with draconian force against South African men, women and children.
By then, though, Paterson’s war was over. In August he suddenly left South Africa and returned home to Sydney. He had experienced months of danger and adventure. He had seen combat at close quarters, putting himself at high risk so that he could get as close to the action as possible. He had seen men die and civilians mistreated. He had even been hit in the ribs by a ricocheting bullet but escaped injury. As the Boer ‘bitter-enders’ retreated further into the northern Transvaal, he hoped for an end to the war within months. He had had enough.
During his nine months in South Africa he had produced powerful and colourful word pictures, not only of the fighting, but also of the land and its people and culture. He had found a people—the enemy—who were remarkably similar to Australians, not the primitive monsters the propaganda painted them to be. His empathy for the Boers can have done him no favours with the army or the government, and it has been suggested that his insistence on discovering them as human beings had something to do with the suddenness of his departure. However, he had earned the right to go home with his head held high. His ‘trial for a month’ at the South African war was a triumph for journalism and for humanism.
The war he left behind was very different from the one he had joined. By late 1900 the Boer ‘bitter-enders’ were ambushing British troops, blowing up trains and bridges and destroying telegraph stations. In February 1901, after the scattered Boer commanders refused peace terms, Kitchener responded by scorching the earth. If the Boer fighters would not surrender, they would be flushed out of the veldt in a ‘series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot’. In a devastating total war, even their families would become casualties of the conflict.
The British torched Boer farms, razed their crops and slaughtered their livestock. Wells were poisoned and the earth salted. Weeping women and children were driven from the smoking ruins of their homes and herded into concentration camps of canvas and wire. There, they died in their thousands of disease and malnutrition. A network of stone or concrete blockhouses sprawled across the Transvaal, protecting roads, bridges and railways. And, in the field, the dirty war continued.
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While Barty Paterson was beginning a new stage of his life at home in Australia, Breaker Morant was in the thick of the fighting in the Transvaal. After enlisting as a private in Australia, he had been promoted to corporal and by the time he landed in Cape Town in February 1900 he had become a sergeant. He was on the road to redemption at last. In baking heat, his unit was soon sent north towar
ds Pretoria. Morant the desert horseman felt quite at home as he rode the veldt to what he hoped would be glory in war and a new beginning at home.
His superb horsemanship and educated manner made him stand out and he soon came to the attention of Major General John French who gave Morant the perfect job—a dispatch rider, or galloper, charged with delivering urgent messages between columns of the army as it advanced. The Breaker might not have been trusted with the loan of a £5 note, but on horseback few could equal him and he was mentioned in dispatches for his reliability as a messenger. The celebrated British war correspondent Bennett Burleigh also employed Morant as a dispatch rider. The dashing horseman played an important part in ensuring Burleigh’s coverage of the war reached his readers at London’s The Daily Telegraph. This job ensured Morant was in the midst of the action. It has also been said that he was a regular visitor to an army hospital, where he had affairs with the nurses and left them with broken hearts.
In October, Morant accepted a transfer to the Transvaal Constabulary. With the transfer came a lieutenant’s commission. At last, the reckless ne’er-do-well had earned recognition that reflected his gentlemanly heritage. He gladly accepted the commission but requested he first be granted leave so that he could return to England. He had become close friends with Captain Percy Hunt, a gentleman from a good family in England. Their bond was a deep one, with the added advantage that Hunt could offer Morant entry into British society. Things were looking bright for Morant as he prepared to leave. Showing the regard in which he was held by his military colleagues, he received high praise in a letter from his former commanding officer with the Mounted Rifles, Colonel C.J. Reade:
Your soldierly behaviour and your continual alertness as an irregular carried high commendation—and deservedly—from the whole of the officers of the regiment. I trust that in the future we may have an opportunity of renewing our pleasant acquaintance.
It was time for The Breaker to go home to whatever he had left behind. It was a defining moment. After an exile of eighteen years, he would be home in time for the Christmas of 1900.
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RULE .303
Harry Morant was returning to England on his own terms and his spirits were high when he landed at Plymouth late in the northern autumn. If he approached the esteemed George Morant for a rapprochement then the olive branch was rebuffed, but the prodigal son at least seems to have been welcomed back into Devon society. Cashed up with army pay, he was there to enjoy himself. He hunted foxes and stags, played polo, caught up with old friends and, as always, made new ones.
Morant was determined to make the most of his return from exile. He even found time for romance. In a pledge that strengthened their growing friendship, Morant and Percy Hunt are said to have become engaged to two sisters—the daughters of a local squire—on the same day. Bonded by experiences of war and a love of hunting, the young soldiers spent much of that winter together. Breaker Morant, the daredevil drifter who had atoned for his sins in the hard Australian outback, seemed to be finding his feet in Devon’s green and pleasant fields. But as winter came to an end, so too did Morant’s cash resources and whatever business had brought him home remained unresolved. Early in spring, his friend Captain Hunt returned to South Africa and a few weeks later Morant followed him.
Morant did not take up his commission with the Transvaal Cavalry. Instead, soon after his return to South Africa in April, he applied to join his friend Percy Hunt in a newly formed anti-guerrilla group, the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC), led by an Australian, Major Robert Lenehan. Morant had ridden a racehorse owned by Lenehan in Sydney and the major was well aware of his recruit’s prodigious skill on horseback. Morant was a perfect fit for the irregular band of soldiers charged with fighting the Boers under the new rules of guerrilla warfare. He gained his lieutenant’s commission and was immediately sent north, first to Pretoria and from there, to Pietersburg.
At first, he served with distinction. In this war of raid and counter raid, Morant’s unit played the Boers at their own game. Light, mobile and ruthless, the Bushveldt Carbineers were horseback commandoes who harried the Boer forces and disrupted their supply lines. They stole the Boers’ food and lived off the land. Completely at home in this country that so resembled inland Australia, Morant rode into battle with a rifle at his side and books of classic poetry in his saddlebags.
He led a squadron that raided Boer farms, often attacking at dawn after riding through the night. Throughout the winter of 1901, he captured many prisoners and the Boers learned to fear him. He was popular with his fellow officers, and enjoyed hunting expeditions and polo games in Pietersburg in his leave time. His commanding officer, Major Lenehan, later described him as ‘just the man for the work’.
As the Carbineers drove further into Boer-held territory, they set up a base in a frontier area north of Pietersburg. This base—a stout, fortified farmhouse—was known as Fort Edward. The commandos of the Bushveldt Carbineers would use it to harry the Boers in a war that was becoming increasingly desperate. Fast, mobile and intimately familiar with the terrain, the Boers staged lightning raids on men and infrastructure. The British built a network of concrete blockhouses linked by hundreds of kilometres of barbed wire and systematically cleared Boers from each sector. Disguised in British khaki or abusing the white flag, the Boers trapped the British in murderous ambushes.
Morant later claimed that around this time, he received orders from his friend Captain Hunt to shoot all Boer combatants dressed in British khaki, even if they surrendered. Morant said those orders were also issued by Captain Alfred Taylor, the sadistic BVC officer who was known to the native Africans as ‘Bulala’—killer. Despite believing those orders originated from Lord Kitchener himself, Morant said he initially refused to follow them, and only did so after a traumatic personal experience. It is these supposed orders that define the debate over whether Morant was a murderer or a scapegoat.
A turning point came for Morant in July, when a Boer commando derailed a troop train near the town of Naboomspruit, and slaughtered all but four of the men on board. Among the dead was Lieutenant Alexander Best, a friend of both Morant and Hunt. The savage nature of Best’s death deeply distressed Morant, who had by now experienced several bloody months of irregular warfare. It was a precursor to an even more distressing killing that pushed him over the line that separates soldier from accused murderer.
Morant’s downfall began on the night of 5 August when his friend, Captain Hunt, led an attack on a Boer farm, hoping to capture the Boer commando leader Barend Viljoen. With seventeen men, Hunt charged the farmhouse after dark, pouring fire through the windows. But Hunt had dramatically underestimated the number of men defending the post. Fanned out inside the house, the Boers replied with a hail of bullets. One slammed into Hunt’s chest as he stormed the house and he collapsed backwards into the yard. The Carbineers were driven back and had to leave their captain where he lay. Hunt died several hours later and, in the dead of night, the surviving Boers fled under the cover of darkness.
Hunt’s naked body was recovered the next day. There were reports that he had been cruelly mutilated. When the news reached Morant, he was devastated. For the rest of his war, he was a changed man.
One of Morant’s fellow officers was a former artillery gunner from coastal Victoria, Lieutenant George Witton. Like Morant, Witton had worked his way up through the ranks to earn his commission in South Africa. And, also like Morant, he would earn notoriety for what happened in the tumultuous weeks after the death of Captain Hunt. Witton later published his account of the confused and bloody events of 1901 in his book, Scapegoats of the Empire. In it, he said Morant became ‘like a man demented’ after learning of Hunt’s death.
According to Witton, Morant broke down as he tried to address the troops, and his commander, the feared Alfred Taylor, stepped up to urge the men to avenge Hunt’s death and ‘give no quarter’. Encouraged, Morant immediately led a patrol to catch the fleeing Boers. Led by a guide, the patrol char
ged over the veldt, halting only every four hours to rest the horses before mounting up and racing off again at a brutal pace. Morant rode at the head of the column, his mood veering from sullenness to fury. When the patrol became lost, Morant erupted into a rage against the guide, cursing and threatening him until he feared for his life.
Breaker Morant, 1865-1902. Photograph courtesy State Library of Victoria.
At nightfall, the patrol rested at a native kraal for a few hours before resuming the pursuit by the pale light of a new moon. Late the next afternoon, they met up with the men of Hunt’s unit at a mission station. The men told Morant that they had recovered and buried the body of his friend. They said Hunt’s neck had been broken and his legs slashed with a knife. His bloodied and bruised face was imprinted with the marks of hobnailed boots, his clothing was gone and his genitals amputated. Morant was convinced that his friend had not been honourably slain on the battlefield but murdered and desecrated by a cowardly enemy. His blood sizzled in a dangerous mix of fury and grief.
At daybreak, news came in that the fugitive Boers were headed for a district called the Waterberg. A gloomy and sullen Morant set out immediately at the head of forty-five mounted men, stopping only once that day to rest the horses. The men travelled light and carried no food. At sunset, the patrol caught up with the Boers who had bunkered down for the night in a laager—a temporary stronghold of circled wagons set up in a hollow between a series of kopjes. The patrol was perfectly placed for an ambush, but as Winton remembered, Morant could not contain his impatience:
Morant was excited and eager to make an attack. He sent Lieutenant [Henry] Picton with a party on his right flank, but to Morant, in his excitement, the moment seemed like hours. Before Picton could get his men into position, and just as I arrived at the foot of the kopje with the rear guard, Morant opened fire on the laager.