The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Although Kruger’s flight passed unnoticed in the general confusion, other strategic decisions could not be hidden. When it became known that the last guns were being removed from the four elephantine forts built after Jameson’s defeat – Schanzkop, Klapperkop, Dasspoort and Wonderboom – a spasm of utter misery seized the volk. Pretoria was the holy of holies, the Boer Jerusalem; to Pretoria they had been drawn like a magnet throughout that awful, endless retreat; here was the ‘great Armageddon’, Smuts called it, when the Boer forces, drawn from all points of the compass, could deliver ‘that final united blow’ that might send the British reeling back to the coast. And now the forts at Pretoria were to be abandoned without firing a shot. With a cry of ‘Huis-toe!’ (‘Off home!’) the burghers began to pour out of Pretoria, after looting anything they could find. Others, including the Chief Justice, formed a committee of ‘peace and order’ (Smuts called it the ‘surrender committee’), prepared to go out and hand over the town to Roberts.69

  The nadir was reached on 1 June, when a krijgsraad was held at the telegraph office in which the senior officers, led by Botha and Smuts, drafted a telegram to Kruger suggesting immediate surrender.70 Kruger replied with an equally despairing telegram to Steyn. Could arms be laid down in protest (at British aggression)? How many men were willing to continue the struggle – a handful?71

  One of the handful was certainly Deneys Reitz. In April, Reitz and his three brothers, with Charley (their African ‘boy’) had, like Botha, the Boer forces in Natal to switch to the western front. They had then fought with Botha against Roberts’s huge columns as they trundled north from Bloemfontein. They had watched the great pillars of dust, day after day, as the British outflanked them. Gradually the commandos had disintegrated. By 1 June, all resistance seemed to have ended. They reached the main road to Pretoria, where horsemen, wagons, and herds of cattle were all mixed up in ‘dreadful confusion’. They met a British column which made no attempt to stop them. (Said Charley, the African servant: ‘Baas, those English people don’t know the way to Pretoria so they are coming along with us to make sure.’) Reitz was sure that the Boers would have made no resistance if the British had ridden in among them, as both sides believed that the Boer army was disbanded and the war was at an end.72

  At length, Reitz and his party reached their homes in Pretoria, to find them bolted and barred. They banged on the doors with their rifle butts. Neighbours told them that the President and their father had ‘run away’, and that Pretoria was to be surrendered in the morning. The city was in confusion; looting was in full swing. Reitz and his friends filled their own saddle-bags, abandoned Charley, the faithful servant, and then rode out of the town to the east. This was the direction in which most of the fugitives had gone. Next day, 5 June, they met their father’s friend, Jan Smuts, off-saddled under a tree. Smuts told them that the war was by no means over; indeed, a new phase was just beginning in both republics. De Wet and Steyn were on the warpath. Louis Botha, acting Commandant-General since Joubert’s death, was starting to gather together the nucleus of a new Transvaal army. This was better news than Reitz had heard for a long time; and already he could see, from the way the burghers were talking and laughing round the camp-fires, that a new spirit was stirring.73

  That spasm of despair had, in fact, passed from the leaders as rapidly as it had come. And now Botha and Smuts (and Kruger, from the railway saloon at Machadodorp) had begun to infuse the rank and file with a new spirit of hope. How had this miracle been achieved?

  The first vital breathing space had been provided by the Johannesburg armistice of 30 May, the work of the gallant Dr Krause.74 It was this which was to prove Roberts’s supreme blunder. For it allowed Botha to extricate his best men and all his heavy guns from the Rand, and preserved Pretoria from the British long enough for Smuts to remove and load on to railway wagons all essential war materials: the reserve ammunition from the Magazine, and all the gold and coin, totalling £400,000-£500,000, from the Mint and the Standard Bank. (The Boer bank officials challenged Smuts’s authority to do so, and the job was performed at gun-point.75)

  Krause had won the first breathing-space from Roberts by sheer bluff. The implicit threat was that the gold-mines would be blown up unless the Boer armies were allowed to withdraw. In fact, the Boer leaders – Botha in consultation with Kruger – had already decided that to blow up the mines would antagonize foreign opinion (about a fifth of the shareholders of the Rand companies were French, German, and American). Dr Krause then had had to block an extremist attempt to blow up the mines. On 27 May Judge Kock, the reckless young judge whose behaviour in the Edgar Case had helped to precipitate the war, had arrived at Krause’s office at the head of a hundred foreign adventurers. He told Krause he had come to fire the dynamite charges. (As earlier reported to Milner, charges had in fact, been laid ready to blow up the principal mines.) After a scuffle, Kock was forcibly restrained – and the Rand saved for the capitalists.76

  So Krause had won them the breathing-space. But the man who had inspired Botha and Smuts was Steyn. The Free State President had seen his own capital subjected to the same humiliations two months before, and had realized that it was not a city, but the illimitable veld, that was the true symbol of the volk. When Kruger’s despairing telegram reached him on 1 June in his hide-out near Lindley (by an oversight, Roberts had left the telegraph lines to the north-eastern Free State intact),77 Steyn’s reply was characteristically blunt. We shall never surrender.78 Smuts, who was one of the first to see a copy of Steyn’s telegram, said later that Steyn ‘practically accused the Transvaalers of cowardice’. After they had involved the Free State and colonial rebels in ruin, Steyn said, they were now ready, as the war reached their own borders, to conclude a selfish and disgraceful peace.79

  Steyn’s reply was the most important telegram of the war.

  It came like a slap in the face to the wavering generals at a krijgsraad on 2 June. The younger officers, like Captain Danie Theron, the leader of the Scouts’ corps, had never suffered the same shattering loss of faith in themselves as their elders. Now Theron made a violent speech against ‘traitors’ and condemned Kruger for abandoning the capital. Botha and Smuts decided that the honour of the volk, as well as their personal honours, demanded a fight to the death. Talk of surrender was forgotten. The krijgsraad settled for a fighting retreat.80 Even to retreat successfully needed a few precious days to restore the morale of the burghers. Negotiations were begun to dispose of Pretoria, and peace-feelers were put out to Roberts. But this was a mere stratagem, similar to Dr Krause’s work of the previous week. The idea of capturing the capital intact would delay Lord Roberts as effectively as if the great guns in the forts had still been manned. Pretoria would serve, like Johannesburg, to keep the wolf from the fold, and win a second, all-important breathing-space. At the same time, among the Boer leaders, all eyes looked to Steyn and De Wet to give them what they hungered for after so many weeks of humiliation: a taste of success.81

  Roberts, meanwhile, received a visit from Botha’s secretary, proposing peace talks, and took the bait as Botha had expected. Roberts was hardly to guess that, once again, he had snatched a tactical reverse from the jaws of victory. All he knew was that Pretoria was his. How could it not be the end of the war?82 He savoured the moment – the climax of his career. The triumphal entry into Pretoria took place at two o’clock on 5 June, by arrangement with the Boers. There were the usual cheering crowds of ‘niggers’ on the pavements (before being sent back where they belonged); down came the vierkleur, up went Nora Roberts’s little silken flag, a crashing salute, and a solemn ‘God Save the Queen’.83

  To some of the British war correspondents, this was the climax of anticlimaxes. Three times already the army had won these petty triumphs: at Bloemfontein, Kroonstad, and Johannesburg. And, like the Boer rank and file, the British Press felt cheated of their Armageddon. ‘Here in the rock-bound rolls of its mountains, where forts were bound defiant like crowns of red gold about the brows o
f its hills; here where for years it had prepared to meet us, we should see the last great fight of a free people brought to bay.’ Instead, they witnessed a dull march-past, battalion after battalion tramping through choking dust, as though Pretoria had merely exchanged one mayor for another. This was the view of Battersby, The Morning Post’s correspondent, who had served on the western front since the start of the war. He had, no doubt, become somewhat blasé at triumphal entries by now. Yet there was substance in his criticism of Roberts. These triumphs were all lacking in the authentic signs of victory: ‘no ruin of streets, no cringing people, no débris of an army, none of the very needful adjuncts of success’. The mistake was to talk, as Roberts did, of civilized warfare. ‘There is nothing civilized in warfare, and never can be; it is a barbarian’s game.’84

  Roberts, however, remained confident that this was a gentleman’s war, and he had won it. He sent an advance guard of Pole-Carew and the Guards into Pretoria, to make arrangements for the march-past at two o’clock. He had not arranged to capture any Boers – or even to rescue the large number of British prisoners-of-war locked up in Pretoria. Winston Churchill, The Morning Post’s other correspondent, witnessed that morning the extraordinary spectacle of a Boer troop-train gliding unopposed out of the main railway station. The train was crammed with Boers, whose rifles bristled from every window; to Churchill’s unfeigned relief (though it was sad not to bag the train), not a shot was fired.85

  There followed Churchill’s moment of glory. It was six months since he had made good his escape, in a brown civilian suit, out of Pretoria Model Schools, then the officers’ prisoner-of-war camp. He now cantered off to find the new POW ‘cage’, to which he was directed by a friendly Boer. He saw a long tin building, surrounded by barbed wire. He raised his hat and cheered. There came an answering cheer from inside the cage. The next scene seemed to Churchill like the end of an Adelphi melodrama.

  Enter Churchill and his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough. ‘Surrender!’ cries the Duke to the camp commandant. Out rush the prisoners, hatless and coatless, in a frenzy of excitement. The sentries throw down their rifles; the prisoners seize them. Someone produces a Union Jack (a piece of vierkleur cut up and rearranged). Wild cheers as the flag goes up, the first British flag over Pretoria since 1881. Time: 8.47 a.m. Tableau!86

  Throughout the next week, Roberts waited confidently for the surrender of Botha’s army. It was not until 10 June that he discovered his mistake, and sent his army back into battle.87 By this time, his own fighting force at the front had been reduced to sixteen thousand. Botha, on the other hand, had succeeded in scraping together five thousand Transvaal burghers. The battle that followed (called ‘Diamond Hill’ by the British, ‘Donkerhoek’ by the Boers) was another resounding anticlimax. Roberts achieved his aim, modest enough: to drive Botha away from his own east flank. (He lost 180 men in the battle, including Lieutenant-Colonel the Earl of Airlie, CO of the 12th Lancers.)88 Unfortunately for Roberts, Botha achieved his own aim, too; it was, in the circumstances, ambitious. Thanks to those two heaven-sent breathing-spaces, Botha had restored to the volk the gift of hope. They had fought with a spirit they had not felt since the balmy days of Magersfontein. They fled from the battlefield, but it was ‘vlug in vol moed’ (‘flight in good spirits’). This defeat, Smuts remarked, had ‘an inspiriting effect which could scarcely have been improved by a real victory’.89

  Meanwhile, a kind of sea-change had come over the war in the veld; something extraordinary had happened in the Free State which explained both the relative weakness of Roberts’s men at Diamond Hill, and the new self-confidence of Botha. Christiaan and Piet De Wet, masters of guerrilla strategy, had lashed out with both fists against the lines of communication in the south.

  The entire Free State forces had now been reduced to a mere eight thousand men by the combined effect of Cronje’s surrender and the partial success of Roberts’s velvet-glove policy. Of these eight thousand, Christiaan De Wet had only a tenth – eight hundred men with three guns, by his own account – under his direct control. They were deficient in most essentials: Mauser ammunition, boots, blankets for winter nights – above all, morale. De Wet’s own morale had sunk low since his coups at Sannah’s Post and Reddersburg two months earlier. That endless, dispiriting retreat through the northern Free State had eroded his own self-respect. ‘To flee – what could be more bitter than that?’ he said as he poured out his soul later. ‘Ah! many a time when I was forced to yield to the enemy, I felt so degraded that I could scarcely look a child in the face! Did I call myself a man, I asked myself, and if so, why did I run away? No one can guess the horror which overcame me when I had to retreat….’ But how could they make a stand, outnumbered by twelve to one?90

  On 27 May, Roberts had crossed the Vaal; on 28 May he proclaimed the annexation of the Free State. Already, a new defensive plan had been agreed between the two Boer governments. Their two armies should now separate. De Wet was thus free to resume guerrilla strategy, the policy he had always recommended in preference to set-piece battles. On 3 June, he received a letter from Louis Botha, confirming the details. ‘What I desire from your Honour,’ wrote Botha, ‘now that the great force of the enemy is here, is to get behind him and break or interrupt his communications. We have already delayed too long in destroying the railway behind him.’ The very next day, De Wet ambushed a convoy carrying supplies from the railway to General Colvile and the Highland Brigade at Heilbron; the telegraph wires had first been cut, so the officer in charge did not receive Colvile’s warning against sending the convoy without a decent escort. The convoy was duly snapped up by De Wet, without firing a shot; this supplied him with fifty-six food wagons and 160 prisoners, mainly Highlanders.91

  De Wet, however, was after bigger game. At Roodewal railway station, roughly half-way between Kroonstad and the Vaal, was a mountain of ammunition, mail-bags, and other supplies, dumped beside the line, pending the restoration of the nearby bridge over the Rhenoster. It was a part of the country that De Wet, above all, knew well; four miles off across this flat, dusty plain was his own farm. On 6 June, he sent off his eight hundred men, divided into three raiding parties: Steenekamp to take three hundred men, with one Krupp field-gun, and attack Vredefort road station, about fifteen miles up the line; Froneman to take three hundred men, with two Krupp guns and a quick-firer, and attack a camp at Rhenoster railway bridge, four miles up the line; he himself, with a mere eighty men and one gun, would strike at Roodewal station and the mountain of supplies.92

  De Wet’s plan, based on careful reconnaissance by scouts, was deficient in only one respect. He had been told that Roodewal was lightly guarded; in fact, a whole British infantry battalion, the 4th Derbyshires, had been sent up the line on 5 June, as a result of the attack on the convoy; and there were other small reinforcements. However, from De Wet’s point of view, all turned out for the best. The Derbyshires, a raw battalion of militia, dumped down beside the railway bridge at dusk on 5 June, were in no tactical position to defend themselves effectively against Froneman’s attack. After several hours’ fighting from behind the embankment (they had no field-guns), they put up the white flag. Froneman then joined in a combined attack with De Wet on Roodewal station. Here the post-office workers, a railway pioneer corps company, and some Anglo-Indian volunteers struggled heroically to build breastworks of mail-bags and bully beef tins. Then at noon they, too, were forced to put up a white flag. De Wet’s combined bag of prisoners in this triple raid was 486 officers and men; 38 British soldiers were killed, and 104 wounded; his own losses were negligible.93 His only regret was that he could carry off only a small part of the booty. He seized all the 303 ammunition he needed (his men were now beginning to use captured Lee Metford and Lee Enfield rifles) and buried several spare wagon-loads in a sandy river bank beside his farm. Then he put a torch to the rest: half a million pounds’ worth of plum-puddings, bully beef blankets, cordite, and 5-inch cow-gun shells.

  It was dark before De Wet rode out of Ro
odewal; the burghers were so burdened with loot that they had to use their horses as pack animals; the captured Tommies had also been allowed to rip open some of the two thousand mail-bags and bring any loot they could carry. When they were a mile from the station, the shells began to catch fire, and everyone in the strange caravan turned round to look at the ‘most beautiful’ display of fireworks De Wet had ever seen.94

  A still more humiliating coup (inflicted by De Wet’s brother, Piet) was the capture of 13th Battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry at Lindley on 31 May. To British eyes, this mounted battalion was the social and political show-piece of the new volunteer army: a company of Irish MFHs, known as the Irish Hunt Contingent, including the Earl of Longford and Viscount Ennismore; two companies of Ulster Protestant Unionists, including the Earl of Leitrim, a whisky baronet (Sir John Power) and the future Lord Craigavon; and a company of English and Irish men-about-town, raised by Lord Donoughmore, who had insisted on paying their own passage to South Africa.95 This patriotic band was commanded by a British regular, Lieutenant-Colonel Basil Spragge; and Spragge proved himself a regular ass. They were supposed to join General Colvile, who was desperately short of mounted men. When they arrived at Lindley on 27 May, they found Lindley had somehow slipped back under the control of the Boers.96 Instead of making a fighting retreat towards Kroonstad, as he acknowledged was perfectly possible (‘I can get out but shall lose in doing so’),97 Spragge sent an SOS to Colvile. Then he and his men sat down astride some kopjes outside Lindley and waited to be rescued. Unfortunately, Colvile, who had been ordered to be at Heilbron by 29 May, and was not fully aware of Spragge’s dangerous situation, decided not to delay his brigade by returning to rescue the mounted troops; he marched on to Heilbron, leaving them to their own devices.98 On 1 June, when the rescue column – three yeomanry battalions led by Lord Methuen (down-graded by Roberts) – reached Lindley and stormed the kopjes, they found the hills already strewn with dead: Spragge’s dead.99 The rest of Spragge’s yeomen had surrendered to Piet De Wet on the previous day, when De Wet brought up field-guns.100