The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  War was war. But when would it be over? In February, Kitchener was told by his Field Intelligence that there were about twenty thousand Boers still in arms against him.51 Hence his scribbled note to Brodrick, just before De Wet’s third ‘invasion’ on 10 February: ‘I cannot say how long it will go on. Not counting voluntary surrenders we reduce their forces at the rate of about a 1000 a month [.] That was my bag for Deer, and January may be a little more. It is a most difficult problem, an enemy that always escapes, a country so vast that there is always room to escape, supplies such as they want abundant almost everywhere.’52 At this rate, the war could drag on for months.

  Now, in March, while the result of the peace talks still hung in the balance, Kitchener felt no nearer being able to predict the date of victory. The problem was made more urgent by the Cabinet’s pressure on him to economize. Kitchener must have guessed (rightly) that the Cabinet favoured Milner’s own plan for protected areas; it might win the war quicker – and would certainly save a great deal of money. The question of economy touched Kitchener on the raw, as he had always prided himself on his gift for cheap victories, measured in British lives and British money. But, as Brodrick had pointed out – in a revealing phrase – until the wheels of the gold-mines began to turn, they could not ‘profit by victories’. On the contrary, the civilian administration of the new colonies would go on piling up a thumping deficit, quite apart from the frightening cost of the war: £2½ million a month.53 To humour Milner and Brodrick, Kitchener had agreed to reopen a handful of gold-mines. At the same time, he had examined the local contracts for supplying meat and transport to the army and found that the firm of Weil (who had supplied B-P in Mafeking) had pulled the wool over Roberts’s eyes and had been making enormous profits; he cancelled Weil’s and other local contracts and so cut the total cost of the war by about a fifth — that is, by £500,000. He also hustled a number of British officers out of South Africa —’hangers-on’, he called them – in order to encourage the others.54

  But, much as he would have liked to be able to make other economies in beef, horse-power, ox-power and man-power – the main items on the bill for the war — Kitchener had to agree, after weeks of hedging, that, as regards the two latter, he needed substantial reinforcements. What kind of reinforcements? Native cavalry from India, he told London, and London gasped. Kitchener’s enthusiasm for ‘native’ troops – if politically naive – is hardly surprising. It was to the vigour of African troops in the Sudan that he principally owed his triumphs as Sirdar, and he found British troops spineless by comparison. ‘The men are getting indifferent. The Boers treat them very well as prisoners and I believe they are not always pleased when they are released ‘ If only they had some proper native troops, real men who would ‘forget their stomachs and go for the enemy’, how different the war would be.55 But Brodrick reminded him that this was a white man’s war (the ‘racial objection was very keenly felt’), and Kitchener had to make do with raw British irregulars of various kinds.56 After Roberts had reached London, the Cabinet had in fact decided to provide thirty thousand new recruits as reinforcements: partly from Australian and New Zealand contingents (Canada, politically divided, refused further assistance), partly from new recruits to the Imperial Yeomanry, and partly from the ten thousand new South African Constabulary being raised in Britain; B-P was supposed to be organizing this SAC to form both a permanent British garrison and that crucial injection of British settlers (according to Milner’s plan to anglicize South Africa). However, B-P had not yet got cracking. Kitchener agreed with Roberts that, as a serious military figure, B-P had been somewhat overrated.

  With the first ten thousand, at any rate, expected to embark in early March,57 Kitchener planned to hustle the enemy more vigorously. He still complained of how few fighting men of any sort he had available for sending out to hunt down and destroy the guerrillas. On paper, Kitchener’s superiority was already crushing: he had inherited a sledge-hammer of 200,000 men (including 140,000 regulars) to crack a nut of 20,000 guerrillas. The real contest was much less unequal. In fact, it was the war of the sieve (guerrilla wars often are); and the guerrilla forces, progressively reduced in size, were becoming progressively finer material. Moreover, Kitchener’s superiority in numbers was partly offset by the vast distance Cape Colony added to his supply lines and by its political unreliability. As most white South Africans in Cape Colony consisted of Afrikaners, and most Afrikaners appeared to sympathize with the Boers, Kitchener had to station troops to guard the Cape ports, the main towns and the railway lines. Deduct more for the garrisons in the main towns of the Free State and the Transvaal. This left 22,000 (of whom only 13,000 were combatants) for French’s eight mobile columns – set to do the actual work of ‘sieving’ and ‘scouring’ in the Eastern Transvaal.58

  Of course, Kitchener tried to choose the best men and best generals for the columns. Divided and redivided for extra mobility, many were now commanded by relatively junior officers. Kitchener, in keeping with his waywardness as an administrator, had a hungry eye for talent, and no scruples about hustling a bright young man to the front, over the heads of his superiors, especially if he was one of his ‘band of boys’ from the Sudan. Hence the way that he favoured Rawlinson and Broadwood – and, more eccentrically, Captain Frank Maxwell, VC (‘The Brat’), the handsome young ADC whom Kitchener allowed to play the fool, teasing the Chief, like a court jester, to the amazement of outsiders.59 Others whom he selected were chosen for their professionalism. They were the counterpart to the new breed of young Boer generals being gleaned by the guerrilla war – Lieutenant-Colonels Julian Byng and Edmund Allenby, and Colonel Douglas Haig – all future British field-marshals.

  It is from Allenby’s letters home that one receives the clearest insight into the frustrations of this ‘hustling’ phase of the war. Allenby was unusually intelligent and sensitive. He noted the novel – indeed, extraordinary – feature of this campaign: the uprooting of thousands of families; women and children given a few minutes to clear their homes, and then driven off in wagons; the making of a new Great Trek and a new mythology of suffering and bitterness. Allenby noted this and found it ‘beastly work’. Most other British officers did not even bother to mention this part of ‘the show’ in their letters home. (Nor, for that matter, did Kitchener mention it in his current public despatches.) Ironically, however, Allenby criticized the unsystematic way the women were cleared from their farms. If the job had to be done, it had better be done properly. And, characteristically, Kitchener was in too much of a hurry to let anything be done properly, being hopelessly out of touch with the realities of war.

  When Kitchener interviewed bright young men at GHQ – Herbert Plumer, Edmund Allenby – he impressed on them that they were mere pawns on his chess-board. He was Grand Master. One false move by them, and they would be out of the game.60 Games-playing also dominated the walls of his intelligence staff: checkerboards of intelligence maps; ‘drives’ and ‘bags’ and ‘kills’. A War reduced reassuringly to facts and figures, cut and dried formulas for victory.61

  How different it looked out here on the veld. The struggle, described in Allenby’s letters, took shape and dissolved like a fog. There were no lines or fronts, no battles – mere skirmishes with an invisible enemy, whose only aim, apparently, was to run faster than their pursuers.

  Allenby, newly promoted Lieutenant-Colonel, had been given a force of fifteen hundred men, with horse-artillery guns, and joined the other seven columns sweeping the Eastern Transvaal, led by General French. Their job was to hustle Boers, clear the country, and stop Botha breaking south towards Natal. They had begun this wearisome trek in late January. Allenby found ‘John Boer’ a ‘slippery customer’ – and, indeed, the whole campaign intensely frustrating. He longed to be home with his wife. ‘As French says we “hustle” them well,’ he told her. ‘I’m tired of hustling Boers, though & should like to get back to England and you, Dear Love. We caught one of Botha’s staff officers yesterday. He said the war
would last another year at least!!’62 Allenby thought the Boers would throw in the sponge before that, though he saw no immediate end to this sickening campaign:

  I should rather like some of those fashionable warriors, who went home at ‘the End of the War’ to come out and see what the war looks like now that it is at an end. It might give them a few new ideas. As far as my experience goes, the ‘War’ was the easiest part of the campaign. We’ve had more fighting since the ‘War’ ended, more trekking, and much more discomfort I’ve lost 32 horses in 9 days, only two of which were lost in action The rest have died from exhaustion and short food. There is no help for it. Isolated like we are, we must patrol a lot to keep Brother Boer at a distance, as well as collect grub I must say all the men of my column are splendid; keen as mustard and one never hears a grumble.63

  The endless rainstorms that lashed Kitchener’s columns in the first two weeks of March virtually marooned Allenby’s column on the borders of Swaziland. Floods broke the telegraph wire connecting them with French, the ox convoys were unable to ford the Assegai River, and the men had to sleep in a quagmire without shelter of any sort. Fortunately for them, the Swazis were most accommodating, and kept them alive on mealies. Indeed, to show their good will, some assegai-throwing warriors ambushed a Boer commando which had taken shelter in Swaziland and killed fourteen men – more than Allenby’s column bagged in any single action. Allenby reproved them, with his tongue in his cheek.64

  The physical strain of the three-month trek, and the moral strain of making war on women and children, left him exhausted and ill. He returned to GHQ in late May. His own column had made the following bag: 32 Boers killed and wounded, 36 prisoners captured in the field; 154 surrendered; 5 guns taken (including one of Buller’s guns from Colenso), as well as 118 wagons, 55 carts, 28,911 rounds of rifle ammunition, 273 rifles, 904 horses, 87 mules, 483 trek oxen, 3,260 other cattle and 12,380 sheep. He also brought in 400 women and children.65 The relative absence of fighting Boers in this otherwise impressive total naturally disappointed Allenby. He attributed this partly to the slowness of his fellow—commanders, partly to the impatience of GHQ.

  It’s quite absurd the way we are hurrying through this work [he had written in early May]. There’s a good months’ police work to be done in these fastnesses…. I have to leave heaps of people behind In cases like that we leave the families enough wagons to live on, burn the rest, drive off the cattle, & wish them good day. Their own people can get them when we have gone away. It’s beastly work; but ought to be done thoroughly if done at all. That’s what makes me angry; that they won’t even give me a chance of finishing up a job; either of fighting or police work. I presume it is to throw dust in the eyes of the British public. I hope I am wrong “66

  Similar grumbles at the unsystematic strategy pursued by Kitchener were expressed by others of his élite commanders. Smith-Dorrien, who had not forgotten the way Kitchener had treated him at Paardeberg, wrote in his diary: ‘I much fear that we are leaving a lot of work unfinished … and am sorry the authorities won’t listen to my opinions.’67

  Colonel Douglas Haig, who had three columns under him (more than many generals) complained continually at the lack of co-ordination.68 And Kitchener himself was not unaware of this failing. When the bag for nearly three months’ work of French’s eight columns was totted up, it came to the ridiculously small total of 1,332 Boers killed, captured and surrendered (although the numbers of horses, sheep, and cattle taken prisoner– 272,752 head of stock – was immensely impressive).’69

  In fact, by May Kitchener had already settled in his own mind that ‘hustling’ the enemy was not enough. True, the monthly bag (of killed, captured, and surrendered) for the whole country was rising: 859 in January, 1,772 in February, 1,472 in March, 2,437 in April.70 But, at this rate, the war could still drag on for months. How to evolve a better system of co-ordinating the ‘drives’? How to create some form of net to trap the quarry?

  The answer, presenting itself to Kitchener, was to be found in two new weapons: barbed wire and the blockhouse. It might seem odd that these lumpish tin-and-concrete structures – pill-boxes, the symbol of defensive war – should be the key to making Kitchener’s mobile columns more effective. But Kitchener, the sapper, had spotted a new possible use for the blockhouses, originally built to defend the railway lines. What about a gigantic grid-mesh of blockhouse lines: barbed wire, alternating with blockhouses, each miniature fort within rifle-range of each other? Wouldn’t this create just the steel net into which the columns could drive their quarry? Always assuming that the Boers had no field-guns, and so the blockhouses could be made more or less impregnable.

  To have to string barbed wire, and throw up tin-and-concrete forts across half South Africa, was not, of course, an ideal short cut to ending the war. Nor was it going to be cheap. Kitchener saw no alternative – except offering conciliatory terms to Botha. When Rawlinson arrived in Pretoria in March (after escorting Bobs to England, he had been recalled by K), he found Kitchener pacing up and down the garden at Pretoria, and in high spirits. He explained to Rawlinson his plans for the prototype of a new kind of drive. ‘He sees that we made a big mistake in talking as if the war was over. He is working out a new system, greatly increasing the number of columns, and fortifying the railway lines with block-houses. The columns will drive from line to line and will find supplies at both ends. This is the right way to deal with guerrillas.’71

  On 16 March, a week after this cheerful meeting with Rawlinson, Kitchener received the bad news which he had expected. Botha had turned down the terms offered at Middelburg – apparently because of the British Cabinet’s refusal to allow an amnesty for the colonial rebels.72 The news hardened Kitchener’s heart. He would press on with his gigantic grid-mesh of blockhouse lines.

  He was, in fact, furious with the way Milner had thwarted his plans to end the war by giving Botha generous terms. Perhaps Kitchener was mistaken. There may have been other insurmountable obstacles to peace, as well as Milner; perhaps, even if Kitchener had been given a free hand with Botha, Botha could not have persuaded Steyn and the Free State generals, like Hertzog and De Wet, to abandon their treasured independence. This will always remain one of the great might-have-beens of the war.

  Kitchener, however, regarded Milner as the villain of the peace talks. Outwardly, the relations between the two men were warm enough; and Kitchener envied Milner his diplomatic ways, no doubt. To Brodrick, Kitchener could not resist expressing his own blunt feelings about Milner’s policy. A policy of ‘extermination’, Kitchener called it. And was it not ‘absurd and wrong’ to make war, costing £2 million a week and thousands of lives, just to put three hundred colonial rebels in prison?

  I did all in my power to urge Milner to change his views … an amnesty or King’s pardon for the two or three hundred rebels in question (carrying with it disfranchisement which Botha willingly accepted) would be extremely popular amongst the majority of the British and all the Dutch in South Africa; but there no doubt exists a small section in both Colonies who are opposed to any conciliatory measures being taken to end the war, and I fear their influence is paramount; they want extermination, and I suppose will get it….

  Milner’s views may be strictly just but they are to my mind vindictive, and I do not know of a case in history when, under similar circumstances, an amnesty has not been granted…I wonder the Chancellor of Exchequer did not have a fit.73

  Brodrick’s soothing reply (‘Is it not likely that with one more turn of the military screw, they will be ready for submission?’) did not soothe Kitchener.74 Indeed, it spurred him on to make some provocative new suggestions of his own. If there was talk of turning the screw, what about confiscating all the property of the Boers still out on commando? It was repugnant, ‘but in this war we have had to do much that is repugnant’. Or what about mass deportation of all Boers who had fought in the war, together with their families and dependents? They could be sent to the Dutch East Indies, Fiji, or Madagas
car. These country Boers could never be an asset to the British; they were ‘uncivilized Afrikander savages with a thin white veneer’, savages produced by generations of lonely life on the veld. Their expulsion would make room for decent British settlers.

  In the intervals between despatching these wild proposals, Kitchener gave the British Cabinet an astonishingly sound piece of political advice. They could prolong the war, if they chose, by agreeing to Milner’s ‘vindictive’ desire to impose unconditional surrender. But in the end, the Boers would still have to be given the same generous terms of peace. This was because South Africa was a ‘white man’s country’ and the British colonials would have to share the country with the Boers, and, in due course, the mother country would have to give back South Africa – white South Africa – the freedom to govern itself, just as they had given it to all the other white nations of the Empire.75

  A few weeks after the collapse of the Middelburg talks, Milner temporarily handed over the keys of his new kingdom, making Kitchener acting High Commissioner of the two new colonies, and took the train back to the Cape. On 8 May, he boarded the Saxon to take his ‘holiday’ in England. He was exhausted, after weeks of wrangling with Kitchener, but victorious.76

  To Violet Cecil he did not pretend to shed tears over the collapse of the peace talks. ‘I hope we shall take warning and avoid such rotten ground in the future.’77 He was content that the war would have no ‘definite end’ at all, but merely fade away. In the meantime, would Kitchener behave himself? Milner can hardly have forgotten the farcical episode the last time he had taken leave in England, when General Sir William Butler, as acting High Commissioner, had sided with the Boers.