The Boer columns caused greater damage to the British in this period of the war than ever before. Their incessant maneuvers and frequent attacks exhausted the British forces; their horses died by the thousands. There were daring attacks on such strategic targets as the Bloemfontein waterworks. De Wet wrote that it was painful for him to see any railway line and not be able to damage it. At first the commandos used a primitive land mine. The barrel and lock of a gun connected to a dynamite cartridge were placed under a sleeper; when a passing engine pressed the rail to this machine, it exploded.79 Later on the system was perfected; the gravel was hollowed out, the machine was placed under a sleeper and covered up again. The British trebled their guards but there were still explosions, and no trains could run at night.
To isolate the commandos and to prevent a breakthrough, the British built a network of blockhouses at a distance of between eighty and eight hundred yards, which were connected by barbed wire entanglements, trenches and stone walls. To man them and to maintain other garrisons, some hundred thousand troops were needed. De Wet was scornful about these "white elephants" and claimed that he always fought his way through, that not a single soldier was captured as a result of the "policy of the blockhead."80 He found it more difficult to cope with British night attacks and, like other commando leaders, was paralyzed and eventually defeated by the British scorched-earth policy. Kitchener's flying columns sweeping the area beyond the blockhouses were not effective; if the Boers lost heart, it was not as the result of these drives but because of the strategy of steady attrition. It was a race against time for both sides; opposition to the war in Britain was rising and Kitchener was by no means optimistic. "The dark days are on us again," he wrote in March 1902. Four months earlier Smuts's column had entered the western regions; at first they were "hunted like outlaws," but, "today," Smuts wrote, "we practically held the whole area from the Olifants to the Orange river 400 miles away, save for small garrison towns here and there."81 But there were some hundred thousand Boer women and children in the concentration camps, and the number of Boer prisoners of war (thirty-two thousand) who had been exiled was by early 1902 considerably in excess of the number of those still in the field (eighteen thousand). Thus, after heated internal discussions at Vereeniging, with Steyn and de Wet demanding a fight to the bitter end, the Boer leaders capitulated. What clinched the matter was apparently an aside by Kitchener in conversation with Smuts — that in all probability two years hence a Liberal government would come to power granting a constitution to South Africa which would meet the Boers' demands for national autonomy.82 The peace terms were not too harsh; within the next five years Britain was to pay the Boers some ten million pounds in compensation for the property that had been destroyed, and in 1910 the Act of Union came into force, the first major step on the road to an independent South Africa.
The Boer War had certain unique features distinguishing it from all other wars of the period. Was it a guerrilla war? De Wet did not think so. "I was always at a loss to understand by what right the British designated us guerrillas," he wrote. In his view, the only case in which the term could be used was when one civilized nation had so completely vanquished another that not only the capital was taken but the whole country from border to border occupied, and this clearly was not so in South Africa.83 But de Wet labored under the misapprehension that brigandage and guerrilla warfare were more or less synonyms; a deeply religious man, like most Boer leaders, it was for him a "war of religion." "My people will perhaps say 'our generals see only the religious side of the question.' They will be right."84 They had begun the war "strong in the belief in God," because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the possibility of defeat had not entered their minds.
It was a "gentleman's war" to the extent that nongentlemen — that is, black people — were not mobilized by either side. The Boers underrated the enemy in the light of their past experience with the British (their victory at Majuba Hill in 1882), and the victories in the early months of the war seemed to justify their optimism. But they underestimated the resources of the British and, once the war became less gentlemanly (the scorched-earth tactics and the concentration camps), the Boers found themselves not only without food and in rags, but having great trouble getting weapons and ammunition. Reitz relates that he had exactly four bullets left when he joined Smuts's raid into Cape Colony, and others were no better off. Had there been two or three million Boers, they could have held out almost indefinitely against the British, but even their fighting spirit and commando tactics were not adequate enough substitute for their paucity of numbers.
The war had long been at an end when the leaders of the Boer commandos were to find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades — like the Spanish guerrilleros in the Carlist wars, and like many other guerrillas before and since once their wars were over. When World War I broke out, de Wet and de la Rey felt the time had come to shake off the British yoke. Hertzog was wavering, but Smuts and Botha suppressed the rising by force of arms. While de la Rey was killed in the fighting, Smuts lived to become a British field marshal and member of the British war cabinet. He commanded the British troops in German East Africa in World War I, while Botha fought the Germans in South West Africa. Reitz commanded the Royal Scots Fusiliers, one of the oldest British regiments, on the Western Front and eventually became a South African cabinet minister. The Boer War generation dominated the South African political scene for many decades; when the Nationalists at long last broke Unionist rule in the elections of 1948, the former were still led by General Hertzog, the latter by Smuts. And when the South African Republic was proclaimed and in May 1961 left the Commonwealth, there were still some of those alive who had fought for independence sixty years earlier.
Brigandage and Guerrilla Warfare
After his return from a visit to the distant provinces of northern China, Eric Teichman, a British diplomat, wrote in 1917 that the north of Shensi Province was at the time of his visit in the hands of organized troops of brigands of a semipolitical character, "robbers one day, rebels the next, and perhaps successful revolutionaries the next." It was in this very area that the Chinese Communists established their main base after the Long March. But the phenomenon was by no means specifically Chinese — in Latin America throughout the eighteenth century, and elsewhere up to and including the present time there have been similar phenomena.85 There is in fact frequently no clear dividing line between guerrilla warfare, terror and brigandage. No one, to be sure, thought of nineteenth-century Russian and French anarchists as guerrillas; their attacks were directed against leading figures of the political establishment, and sometimes indiscriminately against the public at large. But in later years the border line between guerrilla warfare and assassination became hazy; the activities of the Irish rebels and the Macedonian IMRO serve as an illustration. The demarcation between guerrilla and banditry had all along been less than clear. For ages past, the world over, bandits operating from hideouts in inaccessible regions such as mountains or forests used the technique of the hit-and-run raid and the ambush, they had to be good shots and good horsemen to succeed in their chosen profession. There were, of course, important differences, not least on the tactical level; the marauders usually operated in very small groups and, even where brigandry was endemic, cooperation was rare between one band and the other. (Outside Europe, however, bandits sometimes operated in units of many hundreds.) Above all, they lacked a political incentive, robbery being in the main and chief objective; the richer the victims, the better. Nonetheless, as with every rule, the exceptions did sometimes exist and a political element would enter into brigandage — as, looking back, with the Haiduks in the Balkans, while the activity of dacoits in Burma can also not be ignored in this context. After the defeat of King Thibaw in the third Burma war (1885), armed gangs of patriotic robbers continued to harass the British for several years. But they also fought their own countrymen, and, of course, each other.
Certain early anarchist and socialist id
eologists such as Bakunin and Weitling set great store by the bandit, the "genuine and sole revolutionary — a revolutionary without fine phrases, without learned rhetoric, irreconcilable, indefatigable and indomitable, a popular and social revolutionary" (Bakunin). Such expectations seemed perhaps only logical, up to a point; the bandits were a subversive force, undermining existing society — like the early Fascists, they were the outcasts of all classes. But, unlike the Fascists, they were highly individualistic people, they had no intention whatsoever of establishing a mass movement and of overthrowing the entrenched order. They were not even interested in expanding their ranks beyond a certain limit. Bakunin's fantasy had a revival in the theories (and practices) of some twentieth-century revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas, as we shall see in turn.
Banditry has been inherent in all known societies since the beginning of time, but robbers have differed from each other not less than sociologists and philosophers. There was, at one extreme, the sadistic outlaw who found fulfillment in murder for murder's sake, and on the other the noble bandit (or bandolero) who robbed the rich and distributed some or even most of his loot among the poor. In times of general political and social disturbance robbers would become guerrillas, some because they found it convenient to pursue their old exploits under a new respectable cloak, others because they were patriotically inclined and capable of disinterested action. Furthermore, most guerrilla movements included members of semirespectable professions such as smuggling and poaching; in peacetime these activities were strictly illegal, but smugglers and poachers were hardly regarded by society as major criminals and in time of war moral standards were invariably lowered. Smugglers and poachers knew the countryside better than anyone else, they had a lifetime of experience of being on the run and were often of considerable help to guerrilla strategists.
There were other affinities between guerrilla and bandit, inasmuch as the former, "living off the land," had to appropriate horses, food and other supplies from the local population, usually without paying for them. He did this in the name of a cause, whereas the robbers did it for less elevated reasons, but for those deprived of their belongings, the effect was all one. In addition to the official requisitions ordered by the guerrilla chiefs, there was invariably a good deal of private enterprise marauding. It would be hard to point to a single guerrilla campaign in which looting did not occur, if only because strict discipline was difficult or impossible to enforce among dispersed irregulars. It was rare in some guerrilla movements led by men of integrity such as Garibaldi or the Boer generals, but more often than not the guerrillas took a share of the spoils as their due, simply because this was the only kind of payment they had any hope of getting. This was all but standard operating practice in nineteenth-century Latin America, but it also happened in the Vendee, in the Spanish rising against Napoleon, in the American Civil War, among Abd el-Kader's followers and in countless other instances. The more farsighted guerrilla leaders did what they could to prevent systematic and too-frequent looting because they knew that, in the long run, they depended on the goodwill and the collaboration of the local inhabitants — mention has been made of the extermination of robber bands by Mina in the Spanish wars —but even they had their hands full trying to impose a guerrilla order. Mention has also been made of the almost imperceptible transition from brigandage (or bandolerismo) to partisan warfare in Cuba in the 1870s and the same applies, in some degree, to Mexico — Pancho Villa was perhaps the most famous case of a bandit turned guerrilla, but there were many others.86 And this leaving out, nearer to our own times, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Cuban war in the 1950s. In some countries bandolerismo was a concomitant of the social struggle — this certainly goes for Mexico and for Andalusia at the end of the eighteenth century — elsewhere, as in Greece, the armatoli were on the contrary a conservative force forming part of the established social system.
Paneho Villa turned bandit, so he claimed, only because he wanted to defend the honor of his mother.87 Su San, the female gang leader who earned a unique place in the history of the Taiping revolution, had become an outlaw (and the head of a major bandit gang) after the death of her husband. She organized a posse to hunt down his murderer, killed him with her own hands and in time became the chief of a band which had the reputation of robbing the rich to help the poor. Eventually she joined the Taiping army with two thousand men, winning immortality in the poems of contemporary Chinese literati.88
During its guerrilla phase, Communism in China drew not a few of its recruits from the ranks of robber bands. Writing about the composition of the Red Army, Mao declared it was not true to say (as the Hunan Provincial Committee had done) that all the soldiers were éléments déclassés, meaning deserters, robbers, beggars and prostitutes, but he admitted that the majority consisted of such men and women.89 In principle it was quite true that they should be replaced by peasants and workers but in practice it was impossible to find replacements. Hence the necessity to intensify political training "so as to effect a qualitative change in these elements."90 The éléments déclassés (yumin) were especially good fighters, they were courageous, and under the right leadership they could become a revolutionary force. It was surely no mere accident that the Communist guerrillas appeared precisely in those parts of China such as the Hua Yin region in which banditry on a mass scale had been endemic for a long time. In the early phase the Communist guerrillas had much in common with other armed bands such as the t'u-fei (bandits), and Mao for one displayed great interest in the t'u-fei tradition.91 In later years the Chinese Red Armies only tolerated them in regions in which Communist rule had not yet been firmly established.
The ecology of guerrilla war and banditry is identical to all intents and purposes. This applies to all the more recent major guerrilla wars — China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, and so on. Naturally both guerrillas and bandits looked for hideouts in difficult terrain. But there was also usually a regional tradition of "young people taking to the hills.
If some bandits would turn to the left, others would join rightwing forces; the story of the resistance against Napoleon in southern Italy is enlightening in this respect. As in Spain, the French army of occupation could maintain itself only in the large towns; the countryside was in the hands of men who hated the foreign invaders, had lost their jobs or did not want to be conscripted. They preferred to pursue guerrilla warfare: "too weak for such an operation, they were still strong enough to turn brigands,"92 But they did not think of themselves as robbers, almost to a man these brigands died courageously when apprehended by the French. "I ladri siete voi" (You are the robbers), a Calabrian peasant proudly declared when facing the tribunal at Monteleone. "I carried my rifle and knife for King Ferdinand whom my God restore,"93 Militarily these brigands' gangs were by no means insignificant; the occupation army could transverse the country only in large units, small detachments were almost certainly bound to be destroyed. Murat's lines of communication were constantly disrupted, several battalions always had to be ready to fight the bandits. In the end, ten thousand soldiers were spread over two provinces. General Championnet once admitted that Fra Diavolo's band gave him more difficulty than any division of the royalist army.94 The French position improved after they had enlisted the help of Andrea Orlando, himself an ex-bandit who knew most of the hideouts of his former comrades, and made him head of a counterguerrilla detachment. The bandit guerrillas committed innumerable atrocities, to which the French responded with "extraordinary measures"; since they found it impossible to chase the brigands, they turned against the villages, compelling them (in the words of a French officer) "to extirpate the brigands of themselves under penalty of being regarded as their complices and abetters." (Lettres sur les Calabres, par un officier français, Paris, n.d.)
Fra Diavolo, the most notorious of these robbers, was in fact born Michele Pezza, his better-known sobriquet indicating the cunning of a priest and the malice of the devil. It is reported that French officers who fell int
o his hands were burned at the stake while the villagers danced around this auto-da-fé. Like other prominent robbers such as Gasparone, he became the protagonist of an opera (by Auber, with the libretto by Scribe).95 He had been made a colonel by King Ferdinand and after his death — he was hanged by the French in November 1806 — his family received a royal pension Mammone, Fra Diavolo's almost equally famous colleague, had the reputation, perhaps apocryphical, of a cannibal: "The inhabitants [of his native village] assert that he hung about the butchers' stalls for an opportunity to put his mouth to the gashed throats of bullocks and swine."96
In this guerrilla war in the southern Italian provinces, the patriotic forces consisted of an alliance between the Bourbonists, the nobility, the clergy and the brigands, while the liberals, the republicans and the French were the enemy. The reactionary forces were headed by Cardinal Ruffo, who coined the slogan "Fernando e la Santa Fede"; the brigands, among them many released convicts, were fighting in the name of the holy faith. Ruffo promised the citizens faithful to the king exemption from taxes for six years and celestial delights for all eternity:
The rabble took up its line of march as a disorderly religious procession. They tore down the trees of liberty, set up crosses in their place, entered villages and visited churches with the most sacred forms and ceremonies of the Roman Church, the Cardinal in his purple blessing the people and their arms.97
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