Other books by Byron Farwell
The Man Who Presumed: A Biography of Stanley
Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton
Prisoners of the Mahdi
Queen Victoria’s Little Wars
To my sisters
Mary Chenoweth
Helen Peter
First published in the United States of America by Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc. in 1976
Republished in this format in 2009 by
Pen & Sword Military
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright © Byron Farwell, 1976, 2009
9781783830619
The right of Byron Farwell to be identified as Author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Table of Contents
Also by
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
1 - THE BIRTH OF A PEOPLE
2 - VOORTREKKERS AND THEIR REPUBLICS
3 - THE FIRST ANGLO-BOER WAR
4 - THE JAMESON RAID
5 - MOVING TOWARDS WAR
6 - EVE OF WAR
ACT I
7 - WAR BEGINS
8 - TALANA: THE FIRST BATTLE
9 - ELANDSLAAGTE
10 - THE BATTLE OF LADYSMITH
11 - BULLER
12 - METHUEN
13 - MAGERSFONTEIN
14 - STORMBERG JUNCTION
15 - BEFORE COLENSO
16 - COLENSO
17 - BLACK WEEK
ACT II
18 - LORD ROBERTS AND LORD KITCHENER
19 - TABANYAMA: PRELUDE TO SPION KOP
20 - SPION KOP
21 - AFTER SPION KOP: VAAL KRANTZ
22 - THE GREAT FLANK MARCH
23 - THE SIEGE OF KIMBERLEY
24 - PAARDEBERG
25 - THE SIEGE OF LADYSMITH
26 - BLOEMFONTEIN
27 - DECISIONS AT KROONSTAD
28 - THE BOER REVIVAL
29 - ON THE MARCH TO PRETORIA
30 - MAFEKING
31 - PRETORIA
32 - AFTER PRETORIA: ROODEWAL AND BRANDWATER BASIN
33 - ADVANCE TO KOMATIPOORT
34 - THE END OF THE SECOND ACT
ACT III
35 - COMMANDOS IN CAPE COLONY
36 - SMUTS’S INVASION OF THE CAPE
37 - FIGHTING THE GUERRILLAS
38 - SOLDIERING ON THE VELD
39 - GUERRILLA LIFE
40 - THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND EMILY HOBHOUSE
41 - THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: THE LADIES COMMITTEE
42 - PRISONERS OF WAR
43 - VEREENIGING: THE BITTER END
44 - EPILOGUE: THE DUST SETTLES
GLOSSARY
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SOUTH AFRICA
1899-1902
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to the many people in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States who have assisted me in my research. Three South Africans have been particularly helpful, devoting much time and taking great pains to provide me with new material: George Aschman, former editor of the Cape Times; Maria Bosman, daughter of Captain J. W. “Koos” Bosman of the Transvaal Staatsartillerie; and G. E. Steyn, daughter of President M. T. Steyn.
Among others who have provided me with valuable material, I would like to express my gratitude to Stanley Beadle, G. M. Botha, Frank R. Bradlow, J. H. Breytenbach, Mrs. J. Canning, W. H. Carter, Anthony de Crespigny, Lillian du Preez, Austin M. Fraser, Etrechia Fichardt, H. J. Graham-Wolfaard, Jock Hasswell, Doris Heberden, Carl Hegardt, David Hillhouse, Albert Hollingsworth, Adelaide Jacobs, Mrs. G. V. Kearns, V. Leibbrandt, Petrovna Metelerkamp, C. E. More, Woody Nel, L. Oxenham, William la Roux, J. H. Schoeman, J. J. J. Scholtz, C. E. Sherwood, George and Lillian Tatham, E. S. Thompson, Casper Venter, Rolf Wik-lund, Buller Willis, and W. E. Wright.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Ruth, who devoted nearly a thousand hours to making this a better book. I am deeply indebted to her for her sound advice, penetrating insights, keen criticism, and sustained enthusiasm.
PREFACE
The war is the biggest thing since the Mutiny. It is great in itself; It is great in its incidents; It is great in its issues.
—Lord Lorning in a letter to Lady
Edward Cecil, 11 December 1899
Although this book deals with politicians and warriors, with politics and battles, it is neither a military nor a political history in the conventional sense, but a description of a great human drama that encompassed, as Jan Smuts said, “a vast tragedy in the life of a people, whose human interest far surpassed its military interest.”
In popular interest the Anglo-Boer War was eclipsed by the Great War which followed it only a dozen years later, the deaths of millions overshadowing the deaths of mere tens of thousands, but it was an important war—important at the time and important for its effect on the affairs of the world since.
There is little similarity between the Anglo-Boer War and the two world wars; in its early stages the Second War of Independence (as the Afrikaners now prefer to call the Anglo-Boer War) was reminiscent of the wars of a century earlier, with formal, almost stately set-piece battles; in its later stages it more nearly resembled the wars of the last quarter-century, those in Southeast Asia or the wars of the Portuguese in their African colonies.
In the two world wars of this century the actions of individuals or their units could determine the outcome of a battle only when massed with tens or hundreds of thousands of others; whether the actions of any one man or any one regiment were brave or cowardly, wise or foolish, scarcely mattered except in their aggregate. Battalions and regiments, even divisions, often seemed to lose their identity, to be lost in the swirling mists of battle, disappearing or returning decimated with no noticeable effect on the course of the war. The Anglo-Boer War was different. Although a major war, it was small enough for the actions of individuals and small units to be significant.
In September 1899 Britain stood at a point in history and occupied a place in world affairs analogous to that of the United States sixty years later. She was, or conceived herself to be, the greatest power in the world: a belief as yet uncontested and thus untested. Rulers and statesmen thought, as they are ever prone to do, in terms of conventional national power and of the conventional way in which t
hat power historically had always been tested: through war. Not in eighty-four years, since Waterloo, had any major world power seriously contested Britain’s position in the world—the Crimean War posed no real threat to the Empire, and the Indian Mutiny, which did, was, after all, a mutiny and not even a rebellion —but when the Boers invaded Britain’s South African colonies in 1899 it marked what is sometimes seen as the beginning of the end of the British Empire, though it certainly did not seem so at the time.
The Anglo-Boer War, like the American entanglement in Southeast Asia, involved a highly industrialized nation’s attempt to subdue a smaller agricultural country; in both instances the smaller nations resorted to that form of combat in which the intelligence, imagination, and character of the people count most and the quantity and quality of the weapons least: guerrilla warfare. In both cases the basic limitations and weaknesses of the great powers were revealed to an envious world and to its jealous and ambitious rulers and statesmen.
Britain won the great Anglo-Boer War, but at the cost of its reputation. The number of men, the amount of matériel, and the length of time required by mighty Britain to subdue a relative handful of South African farmers jolted Britain and amazed the world. Among the many interested spectators to this revelation of Britain’s limitations, none perhaps was more interested than the Kaiser and the Great General Staff of the German army, which produced a detailed two-volume study of the conflict. The exact extent to which the Kaiser and his generals were influenced by the spectacle of the British army’s performance in South Africa cannot be determined, but certainly they saw little to discourage their aggressive ambitions.
Whether history has lessons to teach is a debatable and much debated issue, but always men have sought to learn from what others did in the past. As often as not men have learned the wrong lessons, for, like the pronouncements of the oracle at Delphi, the past is capable of many interpretations and is often misunderstood. Men seek solutions to specific problems, and, as history never really repeats itself, these kinds of solutions history rarely provides. What it does offer is a vast array of examples which illustrate general principles. A lesson the British thought they had learned from the Anglo-Boer War was the importance of mounted men in modern warfare—and so they sent thousands of horsemen to France in 1914. The real lessons, of course, concerned the more general principles of the importance of mobility to an army. Young W. E. Davies of the Rifle Brigade discovered the kind of lessons history teaches when he found that the Anglo-Boer War was “exactly like every other war in that it was unlike any other war.”
We might, however, learn something from the erroneous conclusions men have drawn from history, particularly the history of wars. After some earlier and all subsequent major wars there have been those who concluded, as did John Atkins after the Anglo-Boer War, that “weapons ... are too terrible for wars to continue.” History has repeatedly illustrated that there is no weapon so terrible that some nation will not sometime use it.
The great principles concerning men’s conduct are, of course, continually being demonstrated, and the recitation of history’s examples—including a roll call of the sins which men and nations are prone to commit—serves as a reminder of the vast range of deeds, good and evil, which men and women are capable of performing. History reminds us too that rulers and statesmen are, after all, men and women.
For most Britons the Anglo-Boer War has come to seem quaint; few remember why it was fought, the way it was fought, or its consequences. The Americans, who had citizens fighting on both sides, who (most of them) expressed strong pro-Boer sentiments, and who profited mightily from the sale of horses, mules, and tinned beef to the British, remember the war but none of its details, and they have completely forgotten their own interest and involvement in it. For the Afrikaners, however, the war is still a vital, living issue, though the facts have dissolved into myths, leaving in the hearts of many a distilled bitterness. Although nearly all those who took part in the war are now dead, the fears, hopes, attitudes, and prejudices it generated remain, and they influence the actions of the Afrikaner people and the South African government. South Africa is a land in whose history bizarre, improbable events have occurred with astonishing frequency, but no event has left a more lasting imprint on the minds and hearts of her people than the Second Anglo-Boer War, and no one can hope to understand the country or those who today rule it without an understanding of this conflict.
The best detailed, blow-by-blow account of the war is to be found in The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, a seven-volume work written by a variety of hands over several years under the general direction of L. S. Amery. I have made frequent reference to this as simply The Times History. The Official History had too many tendentious editors. From the array of conflicting numbers available—casualty figures and sizes of forces engaged, for example—I have tried to select those which seemed to me the most reliable or at least the most plausible.
The best of the modern accounts is Rayne Kruger’s Good-bye Dolly Gray, first published in 1959. This is a military history with scant attention paid to the concentration camps and none to the prisoners of war, who by war’s end outnumbered the fighting burghers in the field. Since Kruger’s book appeared, a number of studies of men and events connected with the war have been published in South Africa—the works of Johannes Meintjes, for example—and much new material is now available to the historian which throws light on many aspects of the war. And I have received an astonishing amount of unpublished material from helpful and interested South Africans and Englishmen.
To mitigate as far as possible the annoyance of footnotes, all citations of sources are numbered and tucked away in the back of the book for those interested; in the few instances where it seemed desirable to add notes of substance, asterisks have been used and notes placed at the foot of the page.
Finally, it should perhaps be explained that when shrapnel is mentioned the reference is to the type of shell (or its missiles) invented by Henry Shrapnel, a projectile timed to explode in the air and to disperse a number of metal pellets, and not, as the word is commonly used by journalists, to describe high-explosive shells or their fragments.
PROLOGUE
1
THE BIRTH OF A PEOPLE
South Africa is a land bathed in sunshine, with air so bright and clear that one can see great distances across its unforested hinterland, that vast plateau called the high veld. Nature seems to have done its best to protect this fair land from desecration by man: its few high-banked rivers are unnavigable, and the red soil resists the growth of most alien crops. Behind the high veld (for the land seems to face southeast) is the great Kalahari Desert; in front of it lies a series of mountain ranges curving along the escarpment for 1,400 miles, and, on the southeastern edge of the plateau, the Karoo—a strip of high, arid tableland. These separate the high veld from the low veld and the littoral which begins in the hot, tropical northeast at Mozambique and sweeps down south to the temperate Cape of Good Hope. South of the Cape there are only the wastes of Antarctica and the invisible dividing line between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. Along South Africa’s nearly 2,000 miles of gale-swept coastline there are few natural harbours, few points at which strangers from the sea can penetrate. Yet men have been here, though never in great numbers, for a very long time. And always they have fought each other.
There has been a conflict of cultures here, a “race problem,” for as long as men can remember—longer even, for archaeologists and anthropologists have exhumed the problem from the prehistoric past, a past so distant it is not certain the protagonists were actually human. In that dimly seen period of history, hundreds of thousands of years ago, two types of humanoid creatures lived on this land. Then, several thousands of years later, there was but one: Homo sapiens. South Africa’s first cultural conflict ended in the complete and utter extermination of one humanoid creature by another.
The survivors were perhaps the ancestors of the Bushmen and the Ho
ttentots. These first known inhabitants of the Cape were yellow-skinned people, short in stature, who spoke languages characterized by a number of clicking sounds which served for some of their consonants. The men had protuberant bellies; the women had pendulous breasts and enormous buttocks. The taller Hottentots developed a more advanced culture and eventually subdued or drove away the Bushmen.
In 1498, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape and landed at Mossel Bay, he found only Hottentots (at least these are the only people mentioned), for the black men were still far to the north. Other Europeans followed Da Gama, but none stayed until on 6 April 1652 Johan (Jan) van Riebeck of the Dutch East India Company, landed at Table Bay with about one hundred men and four women to form a settlement which, it was hoped, would be able to provide meat and fresh vegetables for the Company’s ships going to and from the East Indies. Van Riebeck built a fort, planted crops, and soon was demanding that more women be sent out—not soft, town-bred girls, but “lusty farm wenches.”
Conflict with the Hottentots was perhaps inevitable. In the unequal struggle the Europeans soon displayed their superior strength, and the last serious organized resistance of the Hottentots was crushed in 1677. With their easy adaptability, the Hottentots turned from warring against the white man to working for him. Those who survived the white man’s diseases began the process of interbreeding with other races that was to result in their extermination as a separate race.
In 1688, thirty-six years after Van Riebeck landed, there arrived at the Cape a group of about 175 Huguenots—men, women, and children—who had been driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Within two generations the French language was forgotten and the descendants of these refugees merged with the Dutch community, adopting their language, religion, and mode of life but adding an astonishing number of French surnames which survive to this day through generations of prolific families.
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