Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  He was born in 1857, the son of an Oxford geometry professor who sired fourteen children. Robert was the eighth child by his third wife, a woman who claimed to be a descendant of that Captain John Smith whom the beautiful Pocahontas saved from being clubbed to death by her friends and relations. Robert was educated at Charterhouse, where, although he did not do well in either studies or games, he distinguished himself in the school plays. Two of his brothers had done brilliantly at Oxford, but Robert, in spite of two attempts and the distinguished reputation of his father, failed to gain admission. He had not thought much about the army, but the tests were easier, he passed, and without any military education whatsoever he was gazetted straight to the 13th Hussars in India.

  Baden-Powell had some military assets (he could ride and shoot), and he was able to enliven the dullness of garrison life with his sketches and caricatures (he was ambidextrous) and by his talent in amateur theatricals. He could play the piano, whistle, and sing, including comic songs sung in an hilarious falsetto. He was “as good a skirt dancer as ever ‘brought down the house,’ ”3 and he was said to be “the most inveterate practical joker in the British army.”4 He loved to dress up in costumes and disguises: George Younghusband encountered him at Simla disguised as an Italian count. Punch once referred to him as “Barnum Powell.” Black and White Budget summed up his personality: “He is a delightfully breezy beggar is B-P.”5

  From India he sent home sketches which were published in Graphic, and he tried to make a name for himself by writing military manuals. When he sent home the manuscript for Reconnaissance and Scouting he wrote his brother: “Even if it did not sell twenty copies it would be a grand advertisement for me—because I could send copies to all the brass quartermaster-generals, Wolseleys, etc.,”6 and he dedicated his Manual of Cavalry to the Duke of Connaught. It took him twenty years to reach the rank of major, but thereafter his rise was rapid. He saw service in Zululand, in the Ashanti campaign of 1895, and in the Matebele campaign of the following year. In 1897 he was promoted colonel and given command of the 5th Dragoon Guards.

  His assignment in South Africa was to raise two regiments of mounted infantry in Bechuanaland and Rhodesia for the purpose of defending those colonies’ frontiers. He took with him Major Lord Edward Cecil of the Grenadier Guards, the son of Lord Salisbury, and Lieutenant the Honourable Algernon Hanbury-Tracy of the Royal Horse Guards, a son of Lord Sudeley. Lady Edward Cecil accompanied her husband as far as Cape Town, leaving behind their four-year-old son George. In Cape Town, before making his way to Bulawayo, B-P found time to contribute to a charity bazaar a parody of Longfellow’s poem “Psalm of Life,” signing it “Wrongfellow.”

  Baden-Powell experienced some difficulty raising his two regiments, but he did manage it, for as Sir William Butler had said: “There is always in South Africa a floating population of loafers, mostly men who have made Europe too hot for them, who are ready to join any corps raised for them.” Not all of the recruits were British and not all could ride—or at least many were unable to ride the half-broken horses provided them. It was while he was at Bulawayo that Baden-Powell acquired the services as his aide-de-camp of Captain Gordon Wilson, whose wife, Lady Sarah, nee Churchill, was Winston’s aunt. Lady Sarah was with her husband at Bulawayo, spending her time practicing first aid “on the lanky arms and legs of a little black boy.”

  It was not in the minds of anyone in London or Cape Town that Baden-Powell should make any preparations to defend Mafeking, which was not in either Bechuanaland or Rhodesia but over the border in Cape Colony and only 8 miles from the Transvaal frontier, but he began to use it as a base. The firm of Julius Weil & Company had ample storage space there, and Major Lord Edward Cecil, as Baden-Powell’s chief of staff, opened negotiations with Mr. Benjamin Well for enormous quantities of supplies. Anticipating war and difficulty in obtaining supplies after it had started, Cecil asked the government for £500,000. The request was refused. Cecil then turned to the Weil Company, offering his personal guarantee of payment, frankly telling Benjamin Weil: “I place this order with you without the authority of my superiors. I may have to pay for it myself, but I will take the responsibility on my own shoulders.” And so he did, giving Messrs. Weil his personal note of hand for £500,000. As his wife later said: “It was very sporting and very shrewd of the Weils to take this risk; they must have known that he himself had not a tenth of this money. But they banked on Lord Edward’s personality and his father’s position, and the deal saved Mafeking.”7

  It was indeed a deal which saved Mafeking, and in doing so it made Baden-Powell a hero. One might imagine that B-P would have been grateful, but at the end of the siege, in a private letter accompanying his dispatch, he wrote: “Cecil did his best but was not much use.”

  As trains loaded with supplies poured into Mafeking and the Weil storehouses began to bulge, Baden-Powell asked for permission to put an armed guard there to protect his supplies. The size of the guard was not specified, so when permission was granted he put an entire regiment there, half of his total force, and moved to Mafeking himself, setting up headquarters quite comfortably in Dixon’s Hotel and making preparations for the town’s defence. He also took time to correct the proofs for his seventh book, Aids to Scouting, the first chapter of which was concerned with “pluck.” This was a word much loved by the Victorians, and “plucky” was an adjective often applied to B-P. It seemed to strike the right note of casual bravery, to describe what all late Victorians most admired in men and what all the world imagined Baden-Powell to be.

  Mafeking (the name is a Bantu word meaning “place of stones”) was the most northerly town in Cape Colony. It was not much of a town really. Baden-Powell described it as “a very ordinary-looking place.... Just a small tin-roofed town of small houses plumped down upon the open veldt.” The European section had been laid out by Sir Charles Warren in 1885 and by 1899 occupied roughly 1,000 square yards with two open spaces named Government Square and Market Square. The only two-storied building was the Sisters of Mercy Convent, inhabited by a Mother Superior and eight nuns. The European population consisted of 1,074 men, 229 women, and 405 children; about 200 of these people were Boers. There were some 7,500 Bantu, partly from the local Barolong boo Ratshidi tribe and partly families who had left the Rand area when the uitlanders fled and the mines closed, depriving them of employment.

  There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that when hostilities began Mafeking would be attacked. It was isolated; although small, it was the second-largest town, after Kimberley, in northern Cape Colony; it was close to the Transvaal border; and it sat on the railway line that joined Rhodesia with Cape Colony. Aside from Baden-Powell and the handful of officers with him, there were no regular troops in the area. The total force for the defence of the town consisted of the newly raised Protectorate Regiment (469 men), the Bechuanaland Rifles (82 men), the Town Guard (302 men), some police, a railway detachment, and a “Cape Boy Contingent”—in all, about 1,200 men. Less than half were armed with magazine-load rifles; the rest were equipped with Martini-Henry single-loaders. In addition, Baden-Powell armed about 300 Bantu with obsolete firearms to act as cattle guards. At the start of the siege the only British artillery consisted of four muzzle-loading 7-pounders, a 1-pounder Hotchkiss, and a 2-inch Nordenfeldt; there were also seven Maxim machine guns and two armoured locomotives. With this meagre force B-P began planning to defend the town for what was expected to be a siege of at most six weeks.

  A number of proclamations were issued. One suggested that since the town would almost certainly be shelled, women and children should leave while the railway was still in operation. Another gave notice that mines were being laid, adding that small red flags would mark their locations “in order to avoid accidents.” Most curious of all was one that read:

  Notice

  SPIES

  There are in town to-day nine known spies. They are hereby warned to leave before 12 noon to-morrow or they will be apprehended.

  By orde
r

  E. H. Cecil, Major

  C.S.O.

  Mafeking

  7th October 1899

  On 13 October the Boers tore up the railway track and cut the telegraph lines. Mafeking was isolated, although not surrounded, and the siege of the town began. Estimates of the size of the Boer forces around Mafeking varied widely, but at the most it was probably not more than six or seven thousand, and most of the time considerably less. Brian Gardner did an amusing comparison of the various figures Baden-Powell himself gave for the number of enemies he faced.8 For example, October 1899: 5—6,000; May, 1900: 8,000; 1907: up to 9,000; 1933: 10,000; 1937: 12,000.

  On 14 October the British attacked a Boer contravallation and lost 2 killed and 16 wounded—B-P called it a “smartly fought little engagement,” claiming in his official report 55 Boers killed and more than that number wounded. The Boers reported 3 casualties. British stretcher-bearers were fired on as they worked after the battle, and the next day Baden-Powell sent a letter of complaint to Piet Cronjé; Cronjé dispatched a Boer doctor to deliver a personal apology: young men who did not understand the significance of the red cross flag had fired the shots and had been reprimanded. The doctor was given lunch and sent back with a bottle of whiskey for Cronjé.

  The following day the Boers bombarded the town, but no one was hurt. Many of the European inhabitants had already prepared dugouts. After the bombardment Cronjé sent in a demand for an unconditional surrender. It was carried by an Englishman named Everitt who was fighting on the Boer side; he, like the doctor, was treated with elaborate courtesy, given lunch at Dixon’s Hotel, a few drinks, and a polite refusal to take back with him.

  Mafeking was never completely invested. Hardly a week went by without a Bantu messenger passing through the lines carrying a “Kaffir-gram,” as the messages were called. The system of runners and dispatch riders was organized by the enterprising Benjamin Weil. It was Weil too who provided interpreters, artillery spotters, and frequent and generous gifts from his stocks. The siege, though long, was not ferocious and there was seldom much action. B-P never pretended otherwise in the frequent messages he sent out. It was the British public who filled in a background of hardships and danger, choosing to see heroism in B-P’s cheery jauntiness.

  On the night of 27 October 53 men of the Protectorate Regiment, led by Captain Charles Fitzclarence, made a successful bayonet raid on a Boer trench. Baden-Powell reported Boer losses as one hundred; The Times History said three. British losses were six killed, nine wounded, and two missing. Fitzclarence, on Baden-Powell’s recommendation, was given the Victoria Cross for his night’s work. It was unfortunate that the trench so ferociously attacked had been mostly held by young boys. J. Emerson Neilly of the Pall Mall Gazette, one of a number of correspondents in Mafeking, wrote: “It is not too much to the taste of your soldier to bayonet a lad of thirteen or fourteen; but if any shame attaches to the killing of the youngsters, it must rest on the shoulders of those fathers who brought them there.”9

  On 31 October the Boers launched a small-scale attack on one point of the perimeter. Losses were light on both sides. That the Boers never made an all-out attack on the town can be explained not only by their temperamental reluctance to undertake offensive operations but also by the orders from Kruger, who had rightly seen that Mafeking was of no military importance—the primary Boer objective on the western front was Kimberley—and had told Cronjé that if it would cost more than fifty casualties to take the town the attempt should not be made.

  After another night raid by the British on 7 November there were, except for some shelling, seven weeks of quiet. The Boers, ignorant of the vast quantities of stores and supplies Cecil and Weil had piled up, expected the British to run out of food and capitulate; the British thought the Boers’ patience would run out and they would leave. In lieu of bullets, the antagonists exchanged messages.

  A recurring complaint of Baden-Powell’s was that the Boers shelled the convent, which had been converted into a hospital. Cronjé counter-charged that the British stationed artillery near the convent. Although an article in the Mafeking Mail (9 November 1899) denied this, the unpublished diary of Mother Mary Stanislaus confirms that there were indeed guns near the convent, and Lady Sarah saw a Maxim there. Officers who knew about the guns later claimed implausibly that they had been put there to protect the convent.

  At Mafeking, as elsewhere, the Boers did not, unless forced to, fight on Sundays. Guy Fawkes’ Day fell on a Sunday in 1899, and B-P, who planned to celebrate it with the traditional fireworks, sent an explanation of this peculiar holiday to Cronjé, telling him “not to be alarmed.”

  For the British Sundays at Mafeking, as at Kimberley and Ladysmith, were a time for sports, entertainments, washing clothes, paying visits—almost every activity, in fact, except fighting and attending church. Solomon Tshekisho Plaatjej (1877-1932), the only black African to leave a diary of his experiences during the war, noted that the “gymkhana meetings and merryments” on Sundays were “strong counter-attractions to Divine Services”: “These surely must be one of the causes of the deadliness of the Dutch weapons now. I had entered my pony for a run in next Sunday’s races ... but I had decided to withdraw him today lest I be guilty of blatant sacrilege and thereby further imperil my already dangerous condition.”10

  The British, not sharing Plaatje’s sense of sin, looked forward eagerly to their Sundays. J. Angus Hamilton, correspondent for The Times and Black and White Budget, wrote: “We drink, we accept one another’s invitations to meals of surpassing heaviness; we even invite ourselves to one another’s houses. We eat, we drink, we flirt, we live in every second of the hours which constitute Sunday.”11 Sometimes on Sundays Boers and Britons met to chat and the Boers would exchange newspapers for whiskey.

  No one enjoyed Sundays more than the garrison’s commander. B-P energetically organized sports events and a wide variety of entertainments. On Sunday mornings the band played, and on Sunday evenings there were concerts, plays, and sketches in which B-P took a prominent part: he recited, played the mouth organ and the piano (once imitating Paderewski by putting a mop on his head), sang songs (some of his own composition), and acted parts. He also arranged for agricultural, art, and horticultural exhibitions and organized teas, dances, and a baby show. There were complaints of the tedium of the siege, of course, but in general the people in Mafeking complained less about their boredom than did the inhabitants of Ladysmith and Kimberley. There is, perhaps, much to be said for having as commander of a besieged town an energetic buffoon.

  After sitting around Mafeking for five weeks Cronjé moved off with most of his commandos, leaving only about 2,000 men (B-P said 4,000) under Assistant Commandant-General J. P. Snyman to continue the siege. The Boers engaged in no further offensive operations. Most of the burghers were from the western Transvaal, their farms were not far away, so their wives and children visited them; to many it seemed “little else than a pleasant picnic.” No attempt was made to encircle the town completely, and the British messenger service improved. Private citizens posted personal letters, and even small packages were received from the outside world. Sometimes the Boers themselves passed on messages, as when in November through their courtesy Lord Edward Cecil was told of the death of his mother.

  The adventures of Winston Churchill’s Aunt Sarah enlivened the scene. She had gone with her husband to Mafeking when Baden-Powell moved there, staying at Benjamin Weil’s house by the railway station and taking her meals at Dixon’s Hotel, where, she said, “the food was weird.” Just before the siege began she left the town and established herself in a tiny settlement 75 miles away on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. This proved much too dull, and she began to roam the countryside. Although by this time the area was controlled by the Boers, she encountered little difficulty. Stopped once by a Boer patrol and asked for her pass, she flourished her British passport and was waved on. All might have gone well for her if a Reuters correspondent she met in her wanderings had not p
resented her with a pigeon. It was the pigeon, that “idiotic bird,” that undid her.

  ENGLISH ARTILLERYMEN BRINGING UP A GUN NEAR COLENSO WERE

  SCATTERED BY A BOER SHELL.

  The Reuters man assured her that the bird would carry a message to Mafeking, and Lady Sarah, delighted, dashed off a note to B-P offering to collect intelligence for him. The note was attached and the bird released. It circled uncertainly a few times and then headed straight for Snyman’s headquarters, a farmhouse about 40 miles away. It was sighted there perched on the roof and shot; the message was read and Lady Sarah was taken into custody. She was indignant. No one had any right to hold her, she told Snyman, and she insisted that she be permitted to go to Mafeking. Snyman said he would consider the matter.

  Spies, of course, could be shot, but Lady Sarah could not be so simply dealt with. Snyman offered to exchange her for Petrus Viljoen, a Boer then in the Mafeking jail serving a sentence for horse stealing. Baden-Powell refused. Her captors politely suggested that she would find “pleasant ladies’ society” in Pretoria and offered to send her there, but Lady Sarah bristled: “I remarked that I had no intention of visiting their capital ... I would not for an instant admit they had any right to detain me or to send me to any place against my will.” “I could see,” she said later, “they were taking a cowardly advantage of me because I was a woman.”12

  For several days Snyman and B-P negotiated without getting anywhere. On 4 December Snyman telegraphed to Kruger, explaining the situation and asking plaintively, “What shall I now do with Lady Sarah Wilson? Please answer speedily.”13 Meanwhile, Lady Sarah was making herself disagreeable, as she herself admitted: “In fact, I was on every occasion so importunate that I am quite sure the General’s Staff only prayed for the moment that I should depart.” Alternating demands that she be released with complaints about her accommodations, she raised a storm in the laager. She was quartered in the hospital, and she objected to the couch she slept on and the people she was forced to associate with; in particular she objected to a woman doctor, the first she had ever seen. A female physician, and a badly dressed one at that, was a phenomenon Lady Sarah did not approve of, and to hear her addressed as “doctor” was insupportable. She hammered incessantly on poor Snyman, showering him with letters when she could not see him to speak her mind, and by 6 December she had reduced him to begging the state secretary: “Please, please send me at once your decision concerning Lady Sarah Wilson. She is unwilling to stay here any longer.”14