Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  On 17 January 1902, a hot summer’s day, Scheepers was taken to Church Square where soldiers were drawn up and the townspeople assembled. There Colonel Arthur Henniker-Major read the death sentence and announced that Kitchener had confirmed it. It was reported that Colonel Henniker-Major’s whole body trembled as he read and that it almost seemed as if he rather than the condemned man would collapse. The Reverend A. C. Murray visited Scheepers in his cell when he was brought back to it: “I found him so excitable and indignant that it was not possible to have much discussion about his spiritual well-being, and I thought it advisable for us to kneel and lay his circumstances and condition in prayer before the Lord.”10

  The next day Scheepers was taken in an ambulance to his place of execution outside of town. Dismounting, he walked past the open grave waiting to receive him and raised his manacled hands in salute. One of the soldiers asked for the badge he wore on his hat which had the word “Liefde” (Love) on it. He refused, saying he wanted it buried with him. He sat on the chair and the soldiers prepared to tie him to it. He begged them not to, but they had orders to obey. Bound and blindfolded., he was shot by a squad of soldiers from the Coldstream Guards.

  Scheepers’s body was cut loose, put on a blanket, and carried to the grave. As they were about to lower it an officer called, “Let him drop.” He was dropped.

  “When the adjutant ordered us to drop him,” said one of the soldiers later, “it made me feel sick.”

  The chair on which he had sat to be executed was broken up and thrown in the grave. His hat too. Then unslaked lime was thrown in and the soldiers shovelled the dirt over him and levelled the grave while the band of the Coldstream Guards played “More Work for the Undertaker.”

  Back in their quarters that night a comrade said to Private Wilfrid Harrison, who had been one of the firing squad, “Well, that’s another of them dispatched.” Harrison hit him.

  Scheepers was dead and buried, and the British had done their best to make certain there would be neither relics nor shrine. But his ghost lived on, and in the hearts of Afrikaners he was enshrined as a martyr. Shortly after the war, Jacobus and Sophia Scheepers came to Graaf-Reinet to look for the grave of their son, but could find no trace of it. When, later, it was discovered, it was found to be empty; only some pieces of the chair and his hat remained. His final resting place has never been found.

  Commandant Pieter Kritzinger almost suffered Scheepers’s fate when he fell into British hands; after his wounds healed he was tried by a military court for a similar list of offences, but he was acquitted of them all. Perhaps he profited by the public clamour against the executions. British politicians, Winston Churchill among them, decried the folly of creating another martyr. The trials of Scheepers and Kritzinger brought forth howls of outrage in Holland, Germany, France, and the United States. Senator Henry Moore Teller of Colorado was among those who protested the sentence given Scheepers, and he moved in the United States Senate that President Theodore Roosevelt ask Britain “to set aside the sentence in the interest of humanity,” but he was too late. Scheepers had already been shot.

  To the Afrikaners rebellion did not seem as heinous a crime as it did to the British; after all, rebellion had always been a part of the Boer tradition. They were as horrified by the executions as their grandfathers had been by the hanging of the rebels at Slachter’s Nek in 1816. Now a new generation of Afrikaners was hardened in the belief that the British were unjust, cruel, and bloodthirsty.

  There were other Boer commanders who led commandos into Cape Colony and who committed all, or most, of the offences for which Scheepers and Lötter were executed, but they were fortunate enough not to be caught. Hertzog was one of these; another was a future field marshal of the British army who became a member of the Council for Imperial Defence in World War I, prime minister of South Africa in World War II, and one of the founders of the United Nations: Jan Smuts (1870–1950).

  Smuts was technically a British subject, for he was born on a farm 3 miles from Riebeck West in Cape Colony. Like all Afrikaners, whatever their profession, he ever remained proud of being a farmer; at the age of seventy-seven, after a life largely devoted to politics in towns and cities, he still claimed, “I am just a son of the veld.... I am a farmer’s son, and my people have been farmers through the centuries.” His early boyhood was indeed spent on a farm, and of course he learned to ride and shoot. Until the age of twelve he received no schooling, but he possessed a remarkable intellect and he entered Victoria College at Stellenbosch at the age of sixteen. He went on to Cambridge, where he performed the astonishing, perhaps unique, feat of taking both parts of the Law Tripos at the same time; he also collected prizes for papers on constitutional law, Roman law, and jurisprudence. He entered the Middle Temple and at the age of twenty-five was a practicing barrister.

  Friends and relations have taken pains to point out that Smuts was not really haughty, unfeeling, and unsociable, that he was actually a warm, sensitive human being. This needed pointing out because it was not evident. Most of his contemporaries saw him as a man of cold intellect. He was shrewd too, and many thought him “slim” (foxy, crafty). Even among those who respected his abilities he was often called Slim Jannie. Intensely loyal to those he served, he spent most of his career serving two men, neither of whom was in the least like him: Paul Kruger and Louis Botha. Both of these masters had remarkable qualities of personal leadership and liked close, personal, direct contact with people; both, too, appreciated and knew how to use the powerful intellect of Jan Smuts.

  When Kruger had decided to appoint the brilliant young lawyer as state attorney there had been some grumbling and the Johannesburg Star said: “Though he may have all the precociousness of a Pitt, we still consider twenty-eight is rather too young an age for the State Attorney of the South African Republic.”11 But Kruger never heeded the advice of newspapers—he didn’t even read them. The appointment was made and Smuts was serving in this office when war was declared. His relationship with Kruger was, he said later, as “between a father and his son.” After the fall of Pretoria there was not much need for a state attorney, and Smuts joined De la Rey in the western Transvaal, where he quickly learned his new trade as a guerrilla leader.

  Most of the invaders of the Cape had been neighbouring Free Staters, but at a conference of Transvaal leaders on 20 June 1901 it was decided that Jan Smuts should lead a commando into Cape Colony. With a hand-picked force of 362 men he started off on an arduous and dangerous 2,000-mile ride with Jacobus van Deventer and Ben Bouwer as his two chief lieutenants. Into his saddlebags went the essentials: confidential papers, a photograph of his wife Isie (née Sybella Krige), the New Testament in Greek, a Bible in English, the complete works of Schiller, and—appropriately, as it turned out—Xenophon’s Anabasis.

  The jumping-off place for the expedition was near Vereeniging, where ten months later it was all to end.

  36

  SMUTS’S INVASION OF THE CAPE

  One of the men who followed Smuts into Cape Colony was Deneys Reitz, only eighteen years old but already a veteran. All five of State Secretary Francis Reitz’s sons by his first marriage fought in the war, even the youngest, age twelve when the war began. Deneys had seen action in the early fighting around Ladysmith and at Spion Kop; he had taken part in the eastward retreat after the fall of Pretoria and had escaped into the bush veld to continue fighting. He had several times changed commandos before joining Smuts, and it was his fortune to see more action than most in the course of the war.n

  Calamity marked the very beginning raf Smuts’s expedition; while still gathering up his command at Krugersdorp in the Transvaal, a tremendous thunder storm struck and six of his men were killed by a single bolt of lightning. It was not a good omen. Riding into the Free State, Smuts stumbled into a trap of Kitchener’s making, a drive to round up all the commandos operating in the area. In addition to the men manning the garrisons and blockhouses along the railway, 15,000 troops organised into seventeen columns were
engaged in sweeping the area he had entered. To lead his commando through the meshes of such a net took skill and luck, hard riding, much fighting, and artful dodging. By the time they reached the Cape Colony border thirty more men had been lost.

  On 5 September they slipped across the Orange River by night and, entering Cape Colony, began a trial more arduous than any of them had ever imagined. Almost at once they lost three killed and several wounded in skirmishes with Basutos. Foul weather proved their greatest trial. Until then the nights had been cold but the days had been cloudless and the sun had given some warmth; now rain set in and they rode for days shivering under blankets thrown over their shoulders. Through the bitterly cold nights they lay dismally in the mud. “The nights were evil dreams,” said Reitz. Three days after entering the colony they encountered the British for the first time at a pass (a narrow defile, actually) called Moordenaas Poort (Murderer’s Pass); one man was killed and two severely wounded. Smuts himself had a narrow escape; he lost his horse and his saddlebags with his books, papers, and his wife’s photograph. The following day there was another fight. The British began to hem them in. Three days later Smuts wrote in his diary: “Eleven forces move to surround me.”

  With no doctors and no bandages or medical supplies of any sort and no wagons, the wounded had to ride; when they could no longer mount they were left in farmhouses to be collected by the British. Deneys Reitz said:

  Amid all the cruelty ... there was one redeeming feature, in that the English soldiers, both officers and men, were unfailingly humane. This was so well known that there was never any hesitation in abandoning a wounded man to the mercy of the troops, in the sure knowledge that he would be taken away and carefully nursed, a certainty that went far to soften the asperities of the war.1

  Smuts and his men were short of almost all necessities. Reitz did not have a shirt or even underclothes, only “a ragged coat and worn trousers full of holes.... On my naked feet were dilapidated rawhide sandals, patched and repaired during eight months of wear, and I had only one frayed blanket to sleep under at night.”2 Few of his companions were better off, and every day saw conditions worsened. Chivied mercilessly by a strong and numerous enemy, men and horses suffered from the cold, the damp, and the fatigue of long, hard rides. One by one the horses faltered and dropped.

  Near sunset one evening they came within sight of Jamestown, but as there was a strong British column nearby, Smuts ordered his tired men to keep moving. The night was dark, a cold rain drove into their faces, and their local guide lost his bearings. The men walked, pulling their exhausted horses behind them. While crossing a spruit Reitz’s feet stuck in the clay and his wretched sandals came apart when he tried to pull them out. He was now reduced to cutting corners from his thin blanket and tying the scraps around his naked feet. At last, after five hours of floundering about in the mud and cold, the entire commando stumbled to a halt. Men and horses, stiff and numb, dumbly huddled together, ankle deep in mud, an icy rain pouring down on them. When it grew light they counted thirty dead horses.

  There was some comfort to be found at the occasional farmhouse they came upon where they were sometimes given bread and coffee. At one large farm they were even able to build fires and eat a hot meal, unimaginable luxuries both. Here the farmer’s wife gave Reitz a pair of boots, and he made a coat for himself of a grain bag by the simple expedient of cutting holes for his head and arms. His companions laughed, but they soon followed his example.

  Although unwilling to leave their farms and fight, many Cape farmers were willing to help the ragged, harried band with information or to act as guides. Near Dordecht a young farm boy led them expertly on a 30-mile march around the flank of a threatening British column. The tired men halted at a farm and slaughtered a few sheep, but before they had time to cook their mutton there was the familiar cry of “Opsaal!” (saddle up). A long column of British troops was coming towards them.

  Detailing some of the men to fight a rear-guard action, Smuts led his depleted force towards a pass in the Stormberg range near Pen Hoek. The troopers swinging around to follow him were slowed down enough by the fire of the rear guard to give them time to make their way up the mountain and onto a large plateau. Looking down on the plain from the far rim of the plateau, scouts could see trains off-loading soldiers and horses; some units were already mounted and making their way towards them. Smuts tried desperately to find some way to escape. He led his men he knew not where, in circles, seeking now here, now there, for an opening in the ring of troops drawing ever tighter around them. A gale blew dust and grit into the faces of the cold, tired, desperate men as they searched unsuccessfully for a weak spot in the gathering noose.

  All day long they fought skirmishes and beat hasty retreats. Dusk found them stranded at a small farmhouse. They had been forty hours without sleep; men and horses were famished and exhausted; their ammunition was almost gone; the expedition so far had achieved nothing. Short of a miracle the next day’s sun would see their surrender. But the Boers believed in miracles, and what men believe in often happens. As Smuts stood in the farmyard with his lieutenants, Van Deventer and Bouwer, a hunchback on crutches came out of the house. He hardly looked like their deliverer as he hobbled up to Smuts, but he was. He knew a way out over a bog-like area that was unlikely to be guarded, and he offered to guide them. Once again the men heard the familiar cry of “Opsaal!” Six or seven burghers had been wounded in the day’s skirmishing, yet all but two went on.

  Mounted insecurely on a horse, their guide led them in the dark over a slippery, squelching, twisting path. At one point they slipped past a British unit, passing so close that they could hear the soldiers’ voices and the champing of their horses. At the edge of the escarpment their guide slid from his horse, adjusted the crutches under his arms, and set off in the night to make his way home.

  Smuts quietly gave the order, and in the dark the men led their horses over the rim, slithering and sliding down the steep, grassy slope. It was, said Reitz, “probably the nearest approach to the vertical attempted by any mounted force during the war.... At times whole batches of men and horses came glissading past, knocking against all in their course.”3 Even when they reached the plain below they had to press on. Their greatest need was for sleep, but sleep was impossible. Ahead of them were the tracks of the railway they had seen that morning, and several miles beyond was another set of tracks. Both would have to be crossed before daylight if they were to escape fresh swarms of troops which the trains could quickly bring to the scene. Only the cold, biting wind kept them awake. Not for another twenty-four hours would they rest.

  It was about eleven o’clock that night when they reached the first set of tracks. A train was approaching, and some of the men were for derailing and attacking it, but Smuts refused: there might be civilians on board, he said. The lighted windows of the train rolled by as they sat their horses in the dark. Framed inside them were fresh, smartly dressed officers drinking wine, laughing and talking. It seemed an incredible world they gazed at. When the last carriage clattered past they were left in the silence to dismount and wearily lead their horses across the tracks. They had missed an opportunity to change history. General John French was on that train.

  They rode all night. Held up briefly by a fence or a ditch, men would slip to the ground and, crouching at their horses’ feet, fall so soundly asleep that they had to be shaken awake. The sun was rising as they crossed the second set of tracks at a siding about 5 miles from Sterkstroom. There were some deserted railway buildings there, and Van Deventer and a few men stayed behind to search for anything useful. While they were scrounging, a goods train came clanking up. Van Deventer stopped it by switching the points. It proved to be an empty coal train with only a driver, stoker, and brakeman aboard, but Van Deventer did find a mail bag which he extracted before allowing the train to go on its way. The idea of destroying the train to prevent its use by the British or to prevent its crew from reporting their presence seems not to have occurred t
o him.

  Most of the mail proved to be personal letters of little interest, but there were newspapers and these were eagerly scanned for news of the war. They were delighted and amused to find an item about themselves: Smuts had invaded Cape Colony with “the riff-raff of the Boer armies.” Also of interest was Kitchener’s first and only attempt to end the war by threats: a proclamation announcing that all Boer officers who did not surrender by 15 September would be “banished forever from South Africa; and the cost of maintaining the families of such burghers shall be recoverable from, and become a charge on, their properties, whether land or movables in both colonies.” De Wet later said of it: “It had no effect whatsoever.... I know of no single case where an officer in consequence of this proclamation surrendered; on the contrary ... the burghers had more reason to trust their officers than before.”4 He was probably right. The Boers called it a papierbomme (paper bomb). Steyn., De Wet, and De la Rey all made defiant replies. On 15 September Steyn wrote Kitchener a long letter in which he said: “May I be permitted to say that your Excellency’s jurisdiction is limited to the range of your Excellency’s guns.”5 As for the threats to the Boer officers:

  Our country is ruined; our hearths and homes wrecked; our cattle are looted, or killed by the thousand; our women and children are made prisoners, insulted, and carried away by armed kaffirs; and many hundreds have already given their lives for the freedom of the fatherland. Can we now—when it is merely a question of banishment—shrink from our duty?6