Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  “One does not fight because there is hope of winning,” said Cyrano de Bergerac. “It is much finer to fight when it is no use.” Such appeared to be the attitude of the burghers on the veld during the final year of the war, and Schikkerling seemed to echo Cyrano’s sentiments: “Any fool can glory in victory, but only the brave can endure defeat upon defeat. A victory is glory to the meanest, but the test of courage is reverse. . . . There is more in the strength to endure than in the power to inflict. . . .”19

  Even in the worst of times there came for most commandos brief respites, occasional lulls, when men could rest and play. Charles B. Holme, an Australian, was one of five men from the Queensland Mounted Infantry captured by the Johannesburg Commando and kept for a time unconfined in their laager. He was surprised to see the young Boers playing such childish games as leapfrog and “egg in the hat,”q and a game called “mill,” a variant of the morris game. Group singing was popular, and although the Doppers sang only hymns and psalms, those belonging to the less strict sects of the Dutch Reformed Church sang secular songs. Some men managed to carry fiddles or concertinas strapped to their saddles, and there were frequent concerts. In September 1901 a group of burghers wrote and produced a play at Pilgrim’s Rest in the northern Transvaal; women in the town took part, and even General Ben Viljoen played a role. The plot has not survived, but the final scene, played to great effect, featured the execution of a traitor to the accompaniment of a song.

  The most charming, certainly the most pleasant picture of guerrilla life is that of a group of young Boers who on New Year’s Day 1901, after bathing in a stream, decorated their horses and themselves with ferns and wild flowers and rode gaily back to their laager.

  The British did not, could not, occupy all of the two former republics. Although they held the railways, the cities, the mines, and the most populous areas, there were still places where Kitchener’s columns never ventured. De la Rey, “the Lion of the West,” successfully held back the British in the western Transvaal, and the British gave up as an impossible task the occupation of the sparcely settled north, the wild Zoutpansberg district. The one railway running north from Pretoria went only as far as Pietersburg, which the British first occupied when a column under Plumer rode into town on the night of 8 April 1901. Pietersburg’s only defender was the village schoolmaster, who hid in the tall grass just outside the town and shot two Tasmanian officers and a trooper before he was run to earth. Plumer’s column did not remain long, but he destroyed four steam mills, a repair shop, and the plant of the two newspapers.

  From the Zoutpansberg came some of the most rugged and intractable burghers. Conan Doyle described them as “tough frontiersmen living in a land where a dinner was shot, not bought. Shaggy, hairy, half-savage men, handling a rifle as a mediaeval Englishman handled a bow, and skilled in every wile of veldt craft, they were as formidable opponents as the world could show.”20

  These were takhaaren, people who seemed strange and wild even to the other Boers. Many of the town Boers had never before encountered them. Schikkerling on seeing them for the first time wrote:

  These people are wretched indeed. Some, I am told, hardly till the soil, subsisting mainly on stamvruchten and other wild fruits, and even eating monkeys. One of them had sold his daughter for two oxen to a man who did not seem quite white. (I saw her, and I certainly think she was worth three.) They are ignorant and unschooled in civilized ways, having been reared in the wilderness in a chronic state of withering poverty.21

  Boer tactics remained basically unchanged, but occasionally ingenious leaders could startle the British with something new, as Brigadier General H. G. Dixon discovered three days after setting out from Naauwpoort on 26 May 1901 with 430 mounted men and 800 infantry, seven guns, and a pompom. Most of his mounted men were newly arrived yeomanry who had seen no serious fighting, but the infantry and gunners were veterans. He discovered a cache of ammunition buried on a farm called Elandsfontein and, although it was only one thirty in the afternoon, decided it was too late in the day to start the removal, so he withdrew the bulk of his force to Vlakfontein farm about 2 miles away, leaving as a guard at Elandsfontein a company of Derbys, the yeomanry, and two guns, all under the command of Major Henry Chance, an artillery officer.

  Chance and his guard were attacked suddenly and with exceptional ferocity by one of the most daring of the young Boer generals: twenty-nine-year-old Christoffel Greyling Kemp. The Boers set fire to the veld, taking advantage of a westerly wind that blew the smoke and flames towards Chance’s position. Behind the flames and obscured by the smoke, Kemp boldly advanced with 500 burghers, secure from the fire of the British guns. Chance withdrew 1,200 yards towards Dixon’s camp at Vlakfontein and sent for reinforcements; the fire was gaining on him. Suddenly, through the smoke and flames, looking like blackened, smoking fiends, rode the Boers, firing from the saddle as they bore down on Chance and his men. Nine out of 16 yeomanry officers fell, dead or wounded. The yeomanry recruits fled in terror and were shot down by the dozens as they did so. The gunners, embued with the traditions of their regiment, stuck to their guns; 17 out of 19 fell.

  Kemp turned the captured guns on the British, but Dixon, coming up rapidly to the rescue, led the Derbys and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in a counterattack with the bayonet that drove the Boers from the field.

  After the battle there were many and persistent reports that Kemp’s men had killed British wounded. Conan Doyle said, “There is no question at all about the fact, which is attested by many independent witnesses.... the incident is too well authenticated to be left unrecorded.”22 But Conan Doyle did not document the charge or even cite the witnesses. When all the evidence was sifted it came down to one burgher, a man named Van Zyl, wounded himself and out of his head, who crawled about and shot three wounded soldiers before he could be stopped.

  The most spectacular Boer victory of the guerrilla war was, like Vlakfontein, against newly arrived, unblooded troops, and it took place on 7 March 1902, almost at the end of the war. It was spectacular not in the number of killed and wounded (impressive though this number was in relation to the forces involved) or in the tactics displayed (brilliant though the Boer tactics were) but because it resulted in the capture of Lieutenant General Lord Methuen.

  In his attempt to march to the relief of Kimberley in December 1899 Methuen had behaved arrogantly and stupidly, and his campaign had ended in disaster at Magersfontein. He had been humbled and he knew it; he had been taught a lesson and he was not such a fool as to ignore it. Since then he had worked hard to redeem his tarnished reputation. When Buller and all the other senior officers who had come out with him returned home, Methuen remained, accepting any job given him and doing it willingly, conscientiously, and usually doing it well. He was the senior officer in the country, senior even to Kitchener, but he served without complaint under younger and junior generals. There were few senior officers in the British army who would have suffered this indignity. At one time his command was reduced to a single column such as would normally have been commanded by a colonel, but he manfully soldiered on—and he fought.

  On 2 March 1902 Methuen, now in charge of the western Transvaal theatre of operations, left Vryburg with four guns and 1,300 men. Only a week earlier disaster had struck one of his principal columns under Colonel Pelham von Donop. De la Rey had scuppered it and in the process had acquired guns, mules, horses, and a half-million rounds of ammunition.

  The column Methuen personally led out of Vryburg consisted mostly of ill-trained and inexperienced troops. Culled from fourteen different units, they were a mixture of yeomanry, mounted police, regulars, and colonials. Only the gunners, 200 Northumberland Fusiliers, and 100 Loyal North Lancashires were seasoned veterans, but Methuen intended to link up with another column of 1,500 men under Colonel Grenfell. The country over which he marched was arid, water supply was uncertain, and his oxen were in poor condition, so his rate of march was slow. On 6 March a small Boer commando followed the column
and skirmished with the rear guard, made up of the 86th Yeomanry and some colonials. At one point, when the Boers pressed forward with some vigour, the colonial officers lost their heads and the men panicked. A few shells dispersed the Boers, but Methuen had personally to restore order among his shaky men. It was an ominous sign.

  When Methuen camped for the night at a place called Tweebosch his intelligence officer reported that the small commando with which they had skirmished that day had linked up with a large force under De la Rey, but he could not say where it was, nor had he discovered the location of Grenfell’s column. De la Rey, on the other hand, knew exactly where Methuen was, and undoubtedly he knew the composition and quality of his column; taking 1,100 picked men, he set out to get him. Methuen the hunter was now the hunted.

  Early on the morning of the next day Methuen’s column lumbered off northward. It did not get far. At five o’clock, just after daybreak, in the angle formed by the Little Hart’s and Great rivers, De la Rey’s skirmishers began to harass Methuen’s rear guard. An hour later De la Rey’s horsemen were also on the column’s right flank. Next De la Rey threw out three successive lines of skirmishers on the left rear of the column; then he brought up a fourth line of horsemen who passed through their own skirmishers at a gallop and, firing from the saddle, charged home. The yeomanry and colonials panicked and fled. A section (two guns) of the 38th Battery remained, but there was not a rifle to protect them. They fought to the end. Lieutenant Cuthbert Nesham, in charge of the section, was the last survivor. He refused to surrender and was shot down. Methuen and the regular officers tried in vain to halt the flight of the colonials and yeomanry, but it was a “battle of the spurs” and many did not stop until their horses were blown. Methuen gathered together his infantry regulars and the remaining two guns for a hopeless last stand.

  A lance corporal of the Northumberland Fusiliers described the scene where Methuen stood:

  It was a dreadful sight around the guns, just like a slaughter-house. I have never seen men work so hard in my life. They kept on firing the guns under the heaviest fire that I have ever been under, never seeming to heed their dead comrades or horses, because a similar fate awaited them. The last gunner, finding himself alone, was just leaving when he was shot through the head. Lord Methuen did not quit the guns until then. He came over to us and stood about fifteen yards from where I was. Five minutes later he got his first wound—in his right side—and then tried to mount his horse. I do not know what he was going to do, but his horse was shot in the leg, and he had to get off. A few moments later he got his second wound—in the thigh—and lay down as if nothing had happened. His horse was shot dead immediately afterwards, falling on him and breaking his leg. The doctor went to him to dress his wounds, but, before he had half finished he was shot, too, and our General had to lie there till he surrendered.23

  It was quickly over. The British lost 4 officers and 64 men killed, 10 officers and 111 men wounded, and about 600 were captured. De la Rey acquired another four guns.

  No one could know that this was to be the Boers’ last victory. At British army headquarters it was thought that it might be the first of many, marking a turning point in the war. Ian Hamilton wrote: “I can’t tell exactly how folk felt about all this in England. At Pretoria I do know that it really almost seemed as if everything might crash back into chaos. In fact, the whole issue of the war seemed now to hinge on the Western Transvaal.”24 When Kitchener heard the news he took to his bed for thirty-six hours; his nerves, he confided to his aide-de-camp, Captain Francis Maxwell, had “gone to pieces.”

  Methuen was the highest-ranking officer the Boers ever captured: a lietuenant general and a real lord besides; he was indeed a prize. His cattle killing and farm burning had made him a much hated man, although the policy which dictated his actions was not of his making. He had even burned down De la Rey’s own farm. And it was in a fight with Methuen that De la Rey’s son had been mortally wounded. The British had shot Gideon Scheepers and other Boer officers—why should they not shoot Methuen? Such was the temper of De la Rey’s men. At the thanksgiving service held after the battle the predikant took as his text that “it would be displeasing to the Lord did we allow such a man who had dealt so cruelly with women and children to go untried.” But De la Rey had his own ideas of what would be displeasing to the Lord, and he did not think that God was as bloody-minded as his predikant. He determined to send Methuen to the nearest British hospital. His men almost mutinied when they heard this decision, but De la Rey was adamant: Methuen was sent with a British doctor under a flag of truce into Klerksdorp along with a personal message of sympathy from De la Rey to be forwarded to Lady Methuen.

  Almost from the moment that Roberts began his invasion of the Orange Free State there were women who fled from their homes, preferring a life on the veld to living under the rule of the British. They wandered about from place to place with their ox wagons, some chickens perhaps, a few cows, living as best they could, often with their daughters and small sons. Sometimes they attached themselves to commandos, but they were not really welcome; they were an encumbrance to the fighting burghers.

  There were many of these wandering groups, and scattered over the veld there eventually came to be women’s laagers. It was a hard life indeed for most of the women. For them, as for the men, clothing was scarce, and they made frocks out of captured British blankets when they could get them. De la Rey’s wife, who spent eighteen months on the veld with six of her children and three Bantu servants, made dresses for her daughters from captured Union Jacks. Steyn received a report on conditions in some of the women’s laagers: “The women and children, suffering almost every one from malaria, fever and other diseases in consequence of privations and bad food, without physicians, without medicines, without any consolation in this world, almost without any clothes, and after hostile raids, without any food at all.”25

  With the beginning of the wholesale farm burning such women’s laagers became more and more numerous until the British decided to sweep up the women and their children and put them in concentration camps.

  40

  THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND EMILY HOBHOUSE

  War is many things. Above all else it is a tragedy. How does one measure the depth of a tragedy such as war? How, in human terms, does one count the cost? One way is to count the killed; another is to assess the consequences of the calamity for future generations. By any such measurements the saddest statistic of the war in South Africa is not the number of homesteads burned or even the number of burghers and soldiers killed in the fighting, but the death toll of the women and children.

  More Boer boys and girls under the age of sixteen died in British concentration camps than all the fighting men killed by bullets and shells on both sides in the course of the entire war.

  The exact number of Boer children who died in the camps is unknown; the most conservative estimate puts the figure at 16,000, but the actual number was probably closer to 20,000—and most of these died within one twelve-month period. This does not include the unknown and unestimated number of Bantu and Coloured children who also died in great numbers.

  On a month-by-month basis, the death rate among the Boer women, children, and men in the camps ranged from a low of 20 per thousand to a high in October 1901 of 344 per thousand. As a basis of comparison, the average death rate in England at this time was 19 per thousand and today is less than 11 per thousand. The average death rate of the children in the camps was about 300 per thousand.

  How could such a disaster occur?

  Soldiers and fighting burghers alike would have had to agree that in their efforts to kill each other the women, the children, the old men, and the helpless got in their way. The fighting burghers were unable both to fight and to care for their families; the British, by their farm burning, livestock slaughtering, and destruction of crops, made it increasingly difficult for the families to care for themselves. There were, too, the burghers who had laid down their arms and who wanted on
ly to live in peace but were made homeless by their fellow countrymen whose threats and depredations drove them to seek British protection.

  The first indication that the British would have to do something for these people was found in a dispatch by Roberts dated 3 September 1900 in which he mentioned that ten men with women, children, cattle, and wagons had come into the British camp at Eerst Fabricken seeking protection. On 22 September Major General J. G. Maxwell, military governor of the Transvaal, announced that “camps for burghers who voluntarily surrender are being formed in Pretoria and Bloemfontein.” Thus these first “burgher camps” or “refugee camps” were indeed simply that: places where the peaceful burghers and their families could come in and be guarded by British bayonets.

  The next step came when Kitchener sent out a memorandum to all general officers (21 December 1900) pointing out the advantages of bringing into the camps “all men, women and children and natives from the Districts which the enemy’s bands persistently occupy.” This, he said, would be “the most effective method of limiting the endurance of the Guerillas.... Moreover, seeing the unprotected state of women now living in the Districts, this course is desirable to ensure their not being insulted or molested by natives.” This same order pointed out that there would be two classes of inmates in the camps: the first, who would be entitled to preference in accommodation and food, were the families of “neutrals, non-combatants, and surrendered burghers”; the second would be “those whose husbands, fathers and sons are on commando.” Thus the nature of the camps changed; henceforth they were to hold the willing and the unwilling, the pro-British, the neutrals, and the defiant. The Boers too saw themselves as a people divided into the “joiners” or “hands-uppers” (hensoppers) and the bitter-enders (bittereinders). There was to be much friction in the camps between these two elements. So much animosity was shown towards the families of National Scouts that special camps had to be established for them.