by Jan Morris
8
For the saddest Boer humiliation of the war we must make our way along dusty veld tracks, through low hills prickly with thorn, to the infinitesimal hamlet of Paardeberg, on the Modder River in the Orange Free State. There, at the climax of Lord Roberts’s campaign, the main Boer army, with all its wagons, animals, women and children, was surrounded in its laager in the river-bed. It was February, 1900, the height of the South African summer. The weather was hot and heavy, with thunderstorms now and then, and black clouds piled often over the southern horizon. As usual, the Boers lay there very low. To the British, drawn up north and south of the river, nothing showed in the open veld but the snaking course of the river itself, tangled with shrubbery, and the smoke of the Boer encampment buried in its green ravine. Within the laager, though, General Piet Cronje’s army was tensely concentrated. It was the very epitome of the last-ditch stand, down there in the airless river-bed. It was an allegory of Boerness.
On the crest of the river-banks the commando marksmen were entrenched, with clear fields of fire up the gently rising scrubland to the open veld. Behind them in the shaly gorge all the paraphernalia of the army was jammed this way and that—wagons tilted on the shingle, piles of ammunition boxes in the muddy lee of the banks, gun-litters and field kitchens, hospital tents, horses tethered restless among the trees, twitching their tails against the flies. Rough shelters had been scooped out in the bluffs, and there the women in their poke bonnets, the children in their grubby prints and frayed trousers, sheltered behind awnings of old canvas. The men lived and slept in their wagons, or in bivouacs at the river’s edge, or at their guns. Their laager was two miles long, like a trench-grave in the veld.
For ten days the Royal Artillery tried to blast the Boers out of this place. The river-bed was thick with cordite fumes, rubble, wrecked wagons, the smoke of burning wood, the stink of dead horseflesh, and sometimes the Boers could see, in the patch of sky between the trees, the round red shape of an observation balloon, like death’s scrutiny. Several times the British attacked frontally across the veld, to be beaten back with fearful losses, and the women crouching in their dug-outs could hear the rifle-fire almost above their heads. All hope of relief was lost, but Cronje, a huge, tragic, shambling figure of a man, declined offers of safe conduct for his non-combatants and refused all calls to surrender—‘During my life-time I will never surrender. Dixi.’ Instead day by day the Boers fought back sullenly and despairingly, weaker each hour, shorter of food, shorter of sleep, disillusioned in their river-bed.
Paardeberg was the greatest single reverse in the history of Boer arms. When the spirit broke at last, and on February 27 Cronje, in his wide hat and shabby green frock-coat, climbed out of the ravine to surrender to Lord Roberts, he did not reply to the victor’s courteous greeting—‘You have made a gallant defence, sir’: and when his 4,000 ragged and half-starved burghers filed into captivity with their wives and children, carrying blankets and bundles of possessions, some with umbrellas, they looked less like an army than a band of dispossessed peasants, and the British soldiers watched them go with mingled pity and amusement. It was Majuba Day, the proudest day in the Boer calendar; when Cronje himself rode away to prison camp, he travelled stormy-faced and erect in a Cape cart, Mrs Cronje implacable at his side.1
9
‘Say, colonel,’ inquired an American observer, watching a British battalion prepare yet another frontal assault upon yet another impregnable hill, ‘isn’t there a way round?’ The story of the Boer War is full of such sudden pungencies. It was not war on the gargantuan twentieth-century scale, huge conscript armies pursuing inconceivable objectives. It was war recognizably between people, fighting for targets all could see, commanded by generals everyone knew, animated by public emotions. ‘It is our country you want!’ Kruger once cried to a visiting Englishman, tears falling down his cheeks. ‘I thank God,’ General Sir George White told his soldiers, when Ladysmith was relieved at last, ‘I thank God we have kept the flag flying.’
It was war in the open, self-explanatory. Here, for instance, in the miserable last stages of the conflict, we see through the eyes of a young Boer soldier a scene somewhere in the northern Cape, where a ragged and emaciated commando is desperately trying to evade the British net. In terrible weather the Boers are riding deeper and deeper into Cape Colony, in the hope of getting help from the Cape Dutch, but by now they are almost beaten, hungry, wearing rags and home-made sandals, driving their bony horses in endless night marches across enemy territory. On a stormy night in September they reach a railway line, and as they do so a train approaches. Shivering with cold and wet, the Boers throw themselves on the ground as it thunders by: and out of the blustery darkness, through the rain, they catch a glimpse in lighted windows of clean and well-dressed British officers, laughing over their dinners in the restaurant car. In a moment it is past, leaving only the smell of its steam and the rattle of its wheels on the lines: and so the Boers, rousing their horses, wrap their rags around them and cross the railway track into the night.
Or here a British medical officer waits at night for the ambulance wagons to reach his hospital, No 4 Stationary Field Hospital, out of the Tugela battlefields. Two white lanterns have been hung from a flagstaff outside the hospital tents, to guide the drivers, and one by one the ungainly hooded wagons, each drawn by four horses, lurch and sway out of the darkness with their loads of maimed and dying. Usually they come silently out of the veld, but once the doctor hears, as a wagon waits outside the lines for the stretcher-bearers to unload it, a repeated half-conscious cry from a man inside. ‘Can you see the two white lights yet, Bill? Where’s the two white lights? Can you see them yet, Bill? Can you see them white lights? …’
And here, almost at the end of the war, the Boer General Jan Smuts, with his harum-scarum escort of guerillas, meets his chief opponent, General Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, after months of hit-and-run warfare across the immensities of the veld. Smuts and his companions have been brought for negotiations by train from the south, in a journey that has lasted a week—by day cautiously across the veld, for the guerilla war is still being waged, at night with the train’s searchlight constantly sweeping the landscape. At last they reach the little station of Kroonstad, in the Orange Free State, where Kitchener is to meet them. The train draws into the station, and stands hissing at the platform in a sudden silence. The heat is intense. The Boers, thin, tired and sun-blistered, watch expectantly out of their compartment windows.
Presently the British general arrives, just as he arrived in his gunboats off the Fashoda fort. Reddish-brown from sun and long campaigning, expressionless as always, his blue eyes cold above his famous moustache, he rides into the station yard on a black charger. Around him ride, in the stiff English manner, three or four staff officers. Behind are a couple of willowy aides. And as they clatter up the yard the Boers see with astonishment—with admiration too, perhaps, even with a touch of awe—that behind the officers rides a bodyguard of turbanned Pathans from the north-west frontiers of India, crimson-jacketed, with jackboots polished like glass and gold-mounted scimitars at their sides. The grand illusion has arrived once more, at the Kroonstad station yard.
10
It was a war of striking personalities, and in power of character the two armies were well matched. It is the British, however, that we are concerned with, and it may be said that in the Boer War, as in most of their imperial conflicts, they got the leaders they deserved. Grandiose there upon the pinnacle of their power, they were represented in South Africa by an extraordinary gallery of originals, good or bad.
Several of the great stars of Empire were there, of course, all behaving characteristically. Roberts, ‘Our Bobs’, brought with him from England a Union Jack sewn by his dear wife to be hoisted over Pretoria. Kitchener, ‘Old K’, put on weight during the campaign. Rhodes, ‘The Colossus’, nearly came to blows with the British military commander of Kimberley, but was gratified to get a telegram from the Kaiser congratulating
him on its defence. Buller, ‘Sir Reverse’, remained through all his misfortunes the most beloved of the generals—though his soldiers often laughed at him, and nicknamed him the Tugela Ferryman because he led them back and forth across that river so often, still they never let him down. He could, so one of his colonels wrote, ‘by a short unintelligible address send his defeated and diminished army merry and confident back to camp’, and when he was relieved of his command they apostrophized him with a song of consolation:
Cheer up, Buller my lad,
Don’t say die.
You’ve done your best for England,
And England won’t forget.
Cheer up, Buller my lad,
You’re not dead yet.1
There were many soldiers less famous but no less singular. General Sir Charles Warren, for instance, had once been Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, in which post he became famous for failing to catch Jack the Ripper and for issuing his orders in rhyming couplets.2 Colonel ‘Sam’ Steele of Strathcona’s Horse had spent thirty years as an officer of the Canadian Mounted Police, and liked to reminisce in his veld bivouac about Big Bear and the Frog Lake Massacre. General the Earl of Dundonald had been entrusted by his grandfather, Admiral Lord Dundonald, with a Secret Plan for the salvation of the nation in case of extreme emergency, and was constantly troubled by the thought that the moment for its disclosure might have arrived.3 General Sir Henry Colvile was the author of A Ride in Petticoats and Slippers. Colonel Ian Hamilton kept his notes in a French shorthand of his own invention. General Wauchope, who died at Magersfontein, was one of the richest men in Scotland and had been Gladstone’s opponent at Midlothian in the general election of 1892. Lord Rosslyn of the Blues was the original of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
Lords Dunraven, Paget, Lathom, Lovat and Donoughmore all raised private regiments, whose troopers paid their own passage to South Africa, and donated their pay to the Widows and Orphans’ Fund. The ubiquitous Winston Churchill covered the war for the Daily Telegraph, now and then fighting a spirited skirmish on the side, and once escaping with great publicity from a Boer prison camp (‘He’s a fine fellow’, wrote Buller to Lady Londonderry. ‘I wish he were leading regular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper.’) The young Mahatma Gandhi, then living in Natal, was one of the stretcher-bearers who toiled up Spion Kop. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, ran a field hospital. Rudyard Kipling worked on an army newspaper. Edgar Wallace the novelist scooped the world for the Daily Mail with the news of the final peace agreement. Mary Kingsley the great West African explorer died of fever nursing wounded Boers. Even Queen Victoria herself, though she did not visit the battlefields physically, was certainly there in the spirit, and she sent to each of her soldiers, on New Year’s Day, 1900, a tin of chocolate as a souvenir, with her crowned head on the lid, and the message ‘I wish you a Happy New Year.’
11
It was a bitter war, ending more bitterly than it began, but like most wars it was bitterest away from the fighting. There were bigotries on both sides. Passions were crude, abuse was often elementary. Kipling did not hesitate to attack Kruger personally in his famous anathema The Old Issue—
Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old …
The Boers and their supporters, in return, loved to represent Queen Victoria as a bloated, bug-eyed and probably dissolute old harridan, while both sides were assiduous in spreading atrocity stories about each other, generally untrue and often wildly unconvincing.
It was the first of the propaganda wars. Every incident in the field, flashed across the world by the electric telegraph, was magnified or distorted to prove a point or support an ideology. The whole world joined in this new excitement: the Boer War was the Algeria or Vietnam of its time. When, in Black Week, the British armies were so disastrously defeated three battles in a row, half the world laughed or cheered at their discomfiture: six months later, when Mafeking was relieved, the other half responded with such hysterical celebrations that the name of the little town went briefly into English usage—‘Mafficking, indulging in extravagant demonstrations of exultation.’
But they Mafficked far more boisterously in Piccadilly than in Mafeking itself, and the Boers celebrated their victories only with thanksgiving to God. In the field a sad and incoherent comradeship often linked the fighting men. British doctors regularly attended the Boer wounded, and British prisoners were generally treated with courtesy. When the Boer General Kroos de la Rey went to war from his home town of Lichtenburg, in the Transvaal, he left instructions that a plot in the town cemetery should be reserved for the honourable burial of British soldiers killed in the war: his orders were obeyed, and when the time came the British dead were reverently laid among their enemies.1
For though the propagandists might argue otherwise, the behaviour of these opponents was often much alike. The Boers were fighting for independence, which they believed to be their sacred right: the British were fighting for an Empire which they thought to represent all that was best in human progress, headed by a Queen who was virtually divine herself. On the Boer side was the sense of ‘Volk’, a sense of earth, livelihood and immediacy. On the British there was a noble brotherhood between officers and men, an uncomplaining acceptance of misery, a touching devotion even to the most incompetent generals—‘if he’s not worth following,’ another British private wrote of the Tugela Ferryman, ‘I don’t know who is.’ Both sides drew a kind of magic from the past. ‘They have taken away our Majuba Day!’ cried President Kruger in anguish when he heard the news of Paardeberg. ‘Now quietly, lads,’ said Colonel ‘Bobby’ Gunning of the King’s Royal Rifles, addressing his NCOs on the eve of battle, ‘remember Majuba, God and our country.’ Time and again we read of chivalries in the field—a wounded enemy given free passage, a parched patrol allowed to water its horses, the exchange of wounded, cheerful repartee by heliograph across the lines. Sober in victory as in defeat, the Boer soldiers never crowed over their enemies, and were frank in their admiration of British qualities. As for the British regulars, they came deeply to respect the best of the Boers, and cherished the very name ‘commando’ to use one day for themselves.
These were Christian armies, fighting each other at the end of the Christian era; Boer and Briton shared a trust in many old truths, and a homely familiarity with the prophets and patriarchs of their creed. In one of the Natal battles a middle-aged British officer, Major Charles Childe-Pemberton of the South African Light Horse, was ordered to lead an assault upon a hill. He was portly and greying, having retired from the Royal Horse Guards some years before, and was a popular racing man, known always by his racecourse nickname, Monsieur L’Enfant, or The Child. Before the battle he confided in his brother-officers that he had a premonition of death, and asked them to see that on his grave was inscribed verse 26, Chapter 4 of the Second Book of Kings. The attack was made; the hill was taken; Major Childe-Pemberton, laughing at his own presentiment, was hit in the head by a scrap of shrapnel, and died on the spot.
They buried him nearby, ‘affectionately and reverently, in his own clothes, just as he was’, and above him they wrote his chosen epitaph: ‘Is it well with the child? It is well.’1
12
The Queen died with her century, the heroic spirit faltered, squalid images of burnt farms and diseased internment camps replaced the splendours of bugle and night march. The struggle degenerated into a messy and generally inglorious manhunt, soured by recriminations and reprisals, executions in the field, arson and broken oaths. Mile after mile the countryside was left scorched and desolate: in the internment camps the unforgiving Boer women, far from the camaraderie of the front line, nursed their dying babies. The Boers thought the British were resorting to genocide, and reproached them for betraying the white man’s code by arming African scouts and sentries. The British accused the Boers of treachery, fighting as they did in civilian clothes, and disregarding many conventi
onal laws of war.
Squat and ugly blockhouses now disfigured the landscape, 8,000 of them, one every 1½ miles through the old Boer republics. Their protruding armoured balconies gave them an ominous mediaeval appearance, and between them thousands of fortified posts divided the country into enormous stockades, into which the commandos were laboriously penned. In one of Kitchener’s drives 9,000 soldiers, 12 yards apart, formed a beaters’ line 54 miles long, moving 20 miles a day, while seven armoured trains patrolled the railway tracks, and another 8,000 men manned the blockhouses all around. Across this hideous chequer-board the fugitive commandos clawed their way. They were like wild animals, Kitchener said, forever running away—‘not like the Sudanese, who stood up to a fair fight’. By the end of 1901 more than sixty British columns were in the field, but more than 20,000 guerillas still eluded them, and away in the east an exiled Government of the Transvaal, setting up its nomadic capital in farms, woods and high valleys, survived to the bitter end. Deep within the Cape Colony, where he got within sixty miles of Cape Town itself, Smuts prayed a favourite prayer of the Griqua tribespeople: ‘Lord come to our help yourself, and not your son for this is no time for children.’
