The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  The great majority of the 700,000-odd Africans, of course, did not live in locations and work in the mines. They lived in the kraals dotted the length and breadth of the country, and supplied the Boers with all the menial labour for cattle ranches and other farms. It was in these farms that the third cornerstone of Kruger’s state was pre-eminently found: the indomitable vrouw, the Boer housewife. If the Boer commandos had a secret weapon in the shape of the spade, the nation as a whole had a secret weapon in the shape of the cradle. Demographers rubbed their eyes when they tried to measure the Transvaal birth rate. That tidal wave of Uitlanders, the gold rush itself, had failed to offset the simple, dogged, philoprogenitive persistence of the backveld Boer.37 No one knew even roughly how the score stood. The number of potential voters among the Uitlanders must have outnumbered the Boer menfolk before the exodus in 1899. Without a doubt, the volk were now in the majority. The dedication of the Boer vrouw was epitomized by Kruger’s own family. In 1900 he had one hundred and fifty-six surviving children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.38

  Of course, the vrouw did more than rock the cradle. She ran the house, she worked on the farm; Kruger’s wife still milked the cows in the farmyard behind the President’s house in Pretoria.39 Already the stress of wartime had entrusted to the Boer wives a mass of tasks previously done by men. They were overseeing the farms, bossing the African labourers as they sowed the millet that spring, and herded the cattle.40 They supplied regular food hampers for their sons and husbands fighting at the front. Pretoria was full of women that Christmas: lining the streets at the State funeral and crowding the covered wagons into Church Square for the Nachtmaal (communion) celebrations.41

  The Uitlander, the African and the vrouw. It was the third of these that was the unshakable foundation of Kruger’s state. In the last resort, if the war of attrition became a guerrilla war, the Uitlanders would be of no help, and the Africans might be a liability. On the vrouw everything would depend, as it had depended before the Transvaal had become an industrial state.

  But guerrilla war was still far from Kruger’s thoughts. He still hankered after some offensive stroke. On New Year’s day he sent a telegram to Joubert (back for a time from his sick bed), repeating his proposals. This time he was rewarded. The krijgsraad agreed to resume the offensive on 6 January. A combined force of four thousand burghers would storm the Platrand at Ladysmith (known to the British as Wagon Hill and Caesar’s Camp). It was the flat-topped ridge that commanded the town from the south.

  Botha (who was to keep Buller occupied, meanwhile, at the Tugela) was delighted with the plan. ‘Now’s the time,’ he telegraphed Kruger, ‘now, above all, before the English are reinforced, in numbers and morale, by the coming of Robert., and Kitchener.’42

  CHAPTER 23

  ‘Are We Rotters or Heroes?’

  Ladysmith,

  2 November 1899 – 6 January 1900

  ‘When I come home I shall want to sleep in my clothes out on a path in the garden in a blanket. If it isn’t raining I should like someone to pour a watering pot over me every now and then. And the gardener [to] come out and shoot every hour or so in the night….‘

  Major Robert Bowen, 60th Rifles, to his wife, shortly before he was killed on 6 January 1900

  Six weeks earlier, Gunner Netley, of the 13th Battery, began his diary of the siege of Ladysmith, jauntily written in violet pencil in the leaves of the exercise book he kept in his haversack:

  Thur 2nd Nov:… the siege has started. The Boers opened fire with their artillery into the town, but luckily they did no harm….

  Sat Nov 4th: Enemy reported marching towards the town, and the troops go to meet them and we can hear firing towards Action [Acton] Holmes. The 69[th] Battery fired into the Boer camp, while they were in at Breakfast, and of corse they received a little more of our cough medicine

  Sun Nov 5th: All is quiet around but we are keeping a keen eye on anything moving.

  Thur Nov 9th: Stood to arms till daybreak, at 5.20 am the Boers opened fire on us from heavy artillery all around us, shelling the camp and Town, firing verry fast all the while. At 7.30 am the Boers attacked King’s hill in force; but met with a warm reception, being repulsed three times with loss, then they attacked Ceazers [Caesar’s] Hill and met with the same result…. The Naval Brigade fired a Royal salute [for the Prince of Wales’ Birthday] with live shell…. Boers losses are estimated at 850 killed and wounded… our losses are 6 horses and one mule, after having 300 Boers shell fired at you….

  Sat Nov 11th: A fiew rounds from long Tom which was responded to by our boys in blue [the Naval Brigade], and they soon quietened them.

  Sun Nov 12th: Stoot [sic] to arms, and church parade.

  Mon Nov 13th: Boers bid us good morning with long Tom….

  Tues Nov 14th: As usual at daybreak the enemy opened a slow artillery fire … this continued until night when they fired off all their guns, as a transformation scene or grand Finale. Expecting reinforcements from Colenso.

  Wed Nov 15th: A fiew shells this morning but it is raining, and so there is ‘not mutch ado about Nothing,’ as Shakespeare says; no news of reinforcements yet arrives….

  Sat Nov 18th: Stood to arms as usual till daybreak Johny Dutchman is still wasting his ammunition.

  Sun Nov 19th: Stood to arms but all was quiet… church parade….

  Mon Nov 20th [Boers’] capture of an armoured train [at Frere] … with an escort of mounted Infantry who made good their escape….

  Tues Nov 21st: They are firing an odd shot or two from Gun Hill at us, but we want an extra strong pair of glasses to find out what damage they are doing….

  Nov 22nd: A thunderstorm broke out during the morning and the enemy kept it company by putting a few shell down at us….

  Nov 23rd: Two privates of the Gloucesters died of enteric, were buried today….

  Nov 24th: One shell dropped clean in the midst of D Coy of the Liverpools killing one man and wounding 9 others….

  Nov 25th: Up and about early building a shelter from old railway sleepers and stones….

  Nov 28th: All verry quiet at daybreak relief column reported from P[ieter] M[aritz] Berg have met a strong force of the enemy and repulsed them….

  Nov 29th:… the Boers Artillery are verry quiet this morning so we are doing ditto…. Another big fight reported near Colenso. Boers were again driven back. Losses of the Boers were estimated at 1400 killed and wounded and 300 prisoners….

  Dec. 1st: The Boers bid us good morning as usual, with a few shots, but nothing out of the ordinary occured….

  Dec 2nd: At it again with old Long Tom.

  Sun Dec 3rd: All quiet – church parade. Cricket match.

  Mon Dec 4th: Our old friend Long Tom saluted us as usual News reached us about Gen. Gatacre defeating the Boers three times. About 8,000 strong the enemy were. Our own relief column drove the enemy north of the Tugela….

  Thur Dec 7th: Long Tom spoke to us again whith the same old Talk….

  Sun Dec 10th: Boers opened fire with long Tom number 2 from Umbulwana, Church parade as usual….

  Sat Dec 16th: Reported that a big fight occured yesterday between Ladysmith and Colensoe. Usual Boer Long Tom fired but damage was nil. Gen. Gatacre had a complete victory with yesterday’s fight… [the disaster at Stormberg].

  Sun Dec 17th: All quiet Church parade.

  Mon Dec 18th: Stood to arms at 2.30 am till 7.30 am and are ready for an attack but no such luck.1

  ‘No such luck.’ Gunner Netley talked as though a second attack by the enemy would have been welcomed by the garrison as a diversion from the monotony of the siege. In fact, that first attack – on 9 November, when they stormed King’s Post to the north, and Caesar’s Camp to the south – had been beaten off with ease, though not without losses.

  He was an extraordinary fellow, Gunner Netley. His boots were worn out, his clothes in tatters; he had been living for six weeks in a hole in the ground. He had to confess, years later, that the siege of Ladysmith
was actually the worst ordeal of his life.2 Yet he wrote in his diary of church parades, cricket matches, and his old friend Long Tom, making it all sound so homely and civilized. The truth was a great deal more complicated – and demoralizing.

  Disappointment and humiliation. If Black Week sent a shudder through most patriotic Englishmen in England, how much sharper the pain for the garrison of 13,745 white soldiers and 5,400 civilians (including 2,400 African servants and Indian camp-followers)3 who had spent the last six weeks waiting for Buller to unlock the door of their prison.

  The shattering blow, which Gunner Netley did not even refer to in passing, was the news that the relief was postponed. For six weeks the soldiers had expected relief as soon as the Army Corps arrived.4 Now, on 17 December, a small, bleak Natal Field Force order was posted up on battalion notice-boards. Buller had ‘failed in his first attempt at Colenso’.5 Relief was postponed for weeks – until after Christmas, at least.

  For three days, the garrison had heard Buller blazing away at Colenso, the rumble of his guns echoing across the yellow, thorn-covered rim of hills that cut short the view from Ladysmith southwards to the Tugela. From the sound, Buller seemed to be doing great things. All through that boiling hot Friday, the day of the battle, people sat in their dugouts and dogholes, carved out of the sticky black clay of the town gardens or straddling the red rocks of the fourteen-mile perimeter. There was nothing to do but wait for the news.6

  On Saturday evening, it had come: the story that Buller had won a great victory. ‘Killed and wounded three thousand Boers.’7 Now, with the Sunday lunch of ‘T.O.’ (trek-ox) and hard biscuits, the hard truth. The Ladysmith Press Corps – nearly a dozen war correspondents from British and colonial papers – were given the unusual privilege of a Press briefing from White’s Intelligence Officer, Major Altham. He showed them the Natal Field Force order. The General ‘regretted’ Buller’s reverse, and expected the garrison would continue to display the ‘Ladysmith spirit’ as before. Further details were refused the Press Corps. They were allowed to send thirty-word censored heliograms to the outside world. They were also told it was their duty to ‘keep the town cheerful’.8 It was a duty they had done their best to perform, in the last six weeks of the siege, by producing a siege newspaper, the Ladysmith Lyre (‘Liar’), lampooning both Oom Paul and White’s HQ staff.9

  The HQ staff actually knew little more of Buller’s situation than they told the Press Corps. Communication was fitful. There were Africans brave enough to risk being shot by running the gauntlet of the Boer lines; the heliograph at Weenen flashed when the sun shone; when it was dark, the searchlights at Frere wrote ghostly messages on the clouds. Yet three days after Colenso, the HQ staff still had no idea of the seriousness of Buller’s casualties at the battle.10 They received Buller’s gloomy telegrams on the 16th and 17th without realizing the reason for his gloom. Hence, an outburst from even a most level-headed man like Colonel Rawlinson, the Assistant Adjutant-General. The staff mistakenly thought Buller had funked the attempt to break through at Colenso, and was urging them to surrender, in order to avoid having to fight himself.11

  One can understand their feelings. At the root of their bitterness towards Buller was an overwhelming sense of humiliation. Goodness knows, as Rawlinson put it, they had done little enough to help themselves. The most humiliating fact was this, kept secret by the HQ staff: with the departure of Botha’s force, the Boers at Ladysmith were actually outnumbered by the men they besieged – perhaps by more than two to one.12

  Among the ordinary regimental officers, the news of Buller’s reverse set the upper lips quivering. ‘Everybody down Everybody’s spirits at zero,’ said Captain Steavenson, the Adjutant of the Liverpools.13 ‘Buller’s got the knock,’ wrote Captain John Gough, of the Rifle Brigade. ‘It is too awful for words…. 12 guns lost … how it happened we have no idea.’ There was bitterness, but directed more at the HQ staff than at Buller. ‘What annoys me most of all,’ said Gough, ‘is to see the staff officers come up most beautifully dressed, polished boots, white collars etc and then to hear them buck at their hardships.’14 ‘We on our side,’ said Surgeon-Captain Holt, ‘are stuffed full of red-tabbed staff officers and the Boers are just ordinary dirty-looking farmers… and yet they can match us…. Everybody abuses the staff from top to bottom.’15

  As Christmas approached – plum pudding in the trenches for regimental officers wearing muddy boots and drinking muddy water; a six-course meal for the gilded staff at Convent Ridge16 – the ‘Ladysmith spirit’ was wearing dangerously thin.

  They had been forced in on themselves, these British officers, just as they had been forced inwards to the auburn rock and clay of Ladysmith. It was a ‘civilized war’: a war of the Red Cross and the other chivalries of the Geneva Convention. And it was proving a great education. ‘The longer the siege goes on,’ wrote John Gough, ‘the more I wonder where is the fun and glory of soldiering.’17 Of course, he was not joking. There had been fun and glory for British officers in those ‘savage wars’. Now they had to look their profession in the face, and they did not like what they saw.

  A siege is a war in microcosm, expressed in heightened, theatrical form. Boredom, discomfort, anxiety, funk, bravery, hope, humiliation – above all, discomfort and boredom. These were the fluctuating rhythms of the siege of Ladysmith – as they are, of course, of most real wars. The town itself was encircled by Boer artillery. Here they were squeezed between the ‘iron fingers’ of Joubert’s army, said George Steevens, jauntiest of the war correspondents.18 And the defenders had not only to keep control of the town. They had to fight a war of attrition, supported by little polo, cricket or champagne, against their own emotions.

  From the first day of the siege, humiliation had proved the moral keynote. ‘Rotten show… the whole thing is a disgrace,’ said Surgeon-Captain Holt after Mournful Monday. ‘Awful show … too awful for words, a disgrace which it will take some time to get over,’ said Captain Gough.19 Boredom was equally corrosive. ‘Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing,’ wrote George Steevens in a despatch for The Daily Mail. ‘At first, to be besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is nothing but a weary, weary, weary bore. We do nothing but eat and drink and sleep – just exist dismally.’ ‘During morning, languid shelling. Afternoon raining – Ladysmith wallowing deeper than ever Relieve us, in Heaven’s name, good countrymen, or we die of dullness!’

  Most of the war correspondents were billeted in pleasant brick houses on the outskirts of the town, and suffered no casualties in the bombardment. Though poor Steevens did not die of dullness. He died, soon after Christmas, of typhoid.20 To the soldiers who lived in dog-holes along the perimeter, or camped in the open plain, the shelling was ‘awfully trying’.21 No doubt it gave the ordinary soldiers some amusement to watch the officers throw themselves flat on their faces when shelling began.

  In exposed sectors, a look-out was posted to give warning. Everyone came to know the routine. A cloud of white smoke from ‘Bulwana Tom’ or ‘Puffing Billy’; they fired black powder, as opposed to the smokeless shells of the howitzers, ‘Silent Susan’ and ‘Weary Willy’. The look-out blows his bugle or bangs his gong.22

  Thirty seconds to take cover. Up on Cove Redoubt the ‘Lady Anne’ — the 4.7-inch gun of the Naval Brigade and one of the only two guns with the range to answer the Boers – fires a round back at ‘Bulwana Tom’. Twenty seconds to take cover. Terrified Africans running across the open veld. Now the plain is deserted. The civilians cling to their own bomb shelters. Five seconds more. The return shot from Lady Anne, fired with higher velocity, sends up a plume of debris close to Bulwana Tom’s huge sandbagged emplacement five miles away. Then, with a scream and a crash, Tom arrives. The 94-pound shell bursts in a shower of steel shell fragments that hum through the air, like birds, for seconds after the explosion.23 How absurd! No casualties. Or perhaps it is not so absurd, and somebody is lying dead, with his head blown off or his legs smashed.24


  The garrison were disconcerted to find that the Boers refused to conform in their gunnery, as in so many military matters, to any recognizable rules. At first, there was an understanding that the Sabbath would be a day of rest for both sides: church parades and bathing parades for the British, hymn-singing for the Boers.25 But at dawn on Sunday, 12 November, the Boers started their bombardment, and henceforth there was no time of day or night when the garrison could feel safe.26 Even on Christmas Day, Long Tom gave a display of mixed feelings. He fired numerous shells, one of which, when dug up unexploded, proved to contain a Christmas pudding wrapped in a Union Jack, and a note: ‘The compliments of the season.’27 It was this uncertainty how to react to the shelling – whether to treat it seriously or take it as a joke – that added to the strain and humiliation of the experience.

  There were days, like 24 November, when Long Tom did not play the fool by any means. That evening, shortly after 6.00 p.m., two shells plumped into D Company of the Liverpools. The men were as ‘thick as peas’ on the hill, said Captain Steavenson. Everyone had thought the day’s bombardment over. But shrapnel rattled down on the tin roof of the officers’ mess and, when it was over, nine men, of whom five were dead or mortally wounded, lay smashed on the hillside.28

  Friday, 22 December, was a still blacker day for the Gloucesters. They had failed to appoint a look-out, and about seven in the morning Long Tom, who had been bombarding the town, turned his attention to the stone shelters of F Company. Lieutenant Hickie saw the explosion and ran forward. He was met by a fearful sight: ‘Outside the shelter lay a heap of our men dead or dying – a mangled mass.’ One single shell, exploding in that cramped space, had killed eight men and wounded a further nine. After that, the Gloucesters, too, appointed a man with a telescope to watch Long Tom.29 Most demoralizing of all, there was a direct hit on the Town Hall on 30 November, and ten patients and doctors in the 18th Field Hospital, which was quartered there, were killed or wounded.30