The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Bloemfontein (rechristened ‘Bobsfontein’) was certainly a pretty place, and so were many of its female inhabitants. The mutual recriminations among the invading force were, for the moment, submerged in a whirl of unaccustomed entertainment.28 To fraternize with the enemy was an essential part of Roberts’s and Milner’s short-term plans for the Free State. The take-over, for both military and political reasons, must be accomplished as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Many Boer officials were therefore left undisturbed at their posts. At the same time, every encouragement was given to English-speaking burghers, like Mr Gordon Fraser, to fill the gaps left by Steyn and the burghers in arms.29 To the Boer population in general, the message was friendship: trust the army to behave like gentlemen; trust the Empire to welcome the newcomers. Hence the parties and banquets, to which Boers were invited, and the band of the Highland Brigade that played every evening in Market Square. And hence a new bilingual daily newspaper, with the heart-warming title of The Friend, started by Roberts, only two days after his triumphal entry, by closing down the anti-British Express.30

  The Friend used the presses of The Express, and was run by British war correspondents in their spare time. The idea was both Milner’s and Roberts’s. They had roped in a dazzling team of patriotic pen-men, including the unofficial laureate of the Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, an old admirer of Roberts’s since India days, arrived at the war front just after St Patrick’s Day. He wrote a stirring poem about the Irish regiments being ordered to wear shamrocks:

  From Bobsfontein to Ballyhack,

  ’Tis ordered by the Queen

  We’ve won our right in open fight,

  The wearing of the Green.31

  In general, Kipling did not add much lustre to his literary reputation. But The Friend, whimsical and heavy-handed as it was, gave a boost to the army’s morale. The Boers, on their part, could only be reassured by its message. The new regime would continue the ‘civilizing’ work of the old. All Africans must carry passes. Twenty-seven African ‘boys’ were found without passes after nine o’clock and were each given five lashes by the Boers’ Native Police, who were complimented by the British for ‘their good work’.32

  As well as giving his army a new voice, Roberts gave them, or began to give them, what they needed even more urgently: new boots and new uniforms.33 They had marched into Bloemfontein half-naked, with their feet showing through the sides of their boots. The Commander of the 9th Division, Sir Henry Colvile, drily observed, ‘Some of the men’s nakedness would have been less striking if they had taken off their rags altogether.’34 Step by step, garment by garment, the army returned to decency. And to meet women and girls again seemed almost like a dream. ‘I shall never forget the extraordinary impression,’ wrote Lieutenant Rankin, of Rimington’s Tigers, ‘after weeks spent in exclusively male society, and amid all the horrors and blasphemies and filthiness of constant fighting, by the sight of three pretty little girls in sun-bonnets and spotless muslin frocks giving cigarettes to the soldiers.’35 Still more delightful was the young, flirtatious Lady Edward Cecil, invited by Roberts to visit the front at the end of March, when she inspected the Guards. What ‘great big men’, she commented.36

  Apart from such heady thrills, the ordinary soldiers took time off to write letters back to England in reply to those thousands of letters from home that littered the veld at every camp site.37 It was the first dramatic test of the new mass literacy, this orgy of letter-writing by the working class. The men whose grandfathers in the Crimea, and great-great-grandfathers in the Peninsula, had relied on the officers and war correspondents to keep the world informed, now had the means to give their own versions of their experiences. ‘Thank God I am still in the land of the living but I have been very very lucky, my word.’ ‘I write these few lines to you hoping to find you at home and in good Health and enjoying yourself….’ ‘If you see anyone that knows me, please give them my kind regards….’ ‘I am afraid there will be another fight… but buck up we will pull through allright…’ ‘Dear old chum … remember me to your Mam and Dad and Bert and Wal, I beg to close hoping it will find you quite well, believe me to remain your Old Friend…’38 The soldiers’ mail poured out a stream of reassurance. On the realities of war – the horrors, the blasphemies, the filthiness – these letters were silent.39

  Roberts, too, sent a reassuring and somewhat stilted letter back home – to the Queen. It was weeks since he had had the opportunity.40 How dramatically the pattern of the war had changed since then! The relief of Kimberley, the capture of Cronje, the relief of Ladysmith, the capture of Bloemfontein – all accomplished within a month. No wonder Roberts enjoyed the respite at Bloemfontein, though impatient to resupply the army and be off. The South African autumn he found ‘perfection’:41 in those shady gardens, the sun became a friend once more. Every morning ‘the little man’,42 as people called the Chief, attended a service in the Anglican Cathedral, the red-brick, neo-Gothic pile in which Milner had heard that sermon, the previous June, ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’. Now the cathedral was full of burly, young, khaki-clad soldiers, their faces burnt raw by the sun, and the cheerful red and blue uniforms of the nursing sisters. The Chief sat in the front pew, below the pulpit, a frail, white-haired figure, with the black arm-band, alone.43

  To Queen Victoria, Roberts first expressed his gratitude for her congratulations: ‘It is a great satisfaction to me… to learn that the operations in which we have been engaged have met with the approval of your Majesty….’ He continued: ‘It is impossible for me to describe to your Majesty how admirably the troops have behaved … want of transport prevented tents being carried… officers and men had frequently to bivouac under a drenching rain, and more than once they had to be satisfied with half rations…. But nothing damped their spirits…. Your Majesty’s soldiers are indeed grand fellows.’44

  Roberts was not given to boasting. He prided himself on the level-headed way he looked fortune in the face. But now, with the astonishingly sudden collapse of the Boer armies, and the singing of ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ in Bloemfontein, he made the great miscalculation:

  The Orange Free State south of this [he forecast to the Queen] is rapidly settling down. The proclamations [of an amnesty] I have issued are having the desired effect, and men are daily laying down their arms and returning to their usual occupations. It seems unlikely that this State will give much more trouble. The Transvaalers will probably hold out, but their numbers must be greatly reduced, and I trust it will not be very long before the war will have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

  We are obliged to rest here for a short time to let men and animals recover, and provide the former with new boots and clothes.45

  ‘Not very long’ till the end of the war. To rest ‘for a short time’. Together, both these crucial strategic estimates – of Boer weakness and British strength – were to prove disastrously optimistic. The first was based on a fundamental misconception about the Boers; the second compounded the error. Roberts was no fool – and no genius. He was a highly successful imperial general, with the tactical and diplomatic skill, and the limitations, born of forty years’ peace and war in India. He had no insight into South Africa, knew nothing of the complexity of colonialism, nothing of the tenacity of Afrikaner nationalism, and the extraordinary resilience of the Boer – hunter and hunted, fighting animal and political animal.46

  Significantly, it was Buller, who had served side by side with Boers in the final Zulu War, who accurately predicted the peculiar difficulty of a war against them. It would be a ‘civilized’ war, meaning a war according to the rules of the Geneva Convention; but in an ‘uncivilized country’, meaning a country with few railways and other man-made assets, which themselves could easily be laid waste. It would also be a ‘national war’ – that is, a trial of strength not merely between governments, but between peoples and nations. It would be war against a young nation composed of communities scattered across an enormous territory.

  In
this type of pioneering, colonial society, there was no highly organized machinery of administration, and the central government carried little influence or authority. ‘Time has not yet glorified the seat of Government with a halo of sentiment,’ wrote Buller. ‘To every man his own home is the capital. Hence there is no commanding centre by the occupation of which the whole country or even a whole district can be brought into subjection; no vital spot at which a single blow can be struck that will paralyse every member of the body. There are living organisms which can be divided into a multitude of fragments without destroying the individual life of each fragment.’47

  These were the lessons that Buller drew both from history and his personal insights. He predicted that the set-piece war would change into a fragmentary war. He believed that military strategy based on the conventional idea of the ‘single blow’ would not bring much closer the conquest of the Boers. He compared the present task with the one set Generals Howe, Clinton and Cornwallis in the American War of Independence. It was no good capturing capitals, as they had captured New York, Philadelphia and Charlestown, unless they could subdue the territory between. As soon as the enemy re-emerged, the population would revert to its earlier allegiance – understandably, unless they could be protected against intimidation. The real task was to beat ‘every armed man in the field’. Otherwise, to march through an enemy’s country would be like trying to arrest the flow of a river by walking through it. ‘Such a man may indeed stem its force where he stands, but let him move where he will, the waters always close before and behind and around him.’48

  Buller, of course, had played Cassandra before: in September 1899. Now he forecast a guerrilla war.49 His advice to Roberts was this. No good to march on Pretoria before he had thoroughly crushed the Free State armies. Otherwise, across the Vaal, those waters would close around him.

  Roberts, by contrast, stuck to the conventional idea of surrender. Capture the capital and you have cut off the head of the enemy. Their spirit must die, too. And he had long intended to use political means – the kind that was often used in Indian frontier wars – to smooth his march to Pretoria. On 15 March he offered an amnesty for every Free State burgher except the leaders. All they need do was to return home, take the oath of allegiance and surrender their arms.50

  The complete contrast between these two strategic options can never have been more apparent than in the fortnight after the fall of Bloemfontein. The Boer forces in the field, according to Roberts’s Intelligence Department, had been reduced to a total of about thirty-seven thousand in mid-March. (The actual numbers were probably still smaller.)

  The largest single concentration was still believed to be the Boer invasion force in Natal: thirteen thousand, most of whom were now dug into the line of the Biggarsberg, forty miles north of Ladysmith.51 In Cape Colony, a raiding party of about one thousand burghers, led by General Steenkamp, had set alight a local Afrikaner rebellion in the scattered settlements around Prieska, in the north-west Karoo.52

  The other Boer forces had, by 17 March, abandoned their posts south of the Orange River, after blowing up both the strategic railway bridges that linked Bloemfontein with the Cape Ports – Norvals Pont on the Cape Town and Port Elizabeth lines, Bethulie on the East London line. The total of Boer forces still occupying British territory was thus estimated at 15,500, including General Snyman’s band of 1,500, still ineffectually besieging Baden-Powell at Mafeking. 21,500 other burghers were believed to be scattered about the Free State. There were thought to be 5,000 to 6,000, led by De Wet and De La Rey, who had abandoned their trenches and fled north from Bloemfontein. There was a large force under General Du Toit to the north of Kimberley. And 4,000 men under General Olivier were known to have abandoned Colesberg at the end of February and to have retreated somewhere to the north-east.53

  It was these commandos of Olivier’s, above all, that would have been a prime target for offensive strategy, if Roberts’s priority had been to crush the Boer armies in the Free State. For Olivier was trapped a hundred miles behind the main British lines. But Roberts had decided to consolidate his position by halting at Bloemfontein until he could build up a still larger army ready for the next great ‘tiger-spring’, in The Times’s phrase54 – the march on Pretoria. His strategy was for the moment defensive: to protect Bloemfontein from a raid by De Wet from the north, to reopen the town’s water-works twenty miles to the east, and to reopen the railway line to the south. (The first train to Cape Town actually rumbled across temporary rails laid on the road bridge at Bethulie on 19 March.’)55 He ordered Buller to remain on the defensive in Natal, too: Buller protested violently.56 Where Roberts did take the initiative his aims were political. He sent out small parties of troops into the country to distribute the proclamations of amnesty and to collect surrendered arms.57

  On 15 March he heard important intelligence: General Olivier and a column, said to consist of six to seven thousand Boers from both Colesberg and Stormberg, were advancing north up the road that passes about forty miles east of Bloemfontein close to the frontier with Basutoland. Further reports amplified this intelligence during the next few days. Still, Roberts issued no instructions for any of his main Free State army, consisting of over 34,000 men, to try to block Olivier’s column of 6,000. He waited till 20 March before he told French to take one cavalry brigade, a few guns, and some MI to go to Thabanchu, astride Olivier’s route. To send so small a force so late was hardly more than a gesture. Olivier side-stepped French. After an epic march of three weeks, Olivier’s ponderous wagon train, twenty-four miles long, passed safely behind the British lines, their morale as intact as their ox wagons.58

  Some people have argued that it was beyond the power of Roberts’s large army even to attempt to attack so small and cumbersome a Boer force. Significantly, The Times History’s school of historians, so quick to blame Buller for failing to send his 2,500 mounted men to pursue Botha’s and Joubert’s 15,000-strong army the day of the relief of Ladysmith, reversed their arithmetic when facing critics of Lord Roberts. It would have been a ‘very grave risk’, we are told by Amery, to send 20,000 in pursuit, leaving only 15,000 ‘exhausted men’ to guard Bloemfontein. (In fact, there was not the least danger to Bloemfontein.) Yet even Roberts’s keenest admirers admitted that the main reason why he did not try to crush Olivier was that he thought the Free State burghers would, if simply left to themselves, accept the amnesty, take the oath of allegiance, and disperse to their homes. It was this preconceived belief, that the fall of Bloemfontein would knock all the fight out of the Free State, which was to be his fundamental miscalculation.59

  His second miscalculation was that his own army would be ready to move forward ‘in a short time’. It is also significant that the same critics, led by The Times, should have treated the breakdown of Roberts’s army at Bloemfontein as a mere act of God, a misfortune that could happen to the best of commanders.60 For breakdown it was to be. By the end of March, when this first golden fortnight of peace in the Free State was to come to a sudden end, Roberts’s force was not to be much nearer being ready to move.

  The underlying reason was that, by temperament and background, Roberts was not interested in the dull grind of military administration. The Army Service Corps – Buller’s great innovation at the War Office – he dismissed, as we have seen, calling it one of the aberrations of the ‘Wolseley ring’.61 But he had failed to create a competent HQ staff to whom he could delegate.62 His friend from India, Major-General William Nicholson, newly created Director of Transport, could not abide Kitchener; anyway, Kitchener was far too self-willed to act as anyone’s Chief of Staff.63 The result was chaos in the marble hall of the Presidency, as there had been chaos on the banks of the Modder. In the hall (the ‘Hall of Idlers’, as someone called it) sat that dazzling collection of red-tabbed princes, dukes and other nobility, fingering their medal ribbons (DSO was said to mean ‘Duke’s son only’) and enquiring about the supply of ‘medicines’ that had come up the railway line. ‘Medicine’
or ‘cod-liver oil’ was the code name for champagne.64

  Meanwhile, the problem that bedevilled everything remained that triple-headed monster, transport: trains, horses, oxen.

  A glance at the map showed the peculiar and dangerous isolation of a British garrison in the Free State; kept alive by the single-track, narrow-gauge railway that ran due south for the first hundred miles before diverging at Springfontein towards the three Cape ports. When Buller had suggested in December that a special military railway line might be built to extend the Cape railway by a new westerly route towards Bloemfontein, Roberts had ridiculed the idea.65 Yet it was predictably in this hundred miles nearest Bloemfontein that railway congestion was now proving most acute, after the ‘reopening’ of the line. Moreover, Roberts had wasted months before ordering extra rolling stock from outside South Africa. On 20 March, he found himself cabling to England for twenty-five engines and three hundred wagons as a matter of the highest urgency.66 It would be months before they arrived. Meanwhile, all supplies – every boot and blanket, every round of 303 and every 6-inch shell, every biscuit and every bandage and bottle of medicine – had to run the gauntlet of that wretched single-track railway line.67 As we shall see, one of the direct results of the defects in railway transport was a loss in men’s lives that made Spion Kop relatively cheap.

  Horses, too, horses by the thousand, Indian horses, Burmese horses, Argentinan horses, had to come up the same railway line, battered and bruised after travelling half-way across the world. Roberts’s grand army swallowed horses as a modern army swallows petrol. French’s cavalry division alone had lost fifteen hundred killed, died or missing during the relief of Kimberley. On a single day-the Battle of Poplar Grove on 7 March – the division reported a further 213 casualties.68 If this was the wastage of one division on one day, what would it cost to make a really mobile army? For it was Roberts’s plan to mount fifteen thousand men as MI.69 Where were the horses to come from? Ever since February, there had been a series of plaintive exchanges between Roberts’s Field HQ and Pall Mall on this subject.70 But, whatever Pall Mall’s failures, it is clear that Roberts had grossly underestimated the scale and complexity of the problem. The vital position of Director of Remounts at Stellenbosch had been given to an officer considered totally unfit (he was a manic-depressive) for any other duty. Eventually he shot himself.71