The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  The third kind of transport was conducted by Africans: eleven thousand mules led by about two thousand African drivers. There was a simple reply to the claim that the arrival of Roberts’s army in Bloemfontein in a state of total exhaustion was one of those unavoidable misfortunes of war. The breakdown of men and horses was, in fact, due to their being put on half-rations, largely because of the loss of the virtually unguarded convoy at Waterval Drift, itself the result of Roberts’s abolition of ‘regimental’ transport.72 Ironically, Roberts had now been forced by events to restore the ‘regimental’ system in all but name.73 Never had an attempt to economize on transport proved more of a false economy. A little less impatience, and the thirty thousand men that Roberts had marched into Bloemfontein might have been in no worse condition than the twenty thousand that Buller marched into Ladysmith.

  The most dramatic and painful symptom of the defects in Roberts’s military system was the death-rate from typhoid. Summer was the season for typhoid in all the large South African towns. The disease feeds on poor hygiene and overcrowding, the natural state of the African kraal. It was, in a sense, Dingaan’s revenge on his conquerors. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the disease was largely tamed.74 To prevent typhoid, you needed careful sanitation; to treat it, you needed careful nursing and a careful diet. During the siege of Ladysmith, this, as we saw, had not been achieved. Hence that death-rate of 563 out of the garrison, of whom 393 were typhoid victims. Bloemfontein soon began to outstrip Ladysmith’s grim record of ten deaths a day. The Raadzaal was taken over as a hospital. There were funeral processions every afternoon along those dusty streets where the triumphal troops had marched: a few soldiers, stumbling along with arms reversed, gaunt mules dragging a buck wagon, and on the buck wagon, sewn into a blanket, a human bale. There was no solemn music here, and rarely a flag as a last tribute. The dead were as commonplace as any other burden the mules carried. Marching feet, the creak of wheels, the jingle of harness, the cries of the African drivers: this was reveille and Last Post together.75

  Why was there a typhoid epidemic at Bloemfontein? The basic source was obvious enough – it was endemic. And men, unsatisfied by Roberts’s ration of half a water-bottle a day, had drunk water wherever they found it, including the water of the Modder River at Paardeberg, polluted by Cronje’s camp. But why had typhoid spread so rapidly, weeks after Cronje’s surrender? Negligence, was the simple answer. Neglect of elementary sanitary precautions in the army camps, as Bloemfontein’s population soared from four thousand to forty thousand in a month; neglect of the patients in hospitals that turned a crisis into a disaster. This was the view of a crusading British Unionist MP – William Burdett-Coutts, husband of the philanthropist – who came out on Roberts’s invitation and returned to denounce the scandal of Roberts’s hospitals in both Parliament and the columns of The Times.

  Burdett-Coutts described in The Times what he saw at Bloemfontein on 28 April, using language reminiscent of Sidney Herbert’s famous despatches from Scutari:

  … hundreds of men to my knowledge were lying in the worst stages of typhoid, with only a blanket and a thin waterproof sheet (not even the latter for many of them) between their aching bodies and the hard ground, with no milk and hardly any medicines, without beds, stretchers or mattresses, without linen of any kind, without a single nurse amongst them, with only a few ordinary private soldiers to act as ‘orderlies’… and with only three doctors to attend on 350 patients…. In many of these tents there were ten typhoid cases lying closely packed together, the dying with the convalescent, the man in his ‘crisis’ pressed against the man hastening to it. There was no room to step between them….76

  There is no reason to think Burdett-Coutts exaggerated what he saw, nor that what he saw was not typical of the field hospitals around Bloemfontein.77 Of course, part of the reason for these appalling conditions was, like so much else at Bloemfontein, the failure of one single-track railway line, short of rolling stock, to supply all the needs of the army. But there were volunteer hospitals at Bloemfontein, staffed by civilian doctors, including Dr Conan Doyle. There was also a Boer government hospital, the Volks Hospital, doing excellent service for the British.78 These hospitals, too, were dependent on that single-track umbilical cord. And they had beds and doctors and medicines and nurses for their patients; so much so that Conan Doyle found several hours a day, at the height of the typhoid epidemic, to write his Great Boer War.79

  The army hospitals were bad because they were run by the army. They represented all that was most inflexible about the British army: the endless form-filling, and obsession with rules and regulations, that made red tape and red cross almost synonymous. The ideas of Colonel Exham – White’s fearsome PMO, with whose triplicate forms Major Donegan had wrestled during the siege of Ladysmith and whom Buller had sent packing after the siege-dominated Bloemfontein.80 It was the spirit of Scutari reborn. Where were the ladies with the lamps? Roberts himself had recognized as early as February that there was a serious outbreak of typhoid in the hospitals on the Modder, and that orderlies and nurses were even then unable to cope. However, he had asked for a mere twenty extra nurses from England. Later he raised the figure to forty, then to fifty, for the whole of South Africa. The reason: he found his own PMO, Surgeon-General Wilson, ‘not very responsive or sympathetic’ to the idea of lady nurses.81

  There was an astonishing difference in Roberts’s attitude to field generals and surgeon-generals. Field generals – sometimes good field generals – were sacked wholesale by Roberts. But where it was only a matter of health and hygiene, Roberts was prepared to leave in charge a general in whom he had absolutely no confidence. He had personally visited the army hospitals at De Aar and Orange River Station on 9 February, on his way to the north; Wilson had called them ‘as good as could be expected’; Roberts found them as bad as he feared. He then told Lansdowne, ‘The fact is he [Wilson] is a poor creature and does not seem to have any idea of what is required.’82 But Wilson – and Colonel Exham himself-were left for weeks almost unchecked in control of the hospitals at Bloemfontein. It was not until late April that an SOS was sent to England asking for three hundred extra orderlies and thirty doctors. Why did not Roberts intervene weeks earlier? Because it was not Roberts’s style to concern himself overmuch with the life (or death) of Tommy Atkins. Perhaps it was his long years in India, commanding an army largely consisting of natives, that had dulled his interest in these questions. At any rate, there is a note of breath-taking complacency about his letter to the Queen in mid-April, the week before the SOS for extra orderlies and doctors: ‘The health of the men, too, is very good. There are some 2,000 in hospital [at Bloemfontein] but this is only at the rate of 4 per cent, a very small proportion during a campaign…. The climate now is quite perfect, and I hope that Lady Roberts and my daughters will be able to come here ere long. They will find it an agreeable change after Cape Town.’83

  Meanwhile, a great change had come over the Free State. One of their leaders, exploiting Roberts’s naïve belief that the struggle was nearly over, now rekindled the Boers’ determination to fight, and thus changed the whole course of the war.

  A week before this new phase opened, a tall, stiff, careworn figure slipped inside the marble hall of Roberts’s HQ at the Presidency.84 The High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, had come up to the front for a first glimpse of his shy young bride, ‘Miss Bloemfontein’, as The Friend called her.85 He had also serious political matters to concert with Roberts. The generous terms of Roberts’s proclamation of 15 March, offering amnesty to all except leaders, were originally inspired by Milner. In January, he had modified the draft of the amnesty to include combatants as well as civilians. He now stood firmly behind Roberts, as Roberts held out the olive branch.86

  It might seem out of character that Milner, the man who had precipitated the war, was now prepared to gamble on this short cut to peace. After all, he had never underrated the tenacity and resilience of Afrikaner nationalism, any more than
Buller. And the political task he had set himself was no less than to crush the ‘Afrikaner idea’ once and for all. ‘An irreconcilable enemy has tried to extinguish us,’ he wrote from Bloemfontein that very week. ‘We must extinguish him.’87 Why not then let the war go on?

  One can guess the working of Milner’s mind, reading between the lines of his letters to London. He was much more aware of the risks than Roberts, yet he was prepared to take these risks for two tactical reasons. First, he was intensely impatient to get on with the peace. Although he shared the current hero-worship for Old Bobs (‘a wonderful old creature with a heart of gold’), the continuation of the war left him bitter and frustrated. ‘The more I see of the army,’ he wrote to Lady Edward Cecil, after this visit to Bloemfontein, ‘the more unhappy I feel about it.’88 It was the endless blunders of Roberts’s military administration – the hopeless muddle of the transport system, the appalling redtape of the hospitals – that drove him near despair.89 The dream of his life – to forge the weakest link into the strongest in the imperial chain – could not even begin with this blundering army in occupation. Meanwhile, it was the enemy who were forging a new nationalism in the crucible of the war.

  There was a second reason why Milner wanted a quick end to the war, and it was equally fundamental. The secret alliance he had made with those two Empire-minded millionaires – Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher – depended on the profitability of the gold-mines. Now he had recently had word from Eckstein, the local manager of Wernher-Beit’s and the leading representative of all the gold bugs, that the Boer authorities planned a scorched-earth policy against the Rand mines: to mine them with a vengeance, by blowing them up with dynamite. The shafts were already drilled for the purpose.90 Clearly, the damage could run to millions of pounds. Hence Milner was prepared to lean over backwards to be conciliatory to the Boers – at least, until the British army had seized hold of the Rand.

  Milner kept these anxieties to himself. He accepted only one important public engagement on his flying visit to Bloemfontein. On 28 March he was guest at the banquet in the Railway Bureau given for Lord Roberts by four members of the staff of The Friend.91 It was an irresistible imperial occasion: sword and pen, they were fighting the same battle: Bobs, the hammer of the Boers; Kipling, the Orpheus of the Empire. Kipling proposed the toast; a short, sturdy figure, with pale features behind the black moustache and the spectacles. He raised his glass. To Kruger, the man to whom they owed everything – ‘who has taught the British Empire its responsibilities, and the rest of the world its power, who has filled the seas with the transports and the earth with the tramp of armed men….’92

  Milner, who might fairly have claimed that particular toast for himself, was his usual modest and self-deprecating self. He must have remembered, with mixed feelings, when he had last saluted Kruger. It was here, at this actual table, in Bloemfontein’s Railway Bureau, at the conference in June of the previous year. Milner proposed a toast and raised his glass: to Roberts, ‘the military magician’.93

  This was, indeed, the honeymoon after the shot-gun marriage with Miss Bloemfontein. Roberts’s praises were on every lip. ‘This wonderful little man, it was said [wrote Winston Churchill] had suddenly appeared on the scene; and, as if by enchantment, the clouds had rolled away and the sun shone once again brightly on the British armies…. ’94

  But the weather in South Africa runs to extremes, and the storm-clouds were gathering fast.

  CHAPTER 32

  ‘Keeping De Wet from Defeat’

  Northern and Eastern Free State,

  17 March-April 1900

  Question: Why do the Boojers go to bed with their boots on?

  Answer: To keep De Wet from defeat.

  Story told to the author by one of Roberts’s veterans in 1970

  Four days after the fall of Bloemfontein, on St Patrick’s Day 1900, the Free State and Transvaal leaders had held a krijgsraad at Kroonstad. The atmosphere was cordial; Francis Reitz, Kruger’s State Secretary, composed a humorous poem in English, mocking Kipling’s poem in The Friend about the Irish regiments and their St Patrick’s Day shamrock.1 But the problems facing the krijgsraad were nothing to joke about – no less than how to find a new way of pursuing the war.

  Kroonstad, 130 miles north of Bloemfontein, across the rolling, brown void – a void bisected by the single railway line, and intersected by an occasional railway bridge – was a typical Free State town. Now declared the official capital of the state, it possessed no real public building. When the two Presidents – Steyn and Kruger – addressed a large rally in the Market Square, they braved the rain standing on a butcher’s stall.2

  The sight of Kruger’s top-hatted figure in the sister republic had a quality of pathos and desperation that no one could miss. Despite his failing eye-sight, the old President had been persuaded to make the two-day train journey to Natal in early March to rally the burghers sent reeling by Buller’s advance. Then, hardly pausing at Pretoria, Kruger had taken the train down to Bloemfontein, to rally the burghers on the western front. He had arrived at De Wet’s HQ near Poplar Grove on 7 March, at the actual moment the battle began. De Wet bundled him back into his carriage, and off the tired mules trotted with their precious burden;3 one shell, from French’s horse artillery, fell just behind the carriage; Kruger turned disdainfully to look at the thing, according to a famous story – ‘So that,’ he remarked, ‘is one of the Queen’s pills. ’4 But even Kruger’s wit failed him after so many burghers had fled in panic from Poplar Grove, and the defection of one commando had caused Bloemfontein to be abandoned without a shot. At the krijgsraad, both deputations decided to prosecute the war ‘more energetically than ever’.5 But were these just brave words? What could a war council achieve if the volk in the Free State decided to take Lord Roberts at his word, go home and call it a day?

  The man who claimed to have the answer to this overwhelming question was Christiaan De Wet. He had been appointed the Commandant-General of the Free State army, after General Ferreira had been accidentally shot dead by one of his own sentries. De Wet’s response to the débâcle at Bloemfontein was nothing if not original. His commandos were exhausted after six months away from home. Well, let them go home. But they must return to their posts by 25 March. De Wet’s ideas brought him into conflict with General Piet Joubert. Joubert, though an invalid and soon to succumb to his final illness, still nominally controlled the Transvaal army, and had come to the Free State for the krijgsraad. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ the old warrior enquired, ‘that you are going to give the English a free hand, whilst your men take their holidays?’ ‘I cannot catch a hare, General, with unwilling dogs.’6

  De Wet was well aware that some of those dogs would not return to hunt the Khaki hare. But the best would return – their spirits restored after a ten-day furlough. Better ten men who really wanted to fight than a hundred men who shirked their duties. Already the basic principles for the new phase of the war were taking shape in De Wet’s mind: guerrilla principles. First, to weed out the men whose unreliability endangered everyone’s life; and so to make his own commandos into an élite striking force. Second, to increase their mobility, by abolishing the great wagon trains that made every Boer expedition into a Great Trek, and had proved Cronje’s undoing (and would have proved General Olivier’s, if Roberts had chosen to attack him in strength). Third, to tilt their defensive strategy progressively away from the conventional method of trying to block or delay an invasion by fighting at the front. The enormous numerical superiority of the British made such direct strategy a forlorn hope. Instead, they should develop the raiding strategy, behind the enemy lines, the strategy which had proved so successful against the 180 wagons at Waterval Drift. Apart from the military value of raiding the enemy’s lines of communication – and De Wet recognized that the success of Roberts’s advance hung by a thread, that single-track railway to the ports – there was also the all-important question of the burghers’ morale. Give me one day’s ‘good work’, said De We
t. And he’d have the burghers flocking back to join the commandos – even the burghers who were now taking the benefit of Roberts’s amnesty.7

  In principle, the krijgsraad accepted De Wet’s ideas, which coincided with those of the most successful Transvaal general on the western front, General De La Rey. It was to be many months before the ideas were fully developed; and, meanwhile, the overall fortunes of the Boers were to fall to their nadir. But the credit for avoiding a national collapse that month, March 1900, must go primarily to De Wet. He was now to give, less than three weeks after the fall of Bloemfontein, a sensational demonstration of what these ideas meant, by taking a mere fifteen hundred men to operate on the flank of the British army of thirty thousand.

  The two Presidents themselves agreed to De Wet’s plan, although they did not abandon conventional defensive strategy. They also decided to use political methods to stiffen the burghers’ shattered morale, and prevent the Free State men from abandoning their comrades in the Transvaal and accepting Roberts’s amnesty. Already they had made one or two important manoeuvres in the propaganda war. On 5 March, they addressed a joint appeal to Lord Salisbury, repudiating the claim that they had gone to war with aggressive intentions. The war, on their part, was ‘only commenced as a measure of defence … and was only continued in order to ensure the indisputable independence of both Republics as Sovereign International States’ and to protect Afrikaners, from the Cape and Natal, who had joined them.8 Of course, this was not an olive branch offered to Lord Salisbury. It was a challenge to Britain to state its own intentions, to expose Britain as an aggressor both in the eyes of the world and of their own burghers. It was a counter-ploy to offset the blandishments of Lord Roberts, by proving the humbug of Lord Salisbury’s speech the previous autumn: ‘We want no gold, we want no territory.’9 Well, did that stand today? Or was Britain now proposing to annex both republics? When Salisbury replied on 11 March, the reply was, as expected, quite uncompromising. There was no argument now about the oppressed Uitlanders, or the rights of the suzerain power. Salisbury simply stated that Britain was ‘not prepared to acknowledge the independence’ of either republic.10 Moreover, Kruger made great play with that copy of the secret Intelligence Department pamphlet, Military Notes on the Dutch Republics, captured with Symons’s baggage at Dundee on 23 October. It proved that the British aim, all along, was to annex the two republics.11