The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  B-P had survived the first two months – the Cronje phase – partly owing to his own audacity, partly owing to the good fortune of having Cronje for an enemy. There can be no doubt that if any Boer commander worth his salt had commanded the six thousand besiegers, B-P’s men would now have been enjoying a quiet game of cricket in the prisoner-of-war camp at Pretoria. (Still, by the same token, if Sir George White had commanded the Mafeking garrison, even Cronje would surely have captured it.) B-P, at any rate, bluffed Cronje into believing that the tiger had sharp claws. On seven different occasions in October and November, he sent out raiding parties to make what he called ‘kicks’ at the Boers. These were expensive in casualties; about a sixth, 163 of the garrison (ten times the casualty rate at Ladysmith) were killed, wounded, or missing during this period.37 At the same time, he improvised dummy forts, guns and armoured trains to draw the enemy fire. This kind of military prank were good for British morale, as well as producing a regular crop of spent shells, cheerfully collected up by the African ‘boys’ to be sold as curios to the white population. The shells from the Boers’ 7-pounders were particularly to be prized. For these two guns, now turned against Dr Jameson’s old base, were the two 7-pounders captured from Dr Jameson at the Battle of Doornkop.38

  On their own part, the garrison, like the Kimberley garrison, improvised heavy artillery from unlikely materials. The Mafeking counterpart of ‘Long Cecil’ was the ‘Wolf (a name that B-P was pleased to claim as tribute from the Matabele; impeesa, the ‘wolf-that-never-sleeps’). The gun had started life as a piece of 4-inch steel pipe. Add a threshing-machine, as a chassis; cast a breech in the railway foundry: with a roar of smoke and flame, the Wolf could throw an 18-pound shell four thousand yards across the veld.39 Still more heart-warming was the way that a gun called ‘Lord Nelson’ rose to the occasion. One day, Major Godley of the Protectorate Regiment had found this interesting antique, a ship’s cannon, made of brass and dated 1770, employed as a gate-post on a local farm. It turned out that, years before, the local Baralong tribe had bought it from some German traders as a protection against Boer raiders. By one of those odd chances of war, the initials ‘B.P. & Co.’ were found to be engraved on the barrel. B-P modestly disclaimed it as a family heirloom – in fact, the initials stood for Bailey, Pegg, ironfounders – and had it rechristened ‘Lord Nelson’. And in one of his official reports to Lord Roberts, B-P spoke most highly of the effects of its 10-pound solid cannon-ball. (‘It bumped down the road,’ said Major Godley later, ‘exactly like a cricket ball … and one old Boer tried to field it with disastrous results to himself.’)40

  Other terrifying ‘specialities’ of the garrison included dynamite bombs made up in potted meat tins. They were thrown by Sergeant Page, the champion bait thrower of Port Elizabeth, ‘with accuracy over… 100 yards’. There was also a miniature railway, constructed within the precincts of the town. A patent fuel, cow dung and coal dust, mixed in equal parts, helped mitigate the coal shortage. (Firewood was also commandeered in vast quantities from the roofs of the wretched Africans’ huts in the ‘Stadt’, as their shanty town was called.41) Finally, there were some expedients, of laughably little practical value, but designed to be just that: laughable. B-P had some Mafeking stamps printed, and his own head replaced the Queen’s; the lese-majesty was actually the idea of his staff, but B-P, as ‘a sort of tyrant or president’, was delighted. ‘My head on it,’ he told his mother. ‘That, I think, is proof of our being an independent republic in Mafeking!’42

  It was in his policy towards the Africans that B-P showed himself most masterful in his flair for improvisation – and in his ability to bend the rules. It had been an axiom of the war so far for both British and Boers that it was to be a ‘white man’s war’.43 In practice, this had meant that fighting was limited to white men, with the exception of Colonel Holdsworth’s raid on Derdepoort on 26 November, but that each army had enrolled thousands of brown men and black men as unarmed scouts, grooms, drivers, and (principally on the Boer side) the all-important diggers of trenches.44 B-P took a daring step towards making it a black man’s war.

  Beyond the neat, colonial lines of tin-roofed bungalows, a thousand yards square, lay the other Mafeking: a picturesque native town of gaudy mud huts, sycamore trees, and huge elephant-grey stones, sprawling along the greasy banks of the Molopo River. Within this black Mafeking, known as the native Stadt, were concentrated seven to eight thousand Africans: five thousand of these were the regular inhabitants, Baralongs, ruled by a Chief and a Queen Mother; the rest comprised various African refugees, Fingoes driven into the town when their villages were burnt by the Boers, and unfortunate Shangan ‘mine boys’, expelled from the gold-mines of the Rand, and robbed of their savings by the Boer authorities.45

  Now B-P, like the Rhodesian settlers he admired, knew how to handle Kaffirs. You had to be fair but firm. He sacked Wessels, the Baralong Chief, for ‘want of energy’.46 He executed by firing squad some starving Africans caught stealing food. He had 115 others flogged.47 With these little encouragements, he persuaded the Africans to play the important part he had designed for them in the siege. Gangs of Shangan mine boys were set to work digging the maze of trenches, four miles of covered ways,48 that were quite as intricate as any that the Boers designed. Other Africans were roped in, as at Ladysmith and Kimberley, to serve as scouts, spies, runners, and cattle herds. Where B-P departed completely from precedent was that he armed three hundred Africans with rifles. Christened the ‘Black Watch’, they were set to guard part of the perimeter. This remarkable step B-P took for two different reasons. There was the simple arithmetic: he had added a third to the size of his garrison. And, after all, the native Stadt comprised a tempting part of the perimeter; if the Boers attacked the Stadt, the natives must pull their weight in repelling them.49

  Such were the broad lines of B-P’s policy for the siege: professional, practical, ruthless even, behind the practical jokes. What about the men (and women) of the garrison?

  During the first phase of the siege, morale was generally high. The twenty imperial officers at Mafeking had one great advantage, apart from having such a resourceful commander. They were supposed to be an élite, chosen either by the War Office or by B-P for the difficult and dangerous operation of his raid. There were relatively few civilians to make trouble50 – nothing, at any rate, to compare with the colossal nuisance of Cecil Rhodes. B-P’s right-hand man in the siege was the Adjutant of the Protectorate Regiment, Major Alick Godley, a jolly, polo-playing, pig-sticking, bush-whacking Anglo-Irishman on loan from the Dublin Fusiliers.51 Another Irishman in whom B-P had every confidence was ‘Fitz’, Captain FitzClarence, in charge of B Squadron of the Protectorate Regiment, and B-P recommended him for a VC for his part in the attacks and counter-attacks along the perimeter.52

  By contrast, B-P found two of his most senior officers – Lieutenant-Colonel C. O. Hore, the CO of the Protectorate Regiment, and Major Lord Edward Cecil, his Chief of Staff – a considerable strain. Why he did not hit it off with Hore is not clear. But in the case of poor Lord Edward Cecil, it was all too easy to understand. His natural diffidence had been intensified by the unfortunate marriage with Violet and – since the siege had begun – by the news of the death of his mother, Lady Salisbury, the woman who had dominated his life. Now his mood amounted to a kind of moral surrender. Fortunately, B-P was able to give him a task in which he could do no great harm – looking after an improvised cadet corps (ironically, the most famous product of the siege; it was the prototype of the Boy Scout movement).53 Cecil never got over Mafeking. ‘I dread anything that reminds me of that ghastly time, I really dread it,’ he said years afterwards when he heard B-P might be coming to live near his house in Sussex.54

  There were also some civilians with whom B-P found himself at loggerheads. The leading local doctor, Dr Hayes, had been made PMO, but was ‘in continual hot water’; B-P told him to resign ‘before I have to order you out’.55 The Press Corps was at first a thorn in B-P’s s
ide: ‘more of the reporter than the correspondent, all with very incorrect views of the situation – some alarmist, others incautious’. In November, some of them had thought they could make good their escape, and asked B-P permission to leave. He forbade it. ‘I consider it,’ he noted, ‘best that they should not thus evade Censorship by a staff officer, and spread all the gossip of the place in “interviews” on reaching Cape Town.’56 Later, their mutual relations mellowed – though not before the melodramatic evening when The Daily Chronicle correspondent, Parslow, was shot dead by a half-pay, half-mad artillery officer called Murchison. (Murchison was sentenced to death by B-P, but later released because of gallant services in the siege.57)

  For the first couple of months, B-P coped well enough with the civilians’ tensions. The second part of the siege saw morale fluctuating dangerously ‘Heard from three sources,’ B-P wrote in his diary on 18 March, ‘that the townspeople are expressing themselves tired of the siege and of me etc. They say … that I am asking for reinforcements not to be sent in order that I may gain Kudos afterwards….’58

  There was little physical danger from ‘Old Creechy’, the Long Tom. Sometimes he threw seventy shells into the town during one day.59 But the town was so open, and the white inhabitants were so few and so dispersed, that the shelling killed, B-P was relieved to find, few except natives. From the beginning, B-P realized that the most serious threat from shell fire was the threat to morale, and took counter-measures.60

  Through binoculars, you could see the precise direction in which Creechy’s barrel was pointing. An alarm would be telephoned to the threatened target. People ran to the deep shelters, excavated beside all the main buildings, chattering and giggling with nervous excitement. (In fact, the shelters were deliciously cool, after the burning heat above ground.) Then the heads bobbed up again, like rabbits’ heads after the hunter has passed, to see what damage old Creechy had done. And damage he certainly did.61 The convalescent home run by some Catholic missionaries, the only two-storeyed building in the town, received at least a dozen direct hits. ‘How near that sounds!’ remarked one of the visitors, Lady Sarah Wilson, hearing the report of the gun one evening. The next moment, she and the Resident Commissioner, who had dropped in for an evening game of cards, vanished under a wave of gravel and tomato-coloured brick-dust. When the wave passed, it was found no one had been injured. Yet the 94-pounder shell had exploded four feet from where the two were sitting, and two tons of masonry descended on the card table between them. There were other equally strange escapes – a shell carried a canary out of the window, intact in its cage; and a large African wedding party, the bridegroom complete with top-hat, morning coat and a rifle over his shoulders, passed unscathed through a downpour of Mauser bullets as they paraded along the street.62

  It was Lady Sarah Wilson whose high spirits added something to the siege that even B-P, with all his ingenuity and hard work, could not offer the men of the garrison. She was a duke’s daughter, sister of Lord Randolph Churchill, aunt of the dashing young Winston Churchill, young and extremely pretty. She had come out to Rhodesia with her husband, a cavalry officer, to escape the monotony of the English season – and found herself, after being exchanged with a Boer cattle thief, sent in as a prisoner to Mafeking. How the staff officers snatched at an invitation to Christmas lunch in her ‘bomb-proof: an elegant, white-panelled hole carved out of the red soil of Mafeking, the walls decorated with African spears from the Matabele War and an immense Union Jack, the roof made of wooden beams with small port-holes. It reminded you of the picture of the cockpit of HMS Victory, one of her guests remarked cheerfully, ‘as Nelson lay a-dying’.63

  Still, even the glamour of Lady Sarah could not altogether dispel the agonizing boredom that covered Mafeking like the dust from the Kalahari. It was the need to cope with boredom that led B-P to make his only serious tactical error of the siege.

  The day after that convivial Christmas lunch in the dugout – ‘Black Boxing Day’, as it became known – B-P decided to try to capture Game Tree Fort. This was a Boer strong-point three thousand yards north of the town. There was nothing greatly to be gained by the attack, apart from extending the area for cattle to graze and giving the Boers a ‘kick’ to show them the garrison was still alive. But B-P believed that the Boers were in the process of strengthening the fort and was keen to have a go at them before it was too late.64 It was already too late. At 4.30 a.m. the townspeople were awoken by loud firing: the puny roar of the muzzle-loaders, the snarl of Lord Nelson, the answering jingle of Mausers. The firing continued for several hours. It was a beautiful, clear, sunny day, but no one in the town could see what was happening. Major Godley, Adjutant of the Protectorate Regiment, went out in the armoured train and reported the grim news back to B-P. Since the last reconnaissance, the Boers had roofed in the strong-point; it was a real block-house – impregnable, unless the attacking force had proper artillery support. With the gallantry of regulars, C and D Squadrons of the Protectorate Regiment had thrown themselves against the sandbagged parapet and been shot down at point-blank range. When the armoured train, flying the white flag, returned for the casualties, the ground was heaped with bodies.65 The death-toll of twenty-four (including three officers) brought the total of deaths in action to nearly fifty, and the total casualties comprised ninety-six, almost exactly a tenth of the white garrison.66

  Then Angus Hamilton, The Times correspondent, who had been all in favour of the garrison having a go at Game Tree Fort, was allowed to go and look himself, under the flag of truce. It was a sobering sight, this first view of the invisible enemy, and the last view of their victims, some of whom were Hamilton’s personal friends.

  The heavy vapour from the shells still impregnated the air, and hanging loosely over the veldt were masses of grey-black and brown-yellow smoke clouds. Boers on horse back and on foot were moving quickly in all directions…. The scene here was immensely pathetic, and everywhere there were dead or dying men…. The attitude of the Boers around us was one of stolid composure, not altogether unmixed with sympathy … big and burly, broad in their shoulders, ponderous in their gait, and uncouth in their appearance, combining a somewhat soiled and tattered appearance with an air of triumph…. Here and there they made some attempt to rob the wounded and despoil the dead….67

  Later that afternoon, the dead were buried, and the Last Post sounded over their mass grave. B-P took the disaster with his usual air of mastery. He praised the men’s heroism in General Orders. And with perhaps unconscious irony, he wrote to Roberts that it would be a lesson to the enemy not to make frontal attacks.68

  January was a bad month for the garrison. Food was at last running short. B-P’s calculation before the start of the siege was that he had food enough for the white garrison to last four months – that is, till the end of February. Supplies for the Africans, meaning their staple diet of mealies, were not expected to last beyond December.69 The chief reason why the white garrison was relatively well off was the lucky chance that recently the firm of Weil had stock-piled thousands of tons of flour, meal, grain, and other supplies at Mafeking, to take advantage of a change in the custom duties for exports to Rhodesia. B-P had snapped up Weil’s stock-pile; and, when the Cape authorities had refused to authorize the deal, Lord Edward Cecil (encouraged by Milner) had given his personal IOU for a cool half a million pounds.70 Still, even this stock-pile was near exhaustion in January. How, then, was the garrison still fat and well – at least, the white part of the garrison – as April drew to its close? How was the conjuring trick performed – B-P’s version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes?

  There have been numerous accounts of the siege of Mafeking, and numerous biographies of its hero, B-P, and none of them explains this extraordinary feat. The answer has been hidden for seventy-eight years in B-P’s confidential staff diary of the siege. In a word, the white garrison took part of the rations of the black garrison. And part of the black garrison was accordingly given the choice of starving to death
in the town or running the gauntlet of the Boers.

  That this was B-P’s policy is made clear in the chilling, mouthful-by-mouthful details of B-P’s confidential diary:

  Nov 14: The census shows our numbers to be as follows:

  Whites: men 1,074, women 229, children 405

  Natives: 7,500 all told

  Supplies: Meat plentiful live and tinned 180,000 lb

  Meal and flour 188,100 lb

  Kaffir corn and mealies 109,100 lb

  White rations required daily 1,340

  Native „ „ „ 7,000

  Thus we have 134 days for whites

  „ „ „ 15 days for natives.71

  This was the first stock-taking and very serious it seemed. All the meal and flour supplies in the town – whether belonging to merchants, individual Africans, the railway authorities, or the army itself – were therefore to be rationed. And B-P forbade Africans to buy bread. He was determined not to allow the ‘white’ rations, meaning flour or meal considered edible by white people, to be used to eke out the proportionately far smaller supplies labelled as ‘black’ rations.72 How could he then prevent the Africans from starving?