There were only two men big-hearted enough to prevent a moral collapse of this sort: Christiaan De Wet and President Steyn. Neither was now present in the Brandwater Basin. It was their column of eighteen hundred men that had slipped through the British net on the night of 15 July, while Hunter was stuck at Bethlehem. Their escape had proved a great triumph for the cause. But it also led naturally to one of the great disasters. Once the two men had gone – the embodiments, military and political, of the Boers’ will to resist – the morale of the volk evaporated.
The original agreement with President Steyn was this: the Brandwater Basin was not to be defended and the army would split into four divisions. The first, led by De Wet, would escort Steyn to safety on the night of 15 July; the next two, led by Generals Roux and Crowther, would follow; General Marthinus Prinsloo and the fourth division would stay behind to guard the cattle in the mountains.25 This agreement was forgotten the moment that Steyn and De Wet turned their backs. Instead of escaping, the burghers made, as we have seen, half-hearted attempts to defend Slabbert’s Nek and Retief’s Nek. It was as though they had only been waiting for a pretext to surrender. On the morning of 29 July, as soon as Golden Gate was finally sealed off, General Prinsloo sent a message under a white flag in the area to General Hunter. As the commander-in-chief he was prepared to surrender the whole force, on condition that all except leaders would be free to go home.26
But was Prinsloo in fact Commander-in-Chief? General Roux claimed that he was in overall command. However, Roux was too cautious a man (despite the extra moral authority he had by virtue of being a Minister of the Church) to force a showdown with Prinsloo; anyway, his laager was some way off in the direction of Golden Gate. By the time he reached Hunter’s field HQ near Fouriesburg to declare Prinsloo’s surrender invalid, he had to acquiesce in his own surrender.27
The terms offered by Hunter were stiff, but not, in the circumstances, too stiff. It was fortunate, perhaps, for the British that the cable cart connecting with the telegraph line to Roberts’s HQ in Pretoria worked badly that day. Roberts, at Milner’s insistence, demanded unconditional surrender. Hunter, off his own bat, offered to allow the burghers a concession: ‘I have promised not to confiscate private property or personal effects of the burghers.’ In practice, this meant that, although Hunter refused Prinsloo’s principal demand – not to treat the burghers as POWs, but to let them go home – he was prepared to let them keep their carts and covered wagons. There were sensible reasons for this concession (apart from Hunter’s goodness of heart). Hunter was in a hurry to leave the mountains. The pursuit of De Wet was now in full swing; Pretoria was crying out for Hunter’s divisions to go north. And the long, red line of his ox convoys, leading into the Brandwater Basin, was stretched dangerously thin.28
The actual surrender took days to accomplish and presented one of the great spectacles of the war. The covered wagon had always been the symbol of the Boer frontiersman, as it had been the symbol of his American counterpart: the wheel-going home of the trekboer, which, together with his herds of cattle, his horses and his rifle, was his main possession. Now the valley was full of trekking wagons. They poured into Fouriesburg, and for each Boer the brief ritual of surrender was accomplished: Mausers taken, barrels opened to remove the ammunition, then thrown on to the fire, an immense victory bonfire that burnt night and day.29
The yeomanry helped gather up the spoils, still astonished at the ease and cheapness of their triumph. Their prisoners they regarded with mixed feelings, just as the British had regarded the prisoners taken with Cronje five months earlier: ‘We had many days of receiving prisoners,’ wrote Captain Bromley-Davenport.
They came in about 300 to 500 at a time, threw down their arms and ammunition and were then marched away south. They are all allowed to ride, a privilege never awarded to any prisoners whom they took, and even to keep their cape carts and wagons – altogether they were treated with great leniency. They struck me as a good-natured lot and entirely destitute of pride or shame. They did not appear to mind being beaten – all that they were concerned about was the safety of any property.... I had a long talk with Roux, the fighting parson of Senekal, a very dangerous fanatic.... I am glad we have got him. But I could not help liking him. He appeared to be honest, & all the Boers say that he at least is full of personal courage.30
By 10 August, Hunter had passed through Bethlehem again, on his way north to Lindley. The total of surrenders had already reached 4,314 men – including three generals and half-a-dozen commandants. Two British field-guns had been recaptured: they were Broadwood’s guns, lost by U Battery at Sannah’s Post. In the end, only one important Boer leader, Olivier, refused to recognize the validity of Prinsloo’s surrender. Olivier left by the Golden Gate just in time, taking several commandants and fifteen hundred men with him. Hunter regarded this as a breach of faith, but he could hardly complain. He had made the greatest haul of prisoners in the war, at astonishingly little cost: a total of 33 dead and 242 wounded throughout the fortnight’s campaign in some of the wildest terrain in South Africa.31 In scale and cheapness, Hunter’s victory put all others, including Paardeberg, far into the shade.
Yet decisive victory still eluded the British. The ugly fact was that the surrender of one lot of Boers only seemed to encourage the others to fight. De Wet was now roaming the veld, unhampered by Prinsloo and his faint-hearts, eager to get a grip, once again, on the jugular of Roberts’s main army.
The news of Prinsloo’s surrender reached De Wet three days later in his laager south of the Vaal, jubilantly relayed by Major-General Charles Knox, commander of one of the British columns surrounding him. Next day, it was confirmed by Prinsloo’s secretary – a young man called Kotze, who had been sent post-haste by Hunter. Steyn and De Wet rode out into no-man’s-land beyond the laager to meet Kotze. He brought the brief, sad message from Prinsloo: ‘Sir, I have been obliged, owing to the overwhelming forces of the enemy, to surrender unconditionally with all the Orange Free State laagers here. I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant – M. Prinsloo Commander-in-Chief.’ ‘Commander-in-Chief,’ replied De Wet, icily. ‘By what right do you usurp that title?’ He was actually thunderstruck by the news. ‘It was nothing short of an act of murder,’ he admitted later. ‘One could gnash one’s teeth to think that a nation should so readily rush to its own ruin!’32
Possibly De Wet’s anger had been sharpened by the thought that he himself was not entirely blameless. After all, he had failed to stay and supervise the evacuation of the Brandwater Basin, though he must have known that the burghers were near the end of their tether; and he had taken both the special corps of scouts to make good his own escape. According to his later published version of events, he did not blame himself.33 It was not his style, reproaching himself when he blundered. And, it must be said, he rarely had occasion for it.
In the eyes of the British public, De Wet’s exploits – dazzling, infuriating, baffling – had by now earned him the reputation of a magician.34 Who was this extraordinary man, who could lead Roberts and his generals such a dance, swooping down on Broadwood at Sannah’s Post, cutting up the Royal Irish at Reddersburg, pouncing on the Derbyshires at Rhenoster River, and always vanishing as swiftly as he had come? In the eyes of his own men, and of the British prisoners he captured from time to time, there was little mystery about him. On the contrary, he seemed intensely painstaking, one of the few really professional commanders on either side.35
Professionalism, in Boer eyes, meant common sense raised to the highest level. In De Wet’s case it was a kind of genius. He had none of the charisma of Louis Botha: the personal magic that cast a spell on the volk (and was later to make Botha a hero even in the eyes of British imperialists). De Wet was blunt, charmless, even brutal.
One British officer, Captain Molyneux Seele, acting staff officer to Colonel Ridley’s MI, spent an enforced holiday as De Wet’s guest in the laager that July and was greatly impressed. How he envied the Boers their commander,
Captain Seele admitted ruefully. His own capture had been partly the fault of the Intelligence Department, who had reported no Boers for miles; and De Wet’s laager proved to be just over the hill. That ‘ass’ of a CO, Ridley, had failed to send out scouts. So Seele found himself one morning running unarmed across the veld, with fourteen mounted Boers firing from the saddle at him; ‘not the ideal conditions in which to meet Brother Boer’. The burghers who caught him apparently regarded the whole thing as a ‘huge joke’.36
In due course, he was brought to De Wet’s laager; it was Sunday morning and the burghers were singing hymns, ‘yelled out in a nasal drawl’. He was searched, and his field-glasses were confiscated (but his greatcoat and other possessions were handed back). Then he met De Wet’s other ‘guests’, a few prisoners sitting round a ‘big pot of Kaffir corn boiled and smeared with grease ... an awful compound they pronounced excellent’. De Wet himself spoke no English, but his hand was everywhere. ‘He rules his mob by the strength of his right arm and character. About 5 foot nine with broad chest and a very upright seat on his grey horse, he was continually conspicuous.’ Superficially all was confusion in the laager, but there was ‘order in disorder’. No tent lines, no dressing by the left or right, and no noise, but every wagon, cart and tent was laid out in the same relative position, wherever they laagered. Hence the extraordinary speed with which De Wet could strike camp. A mounted Boer would give the signal; then ‘the whole conglomeration of tents, wagons, capecarts, horses and oxen, white men & Kaffirs’ were on the move in ten minutes. But this feat would have been impossible if the Africans had been left to inspan the animals unassisted, as they were left in the British army (twelve mules or sixteen great, dour trek oxen to harness to each wagon). In De Wet’s camp, everyone was a countryman and lent a hand with the transport, as they had been trained since boyhood. Discipline was severe. Sentries who slept on duty were punished by being put on ant heaps and shot if they moved.37
As regards De Wet’s fighting methods, Seele was immensely impressed, though he did not suggest such techniques would have been desirable in the British army. ‘His method of fighting, say, a rearguard action is as follows. He gets his wagons under way then places his fighting men in position then hands over to his second in command. After this he gallops, usually alone, to the head of the wagons and drives back any skulker by fierce invective &, if that fails, with his sjambok into the fighting line. Once there he resumes command.. . . De Wet is a wonderful man.’38
Such was the flattering view of an English staff officer. In fact, De Wet’s strong right arm was hardly tested after the news of Prinsloo’s surrender. ‘It was impossible to think of fighting,’ De Wet wrote, ‘the enemy’s numbers were far too great – our only safety lay in flight.’ And flee they did. In early August, he estimated that there were five or six generals and forty thousand men pursuing them. Their own column was a mere 2,500, including Steyn, his entourage, and four hundred wagons and carts. How De Wet hated those wagons! Against his orders, the burghers clung to those wretched possessions, and even De Wet was powerless to make them give them up, though their part in precipitating Prinsloo’s surrender was obvious enough. This handicap meant that De Wet could only flee at the pace of an ox; and even De Wet’s oxen could barely do thirty miles a day.39 How, then, could he elude the forty thousand men (actually twenty thousand) converging on his lair at Reitzburg?
The secret lay in De Wet’s professional scouts. Significantly, De Wet had not, like the British, left this vital part of field intelligence work to ordinary mounted troops. He had trained up two special corps – under Captains Danie Theron and Gideon Scheepers (and, oddly enough, foreigners, too, were recruited into these élites). It was through these scouts that De Wet now discovered that, though the cordon was pulled tight behind him, frustrating all means of escape inside the Free State, Roberts had failed to block one drift across into the Transvaal. He crossed the Vaal on 6 August by the regular crossing at Schoeman’s Drift. His situation was still critical. He had lost the advantage of campaigning in the home ground of the Free State, where his men knew every kopje and every farmhouse and every hidden source of food, where they were conscious of fighting for their own country. Moreover, the mountainous country ahead suited his pursuers better than the open plains of the Free State. His route lay across the western flank of the Rand, well to the west of the line of Roberts’s advance two months earlier. Beyond the Rand lay a higher chain – the Magaliesberg – that dominated the fertile river valley to the west of Pretoria. To shake off his pursuers, he must cross the Magaliesberg. But where? All the mountain passes were likely to be blocked by the English.
‘ “Inspan!” No man uttered a word of complaint’; (so went De Wet’s own somewhat rose-coloured account of this ordeal), ‘each man did his work so quickly that one could hardly believe that a laager could be put on the move in so short a time.’ Behind them they left the veld black and smoking. It was De Wet’s form of scorched-earth policy. This dry grass – the winter grazing – burnt like tinder. They reached the tall poplars of the Magalies valley on the morning of 14 August, and set off uphill towards a rocky pass called Olifant’s Nek: the main south-western pass over the Magaliesberg.40 It had been occupied by Lord Methuen’s column a few days earlier. De Wet’s men had marched two hundred miles in the last month to reach the Magaliesberg, only to be trapped, it would seem, more completely than Prinsloo in the Roodebergen.
Two days earlier, Roberts had sent a jaunty cable to Lansdowne, predicting the imminent doom of Steyn and De Wet. The pack was in full cry: three columns – about twelve thousand men, led by Kitchener, Methuen, and Smith-Dorrien – baying at his heels; Ian Hamilton, and a further eight thousand, hurrying across to block Olifant’s Nek. ‘I shall be greatly disappointed if De Wet and Steyn manage to escape,’ cabled Roberts.41 To the Queen, he wrote a long letter, conveying the same sentiments in more courtly terms. Hunter’s successes in the Brandwater Basin, and the flight of Steyn and De Wet over the Vaal, ‘practically closes the war so far as the Orange River Colony is concerned’. He was now hoping to corner De Wet and Steyn, ‘an intensely interesting and exciting operation, rendered more so by the great size of the country and the extraordinary mobility of the Boers, who manage to slip away in the most marvellous manner’.42
Roberts wrote effusively every few weeks to the Queen, sending her copies of some of his victory cables. But Roberts was aware he was not one of her favourites; at any rate, he had had his knuckles rapped at various times. For example, after capturing Pretoria, he had cabled to ask about the huge bronze statue of Kruger that was to have been erected. The massive pedestal was already in place in Church Square. Would Her Majesty like to be put up there instead? The Queen was not amused at the thought of stepping into Kruger’s shoes.43 Most distressing to Roberts were the Queen’s hints about his own wife. The Queen disapproved of camp-followers; indeed, she felt so strongly about ladies going to the front that an official announcement had been made, quoting her disapproval.44 Roberts had insisted on bringing Nora Roberts and his two daughters up to Bloemfontein. In early July, Nora steamed on to Pretoria, in a special armoured train, guarded with pom-poms and maxims.45 He claimed that his wife was needed for hospital work. As the echoes of the great hospital scandal were now reverberating around Britain, including Balmoral, this was not a safe line of defence.46 In and out of the hospitals, so the gossip went, Nora Roberts’s interference was a menace. People spoke of ‘petticoat government’; as though the Field Marshal’s baton was in Nora’s large knapsack (and large she was, towering over the little man). Was there any truth in these stories? Lord Kerry, Bobs’s ADC, was asked this precise question by his mother, wife of the War Minister. He defended the Chief, while admitting that Bobs’s recent conversion to a tougher line against Boer women and children was probably due to Lady Roberts’s violent hostility to them.47
The stories of petticoat government did perhaps signify something: a certain arbitrariness – pettiness, even – about t
he way the Field-Marshal ruled his army. He had decided to sack two of his senior divisional generals – Gatacre and Colvile – after the ‘unfortunate affairs’ at Sannah’s Post, Reddersburg and Lindley.48 Yet the way he had singled them out for humiliation – simply because they were not part of the Roberts’s charmed circle, people said – did not encourage the other generals. They blamed Roberts’s and Kitchener’s own staff work. And they began to shrink from taking risks.49 Not that Roberts’s drastic sackings had achieved his object. There had been a spate of new ‘unfortunate affairs’ in July: the most recent, disaster to the Scots Greys and Lincolns at Zilikat’s Nek on 11th July; 189 had surrendered to De la Rey, when he struck out from his lair north of the Magaliesberg. In due course, Roberts, too, struck out, sacking the COs of the Scots Greys and the Lincolns.50
Still, despite these set-backs – bad omens for an early end to the war – and despite the formidable presence of Nora Roberts at the Pretoria HQ, the staff officers led a cheerful enough existence. There was a regular paper-chase; Lord Kerry played polo most days. It was almost like Simla, sitting out in the cool evenings at Mimosa Cottage, where Kerry had his billet. Of course, there were fewer coronets now among the red-tabs: ‘Sunny’ Marlborough had sailed off home, and so had his cousin Winston (eager to try his luck again at Oldham in the next election); the poor old Duke of Norfolk had fallen into an ant hole and broken his thigh. To fill the gap, the little man had made a new raid on the nobility. Prince Christian Victor, Queen Victoria’s favourite grandson, had had an undistinguished enough war so far, stuck with Buller in Natal. He was now made an extra ADC to the Chief. It was a compliment to the Queen, though the sequel was to be melancholy indeed.51
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