The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Roberts himself was little in evidence. He was writing, endlessly writing, at his desk. What could he make of this strange new twist of fortune? Six weeks ago, he had been convinced that the war was virtually over. Now he was not so sure. Once again, there were two basic choices. Give priority to rounding up the guerrilla leaders: that is, crush De Wet, and De la Rey, who had now emerged as the leader of ‘unrest’ (Roberts’s euphemism for guerrilla strikes) west of Pretoria? Or press on with regular warfare: that is, march against the last real Boer army in the field, Botha’s army, now at Machadodorp, and push on eastwards along the railway towards Mozambique?52

  Linked with these strategic questions, was the overwhelming political one: what terms to offer the Boers. The senior general, on whose judgement Roberts relied most of all (and whom he had recommended should take over as GOC in South Africa on his own departure) was Ian Hamilton.53 Hamilton had strong views against imposing terms of unconditional surrender on the Boer governments. He had also protested against the Proclamation of 31 May, which, while offering amnesty to the rank-and-file on certain terms, made it clear that the leaders would be deported if they surrendered. ‘If had my way,’ Hamilton told his wife (and the Chief knew), ‘every single big man who had surrendered up to date should be living in his own house in receipt of a handsome allowance.... But of course if Chamberlain, Milner & Lord Bobs are going to grind them down utterly, then they must be prepared to spend a great many millions of pounds and many hundreds of lives before they bend desperate men to the breaking-point.’54 In fact, Milner had changed his ‘velvet-glove’ strategy, now that the Rand mines had been saved intact. They must stick to unconditional surrender for the governments, and change the terms of the Proclamation for individuals, so that all the rank-and-file, as well as the leaders, would be made prisoners-of-war, and not be allowed merely to take the oath of allegiance and hand in their arms.55

  In the event, Roberts had compromised on both these interlocking issues, strategic and political. He had decided to attempt both a round-up of De Wet and try to push on to the Portuguese border. He resisted Milner’s attempts to revise the official Proclamation, although privately the generals were ordered, as Hunter had been, to extend the practice of burning farms.

  Perhaps, as Kerry thought, Lady Roberts’s arrival in Pretoria had something to do with this hardening of policy towards civilians. Certainly, Roberts reacted with a new severity that month. There had been a half-baked conspiracy in Pretoria to kidnap him. A German Uitlander, Lieutenant Hans Cordua, led the plot, and was led on in turn by a British agent provocateur. Roberts, much to the surprise of Kerry and the other ADCs, had Cordua court-martialled and shot56 At the same time, Roberts expelled from Pretoria several hundred Boer women and children, sending them by railway in open trucks to Botha’s laager near Machadodorp. He warned Botha that he refused to feed and house Boer dependants as long as the Boers were raiding the railway. Botha protested that it was inhuman. (In fact, many refugees seemed glad to be off; they sang the ‘Volkslied’ defiantly at the station. And Roberts took care not to expel Botha’s own wife, still less the wives of Steyn and Kruger, who were treated as show-pieces of imperial generosity.57)

  After a fortnight’s rest in his lair near Reitzburg, De Wet had finally broken cover on 6 August, slipped across the Vaal, and the hunt was on. How could 20,000 men fail to hunt down a mere 2,500? The hunters had command of the railway and of the telegraph system, and the terrain itself was all on their side.58 But fail they did, and in a way that was peculiarly humiliating for the two generals Roberts believed were the brightest stars in his army.

  The first failure was Kitchener’s, as the co-ordinator of the four columns near the Vaal. ‘K of Chaos’ he had been called because of the disaster to the convoy at Waterval Drift in February; and for several of the later disasters, like the loss of the Derbyshires at Rhenoster River, Kitchener’s chaotic staff work had been equally to blame.59 In early August, he was supposed to have boxed De Wet in at Reitzburg. To the south were his own column – Broadwood’s and Little’s cavalry brigades – and Charles Knox’s mixed force. Just across the Vaal, which was only fordable at a few places, was Methuen’s column, mainly yeomanry. Standing back on the Klerksdorp-Krugersdorp railway (a kind of long-stop) were Smith-Dorrien and his brigade.60

  All that was needed to crush De Wet was for one of these four columns to delay him sufficiently long – say, in a one-day action – for the other columns to lumber up and overwhelm him. So when De Wet had crossed the Vaal at the main crossing-point at Schoeman’s Drift on 6 August, it was Kitchener’s chance to close in for the kill. But first, Kitchener had mistakenly told Methuen to move to a ford farther downstream, allowing De Wet to slip through the gap. Then, equally mistakenly, Kitchener had sent his cavalry on a detour upstream, leaving Methuen to take up the pursuit almost unaided. Methuen redeemed his earlier failures by his skill in this campaign. He and his yeomanry dogged De Wet so closely that De Wet was forced to abandon a field-gun and all his prisoners. On the night of 10 August, De Wet swung westwards across the Krugersdorp railway line and side-stepped Smith-Dorrien. Now the main mountain range west of Pretoria – the Magaliesberg – loomed ahead, and Ian Hamilton joined the chase, only to prove still more incompetent than Kitchener.61

  Ian Hamilton had 7,600 men. On 11 August he was ordered by telegraph to block Olifant’s Nek, to prevent Steyn’s and De Wet’s escape. Hamilton knew the crucial importance of this. Yet somehow his military instinct – the quality, above all, which Roberts prized in his generals – now deserted him. He telegraphed back to Roberts that he would try to intercept the Boers on the Rand before they reached Olifant’s Nek. He then took a detour along the Rand, instead of striking out directly to the nek. And his men dawdled. In the two final days of the hunt – the 12th and 13th – Hamilton’s men covered barely thirty miles, compared with De Wet’s forty-five miles. So the hopes of ending the war at a stroke had vanished, as they had begun, in a great cloud of red dust, the only trace that remained of De Wet’s ox wagons.62

  The results of the nine-day chase were especially ill-received by Kitchener. He sent a private telegram of protest to Roberts’s HQ. ‘We ran him hard into a corner and fully relied on your closing the door at Olifants Nek how was this missed.’63 (Rawlinson’s comment was that this telegram of K’s was the ‘cry of the hound when the fox gets away into an earth that has not been stopped’.)64 Roberts’s own reaction was tight-lipped. His official despatches – so vocal on the failures of men like Buller, Warren, Colvile – preserved a deafening silence on the question of Hamilton’s blunder. Even in his letters to Lansdowne, Roberts did not give the game away.65 But the same day, Rawlinson, who was at Roberts’s elbow, put the blunt truth in his diary: ‘We ordered Johnny [Ian Hamilton] to go to Olifants Nek but he did not go there and in consequence De Wet has eluded us. This will prolong the war considerably I fear, and we are all down in our luck....’66

  Having lost one dazzling opportunity, Roberts now turned to grasp the other: to beat Botha in regular warfare and disperse or destroy the last of the Transvaal army.

  And here, despite himself, he was soon to be grateful for Buller.

  Buller’s 4th Infantry Division joined up with Roberts’s 4th Cavalry Brigade on 20 August, when the cavalry reached Twyfelaar, south of Belfast, and there was some sly self-congratulation among Buller’s men. Buller’s infantry were a strange sight: many officers bearded to keep out the cold, khaki in tatters and burnt black by the ash from the grass fires; but they noted that Roberts’s men seemed half-starved, as well as in rags. It was reported that the brigade major of the 4th Cavalry ‘burst into tears’ at the sight of a pat of butter, and a bottle of beer ‘brought on a fit’.67

  As the divisional commander, Lieutenant-General Neville Lyttelton declared himself shocked by the ill feeling that had grown up between the two British armies (‘war lets loose a flood of envy, hatred, malice ...’68), but he welcomed friendly competition. Next day, his division was
to have its chance. The combined armies were to advance against the Boers’ strong-point west of Machadodorp, where Botha was reported to have seven thousand men and fifteen guns.69 Lyttelton did not expect much of a ‘show’: worse luck, for nothing would have suited him better than to have a chance of finishing the enemy off. He was afraid they would keep up their new sort of war – ‘hovering about, sniping at very long range, & occasionally making a pounce on our communications’ – for weeks, even months.70

  This final phase of the advance of the Natal army had begun on 7 August, when Buller pushed up twelve thousand men – Lyttelton’s infantry and Dundonald’s mounted brigade, with forty guns – leaving the rest of his force as a garrison in the rear. Buller had chosen Lyttelton’s division as a compliment partly to its commander, partly to the men themselves, who were, with the exception of the Inniskillings, all from the battalions who had survived the siege of Ladysmith. It seemed appropriate that the battalions who had had the misfortune to initiate the war should be given a chance of concluding it.

  Lyttelton himself reciprocated the compliment; he had mellowed a good deal in his feelings towards Buller. ‘Buller has learnt much and we have every confidence in him,’ he wrote on 8 August, and though his views about ‘Sitting Bull’ (the new nickname) fluctuated, as they did about Lord Bobs and Kitchener, he was, in a fashion, loyal to his own chief.71 True, he did not think Buller’s recent victories – victories, as we shall see, on the advance into the Transvaal – had been especially testing; and he flattered himself in private that he had taught Buller a few lessons, and generally kept him up to scratch. On the other hand, the blunders over on the western side – the endless ‘unfortunate incidents’ reported in Roberts’s despatches – these blunders had taught Lyttelton much about Buller. There was something to be said for Buller’s slow-but-sure strategy after all. The shortcomings of Roberts’s ‘sudden rapid pounces’ (the tiger-spring strategy) were now clear to Lyttelton. As he said, ‘It makes it very difficult to safeguard his communications or to make proper arrangements for his hospitals, & it also usually involves prolonged halts to make good these shortcomings, during which the enemy has time to pull himself together. It is a question whether a slower but continuous advance is not sometimes better.’72 He had warmed to Buller’s point of view, when considering that the advance in Natal had been delayed weeks by the blunders in the Free State.

  He also blamed Roberts for his failure to evacuate his typhoid patients promptly by train to the base hospitals, using supply trains going back empty. He had no doubt that the failure of Roberts’s cavalry was partly Kitchener’s fault. ‘I hear that both horses and men are in a most dilapidated state... they all combine in cursing Kitchener....73

  Praise from Lyttelton, even if only the product of his disenchantment with Roberts and Kitchener, was praise indeed; for Lyttelton was a military member of the new imperialist élite, in whose eyes Buller was profoundly suspect.74 By contrast, Lord Dundonald, an old friend of Buller’s, took personal pride in the change that had come over the fortunes of his chief. He contrasted the unbroken run of success of the Natal army – not a gun, not a wagon captured in their two-hundred-mile advance from Ladysmith – with the tales of disaster from Roberts’s side. He also contrasted their own self-restraint with the practice of collective punishment by looting and farm-burning now officially sanctioned by Roberts. Buller refused to sanction either, and woe betide the marauder who fell into the hands of the Chief! Dundonald agreed that collective punishments were neither fair nor politic. Attacks on the railway were not the work of locals; ‘and when once these farms were burnt the country round became a desert and their owners inveterate haters of the British’.75

  Buller himself did not spell out his reasons for opposing farm burning. One can guess them. Twenty years before, he had raised a troop of Light Horse among the Boers of this part of the Transvaal. There was hardly a man in the Wakkerstroom district who did not have a relation who had fought with Buller against the Zulus.76 And he had not only a personal and humanitarian objection. Buller, as we saw, differed radically from Roberts on the question of the strategy to pursue after the capture of Bloemfontein and the relief of Ladysmith. Buller believed the priority was to destroy the armies of the enemy in the field, not occupy their towns, and burn their farms. Hence he had wanted to push on and attack Botha’s army in north Natal immediately after the relief of Ladysmith, while he had Botha on the run. And hence his belief, expressed in aggrieved tones to Wolseley in early April: ‘If I had been allowed to go on I feel certain that I should have been at Harrismith [the railway terminus on the Natal-Free State border] with the railway behind me and Natal clear south of Ingagane by [April] the 11th.’77

  Instead, Roberts, as we saw, had set his heart on the psychological effects of capturing Pretoria. So he postponed both Buller’s objectives – clearing Natal and crushing De Wet and the Free Staters. He ordered Hunter’s division to join him, and so reduced Buller’s mobile force to three infantry divisions and two cavalry brigades. And he had told Buller in March and April to stay ‘strictly on the defensive’. (It must be said that Buller interpreted these orders more strictly than Roberts intended.) The wrangle between the two men continued throughout April and early May. Roberts proposed that Buller send another division north-west across the Drakensberg, and that he should then join him on the Vaal for a converging thrust on Pretoria. Buller insisted on the need to cross the Biggarsberg and clear the main railway northwards. Eventually Buller had got his own way. Roberts’s five divisions made their tiger-spring on to Pretoria, unassisted. Buller took his three divisions scrambling over the Natal passes, under the shadow of Majuba, and so into the dusty plains of the Transvaal and up to Standerton.78

  Buller found his own success understandably exhilarating. He showed no great tact (or tactics) in the wrangles with Roberts (‘I cannot help thinking the little man is not well-disposed to me,’ he naïvely confessed to his wife, ‘and will do me an ill-turn if he can.’)79 What he enjoyed was success in the field. Between 10–15 May he outflanked an estimated seven thousand Boers dug into the Biggarsberg. ‘We have had an almost perfect little expedition,’ he wrote on 15 May from Symons’s old camp at Dundee. ‘I have surprised and outmanoeuvred the Boers and have got a very considerable force out of an enormously strong position, with very small, and indeed infinitesimally small loss, only five wounded.’80 It was, indeed, one of the neatest tactical feats of the war, the proof that for Buller, too, the war could become a walk-over, given sufficient troops.

  On 6-12 June, he repeated the trick, in the spectacularly difficult country around Majuba. The Boers, led by Louis Botha’s brother, Christian, and estimated at ten thousand, had built miles of intricate entrenchments to guard the main passes, including Laing’s Nek. Buller left Clery’s division to mark them. Meanwhile, Hildyard’s division pushed through a minor pass over the Drakensberg to the west, fought a brief battle at Alleman’s Nek, and so outflanked the Boers at Laing’s Nek without more ado.81

  To take such a famous strong-point – the Gibraltar of Natal – without a shot delighted Buller. It had been ‘a sort of fetish with them’, he gathered from the prisoners. ‘To have been kicked out of it... after all their preparations’ seemed to him ‘the hardest knock the Boers have had in this war’. And what pleased him most, so he told his wife, was the telegram that arrived from Roberts four hours after Buller had captured the nek. Roberts told him ‘the Boers were at least 4500 strong on Laings Nek with 14 guns and were determined to fight and that I was not to try and turn them out as it was too great a risk of heavy loss – and I had already turned them out. That was rather pleasant.’82

  The Natal army had spent the next six weeks by turns advancing then consolidating their hold on the south-east of the Transvaal. There was much to be done: the first task, strategically, was to open the second railway line from the sea to Pretoria, the Natal line down which Joubert had poured his troops before the outbreak of war. The railway tunnel at Lain
g’s Nek, dynamited by the Boers, was brought back into service by Girouard’s railway gangs. A prize of eighteen engines, intact except for their connecting rods (some Africans found them buried), was captured at Standerton. On 4 July, units of the two armies – Buller’s and Roberts’s – first met. The linking of the Natal railway with Pretoria, accomplished a few days later, transformed the supply situation from Roberts’s point of view. Prinsloo’s surrender, at the end of the month, averted the main threat to Buller’s lines of communication posed by the commandos in the Free State. So, by early August, the way was at last clear for the combined armies –Roberts’s from the west, Buller’s from the south – to strike at Botha.83

  Meanwhile, as significant as the meeting of the two armies was the meeting of the two commanders. Nothing is so striking in the story of the feud between Buller and Roberts, that had bedevilled each stage of the war, than the simple fact that the two men had never met in their lives. Roberts was the leader of the ‘Indians’; Buller the second-in-command of the ‘Africans’. That was enough to cripple their co-operation. Then, on 7 July in Pretoria, they first met face to face. But if this first meeting in Pretoria was somewhat chilly (Roberts was haunted by the thought of who had issued those orders that had killed Freddy at Colenso), both men did their best to bury the hatchet – for the time being.84

  Their second meeting took place at Belfast on 25 August, as soon as Roberts arrived to direct the combined attack on Botha’s army. Buller was impatient at Roberts’s slowness. Privately, he grumbled at the splendid chances Roberts had made him lose. He had arrived at Carolina, thirty miles to the south, on the 14th, and there he was told to halt till the 22nd – ‘a pity, as during this week Kruger with us so near will certainly move back from Machadodorp, while if I had forced right forward from Carolina or Machadodorp I should certainly have caught some of his staff, and I was quite strong enough to do so.... It is an unfortunate delay, at an unfortunate moment....’85