The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  The tactical problem that now presented itself was troublesome to Roberts – more troublesome, because of the terrain, than the similar problem at Diamond Hill in early June. Botha’s army – estimated at seven thousand men, with twenty guns, including several Long Toms – straddled the main watershed that carried the railway between Belfast and Kruger’s HQ farther east. As usual, Botha’s men were virtually all mounted. So they had been able to extend their front to twenty miles. And the appalling country either side of the railway – deep ravines to the north, streams and bogs to the south – made their flanks still more impregnable. As usual, the British had the overwhelming advantage of numbers – nineteen thousand men, with eighty-two guns – but less than five thousand of these men were mounted.86 At first, Roberts planned to outflank Botha on the east, where the bogs were. Fortunately for his reputation (Roberts’s cavalry might well have got into a worse mess than at Diamond Hill), he was dissuaded. Buller’s own plan was adopted: Lyttelton’s two infantry brigades to attack near the centre of the line, supported by a converging artillery barrage; French’s cavalry to push round by the Lydenburg road to the north. Roberts accepted this plan, perhaps reluctantly. For his own infantry, the Guards Brigade, under his favourite, ‘Polly’ Carew, were left without a role.87

  The Battle of Belfast (alias Bergendal), the last set-piece battle of any size in the war, began on 27 August with a cavalry strike and then the usual artillery barrage. Buller had spotted the tactical key to Botha’s position.88 It was a big red kopje near a farm called Bergendal, a jumble of fantastic boulders, spread across three acres, whose own great natural strength belied its fatal weakness in relation to Botha’s defence line. Like a miniature Spion Kop, it jutted out in a salient from the centre of Botha’s twenty-mile front. Unlike Spion Kop, it could not be supported from sides or rear, owing to the ground that screened Botha’s view but gave Buller’s massed artillery a field-day. So Botha had entrusted the crucial kopje to sixty men of his élite: the Zarps, alias the Johannesburg Police. They were given a pom-pom and ordered to hold it to the end.

  The Zarps did exactly that. Their Last Stand out-rednecked the rednecks. How ironic that the notorious Zarps, the ‘bully-boys’ of Johannesburg, the epitome of the brutal Boer, who had helped precipitate the war by shooting Tom Edgar – how ironic that it should be these men who now came to be regarded by the British as heroes cast in their own mould. Down crashed the thunderstorm of lyddite on that single, isolated red nob of boulders: a three-hour broadside of naval guns, howitzers and field-guns – forty guns, grinding and hammering that strong-point to powder. And the Zarps took it on the jaw like Tommies. ‘No ordinary Dutchman would have held on like that,’ said Lyttelton admiringly. It must be a ‘perfect inferno’.89

  About 2.30 p.m., Buller gave the nod to Lyttelton, and Lyttelton let loose four battalions of infantry: Lieutenant-Colonel Metcalfe, with Lyttelton’s own regiment, the Rifle Brigade, converging from the left, supported by the Devon-shires; the weaker Inniskillings (after their disastrous losses on the Tugela they were mainly raw militia) and the Gordons behind them. By now, Lyttelton thought that the Zarps’ resistance had been crushed. Yet, though the artillery still hammered the kopje ahead of the advancing infantry, the surviving Zarps had only held their fire. As the infantry went over the skyline, Lyttelton saw his riflemen ‘falling pretty thick, but there was little flinching’. The Inniskillings, by contrast, ‘came under porn-porn fire & forthwith ran away but were rallied and came on again’. Both battalions, still under the screen of artillery, converged for the final charge on the kopje. Their own losses were severe, especially in officers: Metcalfe and six other officers wounded, three dead (all of the Rifle Brigade); a hundred men wounded or missing, and twelve dead. But when they captured the smoking remains of the kopje, they found that, for once, the enemy had suffered severely, too: fourteen dead bodies (including a police lieutenant’s) lay there beside their post; nineteen prisoners were taken (of whom eight, including the commander, were wounded); other wounded had been removed by the Boers. As a force, the Zarps had been annihilated.90

  The storming of the kopje achieved much more. Buller had smashed open the weak joint in Botha’s armour. At once, the Boer lines caved in along the whole front (pursued, with the usual lack of success, by the over-weighted and underarmed British cavalry).91 But it was a crushing victory, and Roberts was most impressed by Lyttelton. ‘The best of it,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘was that it was done under Bobs’s own eye, & he was delighted with the manner in which the Natal Army fought. He told Buller that he did not think the Koppie [sic] could be carried.’92 Buller was understandably delighted too. ‘Here I am, as happy as a pig,’ he wrote to his wife, Lady Audrey, three days after the battle.

  We had a very pretty little fight on Monday, with [the] Field Marshal and the whole Guards Brigade looking on, so we had plenty of swagger. Certainly it went off very well and exactly as I could have wished. I got on to Machadodorp the next day, then up the Berg and the following day executed a manoeuvre which I think procured the release of all the [2000 British] prisoners at [the POW camp at] Nooitgedacht. Tomorrow I am off to Lydenburg having just missed catching Kruger. I hope to catch him next time. The end cannot be far off now I do believe, but between you and me I wish the Field Marshal would move a bit quicker. He lets so many chances slip....

  Today I have a very nice telegram from the Queen, and I hope the fight has been thought something of in England. It was a very difficult job and came off well so I was really pleased, and it was not the least pleasure that I defeated the army and opened the road to Machadodorp, while Lord Roberts’ army, which had got there before me, had missed the chance and had to sit looking on. What a beast I am! I don’t mean that. But the men liked it.93

  In September and October, Buller’s two divisions plodded northwards among the misty gorges and precipices of the Mauchberg – Spitzkop, Hell’s Gate – that culminate in the great eastern escarpment of the Transvaal. It was God-given country for Boer tactics. Buller’s veterans manoeuvred the commandos out of a series of Spion Kops with less than a hundred casualties. Botha’s northern army, now only 2,500 strong, concentrated on flight.94 At the end of October, Buller took the train for Durban and sailed for Southampton. By British crowds, he was to be given a hero’s welcome.95 (Buller behaves ‘as if he was Napoleon after Austerlitz’, grumbled one of Kitchener’s friends.)96 The British government’s welcome was to be less rapturous. Despite eight months of unbroken success in an independent command, at the head of a third of the British fighting force, Buller was to be given no official honour of any kind – though Roberts gloomily predicted Buller would be given a peerage. Roberts himself was to be given an earldom and £100,000, and was to be appointed to succeed Wolseley as C-in-C in December 1900, as soon as he returned.97 Buller was packed off to his pre-war job, training the Army Corps at Aldershot.

  It was a quiet ending to the long feud between ‘Africans’ and ‘Indians’. So it seemed. Even Ian Hamilton, the most partisan of the ‘Indians’, conceded that in the last phase of the campaign Buller had ‘handled his troops very well indeed’. He said that Buller ‘certainly was generous’ in his acknowledgements to him. On his own part, Hamilton confessed he no longer felt that ‘strong dislike of him amounting to hatred’ he had felt hitherto.98

  But a different future lay ahead. In January 1901 – in the first month of the new century, and the last of the old Queen’s reign – Roberts and the ‘Indians’ returned to claim their kingdom at the Horse Guards from Wolseley. The old wounds reopened; the feud between Buller and Roberts was resumed. St John Brodrick, the new War Minister, compared their feuding to the wrangles between Lucan and Cardigan. He did his best, he claimed, to keep the peace; but Buller was ‘impracticable’.99 In October 1901, Roberts and Brodrick concerted a plan for a ‘coup’ (Roberts’s phrase) against Buller.100” Roberts’s clever young protégé, Leo Amery, wrote an anonymous letter to The Times, taunting Buller with the so-called ‘surrende
r telegram’, in which Buller was supposed to have ordered General White to surrender Ladysmith; the government had refused Buller permission to publish the true text. Buller then blurted it out at an official lunch at which Amery was present.101 Roberts threatened to resign if the Cabinet would not allow him to have Buller sacked for indiscipline.102 Roberts was given Buller’s head on a plate.

  Buller’s sacking set the seal on Roberts’s victory in the war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Indians’ that had bedevilled the war against the Boers. In succeeding years, most historians have sided with Roberts, beguiled by Leo Amery’s masterly polemic, in The Times History of the War in South Africa. I have tried to restore a balance in our judgement of Buller. It is my view that Amery and his school have used a double standard, over-generous to Roberts, over-harsh to Buller.103 Neither Buller nor Roberts can be rated as great generals, judged on their performance in South Africa. The great generals of this war were to prove exclusively Boer: Botha, Christiaan De Wet, De la Rey, perhaps Smuts. On the other hand, Buller’s achievements have been obscured by his mistakes. In 1909, a French military critic, General Langlois, pointed out that it was Buller, not Roberts, who had had the toughest job in the war – and it was Buller who was the innovator in countering Boer tactics. The proper use of cover, of infantry advancing in rushes, co-ordinated in turn with creeping barrages of artillery: these were the tactics of truly modern war, first evolved by Buller in Natal. And, as General Langlois said, ‘he is entitled to a share of the glory which in England appears to have gone almost exclusively to Lord Roberts’.104

  Buller’s most obvious limitation, that emerges from a study of his hitherto unpublished papers, was not, as his enemies claimed, any lack of self-confidence. On the contrary, he was too self-contained – and isolated from his colleagues. Later, he blamed himself for not having insisted that he be allowed to choose his own generals and staff for the South Africa expedition. He blamed himself for his outburst to Lansdowne and White after Colenso. In this self-appraisal he was surely correct. But these were not the errors of a weak, vacillating man. And they were partly the result of a situation that was not of Buller’s making and would have proved intensely frustrating to anyone – the feud between ‘Indians’ and ‘Africans’.

  By contrast, Roberts’s principal defect as a commander was impatience. It was this that had landed him in a series of administrative blunders that marred all his successes: the immobility of his cavalry, the break-down of his transport, leading in turn to the break-down of his hospital service, and his crowning error – to imagine in the autumn of 1900 that he had as good as won the war.

  The war was ‘practically’ over. That was what Roberts told an audience in Durban at the beginning of December.105 President Kruger, after weeks as a fugitive in a railway carriage, had finally crossed over the border of Mozambique on 11 September and taken ship for Europe. (The Gelderland, a Dutch cruiser, was sent to fetch him.) Routed at the Battle of Belfast, Botha’s army split into fragments. They were pursued by three British armies: Buller’s in the north; French’s at the centre; while Pole-Carew and Ian Hamilton plodded east, sweeping three thousand Boers before them down the railway line to Komati Poort and the Mozambique frontier. The British inflicted few casualties. About two thousand Boers and foreign volunteers surrendered to the Portuguese colonial authorities after making a spectacular bonfire of fifteen hundred railway trucks and their contents – and abandoning their last Long Tom and the last British 12-pounders captured at Sannah’s Post. Most of these Boers were later returned to the Transvaal after taking the oath of allegiance; five hundred foreign volunteers, including a hundred of MacBride’s ‘Irish Brigade’, were repatriated to Europe and America.106 On 25 October – six weeks after publishing it in Army Orders – Roberts jauntily proclaimed the annexation of the Transvaal. He proposed to hand over the command to Kitchener early in November, and return to England by way of Durban after a sombre visit to Natal to see poor Freddy’s grave near Colenso.107

  What of the thirty thousand Boers still at large in the Free State and the Western Transvaal, including De Wet, Botha and De la Rey? Characteristically, Roberts gave the public the impression that he opposed harsh measures to stamp out the embers of the war. In fact, he ordered his generals like Hunter, to continue to extend the use of farm burning as a means of denying food to the guerrillas and punishing their civilian supporters. According to official records, October brought a bumper crop of burnt farms. All over the Free State that spring, the blue sky was tainted with the black smoke of burning homesteads.108 To one of his admirers, Roberts confessed that he had perhaps erred on the side of weakness in the past. He would ‘starve into submission’ the last of these ‘banditti’, as though he were leading a punitive expedition on the Indian frontier.109 He would be home for Christmas.

  Painful events, as it turned out, delayed his departure for England. The Queen’s soldier grandson, Prince Christian Victor, died of typhoid in Pretoria; perhaps his death hastened the Queen’s own end. And Roberts’s daughter, Aileen, nearly died of typhoid, too. So he did not reach England till January 1901.110

  By then, the whole strategic map had changed once again. Roberts was right when he told his audience in Durban that the war was ‘practically over’. So it was: the war of set-piece battles. But a new war – just as costly in time and money and human lives, and far more bitter, because it directly involved civilians – had only just begun.

  PART IV

  Kitchener’s Peace

  ‘I do not want any incentive to do what is possible to finish… I think I hate the country, the people, the whole thing more every day.’

  Lord Kitchener to St John Brodrick, the new War Minister, 1901

  SENDING THE INNOCENTS TO HEAVEN.

  CHAPTER 36

  A Muddy Election

  London, Autumn 1900

  ‘You see, I had read a book,’ the Knight went on in a dreamy far-away tone, ‘written by someone to prove that warfare under modern conditions was impossible. You may imagine how disturbing that was to a man of my profession. Many men would have thrown the whole thing up and gone home. But I grappled with the situation. You will never guess what I did.’

  Alice pondered. ‘You went to war, of course —’

  ‘Yes, but not under modern conditions.’

  The White Knight (Lord Lansdowne) explaining the Cabinet’s war policy in Saki’s satire Alice in Westminster, autumn 1900

  The news that the war was ‘practically’ over came as no surprise to the government; a well deserved victory, if somewhat belated. Lansdowne’s own feelings of disappointment at the unexpected stubbornness of the Boer governments had kept pace with Roberts’s; his ear was equally well tuned to British public opinion. The public had become restive. Small wonder the war had dragged on three months since the triumphant entry into Pretoria.1

  In August, The Times had grumbled that this state of affairs could go on ‘indefinitely’, unless Roberts took sterner measures against the Boers. ‘As in other matters, we have pushed leniency to weakness,’ was the Thunderer’s verdict in mid-August. These guerrillas must be treated as ‘simple bandits’. The civilian population must be taught a lesson by ‘retaliatory measures’.2 Lansdowne had sent a soothing message to Roberts to say he was glad he had discarded the ‘kid glove’ policy, and started farm-burning.3 But, of course, all this was academic, now that the war was nearly over.

  Nearly, but not quite. And was it not the moment, with victory in sight, to spring a trap on the Opposition, by calling a general election? It was a paradox that a government whose talent for governing was generally reckoned so low, should now be expected to win an overwhelming majority at the polls. All the more so because their preparations for war, the conduct of the war itself, and the debates in Parliament on these subjects — especially on the hospital scandals — had confirmed their reputation for incompetence.4 But the war, which had damaged the government, had left the Liberals flat on their backs, divided into three warring par
ts – radicals, moderates, imperialists – with Campbell-Bannerman quite unable to unite them.5 Hence the need, from the government’s point of view, to spring an election before the war was over—the war in South Africa, and the war among the Opposition.

  For weeks, arguments for an early election had been anxiously debated by the government and whispered by the Press. Chamberlain, with characteristic impatience, originally plumped for June, a post-Mafeking election. Salisbury, as usual, refused to be hustled.6 Then the telegrams from South Africa had turned sour for a time. There was the Boxer Rebellion in China. After that, golf courses, grouse moors and foreign watering-places beckoned. An arid Parliamentary session expired with the rumours of dissolution still unanswered. In September, Lord Salisbury returned from his summer holiday in the Vosges, read the telegrams from South Africa, and agreed. This was the moment. They could go for a double mandate: to confirm that the war could not be ended by a compromise, this time, over Boer independence (not ‘a shred of independence’ were Salisbury’s words), and to confirm that the immediate future of the newly annexed states was for them to be governed as Crown Colonies. The opposition would be trapped. They would have to take their medicine in the election by swallowing both these distasteful propositions. Even so, they could be labelled ‘pro-Boer’, and anti-British. This was the plan agreed by the government parties.7 On 18 September, The London Gazette revealed that the Queen, at Balmoral, had duly dissolved Parliament (it was to be the last complete Parliament of her sixty-four-year-long reign) on the previous day. Polling for the election – the ‘Khaki election’, as people called it, alias the ‘patriotic election’ —would start in a fortnight.8