The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Botha was allowed by Kitchener to send a cypher cable to Kruger, to consult him about peace terms. The cables were exchanged by way of the Dutch Consul-General in the Transvaal. There followed much the same pattern as at Middelburg: British hopes raised; the Transvaal, as peace-maker, apparently anxious to persuade the Free State to come to terms; then a devil-may-care challenge, signed by the acting Presidents of both so-called governments, that they would accept no terms short of preserving their independence.41

  In mid-July, British intelligence at the War Office broke the cypher used in the cables to Kruger. The cypher turned out to be in French, based on dictionaries, and was jointly cracked, according to an unpublished account, by a cryptographer in Ireland and the assistant librarian at the War Office Intelligence Department.

  The cables showed how confident President Steyn felt of his ability to continue the struggle. True, they also confirmed that Botha and the Transvaal were genuinely anxious for peace. But Steyn appeared to be able to paralyse Botha’s peace efforts indefinitely.42 Ironically, Steyn himself had a hair’s-breadth escape, in his shirt-sleeves, from his laager at Reitz that same week in July. Brigadier-General Broadwood surrounded it and captured twenty-nine other members of the ‘government’, £11,500 (including 800 sovereigns) and all the government papers. The papers confirmed that the Transvaal was in dire straits, but also that Steyn was determined to prevent a surrender.43

  These were the British successes that Kitchener seized on to show the danger of abandoning the sweep-and-scour policy. Why weaken their grip, on the enemy just when this strategy was beginning to succeed? He used the opposite argument when pointing to the enemy’s own occasional flashes of success.

  In general, the commandos in the last few months had dealt only pin-pricks to the elephantine hide of Kitchener’s army of 250,000. (A number he disputed, pointing out that his ‘effective’ army was only 156,000, and the number able to pursue the enemy only half that.)44 True, the commandos regularly raided the railway lines and blew up trains, causing general irritation, and sometimes even casualties. They even dynamited Modderfontein, one of the Rand mines.45 But the latter was a unique incident (after this, the mines had to be protected) and attacks on the railway tended to decline as the year wore on. The main guerrilla threat was to the empty veld.

  Occasionally, however, the columns hunting a needle in the haystack got their fingers badly cut On 29 May, Brigadier-General H. G. Dixon, combing the south-west Transvaal alongside General Babington, Colonel Rawlinson and Lord Methuen, was attacked near his camp at Vlakfontein. Dixon had been searching for buried guns. He had been given information which proved false, not so the information which General Kemp and 1,500 Boers had been given about him. Kemp, one of the most daring of the new men whom guerrilla warfare had thrust to the front, snapped up Dixon’s rearguard, and captured two guns. The guns were recaptured, but the action cost Dixon 49 men killed and 130 wounded.46

  The battle was not even a clear tactical victory for Kemp, as he left forty-one men dead on the field and was forced to flee as soon as Dixon’s fellow-commanders lumbered up to reinforce him. The direct strategic result of Vlakfontein was nil: the columns continued the combing operation undeterred. Yet the psychological effect – the capacity to prolong the war – of this and similar actions seemed to Kitchener serious enough.

  Most serious of all was the effect of Kritzinger’s ‘invasion’ of Cape Colony, which had now been in progress for seven months. In itself, this seemed a small enough affair: a midget army of about two thousand (half of whom were believed to be Cape rebels), without much food or ammunition or the means to concentrate and deal an effective military blow.47 Provided they were kept hustled, they could be kept weak and dispersed. Yet as a symbol of the unbroken spirit of the two republics, of the idea of militant republicanism mounted, so to speak, on horseback and galloping across British territory, this Lilliputian commando had to be destroyed as a matter of urgency.

  Hence Kitchener’s second line of argument: to reduce my army is out of the question until I have cleared the Cape.

  As soon as Milner had set sail again for South Africa, the full weight of Kitchener’s counter-attack on the Cabinet developed. He proposed a new stick-and-carrot policy of his own: mild, one-year sentences for Cape rebels who surrendered voluntarily; otherwise, death sentences for Cape rebels captured in arms; lenient treatment for burghers of the Transvaal and Free State who surrendered voluntarily; otherwise, first fines and then confiscation of their goods, and permanent banishment for the leaders.48

  The Cabinet were forced back on to the defensive. They blocked Kitchener’s wildest ideas – including a plan to deport the women and children from South Africa to join their husbands abroad;49 and, as the alternative, to pay the entire cost of the concentration camps by selling property belonging to the men out on commando.50 They also protested at the brutal circumstances in which Kitchener had allowed General French to execute some captured Cape rebels at Dordrecht; the townspeople had been forced to witness these public executions.51 When Kitchener rounded on Brodrick – let me take a ‘strong line’ and I’ll finish the war quickly – he was quietly reminded that ‘severity’ had not proved itself a great success so far.52 On the major issues, the bitter wrangle continued. Kitchener was forced to accept a much-diluted version of a proposed new proclamation, warning the Boers to expect tougher measures after 15 September.53 The Cabinet had to accept that if the proclamation failed (as it did fail) there would be no troop reductions after all and the government would be heavily out of pocket. They would have to go crawling to Parliament to ask for extra money.’54

  Meanwhile, the Fawcett Commission – that daring experiment, a ladies-only commission to report on the concentration camps – embarked on their work. From August to December, they steamed up and down the veld in their special second-class train.55 They had one important political qualification, these industrious ladies: they all believed that the war was just, and that this in turn justified certain unpleasant measures directed at the civilian population.

  This was the crux of the difference between them and the friends of Emily Hobhouse.56 Otherwise, they were a diverse band. Mrs Millicent Fawcett, the lady chairman, was both an active Liberal Unionist and an active feminist, the leader of the women’s suffrage movement. Lady Knox was the wife of Major-General Sir William Knox, Kitchener’s general. The four other ladies included a nurse from Guy’s Hospital and two doctors already in South Africa (one of whom married a camp official during the tour).’57

  They presented their official report in December; meanwhile, their comments were constructive and pungent. If Brodrick expected them to add a ladylike coat of whitewash to the camps, Brodrick was in for a surprise. They were not objective (who ever could be in a war?) but they tried to be fair.

  By 18 September, the ladies had already surveyed seven of the camps in the ORC, including those visited by Emily Hobhouse. Their impressions were predictably mixed. Sometimes they saw an incongruous game of lawn tennis being played in the camps.58 Occasionally, when they tramped along the dusty lines of white tents, someone would hurl out abuse at them: ‘De British not able to conquer de men, are now making war on de women and children.’ (They responded, somewhat tactlessly, by reminding them how the Boers treated the womenfolk of the Zulus and Basutos they had beaten in battle.) But generally they were received as politely as Emily Hobhouse had been received; and they were touched by the way most of the Boer vrouws accepted their good intentions.59

  In their criticisms of the camp system, Mrs Fawcett and her Commission confirmed in all essentials the accuracy of Emily Hobhouse’s account, and the long-overdue nature of her proposed reforms. Indeed, their chief recommendations went further:

  Forty trained nurses to be sent out immediately to South Africa.

  A ‘strong effort’ to be made to improve the railway transport allocated to camps.

  Rations to be raised by ½ lb rice per week

  Where no other fuel
was available, coal rations to be at least 1½ lb a day.

  Wood to be provided for bedsteads, so no internees had to sleep on the ground

  Every camp to have proper apparatus for sterilizing linen used by typhoid patients.

  A travelling inspector of camps to be appointed.

  To this list they soon added the following:

  Water boilers to be provided enough to boil all drinking water.

  Vegetables to be added to the rations.

  Camp matrons to be appointed as rapidly as possible.

  They gave similar recommendations to the Natal and Transvaal administrations. In due course, they visited thirty-three white concentration camps (though a characteristic flaw in their philanthropy was in their failure to help, or even visit, a single camp for Africans; there were thirty-one camps for Africans in the ORC alone). They concluded that the whole scale of rations was too low, and advised additions in a long list of items, including bread, sugar, coffee, and milk, as well as fuel and soap.60

  Such were their general recommendations. On individual camps, their comments were occasionally flattering, often not. They were impressed by Norvals Pont, and recommended energetic young Mr Cole Bowen (just as Emily Hobhouse had recommended him months before) to be made travelling inspector. They were shocked by the state of the hospital at Bloemfontein camp, where there were no arrangements to sterilize linen infected by typhoid patients. They were still more shocked by the camp at Brandfort, where an epidemic killed 337 (nearly a tenth of the inmates of the whole camp) in the first three weeks of October. There were three other camps where they blamed grossly incompetent staff, and recommended complete reorganization.61

  Often, too, they blamed the army. At Heilbron, Kitchener’s men sent a new wave of measles-infected internees into the town, which swamped all facilities:

  The death-rate was very heavy, 10 dying on one of the nights of the Commission’s visit. Though some of the houses were comfortable, others were miserable sheds or stables, and one hovel was one surely meant for a pig or perhaps some poor native and yet a young girl, dangerously ill, lay in it…. There is barely language too strong to express our opinion of the sending of a mass of disease to a healthy camp; but the cemetery at Heilbron tells the price paid in lives for the terrible mistake.62

  But Mrs Fawcett’s most damning criticisms (the old criticisms about failure to follow elementary rules of sanitation) were reserved for Mafeking. Emily Hobhouse had visited Mafeking camp in April and found morale low. On 20 August the special train, bearing Mrs Fawcett and her ladies, steamed into the town. They found the camp exceptionally dirty. Women were washing clothes in water fouled by excrement. Slop water was thrown on to the ground beside the tents. Latrines were not properly disinfected. The Commission warned the superintendent of the dangers of a typhoid epidemic. The superintendent paid no attention, pointing out that only forty deaths had occurred since March. By the time they returned in early November, there were four hundred deaths a month, many of them caused by typhoid.

  If anything could be missing from a camp, it was missing at Mafeking. Medicines ‘deplorably deficient’, said the Commission; ‘many deaths and no mortuary’; complete break-down in the supply of fresh meat; no rations of vegetables, although they could have been bought in the town; and, behind it all, grossly culpable neglect by the staff.63

  It was Millicent Fawcett, not Emily Hobhouse, who came closest to playing the role of Florence Nightingale in the terrible crisis that had overwhelmed the camps. There was a touch of steel about Millicent, masculine steel (though she would never have used that adjective as a compliment; men could be such idiots!), and a professionalism that made Kitchener look like a bungling amateur. She did not mince her words when she told Milner the facts of death in the camps.64 The terrible mortality figures had continued to rise, contrary to Brodrick’s assurances, based on Kitchener’s ridiculously ill-informed forecasts: August — 1,878 deaths among 105,347 white ‘refugees’ and 467 among 32,272 coloured ones;65 September – 2,411 deaths among 109,418 whites, about 600 among 38,549 coloured people;66 October – 3,156 deaths among 111,619 whites, 698 deaths among 43,780 coloured people. These October statistics were now plague-high, proportionately as well as absolutely: 34.4 per cent., calculated as an annual death-rate for white inmates of all ages; 62.9 per cent. for children in the ORC, 58.5 per cent, for children in the Transvaal.

  At individual camps like Mafeking, the October figures represented an annual death-rate of 173 per cent.67

  Mrs Fawcett spelt out the causes to Milner. The deaths were not simply the result of circumstances beyond the control of the British. True, her Commission attributed the epidemics partly to the especially insanitary conditions of wartime South Africa, and to the almost total devastation of the country. They also blamed the unhygienic habits of the Boer women (‘even at the best of times, the Boer woman has a horror of ventilation. … It is not easy to describe the pestilential atmosphere of the tents … the Saxon word “stinking” is the only one which is appropriate.’) But the Fawcett Commission pointed a feminine finger at the military (and, of course, male) red tape in which the camps had been trussed: the spread of the epidemics should have been foreseen; elementary rules of sanitation should not have been forgotten; vegetables should have been provided; doctors and nurses should have been rushed to the scene from England when the epidemics first broke out.68

  These were the formal conclusions reported by Millicent Fawcett and her ladies in December. Of course, they were of no comfort to the government. But Chamberlain had at long last got the message. And it is clear he recognized the ultimate causes of the catastrophe: Milner was in theory the man responsible for the camps, but the main decisions (or their absence) had been left to the soldiers, to whom the, life or death of the 154,000 Boer and African civilians in the camps rated as an abysmally low priority.

  In mid-November, Chamberlain cabled to Milner what amounted to a rebuke. He assumed that Milner was now in a position to exercise ‘full control of the arrangements for all camps’. In that case, ‘it is necessary… that I should be satisfied that all possible steps are being taken to reduce the rate of mortality, especially among children, and that full and early reports should be sent to me….’ A few days later, he added, with a blinding glimpse of the obvious, ‘If you are in any need of trained men … you must not fail to ask for such assistance’, which could easily be obtained in India.69

  Milner’s reaction verged on panic. The women and children would ‘all be dead by the spring of 1903. Only I shall not be there to see as the continuance of the present state of affairs for another two or three months will undoubtedly blow us all out of the water.’70

  In fact, the terrible mortality figures were at last declining. The commonsense of the Fawcett Commission had a magical effect on the annual death-rate, which was to fall by February to 6.9 per cent, and soon to 2 per cent., less than the average in Glasgow.71

  Ten months after the subject had first been raised in Parliament, Lloyd George’s taunts and CB’s harsh words at the Holborn Restaurant had been vindicated. In the interval, at least twenty thousand whites and twelve thousand coloured people had died in the concentration camps, the majority from epidemics of measles and typhoid that could have been avoided.72

  Meanwhile, things were at last stirring in the long-static guerrilla war. Kitchener’s sweep-and-scour policy was beginning to work. And, deprived of their old bases in the ex-republics, the Boers were forced to try the dangerous experiment of raiding the Cape and Natal.

  CHAPTER 40

  Raiding the Colonies

  Cape Colony and Natal,

  3 September—December 1901

  ‘Dams everywhere full of rotting animals; water undrinkable. Veld covered with slaughtered herds of sheep and goats, cattle and horses. The horror passes description … Surely such outrages on man and nature will lead to certain doom.’

  Jan Smuts’s diary, 7 Aug 1901, while he and his 200 men were trekking through the Fr
ee State

  Smuts decided to make for Kiba Drift, with his 250 men, the moment that Commandant Wessels got back from patrol. It was 3 September, and the light was already failing. Ahead of them lay a long, dark line, the Up of the great canyon cut by the Orange River as it comes swirling out of the mountains of Basutoland. Wessels had brought a local farmer, a veteran of the Basuto War, to guide them over the river. For several days, Smuts’s men had been scouring the brown veld to the north, hunting for a suitable drift. The Orange River was still low – the spring rains had not yet broken – but every sandy footpath leading down to the river seemed to be blocked by files of white tents.1

  Except the bridle path to Kiba Drift, the path to the Native Reserve at Herschel. It was still open – that night. On his return, Wessels confirmed that they must go at once. The Khakis were sweeping down from the north, clouds of them.2

  ‘Up saddle.’ People recognized the General, ‘Oom Jannie’ (‘Uncle Jannie’), by his pointed yellow beard, clipped in the French style, the grey riding breeches, and the cluster of staff, including three heliographers.3 Most of the other men, like most of the Boer guerrillas everywhere, were dressed in rags. Deneys Reitz, the irrepressible eighteen-year-old son of Kruger’s State Secretary, belonged to a group who called themselves, ironically, the Rijk section – the ‘Dandy Fifth’. He had no shirt under his ragged coat, and his raw-hide sandals had been patched and repatched for eight months.

  A few men wore khaki uniforms captured from the British (a dangerous blessing, it would soon prove).4 Others carried British Lee Metfords slung over their backs. Apart from these trophies, the commando was short of nearly everything: no medical supplies, little Mauser ammunition. They had plenty of horses – perhaps two apiece, as well as the pack animals. But forage was scarce at that time of the winter.5