It was at this point, on 26 September, that Botha succumbed to a fit of over-confidence quite as serious as Gough’s – more fatal, in fact, for the Boers than Blood River Poort for the British. Botha had been told by the local burghers that these two British laagers would be easy meat, because they were not entrenched. Actually, they had not only good trenches, but good men to man them, too. Botha’s blunder was the result of poor intelligence, a failure that was usually the prerogative of the Khakis. To cap it all, the burghers threw themselves with British-style recklessness against the trenches at Fort Itala. They lost at least fifty-eight men, killed and wounded. The attack on Fort Prospect was equally brave and equally futile.50 Botha’s demoralized men scampered hastily back into the Transvaal, just as a whole herd of Khakis, fifteen thousand strong, lumbered up to overwhelm them. The invaders were now fugitives once more.
‘I must report that it was impossible for our commandos to enter Natal,’ said Botha in his official report on the expedition, ‘because the enemy were aware of our plans, and he already had laagers [forces] just opposite all the drifts of the Buffalo River…. We had specially unfavourable weather; for 11 days it rained almost day and night. This weakened the horses very much. …’51 The rain certainly added to Botha’s problems, as it added to Smuts’s. Yet the Natal invasion could never have been more than a forlorn hope. What positive military advantage could one thousand men achieve there, except to buy a little time for the Boers? And the raid itself had cost Botha some of his best men and brought the others into a cul de sac. The Zulus stood grimly on this south-east borderland, twelve thousand assegai-waving tribesmen, instructed by the British to repel invasion of their own territory.52
The fiasco of the Natal ‘invasion’ must only have confirmed what Botha, in his heart, had soberly recognized ever since Middelburg. There were no other options: only to fight to the end or to accept Kitchener’s peace.
Smuts, the enthusiast, had persuaded his colleagues that the raid into Cape Colony might achieve much more than the raid on Natal. It would not merely take the pressure off the main commandos in the republics. It would also bring a dramatic accession of strength to the cause by adding thousands of colonial Afrikaners to their ranks. Now, by the standards he had set himself, Smuts failed more completely than Botha.
In October, he broke south through Haig’s cordons in the direction of Port Elizabeth. In November (after a nightmare of hair’s-breadth escapes), he found a refuge from his pursuers near Calvinia in the Western Cape.53 But what military advantage had Smuts achieved by marching two hundred men across the length and breadth of Cape Colony, except in striking a blow to British pride?
Smuts himself put the best gloss, understandably, on his epic march. In his first report to the two governments, he listed his achievements and claimed: ‘The feeling of my burghers is strong, although they have perhaps suffered more heavily than any other commando in this war, and they look forward hopefully to the future.’54 In his secret report, by contrast, he admitted his failure in the main task he had set himself: to pave the way for De la Rey’s arrival in the colony with a large Transvaal army, and the official establishment of a Cape Afrikaner government as a third belligerent in the war. The colonial Afrikaners had decided not to join the commandos. This, Smuts claimed, was due to the shortage of horses.55 The underlying reason, which he did not admit, was that most colonial Afrikaners now believed that the republics were too weak to achieve anything by prolonging the struggle.
In January, Smuts was still writing bravely to De la Rey as though he were master of the whole west and north-west of Cape Colony. Given reinforcements, they could soon invade the rich southern heartland of the Cape, including his own homeland, Malmesbury. And Smuts claimed that he was sure there had been a dramatic change of heart in Britain, where ‘not only the English people but also the leading men are getting sick of the endless war’. The Liberals wanted to offer new peace terms which would preserve the republics’ independence. The terrible death-rate in the concentration camps, said Smuts, had turned other nations bitterly anti-British, and even influential supporters of Salisbury’s government were shocked by this fearful disaster. ‘Perhap’s God’s will,’ he told De la Rey, ‘is that through our ill-treated women and children a decisive end should be made to this war.’56
But in his heart of hearts, Smuts must now have recognized that no diversions outside the two republics (military campaigns in the Cape like his own, or political campaigns by Boer sympathizers inside Britain) could alter the grim logic of Kitchener’s ‘bag’.57 In the twelve months since Kitchener had taken over, he had hammered and beaten and ground down the Boer forces to about twenty-five thousand – roughly half their number when Roberts had left.58 If this process went on, the end would be bitter indeed.
To his brother, Kosie, Smuts sent a sombre letter of farewell: ‘I have hardly any hope of seeing you in this life.’59
CHAPTER 41
Blockhouse or Blockhead?
The New Colonies,
November 1901 – March 1902
‘This war is fast degenerating into the same kind of dacoit hunt we used to have in Burmah. The Boer is becoming just as cold-blooded a ruffian as the dacoit was and his wholesale slaughter of Kaffirs … has I think forfeited his right to be considered a belligerent. I found the bodies of four Kaffir boys none of them over 12 years of age with their heads broken in by the Boers and left in the Kraal of their fathers. Strong measures will be required to stop this slaughter.’
Colonel Rawlinson to Lord Roberts 28 August 1901
‘Who would have thought when you left Johannesburg,’ wrote Kitchener ruefully to Roberts at the end of November 1901, ‘that I should be a year in command with the war still going on?’1
Then, a few days later, Kitchener saw, at long last, light at the end of the tunnel. The war should be over by April. This was the forecast he made to Brodrick on 13 December. ‘I think we can fairly count on the Boers not keeping us here after April.’ He confided to Roberts by the same post: ‘I think about April we shall have pretty well exhausted the boers [sic], and so enclosed them in areas that they will find it very hard to keep up much form of resistance…. The blockhouse system is telling very well. …’2 And, by April, the South African winter would be upon the survivors. Then the drought and the frost would burn the grass as yellow as a Coloured man’s skin, adding the final touch to the havoc created by Kitchener. No grass, no war – was the equation as simple as this? Now that the guerrillas were almost completely dependent on grass to feed their ponies (the hay had vanished in smoke), surely winter must freeze them to immobility.
For once, Kitchener’s forecast was almost correct, though there were to be other reasons than blockhouses, and no grass, that were to bring the Boers to their knees. And there were to be dark days in March, when the light in the tunnel would flicker and fail, before Kitchener finally escaped, sadder and perhaps even wiser, from the humiliations of victory in South Africa.
The turning-point of the guerrilla war – that is, the beginning of Kitchener’s final, successful phase – had begun in late November. It followed a phase of intense frustration, which precipitated one of those extraordinary spasms of near-despair on Kitchener’s part, no less alarming to his staff because these volcanic eruptions were so rare.
It was soon after Kitchener read the news of Buller’s downfall. Not that this event depressed him. He was in close enough alliance with the Roberts Ring to know how well this coup against Buller could serve his own career. He told Roberts, ‘However sorry one may be for Buller, the example will have I am sure a most salutary effect throughout an army where … strict discipline is much wanted.’3 However, the Press campaign against Buller had whetted the Press’s appetites. In early November, Kitchener learnt that an article had appeared in The Spectator denouncing him for incompetence, and calling for his removal.
These spiteful attacks in The Spectator, perhaps prompted by Milner, a close friend of the editor’s, confirmed K�
�s fears that the government had lost patience with him and were preparing to throw him to the wolves. He had, it must be said, more or less invited this fate. Ever since the collapse of the Middelburg peace talks, Kitchener had been conducting the war under protest: against Milner, for ‘vindictively’ blocking the amnesty for colonial rebels, which Kitchener believed could have ended the war;4 against Milner, too, for prematurely restarting the gold-mines at the expense of the war effort;5 against the War Office, for the tens of thousands of sub-standard horses sent out to South Africa; against Chamberlain, for refusing him a free hand to crush the guerrillas by banishment, confiscation, and execution.6
There was ill-concealed resentment in every line of Kitchener’s reports to Brodrick in mid-October: ‘Extermination … is a long and very tiring business … they seem as fanatically disposed to continue the war as ever, and I fear it can only end by our catching all or almost all of them. It is hard work for our men… if you think that someone else could do better out here, I hope you will not hesitate to for a moment in replacing me. I try all I can but it is not like the Soudan and disappointments are frequent—’7
Indeed, it was not the Sudan. And it was not so much a question of disappointment as of desperation. The Cabinet’s overriding priority, to which Kitchener was supposed to be committed, was to cut the cost of the war by cutting the number of troops in South Africa. Kitchener wanted more troops. On 1 November, he sent an SOS: ‘I now think the remainder of the Boers are so determined to resist to the last that it would be admirable to send any troops you can spare.’8 A few days later, he cabled Roberts secretly:’… the strong rumours current everywhere that I am to be relieved of my command…. Perhaps a new commander might be able to do something more than I can do to hasten the end of the war.’9
Roberts’s swift reassurance (‘Believe me we all have absolute confidence in you and are satisfied you have done and are doing all that is possible to hasten end of war’) was followed by a list of promised reinforcements: two infantry battalions, three companies of MI and possibly more MI, cavalry and infantry from India. But it soon emerged that all these ‘reinforcements’, except the three companies of MI, had to be exchanged for troops already in South Africa.10 And Kitchener was not so foolish as to doubt that the Cabinet was considering whether to sack him. He was cheered to learn that Roberts was sending out his special favourite, Ian Hamilton, to act as Kitchener’s Chief of Staff.11 ‘I blame myself,’ cabled Roberts, ‘for not having tried to provide you with assistance of the valuable nature you so generously afforded me.’12 But Kitchener must have guessed that part of Hamilton’s job was to report back privately a vital question to the Cabinet: was K on the verge of a breakdown?
The last straw that broke Kitchener’s self-confidence was the ‘smash-up’ of Lieutenant-Colonel G. E. Benson and his column at Bakenlaagte, in the Eastern Transvaal, news of which filtered through to Pretoria on I November. ‘It is the usual story,’ K reported to Roberts bitterly. In fact, he had found it much more disheartening than recent disasters, including the cutting-up of Gough’s column in Natal, and of Lord Vivian and the 17th Lancers in the Cape. Benson was virtually his best commander, led by the best Intelligence Officer.
The Boers observe the movements of a column from a long way off, only showing very few men, then having chosen some advantage, in this case it was the weather, then charge in with great boldness, and the result is a serious casualty list. Benson’s was one of the very best columns, and had an excellent and efficient intelligence run by Woolls Sampson [the Uitlander leader]. He knew every inch of the ground having been constantly in that part of the country and my last telegram from him on the 29th was to the effect that the country was clear… if a column like Benson’s operating 20 miles outside our lines is not safe it is a very serious matter and will require a large addition to our forces to carry on the war… what makes me most anxious is, if they can act in this way with Benson’s columns, how far easier it would be for them to catch some of my less efficient columns. …’13
Fortunately, this spasm of near-despair had passed by the time Ian Hamilton himself arrived in Pretoria. By then, the facts about Benson’s death at Bakenlaagte were clearer, and they were not, after all, so discouraging to the British, nor so cheering to the Boers. Benson’s rearguard had fought heroically, losing 66 men killed and 165 wounded, and sacrificing themselves to save the main column. On their part, the Boers, led by Louis Botha himself, had suffered a heavy loss in the death of General Opperman.14
The grand strategy to which Kitchener had now reluctantly applied himself was, in effect, Milner’s strategy: to establish ‘protected areas’, centred on Bloemfontein, Pretoria, and the Rand, and then progressively work outwards from these areas, clearing the country of all guerrillas and restoring civilian life within them. By the end of October 1901, ten thousand square miles in the Transvaal and Northern Orange River Colony, and 4,200 square miles around Bloemfontein, had been officially declared ‘absolutely clear’ in this fashion.
This new policy was Milner’s, the new weapons were Kitchener’s. And no patent weapon could have been simpler than the lines of ordinary barbed-wire fence, guarded at intervals by homespun earth-and-iron blockhouses (costing £16 each), which had sprung up at Kitchener’s command. The system had originated in January 1901 as a line of fortified posts protecting the railways. Then Kitchener had developed the network to provide a fence for the protected inner areas of the country itself. In effect, the fence lines of blockhouse-plus-wire served as a linear garrison, a low wall of high-tensile wire, in which wire and the infantryman, stretched to miraculous thinness, could fence out the mounted enemy (provided always, of course, the enemy had no field-guns – or time to use wire-cutters). Kitchener’s latest step was to turn part of the system the other way about. On the periphery, the barriers served as offensive, not defensive, weapons; not as cordons to keep out the enemy, but as cages in which to trap them, a guerrilla-catching net stretched across South Africa. By May 1902, there would be over eight thousand blockhouses, covering 3,700 miles, guarded by at least fifty thousand white troops and sixteen thousand African scouts.15
Already, by the end of October 1901, despite Kitchener’s black moods, the blockhouse system had dramatically improved the strategic map of the war, looked at from a British point of view. The ‘bag’ had averaged two thousand a month since March. Natal was clear. In Cape Colony, the two thousand-odd guerrillas had been hustled into the two least important areas: the wastelands of the extreme west and extreme north-west. In the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, the guerrillas were fragmented and powerless to attack even the most remote railway line. Most of the central parts of both new colonies were clear. The grand total of the enemy was believed to have been reduced to ten thousand, at a ‘liberal estimate’, in both republics. (The actual number of the enemy, including those lying low in their homes, was actually to prove nearly double this figure.)16
There were three main centres of resistance: first, in the north-east corner of the ORC, where Steyn and De Wet had gathered 2,000–2,500 men in the plains between Reitz, Lindley, Bethlehem, and Basutoland; second, the semi-deserts of the Transvaal, west of where De la Rey had 2,200 men beyond the Magalies-berg; third, the plains of the Eastern Transvaal, to which Botha had returned after his abortive raid on Natal.
Obviously, it was to crush these leaders and their men that Kitchener attached the highest priority. They were not only the driving force behind the guerrilla war itself; Steyn and De Wet were believed (with reason) to be the principal obstacle to renegotiating peace on Middelburg principles. Hence the vital importance of extending the blockhouse lines rapidly in both new colonies. Progress was indeed rapid. In November, the cleared areas were more than doubled: rising from 10,000 to 14,450 square miles in the Transvaal, from 4,200 to 17,100 square miles in the ORC. Beyond this cordon, the hunted Boers would have only three choices: to try to break through the blockhouse lines, to break back through the mounted infantry pursui
ng them – or to give up the hopeless struggle and voluntarily pay toll to the ‘bag’.17
By its nature, the war of the columns had always been a confused and shapeless kind of war, despite the clusters of neat red flags, moved by Kitchener every morning before breakfast on his war map at GHQ. Sometimes, that alarming enemy concentration depicted there proved to be nothing worse than a herd of blesbok (wild deer); at other times, the hunted would become hunters in turn (as Gough and Benson had found to their cost) and then vanish again into the veld. Invariably, great expectations ended in a let-down. Yet, with the extension of the blockhouse lines, the ‘bag’ was once again on the increase (270, 321, 435, 453 in the four weeks ending 23 December), and Kitchener’s pendulum swung up again. ‘Progress,’ he cabled on 5 January, ‘though slow, all points to the inevitable conclusion.’18
Frustration, the keynote of most wars, whether regular or irregular, took a thousand forms: from Kitchener’s helplessness at being unable to give the coup de grace to the guerrillas, to Tommy Atkins’s sense of the excruciating boredom of life in the blockhouse. But boredom was the enemy that the Tommy knew best. The regular soldiers who had served in India were inured to this double frustration: the overpowering heat and claustrophobia of the barrack-room, the equally crushing sense of isolation from home. They made the best of the blockhouses. They planted petunias in bully-beef tins; they chalked up the usual facetious names (‘Kruger’s Castle’, ‘Rundle’s Starving Eighth’, ‘Chamberlain’s Innocent Victims’) and they wrote letters home, tens of thousands of them, stiff-upper-lip letters for the most part, to be collected by the weekly mail wagon. Of course, life remained terribly tedious. There was little to gossip about on the telephone that connected every blockhouse to its neighbours. But there were pets to be looked after: dogs, goats, pigs, even lizards. There were the convoy’s visits. And just occasionally, a whirlwind in the night, a summer storm rattling the tin-cans on the trip-wires so that they rang like a xylophone, and, setting off a fusillade of shots into the darkness, there was a visit from a party of guerrillas.19
The Boer War Page 85
