To succeed, the steam-roller demanded, above all, that someone should be on the spot to co-ordinate the super-columns: a chief engineer to supervise the day-by-day adjustment of the gigantic machine. Kitchener’s temperamental dislike of delegating anything to subordinates had blinded him to this defect, although already implicit in the mixed success of the system in the Orange River Colony. Now it was embarrassingly obvious in this inhospitable region, where the net of blockhouse lines had to be cast so wide (no water, no blockhouses). The crisis prompted the generals to take the liberty of sending a round robin to K: why not appoint Ian Hamilton as the overlord? It was thus that Ian Hamilton, K’s Chief of Staff, was appointed overlord to all thirteen columns. With a staff of only one ADC and one Indian servant, Hamilton raced down to Klerksdorp on the afternoon of 6 April, and set the steam-roller in motion again.34
The new plan was not particularly subtle, though competent; Hamilton and his commanders had worked it out for themselves. Poor Woolls-Sampson had lost the commandos once again, after sending Rawlinson on a wild-goose-chase in the direction of a dried-up pond called Barber’s Pan. Hamilton now planned to march three of the four super-columns for two days south-westwards from the blockhouse line. (Rochfort, with the fourth column, was to guard the line of the Vaal.) Then Hamilton would swing the three super-columns southwards at the point where two small rivers, the Brakspruit and the Little Hart’s River, flowed into the main western tributary of the Vaal, the Great Hart’s River. It was this relatively fertile valley at the centre of the ‘box’ formed by the western blockhouse lines that had proved De la Rey’s main lair and main hunting-ground. Here was Boschbult, here was Tweebosch. Hamilton assumed that the Boers were still somewhere there, too. Presumably they would expect the British to continue westwards beyond the valley, and would themselves break away to the south. In fact, Hamilton had arranged for the columns to double back instead and squeeze the Boers against the line of the Klerksdorp blockhouse.35
So things looked hopeful. It was about time for a ‘scrap’, said Rawlinson. De la Rey and Steyn themselves had gone to Klerksdorp for the peace talks. A ‘good chance’, said Rawlinson, to ‘smash up their subordinates’.36 Hamilton agreed. ‘Once more all my fortunes on the die!’ he wrote to Winston Churchill with a flourish.37
The steam-roller lumbered off on 10 April, Walter Kitchener at 6.00 a.m., Rawlinson at 6.45 a.m.; Kekewich was somewhere ahead. The advantage of having someone actually in charge of the steam-roller was immediately apparent. Hamilton had intended that his three super-columns should dig in for the night of the 10th along the line of the Brakspruit to within about twelve miles of its junction with the Great Hart’s River. On the night of the 9th, his intelligence warned him that there were Boers ahead. So he was able to alter his battle plan, to change feet in mid-action. He flashed a signal to Kekewich: push on towards a farm called Rooiwal (‘Red Valley’), to close the gap between the current west flank and Great Hart’s River. This telegram miscarried, and thus Rawlinson found Kekewich ‘comfortably settled bang in the middle of my line’. Kekewich was told by Hamilton, who had been riding at Rawlinson’s side: inspan and decamp. By dusk, the British lines thus extended for twenty miles, from close to the Great Hart’s River to east of Boschbult: a line of hastily dug trenches, held by groups of 100 to 150 men at intervals of half a mile.38
By virtue of being on the spot, Hamilton had been able to prevent a serious blunder; indeed, unknown to anyone, he had achieved a great deal more. The confusion of Kekewich’s move westwards, late on the evening of the 10th, served to confuse the enemy better than any ruse de guerre. Early next morning, Kekewich closed ranks, and concentrated three thousand men at Rooiwal, to prepare for the drive. So the western part of the British line, which had been the weakest when reconnoitred by the enemy, was now the strongest: a steel hook, hidden, quite by accident, in a tender piece of bait.39
It was a cool, sunny morning, about 7.15 a.m., when the ‘bait’― an advanced screen of forty MI, commanded by Major Roy – witnessed one of the eeriest sights of the war: a great wave of a thousand, perhaps even fifteen hundred, slouch-hatted figures on horseback, sweeping knee-to-knee up the hillside towards them. Were they Rawlinson’s men? Roy passed on the question to Kekewich. The men opened fire from the saddle, and, still firing, cantered up the hillside. Then, led by someone in a blue shirt (it was General Potgieter), the wave of horsemen broke over Major Roy’s head, killing and wounding half his small party.40
For two and a half years, from Magersfontein to Tweebosch, it had been the Boers’ natural gift for tactical surprise that had won them numerous victories, both in defence and attack. Moreover, in the last few months, the Boers had developed a twentieth-century version of the cavalry charge: to gallop the British line, fighting from the saddle – not with that obsolete arme blanche, but firing unaimed shots from magazine rifles.41
Now they had overreached themselves. To succeed, these revolutionary tactics not only demanded courage, and good luck and bad weather; the terrain, too, must be pro-Boer. Here at Rooiwal, the veld was implacably pro-British. There was no cover or camouflage for the attackers: no trees, no kopjes, no kloofs to hide them. By contrast, the stony hillside of Rooiwal, half a mile to the north, hid Kekewich’s two columns like a curtain. The Boers, led by Generals Kemp and Potgieter, galloped on towards destruction, as though possessed by the spirit of Lord Lucan and the Light Brigade.
Actually, in General Potgieter’s case, the comparison was not to prove so far-fetched. When they were about a mile and a half from Rooiwal, they breasted the rise, and the curtain rose, revealing the overwhelming odds: their own force numbered seventeen hundred strong in all, without field-guns; opposite them, in close order, were Kekewich’s two columns of nearly three thousand dismounted MI – supported by six guns and two pom-poms. To continue the charge seemed folly, if not madness. Yet Kemp and Potgieter both accepted the challenge; in their attempt to out-do De la Rey’s achievements, they threw his tactics to the winds. They cantered on, forming a massed phalanx, two, three, and four deep. The six British guns began to tear holes in the column. Still they came on, gambling everything on the chance that the British would turn and run.42
If fortune always favoured the brave, Kemp and Potgieter would have won the most spectacular victory of the war. As it was, they were assisted by the shooting of Kekewich’s MI, which was dismally wide of the mark. Some of the raw yeomen turned and fled. Lieutenant Carlos Hickie, Lieutenant-Colonel H. M. Grenfell’s signalling officer, had just gone off to tell the commanding officer of the convoy to laager it up. Suddenly he saw a mob of panic-stricken yeomen galloping back. ‘I tried to get hold of these faint-hearted ones to line them up on the flank but nothing would stop them. It takes a strong man to shoot one of his own men but I thought I should be driven to it that day The galloping men stampeded the convoy.’43 But no Boers followed. A mile away, Potgieter lay sprawled thirty yards from the South African Constabulary line, conspicuous with his neatly trimmed beard and his blue shirt, and there were three bullets in his head and body. Beside his corpse lay fifty other dead Boers, and those too seriously wounded for their comrades to carry back on their horses.44
The Boer charge had failed, and now it was Ian Hamilton’s turn. If ever there was a chance to display those dashing qualities which Roberts and Kitchener so admired in Hamilton, it was surely this moment. There were five thousand reinforcements under Walter Kitchener away to the east. And here, concentrated within seven miles, were about seven thousand British mounted troops: Kekewich’s two columns at Rooiwal, Rawlinson’s two columns close at hand to the east. In fact, Hamilton and Rawlinson were actually riding together at Boschbult, inspecting the battlefield where Cookson had been mauled by De la Rey on 31 March, when they both heard the sound of heavy firing at Rooiwal. It was soon after 7.00 a.m. What was ‘Keky’ up to? The two men cantered off towards the camp, where they arrived in time to see Potgieter’s repulse. View halloo!45 But it was an hour and a half later, 9
.30 a.m., before Hamilton was prepared to allow Kekewich and Rawlinson to go after the fox, and 11.30 a.m. before Walter Kitchener, who was twenty miles away to the east, got the signal to follow. The delay was largely caused by Hamilton’s fear of a counter-attack on Kekewich’s convoy.46 No doubt Hamilton should not be blamed – any more than Buller for his delays in similar circumstances. Moving men on a battlefield is not like moving men on a hunting-field. At any rate, the fox went to ground. All that Hamilton’s men captured after a fourteen-mile gallop were fifty stragglers, the last of Methuen’s field-guns, and a pom-pom which De la Rey had taken at Tweebosch. Rawlinson commented: a good run, ‘but hard on the horses’. Kekewich thought bitterly of the bad shooting of his own MI. With one good company of infantry, he could have killed three hundred of Potgieter’s line.47
Meanwhile, at the scene of Potgieter’s charge; among all the mangled bodies, there was the usual incongruous aftermath: Africans shouting at their oxen, British soldiers hunting for grub, someone taking snaps of someone else with a Kodak, Tommy Atkins brewing up tea in a captured kettle, as though the battle itself were already an irrelevance. One officer, however, was struck by the unusual sight of so many dead and wounded Boers. ‘Although it seems rather brutal to say so,’ said Grenfell’s signalling officer, ‘it made one glad. For so often one had seen the opposite.’ At the same time, he suddenly felt a rush of admiration for the enemy. What ‘brave fellows’ they were ‘who charged up in such gallant style’. It was really a ‘wonderful sight the way they came on —Potgieter must have been a splendid man’. As he was standing there, one of the other British officers called out for someone to shoot a wounded Boer who was found to be wearing British khaki; according to Kitchener’s rules, he could be shot out of hand. The signalling officer protested: he felt ‘too much respect for his bravery’. The Boer was spared. Then everyone laid to, collecting up the Boer wounded and carrying them to the ambulance-wagons.48
So ended, if not in a blaze of glory, at least with an echo of chivalry, the last formal battle of the war. Ian Hamilton led the columns backwards and forwards for a further four weeks, flattening De la Rey’s old hunting-ground, without any great addition to the bag.49 His opposite number, Bruce Hamilton, played a similar game in Botha’s old hunting-ground in the Eastern Transvaal.”50
But all eyes were now turning to Pretoria, where, on 19 May, De la Rey, Botha, and the others resumed the peace talks with Kitchener. The ‘interminable’ war was fizzling out at last. So it appeared. A new question, a new battle, not only between Briton and Boer, but between Kitchener and Milner, was to be fought out over the terms of peace.
When Milner complained, ‘K is a strong man. But all he can do is paralyse me,’ he was not exaggerating. The clash of personality, and of principle, had now reached a climax.
Of course, Milner still held his cards close to his chest. He did not admit to Kitchener, any more than to the Boers, that he hoped to see the peace talks fail. But there was something in Milner’s sarcastic manner, in those grey eyes, behind the frock-coat and the eye-glass, that alerted Kitchener and his staff to the danger.
‘Now, Heaven forgive me if I am wrong,’ [Ian Hamilton had written in March to Winston Churchill, who was told to show the letter discreetly to the Cabinet if he chose] ‘but I doubt if Milner himself (consciously or unconsciously) wants peace yet… once you accept this idea, you will see it holds water from whatever point you look at it. Just think of the thousands of difficulties we were able to keep off from him by Martial Law with its delightfully simple and summary processes. … Therefore if I am right, Lord K. will as likely as not find his chief difficulties are not so much with the Boer Government as with the irreconcilable attitude of some of our own people.’51
When the Pretoria conference began, Hamilton found his insights dramatically confirmed. Suddenly the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. Strange, he thought, to look back on the Bloemfontein conference which had failed three years before. Now he saw why it had failed – because of Milner. The inevitable result, ‘under the circumstances’, had been ‘this bloody war’. In fact, Hamilton believed that the war was ‘providential’, because of the need to confirm imperial supremacy over all South Africa, ‘but the time has now come when we want quite another sort of winding-up to the palaver’.52
Rawlinson was equally hostile to Milner’s policy, which he rightly suspected was to drag out the war, in order to impose Crown Colony government on the Cape. Yet ‘I am inclined to think that we shall not be able to make Milner “King” of S. Africa’.53 No doubt both Hamilton’s and Rawlinson’s views reflected, to a great extent, their Chief’s. Why was there this deep gulf between their views and Milner’s?
For himself, of course, Kitchener was utterly sick of the war, longing to be off to India. He was also alarmed – as indeed was the Cabinet – by the numerous ways in which the continuation of the war was damaging both the army and the nation: the direct cost in money, men, and morale; the indirect cost, which meant postponing army reform, and continuing to advertise to the world that Britain was almost naked of regular troops.54 At the same time, a subtle change had recently come over Kitchener and his staff in regard to their attitude to the Boers.
It was only a few months since Rawlinson had recommended executing ‘cold blooded ruffians’ like the Boers out of hand: ‘It will be no congenial task to fight white men under those conditions, but I do not see there is any alternative… it is certainly best for the future peace of the country.’55 Kitchener himself had had no compunction in executing Cape rebels, like Scheepers and Lotter, as war criminals. His executions now totalled fifty-one.56 Yet now, when the enemies sat down together round a table, a sense of solidarity immediately sprang up between the soldiers on either side. Perhaps Hamilton, always excitable, exaggerated the feeling. But he had noticed that there had grown up ‘a strange sort of mutual liking’ between the soldiers in the field. He himself found the Boer leaders the ‘best men in South Africa’. On their part, the Boers invited Hamilton to attend a birthday party given for Smuts on 24 May. Hamilton was in ecstasies. He told Churchill, ‘I sat between Botha and De la Rey. On Botha’s right was De Wet: on De la Rey’s left sat Smuts. I had the most enchanting evening, and never wish to eat my dinner in better company. They told me a great many stories about the War which would give me much joy to repeat to you … of their escapes from myself and others.’57
The ‘best men’ in South Africa? A sneer at the loyalists, it would seem. So it was – especially the non-British variety. Hamilton had not only grasped that Milner was trying to block the peace talks. He realized why: Milner wished to destroy the Boers as a political force and tip the balance in favour of the ‘loyalists’. The idea of the war resulting in their supremacy filled Hamilton with disgust. He had warned Churchill in January that real loyalists were ‘precious scarce’ – except in so far as ‘loyalty is a South-African political expression, meaning anti-Dutch’.58 He told him a month later,
Do let us profit by our experience when we smashed the Zulus for the Boers, and not repeat the mistake by annihilating the Boers for the Jewburghers. You have no idea what arrogant insolent devils you will discover as soon as Mr Boer had lost his mauser. If one could only keep a tame commando in perpetuity within striking distance of the mines, all would go as merry as wedding bells. Otherwise your great Government will find itself rather vulgarly snubbed as soon as you wish to interfere in the smallest degree with the Chamber of Mines pretension to run the whole of Africa for its own particular advantage.59
Churchill agreed. He had ‘very little admiration’ for the Cape loyalists or for the Uitlanders of the Transvaal. The Boers, not they, must be ‘the rock’ on which the British position must be founded. On their part, it was a ‘shrewd’ move of the Boers to pre-empt the loyalists.60
Meanwhile, a few days before Hamilton’s hurried return from Klerksdorp in a coal truck, to be ‘at K’s elbow during the crisis’, Milner had managed to block the first dangerous offers of
peace.
By 15 May, the national delegates, elected by the commandos scattered all over the two countries, had safely reached Vereeniging, astride the Vaal, fifty miles south of Pretoria. These sixty delegates duly chose a five-man negotiating team: Generals Botha and De la Rey and State Attorney Smuts for the Transvaal; Judge Hertzog and General De Wet for the Free State. The team had still not been given plenary powers, so the peace terms, if agreed, had to be ratified by the delegates at Vereeniging. By the same token, they had to be ratified by the British Cabinet in London. Negotiations resumed at noon on 19 May.61
The new peace offer seemed to Milner as farcical as the old. What about a protectorate, asked the Boers? They offered to surrender independence as regards foreign relations, preserve internal self-government under British supervision, and hand over part of the Rand and Swaziland. In effect, this meant that part of the two countries would be a Crown Colony, part a protectorate. Kitchener agreed that these proposals were unworkable, even in military terms. However, Milner remained intensely suspicious of Kitchener. After several hours’ manoeuvring, the Boer team suggested that Smuts had an informal talk with Kitchener and Milner. This gave Milner the chance of a pis alter: to restore the talks to the Middelburg line. After lunch, the three men worked out a draft of a preamble to the surrender terms, in which the Boer leaders were recognized to be ‘acting as the Government of the South African Republic’, and ‘acting as the Government of the Orange Free State’ (two governments officially abolished by the British nearly two years earlier). In return, they were to agree that the burghers would recognize King Edward VII ‘as their lawful sovereign’. It was then proposed that a sub-committee would begin to draw up the details of the agreement to add to this preamble.62
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