The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Such was the political thinking (echoing Ian Hamilton’s) behind Botha’s argument for winning the peace while they could still fight for peace. Let us be warned, Botha might have said, by the way we were outmanoeuvred by Milner, three years ago, at Bloemfontein.

  De Wet and his generals clutched at the counter-arguments. They were convinced that military resistance was still possible, though they could not say how. At what cost to the women and children? De Wet: ‘Their sufferings are among what we may call the necessary circumstances of the war….’ So on the struggle must go. But even De Wet was to recognize that the Free State could not – and must not – struggle on without the Transvaal’s help.96

  Probably, before those anguished debates, spread over so many days, the outcome had already been a foregone conclusion, once the meeting at Vereeniging had been arranged. As De Wet’s close ally, Judge Hertzog, put it, the strongest argument for peace was that ‘some of their own people had turned against them, and were fighting in the ranks of the enemy’. Yet if he could have believed that to maintain their independence was practical, he would have disregarded even that argument. What made him see that the collapse of resistance was inevitable was that all the scattered commandos had come together and exchanged information, and heard Botha himself declare the condition of the whole country ‘hopeless’.97

  The vote was taken in the great marquee at Vereeniging, soon after 2.00 p.m. on Saturday 31 May. A motion was drafted, summing up the six main reasons why the governments must accept the British terms: no food for women and children, and no means to continue the war; the concentration camps (this was for propaganda purposes); Botha had actually admitted ‘one is only too thankful nowadays to know that our wives are under English protection’;98 the ‘unbearable’ conditions caused by Kaffirs, especially the Holkrantz ‘murders’; Kitchener’s proclamation of 7 August, which threatened the confiscation of burghers’ land; the impossibility of keeping British prisoners; in short, no hope of success. To avoid a disastrous split, Botha and De la Rey went to De Wet and asked him and the Free State leaders to accept the resolution of the Transvaal. De Wet and most of the others agreed. The delegates voted for Kitchener’s peace by an overwhelming majority: fifty-four to six. It was the bitter end, but the alliance stood firm.99

  Acting President Burger added the solemn words: ‘We must be ready to forgive and forget ‘He referred, significantly, not to the British, nor even to the Uitlanders, but to the volk. ‘We may not cast out that portion of our people.’100

  In the great marquee at Vereeniging, the moral ordeal had stamped its mark on everyone. ‘How great was the emotion,’ wrote Kestell, the official reporter. ‘I saw the lips quiver of men who had never trembled before a foe. I saw tears brimming in eyes that had been dry when they had seen their dearest laid in the grave.’ The ordeal continued, as the members of the two governments were rushed back by train to Pretoria, to sign the death-warrants – technically ‘terms of surrender’ – of the republics. It was now eleven o’clock on Saturday night. They were driven to Kitchener’s HQ, where they were met by Kitchener and Milner, the latter looking grey and ill. Burger signed first for the Transvaal, De Wetfor the Free State. Kitchener and Milner signed last. It was all over in five minutes; the republics finally dead and buried. There was an embarrassed silence, broken by Kitchener’s well-meant ‘We are good friends now.’101 Kitchener’s new friends retired, dazed, to their hotels. Kitchener, Ian Hamilton, and the staff retired to celebrate their forthcoming departure from South Africa – and the £50,000 victory grant which Parliament was to vote K. (He hastily cabled for it to be put in South African gold shares.)102

  Milner did not celebrate. In his heart, he must have known he had lost the ‘great game for mastery’ in South Africa. When he had decided to try to precipitate war, three years earlier, he had not been hopeful. Yet to have the game thrown away by Kitchener, with victory in sight – that was hard to bear. All that he could say was that he had prevented a disastrous peace being signed. He had stopped Kitchener from putting a date to the restoration of self-government. That was the vital thing. He had bought time for himself, and his crèche. They must now strain every nerve to build up the gold industry, and thus bring new blood into the Transvaal, settlers for the Rand, settlers for the farms, united, loyal, imperial-minded British settlers by the thousand, drawing on loans offered by Wernher-Beit.103

  Peace. Apart from the Uitlanders (who shared Milner’s forebodings), the hundred-odd British columns in the field took the news with the same mixture of delight and incredulity with which the army had taken the news of the Boers’ ultimatum in 1899. Peace was the message of the joy-shots crackling along the three thousand miles of blockhouse lines, and the garrison guns thundering all over South Africa like a victory peal. ‘Peace.’ There was just that one surrealist word on the message carried to the Addo Bush, where Colonel Beauchamp Doran’s column was floundering in a freak snowstorm. (‘Don’t let’s meet a Boer who hasn’t heard,’ said young Lieutenant Pym.)104

  Colonel Rawlinson was at church parade when he was handed the telegram from the Chief. It gave him a ‘thrill… the like of which I have never felt before. So here is the end of all our hardships and labours. I kept the telegram in my hand until the service was over when I formed up the troops and announced the glad tidings … calling on them not to forget those friends we had lost and finishing up with three cheers for Lord K.’105

  A few days later, the trek to the ports began: all but 20,000 of the 250,000 British troops were being sent home or disbanded.

  There was a new song as they marched to the docks, about the christening of a baby called Blogs.

  Chorus

  The Baby’s name is Kitchener Carrington

  Methuen Kekewich White,

  Cronje Plumer Powell Majuba

  Gatacre Warren Colenso Kruger

  Cape Town Mafeking French

  Kimberley Ladysmith Bobs

  The Union Jack & the Fighting Mac

  Lyddite Pretoria Blogs.

  The Parson said these names upon this infant I can’t pop

  So my wife she bruised his rolling veld & jumped on his Spion Kop

  She kicked his mounted infantry till his Bloemfontein was sore

  Then she did a flanking movement & she started out once more.

  Chorus

  The Baby’s name, etc106

  The commandos, too, seemed glad the struggle was over. Twenty-one thousand ‘bitter-einders’ emerged from their hiding-places (over twice as many as British Intelligence had bargained for). There was the same brief ritual as in previous surrenders: their rifles thrown in heaps (mostly captured British Lee Enfields, by this stage of the war); prayers uttered by the commandants. Then they trekked off to the concentration camps, to look for their families. Their discipline and morale – they held their heads high, like men who have won a moral victory – were conspicuous.107 Their time would come. Equally conspicuous was the hang-dog look of the ‘hensoppers’ and ‘yoiners’ (the National Scouts and other collaborators). Politically, they were to be outcasts – skeletons well hidden away in the cupboard. The fact that a fifth of the fighting Afrikaners at the end of the war fought on the side of the British was a secret that has remained hidden till today.

  As the British officers marched their men down to the docks, their own mythology was also being born. ‘A very pleasant time for a young fellow A regular sort of picnic…. A gentleman’s war…. The happiest year of my life.’108 The easy phrases covered the crudities of war, like the sand blowing in over the graves of their comrades. Yet, if we may judge from the talk of ordinary soldiers, this mythology did not extend far into the ranks. ‘It was a cruel war, it was. … We were half-starved all the time…. I never saw the point of it…. It was the worst war ever. … Johnny Boer, he used to shoot niggers like you’d shoot a dog. … It was all for the gold-mines.’ So the majority of the veterans whose voices I recorded, seventy years later.109

  But, whatever it was
, and whatever it was for, it was over.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Winners and Losers’

  ‘They took the hill (Whose hill? What for?)

  But what a climb they left to do!

  Out of that bungled, unwise war

  An alp of unforgiveness grew.’

  William Plomer

  In money and lives, no British war since 1815 had been so prodigal. That ‘tea-time’ war, Milner’s little ‘Armageddon’, which was expected to be over by Christmas 1899, had cost the British tax payer more than £200 million.1The cost in blood was equally high. The War Office reckoned that 400,346 horses, mules and donkeys were ‘expended’ in the war.2 There were over a hundred thousand casualties of all kinds among the 365,693 imperial and 82,742 colonial soldiers who had fought in the war. Twenty-two thousand of them found a grave in South Africa: 5,774 were killed by enemy action (or accident) and shovelled into the veld where they fell; 16,168 died of wounds or were killed by the action of disease (or the inaction of army doctors).3 Today, their sombre last parades —marked by lines of white crosses – can be seen outside Bloemfontein. Here, the carefully tended dead dominate the landscape like their successors in the fields of Flanders.

  On the Boer side, the cost of the war, measured in suffering, was perhaps absolutely as high; relatively, much higher. It was estimated that there were over 7,000 deaths among the 87,365 Boers – including 2,120 foreign volunteers and 13,300 Afrikaners from the Cape and Natal who served in the commandos of the two republics.4 No one knows how many Boers – men, women and children – died in the concentration camps. Official estimates vary between 18,000 and 28,000.5 The survivors returned to homesteads devastated almost beyond recognition. Several million cattle, horses and sheep, that had comprised their chief capital, had been killed or looted. In theory, the policy of farm burning had been stopped on the British government’s orders in November 1900. But, as Kitchener himself admitted, most farms came to be destroyed one way or the other; doors and windows made valuable firewood in a treeless landscape, and the tin roofs helped build the blockhouses. In due course, the vanquished enemy submitted their claims: 63,000 separate claims for compensation for war losses. The imperial government made free grants of more than the £3 million promised at Vereeniging, but a disproportionate amount went to ‘handsuppers’. In addition, the Uitlanders and other loyalists received compensation totalling £2 million.6

  Most severe were the losses borne by the Africans. The damage to their property may not seem large: yet they filed compensation claims of £661,000 in the Transvaal. But few Africans owned much property in the ex-republics. The British government paid them compensation at the rate of seventeen per cent – a lower rate than the Boers were paid.7 How many Africans were injured or died as a result of the war? No one bothered to keep full records of the deaths among the 107,000 ‘black Boers’ (as one of them described himself) in the Africans’ concentration camps. They were the farm servants and their families – the retainers of the better-off burghers. The incomplete records give their death roll as seven thousand, but the actual total probably exceeded twelve thousand.8

  How many deaths were there among the Africans who fought on the side of the British – the ten thousand armed Africans who served as scouts, guides and blockhouse guards, and the thirty to forty thousand unarmed Africans who worked as drivers, labourers and so on?9 The Boers openly admitted killing the armed Africans when they captured them, and there is much unpublished evidence that they killed the unarmed ones too.10 Canon Farmer, one of the leading British missionaries in the Transvaal, wrote privately in 1901,

  Of all who have suffered by the war, those who have endured most & will receive least sympathy, are the Natives in the country places of the Transvaal… they have welcomed British columns & when these columns have marched on they have been compelled to flee from the Boers, abandon most of their cattle & stuff & take refuge in the towns or fortified places, or be killed. I have been asking after my people & this is the account I get of them all…. For instance, at Modderfontein, one of my strongest centres of Church work in the Transvaal, there was placed a garrison of 200 [white] men. The Natives – all of whom I knew – were there in their village: the Boers under [General Jan] Smuts, captured this post last month & when afterwards a column visited the place they found the bodies of all the Kaffirs murdered and unburied.

  I should be sorry to say anything that is unfair about the Boers. They look upon the Kaffirs as dogs & the killing of them as hardly a crime. …11

  If this was how Jan Smuts, as high-minded as any of the commando leaders, treated the hundred-odd Africans of Modderfontein, the fate of others can be imagined.12

  The fruits of victory tasted sweet and sour to the British army. Of course, the old class-conscious British army was not destroyed, as Wolseley had hoped. On the other hand, the antiquated War Office machine in Pall Mall was given new premises, a new general staff, and a thorough overhaul. Wolseley must have allowed himself a wry smile when the Cabinet decided the partnership with the Commander-in-Chief was impossible, without warning the incumbent, Roberts. Roberts arrived at the Horse Guards one morning in 1904 to find he had officially ceased to exist. (‘They stabbed you in the back,’ cried Ian Hamilton.)13 The Cabinet created a Chief of the General Imperial Staff instead. Roberts died in the autumn of 1914, in his eighty-third year, when gamely pushing his way to the BEF front line at St Omer.

  Other generals came to grief in bizarre circumstances. As C-in-C in Ceylon, ‘Fighting Mac’ (General Hector MacDonald), the grizzled general who had risen from the ranks, fell victim to a love affair with a Ceylonese boy of noble birth. He died like a gentleman: to save the army, and his wife, from scandal, he shot himself in the Hotel Regina in Paris.14 General Colvile, sacked by Roberts, was killed cycling near Bagshot, and it turned out that the car which ran him down was driven by Colonel Rawlinson. General Gatacre (‘Backacre’), also sacked by Roberts, got a job with a rubber company, and died of fever, trying to tramp through the jungles of western Abyssinia.15

  On the Boer side, General Piet Cronje also came to a sad end. He died ostracized by the volk for his bad taste in re-enacting the Last Stand at Paardeberg in the St Louis World Fair of 1904.16

  By contrast, Buller took his sacking philosophically. He withdrew behind the bluff mask of the West Country landowner. ‘It will all be the same in 100 years,’ he told his wife.17 Perhaps he was wrong. But before he died in 1908, his admirers put up a monument to him in the main street of Exeter. It said simply – and perhaps rightly – ‘He saved Natal.’

  Ian Hamilton, Roberts’s chief protégé, rose rapidly to fame and power, but was made a scapegoat for the disaster in the Dardanelles campaign. He died in 1947, excitable and brilliant to the end.

  Strange to say, two of Roberts’s least favoured senior generals – Methuen and White— later became field-marshals. Methuen returned in 1908 to South Africa as GOC. White, whose weakness in letting himself be trapped at Ladysmith had wrecked the whole strategy of the war, was made Governor of Chelsea Hospital. After his death, to millions of Englishmen who read of the annual celebrations of Ladysmith Day (28 February), Field-Marshal Sir George White, VC, became the symbol of endurance and courage.

  Among the younger generation of Roberts’s and Kitchener’s officers, there were many other future field-marshals: Byng, Robertson (the first to rise from the ranks), Birdwood, Allenby, and the leaders of the BEF in 1914–15, French and Haig.18 The last two named had learnt something from their days in the veld: above all, the need for a staff system to plan, organize, feed, doctor and co-ordinate the huge, far-flung armies that modern war demanded. They improved the artillery, increasing the calibre of the British field-gun in 190919 (though this remained lower than that of the 4.7-inch guns Buller had improvised a decade before). They left the arme blanche as it was – a white elephant.

  The central tactical lesson of the Boer War eluded them. The reason for those humiliating reverses was not the marksmanship o
f the Boers, nor their better guns or rifles, nor the crass stupidity of the British generals – all myths which British people found it convenient to believe. It was that the smokeless, long-range, high velocity, small-bore magazine bullet from rifle or machine-gun —plus the trench – had decisively tilted the balance against attack and in favour of defence.20

  The world learnt this lesson the hard way: in the bloody stalemates of the Dardanelles and Flanders.

  In politics, too, the war brought results no one could have predicted. Rhodes had died in 1902. Kruger died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. Meanwhile Milner’s ‘crèche’, alias Kindergarten, started their race to rebuild the Transvaal and Free State on British lines, before the British Parliament (‘that mob at Westminster’) handed them back to the volk. The careful work of reconstruction partially redeemed for many Boers the wanton destruction that had made it necessary. Before the war, Chamberlain’s budget in the Colonial Office, to cover the whole world, totalled £600,000. Now, such was the fashion for peaceful imperial development that Milner and Chamberlain (and Alfred Lyttelton, after Chamberlain resigned as Colonial Secretary in 1903) arranged for £35 million to be borrowed for investment in South Africa. There was also to be a war contribution of £30 million, guaranteed by Wernher-Beit and others. (They were never called to pay.) Soon a grid-mesh of new railways and irrigation channels began to criss-cross the veld, as impressive as the ones built by Cromer in Egypt and the Sudan.21