The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  The same kind of expertise was available to deal with infectious diseases, though these were hard to control. Wounds heal and their treatment ends after a period of nursing, rest and rehabilitation, when the patient has recovered or learned to live with a permanent disability. But infectious diseases are pervasive. It takes discipline to prevent them and a rigorous regime of hygiene to cure them. This is hard to achieve without sufficient fresh food, clean water and medical care.

  Ladysmith was a poignant example. After months under siege by the Boers, the local population and the garrison were on the verge of physical exhaustion. Churchill gave the readers of the Morning Post an eyewitness account. On 3 March 1900 Buller and his entire force paraded triumphantly through the town. They were worn out from months of fighting, their uniforms were in tatters and their boots and helmets in shreds, but with their proud, tanned faces they resembled ‘a procession of lions’. Beside them, the town’s inhabitants, the soldiers in particular, were a pitiful sight to behold. Commander White and his staff ‘sat on their skeleton horses’. His men had done their best to make themselves presentable, but underneath it all they were pale and gaunt, at least those who were up and about. Some 2000 patients were in the hospital tent camp at Intombi, most of them suffering from typhoid or dysentery. This, too, Churchill shared with his readers. He wrote at length about the emaciated, neglected inmates, shivering with fever and confined in congested and unhygienic quarters. They lacked food, milk, brandy and adequate medical care. Behind the hospital was a ‘forest of crosses, marking the graves of six hundred men’.74

  Sister L.M. Hellemans was appalled by the Intombi camp. It bore no resemblance to their own easily accessible and well-equipped field hospital on Potgieter’s farm, which the British advance in early March had forced them to close down. A fastidious nurse from Holland, she had been shocked by the Boers’ indifference to hygiene, but never before had she seen such squalor. General Buller in person had prevented her Red Cross team from accompanying the retreating Boers. Here in Intombi, he said, there were 18 Boer prisoners who needed medical attention. Her unit, the Second Dutch Red Cross Ambulance, was to take care of them. Dr J.D. Koster had protested and claimed their right to freedom of movement, but Buller had been adamant. It was rumoured that he suspected them of having done more for the Boers than just provide medical treatment. Hellemans and her colleagues had to resign themselves to the situation.

  It was hard to imagine anything filthier or more unsanitary. They were told to pitch their tents on the perimeter of the camp, next to ‘the burial place for all detritus, the laundry and other facilities of that kind’—in other words, on ‘contaminated ground teeming with typhus bacteria etc.’. The stench was overwhelming and ‘the unbearable heat turned that pestilent place into a breeding ground for disease’. But they had no choice. They began to unpack their possessions. British soldiers offered to help but ‘they stole whatever they could lay their hands on’. With difficulty, the team managed to have a guard assigned to their quarters, but he ended up denying them access to their own food supplies. They had been confiscated, he said, they would have to get by with food from the canteen. Although their relatively generous supplies were eventually returned, they were still plagued by ‘all kinds of crawling and winged creatures’. They were ‘a scourge. It was a feat to take a bite of food or a sip of something to drink, without swallowing a fly’. The 18 wounded Boers, on the other hand, were nowhere to be seen.75

  Complaints to General Buller about their treatment, the unauthorised detention of an official Red Cross unit, eventually bore fruit. Three weeks later the Second Dutch Red Cross Ambulance was escorted to the Boer encampment in the Biggarsberg. From there they returned to Pretoria to be deployed elsewhere, this time on the western front. Where, precisely, had yet to be decided. It depended on the talks between the Transvaal Red Cross, the medical commission appointed by the government in January, and the overseas relief organisations.

  Medical care in the Boer camps was clearly inadequate and uncoordinated. The commandos were left to improvise. Even in peacetime it was not a priority in the Boer republics. There were two decent hospitals, one in Pretoria and one in Johannesburg; the rest were small, poorly equipped and not easily accessible. The outbreak of war brought no immediate change. Virtually no preparations were made. Physicians, like all other conscripts, served in the commando of their home district and continued to treat their own patients. The only professional military unit in the Transvaal, the State Artillery, was also the only unit with its own medical team, consisting of a physician, a vet, a pharmacist and 12 male nurses.76

  It took outside intervention to change the situation. One of the first to offer practical help was the director of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company, Kretschmar van Veen, who offered his company’s services to assist in the war effort. This included medical care for the Boer commandos, who were given access to the company’s physicians and hospitals. Kretschmar van Veen also donated four fully equipped hospital wagons, which were manufactured at their central workshop in Pretoria. In addition, he played an important part in rallying support in the Netherlands. With the help of his co-directors in Amsterdam and Willem Leyds, the Transvaal’s diplomatic representative in Europe, an agreement was reached with the Dutch Red Cross. As a result, a medical team known as the First Dutch Ambulance left for Pretoria on 28 October 1899. A second team, Sister Hellemans’s group, left a month later. Two more followed in December 1899, the last being a Russian–Dutch initiative. The Dutch East Indies also sent out one of its ambulances around the same time.

  The Netherlands was not the only country to contribute medical equipment and personnel. Fourteen foreign teams—from Germany, Russia, Belgium, Switzerland and Scandinavia—came to the aid of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. More than 200 physicians, sisters and male nurses arrived with modern equipment and huge supplies of medications, bandages and food, which greatly improved the medical care available to the Boer commandos. Even so, the care on offer was largely piecemeal. The service was too disorganised and working conditions were too primitive for it to be otherwise. Sister Hellemans and her colleagues weren’t alone in complaining about the climate, the vermin and the risks of infection. All the overseas aid workers were in the same boat, just as they all met with distrust from the Boers—all those new-fangled ideas about hygiene—and suspicion from the British about their neutrality. In one case these concerns were justified. As soon as they set foot in the Transvaal most members of the 60-strong Irish-American relief team which had left from Chicago in mid-February 1900, shed their Red Cross armbands in favour of rifles and cartridge belts.77

  All things considered, Willem Leyds had reason to be satisfied with the humanitarian aid that Europe was sending to his adopted country. He had no connection with the Irish-American contingent, despite mutterings to the contrary in the British press. But he was accustomed to this kind of criticism. After all, in Britain he was seen as the evil genius who organised shady deals for the Boers. In early April 1900, when a 16-year-old anarchist fired two bullets at the Prince of Wales in the Brussels-North railway station—without harming him, as it turned out—even the respectable Lord George Hamilton, the under-secretary for India, remarked that ‘Brussels had been the headquarters of that factory of lies of which Mr Leyds was the manager’.78

  Leyds had a better reputation on the Continent, where he was considered the unrivalled champion of the righteous Boer cause. Since the outbreak of war there had been no need for him to solicit public support. Europe was almost unanimously on the Boers’ side. Much of his time was spent dealing with relief groups, solidarity marches, letters from well-wishers and fundraising campaigns, leaving him little opportunity to attend to the hordes of volunteers wanting to join the Boer ranks. They were all referred to Paris, where Johannes Pierson, the consul-general and a cousin of the Dutch prime minister, provided the information they needed. Many of them lost interest when it transpired that Pretoria only wanted voluntee
rs who were willing to travel at their own risk and expense.79

  With so much wind in their sails, it was disappointing to hear that the British had broken through on two fronts in late February 1900. Leyds realised just how much ‘the reports about Cronjé, Kimberley and Ladysmith have affected our friends in Holland’. He took leave for a few days, but only to nurse a bad cold. He didn’t consider the situation ‘as hopeless as most people think. I still believe that justice will prevail.’ Paradoxically, he felt that the military defeats opened up new opportunities.

  Firstly, he believed the time was ripe to publish the long-delayed manifesto, Appeal to the Nations. As long as the Boers were on a winning streak, many sympathisers in Europe, especially the Dutch, had been opposed to ‘mediation and intervention’. That would probably change, Leyds assumed, now that they were on the defensive both in Natal and the western Orange Free State. He was proved to be right, at least as far as the Netherlands was concerned. On 4 March, the Appeal to the Nations, signed by ‘around 3000 luminaries in the fields of the sciences, arts, commerce and industry’, was published in several Dutch newspapers. To his disappointment, it had little effect. The Appeal was translated into English, but nothing happened in the countries for which it was mainly intended: Germany, France and Russia. ‘No one said anything about it or did anything because of it,’ Leyds lamented two months later. ‘It has fallen flat.’80

  What was the reason? Leyds had his own thoughts on the matter. It wasn’t so much to do with the Appeal as such. The real problem was the lack of communication between Pretoria and its diplomatic representative in Europe, namely himself. They had been unable to telegraph each other since the beginning of the war. Everything was censored by the British. Messages conveyed by more furtive means got through from time to time, but mostly they were dependent on the mail packet steamships, which inevitably meant long delays. Quick consultations in critical situations were simply not possible. Had things been different, he would have been able to save Pretoria and Bloemfontein from a huge political blunder. Because in Leyds’s opinion, this was the main reason for the failure of the Appeal and, worse still, the undoing of all his efforts to arrange mediation over the previous few months in the best tradition of silent diplomacy. As he had long believed, the Boers’ hope lay with the great powers: Russia, Germany, France or the United States. Nothing else would work. Everything was in limbo until the tide of the war turned, in late February. The Great Powers were taking advantage of Britain’s preoccupation with South Africa to pursue their own interests. Russia was conducting military exercises in Afghanistan, on the border of British India; France was expanding its influence in Algeria; Germany was dividing up the Samoan islands; and the United States, once a colony itself, was taking its first steps on the path of imperialism in the Philippines. ‘The powers can’t get themselves to join forces against a common enemy. Their jealousy and distrust of each other are insurmountable.’81

  But this changed with Britain’s military success. The time and energy Leyds had spent cultivating a cordial relationship with his Russian counterpart, De Giers—and through him with Tsar Nicholas II—seemed to be paying off at last. On 3 March 1900 the Russian government took the initiative for joint action. The German foreign minister, Von Bülow, received a proposal to the effect that ‘the European governments should apply friendly pressure’ to end the bloody war in South Africa. The time was ripe after the British armies’ recent successes. ‘British patriotism’ had been satisfied and any further delay could result in the total destruction of the Boer republics. The idea was that France as well as Germany would support the appeal to Britain in the name of morality and on the grounds of the humanitarian principles of the Hague Peace Conference.82

  This would have been music to Leyds’s ears. It was exactly what he had always wanted. But a few days later, when De Giers told him about the Russian proposal, it was already too late. The proposal had been ruined by another initiative, also conceived on 3 March, but in Pretoria, 10,000 kilometres to the south. This was the brainchild of the commandantgeneral, Piet Joubert. Disappointed by their military reverses, he had been pressing for a peace agreement since February. At first, President Kruger was receptive to the idea and discussed it in the Executive Council on 3 March. The talks yielded two resolutions: Lord Salisbury would be sent a telegram, and an appeal would be made to the Great Powers. Leyds was not asked his opinion—if that had even have been possible at such short notice—but Kruger felt obliged to confer with President Steyn of the Orange Free State. He left post-haste for Bloemfontein where on 5 March the two heads of state composed a telegram, which they sent to Lord Salisbury that same day—bypassing Chamberlain, the secretary for the colonies.

  The naive wording was disarming, but it had the opposite effect. Invoking ‘the blood and tears of thousands who have suffered by this war, and the prospect of complete moral and economic ruin’, Kruger and Steyn pleaded for the restoration of peace in South Africa. It was not their intention to set up ‘an administration over all of South Africa independent of her Majesty’s Government’ but ‘only to maintain the indisputable independence of both republics as sovereign international states’. However, if the British government wouldn’t grant this, there was ‘nothing left to us and to our people but to continue on our present course’. In spite of the British Empire’s vastly superior power, ‘we trust that we will not be forsaken by the God who kindled in our hearts and the hearts of our fathers an inextinguishable love of freedom’.

  From Pretoria the state secretary, Reitz, and the state attorney, Smuts, advised them to wait for Salisbury’s reply before approaching the other powers, but Kruger and Steyn went their own way. From 9 to 11 March they brought their telegram to Salisbury to the attention of the consular representatives of Russia, Germany, France, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, in both their capital cities. They also requested the governments of those countries to ‘intervene in this conflict in order to prevent any further unnecessary bloodshed in this cruel war’.

  A reply from London came by telegram the following day, 12 March. It was icy. Salisbury recalled the arsenal of weapons the Boers had amassed prior to the war. He expressed his outrage at their insulting ultimatum and subsequent incursions into Natal and the Cape Colony. The Boers had forced upon ‘the Empire a costly war and the loss of thousands of precious lives’. For Britain to acknowledge the independence of the Boer republics was out of the question.

  The message was clear, but Bloemfontein and Pretoria initially failed to grasp its full—disastrous—implications. Reitz and Smuts even started drafting a scathing reply to Salisbury and backed down only when they saw the reactions from other countries. Leyds had understood immediately just how serious it all was. It was a huge disappointment and a blow to him personally. All his efforts and subtle diplomatic manoeuvring had been for nothing. Kruger and Steyn had trampled over his work like two bulls in a china shop. That was the sad truth. They had bungled and dealt themselves a deadly blow.

  Every experienced diplomat agreed. De Giers informed them that the Russian initiative had become ‘inopportune’ after the telegram from the two presidents and ‘Lord Salisbury’s categorical statements’ in reply. The response from the Dutch foreign minister, De Beaufort, was that ‘the British Government’s resolute statement’ ruled out ‘any possibility of intervention’. The French foreign minister, Delcassé, felt that any thought of mediating at that stage was ‘manifestly futile’. The governments of Germany and the other countries they had written to responded in the same vein. The American government, however, offered its services to London—the only country to do so—only to be told that its help was not needed. The one person who paid no attention to all the diplomatic turmoil was the young Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. She turned to the German emperor in her personal capacity, as she had done six months earlier in her appeal to Queen Victoria. But Wilhelm II was no more sympathetic to Wilhelmina’s emotional plea than his g
randmother had been. Nothing had changed in the world of diplomacy.83

  The war continued. Lord Roberts had taken little notice of all the upheaval. He ignored it and went on regardless. On 13 March 1900 the British expeditionary army advanced on Bloemfontein. The previous day, President Steyn and his government had fled to Kroonstad, 200 kilometres further north, now the new capital of the Orange Free State.

  Roberts was hoping that Bloemfontein would just be a stopover on his way to Johannesburg and Pretoria, but things turned out differently. His troops had taken a beating. They were unaccustomed to the extreme heat and unpredictable thunderstorms of the highveld summers. The long marches, the heavy fighting and the halving of their rations hadn’t made their lives any easier. The soldiers were worn out, they were constantly hungry and the water they had been consuming was suspect. Paardeberg was particularly bad. After their confrontation with Cronjé’s commandos, the Modder River was polluted by the corpses of horses and oxen. The men had been warned not to drink from it, but many had done so nevertheless. And they had brought the germs to Bloemfontein. Tens of thousands of exhausted, undernourished and diseased soldiers arriving in a town with 3000 inhabitants was a recipe for disaster. A typhoid epidemic broke out, one more rampant than in beleaguered Ladysmith.

  The massive scale of the epidemic was largely due to unreliable supply lines, which was the biggest problem facing Roberts’s army. Bloemfontein had the logistical advantage of being on the direct railway line from the Cape Colony, but in wartime its dependence on rail transport was a drawback. The retreating Boers had blown up the main bridges along the supply route and it would take time to repair them. Temporary, makeshift bridges were not designed to carry the heavily laden goods wagons that were needed daily to supply an expeditionary army of 50,000 men. And when transport became available again, there was still the problem of bottlenecks. Everything the troops needed in the way of food, weapons, ammunition, clothing, tents, horses and medical supplies had to be transported along a single track. Military supplies were given priority over supplies for hospitals that were bursting at the seams. Roberts and his chief of staff were taken to task for bringing this logistical disaster upon themselves by insisting on a centralised transport system. Kitchener of Khartoum, who was ultimately responsible for coordinating it all, came to be known as Kitchener of Chaos.84