The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  The fact that Roberts’s expeditionary army was held up in Bloemfontein suited one man quite well. Winston Churchill, the Morning Post’s war correspondent and second lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, was always eager for action. The relief of Ladysmith had brought an end to the hostilities in Natal. The Boers had withdrawn to the Drakensberg and Biggarsberg. By the look of things, Buller was planning to give his own men and White’s time to recover from the many hardships they had endured. So for the time being, there was no war to be waged or won. It was time to move on to the other front, to see how the last part was playing out there, to witness the march to Pretoria. Ian Hamilton, a friend of Roberts’s from British India, had gone there too.

  Churchill had no difficulty in obtaining leave from the Cockyolibirds and left Ladysmith on 29 March 1900. The train to Durban took him past the now-empty hospital tent camp. The dead were still buried there, but the patients had been transferred to other hospitals. ‘Ghastly Intombi had faded into the past, as a nightmare flies at the dawn of day,’ he wrote, not suspecting that there was another nightmare to come. From Durban he took the boat to East London and from there the train to Cape Town. He booked a suite at the Mount Nelson Hotel while awaiting his new accreditation. A mere formality, no doubt. Lord Roberts was an old friend of the family. As a child, Churchill had seen him on many occasions. Moreover, Bobs owed his appointment as commander-in-chief in British India in 1885 to Lord Randolph, who was the state secretary for India in that period. To pass the time Churchill went jackal hunting with the high commissioner, Milner, and grumbled about the gossip he had heard from other guests at the hotel, where ‘all the world and his wife are residing—particularly the wife’.

  A week later it dawned on him that something was wrong. He decided to ask two old acquaintances in Roberts’s staff, Ian Hamilton and another general he had met in British India, William Nicholson. The answer came by telegram. Churchill’s unsparing pen had evidently offended both Roberts and Kitchener.

  Kitchener’s grievance dated back to the Sudan campaign in 1898. Churchill had published an unembellished account of it in The River War, criticising the killing of wounded Mahdi fighters after the Battle of Omdurman, and condemning the exhumation and beheading of the Mahdi. ‘To destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act.’ Kitchener hadn’t forgotten that Churchill held him responsible for both atrocities. By the same token, this applied to Roberts as well. Churchill had subsequently redeemed himself by his heroism on the armoured train, his escape from Pretoria and by taking part in Buller’s campaign in Natal. But he had thrown those military triumphs out of the window by publishing his newspaper reports. After the defeat at Spion Kop, for instance, he had written a disparaging article for the Morning Post about a sermon by an Anglican chaplain, which didn’t measure up to one he had heard in Sudan by the inspired (Roman Catholic) Father Brindle. More than anything else, his little gem, ‘whether Rome was again seizing the opportunity which Canterbury disdained’, had upset not only the Anglican clergy in Britain, but also the devout Lord Roberts.

  The last straw was his contribution to a debate in Ladysmith about the treatment accorded to those in Natal and the Cape Colony—of Dutch as well as British descent—who had sided with the Boers after their invasion. Many Britons were clamouring for revenge against the ‘rebels’, but Churchill made a public appeal for reconciliation. Vengeance, he wrote in a Natal newspaper, was morally wrong and counterproductive. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, wouldn’t work. It would only alienate the Boers even further. ‘We desire a speedy peace and the last thing in the world we want is that this war should enter a guerrilla phase.’ His advice was to establish British supremacy in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, but after that offer forgiveness and refrain from individual reprisals.

  This kind of thinking went down badly in Natal and the Cape Colony as well as Britain. His articles expressing similar opinions in the Morning Post appeared with a disclaimer from the editors. Roberts and Kitchener weren’t in favour of reconciliation either. Hamilton and Nicholson, however, did support Churchill’s view. Had they not done so, he could have packed his bags and taken himself back to England. Now, on 11 April, he was finally given permission to accompany and report on Roberts’s campaign, but ‘only for your father’s sake’. On his arrival in Bloemfontein he was also subjected to a sermon by Nicholson—Roberts’s military secretary—‘against reckless and uncharitable criticism’.85

  It seemed to help. A few days earlier he had sent an indignant article to the Morning Post about Gatacre’s dismissal. Gatacre, the general who had lost the battle at Stormberg, had fouled up again and been sent packing from one day to the next—unfairly, in Churchill’s opinion. But once in Bloemfontein, Churchill kept his criticism to himself. In his first contribution from there, on 16 April 1900, he outlined the logistical problems without even mentioning Kitchener’s name, let alone his new nickname. And Roberts—who was pointedly ignoring him—he described in glowing terms as ‘the Queen’s greatest subject, the Commander who had in the brief space of a month revolutionised the fortunes of the war, had turned disaster into victory’.

  Most interesting of all, especially in the light of his experiences in Ladysmith, was what Churchill omitted to say. In the meantime, the typhoid epidemic in Bloemfontein had grown to frightening proportions. Conditions had deteriorated since 31 March after a joint attack on the waterworks at Sannaspos, carried out by Boer commandos under the brothers Christiaan and Piet de Wet. During Churchill’s stay in Bloemfontein 5000 people had been infected and 1000 of them died. But there wasn’t a word about it in any of his reports—unlike Arthur Conan Doyle, who was working at Langman’s private hospital during the same period and who insisted in several publications that compulsory vaccination could have prevented all those fatalities. At the time, vaccines were provided only on request. Even then, Churchill didn’t respond.

  The most likely reason is that the subject was too sensitive and he was unwilling to jeopardise his position—or embarrass his patrons Hamilton and Nicholson—by offending Roberts again. Otherwise he would surely have had something to say about Conan Doyle’s call for vaccination against typhoid. He had discussed the subject once before, on his voyage to South Africa on the Dunottar Castle. On that occasion he had taken a stand against vaccination, because he was not convinced of its efficacy. Instead, he put his faith in ‘health and the laws of health’.86

  Columns on the move

  Bloemfontein, 16 April 1900

  Churchill hadn’t come to Bloemfontein to fritter his time away. Action, march, advance, that was the kind of idiom he wanted to convey in the Morning Post. The endless convoys of goods wagons and the daily procession of dark brown body bags were subjects he left for others to write about. He wanted to be on campaign again, accompanying the troops to the highveld. He had no military assignment there, but as a journalist he was impatient to be where the action was.

  In that respect, his timing was perfect. In March 1900 the Boers were as good as played out, at least in the Orange Free State; in April they were back in top form. Under the inspiring leadership of the exiled President Steyn and their new chief commandant, Christiaan de Wet, they developed a new and more flexible strategy. They carried out one raid after another in the contested territory south-east of Bloemfontein. British headquarters reacted with astonishment and indignation. It wasn’t right. The capital had been occupied; the Orange Free State had lost the war; the Free Staters were supposed to surrender. As Lord Roberts put it in a personal letter to Queen Victoria after the fall of Bloemfontein, ‘It seems unlikely that this State will give much more trouble.’ That still left the Transvaal, but after the invasion of Pretoria the war wouldn’t take long, he predicted. A month later, in mid-April, Roberts still thought the same. There had just been a bit of a delay. Before advancing further north, they would need to deal with a few pockets of resistance in the south-east of the Orange Free State. His generals were growing restless.


  Roberts didn’t foresee any major obstacles. He had confidence in his plan: firm military action against insurgents, backed up by the power of the written word. That was how he had operated from the start, his tone gradually hardening from conciliatory to threatening. Not for nothing did the Boers speak of Roberts’s ‘paper bombs’. He issued his first proclamation to the burghers of the Orange Free State on 17 February 1900, a few days before the battle at Paardeberg, calling on them to cease hostilities and assuring those who did that they would not be troubled. His second proclamation of 11 March contained an emphatic warning. He was about to occupy Bloemfontein and promised its inhabitants that those ‘staying peacefully at home will not be molested’. But if the British troops encountered resistance, he added ominously, they would have themselves to blame for the consequences.

  After the fall of Bloemfontein, Roberts’s duplicity became blatantly evident. On the one hand, he put people off their guard by laying on festivities and brass bands. He also launched a bilingual newspaper, The Friend, for which he engaged the services of Rudyard Kipling, Poet of the Empire and author of gems like ‘Take up the white man’s burden’. But at the same time, on 15 March he issued a third proclamation, far more strongly worded than the previous two. It was an infinitely high-calibre paper bomb. Now, he added vindictively, punishment would be meted out to virtually any Boer who had ever pointed a Mauser at a British soldier. Moreover, those who refused to ‘lay down their arms and take an oath to abstain from further part in the war’ would be arrested and deprived of their property. Those who acquiesced would be given ‘safe conduct to their homes’.

  Churchill’s views on the matter didn’t appear in the Morning Post. This was another subject he wisely avoided. Given his earlier appeal for reconciliation between Britons and Boers, he must have had reservations about the edict. What he did describe to his readers were the unintended repercussions of Roberts’s last proclamation. On returning home, many of the Boers who had laid down their arms and taken the oath were lambasted by their commandants and, in some cases, by their families as well. As a result, ‘most of them, from fear or inclination, rejoined their commandos . . . the lately penitent rebels stirred, are stirring’. In this way, Christiaan and his brother Piet de Wet, in particular, managed to raise a substantial army of insurgents. Roberts responded by sending several columns to break the resistance.

  As a war correspondent, Churchill could choose which division he wanted to accompany, providing they would have him. He knew at once. It looked as if the critical encounters would take place in the vicinity of Dewetsdorp, about 70 kilometres south-east of Bloemfontein. Among those who were heading there was an Imperial Yeomanry brigade under the command of General John Brabazon. Churchill knew Old Brab well. He was, needless to say, an old friend of the family, and commanding officer of the 4th Hussars, with whom Churchill had begun his military career. Churchill bought a carriage and four horses, and on 17 April put them on the train to Edenburg—there was enough room going south—and from there rode alone to Dewetsdorp, ‘across a landscape charged with silent menace’.87

  One can only guess what Marthinus Steyn thought of Roberts’s latest proclamation. It was a disgrace, a gift from heaven. Out of respect for Oom Paul, he had taken part in his peace initiatives, but in his heart he had more faith in fighting than diplomacy. In September 1899 he had been reluctant to go to war, but once hostilities broke out his doubts had evaporated. He visited the fronts, gave encouragement to the dispirited commandos, and emerged as the soul of perseverance, even when the war turned against them in late February 1900. Neither Lord Salisbury’s brusque reply to their telegram nor the capture of his capital city by Lord Roberts did anything to weaken his resolve. Roberts’s last proclamation of 15 March had given him an opportunity, which he grasped with both hands, to take some kind of action.

  On 19 March Steyn responded with two paper projectiles of his own. The first was formal and challenged the legal grounds of Roberts’s demands. The Republic of the Orange Free State still existed, he declared, and the government was doing what it had undertaken to do. Every citizen was therefore obliged to perform military service. Anyone who failed to do so or who laid down his weapons ‘without being coerced’ to do so was guilty of high treason.

  His second reply was addressed to the people of the Orange Free State. It was an impassioned appeal to their loyalty. ‘Let us not be misled by this cunning ruse . . . The enemy now by fair promises seeks to divide us by offering a reward for disloyalty and cowardice. Could a greater insult be offered than to dissuade us from a sacred duty, thus betraying ourselves, betraying our people, betraying the blood that has already flowed for our land and nation, and betraying our children? . . . The man who has broken his solemn agreements with our people, will he now honour his deceitful promise?’ The first promises had already been broken. There had been ‘the shameful destruction of property at Jacobsdal, and in Bloemfontein the arrest of citizens who had trusted his proclamation and laid down their arms’. The capital was in the enemy’s hands, ‘but the battle is not lost. On the contrary, it gives greater reason to fight harder . . . Take courage and be steadfast in your faith. The Lord God shall not suffer His purpose for our nation to be obstructed. Persevere in the struggle. The darkest hour is just before dawn.’

  Steyn didn’t stop at words. Two days earlier, on 17 March, a joint council of war had been held in Kroonstad, which had far-reaching consequences for the Boers’ military tactics—and the subsequent course of the war. The meeting was attended by Kruger and Steyn along with other top brass from both Boer republics, including their highest-ranking military leaders, the Transvaal commandant-general, Joubert, and the Free State’s new chief commandant, Christiaan de Wet. With surprising alacrity they agreed on a drastic change of strategy. Even Joubert, the ultimate advocate of defensive warfare, acknowledged the advantages of offensive action as favoured by De Wet, De la Rey and other generals of a younger generation. They would attack, but within limits, in smaller and more mobile units divided into companies of 25 men. They would dispense with their oxwagons and tighten up discipline. The idea was to avoid major confrontations and aim instead for the Achilles’ heel of the British army: their long, vulnerable lines of communication.

  The only matter the two military commanders disagreed on was a surprising measure De Wet had taken a few days earlier. The British would want time to catch their breath after the capture of Bloemfontein, he reasoned, so he had taken the opportunity to disband his commandos and give them leave to go home. On 25 March they were to reassemble at the railway bridge over the Sand River, north of Bloemfontein. Joubert was aghast. How could he! De Wet admitted he had taken a risk. Perhaps some of them wouldn’t come back. But, he thought, his men had spent six months giving the very best of themselves, they were in low spirits after the British successes, discipline was slack, he had to do something. Those who did return would at least be motivated, and he’d rather have ‘ten with the will to fight than a hundred dragging their heels’.88

  De Wet didn’t manage to persuade Joubert, but on 25 March he was proved right. All his men returned except those from districts that were effectively occupied by the British. And, indeed, they came with renewed vigour. His decision proved its worth in the successful surprise attack he undertook at Sannaspos on 31 March. Not only did his commandos and those under his brother Piet manage to put Bloemfontein’s water supply out of action, but they also seized 80 supply wagons and seven guns and took more than 400 British prisoners. It was a triumph that made a powerful statement: the war was not over, the Boers’ new tactics were successful.

  De Wet gave a repeat performance a few days later, on 3 April, when he showed up unexpectedly at Mostertshoek, 60 kilometres further south. With an army of re-conscripted burghers and the commandos of generals Stoffel Froneman and A.I. de Villiers, he mounted a surprise attack against a British infantry unit under Captain W.J. McWhinnie. Reinforcements under Major-General Gatacre arrived too late—
this was the blunder after Stormberg that proved fatal for Gatacre—and De Wet captured another 450 British prisoners. There was clearly a problem Roberts would have to deal with before advancing on Johannesburg and Pretoria.

  Joubert didn’t live to see the first fruits of the new tactics. On 27 March, aged 69, he died in Pretoria of peritonitis. Friend and foe paid their respects. Unaware of the unpleasant surprise De Wet had in store for him, Roberts sent a telegram offering his condolences. Rudyard Kipling honoured him—a bit prematurely—as a steadfast defender of a hopeless cause. ‘But subtle, strong, and stubborn, gave his life / To a lost cause, and knew the gift was vain.’ In accordance with his last will, Joubert was buried on his farm in Rustfontein. At the railway station President Kruger took leave of his lifelong comrade-in-arms and favourite political rival. He spoke movingly of the old days, the days of the Voortrekkers and their sacred commitment to the Promised Land. He was the last survivor of them all.89

  It was hard on the old patriarch. Jan Kock had been killed at Elandslaagte, Piet Cronjé captured and banished to St Helena, and now Piet Joubert gone as well. There was no one left of his own generation. He was 74, and the men who were now running the show in the Transvaal were far younger. Schalk Burger, Joubert’s successor as vice-president, wasn’t yet 50; the new commandant-general, Louis Botha, not even 40; and the state attorney, Smuts, was still in his twenties. State Secretary Reitz, in his midfifties, was the oldest, but sometimes so rash that he seemed half his age. He was completely different from his predecessor, Leyds, who, young as he was, had always been so thorough and vigilant. But Leyds was far away and out of reach, isolated in his European observation post.