The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Kruger’s voice was still firm and impressive when he addressed his people, but his eyesight had dimmed, his gait was less steady, and his thinking more often inspired by the teachings of the Old Testament. He spoke not of Roberts or international political relations, but of the strength of the lion and the king of Assyria. His faith remained steadfast, but he was losing touch with the world. He had allowed himself to be talked into the ill-conceived idea of a telegram to Salisbury and had proceeded to push it through, first in his own Executive Council and then past the 30-year-younger president of the Orange Free State. Immediately afterwards, without waiting for a reply from London, they had called on half of Europe to mediate.

  As if that wasn’t futile enough, Kruger, with Steyn’s backing, went a step further. Why not send a delegation to Europe to persuade one or more of the powers to ‘intervene or assist’? The choice of delegates was easily made. The chairman representing the two Boer republics was Abraham Fischer, a lawyer and a friend of Steyn’s. He was accompanied by Cornelius Wessels, speaker of the Free State Volksraad, and A.D.W. Wolmarans, a member of the Transvaal’s Executive Council, with J.M. de Bruijn as secretary. The fact that none of the three delegates had any experience of diplomacy and that only Fischer spoke fluent English and Dutch—but no German or French—wasn’t considered a handicap. All three were given diplomatic credentials and set off in haste for Lourenço Marques. On 13 March 1900 they embarked on the Kaiser—an obvious clue to anyone who knew anything about European diplomacy.

  Leyds was left to find out about the peace initiative from the newspapers. Even so, he was loyal to this foolhardy mission, as he had been to others in the past. He thought it would be wise to travel ahead to confer with his new colleagues. They met in Milan on 13 April in the presence of Hendrik Muller, the Orange Free State’s consul-general in the Netherlands. It was a frustrating experience for Leyds. He took pains to inform the delegation at length about political and diplomatic relations in Europe and the United States. In his opinion—which had recently been confirmed by his wellinformed Russian sources—they only stood a chance if they travelled on to Berlin without delay. Tsar Nicholas II was still willing to take some kind of action, but only if he was certain that Germany would cooperate. The French government was holding back so as not to jeopardise the World Exhibition in Paris. No other country, the Netherlands included, was in a position to do anything at all. Kaiser Wilhelm II held the key in his hands. There was no guarantee, but if the three ‘suddenly appeared before him . . . like Boers straight from the battlefield’ and appealed to ‘his conscience and magnanimity’, there was a ‘chance of moving him, touching a sentimental corner of his heart, stirring his vanity’.

  The delegation listened politely, but cast Leyds’s advice to the winds. They had already decided to go to the Netherlands first, because of their blood ties with the Dutch, and as Muller strongly supported the idea they proceeded as planned. They arrived in The Hague a few days later and were given a warm reception, but the outcome was what Leyds had expected. Nothing. Prime Minister Pierson was happy to receive them, and their audiences with Queen Wilhelmina and subsequently the Queen Mother, Emma, were cordial and hospitable. But in the talks that really mattered, their official meeting with the foreign minister, De Beaufort, on 26 April, Fischer, Wessels and Wolmarans were unceremoniously fobbed off. De Beaufort had no qualms about the way he dealt with them. Fischer more or less made the grade. He was ‘the smartest, much like an Englishman’. But in his diary De Beaufort described Wessels and Wolmarans as ‘peasants with the cunning, guile and distrust of their kind, who felt superior because they were the leading and ruling class in their country’. Naturally they knew beforehand ‘that the Dutch government would do nothing’, but in spite of this they were ‘bitterly disappointed when I explained . . . that any step we might take would turn the British public against them and that would only be to their detriment’.

  After this disillusioning meeting the delegation decided there was nothing to be gained by staying on in the Netherlands. As their next destination they chose the United States. This, too, Leyds considered a pointless exercise as long as the Republican president, McKinley, and his state secretary, Hay, were in government. But again he gave in to Fischer and his associates. He went so far as to escort them on the first leg of the voyage, from Rotterdam to Boulogne-sur-Mer. On 3 May they embarked on the Maasdam. A thousand well-wishers were on the quay to see them off. Their presence at least helped to sweeten the bitter pill they had been made to swallow. They had won the hearts of the Dutch people.90

  That same day, 2 May 1900, after spending seven weeks in Bloemfontein, Lord Roberts resumed his advance to the north. It had taken a huge effort, but now everything was in place. The men had recovered their strength, their equipment was in order, the gaps in the ranks caused in combat and by the typhus epidemic had been filled, their supplies replenished and—last but not least—the Boer resistance south-east of Bloemfontein had been crushed. More accurately, Christiaan de Wet, who had been prowling around there with some 2500 Boer fighters for the previous few weeks, had been driven away. It had taken ten times as many troops to accomplish this, 25,000 divided into five columns, but step by step they had gained ground. At one point, they had almost surrounded De Wet, but at the very last moment he managed to slip through their fingers—not for the last time.

  It hadn’t been a major battle, more like a series of intermittent skirmishes, with much manoeuvring back and forth on both sides. This was the kind of action Churchill couldn’t resist, even though he was no longer wearing the cockade of black sakabula tail feathers on his hat. On 19 April he arrived in his carriage and reported to Brabazon’s brigade, near Dewetsdorp. Old Brab was delighted see him and at once launched into a litany of complaints about his superior, Major-General French, the liberator of Kimberley. It was entertaining enough—Churchill always enjoyed a bit of quality gossip—but he had really come for the action. Two days later he left with the colourful cavalry units under Brabazon’s command, among them Montmorency’s Scouts with their distinctive death’s head insignia. Raymond de Montmorency, after whom the unit was named, had died two months earlier and Angus McNeill was now their commanding officer.

  It was the same McNeill whom Churchill lured into an adventure that could have cost him dearly. On a reconnaissance they came upon a group of Boers who were making their way to a koppie two kilometres further on. McNeill asked Brabazon’s permission to intercept them. It was granted. ‘Mount, mount, mount, Scouts!’ he cried, and, to Churchill, ‘Come with us, we’ll give you a show now—first-class.’

  And that it certainly was, at any rate for the objective observer. A thrilling race between 200 Boers and 50 Scouts. Whoever reached the hill first would be able to take cover and fire on the enemy. In full gallop Churchill fell to musing about the triumphant mission he had taken part in at Acton Homes three months earlier, except on that occasion they had had the advantage of surprise. Now the boot was on the other foot. Barbed wire stopped them about a hundred metres from the hill, and they were forced to dismount. A few men were trying to cut through the wire, when suddenly they saw the heads and shoulders of ten or so Boers.

  This was nothing at all like Acton Homes. It was Chieveley all over again; the armoured train. ‘Grim, hairy, and terrible’, and how many more were there behind them? ‘Too late,’ McNeill shouted, ‘back to the other kopje. Gallop!’ The Boers opened fire, the Scouts leapt onto their horses and sped off. As Churchill was putting his foot in the stirrup, his horse took fright at the sound of gunfire, bolted, broke loose and galloped away.

  There he was again, on foot as at Chieveley, an easy target on the open veld. This time he had his pistol at hand, but what could he hope to achieve against who knows how many Mausers? He turned on his heel and, for the second time in this war, ran for his life. It looked as if his luck had abandoned him. ‘Here at last I take it.’ The words flashed through his mind. Suddenly, as before, he caught a glimpse of a tall man
on a grey horse. Would he be captured again?

  Then he caught sight of the skull and crossbones: a Scout. ‘Death in Revelation, but life to me.’ He called out, ‘Give me a stirrup.’ The rider slackened his pace, Churchill ran towards him, leapt up behind him and flung his arms around him. He clung to the horse’s mane. Bullets whistled past his ears, his hands were covered in blood. The horse had taken a bullet but it continued to run. Four hundred metres, five hundred, the gunfire died down. It looked as if they were going to make it. Churchill heaved a sigh of relief.

  The rider didn’t. ‘My poor horse, oh my poor fucking horse; shot with an explosive bullet. The devils! But their hour will come. Oh, my poor horse.’ Churchill tried to console him. ‘Never mind, you’ve saved my life.’ But that didn’t help. ‘Ah, but it’s the horse I’m thinking about.’ No more was said. They reached the safety of the next koppie. He had escaped again.91

  Colour

  Kroonstad, 12 May 1900

  By all accounts it was one of the most beautiful towns in the Orange Free State. But Churchill found Kroonstad a bit disappointing. It was slightly bigger than Winburg, but not half as well kept. Everything was covered by a thick layer of red dust and it was dry as could be. Roberts marched one of his divisions into town, for effect, and then out again. His force had left Bloemfontein nine days earlier, singing ‘We are marching to Pretoria’. They had come 200 kilometres since then, nearly halfway. The government of the Orange Free State had been forced to flee again. Let’s hope they’ve got strong legs, Churchill quipped.

  He could allow himself to include a frivolous note in his dispatches to the Morning Post. They were making progress these days. The bulldozer strategy Buller had dreamed of had been set in motion by Roberts and Kitchener. The British war machine was rolling over a 40-kilometre front through the highveld, on either side of the railway line, a massive, unstoppable procession of guns, men and horses heading for Johannesburg and Pretoria. Roberts was in command, with French’s cavalry on his left and Hamilton’s heavily armed column on his right. At the same time, two infantry divisions under lieutenants-general Lord Methuen and Sir Archibald Hunter had left Kimberley and were marching north along the railway track to Rhodesia. The peace on the eastern front had now been shattered as well. On 8 May Buller’s amply reinforced expeditionary army got under way, making for the Biggarsberg and Drakensberg. As Churchill explained to his readers, the hugely outnumbered Boers had been forced to spread their forces over such a wide area that the British armies were breaking through everywhere ‘as an iron bar might smash thin ice, with scarcely any shock’.

  In a word, the Boers didn’t stand a chance. They were desperately short of men and equipment. Their new strategy would have meant allowing Roberts’s forces to proceed unhindered and then cutting him off from his supply lines. This was what Christiaan de Wet had suggested. When he found himself in danger of being surrounded in the vicinity of Dewetsdorp, he had hoped to be able to escape to the south, to the strip of land along the border between the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony. This would put him in a better position to sabotage the vital railway lines. But the other Boer leaders weren’t convinced. The Transvalers were reluctant to let the enemy continue their march to Johannesburg and Pretoria. Their new commandant-general, Louis Botha, had come from Natal to lead the defence in person. He considered his options: a Long Tom to counter the British naval guns; burn the veld so that the British in their khaki uniforms would be more visible against the scorched plains. President Steyn agreed with him and recalled De Wet. He would have to join in to block Roberts’s advance. Resourceful and enterprising as he was, De Wet did everything he could, but all the Boers’ cunning was no match for the sheer magnitude of the British assault, their firepower, their bayonets and now the flanking manoeuvres they had learned after those first insane weeks.

  There was too much happening to follow everything closely; even a wide-awake war correspondent couldn’t take it all in. Churchill had opted for a position on the right flank, near his favourite general, Ian Hamilton, for obvious reasons. Roberts was still giving him the cold shoulder, and after the few days he had spent with Brabazon, French wanted nothing to do with him either. Hamilton was still decent to him, as always. He had even allowed Churchill’s cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, to accompany them. ‘Sunny’ had been attached to Roberts’s staff, along with a Duke of Norfolk and a Duke of Westminster. The British press had quibbled about the number of aristocrats who were being given honorary appointments and Roberts shrewdly decided to dispose of one of them. And so the two cousins found themselves together in Hamilton’s column.

  They had a marvellous time. They rode in Churchill’s carriage from one engagement to the next, enjoying the unspoilt countryside, ultimate freedom, each day bringing a new adventure. A reconnaissance, an ambush, a pursuit, the familiar crack of rifle fire. Nights under the stars. Living off sheep the army carried with them, a few chickens they scrounged along the way and such comforts as they had managed to store in the carriage: ‘two feet of the best tinned provisions and alcoholic stimulants London could supply’.

  Besides military operations, Churchill wrote about the settlements they passed—mostly disappointing—and the people they met on their way. Some of those encounters were interesting. There was that family living on the large farm near the Sand River who had put them up for the night at Hamilton’s request. Four generations of Boers: an elderly man and, for the rest, only women and children. The men and boys, even the youngest of them, had joined the commandos. The family grudgingly offered them the use of a bedroom and the living room. Hamilton’s staff installed themselves on the veranda. Churchill took the opportunity to explore the surroundings. There were a dozen children, he noted, black and white, running around together, ‘little Kaffirs, the offspring of the servants, playing with the sons and daughters of the house’.

  In the living room ‘one very curious book’ caught his eye. It was a songbook compiled by F.W. Reitz, the former president of the Orange Free State, now the state secretary of the Transvaal. It was a book of patriotic battle hymns, with a few English songs in translation. They were all in Dutch and all intended ‘to manufacture a new Dutch nation in South Africa’. Churchill made no effort to conceal his admiration. He regarded this kind of book as ‘the foundation stone of a vernacular literature’. The Boers had been struggling for years to develop a culture of their own. With a little more patience, he reflected, a little less preoccupation with themselves, the odd compromise here and there, they would have succeeded without too much trouble. Instead, their obstinacy had brought ‘a conquering army to this quiet farm, and scattered the schemers far and wide’.

  A few days later—Kroonstad had meanwhile fallen—he had a different kind of unusual meeting. At least, he might have, if Hamilton had had his way. Piet de Wet and his commandos were near Lindley, 80 kilometres east of Kroonstad. De Wet was apparently tired of fighting. On 18 May the brigade general, Robert Broadwood, received an intriguing message. He heard that De Wet was prepared to surrender on condition that he could return to his farm. Broadwood, who had suffered at the hands of the De Wet brothers at Sannaspos six weeks earlier, seized the opportunity. The surrender of a Boer general, the brother of the Free State’s chief commander—this was a chance to get his revenge. Hamilton, too, was more than willing to accept De Wet’s terms. But to be on the safe side he sent a telegram asking for Roberts’s consent. The answer came quickly, and there were no two ways about it. Out of the question. An unconditional surrender or none at all. Hamilton and Broadwood were flabbergasted. Churchill forgot his resolution not to antagonise Roberts. ‘I need not say with what astonishment this decision was received.’ Exile to St Helena or Ceylon, that wasn’t what Piet de Wet had done it for. He chose to keep fighting, as Churchill lamented, ‘to our loss in life, honour, and money’.92

  In the meantime, Sister Hellemans had also succumbed. Like everyone else in the Second Dutch Ambulance, she too ‘paid toll to Ladysmith�
��. In her case it was dysentery. Fortunately she took ill only after reaching Pretoria in early April 1900, at the end of a long, exhausting journey. Now it was her turn to be nursed. There was nothing to do but spend a few weeks resting and recuperating.

  By early May she had recovered sufficiently to get back to work. Her colleagues had already gone on ahead. Their new posting was a town called Christiana in the far south-west of the Transvaal. It was near Veertienstroom, where 15 years earlier Willem Leyds had gained his first practical experience of the workings of diplomacy.93 There was heavy fighting in the area and ‘many sick and wounded patients’ needed medical attention. The special train that took her to the western front on 7 May was packed with Boer commandos. They arrived in Klerksdorp at midnight and from there she travelled another four days on a ‘mule cart’ downstream along the Vaal.

  In Christiana, Hellemans discovered that the local inn had been converted to serve as a hospital. It was a real building and could accommodate 40 patients. Before the Dutch corps arrived they had been looked after by the Transvaal Red Cross. No lack of dedication, Hellemans thought, but a billiard room where people ‘played and smoked immoderately’ was no place for the sick and wounded. They had to have separate quarters. The standard of ‘cleanliness and tidiness’ wasn’t satisfactory either. ‘A Dutch housewife’s hair would stand on end’ at the sight of the kitchen. The floor was made from cow dung, which ‘turned into porridge when anyone spilt a few drops of water’. In addition, it was dingy and musty, the washing-up water was brown and the dishcloths were revolting. Luckily, the Boer girls who worked there were willing to learn. In no time at all, they were ‘polishing and scrubbing, the kitchen looked brighter and our Dutch instincts were assuaged’.