The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  It had all seemed so promising a while back. In mid-July 1900 the majority of the remaining Free State commandos, including De Wet, had been in the Brandwater valley, on the eastern border, near Basutoland. There were about 8000 Boers, with all their guns, wagons, munitions, horses, oxen and sheep: a fantastic prey. If they remained there, they would have been caught in the trap. The valley was virtually closed off by the horseshoe-shaped ranges of the Witteberg and Roodeberg mountains, and there were only a few accessible passes. And Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Hunter—a more appropriate surname would be hard to imagine—with 20,000 men was busy blocking and occupying each of them. To the south was Basutoland, hostile territory, which the Boers would avoid at any cost. They would be trapped and, for the British, it would just be a matter of waiting for them to surrender.

  But this was where things started going wrong. De Wet had seen the danger and decided to leave the valley, in three groups, moving in different directions. He would head north, with President Steyn, the remaining members of the Free State government and 2000 men. Another 2000 men would make their way to the south-west, led by the general—and dominee—Paul Roux. A third group of 500 men, under General J. Crowther, would go east. The rest, Marthinus Prinsloo’s men, would stay behind to defend the mountain passes as long as they could, and then withdraw.

  De Wet left at once, on the night of 15 July. He took one of the two northern passes, Slabbert’s Nek, with all his commandos, 400 oxwagons and five guns. He had come dangerously close to the camp of one of Hunter’s army commanders, Major-General Arthur Paget—less than three kilometres away—but no one had spotted them. This was the first of a series of miraculous escapes.

  But Hunter wasn’t aware of De Wet’s movements at the time. One group of Boers had managed to slip out, so he was told the following day, but, all being well, the rest were still in the Brandwater valley. They were. The other Boer commandants had been less assertive than De Wet. They had dithered about breaking up their laagers, and Prinsloo and Roux had ended up quarrelling as to who was in charge. Putting it to the vote didn’t resolve anything. Prinsloo won initially, but the votes that came in later gave Roux the edge. Prinsloo challenged the procedure and insisted on taking command.

  It was Hunter who benefited from the dispute. On 24 July, in the depths of winter, with snow on the mountain slopes and in a torrential downpour, he flushed the Boers from their positions on Slabbert’s Nek and Retief’s Nek, before doing the same, a few days later, on Commando Nek in the south-west and Nauwpoort Nek in the north-east. The British troops swept into the valley from all four sides. The Boers had no way out.

  At any rate, this is what Prinsloo believed. He called for a ceasefire. Hunter refused and demanded an unconditional surrender. On 30 July Prinsloo conceded, on behalf of all the Boer commandos. Roux protested, and personally made it known to Hunter. He was the highest-ranking officer, he insisted, not Prinsloo; hence the surrender wasn’t legally valid. Hunter heard him out, probably with some amusement at his naivety, and then had him arrested.

  But other Boer commandos did see a way out. Some 1500 men under General Piet Fourie escaped through the Golden Gate, the easternmost pass. The rest followed Prinsloo’s example. There were so many of them that it took more than a week for them all to hand in their weapons. On 9 August they took stock of the damage. A total of 4314 men had surrendered, even more than at Paardeberg. They were shipped to Ceylon, where they remained for the duration of the war. Their two million Mauser cartridges ended up on a bonfire. The British made better use of their 5500 horses, 4000 sheep and 3000 oxen.14

  By then, De Wet was hundreds of kilometres and several ‘narrow escapes’ away. The first reports of the surrender reached him on 2 August. He was appalled. A few days earlier it had been his own brother, Piet, and now Prinsloo, Roux and all those thousands of others. It was ‘an abominable murder of the Government, Country and People’. And it upset his plans. He was at the Vaal and had been intending to veer off to the south, in the direction of the Cape Colony. But now that there were so many British troops in the Orange Free State, it would make more sense to head north, into the Transvaal. There was also the consideration that Steyn wanted to confer with Kruger, not by telegraph, but president to president. He could be of some use.

  The road north wasn’t exactly empty. South of the Vaal 11,000 British troops were advancing with the aim of hemming the Boers in, but even more were lying in wait across the river. There were roughly 18,000 in all, with celebrated commanders like Methuen, Smith-Dorrien, Hamilton and Baden-Powell. And all of them were led by Kitchener personally.

  Even so, De Wet managed to pilot them through. They crossed the Vaal at Schoeman’s Drift, scrambled over an almost impassable trail to Van Vuurenskloof, rested for a couple of hours at Buffelsdoorn. Then they crossed the railway line at Welverdiend, blowing it up at eight places as they went along, forded the Mooi River, and joined Piet Liebenberg’s Transvaal commandos. They veered north outside Ventersdorp, setting fire to the dry grass behind them, and headed for the Magaliesberg. At the last moment they turned eastward. On 14 August they crossed at Olifant’s Nek. They had shaken off their pursuers and escaped.

  That was the gist of the reports Roberts received from his generals. He had to admit that De Wet deserved his good fortune. No Boer commandant had his men so firmly in hand, wielded the sjambok so unsparingly, drove them so hard to maintain his own breathtaking momentum. No one had better scouts. His diversionary strategies were unrivalled, oxwagons and all. He had been assisted by Transvaal commandos. All of that was true. But it didn’t alter the fact that opportunities had been missed, miscalculations made, wrong decisions taken. There had been communication breakdowns, errors, blunders, call them what you like. Whatever the case, they had to do better. He, personally, would be in command against Botha.15

  This was the response Willem Leyds had been hoping for. Dated The Hague, 1 August 1900, it was a draft statement of protest, an unequivocal objection—legally correct and heartwarmingly scathing—to Roberts’s first ‘Transvaal’ proclamations. Typical of Asser, his friend and former mentor. In Asser’s opinion the damage the British had inflicted on civilian property was ‘an outright violation of the established rules of international law. Private property, other than the contraband of war, must be respected in war on land.’ Article 46 of the Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed at The Hague on 29 July 1899, was perfectly clear on that point. And Britain was one of its signatories. In Roberts’s proclamations ‘the citizens of the Republic’ were deemed ‘belligerent parties’. Until a peace settlement was reached or the Republican armed forces were destroyed, the Transvaal would remain under martial law.

  Leyds received Asser’s reply more than a week later. He was in Berlin on another impossible mission with Fischer, Wessels and Wolmarans. The members of the delegation had returned from America and desperately wanted an audience with Wilhelm II. Leyds had warned them that the kaiser was unlikely to receive them. In Paris, through personal connections, he had managed to arrange an informal interview with President Loubet, but there was no chance of something similar in Berlin. The signals he had picked up previously were decidedly unfavourable. But the three of them wanted to try nevertheless. So off they went to Berlin, only to be snubbed and humiliated. They weren’t granted so much as a meeting with a deputy under-secretary, let alone the emperor. Wilhelm bluntly refused to receive them, saying they had nothing of interest to tell him. They should have taken Leyds’s advice, he complained, and come to Berlin as soon as they arrived from South Africa, and not gone off to the Netherlands and America first.16

  On the other hand, Leyds could understand the delegation’s motive. They were willing to grasp any opportunity they could, no matter how slight their chance of success. They clung to the faintest glimmer of hope to counter the gloomy reports on the war. The British were now deporting Dutch nationals employed by the Netherlands-South African Railway Company. Including the
ir families, the numbers amounted to 1400 of his compatriots. And the staff of the Dutch ambulances were being sent home, too. The men were even being imprisoned, on charges of aiding and abetting the Boers. News like that made one wish to do something, if only to send a cheering message from faraway Europe.

  Leyds had done so himself, in a personal letter to Kruger in mid-June, after the fall of Pretoria. He had poured out his heart. ‘My thoughts are with you every day, my honourable State President, and every day I wish I could be close at hand.’ He had ended with a hopeful postscript. ‘The delegation has telegraphed from America. If we persist a little longer, the American government will be compelled to do something for the Republics.’

  He knew they were clutching at straws, but it might give Kruger and the others something to believe in. Otherwise, there were the troubles in China: something of benefit might come out of that. In late June 1900 an uprising in the provinces had spilled over into Peking. The rebels—called Boxers because of their religiously inspired method of fighting—were seeking to curb the growing influence of the West on China. They were murdering foreigners, missionaries in particular, and had laid siege to diplomatic missions in Peking. An international expeditionary force had been raised as quickly as possible, representing all the major Western nations as well as Japan. It was now advancing on the Chinese capital. The British were also involved. With luck, they would need more troops than the 10,000 they had already diverted from British India. And it would probably encourage them to bring a quick end to the war in South Africa.17

  With such thoughts Leyds did his best to keep his spirits up. He needed to, because after Berlin he and the delegation were about to face another ordeal: St Petersburg. Again, they were unlikely to be granted an imperial audience. On the afternoon of Wednesday 15 August 1900, their train pulled into the station of the Russian capital. They were encouraged by the cheering crowd that had come out to meet them, but that was the only warm welcome they received. It was soon painfully clear that the Russian authorities had had enough of their uninvited guests. Newspapers were ordered not to write about them, and the tsar was away on military exercises, which could take weeks. While waiting for his return, Leyds was received anyway, by the foreign minister, Count V.N. Lamsdorff. He was given full diplomatic honours. Leyds was an officially accredited envoy—the second secretary, Van der Hoeven, had presented his credentials in December 1898l8—so he was always welcome to speak to the tsar, Lamsdorff assured him. But the members of the delegation? Well, their status wasn’t clear, so it was impossible for His Majesty to receive them. Lamsdorff, of course, couldn’t either.

  This was a bitter pill for Fischer, Wessels and Wolmarans to swallow. Leyds was given an appointment for his audience: two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 25 August. In the meantime, they were working on the official letter protesting against Roberts’s proclamations. It was almost identical to Asser’s draft, but included another emphatic objection to Roberts’s subsequent proclamations of 16 and 19 June. Leyds sent the letter to the consul-general in London, H.S.J. Maas, asking him to pass it on to Lord Salisbury, and to have 100 copies printed for the press. ‘St Petersbourg, August 18th 1900’—that alone would make the British think twice. It would look as if the tsar were symbolically supporting the protest.

  A week later, at the Peterhof Palace, Leyds heard with his own ears what Nicholas II was actually prepared to do. The tsar came straight to the point. Could Leyds explain why the German emperor had made it so obvious that he was turning his back on the Transvaal? ‘None of my ambassadors has been able to shed light on it.’ Leyds replied tactfully. Only once, he said, had Wilhelm II expressed displeasure with the Boers, and that was when they had ordered guns from France as well as Germany. ‘We are the gun manufacturers of the world,’ he had chided them. But this couldn’t be the problem. The real reason, Leyds suggested tentatively, ‘must . . . be sought in his volatile disposition’. This was apparently exactly what the tsar wanted to hear. Wilhelm II’s habit of changing his mind was Leyds’s only hope, he insisted. ‘If you can obtain his assurance that he will not take Britain’s side, I would still be prepared to intervene.’

  As usual, it was a case of one autocrat shifting responsibility onto another. This was as much as Leyds achieved. That and a request to keep the tsar informed of any developments, through De Giers, his envoy in Brussels. Leyds almost ruined the meeting by making a last plea on the delegation’s behalf. It was not appreciated. ‘I would only be able to repeat to them what I have told you. And do you think it’s pleasant for me, the Emperor of all Russians, to say twice, “I cannot”?’19

  The first thing Roberts did on arriving in Belfast was turn the plan of attack upside-down. It was Saturday 25 August 1900. Buller, French and the others on the mountain ridge had been shelling the Boer trenches for four days, but there was no sign of a breakthrough. The troops were positioned too closely together, Roberts concluded. They needed to be dispersed in order to thin out Botha’s line of defence. He kept Buller on the right, but directed French’s cavalry to the left. They would employ their usual outflanking tactic on both sides. In the centre Lieutenant-General Sir Reginald Pole-Carew would keep up the pressure on the Boers.

  Roberts’s plan worked, though Buller was also entitled to some of the credit. After a day and a half of heavy fighting, he decided not to take the route he had originally planned, but to cut through the centre. From the morning of Monday 27 August he concentrated his firepower from the Bergendal plateau straight onto the railway line. The Boer positions there were held by Zarps, Johannesburg’s police officers. They were nobody’s favourites, but the bombardment they endured won them a lasting reputation on the battlefield. It was one of the most savage onslaughts of the entire war, on a par with Vaal Krantz and Pietershoogte. The Zarps also held out for hours against the subsequent infantry assault by the Rifle Brigade and the 1st Inniskilling Fusiliers. But in the course of the afternoon, the onslaught became unbearable. Those who could still walk—most of their horses were dead or wounded—beat a retreat. The Boers’ defence line had been broken.20

  That evening Botha took stock of the situation. The British breakthrough in the centre had rendered his position untenable. Not only Buller, but also French and Pole-Carew had gained ground. He was in danger of being surrounded and decided to withdraw his whole army. They had lost the Battle of Bergendal (the British called it the Battle of Dalmanutha), the last set-piece battle of the war. There was nothing left to do but follow De Wet’s example and divide his army into smaller detachments that would be able to operate quickly and independently.

  The Transvaal’s political leaders were also compelled to retreat further, as fate would have it, at the same time as those of the Orange Free State. President Steyn, along with the rest of his government, arrived at Waterval Onder in the final stage of the battle. He wanted to confer with Kruger and his advisers. The meeting was held on 28 August in Nelspruit, 75 kilometres by rail to the east. It was a memorable occasion. Not only did the Transvaal government officially approve the new methods of war, but both Executive Councils also agreed to a desperate move, proposed by Steyn. The elderly Kruger would be given six months’ leave to go to Europe and use his prestige to achieve the goal that had constantly eluded Leyds and the delegation: he would persuade other powers to intervene. In his absence Schalk Burger would deputise as president. Reitz would retain the office of state secretary.21

  Reitz’s three sons, Hjalmar, Joubert and Deneys, had survived the battle at Bergendal. It was sheer good fortune. The Pretoria Commando had been no more than a kilometre and a half from the Zarps and well within the British line of fire. Hjalmar had been wounded just under the eye and Joubert had taken him to the field hospital. Deneys had escaped twice—miraculously—from exploding lyddite shells. The first time, the blast had stunned him. The second time, his horse had saved him. The roan had become entangled in its reins and Deneys had gone to free him. No sooner had he reached the horse than ‘a shell burst on
the ant heap’ he had been sitting on.

  In the confusion of their journey back to Nelspruit the brothers had become separated from one another. Halfway there, however, Deneys met his father, who had come in search of them. His father told him what Botha had in mind. He was planning to strike north into the wilds beyond Lydenburg to reorganise the forces in order to carry out guerrilla warfare. They would assemble at Hectorspruit, the second-to-last railway station before the Mozambique border. They agreed to see each other there. The meeting ended in tragedy. The train taking his father back to Nelspruit accidentally ‘killed my poor little Basuto pony’. Deneys was overcome with emotion. ‘Besides having served me faithfully since the first day of the war, he was an intimate link with our old home life, for he had come with us from the Free State as a foal, and the loss of this loyal companion was a great blow to me.’

  There was no time to grieve, as the British had resumed their advance. The Pretoria Commando decided to return to the highveld by way of a detour and continue fighting closer to their families. Deneys wanted to do the same, but his people were in Hectorspruit. At least, he hoped he would find them there. He took leave of the Pretoria men once again and joined other commandos who were making for Hectorspruit. He reached it a day or two later. His three brothers were already there, Joubert, Hjalmar with a large bandage around his head, and Arend, who had recovered sufficiently to ride his horse again, thanks to the Russian nurses. His father arrived two days later, ‘so our family is united again for the first time after several months’.22

  His own way

  Lydenburg, October 1900

  A fortnight was as much as Deneys Reitz could endure. He had been fascinated by all the new things he had discovered on the way. From Hectorspruit they had struck north-west, first through the lowveld on either side of the Sabi, where they had seen an abundance of wildlife: herds of zebra and wildebeest, and at night lions prowling around their camps. From there they had crossed the mountains to Ohrigstad. The route had taken them through lush mountain passes and some of the country’s rare stretches of pine forest. They had spent a week in Ohrigstad, but an outbreak of malaria spurred them on to Lydenburg, which was on higher ground.