The ruse worked. The British split up into two groups, one heading down to the valley, the other up the mountain. Reitz lay motionless until the sun disappeared over the horizon. Then he emerged from his shelter and limped off; a bullet had torn his boot open, and a thorn, several centimetres long, had pierced the palm of his hand when he was thrown from his horse. But he was still alive and had managed to escape. Even so, he was despondent. He was tired, injured, hungry, surrounded by enemies, stumbling in the dark, alone in a foreign country and far from home. Only Providence could save him.
It did, but through its agents on earth. At first barely audible, then gathering volume, the strains of a hymn floated on the air, voices lifted in song to the accompaniment of a harmonium. Reitz knew that friends were at hand. He knocked at the door, introduced himself and was warmly welcomed into their midst. A family of Afrikaners, eager to feed him, tend his wounds and help him on his way. It would be too dangerous for him to remain there. The coloured labourers would betray him. It was the prerogative of the head of the family, a patriarch of 70, to guide Reitz on the first part of his journey. He couldn’t venture far, but he knew an old wagon path that would take Reitz in the right direction. West, that’s where he was sure to find Smuts.
Not that Reitz, alone and on foot, stood much chance of overtaking him, but there was nothing else to be done. He might come across his seven companions on the way. Perhaps they had made a detour to avoid the British. He was proved to be right. That very night, by the light of the moon, he picked up their spoor and even before daybreak he had found them, asleep. All were unharmed. They were amazed to see Reitz, as they had written him off.
After conferring together, they decided to stop following Smuts’s tracks, or at least not as closely as they had been doing. There were too many British columns on his heels, and they themselves had only three horses among them. It would be wiser to take a different route, through less hospitable countryside, but presumably with fewer British troops around. This meant they would have to cross the Swartberg again, cover a stretch of the Karoo again, cross the Cape Town–Bloemfontein railway line, and then veer off west to Calvinia.
They endured weeks of hunger and thirst, but, as they had hoped, encountered only the occasional British patrol. In early November they met up with Smuts’s main force. It was a joyful reunion. No one, not even Smuts, had expected to see Reitz alive again. But Reitz’s happiness was tinged with sorrow. Little remained of the Rich Section. Only two of its men had survived unscathed. Four had been injured, the rest killed or captured. It was the end of their small reconnaissance unit. Smuts assigned the two able-bodied men to Bouwer’s commando and Reitz to his own.
Reitz considered this a promotion, a reward for having overcome so many obstacles on his way. Smuts, however, probably saw it as a way to prevent the state secretary’s headstrong son from getting himself into trouble again. Be that as it may, they enjoyed the first few weeks after all the hardship and deprivation they had endured. There were few British troops here, in the western Cape, far removed from the railway lines. There was the occasional garrison and, from time to time, a column, but on the whole the men were able to breathe freely. Many more bands of rebels were roaming around the area and Smuts intended to organise them into larger commandos.
On 7 November 1901 they arrived at Elandsvlei, literally an oasis of peace, with waving palm trees and an abundance of water. This was the first time since their arrival in the Cape that they had spent more than one night in the same place. In the hills nearby Reitz caught a wild mule, ‘a powerful black, who squealed and bit and threw me several times before I mastered him’. Reitz was on horseback again.109
The foreign minister, Van Lynden, at least had the decency to break the news personally. On 22 November 1901 Willem Leyds was summoned to the ministry. He already knew what would happen. Van Lynden was friendly, but didn’t mince his words. The application from Leyds and the three other Boer envoys had been turned down. The administrative council of the Permanent Court of Arbitration had declared itself not competent to hear the matter of the Boer Republics vs Great Britain. It had a mandate to hear only administrative disputes.
This didn’t come as a surprise. But luckily Leyds had already sounded out the Austro-Hungarian member of the council, Okolicsányi d’Okolicsna, about the alternative he had thought up with Asser, namely, to submit their case to the signatory states directly. In particular, they had the new American president in mind. McKinley had been assassinated in September 1901 and succeeded by his vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, who did not, like McKinley, leave the country’s foreign policy entirely in the hands of the state secretary, Hay. The son of Dutch immigrants, Roosevelt made no secret of his sympathy for the Boer cause. Who knows, he might be prepared to stick his neck out.
Leyds was still pinning his hopes on official arbitration by an influential head of state. Nothing else would work. He’d heard enough well-meant but unsound proposals, mostly from shady characters with powerful connections in the realm of politics or finance. Only the day before, 21 November, a man who called himself Francis William Fox—no one had heard of him—turned up with a document which he said might serve as a framework for peace talks. It had been drafted, he explained, by ‘highly influential persons’. He had already discussed it with the Dutch prime minister, Kuyper, who had intimated that he was genuinely interested. So be it, but Leyds thought it a strange story.
His old business friend Eduard Lippert had proposed something more substantial. He had mediated on a previous occasion, at the beginning of 1899, before the war, at that time in the conflict with the Randlords.110 In the course of 1901 he had offered his services again. In July and August, on his own initiative—but with Leyds’s knowledge—he had held talks with Lord Rosebery, Lord Salisbury’s Liberal predecessor. One of the matters they had discussed was the possibility of granting Leyds and the members of the delegation a safe-conduct pass to South Africa to confer with the Boer leaders. The talks between Rosebery and Lippert were broken off twice, but Lippert got in touch with Leyds again in late November. Would it be a good idea to bring the matters they had discussed to the attention of the public? Lord Rosebery was about to deliver an important speech. It might be a suitable opportunity.
Leyds didn’t think it a good idea at all. He trusted Lippert, but not Rosebery. He would twist things ‘to suit his own party politics’ and present facts out of context, which would ‘give people the wrong idea about the situation’. There hadn’t been any real negotiations. ‘We listened to what you had to say, as a friend of our cause, expressly on that condition.’ Leyds also reminded Lippert of ‘the oath of confidentiality’ he had taken ‘regarding this matter’.
Leyds was soon proved right. Rosebery’s speech to a Liberal gathering in Chesterfield on 16 December 1901 was party political through and through. He declared himself in favour of forceful action against the Boers, who had committed ‘cold-blooded massacres of natives’ and the ‘almost unspeakable crime of flogging and murder in cold blood of an emissary of peace’. It wouldn’t be tolerated and they weren’t getting away with it. But this was not to say that the two republics should be completely depopulated, as Milner had recently suggested. Such a step was going too far. Peace talks would be a reasonable alternative, Rosebery suggested. Not face to face, on the spot, but through representatives of the Boers in the Netherlands. And they should be informal—nothing official. ‘Some of the greatest peaces, of the greatest settlements, in the world’s history have begun with an apparently casual meeting of two travellers in a neutral inn.’ The travellers he had in mind were undoubtedly Lippert and himself.
Rosebery could forget it, as far as Leyds was concerned. In an interview with The Times he refused to comment on Rosebery’s proposition. But he let fly when it came to his allegations. They were ‘monstrous and absurd’ and, in any case, too vague and sweeping to entertain. Except for the one specific case that Rosebery was presumably alluding to, the death of Morgendaal. It w
as true, Leyds conceded, that he had been shot on Christiaan de Wet’s orders. But Morgendaal wasn’t an emissary at all, he continued. He was a deserter and a spy. Imagine an Irish deserter doing something like that in the camp of an Irish regiment. Wouldn’t a British court martial sentence him to death?111
All this scheming strengthened Leyds’s belief in formal diplomatic procedures. Since being turned down by the administrative committee of the Court of Arbitration, he had drafted a petition addressed to the heads of government of nine countries: Russia, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and—the one he had the most faith in—the United States. The letters were sent on 17 and 18 December 1901. Besides copies of his earlier application to the court, they included an impassioned humanitarian appeal for ‘an end to the deplorable conditions which so many thousands of women and children have endured since the introduction of the concentration camps in South Africa’. The death toll was such that if nothing was done, ‘two nations would be annihilated’.112
The reports Jan Smuts drew up in mid-December 1901 sounded considerably more positive. It was all a matter of perspective and information. He couldn’t have known that the mortality rate in the camps had risen alarmingly since his incursion into the Cape. Nor, for that matter, was Leyds aware that the situation was in reality far worse than the official British figures led people to believe. From a military point of view the Boer commandos in the Cape Colony were doing well, at any rate in the west, where Smuts was now in command of 2000 men. Besides his own unit, he headed another 15 or so commando units from the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony itself. The forces in the eastern districts were poorly coordinated, but those west of the Cape Town–Kimberley railway line had only one problem: no horses. According to Smuts, there were thousands more Afrikaners wanting to join him, but the British had done a thorough job of ‘clearing’ the area of horses. If not for that, he could organise the longed-for uprising in no time at all.
Deneys Reitz knew all about the shortage of horses. He had been riding a mule since the beginning of November. It was a sturdy little creature, that wasn’t the problem, but its unsteady gait made it tiring to ride. And, since joining Smuts’s staff, Reitz had done his fair share of riding. He was deployed primarily as a dispatch rider, which meant he was constantly on the road, riding from one commando unit to the next to deliver instructions. He had covered hundreds of kilometres.
Smuts was a man who set store by order and discipline, even from a distance. Instructions for this, instructions for that. Point by point, he put everything in writing, orders to all commandos from field cornets, assistant field cornets and corporals: furlough by permission only, on pain of flogging; consumption of alcohol, ditto; horse-feed to be dispensed sparingly; no looting before the end of a battle, and only under officers’ supervision; correct treatment to be extended to all prisoners of war and civilians, including ‘coloureds and British sympathisers’; no burning or destruction of private property; receipts to be issued for requisitioned or confiscated goods. ‘Our aim is to win, through kindness and clemency, the support of people of all classes and stations who do not commit hostile acts against us.’ This was very different from Kritzinger, Smuts’s Free State counterpart in the Cape Colony, who condemned Africans and coloureds working for the British to summary execution.113
In between his organisational tasks, Smuts found time to draft dispatches to Botha and De la Rey as well as to Kruger, Fischer and Leyds in Europe. He could safely communicate with the latter via German South West Africa. Through the same channel, Smuts also sent a long, bewildered letter to the prominent British pro-Boer activist William Stead. ‘I cannot forget that I owe my education and some of the greatest pleasures of life to England, to its great literature and its profound thinkers.’ And that self-same country now seemed possessed by ‘this demon of Jingoism’. He expressed the greatest admiration for Stead’s courageous stand.114
In early January 1902, Smuts made his way to the north-west border zone to organise and coordinate the many small guerrilla bands scattered in that area. Reitz accompanied him. It was a gruelling journey over hundreds of kilometres, for the most part across desert. They travelled by night and sought shelter from the heat during the day. Kakamas, the settlement they were making for, was on the south bank of the Orange. Across the river was Bechuanaland. While Smuts went about his business, Reitz took time off to enjoy himself. There was food in abundance and he spent his days swimming in the river.
A fortnight later—it was already February—they rode back south, heading for Calvinia. On the way, at Middelpost, they came upon Van Deventer and his men, whom they had last seen in the Suurberg. There was little time for pleasantries. Van Deventer was doing battle with a British column escorting a convoy of 120 wagons. Many of the wagons were already burning, but their guards had not given up the struggle. Reitz joined in. He had arrived just in time to contribute to the victory and—just as importantly—share in the spoils. He came out of the foray with three horses, complete with saddlery. There were scores of them, enough for everyone, and Smuts approved their being taken, along with clothing, boots, ammunition and crates of horseshoes and nails.
This was an absolute windfall. Reitz was no longer a ‘ragged muleteer’, but better equipped than he had been at any time of the war. Everything seemed to be in their favour. In mid-February 1902, the commandos under Smuts, Van Deventer and Bouwer were reunited—with much cheering and merriment—for the first time since the Suurberg. Now the plan was to launch a joint attack on Vanrhynsdorp, which was occupied by British troops. On arriving there, they found the town deserted. The British had withdrawn to Windhoek, 15 kilometres away. That was where they would go. Reitz wasn’t present when they attacked. The evening before, Smuts had sent him to deliver a message to one of the sentries in the area and by the time he returned, the following morning, the fight was over. It had been fierce. Five Boers were killed and 16 wounded. The British had lost roughly the same number, as well as 90 captured. Windhoek was back in Boer hands.
It was 25 February 1902. They were only 40 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean. Smuts felt it was time for a break. He sent for all the men who had never seen the sea. As a boy, Reitz had been to Europe with his father, but this was an experience he didn’t want to miss. Smuts took a group of 70 men to a small coastal inlet called Fishwater. It was a wonderful experience. They arrived there in the late afternoon. A hush fell over them as they approached the edge of the dunes and beheld the infinite expanse of water. Then, as one, like the Greek mercenaries in Xenophon’s Anabasis, they surged forward, crying, ‘The sea! The sea!’ Soon they were on the beach. Whooping and laughing, they threw down their saddles, stripped off their clothes and, like a troop of wild centaurs, galloped bareback into the waves.115
Retaliation
Leliefontein, March 1902
The mission station had been razed and plundered, but the full horror struck them when they reached the rocks beyond it, where they found 20 or 30 ‘dead Hottentots, still clutching their antiquated muzzle-loaders’. The stench was overpowering; the bodies must have lain there for weeks. Reitz knew at once. ‘This was Maritz’s handiwork.’ Smuts was silent, but his face was grim. ‘I saw him walk past the boulders where the dead lay, and on his return he was moody and curt, as was his custom when displeased.’ This was the kind of excessive brutality he had been hoping to prevent.
Everyone knew Manie Maritz, a short, swarthy man, quick-tempered and as strong as an ox. He was born in Kimberley in 1876, but had been living in the Transvaal since 1895. In combat he had cut his teeth against Jameson and his raiders. When war broke out he had initially fought in Natal, subsequently with the Zarps on the southern front, and later in Danie Theron’s reconnaissance corps. As from March 1901 he had been a commandant in the Cape Colony, where he had gained a reputation as a ruthless tyrant, a zealous patriot and a born guerrilla leader.
That’s how Smuts saw Maritz as well. In Janu
ary 1902 he appointed him as a general. Less than a month earlier, he had been badly wounded, near Tontelbos. Reitz had seen his injuries with his own eyes: ‘a terrible gash below the right armpit’. No ordinary mortal would have survived, but Maritz made a speedy recovery. He threw himself into the task to which Smuts had assigned him: an expedition to Namaqualand in the far northwest. A few British garrisons scattered in and around the Kamiesberg were the new targets. Not because the region was strategic—although it had lucrative copper mines—but to induce the British to send reinforcements from Cape Town. They would come by sea, leaving the road to the capital of the Cape Colony open. At least, that’s what they assumed as they sat speculating around the campfire.
On 11 January 1902 Maritz went to the mission in Leliefontein, on the southern slopes of the Kamiesberg. His message to the Khoisan living there was short and unequivocal. Any form of collaboration with the British would be punished by death. Assistance to the Boers would be rewarded with protection, land and cattle. The offer wasn’t appreciated. On 27 January Maritz returned with eight men to drive the point home. The Khoisan also had a point to drive home. They fell upon the Boers, who only escaped by the skin of their teeth. Maritz was incensed and took revenge the following morning, with a stronger force. They killed 35 Khoisan—the rest fled in panic—and razed Leliefontein to the ground. He then made off with 1000 bags of grain, 500 head of cattle and 3000 sheep.
The Boer War Page 52
