The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Smuts and his staff arrived at the mission station in early March, more than a month after the carnage. He had time to take in the grisly spectacle. They had arranged to wait there for word from other commando units, so for days they ‘lived in an atmosphere of decomposing corpses’. With his senses bombarded, Smuts also found among the rubble a whetstone for the mind. Lying there was a German edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.116

  There was enough for Jan Smuts to reflect on. Where, in this war, was the dividing line between legitimate retaliation and plain vengeance? Here in Leliefontein it looked as if that line had been crossed. Still, he was interested to hear Maritz’s side of the story. Sometimes things weren’t as straightforward as they seemed. A week earlier Smuts himself had been faced with a moral dilemma. It was about the execution of Lambert (Lem) Colyn, an Afrikaner from the Cape, a man of his own kind.

  From a legal point of view it was perfectly clear. At the end of January 1902 Colyn had joined Ben Bouwer’s commando in the vicinity of Vanrhynsdorp. He was a hulking man with a wild black beard. He claimed to have escaped from a British prison. They believed him. One night, after spending a fortnight with them, he suddenly disappeared. The commando had a rude awakening early the following morning, when a body of horsemen belonging to the 9th (Queen’s Royal) Lancers, led by Colonel Charles Kavanagh, stormed into the Boer camp. Bouwer managed to escape with several slashes inflicted by a sabre, but his 11 men were captured. Among them were Cape colonists—‘rebels’—who were now in danger of being executed by the British.

  Bouwer swore to avenge Colyn’s treachery. Fate was on his side. A short time later, the reunion with Smuts’s and Van Deventer’s units took place. They decided to hit back at once by mounting a joint attack on the British garrison, which had withdrawn from Vanrhynsdorp to Windhoek. The raid was successful. When it was over, the Boers inspected the deserted British camp, which had been set up around the homestead. Deneys Reitz was there, too. He had missed the fighting because he had gone out with Percy Wyndell, one of his old Rich Section comrades, to look for sheets and pillow-cases to use as bandages for the wounded men. In the farmhouse they discovered a man hiding in the kitchen. Reitz took him to be the farmer, but Wyndell recognised him at once. ‘My God! It’s Colyn!’

  They dragged him outdoors, where an angry mob gathered around ‘the wretched spy’. Bouwer maintained his composure and had Colyn brought before Smuts, who immediately formed a court martial. That same afternoon, Colyn was sentenced to death for espionage. To confirm the judgment, he was again brought before Smuts, who was visiting an Afrikaner friend in the vicinity. Reitz was with him. There, in Izak van Zyl’s dining room and in the presence of his wife and daughters, Reitz witnessed an extraordinary scene.

  Two guards escorted Colyn into the room. What should they do with him? Smuts didn’t need to think long. Colyn was a spy; he had been tried and found guilty. Smuts could pardon him, if he wanted to. ‘Take him out and shoot him!’ The prisoner fell to his knees, begging for mercy, while the women fled from the room in tears. Smuts repeated his order.

  The condemned man was given an opportunity to speak to the Reverend Abraham Kriel. Reitz knew the dominee from the time he had spent with Beyers’s commando in Warmbaths 18 months earlier. Kriel’s never-ending prayer meetings had driven him to distraction, but Reitz was impressed with the way he dealt with the situation now. He accompanied Colyn to the firing squad, where Andries de Wet, another member of Smuts’s staff, took charge. A team of coloured labourers had dug a grave; Colyn was blindfolded and escorted to the head of it. He lifted his hands and murmured the Lord’s Prayer. The shots rang out as he spoke the final ‘Amen’. Colyn fell backwards into the grave and his body was covered with earth.117

  Boer courts-martial condemned scores of people to death for treason and espionage. Taking the circumstances into account, the highest-ranking authority present would either confirm or commute these sentences. During their time in the western Transvaal, Smuts and De la Rey reviewed eight judgments handed down by the court martial in Wolmaransstad. They upheld five and commuted three. Other Boer leaders were likewise called upon to review death sentences. Steyn pardoned Morgendaal’s father-inlaw, Andries Wessels, but upheld several other judgments. Schalk Burger dismissed Meyer de Kock’s appeal for pardon. Louis Botha’s younger brother, Chris, the assistant commandant-general in the eastern Transvaal, was given an unusual sentence to review. Five brothers, Gert, Pieter, Cornelius, Okkert and Marthinus—with the ominous surname, Brits—along with their brother-in-law, Hendrik Koch, had been charged with treason. Marthinus Brits was sentenced to 20 lashes with a leather whip with a stirrup attached to it. The other five received the death penalty. Botha signed the judgments. They were executed on 26 July 1901 by a firing squad made up of 12 members of their own commando. These were all men who had grown up together.118

  Growing resentment between the opposing parties in the later stages of the war led to more summary executions. The Boers who continued to fight in the winter of 1901 were true bittereinders. They were less forgiving towards former comrades who had made peace with the enemy and were now turning against their fellow countrymen in increasing numbers. Some were prominent men, like Piet de Wet in the Orange Free State and Andries Cronjé in the Transvaal, but there were many more who were now collaborating with the British and becoming increasingly active.

  The National Scouts Corps, formed in early 1901, was working hand in hand with the British in the Transvaal. It acquired official status in October of that year and was incorporated into the British army. Its members wore khaki uniforms and swore loyalty to Edward VII. By the end of the war the corps was 1350 strong. Its members were deployed predominantly as patrols and scouts, but they also took part in active combat. In March 1902 Piet de Wet formed a similar but smaller corps of 450 men in the former Orange Free State. The Orange River Colony Volunteers stopped short, however, of taking up arms. Members of both corps risked life and limb if they fell into the hands of Boer commandos. A court martial wasn’t always part of the process.119

  Nor was it ever part of the process when it came to coloureds and Africans in British service. No statistics were kept but, judging from diaries and reports by witnesses and Boer fighters, the number of people executed without trial must have run into the hundreds. These were the summary executions Kritzinger had threatened them with in July 1901. And they were being carried out not only in his own territory, the eastern Cape, but all over the country, including areas where the most senior authorities—like Smuts in the western Cape—had ordered the Boers to observe the rules in their treatment of prisoners of war. He had stated explicitly that this applied to ‘coloured as well as white prisoners and spies’, but that hadn’t stopped Maritz from inflicting a bloodbath on the Khoisan of Leliefontein. What was Smuts to do with him?120

  It wasn’t only the Boers who settled their scores by firing squad, with or without a trial. The British too, in their zeal for vengeance, came close to tipping the scales as far as the rules of war were concerned—to say nothing of their controversial measures against the civilian population. ‘Cape rebels’ were treated mercilessly. Treason was punished with the death penalty as a matter of course. The same applied to Boers wearing a British uniform. More than a hundred cases of this kind were recorded. Strictly speaking, it was admissible under martial law, as were the court-martial sanctions imposed on members of their own forces and the death penalty for desertion and espionage by Africans, coloureds or whites. Nevertheless, these incidents sowed resentment among the Boers, especially when the evidence against them was inconclusive. They also objected to these executions being turned into a public spectacle. They were often carried out in the town square, to the accompaniment of bands and military parades.121

  Three cases in particular caused a furore both locally and abroad. Two commandants, Hans Lötter and Gideon Scheepers, and a general, Pieter Kritzinger, were brought before a court martial in Graaff-Reinet, in the heart of t
he deeply divided Cape Colony. The charges and the validity of the proceedings were disputed in all three instances.

  The case against 26-year-old Lötter revolved around a disagreement about his nationality. He was born in the Cape Colony, that much was proven, but he had also lived in the Orange Free State. In November 1899, soon after the outbreak of war, he had joined the Free State forces and subsequently fought mainly in the Cape. On the night of 4 September 1901 he had been captured in the vicinity of Graaff-Reinet. At the hearing Lötter claimed to be a citizen of the Free State. The evidence was in his saddlebag, he said, but it had disappeared at the time of his arrest. The court rejected his claim, concluding from his inclusion on the Colesberg electoral roll that he was officially a Cape Colonist. As a result, he was found guilty of treason and executed on 12 October 1901.

  Scheepers’s nationality was not at issue. He was born in the Transvaal in 1878 and joined the field telegraphy division of the State Artillery there at the age of 17. In 1898 he left the Transvaal to set up a similar division in the Orange Free State. He fought in the war, first under Christiaan de Wet and then from December 1900 with Kritzinger in the Cape. A few months later he was promoted to commandant. This proved to be a great success. Operating in the area around Graaff-Reinet, his unit captured 1300 British prisoners in just six months. With these feats to his name and his youthful and well-groomed appearance—he sported an elegant moustache instead of the usual scruffy Boer beard—Scheepers attracted attention, in his own circle and beyond. It was the newspaper accounts of his exploits that had inspired Deneys Reitz to join the fight in the Cape Colony.122

  As far as his opponents were concerned, Scheepers was a scourge. In July 1901 he burned down the homes of five British sympathisers in the Cape in retaliation for Kitchener’s relentless drives in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. He was just as ruthless towards coloured and African ‘spies’. When the British captured him, ill and weak, on 10 October 1901, they were understandably bent on revenge. After giving him time to recover, they brought him before a court martial on 18 December and threw the book at him. He was charged on 30 counts of murder, arson, sabotage and mistreating ‘natives’. The court rejected his claim that he had been acting on the orders of his superiors, at that stage De Wet and Kritzinger. Scheepers was sentenced to death. To cover themselves, the British presented the case to Kitchener, who confirmed and signed the sentence. On 18 January 1902 Scheepers met his death before a firing squad, blindfolded and seated on a chair beside an open grave. This was only a temporary resting place. To prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site, the British exhumed the body during the night and never revealed where they buried it subsequently.

  In the meantime, Scheepers’s trial had drawn international attention. The public were outraged. What right had Great Britain to execute an officer of the enemy army, who—as he himself said—was carrying out orders? And that while the war was still being fought? People demanded answers from the British government, not only the Liberal Opposition in its own country—and Churchill, whose views were shifting in that direction—but also the American Congress and other influential bodies abroad.

  The storm of protest came too late for Scheepers, but it probably saved the life of General Kritzinger, the most senior of the Boer officers indicted in Graaff-Reinet. Things hadn’t looked good for the Free State’s assistant chief commandant on 16 December 1901, when he was severely wounded and captured. Everyone knew his name, the man who had brazenly declared that he would kill any coloureds or Africans he discovered in British service. Kritzinger was a Cape colonist by birth; he had grown up in the Orange Free State, that was a fact, but it hadn’t helped Lötter or Scheepers.

  After recovering, he was tried by the same court martial on charges of murdering six Africans. By then, however, it was early March 1902, and things had changed. Protests were heard on both sides of the Atlantic—even Churchill put in a word. A month later, Kritzinger was acquitted. He remained in detention as a prisoner of war.123

  Kritzinger’s case benefited from the fact that the Boers were showing their more humanitarian side. It had become routine for them to release British prisoners of war after a few days; there was nothing they could do with them anyway. But in early March they reeled in a big catch. On 7 March—as it happened, the day Kritzinger’s trial began—they captured their first and last general. And this wasn’t just any general. Lieutenant-General Lord Methuen was a three-time winner—at Belmont, Graspan and Modder River, in November 1899—a mortified loser in the subsequent Black Week at Magersfontein, a serial (unsuccessful) stalker of De Wet and De la Rey, and personally responsible for burning down both their farms.124

  He was someone with whom they had an axe to grind, or at least make a deal with: a general for a general, or something like that. But this wasn’t what happened. On the contrary, the episode ended with a flourish of old-fashioned chivalry, a bolt from the blue in what had long ceased to be a white man’s war, let alone a gentleman’s war.

  One man was behind it. Koos de la Rey was known to be someone who put compassion before justice at the end of a battle. But the generosity he extended to Methuen went beyond anything anyone had ever seen before. He was a true Samaritan. But first, De la Rey subjected his longstanding adversary to the ultimate humiliation—and reduced Kitchener to a nervous wreck for two days. Methuen’s capture marked the climax of an equally old-fashioned duel.

  De la Rey dealt the first blow on 25 February 1902 at Yzerspruit, 20 kilometres from Klerksdorp, where he swooped on a British convoy of 150 wagons. Many of them were empty, but he was happy with what he found: a machine gun, two cannons and a huge cache of rifles, plus a good supply of ammunition, 200 horses, 400 oxen and 1500 mules. This was just what he desperately needed. The way he gained the victory was gratifying as well. De la Rey had tried out a new strategy, which took the British by surprise. He ordered his men to storm the convoy three times, at full gallop, shooting from the saddle. The third attack broke the guards’ resistance. The whole operation took barely an hour and a half. The British suffered 180 casualties, the Boers 50, and another 240 soldiers were captured.125

  The prisoners had been released across the border in Bechuanaland when nine days later De la Rey prepared for the second blow, this time at Tweebosch, near the border, between the Great Harts and Little Harts rivers. The British were out to settle the score for the debacle at Yzerspruit, and called in their forces from all directions. One of them was led by Methuen. It wasn’t an elite unit, but, to be honest, more of a ragbag of relatively inexperienced Yeomanry, irregular colonial troops and the Cape Coloured Special Police. It comprised 1300 men, only half of them mounted, equipped with four guns, two Maxims and 85 wagons. With so few cavalrymen and a force with so little field experience, Methuen should have been wary, especially after the warning he had received on 6 March. It took nothing more than a scuffle between a few Boers and his rearguard to cause instant panic.

  In the evening he set up his camp at Tweebosch. In spite of the ominous signs, he was determined to continue north early the following morning. He was going to block De la Rey, no matter what it took. Some of his men, white and coloured colonists, went on the rampage on a neighbouring farm, which belonged to the Schutte family. They destroyed property, harassed the women and were about to set the whole place on fire, when Methuen stepped in.

  In the Boer camp on the opposite bank of the Little Harts, De la Rey was preparing to attack. He had 750 hardened warriors, all eager to try out their Yzerspruit tactic again. The prophet Van Rensburg’s dreams were auspicious. He had seen another red bull. This time it was thundering down a hill, but it reached the bottom with broken horns and a broken leg. The meaning was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head: a signed and sealed victory for the Boers, first-rate loot and a wounded British general.

  And that’s exactly how things turned out the following morning. A detachment of Methuen’s column set off at three o’clock, followed by the main body an hour later.
Behind them, another hour later, came their endless, cumbersome convoy, forming a perfect target for the Boers galloping in from all sides. Their new strategy, the mounted assault, took the British completely by surprise. Only their gunners sprang into action, and once they had been dealt with, by around ten o’clock, the fight was over. The Boers lost eight dead and 26 wounded. The British lost 68 killed, 872 captured, including 121 wounded, along with their artillery, wagons and around 500 horses.

  But the greatest trophy, of course, was Lord Methuen. He had suffered a complex injury, a bullet wound and a fractured bone. After he had been shot in the thigh, his horse fell on his leg, putting him at the mercy of the man who was the bane of his life. What would De la Rey do?

  De la Rey’s men were rarely surprised by anything their general did anymore, but what he came up with now went beyond anything they could have imagined. It was one thing for him to visit Methuen personally after the battle and introduce him to his entire staff—with the help of an interpreter, as De la Rey spoke no English. Nor did it seem strange that he arranged for the wounded on both sides to be nursed together. That was nothing new. But they were thunderstruck a day later, when his wife, Nonnie, turned up (after their farm was destroyed, she and her children had been roaming around in an oxwagon) and without batting an eyelid presented Methuen with a bowl of chicken legs. After that, De la Rey put their prize prisoner in his own wagon and sent him to the garrison in Klerksdorp, where he would get better medical treatment.

  Methuen was well on his way when the riot broke out. De la Rey’s men forced him to reverse his decision. He tried to reason with them even after couriers had been sent to convey a message to that effect. Precisely this kind of humane gesture would benefit their cause most, he said. In the end, his men relented. Methuen was allowed to continue his journey to Klerksdorp. On arriving there, he sent the wagon back, filled with provisions. In return, De la Rey sent a warm telegram to Lady Methuen. The two men became friends for life.