The Boer War Read online

  THE BOER WAR

  ‘A consummate masterpiece. In numerous vital respects it overturns the gospel as preached by all previous historians of the dubiously called “last of the gentleman’s wars” ’ Lord Anglesey, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Not only a magnum opus, it is a conclusive work … Enjoyable as well as massively impressive’ C. P. Snow, Financial Times

  ‘This splendid book … towers over its predecessors’ F. S. Lyons, Irish Times

  ‘A splendid account … The military history is superb’ New York Times

  ‘The grim story has been told before but never with such sweep and compassion’ Time

  ‘A definitive history of the war. Thomas Pakenham has a historian’s expertise with original sources, a detective’s skill at tracking down new ones, and a journalist’s way of making a good story …’ Scotsman

  ‘Compellingly readable … Pakenham’s descriptions of battles are done with great artistry’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘Vivid and exciting … It is the anecdotal detail, the characters and action, which make this massive work … readable … intimate and accessible.” Los Angeles Book Review

  “The grim story has been told before but never with such sweep and compassion.” Time

  “A definitive history of the war. Thomas Pakenham has a historian’s expertise with original sources, a detective’s skill at tracking down new ones, and a journalist’s way of making a good story …” Scotsman

  “Compellingly readable … Pakenham’s descriptions of battles are done with great artistry.” New York Times Book Review

  “Vivid and exciting … It is the anecdotal detail, the characters and action, which make this massive work … readable … intimate and accessible.” Los Angeles Book Review

  Copyright

  Published by Abacus

  ISBN: 978-0-349-14194-7

  Copyright © 1979 Thomas Pakenham

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Abacus

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Val, in gratitude once again.

  And to the memory of the war veterans who told me what it was like to be there

  ‘Look back over the pages of history;

  consider the feelings with which we now

  regard wars that our forefathers in their time

  supported … see how powerful and deadly are

  the fascinations of passion and of pride.’

  W. E. Gladstone, 26 November 1879, condemning

  the first annexation of the Transvaal

  Contents

  The Boer War

  Praise

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  About the Author

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  Historical Note

  Prologue Rhodes’s ‘Big Idea’: Pitsani Camp (Bechuanaland border), Mafeking (Cape Colony border) and Transvaal, 29 December 1895 – 2 January 1896

  PART I MILNER’S WAR

  1 Out of the Abyss:

  SS Scot and South Africa, 18 November 1898 and before

  2 Nods and Winks:

  London, 22 November – DecemDer 1898

  3 Champagne for the Volk:

  Pretoria, 23–29 December 1898

  4 ‘Voetsak’:

  Johannesburg, 23 December 1898 – 28 March 1899

  5 ‘Working up Steam’:

  Cape Town, 31 March – 9 May 1899

  6 ‘It is Our Country You Want’:

  The Orange Free State, 30 May – 6 June 1899

  7 Milner’s Three Questions:

  Pall Mall, London, 8 June – 19 July 1899

  8 Preparing for a Small War:

  Cape Town, London and Natal, 20 July – 7 October 1899

  9 The Ultimatum:

  Pretoria and the Transvaal, 1–12 October 1899

  10 Bursting the Mould:

  Cape Town and Ladysmith, 14–20 October 1899

  PART II BULLER’S REVERSE

  11 ‘Taking Tea with the Boers’

  Dundee, North Natal, 20 October 1899

  12 White Flag, Arme Blanche:

  Elandslaagte, near Ladysmith, Natal, 21 October 1899

  13 The Knock-down Blow:

  Dundee and Ladysmith, 22 October – 2 November 1899

  14 The Whale and the Fish:

  SS Dunottar Castle and the Cape, 14 October – 26 November 1899

  15 Botha’s Raid:

  South Natal, 9–30 November 1899

  16 The Lights of Kimberley:

  The Western Frontier, Cape Colony, 20–8 November 1899

  17 Breakfast at the Island:

  Modder and Riet rivers, Cape Colony, 28 November – 10 December 1899

  18 Marching up in Column:

  Magersfontein, 9–12 December 1899

  19 ‘Where are the Boers?’:

  Tugela River, near Ladysmith, 11–15 December 1899

  20 ‘A Devil of a Mess’:

  Colenso, Natal, 15 December 1899

  21 Black Week, Silver Lining:

  British Isles, 16 December 1899 – 1 February 1900

  22 Christmas at Pretoria:

  Pretoria, 12 December 1899 – 1 January 1900

  23 ‘Are We Rotters or Heroes?’:

  Ladysmith, 2 November 1899 – 6 January 1900

  24 The Tugela Line:

  Natal, 6–24 January 1900

  25 Acre of Massacre:

  Spion Kop, Natal, 24–5 January 1900

  PART III ROBERTS’S ADVANCE

  26 The Steam-Roller:

  The Western Front, 11–15 February 1900

  27 The Siege within the Siege:

  Kimberley, 9–17 February 1900

  28 Gone to Earth:

  Paardeberg, 17–27 February 1900

  29 The Key Turns:

  The Tugela Line and Ladysmith, 12–28 February 1900

  30 The Handshake:

  Across the Tugela, 27 February – 15 March 1900

  31 The Plague of Bloemfontein:

  The Orange Free State, 13–28 March 1900

  32 ‘Keeping De Wet from Defeat’:

  Northern and Eastern Free State, 17 March – April 1900

  33 ‘The White Man’s War’:

  Mafeking (Cape Colony Border), 30 April – May 1900

  34 Across the Vaal:

  The Orange River Colony and the Transvaal, 31 May – June 1900

  35 ‘Practically Over:

  The Ex-republics, 8 July – September 1900

  PART IV KITCHENER’S PEACE

  36 A Muddy Election:

  London, Autumn 1900

  37 The Worm Turns:

  South Africa, 30 October – 16 December 1900

  38 Disregarding the Screamers:

  Cape Town and Beyond, 17 December 1900 – 28 May 1901

  39 ‘When is a war not a war?’:

  London and South Africa, 1901

  40 Raiding the Colonies:

  Cape Colony and Natal, 3 September – December 1901

  41 Blockhouse or Blockhead?:

  The New Colonies, November 1901 – March 1902

  42 Peace ‘Betrayed’:

  Pretoria, 11 April – June 1902

  Epilogue: ‘Winners and Losers’

  Illustrations


  Important Dates Before and During the Boer War

  Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Thomas Pakenham is the author of The Mountains of Rasselas and The Year of Liberty. His last book, The Scramble for Africa, won both the WH Smith Literary Award and the Alan Paton Award. He divides his time between a terraced house in North Kensington, London and a crumbling castle in Ireland. He is married to the writer Valerie Pakenham and they have four children.

  Maps

  South Africa, 1899

  Boer invasion of Natal, 11 October – 23 November 1899

  Kimberley under siege, 1899–1900

  Battles of Modder River, 28 November 1899, and Magersfontein, 11 December 1899

  Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899

  Ladysmith under siege, 1899–1900

  Battle of Spion Kop, 24 January 1900

  The Breakthrough, 14–27 February 1900

  Mafeking under siege, 1899–1900

  Cartoons

  ‘John Bull and Kruger’ – British cartoon in Manchester Evening Mail, 30 August 1899 (Author’s collection)

  ‘Kruger and John Bull’ – French cartoon by Rouville, 1899 (Author’s collection)

  ‘The tortoise puts out its head’ – from Westminster Gazette, 27 February 1900

  ‘Kitchener sends the Innocents to heaven’ – from the German magazine Ulk, Winter 1901

  Introduction

  The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, in Kipling’s famous phrase, ‘no end of a lesson’. The British public expected it to be over by Christmas. It proved to be the longest (two and three-quarter years), the costliest (over £200 million), the bloodiest (at least twenty-two thousand British, twenty-five thousand Boer and twelve thousand African lives) and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914.

  I decided to try to tell the story of this last great (or infamous) imperial war, taking as my raw material the first-hand, and largely unpublished, accounts provided by contemporaries.

  It was an ambitious idea, to base the book largely on manuscript (and oral) sources. No one had made the attempt for seventy years. In the decade after 1902, the public suffered a barrage of Boer War books. This culminated in a bombardment from the Long Toms, as it were: the seven-volume Times History of the War in South Africa (1900–1909), edited by Leo Amery, and the eight-volume (Official) History of the War in South Africa (1906–1910), edited by General Maurice and others. These two massive works have dominated Boer War studies, and will remain indispensable to the historian. They incorporate, often anonymously, a vast mass of original material.

  Understandably, as they were completed seventy years ago, both have their limitations.

  In due course I began to read the confidential War Office files – those that survived a bizarre decision to ‘weed’ them in the 1950s – the files on which much of Amery’s and Maurice’s work had been based. I was also fortunate enough to be able to dig up, often in odd places, the private papers of most of the generals and politicians on the British side. So there was no shortage of new raw material. I stumbled on the lost archives of Sir Redvers Buller, the British Commander-in-Chief in 1899 – battle letters of Buller’s which had remained hidden under the billiard table at Downes, his house in Devon, and in Lord Lansdowne’s muniment room at Bowood; I sifted through the trunk-loads of Lord Roberts’s papers rescued by the National Army Museum from the care of his most recent biographer, David James (who claims to have burnt every scrap of paper Lord Roberts ever wrote to his wife); I discovered a Secret Journal of the war, written by the War Office Intelligence Department, running to nearly a million words; I saw the private papers of the War Minister, Lord Lansdowne, and other members of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet. And I traced over a hundred unseen sets of letters and diaries, written by British officers and men who served in the war; these were generously lent to me by their descendants.

  I was also privileged to capture on my tape-recorder the memories of fifty-two men who had actually fought in the war, the youngest of whom was eighty-six when I tracked him down.

  These forays into the past were exciting and rewarding in themselves. And through them I came to see what I believe to be the main limitations of Amery’s Times History and Maurice’s Official History.

  The Times History says too much. An eloquent narrative of the war, Amery’s volumes (especially the first three, of which he wrote a large part himself) also represent what he calls an ‘argument’ – many sided but always partisan. Amery was a disciple of Milner, the man chiefly responsible for making the war. Amery was also caught up in the movement for Army Reform, and committed to one side in the struggle between the two factions in the British Army (the Roberts Ring and the Wolseley Ring) which fought the Boers in the intervals between fighting each other.

  The Official History says too little. All its political chapters were eliminated in draft by the Colonial Secretary, Alfred Lyttelton, for fear of offending the ex-enemy, the Boers – that is, for fear of impeding the process of reconciliation’, as he recorded in a confidential minute. And, for fear of offending their friends, the War Office staff found it equally impossible to write frankly about many of the ‘regrettable incidents’ which occurred in the war.

  Moreover both the Times History and the Official History share one central weakness. Few sources from the Boer side of the hill, official or private, were available to their authors.

  I have been extremely fortunate in the help I have received from modern South African historians. I owe a great debt to Godfrey Le May’s incisive study British Supremacy in South Africa, 1899–1907. I have also borrowed freely from the work in Afrikaans of the Transvaal State Archivist, Dr J. H. Breytenbach, who has already completed four volumes of his monumental history of the war, based on the state archives, Die Geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog. I have plundered many other works in Afrikaans, especially Dr J. A. Mouton’s study of Joubert, and Professor Johann Barnard’s seminal work on Botha, Botha op die Natalse Front, 1899–1900.

  Among the new themes in this story I should like to emphasize four in particular.

  First, there is a thin, golden thread running through the narrative, a thread woven by the ‘gold bugs’: the Rand millionaires who controlled the richest gold mines in the world. It has been hitherto assumed by historians that none of the gold bugs was directly concerned in making the war. But directly concerned they were. Owing to the great generosity of Sir Alfred Beit, and the directors of the Johannesburg firm of Barlow-Rand, I have had free access to the political papers of Ecksteins, the Rand subsidiary controlled, at the time of the Boer War, by Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher. I have found evidence here of an informal alliance between Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner, and the firm of Wernher-Beit, the dominant Rand mining house. It was this secret alliance, I believe, that gave Milner the strength to precipitate the war.

  Second, there is a broader strand in the story involving Sir Redvers Buller, who has passed into folklore as the symbol of all that was most fatuous in the late-Victorian British army. ‘Nobody in their senses,’ a distinguished modern historian, Julian Symons, has written, ‘could possibly try to justify Buller’s military actions during the Natal campaign.’ I have made the attempt. At any rate I believe that Buller’s mishaps – and mistakes – must be seen in the context of the feud between the Roberts Ring and the Wolseley/Buller Ring. St John Brodrick, who became British War Minister in 1900, later compared the wrangles between Lord Roberts and Sir Redvers Buller to those between Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan which precipitated the Charge of the Light Brigade. Certainly this astonishing War Office feud at the end of the nineteenth century explains much that would otherwise be inexplicable in Britain’s bungled preparations for war and her reverses during it. And in the end it was Buller, to his credit, who successfully hammered out the new tactics needed when a nineteenth-century army had to fight a twentieth-century war.

&n
bsp; A third strand to the story involves the invisible majority of South Africans: the blacks. Contemporaries talked of the Boer War as a ‘gentleman’s war’ and a ‘white man’s war’. No generalization could be more misleading. From digging in the War Office files, and talking to war veterans, one comes to realize what an important part in the war was played by Africans. Officially absent from the armies of both sides, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand were enrolled to serve British and Boers as labourers, drivers, guides and so on. By the end of the war, nearly ten thousand Africans were serving under arms in the British forces. Many non-combatants were flogged by the Boers or shot. In Mafeking alone, more than two thousand of the African garrison under the orders of Baden-Powell, were shot by the Boers or left by Baden-Powell to die of starvation. In general it was the Africans who had to pay the heaviest price in the war and its aftermath.

  A fourth strand involves the plight of the Boer civilians, women and children caught up in the guerrilla war. To deny the guerrillas food and intelligence, Lord Kitchener ordered the British army to sweep the veld clean. The farms were burnt, the stock looted, the women and children concentrated in camps along the railway lines. Between twenty thousand and twenty-eight thousand Boer civilians died of epidemics in these ‘concentration camps’. I have found much new evidence that Kitchener’s methods of warfare, like the ruthless methods adopted by many modern armies against guerrillas, were self-defeating. The removal of civilians added to the bitterness of the guerrillas. It also freed them from trying to feed and protect their families. But whether or not Kitchener’s methods succeeded as a military policy, they proved a gigantic political blunder. The conscience of Britain was stirred by the holocaust in the camps, just as the conscience of America was stirred by the holocaust in Vietnam. And if the guerrillas in South Africa lost the war, they won the peace.

  It is a pleasure, after eight years of vicarious warfare, to be able to acknowledge the generosity of numerous people in Britain and South Africa who have helped me reach the peace.

  I am deeply grateful to the following owners of important family papers (listed in the references at the back of this book) who have allowed me to quote from copyright and unpublished material in their care: the Marquess of Lansdowne, the Marquess of Salisbury, the Earl Haig, Lord Allenby, Lady Lucas, Lord Methuen, the late Captain Michael Buller, the late Miss Daisy Bigge, Brigadier Shamus Hickie, Myles Hildyard, Owen Keane, Major Trotter, Harry Oppenheimer, Mrs Rosemary Parker, Mrs Frances Pym (née Gough), Mrs Mackeson-Sandbach and Mrs Mackie Niven (née Fitzpatrick).