I hope something may be done before long to bring it home to the Boers that they cannot carry on the present system of warfare with impunity. I feel sure that strong measures would soon end the war.1
—Lord Kitchener, General Officer Commanding, South Africa, to William St. John Brodrick, secretary of state for war, July 5, 1901
Dutch settlers, later known as “Boers,” established themselves in southern Africa beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, gradually expanding north into the hinterland, pressing against lands held by indigenous African tribes. Dutch rule ended, however, when in 1795, Britain seized Cape Colony during the French Revolutionary Wars (and again in 1806 after it had been restored to Holland in 1802), and at the general European peace of 1814, the colony became a permanent British imperial possession. From the 1830s, many Boers ventured north to establish independent communities that would later become the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, both of which shared borders with the British possessions of Cape Colony and Natal.
The source of Anglo-Boer hostility principally lay with the desire for British expansion into Boer lands, partly owing to the discovery of gold and diamonds, but also out of a desire to create a federation of all the “white” territories of southern Africa. After the Transvaal was proclaimed in December 1880, conflict arose in what subsequently became known as the Transvaal Revolt or the First Anglo-Boer War.2 A small Boer force invaded Natal and defeated a British force at Laing’s Nek in December and, again, this time decisively, at Majuba Hill, in February 1881. The British government had no desire to pursue the conflict further and in April 1881 concluded the Treaty of Pretoria, which granted independence to the Transvaal, of which Paul Kruger became president. The discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1886 increased British interest in the area and led directly to the annexation of Zululand, conquered seven years earlier, as part of a strategy to isolate the Transvaal from accessing the sea. Internally, both Boer republics welcomed foreigners (known as uitlanders) seeking work in the goldfields, in the diamond industry, and in various urban businesses and services, but the Boers often resented what they perceived as a growing trend of immorality and licentiousness that permeated their strict, largely rural, Calvinist society. On the other hand, immigrants, most of whom hailed from Britain, resented the disproportionate share of taxation that fell on their shoulders and campaigned for a share in the political life of the country—a risk to Boer sovereignty in light of the massive swell of immigration that threatened to overwhelm the Afrikaner community.3
Both Boer republics made large purchases of foreign weapons in 1899, and when Cape authorities refused to conform to an ultimatum from Pretoria to withdraw troops from the borders, hostilities opened in October, with the Boers assuming the offensive. On October 13, General Piet Cronjé laid siege to Mafeking, where Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, the future founder of the Boy Scout movement, made superb use of limited resources to establish a determined and successful defense. At the same time, forces from the Orange Free State invested Kimberley, in Natal, on October 15, while the main Boer blow fell on General Sir George White at Talana Hill and Nicholson’s Nek later that month, forcing White’s troops to take refuge in Ladysmith. In an effort to relieve the three towns, General Sir Redvers Buller divided his forces, a strategy that led to failure in all cases.
At the Modder River on November 28, General Lord Methuen, commanding a column of 10,000 men, seeking to relieve Kimberley, found his progress blocked by 7,000 Boers under Cronjé and Jacobus de la Rey. After losing some 500 killed and wounded, Methuen succeeded in driving through the Boer lines, but his exhausted troops required rest, and no pursuit was possible. Senior British commanders were slow to appreciate three fundamental lessons: first, it was nearly impossible to inflict anything beyond negligible losses on Boer defenders occupying entrenched positions; second, smokeless powder and repeating rifles, fired from concealed positions, rendered frontal attacks costly, nearly insupportable affairs; and third, since all Boer forces were mounted—even if, through force of numbers, they were eventually driven off—they could simply vanish into the vast expanse of the veldt, reform, and fight again on another occasion. The British Army could not, at least initially, offer an adequate answer to such tactics, for it possessed paltry numbers of mounted forces, and was obliged to rely heavily on Cape yeomanry units. Until the arrival of mounted reinforcements, therefore, British troops were forced to cover enormous areas of hostile territory on foot, with little or no opportunity of pursuit even when success on the battlefield invited it.
Yet even with growing numbers of reinforcements, the British continued to find themselves bested by Boer units, known as “commandos,” both more determined than themselves and with considerably more knowledge of the ground. At Stormberg, on December 10, a British force under General Sir William Gatacre lost heavily in an ambush; the same day, at Magersfontein, 8,000 Boers under Cronjé entrenched themselves on a hill overlooking the Modder River and inflicted heavy casualties on Methuen’s force, which not only unwisely attacked frontally in heavy rain, but without extending into open order. The third British disaster of what became known as “Black Week” took place at Colenso, on December 15, when 21,000 men under Buller, seeking to relieve Ladysmith, crossed the Tugela River and attempted to turn the flank of General Louis Botha, in command of 6,000 Orange Free State troops. The Boers, dug in as usual, easily drove off their adversaries, whose flank attack became encumbered by broken ground. Buller suffered about 150 killed and 800 wounded, together with more than 200 men and 11 guns captured.
Disillusioned with this string of defeats, Buller advocated surrendering Ladysmith, a view that led to his being relieved of senior command. His replacement, Field Marshal Viscount Roberts, the hero of the Second Afghan War (1878–81),4 had extensive experience of colonial warfare, and from January 1900 he and his chief of staff, Lord Kitchener, began a massive program of army reorganization, in recognition of the need to raise a sizeable force of mounted infantry and cavalry. Buller, meanwhile, remained in the field, only to be repulsed at the Tugela in the course of two separate attacks: first at Spion Kop on January 23 and then at Vaal Kranz on February 5. The British lost about 400 killed and 1,400 wounded; Boer casualties, as usual, were disproportionately small, with only 100 killed and wounded. Nevertheless, General Sir John French managed to relieve Kimberley on February 15, and on the same day, Roberts, with a column of 30,000 men, skirted Cronjé’s left flank at Magersfontein, obliging the Boers to withdraw lest their communications be cut off. At Paardeberg on February 18, Cronjé found his retreat across the Modder River opposed by French, who arrived from Kimberley. Owing to illness, French handed command to Kitchener, whose unimaginative frontal assault predictably failed against the Boers’ prepared positions, leaving some 300 British dead and 900 wounded.
Fortunes were soon to change, however. On recovering, Roberts resumed command and encircled Cronjé’s position at Paardeberg, shelling the Boers with impunity while expecting an attempted breakout that never transpired. After an eight-day siege, the Boers, burdened with many wounded and out of food, surrendered on February 27. Almost simultaneously, the British enjoyed successes in other theaters. Buller, positioned along the Tugela in his third effort to relieve Ladysmith, managed to dislodge the Boers from their positions around the town and reached the garrison on February 28.
For the next six months Roberts, finally benefitting from the arrival of large numbers of reinforcements, was able to make good use of the railways to move troops and supplies considerable distances through Boer territory. Accordingly, on March 13, he captured Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, which was annexed to the British Empire on the 24th as the Orange River Colony. In Natal, Buller defeated the Boers at Glencoe and Dundee on May 15, and two days later a fast-moving column of cavalry and mounted infantry under General Bryan Mahon relieved Mafeking after a seven-month ordeal. On May 27, Roberts crossed the frontier into the Transvaal. Ian Hamilton, now promoted to lieutenant general for his services at Ladysmith, encountered a Boer force under de la Rey on May 29 at Doornkop, where he lost heavily. Still, Roberts’s main force carried without meeting resistance, capturing the Witwatersrand goldmines and entering Johannesburg on May 30. On June 2, Kruger and his government left Pretoria and proceeded eastward along the Delagoa Bay railway as far as Machadodorp. Roberts entered Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal, unopposed and in triumph, on June 5, 1900.
Roberts having already, as we have seen, taken Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and the gold mines, he could be forgiven for thinking that he had broken the back of his adversaries’ resistance: Boer morale had reached an all-time low, both republican capitals lay in British hands with no prospect of recapture, and thousands of hensoppers or “hands-uppers” had capitulated, not least after Kruger and Botha on May 31 had telegraphed their opposites in the Free State government to point out the futility of further resistance. With the promise of amnesty and protection for all Boers who pledged permanently to lay down their arms, additional thousands abandoned the cause and returned to their homes. Under these circumstances, Roberts could with confidence assume that the remainder of the war would consist of “mopping-up” operations. President Marthinus Steyn was on the defensive in the eastern Free State, with half the army of the republic, 4,500 men, surrendering in July at Brandwater Basin. In the Transvaal, Kruger also stood in crisis, obliged to surrender himself at Nelspruit, near the border with Portuguese East Africa, the bulk of the Transvaalers having already surrendered at Paardeberg, in late February, as discussed.
As far as Marthinus Steyn and Christiaan de Wet were concerned, the war was not lost. One option remained to be exploited: guerrilla warfare. Thus, the conflict entered a period of transition between conventional fighting and the hit-and-run tactics already employed by de Wet. Indeed, evidence of the Boers’ willingness to carry on the struggle quickly became obvious to Roberts, who appreciated that large areas in both republics remained beyond British control. In particular, his line of communication through the Orange Free State was inadequately defended and open to attack at numerous points. In addition, those Boer leaders who remained in the field were largely young, determined, imaginative, and, no longer obliged to defend the capitals, able to deploy the remaining commandos as guerrillas.
By this time there were perhaps only 25,000 Boers still offering resistance, but they were well mounted and elusive, with up to 400,000 square kilometers (about 150,000 square miles) in which to operate. They understood, moreover, the terrain far better than their adversaries, who continued to rely on the railway lines and larger towns for their supplies. Roberts could not completely control the countryside, a fact that left the British with an apparently insoluble problem—and one they would face on many future occasions in the numerous insurgencies of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Nevertheless, undaunted, Roberts undertook a concerted effort to quash the insurgency. First, he issued proclamations on May 31 and June 1, which meant to persuade the burghers (citizens) still in the field to hand in their weapons. Next, on June 16, he followed this up with a new, more drastic decree: if the Boers struck railway and telegraph lines and stations, troop would put to the torch homes and farms in the area. Such forms of retaliation had been pursued on an ad hoc basis since the beginning of the year; now Roberts made the practice official, providing a legal precedent for the more comprehensive “scorched earth” policy, which Kitchener would apply early the following year.
In the field itself, Roberts opened an offensive intended to drive the Free State forces eastward to trap them against the Basutoland border in a pincer movement during June and July 1900 in what became known as the “first De Wet Hunt.” He took Bethlehem on July 7 and compelled the Free State forces to take refuge behind the Witteberg Range. De Wet and Steyn, with 2,000 men and the Free State government, managed to elude forces under Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Hunter, but Marthinus Prinsloo was forced to surrender about 4,400 men, half the remaining Free State forces, on July 30.
De Wet, meanwhile, showed himself a master of maneuver and deception, easily outwitting his pursuers as he escaped across the border into the Transvaal, despite the fact that as many as 50,000 troops in converging columns sought to destroy him. Free State commandos all the while struck with considerable success against the railway lines, notably the line linking Potchefstroom and Krugersdorp. Superior scouting, firm discipline, and excellent mobility served de Wet extremely well, and he was also assisted by defects in British communications and intelligence gathering. De Wet was, nevertheless, nearly caught by approaching British columns in an encirclement at Magaliesburg while managing to escape across the mountains with his tiny force of 250 burghers in one of many daring operations. As a result of this first De Wet Hunt, Roberts’s advance along the Delagoa railway was delayed for weeks while time and energy were devoted elsewhere to capturing that elusive commander.
Meanwhile, in the northwest, Botha was busy attempting to stem the British advance toward the Portuguese East Africa border, where Kruger had established his government in exile. The Boers could not resist for long, however. On August 27, combined forces under Roberts and Buller pierced their defenses at Bergendal and reached the frontier at Komatipoort, forcing Kruger to board a Dutch warship and go into exile on September 11, 10 days after the annexation of the Transvaal. Both republics had, in any event, decided to send Kruger to Europe to seek assistance from the major powers in an effort not merely to achieve peace but to preserve the independence of the Boer republics as well—clear evidence that, despite the poor odds, all was not lost. In Kruger’s absence, Schalk Burger was appointed as acting president of the (now-defunct) Transvaal.
While an insurgency was now well underway, conventional operations had not quite ended. On June 11, Roberts attacked Botha’s line of defense 30 kilometers (18 miles) east of Pretoria. The following day Hamilton pierced the Boer lines at Diamond Hill, near Donkerhoek, but Botha disappeared in the darkness, falling back east to protect his rear from Buller’s columns approaching from Natal. When it was clear by the end of July that the first De Wet Hunt had failed, Roberts turned eastward to confront Botha. On August 15, Roberts and Buller joined up their troops at Ermelo, bringing the combined British force to 20,000, ready to oppose Botha’s 5,000. Between August 21 and 27, the two sides fought a sharp action at Bergendal, where Roberts’s artillery obliged Botha to retreat toward Lydenburg. With the arrival of British troops at Komatipoort on the border with Portuguese East Africa, Roberts theoretically controlled all of the Transvaal south of the Delagoa railway line. Yet this appearance of control was misleading. Beyond the garrison towns, outside the immediate reach of his troops, the commandos still roamed, and when British troops left an area, Boer authorities simply reinstated themselves.
Anxious to encourage large numbers of disaffected Cape Afrikaners to flock to the republican cause, de Wet invaded the Cape Colony in November, forcing Roberts to divert troops from the Free State and Transvaal. Moving south with 1,500 men, de Wet captured the British garrison of 400 men at Dewetsdorp on November 23, prompting the “second De Wet Hunt,” involving General Knox, with three flying columns and thousands of other troops sent by rail from the Transvaal. De Wet’s operations in December proved disappointing, as heavy rains impeded movement. Nevertheless, he managed to elude his pursuers, most notably in a breakthrough at Sprinkannsnek, assisted by Commandant Gideon Scheepers, a Cape rebel who was later captured and executed by the British for murder, arson, and the ill-treatment of prisoners.
Employing both speed and surprise, even greater success was achieved when on the morning of December 13 at Nooitgedacht, 1,500 men under Major General Ralph Clements were surprised at a cliff’s edge on the slopes of the Magaliesberg by Boer forces under Assistant Commandant-General Christiaan Beyers, de la Rey, and the newly appointed Jan Smuts, a distinguished Transvaal attorney destined to become one of the greatest Boer leaders. At a cost of 78 of their own men, the Boers inflicted over 300 casualties, captured about the same number of prisoners, as well as seized a substantial quantity of provisions, weapons, ammunition, and draft animals. The victory at Nooitgedacht reinvigorated the Boer cause, and as the year closed, Vecht-General Ben Viljoen captured the British garrison at Helvetia in a night attack on December 28–29. In the same month, Roberts, keen to take up his new post as commander in chief of the army in succession to Lord Wolseley, left for Britain in December and passed supreme command of forces in South Africa to Lord Kitchener, his chief of staff, who had 210,000 troops available to him.
Those Boers who remained in the field at the beginning of 1901 regrouped into small, mobile units and, eschewing all further conventional methods of warfare, pursued the irregular form to which they were naturally adept—and which alone offered the only hope of continuing the struggle. Accordingly, rather than confronting substantial British formations in the open, commandos struck at railway lines, ambushed supply columns, destroyed bridges, cut telegraph lines, raided depots, and cut up small British detachments through hit-and-run attacks. De Wet, operating in the Orange River Colony, in particular, epitomized this new strategy, and others did the same: Koos de la Rey and Jan Smuts in the western Transvaal and Louis Botha in the eastern part of the country. Even before Roberts had left South Africa, de Wet had kept over 30,000 British troops occupied in his pursuit across the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal for six weeks in July and August 1900. Now, in February 1901, he crossed into Cape Colony in a bid to raise a revolt among the Afrikaners there, eluding numerous British columns for six weeks before retiring back into the Orange River Colony.
This form of fighting largely confounded British commanders, for while the army possessed extensive experience in confronting irregular colonial enemies across Africa and Asia and in New Zealand, none of those adversaries enjoyed the mobility of the Boers or their modern weaponry. Moreover, even by the beginning of 1901, the army remained woefully supplied and equipped for this form of warfare, being still short of mounted troops, and deploying scouts and intelligence gatherers across such a vast area as to achieve only extremely disappointing results. “As to our wandering columns,” Captain March Phillipps recalled, “they have about as much chance of catching the Boers on the veldt as a Lord Mayor’s procession would have of catching a highwayman on Hounslow Heath … [The Boers] are all around and about us like water round a ship, parting before our bows and reuniting round our stern. Our passage makes no impression and leaves no visible trace.”5
Kitchener summed up the situation to William St. John Brodrick, secretary of state for war, thus:
The difficulties of the present situation out here are that we have to protect very long lines of railway & road and supply garrisons to the many towns & villages that have been occupied all over the country whilst the mobile columns we have in the field are principally taken up in escorting supplies to the various garrisons. We have therefore no striking force of any importance & it is most difficult to find troops in any case of emergency such as the Cape Colony invasion for instance—If we withdraw garrisons it has a bad effect as the boers [sic] at once put up their flag and start a sort of government again.
I estimate there are still 20,000 boers [sic] out on commando in the two colonies. Some officers put the numbers considerably higher. These men are not always out on commando but return at intervals to their farms & live as most peaceful inhabitants, probably supplying the nearest British garrisons with forage milk & eggs until they are again called out to take the place of others in the field. Just now they apparently got these all out with the result that they suddenly show in considerable numbers and act with great boldness when they get a chance. Owing to the reactions of the country the boers [sic] can roam at pleasure and being excessively mobile they are able to surprise any post not sufficiently on the alert.
Every farmer is to them an intelligence agency & a supply depot so that it is almost impossible to surround or catch them. I sincerely hope the people of England will be patient. The boers [sic] trust to weary us out but of course time tells heavily against them.6
Frustration at his inability to achieve meaningful contact with the Boers in pitched battles in which the British would naturally hold the advantage, Kitchener adopted high-handed and unorthodox methods for confronting the problem: targeting the civilian population that constituted the mainstay of the commandos’ support. The counterinsurgency policies best associated with Kitchener’s period as commander in chief in South Africa in fact began during Roberts’s tenure, who had instituted a policy of collective punishment for Boer civilians living near areas of guerrilla activity. “Unless the people generally are made to suffer for the misdeeds of those in arms against us,” Roberts had written in September 1900, “the war will never end.”7 Now, under Kitchener, denying the Boers their means of support translated into increasingly brutal methods as part of a three-pronged strategy of attrition: scorched earth, internment, and containment.
Finding himself unable to capture or eliminate the various guerrilla forces, Roberts had recognized that a systematic, methodical approach to counterinsurgency had to be adopted, and as early as June 1900 he had ordered the burning of farms known to be the property of Boers still on commando. This straightforward, brutal policy struck at the very heart of their means of supply, transit accommodation, and partial sources of intelligence. Kitchener now continued this process—though on a much larger scale—employing a full-scale scorched earth policy intended to lay waste all Boer farmsteads within the reach of his forces. Accordingly, both republics experienced wholesale devastation, with entire towns and thousands of farmsteads set aflame or otherwise rendered uninhabitable. The destruction of supplies of food, both in storage and still in the fields or pastures, was also paramount in a strategy meant to deprive the commandos of sustenance, intelligence, and temporary abodes. Troops slaughtered, seized, or drove off livestock in their hundreds of thousands—in such numbers, in fact that Boers in the Free State would in due course stand reduced to half their herds, with the situation even worse in the Transvaal. In addition, vast amounts of grain, stored or still in the field, disappeared in great columns of black smoke.
In November 1900, Captain Phillipps wrote from the Orange River Colony:
Farm-burning goes merrily on, and our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. We usually burn from six to a dozen farms a day; these being about all that in this sparsely-inhabited country we encounter. I do not gather that any special reason or cause is alleged or proved against the farms burnt. If Boers have used the farm; if the owner is on commando; if the [railway] line within a certain distance has been blown up; or even if there are Boers in the neighbourhood who persist in fighting—these are some of the reasons. Of course the people living in the farms have no say in these matters, and are quite powerless to interfere with the plans of the fighting Boers. Anyway, we find that one reason or another generally covers pretty nearly every farm we come to, and so to save trouble we burn the lot without enquiry; unless indeed, which sometimes happens, some names are given in before marching in the morning of farms to be spared.8
Later, while at Kronstadt, he related a specific case of farm-burning in which he took part:
I had to go myself the other day, at the General’s bidding, to burn a farm near the line of march. We got to the place and I gave the inmates, three women and some children, ten minutes to clear their clothes and things out of the house, and my men then fetched bundles of straw and we proceeded to burn it down. The old grandmother was very angry. … Most of them, however, were too miserable to curse. The women cried and the children stood by holding on to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house. They won’t forget that sight, I’ll bet a sovereign, not even when they grow up. We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods—beds, furniture, and grimcracks strewn about the veldt; the crackling of the fire in their ears, and smoke and flame streaming overhead. The worst moment is when you first come to the house. The people thought we had called for refreshments, and one of the women went to get milk. Then we had to tell them that we had come to burn the place down. I simply didn’t know which way to look.9
Such destruction began on a relatively small scale, Kitchener reporting in February 1901 the burning of 256 farms in the Transvaal and 353 in the Orange Free State,10 but by the end of the war approximately 30,000 farmsteads had been reduced to ashes and many villages entirely destroyed by fire, prompting Ramsay MacDonald, a British politician who visited Lindley in the Free State shortly after the end of hostilities, to observe grimly:
It was as though I had slept among ancient ruins of the desert. Every house, without a single exception was burnt; the church in the square was burnt. … Although taken and retaken many times, the place stood practically untouched until February 1902, when a British column entered it unmolested, found it absolutely deserted and proceeded to burn it. The houses are so separated from each other by gardens that the greatest care must be taken to set every one alight. From inquiries I made from our officers and from our host, who was the chief intelligence officer for the district, there was no earthly reason why Lindley should have been touched. … The whole journey was through a land of sorrow and destruction, of mourning and hate.11
The second strand of Kitchener’s strategy involved internment on a massive scale—a policy directly related to farm-burning, since by doing so the authorities had either to leave women, children, and old men to manage for themselves as best they could amidst the unforgiving veldt or to somehow rehouse them. Although some civilians found refuge in other farms, walked to the nearest town, or found safety in an African kraal, the authorities soon appreciated that these internally displaced refugees—deprived of their livelihoods on British initiative and their numbers rapidly increasing as their homes went up in flames—could not be abandoned to wander in the open, exposed to the elements. To Kitchener, Boer women posed as much as a threat to his military efforts as their menfolk under arms. By clearing them from the countryside, he reckoned he would deny Boer commandos of sustenance and sources of intelligence, adversely affecting them at the tactical level and thus, at the strategic level, obliging them to abandon the war. “The women question is always cropping up and is most difficult,” he declared five days into his new posting. “There is no doubt the women are keeping up the war and are far more bitter than the men.”12
By allowing women to remain on their farms, they offered the enemy benefits in terms of intelligence and supplies. The British solution, ostensibly humanitarian, was simple and brutal: after destroying their homes, loading them onto wagons and moving them to makeshift “refugee camps,” later known as “concentration camps.” Kitchener’s circular memorandum inaugurated this as official policy on December 21, 1900:
The General Commanding-in-Chief is desirous that all possible means shall be taken to stop the present guerrilla warfare.
Of the various measures suggested for the accomplishment of this object, one which has been strongly recommended, and has lately been successfully tried on a small scale, is the removal of all men, women and children, and natives from the districts which the enemy’s bands persistently occupy. This course has been pointed out by surrendered burghers, who are anxious to finish the war, as the most effective method of limiting the endurance of guerrillas, as the men and women left on farms, if disloyal, willingly supply. Burghers, if loyal, dare not refuse to do so. Moreover, seeing the unprotected state of women now living out in the districts, this course is desirable to ensure their not being insulted or molested by natives. …
It should be clearly explained to Burghers in the field, that if they voluntarily surrender, they will be allowed to live with their families in the Camps until it is safe for them to return to their homes.
With regard to natives, it is not intended to clear Kafir [sic] Locations, but only such Kafirs [sic] and their stock as are on Boer farms.13
The army held initial responsibility for the nine camps established by the end of 1900, but within a few months this responsibility passed into the hand of civilian authorities. These makeshift facilities housed both displaced civilians and the families of hensoppers who feared reprisals by those still prepared to resist. Needless to say, the military authorities had no experience of managing the welfare of civilians under such circumstances or on such a scale; predictably, conditions deteriorated because of overcrowding and inadequate supplies of food and water. Basic standards of hygiene and sanitation could not be met: latrines often consisted of unemptied buckets of waste left to bake for hours in the sun, while a woeful absence of medical care compounded the crisis created by malnutrition and disease, causing the mortality rate to spiral. When the secretary of state for war, William St. John Brodrick, wrote to Kitchener in January 1901 indicating the general awareness of conditions in the camp at Bloemfontein and ordering a report, Kitchener disingenuously replied that all was well. Besides, British authorities in South Africa justified the camps’ existence on the basis of military and humanitarian necessity.
The camps found recent precedent in the person of the notorious Spanish general, Valeriano Weyler, who during the Cuban insurrection of 1896–97 had established barbed-wire compounds, behind which 20,000 internees had died.14 British camps consisted of rows of canvas tents and little else—with no proper protection from the extremes in temperature. The administrators assigned by the army to cope with this massive undertaking generally possessed no understanding of the task before them, in particular the acute danger of typhoid in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. Although some camp commandants made the best of a bad situation, many, either through incompetence, negligence, or just plain heartlessness, consigned thousands of civilians, white and black, to a miserable end.
The scandalous conditions of these camps soon became known outside South Africa, thanks to Emily Hobhouse,15 the 40-year-old daughter of a Cornish rector who, alarmed by stories of civilian distress, obtained sponsorship from a relief society and on her own initiative set out to visit some of the camps in the Orange River and Cape Colonies. Horrified by what she saw, she drew up a report of her findings that led to radical improvement in camp conditions and ultimately saved thousands of lives. Supported by the Committee of the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, Hobhouse, unfairly branded a “pro-Boer” by dint of her vociferous yet peaceful antiwar campaigning, set out at the end of 1900 with supplies to be distributed among the camps. On arriving in South Africa she received permission to undertake this work from Kitchener and from Sir Alfred Milner, governor of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colonies, and promptly left for Bloemfontein with £200 worth of food and as much clothing as she could take. Unaware of the true extent of the suffering, Hobhouse initially believed she was bringing gifts to those in need rather than in excessive distress. It was not long before she appreciated the full horror of the camps, with the scale of the suffering truly shocking. On January 26, 1901 she reached a camp on the exposed veldt at Bloemfontein, which she graphically described thus:
Imagine the heat outside the tents, and the suffocation inside! We sat on their khaki blankets, rolled up, inside Mrs. Botha’s tent; and the sun blazed through the single canvas, and flies lay thick and black on everything—no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. In this tiny tent live Mrs. Botha, five children (three quite grown up) and a little Kaffir servant girl. Many tents have more occupants. … Wet nights the water streams down through the canvas and comes flowing in (as it knows how to do in this country) under the flap of the tent, and wets their blanket as they lie on the ground.16
The numerous occupants, moreover, had to share inadequate rations. A few days later Hobhouse discovered “… a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer, kneeling beside her; while, next tent, his wife was watching a child of six, also dying, and one of about five drooping.”17 Hobhouse moved on to inspect other camps, including Norval’s Pont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley, and Mafeking. Almost everywhere she encountered squalid conditions, varying according to the location of the camp; availability of food, water, and fuel; the attitude and abilities of the commandant; and a host of other factors. In general, however, she found appalling conditions of overcrowding, woefully inadequate sanitation, poor food, tainted water supplies, and insufficient medical care, not to mention the less critical matters such as the absence of beds, furniture, and schooling for the children. She returned to Bloemfontein camp on April 22, only to discover that the population had doubled in size to nearly 4,000 people in the six weeks since her first visit. The Springfontein camp had grown six times from 500 to 3,000 internees, with hundreds more on the way. The authorities were simply unable to cope with the growing numbers.
Hobhouse was particularly moved by the suffering of children, whose rising mortality rates could largely be attributed to disease and malnutrition. In a letter home, she described the death of an infant whose mother had fashioned a makeshift tent out of a strip of canvas to shield her sick child. “The mother,” Hobhouse wrote:
sat on her little trunk, with the child across her knee. She had nothing to give it and the child was sinking fast. … There was nothing to be done and we watched the child draw its last breath in reverent silence. The mother neither moved nor wept, it was her only child. Dry-eyed but deathly white she sat there motionless looking not at the child but far far away into the depths of grief beyond tears. A friend stood behind her who called upon Heaven to witness the tragedy, and others crouching on the ground around her wept freely. The scene made an indelible impression on me.18
Hobhouse fought hard to draw the attention of the military authorities to the most immediate needs of the internees: better facilities, food, medicines, clothing, soap, and every manner of basic amenity and comfort. Unable to secure these changes, she decided to return home to publicize her findings and exert pressure directly on the government. She sailed for Britain on May 7, unaware that the evidence she had gathered in South Africa would prove the catalyst for real change. Already there had been questions in Parliament. In March, two members of Parliament had referred to concentration camps, and bowing reluctantly to pressure, the government released statistics on the numbers of internees in April and May 1901: 21,000 in the Transvaal camps, 20,000 in the Orange River Colony, and 2,500 in Natal. All told, there were approximately 60,000 interned civilians. No clear figures could be provided for the number of fatalities, nor could officials confirm the number of blacks held in camps of their own: the British policy of racial segregation demanded that Boers and blacks be kept in separate camps.
Hobhouse published her report in June. It contained stark and unexaggerated facts. Her tone was moderate and her recommendations compelling. She had the sense to reserve her bombastic attacks for her private interviews and personal letters. The report caused an uproar, stirred the hearts of thousands, and attracted the attention of many prominent politicians, who roundly condemned the policies behind scorched earth and the concentration camps, policies described by the antiwar leader of the opposition party, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, as “methods of barbarism,”19 while his colleague, David Lloyd George, accused the government of pursuing “a policy of extermination” against women and children. Brodrick, on behalf of the government, defended such policies, explaining that the guerrillas had forced upon the army the necessity of their “sweeps” across the countryside. The only method of protecting families rested in housing them in camps where they could avoid starvation on the veldt. He asserted that conditions in the camps were on the rise and mortality rates on the decline. “It is urged that we have not done sufficient to make these camps sanitary, and to preserve human life. I deny it altogether.”20
Immediately forced on to the defensive, the government could no longer ignore the issue. Public opinion had been aroused, and although the government continued to insist that the camps served a dual military and humanitarian role—at once denying the guerrillas their sources of support while feeding and housing those whose homes by necessity had been destroyed—it was compelled to institute effective changes to what was increasingly seen as an odious system. In addition, the government, yielding to Hobhouse’s suggestions, appointed Millicent Fawcett to head a women’s commission, which was to travel to South Africa and report on the state of the camps. Hobhouse was specifically excluded because of the “sympathy” she had shown to the Boers. Yet, undeterred by this snub, she decided to continue to monitor improvements for herself and returned to South Africa in October. Kitchener, citing martial law, refused her permission to land and had “that bloody woman” forcibly transferred to a troopship for deportation.
The numbers of civilians in the camps only increased as Kitchener’s sweeps continued. The population of the camps in August 1901 stood at 105,000 whites and 32,000 blacks, and as a result of unsanitary conditions, epidemics of typhoid and measles broke out, increasing the number of deaths from 2,666 in August to 2,752 in September and 3,205 in October. The government did not take remedial action until the beginning of 1902 when the Fawcett Commission’s report, issued the previous December, condemned the camps and their administration on a range of shocking defects—and thus vindicated Hobhouse’s earlier findings. As a result, by the end of the war the death rate in the camps fell to only 2 percent—though not before many thousands had already succumbed.
Kitchener’s attitude toward the camps is instructive, for however horrific their conditions, he clearly did not relish their existence, regarded them as reasonably well maintained, and several times expressed his desire for their closure if some viable alternative could be found. Having, with Milner’s approval, passed the administration of the camps to civil authorities in early March, he justified their existence to Brodrick:
The refugee camps for women and surrendered boers [sic] are I am sure doing good work. It enables a man to surrender and not lose his stock and moveable property which are otherwise confiscated by the boers [sic] in the field. The women left on farms give complete intelligence to the boers [sic] of all our movements and feed the commandos in their neighbourhood. Where they are brought in to the railway they settle down and are quite happy.21
Kitchener’s position remained consistent over time, though he several times expressed his desire for the camps’ closure, as a letter of May 9 reveals:
We are really doing all we can for the burgher camps and I hope soon to be able to let the surrendered burghers take their cattle to the bush veldt—I do not think people from England would be of any use or help to the families in camps as they already have a number of people looking after them but funds might help them if properly administered. I wish I could get rid of these camps but it is the only way to settle the country and enable the men to leave their commandos and come in to their families without being caught and tried for desertion.22
Having said this, Kitchener’s views on the ultimate fate of at least the hostile portion of the Boer population extended into quite radical bounds. If his advocacy for the execution of Cape rebels, whom he described as “merely brigands and murderers”23 did not raise eyebrows, some of his other proposals raised a host of ethical questions, such as his scheme of offering Boer leaders a month’s notice in which to surrender themselves on penalty of the confiscation of their property. He asserted privately to Lord Milner that “… everyone out here considers confiscation the only chance of bringing these people to their senses.”24 He further contended that the only truly effective method of ensuring long-term peace was to resettle the belligerent element of the population abroad, either in the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia), in the French colony of Madagascar, or on the British-controlled island of Fiji. “I could send their families and so clear the burgher camps,” he wrote to Roberts on June 14, “and we should be relieved of a bad and dangerous lot.”25
By the end of June, Kitchener estimated that he controlled more than half the Boer population—either as prisoners of war or as incarcerated in concentration camps—and recommended to his political superiors in London that neither category of detainees should be allowed to return to their farmsteads upon release, thus ensuring the end of any prospect of future conflict with the Boers and allowing space for future British colonization. Moreover, while he privately asserted to Brodrick that “Everything that is possible is being done” for camp inmates,26 some of the views contained in his private correspondence displayed a strong degree of contempt for the Afrikaner strain of South African society. “These boers [sic] are uncivilized Africander [sic] savages with only a thin white veneer,” he wrote in a private letter to Brodrick. “The people who have lived all their lives with them have only seen the veneer,” he continued:
hence they have no idea what brining up in this wild country has produced, savages. The boer [sic] woman in the refugee camp who slaps her protruding belly at you, and shouts “when all our men are gone these little Khakies will fight you” is a type of the savage produced by generations of wild lonely life. Back in their farms and their life on the veldt they will be just as uncivilized as ever, and a constant danger. Change their country and they may become civilized people fit to live with.27
Kitchener’s aversion to the Boers went so far as to persuade him of the veracity of groundless claims made by British medical authorities in the concentration camps that Boer mothers were willfully causing the deaths of their own children as a consequence of “criminal neglect”—a disgraceful attempt to justify the horrendous health catastrophe caused by administrators themselves—and prompting Kitchener to consider the women’s prosecution for manslaughter.28
Kitchener’s great “drives”—some over 80 kilometers (50 miles) long—constituted the third element of his strategy to cope with the guerrillas and finish the war. As he understood that he could neither catch nor destroy the remaining commandos without placing strict limits on their freedom of movement, Kitchener inaugurated a construction program that established a network of light fortifications ultimately consisting of hundreds of blockhouses and thousands of miles of barbed-wire fencing established across wide stretches of the veldt—crisscrossing the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies like a spider’s web—all for the purpose of restricting and channeling the Boers’ movements and thus trapping them in great drives—not unlike a gigantic pheasant hunt—meant to confine them to areas where they could be captured or killed.
Roberts had first ordered the construction of blockhouses in March 1900 to protect the Cape Town-Bloemfontein railway, on which he relied for his supplies. But defending vulnerable targets such as railways, roads, and towns was not enough: the insurgents’ freedom of movement now had to be impeded as much as possible. Blockhouses, initially rectangular and built of stone, were ultimately round and made of layers of corrugated iron packed with earth between them, covered with stout tin roofs, and protected by trenches and barbed wire. Strong enough to withstand rifle fire, once erected in sufficient numbers and linked by thousands of miles of barbed-wire fencing, they became an elaborate network spanning wide areas of the former Boer republics. By the end of the war, blockhouse chains extended for 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), consisting of 8,000 blockhouses garrisoned by over 50,000 men.
Kitchener’s first large-scale drive opened on January 28, 1901, involving seven columns, in total 14,000 men and 58 guns, moving through the Transvaal between the Delagoa and Natal railway lines. Facing vastly superior numbers, most of the commandos fell back without a fight and managed to break through the lines, behind which they were largely safe. Thus, initially, such tactics produced few tangible military benefits. “It is a most difficult problem,” Kitchener admitted in February 1901, “an enemy that always escapes, a country so vast that there is always room to escape, supplies such as they want abundant almost everywhere.”29 Nonetheless, in the areas increasingly cordoned off by blockhouse and barbed wire, the Boers encountered total devastation, rendering subsistence in the field extremely difficult. By the time Kitchener’s forces eventually reached the Natal border in mid-April, they had swept the veldt clean of civilians and had laid waste to the landscape—albeit with scarcely any impact on the commandos. Only a handful, known as “hands-uppers,” had voluntarily surrendered to the British. Some went so far as to change sides—the “joiners”—while those who doggedly remained on commando came to be known as “bitter-enders.” Kitchener’s radical approach to the guerrilla problem proved counterproductive, at least at the outset, for it hardened the resolve of the bitter-enders to carry on in spite of the sufferings of Boer civilians and released them from the responsibility of having to protect their properties and loved ones.
At the same time as Kitchener was executing his drive through the Transvaal, de Wet launched his second invasion of the Cape. Kitchener sent 14,000 troops by rail and road in over a dozen flying columns against a Boer force of 3,000 in the “third De Wet Hunt.” But de Wet’s hit-and-run tactics kept the British confused as to his location and direction of movement. He still managed to sever lines of communication, strike at convoys, and tear up railway lines, to the great consternation of his opponents. He then escaped across the Orange River near Philippolis on February 10—but not before his men and horses had suffered badly from privation and fatigue. Worse still, this second invasion had totally failed in its objectives. De Wet’s men were quite exhausted, and Cape Afrikaners had not joined his force in large numbers. De Wet would, hereafter, remain on the defensive, though others, such as Assistant Chief Commandant P. H. Kritzinger, another effective guerrilla leader, led their own forays. Having met with considerable success after crossing into the Cape Colony in December 1900, he conducted a second raid in May 1901 and later a third, which ended in his capture. During his operations, Kritzinger had ruthlessly executed any blacks found working for the British. Though he was put on trial for murder, he was subsequently acquitted.
The lull in fighting that occurred in the Orange River Colony in the middle of March as a result of British forces dispersing de Wet’s commandos enabled Kitchener to reorganize his mobile columns in that theatre of operations. Without altering the deployment of troops involved in guarding lines of communications in the Orange River Colony, Kitchener subdivided the colony into four districts, each commanded by a general officer with responsibility for reacting rapidly to any concentration effected by the Boers and systematically to clear the countryside of all horses, cattle, and supplies.30
Space precludes a comprehensive examination of Kitchener’s operations and drives, but a snapshot of small periods of 1901 provides a general impression of their tenor. His principal concern lay in the sheer elusiveness of his enemy, and the fact that notwithstanding Boer losses of 1,000 fighters a month, they continued to refuse peace without the restoration of their independence. “It is a most difficult problem,” he complained to Brodrick in early February, “an enemy that always escapes, a country as vast that there is always room to escape, supplies such as they want abundant almost everywhere.” Kitchener appreciated the benefits derived from the continuing influx of reinforcements but lamented how such a vast and punishing theatre of operations simply swallowed them up and caused substantial wastage to men and horses. “It all seems endless,” he wrote on February 1, “and I do not know how to answer your telegram asking for even an approximate time when this war would be over.”31 The financial strain of the war—with an expected expenditure of £60 million for the coming year, a figure Brodrick later modified to £88 million—now threatened to affect operations in the field.32
In March, troops made significant progress in clearing commandos from Cape Colony, capturing both men and horses in growing numbers, but Kitchener admitted to Roberts that bringing an end to the war would constitute “a very long business.”33 He appreciated that attrition offered the only answer to an otherwise intractable situation. Writing to Brodrick, he explained: “The difficult problem is to see how to get any finality to this war … and I can find no infallible solution other than exhaustion.”34 Still, his men were coping increasingly well, for the fitness and well-being of the troops “played out” at the point of Roberts’s departure had now recovered; indeed, the men were eager for the fight. This circumstance, in combination with the arrival of reinforcements, cast a more positive light on prospects.35
Accordingly, in the course of March and April 1901, Kitchener conducted a number of operations. In southeastern Orange River Colony, British and colonial troops advanced north, encountering slight opposition, Kitchener explaining in a dispatch to the War Office on May 8 how “The Boers, following the tactics which have frequently enabled them to evade our columns during recent operations, dispersed and broke back, abandoning their stock.” Nonetheless, by March 20, the columns had taken 70 prisoners, 4,300 horses, and numerous transport oxen.36
In the eastern part of the Orange River Colony, a column under General Rundle left Harrismith on April 19, bound for Bethlehem, where it arrived on the 24th. En route he clashed with various hostile bands, in all numbering around 300 men, who continuously remained along the flanks of Rundle’s force, which spent four days around Bethlehem, passed Retief’s Nek on the 29th, reached the Brandwater Basin unopposed, and entered Fouriesburg on May 2. Having concluded “extensive clearing operations” in the area around that town, Rundle proceeded to scour the surrounding countryside with his “flying” columns.37
In the Transvaal, General French’s lightly equipped, fast columns operated near the border with Zululand, pursuing and engaging commandos wherever encountered, Kitchener claiming that “The energy and persistence with which these operations were carried out caused great demoralization among the Boers, who had moved for safety into these almost impassable districts.” The cull amounted to 200 burghers who crossed into Zululand where they surrendered to local magistrates. Moreover, in the operations following French’s arrival at Piet Retief, the columns under his command succeeded in killing or wounding 73 Boers and capturing 56 men, while another 175 burghers surrendered themselves voluntarily. They also netted masses of animals and equipment: one 15-pounder gun, three pom-poms, 496 rifles, 19,000 rounds of small arms ammunition, 534 wagons and carts, 1,016 horses, 250 mules, and numerous oxen.38
Elsewhere in the Transvaal, Colonels Campbell and Allenby, each in command of separate columns, both engaged strong bodies of Boers beginning on April 18, driving off forces that had been constantly harassing their movements. But the Boers had not surrendered the initiative and carried out operations of their own, such as on March 3, when Generals de la Rey and Jan Smuts, together with Commandant Hendrik Vermaas, with a force of 1,500 men and one gun, vigorously attacked Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Money’s garrison of Lichtenberg at 3 a.m. in a fight lasting until midnight, after which the Boers withdrew, repulsed with losses of 60 dead and wounded and seven prisoners. The garrison suffered 16 killed and 26 wounded. Other Boer forays included an attack by de la Rey with 500 men and three guns near Geduld on March 22 against a strong patrol of the 1st Imperial Light Horse, consisting of 200 men and a pom-pom. The Boers failed, losing 11 killed and 13 wounded, with Commandant Venter among the dead and Field Cornet Wolmarans severely wounded and taken prisoner.39
Other examples of British pursuit included General James Babington’s operations in the Transvaal. On March 23, moving northward, he drove a Boer force before him while at the same time Colonel Shekleton operated against the Boer right flank. Making use of mounted troops and guns only, Babington continued his pursuit on the following day, overtaking the Boer rear guard and driving it off at Zwartlaagte, thereby denying the Boers the respite they badly needed to cover the withdrawal of their convoy. When they assumed a second position a few miles further north, a New Zealand force under Lieutenant Colonel Grey duly broke through to the convoy from both flanks, forcing the Boers to abandon their guns and wagons and flee in confusion, pursued by Babington’s troops, who killed 22 Boers and wounded 32, took 140 prisoners, two 15-pounder guns, one pom-pom, six Maxim machine guns, 160 rifles, 320 rounds of 15-pounder ammunition, 15,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, 53 wagons, and 24 carts, at the cost of only two killed and seven wounded.40
When General Babington learned that de la Rey had concentrated about 2,000 of his troops in the hills around Hartbeesfontein, he ordered a movement to Syferkuil, the town he established as a base from which to operate against the commandos operating in that area. On March 22, near Brakspruit, 700 Boers vigorously attacked a convoy moving between Babington’s camp and Klerksdorp. The escort managed to repel the attack, killing 12 Boers and wounding six.41
Elsewhere in the Transvaal, General Plumer, operating in the area around Pietersburg, in the course of two weeks in April took 91 prisoners; accepted the voluntary surrender of 20 personnel; and captured one Maxim machine gun, 20,360 rounds of ammunition, 26 wagons and carts, and 46 mules. In the course of March and April 1901, Lieutenant General Sir Bindon Blood, operating north of the eastern railway line in the Transvaal, took 1,081 Boers, who either surrendered in the field or voluntarily turned themselves in. His forces also captured one 1-pounder Krupp gun complete with 100 rounds of ammunition, one pom-pom, 540 rifles, 204,450 rounds of ammunition, 247 horses, and 611 wagons and carts. To avoid their capture, the Boers blew up one “Long Tom” (heavy artillery piece), one 4.7-inch gun (captured from the British at Helvetia), one 15-pounder gun, one 12-pounder Krupp gun, two pom-poms,42 and two Maxim machine guns. Thereafter, Plumer concentrated his forces and marched along the line of the Elands and Kameel rivers to Eerste Fabrieken. From Blood’s column, Major General Stuart Beatson moved his force from Ewagen Drift up the left bank of the Wilge River toward Bronkhorst to cooperate with Plumer, but neither column encountered large bodies of Boers, such that only one commando, driven westward by a small force from Plumer’s command, achieved anything of note: in this instance, 27 prisoners, 18 rifles, 30 wagons, and a thousand head of cattle.43
Elsewhere, Lieutenant Colonel Plumer enjoyed a series of successes. Beginning on the night of April 26, he encountered a Boer laager at Klipdam and attacked it at dawn the following day, losing only a single man wounded, while inflicting much heavier losses on the Boers: seven killed, 41 captured, and the capture of the vehicles, animals, and other items found in their camp, consisting of 26 horses, 10 mules, numerous wagons and carts, and 76,000 rounds of ammunition.44 Later, with intelligence received of the Boers’ last Long Tom at Berg Plaats, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) east of Pietersburg on the road to Haernertsberg, Kitchener ordered Grenfell to endeavor to capture it. Advancing immediately, at dawn on April 30, he occupied Doornhoek before proceeding to Berg Plaats. Perceiving the British approach, the Boers commenced firing at a range exceeding 10,000 yards, but after discharging 16 rounds they blew up the gun while Grenfell’s men were still about 3,000 yards’ distance and retreated in a northeast direction. Grenfell, at a cost to himself of only two wounded, took 10 prisoners and 35 rounds of Long Tom ammunition. A thorough subsequent search of a farm at Bergvlei, near Berg Plaats, revealed a cache of 100,000 rounds of Martini-Henry ammunition, which Grenfell’s men destroyed. Using Bergvlei as a base, Grenfell then continued to operate for several days, a detachment from his command of mounted infantry under Major Thomson making use of the cover of thick fog to capture Commandant Marais and 40 of his men. When, together with Lieutenant Colonels Colenbrander and Wilson, the latter commanding “Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts,” returned to Pietersburg on May 6, Grenfell reported that altogether he had accounted for seven Boers killed, 129 prisoners taken in combat, 50 voluntary surrenders, and 240,000 rounds of ammunition destroyed.45
Once de Wet had been expelled from Cape Colony on February 28, operations could continue against the disparate commandos operating throughout the Transvaal under various commanders, “whose ability to keep the field against our troops,” Kitchener explained to the War Office:
is accounted for by the persistent way in which they avoid fighting and the manner in which they cling to the rugged and mountainous localities. These raiders have during the last two months undoubtedly received a certain number of recruits from amongst the Colonial Dutch [i.e. Boers living in Cape Colony], and the friendly feelings of a considerable portion of the rural population assure to them at all times not only an ample food supply, but also timely information of the movements of our pursuing columns, two points which tell heavily in their favour.46
Kitchener also reported on the “untiring valour” of the troops operating in central Transvaal, the efficient execution of orders sent to the various column commanders, and the growing effectiveness of the Colonial Defence Force, whose cooperation with regular army units gave promise of hindering Boer raiding, citing in particular the fact that 300 Boers were forced northward across the Orange River at Oudefontein Drift on April 3, while another commando of about equal strength abandoned its campaign in Cape Colony on May 1, crossing 13 kilometers (8 miles) west of Bethulie. Kitchener regarded both incidents as “a sign that the raiders are losing heart, and that the leaders are only able to retain in the field small bodies of desperate men, who are prepared to adapt themselves to the vicissitudes of guerrilla warfare and brigandage.”47
At this time, Kitchener applied his scorched earth policy more intensively than ever and over an increasingly wider area, leaving those Boers still on the veldt during the winter (June–August) of 1901 critically short of food and shelter. The commandos began to operate less frequently, women and children often chose to live exposed on the veldt rather than face internment, and Boer forces were obliged to make up for shortages of food, weapons, ammunition, and clothing by seizing them from small British detachments at isolated posts. Some measures smacked of even greater desperation: without facilities for holding prisoners of war, the Boers had no option but to release their captives as soon as they were taken.
Acting president Burger and other members of the Transvaal government began to lose heart. President Steyn, of the Free State, on the other hand, together with de Wet and de la Rey, urged resistance to the last man when on June 20 they all gathered at Waterval. Steyn, de Wet, and de la Rey eventually convinced Burger to hold firm, and Boer leaders planned a new invasion of the Cape Colony to try to divert Kitchener’s attention away from his drives to the north. Kitchener, for his part, issued a proclamation on August 7, demanding that Boer officers surrender their firearms by September 15 or suffer permanent banishment from South Africa and the confiscation of their property. In the event, few burghers laid down their arms.
Smuts’s invasion of the Cape in September 1901 graphically demonstrated that several thousand bitter-enders remained at large. First moving into the Eastern Cape almost as far as Port Elizabeth on the coast, Smuts then turned west and proceeded into the southeastern districts before heading north and northwest, where he linked up with other commandos and took several towns near O’Okiep in April 1902. Cape authorities imposed martial law, seized livestock from rebel farms, and rounded up those suspected of collaboration. In the course of the war, about 13,000 Cape rebels—about 10 percent of the white population—joined the Boer cause, and somewhat more volunteered to serve on the British side as either police or mounted troops. Many other Cape Afrikaners who did not themselves take up arms did offer some assistance to Smuts’s men and other raiders, to whom of course they were bound by common culture and language.
Kitchener could report a fair degree of progress by early May. The South African Constabulary were now establishing large numbers of posts and protected areas into which surrendered Boers could return to their farms. The value of this was obvious, as Kitchener explained: “… the irreconcilables will see that ordinary life is going on in spite of all their efforts.” Other semblances of normality were returning to the veldt: Kitchener restarted the mines around Johannesburg at the beginning of May, hoping this would dampen the morale of those still on commando, while attacks on railway lines had greatly decreased as a consequence of the growing efficacy of blockhouses and the gradually expanding wire barriers that the Boers found almost impossible to cross, dividing up, as they did, territory that Kitchener planned gradually to clear.48 On May 24, Kitchener informed Roberts of progress respecting further blockhouse construction: “By fortifying and increasing our posts on the railway lines they form barriers which the Boers cannot cross without being engaged. I am getting blockhouses at every 2500 yards and at night parties from each meet and sleep out between, waiting for any attempt to cross. This has proved very successful. The Eastern and Natal lines are complete and the others will soon be so.”49 By mid-June, moreover, the South African Constabulary posts were demonstrating their effectiveness, and in the Cape, small bands were being cleared and the colonial defense force proving itself increasingly competent.50 Having said this, Kitchener was not terribly impressed by the comparisons between locally raised (largely Anglo-stock) forces and their Boer counterparts: “The South African white (Cape or Natal colonists or Transvaal uitlanders) is very inferior to the boers [sic], both in knowledge of the country, capability of standing hardship, and hard work, and in guts and determination.”51
The strategic picture in mid-1901 therefore remained mixed, with Kitchener ambivalent about the prospect of an early end to the war:
I wish I could tell you when the end of the war would come. We are nearer to it that is all I can say. I much dread the war degenerating into the uncontrolled brigandage which might take a very long time to suppress and cause incalculable damage to the country and enormous expense, hence my desire for terms with Botha who could control the enemy’s forces, however that is probably all over now and how it will end I cannot see.52
Later that month he was equally pessimistic, stating: “We are working away as hard as we can to enclose and catch the boers, but it is difficult work and they have got remarkably cute lately.”53
Compounding his travails in the field, Kitchener felt himself under pressure from London, for the government began to express anxieties for an end to hostilities, not least to alleviate the Treasury from the enormous financial burden imposed by a war of far greater duration than anyone had anticipated. Brodrick went so far as to state the Cabinet’s interest in a scheme by which the army should drive most of the last marauding commandos north of the Vaal River and thereafter declare the war over in the Transvaal, Cape Colony, and Natal, leaving all remaining opposition in the Orange River Colony designated and punishable as brigandage. “We feel,” he stated on behalf of the cabinet, “that some point of this kind must be looked to as neither finance nor policy would permit us to maintain 250,000 men in the Colonies indefinitely.”54 Still, Brodrick was doing his utmost to stave off the demands of his colleagues for retrenchment through the recall of some of the troops in South Africa. “I am doing my best to keep down expenditure,” Kitchener wrote in response on June 7, “but it is no easy task and I do not see my way to do much more in any large war.”55 He also promised to send home as many men as he could spare, but by doing so he believed this would only prolong the war.56 Now was not the time to slacken the pressure, Kitchener argued: “Everything seems to look better and to show that the end is not far off. Our columns are pressing them everywhere and they have no rest and no fight left in them … the exhausting process is going on steadily.”57
But the summer of 1901 proved one of mixed results, and while matters improved for the British, few could doubt the longevity of coming operations. “The war drags on without any definite signs of soon ending,” Kitchener wrote despairing to Roberts on June 14. “I wish I could see an end to it, but this process of exhaustion must in such a country as this be a long one. I do all I can and think all I know. I cannot see my way to do more.”58 Still, volunteer forces from Britain were now making some impact by this time. “The distribution of Yeomanry is complete,” Kitchener reported. “They are doing well but are still green and therefore liable to more casualties than they should have. Another month will I expect make them all right.”59 Two weeks later he confided to Milner: “We are pegging away as hard as we can but the boers [sic] will not stand at all.” The strain was beginning to show on Kitchener personally, who after five years of continuous service in the field—dating from his deployment to the Sudan in 1896 “… would give a good deal to sink into oblivion and peace.”60
Yet he persevered: in the course of July, the army continued to fortify the railway lines with blockhouses with a view to reducing the numbers of troops defending the line, whose protection absorbed more soldiers than any other single undertaking in the theatre of war. Kitchener’s view—one it must be said not shared by all his subordinates—that he would try to meet the government’s request for limited troop reductions, left him in a quandary, prompting him to caution Brodrick that such a proceeding would produce mixed consequences. Fewer troops on the railways would free up space for consumer goods to reach the civilian population but in return for a deleterious impact on operations. “I hope you will remember,” he wrote pointedly in early July, “that every man counts.” In reality, this was not the time to contemplate troop reductions in South Africa, for Kitchener wildly underestimated the numbers of Boers still on commando—13,000 by his reckoning—when in fact the true figure almost certainly exceeded this by more than double. Still, he was correct in his assessment that he could relax restrictions on mining: “I am very grieved,” he wrote privately to Brodrick on July 5:
that we have not been able to absolutely end the war or rather the resistance to our rule which is more what is going on now than actual warfare, but I hope by the end of August we shall have rendered [i.e. weakened] the resistance so that with certain safeguards it may be ignored and the industries of the country may be again safely undertaken and developed.61
Still, all such positive news always carried a prudent caveat, and Kitchener duly warned—as was his wont—against overoptimism at home. “I have had so many disappointments I do not think it wise to count on an early finish.”62 Boer raids into Cape Colony in late July fully justified that note of caution, prompting Kitchener strongly to advise that proposals for troop reduction remain in abeyance at least until such forays ceased. Boer surrenders might again be on the rise, and yet even as the Boers exhibited signs of exhaustion, so too did their pursuers. Moreover, the British faced the paradox that as their enemies declined in number, it became increasingly difficult to catch those who still remained in the field.63
Kitchener accordingly tightened the screws further when, on August 7, he issued a proclamation that gave Boer officers and government officials until September 15 to surrender, barring which they would be permanently banished from South Africa. This initiative achieved almost nothing; in fact, it proved rather counter-productive, encouraging rather than softening resistance. Kitchener, ironically, thought it not strong enough, maintaining that the Boers would simply await a new government in London to overturn the decision. “Confiscation is the only thing that will touch them,” he declared to Roberts on August 9, adding:
I quite understand that confiscation is repugnant to British lawyers, but in this war we had to do much that is repugnant to us all, and where the loss of many valuable lives and destruction of property can be avoided, I should [have] thought the Gov[ernment]t would have taken the only really effective course to stop the war.64
With the death of Queen Victoria in August, Kitchener took the opportunity to provide a précis of the situation on the ground to the new sovereign, King Edward VII:
The enemy are in scattered parties of from 30 to 200 over an immense area, and sometimes in most difficult country, with which they are naturally thoroughly acquainted. These have be captured by Your Majesty[’]s troops. They have excellent scouts and information and generally move away rapidly before our columns can get within 20 miles of them. At the same time if they get a chance at a weak party unsupported, or by any carelessness on our part, they take immediate advantage of it. Long railway lines have also to be thoroughly protected by the troops, and this is done by a system of blockhouses 1600 y[ar]ds apart, with men lying out at night between each blockhouse. There are now over 1500 blockhouses in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony for the protection of railways besides 61 mobile columns scouring the country in every direction. Some of these columns are specially fitted out to travel light and fast and have the boer [sic] leaders as their objective.65
By late August, the government had managed to persuade Kitchener that he would have to manage with almost 50,000 fewer troops—a reduction of 189,000 to 140,000—and requested that he release some of his senior commanders and staff officers, as well. To this, Kitchener strongly objected. But if he faced frustrations generated by his superiors at home, by late August he was nevertheless beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, declaring in an extraordinary statement to Roberts on the 23rd: “One of the advantages of fighting this struggle out to the bitter end, as the boers [sic] seem determined to do, is that we shall require fewer troops to garrison the country when the war is over.” Such were the words of a man determined to remain at the helm for the long haul—a position he clearly stated later in the same communication:
I am afraid there is not much chance of the boers [sic] giving in on the last proclamation. They are quite impossible people to deal with and the only way will be to wear them out by continually catching their men and rendering the country uninhabitable. It is weary work but patience will eventually end the war: I do not see how anything else will do it. I look more to the numbers we kill or capture than to anything else.66
Appreciating more than ever the stark necessity that his troops endure long marches—or rather rides—Kitchener now redoubled his efforts, taking considerable pains to reduce the size of columns and to maximize their mobility and rendering them fit to undertake treks of 80 or 100 kilometers (50 or 60 miles) a day—and more—even for the sake of catching small groups of Boers. Experience had revealed that success, albeit accruing gradually, depended on men specifically trained and tasked for this arduous effort. “I have done all I can to render all columns more mobile,” he explained to Brodrick on August 30. “I have also tried to get picked men for extra mobile columns with a definite objective and a free hand to follow up leads anywhere. It is found that definite corps or regiments are better for this work than mixed forces.”67
By mid-September, Kitchener was aware from prisoners that the commandos were feeling the strain, being often kept continuously on the move—even at night. He was also in a position not only to allow more surrendered Boers to settle back into Johannesburg as a consequence of improved security along the railway lines but to open more mines—both initiatives representing the increasing emergence of normality. As for military affairs, he reported to Brodrick in mid-September that:
We are constantly reducing the enemy forces, and they are becoming more and more discontented with their leaders; but I fear the war will go on until we reduce their numbers to a very small residue. I am glad to say our bag!!! [i.e., the number of prisoners] has not fallen off as [I] rather expected it would. Considerable areas are being entirely cleared and kept clear of boers [sic] & this makes them thicker in the positions they still occupy so that our columns get at them almost better than they did before as boers [sic] are forced out of their own country and hiding places. This process is naturally a very long one, and takes up a large number of troops, but satisfactory progress has been made and the results are rather better than I anticipated. … The troops are wonderfully fit and well & are never better than when out on the trek. … Day after day they are at it and I never hear a grumble. I cannot speak too highly of the tone of the Army all through.68
By late September, if Kitchener had harbored any earlier doubts on this score, he was resigned to a strategy of attrition—reducing the Boers’ numbers through the simple, but by no means effortless, expedients of time, patience, and exertion.69 While he naturally found Boer raids into Natal and elsewhere disruptive to his own operations and necessarily lengthened the war, he had resigned himself to playing a long game, as he explained privately to Brodrick: “… the weekly drain must tell, and already some commando’s [sic] are either reduced to impotence or wiped out altogether and a large tract of country is entirely in our hands and clear of boers [sic].”70 The growing lines of blockhouses were contributing greatly to their decreasing freedom of movement. “I find this is the only way of making the country actually ours,” he continued, “for even if the boers [sic] break through our lines in small parties, they are so chased and find no food or help that they have to surrender.”71 Nevertheless, even by the closing months of 1901, Kitchener perceived no definite signs of a capitulation:
they seem as fanatically disposed to continue the war as ever, and I fear it can only end by our catching all or almost all of them. It is hard work for our men and horses, and must take a considerable time. I think you ought to be prepared for this. … I try all I can but it is not like the Soudan72 and disappointments are frequent. You must remember that as we go on catching boers [sic], we weed them out, and the residue left in the field are generally their best men and therefore more difficult to deal with.73
By early November, the Boers had ceased to attack the railway lines as a consequence of the formidable protection offered by a combination of ubiquitous blockhouses, extensive wire fencing, and an enormous numbers of troops. Yet, as always, Kitchener’s frustrations continued:
I wish I could find out some way of finishing the war; but it is really most difficult. We do all we can to capture the leaders but they are too well guarded to get them by surprise, and concentration of columns finds no one. It is really most disheartening, but by steady perseverance we must get them in time. I wish those that say the war ought to be over would come out and show us how to do it. … We have all done our best and mean to stick to it and see this war through & I sincerely hope it will not be long before we see the end, no effort shall be spared to bring that about as soon as possible.74
In closely examining a discreet period of operations—this time toward the end of 1901—we may examine exactly how Kitchener proposed to “see this war through,” as he described earlier.
By early November, Kitchener could confidently assert that while his troops in general sometimes failed to pin down Boer commandos, they were considerably hampering their movements, Brigadier General Bullock’s column, for instance, obliging one small force to abandon all their wagons and two guns that the rebels had captured from the British at Blood River Poort.In Natal, although heavy and continuous rain and thick mist impaired the progress of columns operating there, the troops nonetheless exerted themselves hard to hunt down and clear the colony of scattered bands of Boers, against whom in numerous skirmishers 21 were killed and 11 wounded, 160 unwounded prisoners taken, as well as 8,600 rounds of small arms ammunition, 400 horses, 5,800 cattle, 165 wagons, 54 carts, and large quantities of food captured. This result, effectively achieving the objective for which reinforcements had been brought in to Natal in the course of September, enabled military authorities gradually to withdraw forces beginning on October 22.75
In northern Transvaal, on the basis of accurate intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Colenbrander of Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts captured a number of Boer supply depots, and during the course of his march took 45 prisoners of war, nearly 4,000 rounds of ammunition, and a very large number of cattle and wagons. Ten Boers voluntarily surrendered themselves. Lieutenant Colonel Dawkins, commanding another column, operated against small Boer commandos in the area west of the railway between Nylstroom and Geelhout Kop, such that by October 26, when he returned to Nylstroom, he had captured 97 prisoners of war, 237 rifles, 9,200 rounds of ammunition, 850 cattle, 20 wagons, and some horses. Elsewhere in the Transvaal, Lieutenant Colonel J. Byng, who left Kroonstadt on October 6, rapidly became engaged with a Boer force under van Niekerk and Spanneberg. On the 13th, Byng attacked a laager at Jackfontein, taking 18 prisoners and some horses. Halting at Klerksdorp for provisions, on the 25th Byng began his return to Kroonstadt and recrossed the Vaal River, where he surrounded Spanneberg’s laager at Huntersvlei, taking Field Cornets Spanneberg and Oosthuyzen and 20 burghers. The British column captured another 11 prisoners near Plessis Rust by the time it had reached Vredefort Road on November 1.76
Meanwhile, Major Damant at Frankfort, and Lieutenant Colonel Wilson at Heilbron, in tandem with their own active operations, continued to offer protection to engineers as they completed construction of the line of blockhouses dotted between those two towns. On October 13, Damant engaged 300 Boers near Naudesdrift on the Wilge River, and two days later encountered a commando numbering 500 men under Commandants Ross and Hattingh, whom he pursued toward the Bothasberg. By the time Damant reached Frankfort on the 25th, his haul consisted of 19 prisoners, 13 vehicles, 40 horses, and 500 cattle captured near Villiersdorp. Other minor night raids conducted by his men produced another 12 prisoners.77 Further operations in the Transvaal included columns led by Colonels Sir Henry Rawlinson and Rimington, which linked up on October 14 near Niemand’s Kraal, and together pursued commandos toward the south, their chase netting 20 prisoners, 18 wagons, 21 carts, 66 horses, and over 2,800 cattle. Both columns then proceeded to Standerton, where they arrived on October 16–17.78
In southeastern Orange River Colony, columns under Major General Knox and Colonel Rochfort continued to operate from fixed positions, with the object of completely clearing the countryside there and capturing the roving Boers still operating in that area—the response to a perennial problem still plaguing British efforts, which Kitchener identified thus: “Small captures have been made, but the enemy’s knowledge of the ground, evasive tactics, and powers of concealment have enabled him so far to avoid any serious loss.” During the course of October, the troops operating in this area killed and wounded only seven Boers, though they captured 125.79
In the same month, in Cape Colony, columns under Lieutenant General French expelled raiding bands of Boers from the colony’s central districts, thereby releasing considerable numbers of troops to be deployed against commandos operating in the southwest and northeast. Of various operations undertaken in Cape Colony, in mid-October columns under Colonel Haig and Lieutenant Colonel Lukin pursued a detachment under Van der Venter, with Lukin’s troops surprising his laager 10 kilometers (6 miles) southwest of New Bethesda, at dawn on the 21st, killing one and taking 14 prisoners. In addition, in tandem with the work carried out by mobile columns, engineers constructed a line of blockhouses from De Aar to Beaufort West, designed to add considerable security to the main railway line there.80
Other elements of Kitchener’s counterinsurgency policy manifested themselves in the form of his institution on October 9 of Martial Law at the Cape ports, designed to inhibit the ingress of supplies to the Boers while causing minimal disruption to the normal life of the residents in the colony as a whole, as Kitchener explained to the War Office:
Whilst the regulations, agreed upon by the Colonial Government and myself, have been framed with a view to minimizing interference with legitimate trade, and preventing unnecessary inconvenience to the law-abiding portion of the community, adequate powers have at length been secured for the military authorities to enable them to deal with the plots and intrigues of Boer spies and sympathizers at the seaport towns, and to close to them this source of supply of munitions of war.81
Kitchener was convinced that the absence of martial law governing traffic along the coast of Cape Colony had aided the Boers in the form of provisions, foreign recruits, and communications with sympathetic foreign governments. The new regulations now brought into force by the general officer commanding in Cape Colony, together with civilian colonial authorities, were designed to bring these sources of assistance to a swift end.82 But more reinforcements were promised for the following March in the shape of six fresh battalions in exchange for two tired ones to be released from service in South Africa and four cavalry regiments in place of two tired ones. Six hundred fresh Canadians plus the heavy recruitment of yeomanry units at home represented further assistance, and Brodrick promised to give serious thought to Kitchener’s request for a thousand mounted yeomanry per month.83
But if Kitchener’s numbers were on the rise and his mobility correspondingly improving, the extremely challenging nature of the ground and climate exacted a fearful toll on the vast numbers of horses required for the cavalry, mounted infantry, artillery, and commissariat. Between February and November 1901, the disease known as “glanders” alone accounted for the deaths of 7,500 horses, with another 5,000 suffering from other illnesses over the same period. In late November, Kitchener explained the array of problems he faced on the veterinary front:
The loss in horses, both in columns in the field and in the veterinary hospitals, has always been very serious especially during the winter months when grazing is not procurable. … The mounted troops we employ are some of them very bad in the care of horses. Colonials are terrible, Yeomanry and Mounted Infantry are bad, and column commanders and officers have the greatest trouble in getting moderate care taken of the animals. I tried fitting out columns with extra horses as the boers [sic] have but the loss through want of care was so terrible I had to give up the plan. Where boer poneys [sic] thrive, our horses simply die. A number of our men are now mounted on rough boer poneys. But what will carry a boer who has two or three spare poneys well, fails in most cases to carry the colonial or cavalry soldier. The work our mounted troops have to do in finding the boers is also so much greater than that of the boers who remain in hiding, that we lost a much larger portion though the boers have lost very considerably.84
Circumstances were improving by the end of the year, however. In early December, Kitchener could inform the War Office of “a considerable extension of the boundaries of the enclosed areas, and [of] a proportionate diminution of the enemy’s field of operations.” In Cape Colony, columns under General French had expelled the Boer commandos from much of the midland districts, and those that still roamed about in the northeastern and southwestern districts were considered “more of a serious inconvenience than a menace or danger of any circumstance. They are in inhospitable country and are being given no rest.”85
In the Orange River Colony, British troops had strengthened their hold over the area east of the main railway line, and Kitchener estimated that the Boers’ area of operations there would soon be completely bisected by a line of blockhouses extending via Kroonstadt to Lindley and from Bethlehem to Harrismith. In addition, engineers were busily engaged in extending the existing blockhouse line between Heilbron and Frankfort to Tafel Kop, which the Boers had for a substantial time used as a rendezvous point and signaling area. Other lines were in the process of extension, as well. “Besides the advantages that may accrue from thus cutting up a vast stretch of country,” Kitchener explained to his superiors in London:
these lines tend to increase our own power of mobility, and under their protection the extension of the railway from Harrismith to Bethlehem is about to be commenced. The earthworks and culverts of this line were finished before the outbreak of the war, and the opening of it for traffic, while greatly facilitating the passage of troops, materials, and supplies in the heart of the north-east district of the Orange River Colony, will go far towards establishing our hold on that portion of the country which has hitherto been the general resort of De Wet’s bands.86
Engineers had by early December also completed the eastward extension of an existing line of South African Constabulary posts, the whole benefitting from the cover of several mobile columns in the eastern Transvaal under Major General Bruce Hamilton, who was actively engaged in pursuing Boers under Louis Botha, now obliged to operate in more confined areas than ever before. “Thus,” Kitchener concluded, “the system of protection of the railway lines by blockhouses has been extended to the protection of areas in conjunction with the establishment of lines which divide up the country outside these areas. The value of this undertaking is already evident, and its completion promises to produce lasting and beneficial results.”87 Hamilton’s tireless efforts soon reaped rewards. On the night of December 3, knowing that a force of Boers had managed to outflank his right and proceed to the southwest, Hamilton executed a long night march in pursuit about 32 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of Ermelo, surprising a scattered laager at dawn on the 4th and capturing 93 prisoners, 116 horses, 26 wagons, 29 carts, and stocks of ammunition, telegraph, and signaling equipment.88
In northern Transvaal, two columns under Colonels Dawkins and Colenbrander linked up on November 27 at Hartbeesfontein, where they made plans to attack a commando under Badenhorst, which intelligence identified as present at Sterkfontein. The attack began at dusk on that day, when 200 of Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts emerged from Zand River’s Poort, while the rest of the mounted troops proceeded via Reitvlei and Langkloof. Over the course of the following two days, the Boers, withdrawing rapidly back, succeeded in eluding their pursuers. But the British refused to ease up the pressure, and on the 29th, Colenbrander with 100 men pressed ahead of the rest of the column and followed the tracks left behind by Badenhorst’s burghers. Remaining closely on their tails through an area almost bereft of water and his troops quite exhausted, Colenbrander finally made contact with his quarry on the morning of December 3, capturing 15 prisoners and all the wagons of the commando. Badenhorst himself, with the 60 men remaining to his command, eluded capture by scattering into the dense bush lining the Poer Zyn Loop River. This effort, in conjunction with Hamilton’s operations, both described by Kitchener as “well planned and carefully executed,” netted in all 104 prisoners, 50 horses, 50 mules, 500 cattle, 6 wagons, 6,000 rounds of small arm ammunitions, “and the serious discomfiture of the enemy in a district in which he had long considered himself immune.”89
In the northeastern part of the Orange River Colony, the British spent early November carefully arranging for the convergence of several columns on the area between the towns of Vrede and Reitz, where intelligence had indicated a Boer concentration. Plans were accordingly drawn up to effect a gradual contraction of this wide “infested” area in such a fashion as to surround the commandos. In the event, the results proved that even the most carefully planned and coordinated movements could and sometimes did fail. “The operation was a comprehensive one,” Kitchener explained to the War Office:
and some idea of its extent and the difficulty attending its execution may be gained when it is noted that the rendezvous and starting points of the outermost column engaged upon it were roughly at the angles of a parallelogram, whose diagonal is 175 miles in length, and of which no side is less than 100 miles, marked by the points: Standerton, Harrismith, Winburg, and Heilbron.
Although the difficulties of distance and of marches designedly tortuous were most successfully overcome by the column commanders, and although the time of arrival at their allotted positions on the circumference of the inner circle was as perfect in this far-reaching manoeuvre as could have been in the most restricted of peace operations, I was disappointed in the event. The results were less than the excellence of the work performed by officers and men deserved, and this was in a great measure due to accident.90
No sooner had the converging movement of the various columns begun, when about half the Boer force “moving in their usual indefinite and undetectable fashion, succeeded in drifting through the gaps, at this time and at this point necessarily wide, of our encircling line,” and proceeded to northwest, aided in their escape by the cover afforded by mist and rain, though abandoning wagons and supplies as they fled. But the principle of converging columns was sound, nevertheless. Kitchener explained how this sort of operation functioned:
The need for both punctuality and deception of movement was especially enjoined upon all column commanders, and thus a difficult combination was effected without a hitch. No column marched straight upon its objective; some at times were actually moving away from it, and marches of all were circuitous and misleading to a degree, yet none were late, and all reached their allotted points fresh and ready for the work they hoped would ensue. A more or less free hand as to the route he should pursue had been given to each commander, the necessity for inter-communication on the third day and for the punctual arrival of the columns at their final positions being alone insisted upon. The last march was performed at night, and when dawn of the 12th November brought the columns to their objective, the fears that the bulk of enemy they had hoped to enclose had escaped were realised.91
While Kitchener admitted that the actual loss inflicted upon the Boers in these operations was insubstantial, he rightly identified the considerable degree of damage wrought on the commandos’ freedom of movement and means of supply, not least of food. The tally of this particular operation is telling on this point, with 22 Boers killed and 98 taken prisoners (of whom 12 were wounded), 10,200 cattle and 3,000 horses captured—though not more 5 percent were regarded as useful—plus nearly 200 wagons and a considerable number of other vehicles of various descriptions. Such large-scale operations must also be seen in the context of many more minor efforts, such as those conducted through the “energy and ingenuity” of officers such as Colonel Rimington and Major Damant, operating from Frankfort along the valley of the Vaal River, where their frequent taking of prisoners also played a part in gradually diminishing their adversaries’ resistance—achieved, as Kitchener readily recognized, by their “marked ability in adapting themselves to the peculiar methods of Boer warfare.”92 But, as always, many columns achieved comparatively little in exchange for sometimes prodigious expenditures of time and effort; General Elliott, commanding another column, conducted several night raids between November 26 and 28, but he failed to make contact with any commando of significant size, arriving at Kroonstad on December 1 with 15 prisoners, 114 wagons, 89 carts, 2,470 cattle, and 1,280 horses, though most of the latter ineligible as remounts for Kitchener’s forces.93
Still, by denying these commodities to the Boers, Kitchener’s campaign of continual pursuit and harassment was slowly bearing fruit, for, notwithstanding the often poor condition of captured horses, cattle seized from the Boers not only denied these to Kitchener’s enemy but conversely benefitted the army commissariat. By the closing months of 1901, the health of British troops was now reasonably good, though wastage through sickness remained a problem. Still, Kitchener reported:
it is far less than might be expected from the arduous labour entailed by the constant pursuit of a very mobile and scattered enemy, frequently at night, and in season of heavy rains. Despite the fatigues of incessant marching, the harassing anxieties of night outpost work in exposed and isolated positions, and the discomfort of wet bivouacs, the cheerfulness and energy of our men is always evident, and there is a quiet determination on the part of all ranks to relax no effort until the campaign has been brought to a successful issue.94
His newly arrived troops were fast acclimatizing and “hardening,” while veterans of the new form of fighting constituted “a fine body of soldiers, well-skilled in the difficult warfare in which they are engaged, and capable of any efforts which they may be called upon the make.”95 The blockhouse system was also having a palpable effect on Boer mobility, albeit at the considerable cost to man them, which Kitchener continued to reduce to free up infantry for the mounted role. He personally inspected about 16 kilometers (10 miles) of the line between Standerton and Ermelo, concluding that no escort was needed and the country around completely clear of a hostile presence. Some intrepid Boers still managed to penetrate the lines, but only to find themselves in enclosed areas with nothing to achieve, Kitchener concluded, apart from “wander[ing] aimlessly about. I expect they will starve or surrender. … Like wild animals they have to be got into enclosures before they can be captured. The boers [sic] cordially dislike the blockhouse lines.”96 De Wet and other Boer commanders occasionally attacked vulnerable portions of these lines under the cover of darkness—and occasionally inflicted serious casualties when doing so, but Kitchener rightly identified such forays as the actions of desperate men,97 and by January 1902, he could justifiable take satisfaction at the lines’ effectiveness:
I feel we are now getting a much closer grip on the boers [sic] in the Eastern Transvaal and the O[range] R[iver] C[olony]. The blockhouses are doing well though of course the boers can and do occasionally force their way through them at night with loss. Even then they are a great help by pointing out where the boers are. We do not claim that these lines are impervious barriers. In fact I rather like the boers to get through sometimes as they thus get separated and out of touch with each other. The proof of their utility is the cordial manner in which they are detested by the boers.98
Further drives continued into 1902. With 30,000 men at his disposal, along with armored trains, Kitchener made three attempts in February and March to corner de Wet against the blockhouse lines that crisscrossed the northeastern area of the Orange Free State. While this strategy trapped relatively few Boers, in general Kitchener’s drives of this period proved successful, with Boer morale suffering under the continuous pressure exerted by the relentless pursuit, and British troops systematically destroying stocks of food as they advanced across a broad front.
At about the same time, in the western Transvaal, Lord Methuen was continuing his hunt for de la Rey, who found his freedom of movement seriously restricted by the ubiquitous blockhouse lines. Other problems now dogged the remaining Boer units, many of which were operating with fewer than 200 men. Food, clothing, and ammunition were growing increasingly scarce, winter was approaching, the numbers of joiners actually assisting the British in seeking out their own compatriots was on the rise, and losses through death and capture could not easily be replaced.
Other Boer commanders faced no better prospects. De Wet, in the Orange Free State, Botha in the eastern Transvaal, and de La Rey in the western Transvaal confronted the problem of far more numerically superior British forces and the narrowing limits imposed by blockhouse lines, which together with Kitchener’s scorched earth policy confined roving bands of increasingly desperate commandos into the wasteland left in the wake of British troops’ devastation. British patrols, now available in large numbers, kept the commandos constantly on the move, rendering it difficult for them to obtain food, weapons, ammunition, and horses, thus forcing the insurgents to look to their own survival instead of maintaining the initiative that they had seized long before. Those determined to fight on, the bitter-enders, continued to do so, but to no tangible end, for they could mount nothing more substantial that occasional forays and minor raids against the British. Even de la Rey’s finest achievement—at Tweebosch, fought on March 7 beside the Little Hart River where his burghers struck Methuen’s rearguard, inflicting almost 200 casualties and taking 850 prisoners, including the wounded Methuen himself, at a cost of only 34 men—the victor had no option but to release them owing to his inability to feed much less to confine them.
When delegates from the various commandos still in the field in the eastern Transvaal met to consider negotiating a peace, Deneys Reitz observed their appalling appearance: “Nothing could have proved more clearly how nearly the Boer cause was spent than those starving, ragged men, clad in skins or sacking, their bodies covered with sores, from lack of salt and food. Their spirit was undaunted, but they had reached the limits of physical endurance.”99 By this point, little remained of the original fighters from the war’s outset back in October 1899. Almost 7,000 had been killed in action, thousands remained in prison camps in Bermuda, Ceylon, India, and St. Helena, and many more thousands, the hensoppers, had surrendered, with some even aiding and abetting the British as joiners in the capacity of guides and scouts. The National Scouts operated in the Transvaal, while those in the Free State were known as the Orange River Colony Volunteers. By April 1902, about 4,000 Boers were collaborating with their erstwhile enemies.
By early 1902, British military strength stood at a staggering 250,000 men, backed by 8,000 blockhouses and 3,700 miles of barbed-wire barricades, with Kitchener deploying 9,000 men in a continuous cordon 87 kilometers (54 miles) in length, which in February advanced in hopes of trapping de Wet and Steyn. A further 8,000 troops garrisoned blockhouse lines while eight armored railway carriages moved up and down the line. De Wet managed to elude even this gargantuan effort, but this sweep still captured 300 commandos—numbers otherwise insignificant in major modern conflicts, but under the circumstances those which the Boers, now in extremis, could no longer afford to lose. Another drive, launched in March against de Wet, caught 800 Boers (minus de Wet), but with increasing use of joiners and black Africans as scouts, intelligence gatherers, and armed guards, the noose was fast tightening.
Kitchener also came to realize that he could increase pressure on his opponents by a change of tactics respecting Boer women and children living on the veldt. Mobile British columns continued to raze farmsteads to the ground; but hereafter, civilians were simply left in situ instead of transported under guard to concentration camps—thus, leaving something on the order of 13,000 homeless and destitute women and children to fend for themselves, subject to the mercy of the elements, and possible attacks from blacks. These trying circumstances—together with still further military setbacks such as on April 11 at Roodewal, where a Boer attack led by General Kemp was repulsed by a combined British force, which killed nearly 50 of de la Rey’s men and wounded 120—played a part in persuading Boer leaders to consider negotiations.
More than a year before the war actually ended, peace talks had opened at Middelburg between Louis Botha and Lord Kitchener on February 28, 1901. These talks had come about as a result of the latter’s suggestion during a time of stalemate, with neither side, in the event, prepared to give much ground. The negotiations were cordial, but there were a number of difficult questions to settle. Initially, both sides brought forward grievances concerning the conduct of their respective opponent. Botha raised the issue of the British arming of natives, while Kitchener, who offered fairly lenient terms, expressed anger over the wearing of British uniforms by some Boer soldiers. Peace naturally dominated the discussions. Boer demands included the prompt return of prisoners; ultimate self-government for the former Boer republics; the use of Afrikaans and English in schools and courts; Boer debts to be cleared up to £1 million; reconstruction money to be offered; blacks not to be permitted the vote before the colonies were granted self-governing status; and a general amnesty to be extended to all former Boer combatants, including Cape rebels—though the latter were to be disenfranchised. The Salisbury government rejected these terms, in particular those relating to amnesty for Cape rebels, and to blacks’ rights, which Chamberlain insisted should be the same in the new colonies as those held in the Cape Colony. Botha was not prepared to compromise on the crucial point of the republics’ independence. The Middelburg talks had therefore failed, though the issues discussed there would ultimately serve as the basis for the successful talks at Vereeniging the following year.
These talks began on April 11, 1902, the same day as the last engagement of the war, at Roodewal. Kitchener had informed the Boers that the Dutch had offered to mediate, and though the British government refused to accept this offer, Kitchener made known the possibility of direct talks to settle a conflict that was now rapidly petering out. A Boer delegation consisting of Botha, Smuts, de Wet, and Steyn arrived at Pretoria, where they stunned Kitchener by proposing terms strikingly similar to those Kruger had rejected at Bloemfontein three years before. It seemed clear the Boers appreciated that the war was in fact unwinnable. They still insisted, however, on the independence of the republics, ignoring the fact that they had been all but vanquished and occupied. In London, the government swiftly called for unconditional surrender, though one concession, essentially symbolic in nature, was offered: Milner was instructed to take part. This order indicated the tacit recognition that the republics were still sovereign states. As a political rather than a military representative at the talks, his participation suggested that this was more than simply a surrender arranged between opposing commanders, but a political settlement between two nations, despite the fact that, technically, neither the Orange Free State nor the Transvaal any longer existed as independent entities.
The Boer delegates requested an armistice in order that they could consult with their representatives abroad as well as with their commanders still in the field. They, in turn, could gauge the views of their own men. Kitchener refused to allow communication with Boers abroad, but in an unprecedented move offered the Boer delegates unhindered use of British railways and telegraphic services to enable consultation with commandos scattered throughout South Africa. He also arranged for safe passage to Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg, where he offered to host formal peace talks in May; for the period of four days prior to the conference, he gave a pledge that British forces would not attack any commando that was to be consulted. Kitchener was anxious to finish the war. He had already been offered the post of commander in chief in India, an appointment he wished to take up as soon as possible, and he was genuinely concerned about the physical and human costs of the ongoing war. He was prepared to make concessions for peace, though not extensive ones, and had shown no compunction about ordering the execution of 51 Cape rebels.
Prior to the talks, de Wet had consulted with all the commandos. The units voted on the thorny issue of retaining or yielding independence. The overwhelming majority voted for independence. British representatives informed Burger, the acting president of the Transvaal, that they would not grant this. De Wet, who felt morally compelled to honor the views of his compatriots in the field, announced, therefore, his readiness to carry on the fight. Jan Smuts and Barry Hertzog now intervened, bringing their legal knowledge to bear on the issue. They averted deadlock, successfully arguing that delegates were not in fact compelled to follow the views of the commandos, but must regard them merely as points for their guidance. They were free, as representatives of the burghers at large, to proceed in the best interests of their people.
Five negotiators were formally appointed from among the 60 Boer delegates assembled at Vereeniging who had been elected by the various commandos. These were Louis Botha, Koos de la Rey, and Jan Smuts on behalf of the Transvaal and Barry Hertzog and Christiaan de Wet for the Orange Free State. In general, those from the Transvaal backed peace, while those from the Orange Free State largely supported continued resistance. President Steyn of the Free State, a staunch bitter-ender, was effectively impotent at the peace talks because of ill health. Had he been able to participate fully, he would have been a strong advocate for the continuation of hostilities.
When negotiations began, the Boers offered the Rand, other territories, and control of foreign affairs to Britain in return for self-government in all other matters to be permitted without restriction. Britain was in a strong position and refused. Kitchener had been instructed to follow the Middelburg terms closely, conceding little more than an amnesty for the Cape rebels: independence for the Boer republics was simply not an option. Milner was prepared to cease all discussions, but Kitchener was more conciliatory, and in separate informal discussions with Smuts informed him that he predicted a change of government in London within two years. A Liberal government, he suggested, might be prepared to modify the less palatable aspects of any treaty to be signed at Vereeniging. The impasse gradually eased, and the British team drew up a statement calling on the Boers to disarm and accept British sovereignty. If this were signed, other terms would be appended and a formal treaty concluded.
Eventually, and paradoxically, Smuts and Hertzog hammered out with Milner and his team a draft agreement that bore a striking resemblance to the Middelburg terms. Milner and Kitchener declined to set a deadline for the establishment of South African self-government, but the Boers successfully negotiated concessions over and above the original basis for settlement. Britain, for instance, pledged to pay Boer war debts up to £3 million—triple the amount originally offered. Loans to assist in the rebuilding of houses and farms were to be offered to Boers and loyalists. All adult males were to be eligible to vote, apart from the leaders of the Cape rebels, who would now face a five-year rather than a life exclusion from enfranchisement. Only the leaders of the Cape rebels would now face imprisonment. On the issue of blacks’ political rights, the Boers insisted that they were not to be enfranchised until after the colonies became self-governing.
Milner opposed the peace process all along, for he believed that within a matter of months Britain’s military position would permit her to establish her own terms, with himself at the head of the civilian administration of a greater South Africa. Yet his efforts to stall for time failed, and the terms in general were considered very favorable by the Cabinet in London. Nonetheless, ministers expressed doubts on the issues of loans and on native rights. London had no objection to the amount proposed, but the figure offered was to include the repayment of war debts as well.
The issue of native rights proved of far greater concern. It was perfectly clear that if suffrage were not extended to blacks before British control ceased in South Africa, the Boers, once authority passed into their hands, would simply refuse it. The British government found this unacceptable. Nevertheless, insistence on this point threatened the whole peace process. After Milner informed the cabinet that the Boers refused to sign any agreement containing such concessions, the British government yielded, leaving the political fate of natives in the hands of a future Afrikaner government. The sacrifice of this issue was to have major implications for the future of race relations in South Africa.
The revised draft treaty arrived back in Pretoria on May 27 and required a simple acceptance or refusal on the part of the Boer leaders by May 31. Botha led the peace faction within the Boer delegation and justified his position on numerous grounds. Severe shortages of horses and food continued to impede the ability of commandos to operate successfully. Those women and children still on the veldt or accompanying the commandos were still suffering extreme hardships. The camps, which had never provided adequate shelter, were now full. Conditions inside were well known to the outside world. Circumstances that led families to wander without shelter and adequate food could, he argued, no longer be tolerated. The blockhouses were gradually immobilizing the remaining commandos, no rebellion was likely to occur in the Cape, and foreign assistance had not materialized.
Yet an even greater concern troubled Botha: the threat, real or imagined, of native attacks on Boer individuals and settlements, many of which, their men still on commando, stood effectively defenseless. An incident at Holkrantz, north of Vryheid, which occurred 10 days before the opening of negotiations, underlined this perceived threat. There a commando had raided a Zulu kraal, drove off women and children, stole the cattle, and left the settlement in flames. After the local chief, Sikhobobo, protested, the commando leader justified the raid on the grounds that the Zulus had aided the British. When, in a public statement, he likened the chief and his men to lice, Sikhobobo launched an attack, retaking a large proportion of the cattle originally seized by the Boers and inflicting heavy casualties on the commando concerned. Although no Boer women or children were harmed in the incident, which was the result of direct provocation, some delegates concluded that only peace could provide Boer civilians real protection. Botha nevertheless had his critics, particularly delegates from the Free State like de Wet and Steyn who continued to refuse peace without the guarantee of independence. The Free State delegates’ position was understandable: they had not had to bear as large a brunt of the war as had their southern neighbors in the Transvaal. Indeed, Steyn was so incensed by the terms that he immediately resigned his presidency. De Wet was left the remaining die-hard against surrender—a true bitter-ender.
The ultimate question now fell to the three senior commanders whose importance in the conflict gave them an implicit authority over the opinions of the other delegates. These were Botha, who advocated peace; de Wet, who favored continuing the war until the republics were granted independence; and de la Rey, who at first remained undecided. Finally, the latter concluded that peace, at a time when there were still concessions to be wrung from the settlement, offered the Boers the chance to retain essential elements of their Afrikaner society, such as the education, taxation, and legal systems. Further resistance, de la Rey maintained, offered more burghers the opportunity to change sides, joining the 5,000 men, including de Wet’s brother, Piet, who had already offered their services to the British. Peace concluded now, on reasonably favorable terms, offered the opportunity for future independence as a unified Afrikaner nation.
Events took a decisive turn on the morning of May 31, the day scheduled for the crucial vote. Botha and de la Rey met privately with de Wet in his tent and pleaded for his support. Winning the war was impossible, they argued, and little time remained for an honorable peace. De Wet was ultimately persuaded, and the Boer delegates were presented with a document containing six reasons why the British terms ought to be accepted. The policy of scorched earth had rendered further resistance impossible; the concentration camps had already caused untold suffering to Boer civilians; native Africans had openly begun to oppose the Boers, as seen at Holkrantz; the British had issued proclamations threatening the confiscation of Boer land; the Boers possessed no facilities for holding British prisoners; and, finally, there was no realistic chance of victory in the field. When the vote was taken that afternoon, 54 delegates out of 60 supported the treaty terms. The Boer leaders quickly returned to Pretoria and signed the treaty. “We are good friends again now,” Kitchener said to the Boers as he shook hands with them. The leaders now had to inform the various units in the field. There were still 21,000 men under arms, though one-fifth of all the Boers engaged in the fighting were now on the British side. Disarmament occurred peacefully, though many were not reconciled to peace.
The human cost of the war was high, though it is important to remember that the counterinsurgency phase covered only a proportion of the conflict—roughly the summer of 1900 to the summer of 1902. Over the whole period of the war, however, there were approximately 100,000 British and Imperial casualties, including 22,000 dead. About 6,000 were killed in action, while the remaining 16,000 perished as a result of wounds or disease. In a war many had expected to be “over by Christmas” but which actually lasted nearly three years, Britain and her empire eventually sent 450,000 men to fight. The Boers lost at least 7,000 of approximately 88,000 who served in the field (which included 2,100 foreign volunteers and 13,000 rebels from the Cape and Natal), in addition to about 28,000 civilian deaths—mostly women and children who succumbed to disease in the concentration camps. The war cost Britain over £200 million. Of the half a million horses brought to the theatre, 335,000 fell, not to mention scores of mules and donkeys.
At the end of the war, the true, appalling scale of the tragedy could be tabulated: almost 28,000 Boers had died in the 46 concentration camps, mostly from malnutrition and disease—representing almost 10 percent of the prewar populations of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Women accounted for two-thirds of the adult deaths. Most scandalously, nearly 80 percent of the fatalities were those under 16 years old, most commonly dying from measles, pneumonia, dysentery, and typhoid. Official figures record 14,000 deaths among the 115,000 black Africans interned, but the true figure is now thought to be closer to 20,000. What is clear, however, is that, though the camps did not represent a deliberate policy of genocide, they may rightly be condemned as the product of gross indifference by British government officials remote from the scene, together with culpable negligence on the part of many of the camp administrators actually present.
The war left in its wake a ruined economy and a devastated landscape. The wholesale and widespread destruction of Boer farms, livestock, and crops was a new and horrifying feature of the first major conflict of the twentieth century. It is impossible to calculate the extent of the damage exactly, but approximately 30,000 homesteads were burned and several million cattle, horses, and sheep were either destroyed or carried off. As many as 63,000 Boer families made claims for compensation. Farm-burning had achieved its objective of denying sustenance to the guerrillas, but it left no means of support for families returning from internment. Nor were claims restricted to whites; blacks, who for the most part owed cheaper property and earned far less than their white counterparts, sought a total of £661,000 in compensation for damage inflicted on their homes and livelihoods.
Official contemporary estimates of black African losses, about 7,000, fall far short of the reality. Modern calculations estimate that 115,000 blacks were held in the camps, 20,000 of whom died. To these must be added those unrecorded cases of blacks suspected of working for the British, either as soldiers, as scouts, as spies, or in other capacities, and summarily shot by the Boers. Between 10,000 and 30,000 black Africans were armed by the British Army. Whatever the true figures, they render the traditional view of the conflict as a “white man’s war” wholly insupportable. Blacks played a significant role in the British war effort.100
Milner had hoped that British rule in South Africa would shift the balance of power between Afrikaners and those of British descent. Defeat of the Boer republics ought, he believed, to have dampened the flow of Afrikaner nationalism. He looked for a heavy influx of British immigrants after the war who would gradually transform the existing culture, language, and legal structure. With the mines already back in operation and with the reconstruction of the infrastructure underway, industry would once again flourish. Yet the government in London constrained Milner’s plans, and predictions of mass immigration proved wildly overoptimistic.
The settlement at Vereeniging confirmed British supremacy in South Africa. Reconstruction was now the urgent task of Lord Alfred Milner, in his expanded role as high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. His was a massive undertaking, but assistance was at hand in the form of what became known as “Milner’s kindergarten,” a group of young, mostly Oxford-educated men such as Lionel Curtis, Patrick Duncan, and Richard Feetham. Milner remained in South Africa until 1905, during which time he improved standards of education and expanded communications and railways. He introduced reforms on the pass laws for blacks and improved working conditions in the mines, but most of his reforms catered to whites.
Although the emotional scars of the conflict would prove harder to heal, practical measures to restore normality were swiftly set in motion. Boer prisoners were repatriated quickly from Bermuda, Ceylon, and St. Helena. Displaced Boer families—in concentration camps, settled in the Cape, or wandering the veldt—had to be resettled in areas that had been devastated by the systematic policy of farm-burning, as had blacks, bitter-enders, joiners, and uitlanders. To deal with the delicate issue of joiners, colonial authorities established separate repatriation councils. Even the process of returning internees to their farmsteads took time. They could not simply leave on foot. Many remained in the camps for months after the peace until transport was available for them. Many, of course, never made it out, and Boer men arriving at the camps in search of their families sometimes found that they had lost everything.
Economic recovery proceeded apace with the influx of British loans. Vereeniging provided £3 million, together with nearly the same amount in interest-free loans for Boer resettlement and to provide food, medicine, and shelter for immediate need in areas hardest hit by the war. In addition, £2 million was available to uitlanders, blacks, and neutral foreigners. Priority was given to the rebuilding of farms. Tools and seeds were provided to landowners. Total repatriation and resettlement costs ran to approximately £16.5 million. Reconstruction also served to regenerate the economy as a whole, particularly the mining industry, and Milner had begun this work before the war was over, together with his kindergarten. Significant progress was made in returning to and exceeding prewar levels of gold production, so that, whereas in 1903 production stood at £12.6 million, it increased to £27.5 million in 1907, an increase that went far in preparing the region for union only a few years later. This was partly achieved by Milner’s controversial policy of importing indentured Chinese laborers, a move strongly criticized by the new Liberal government in London when it was discovered that they were being flogged and by Afrikaners, who banded together in opposition to these newcomers, backed, ironically, by uitlanders who saw their own wages threatened by the willingness of the Chinese to work down the mines at very low wages. It was also achieved by strict adherence to the pass laws and tough control imposed on the cost of native labor.
For ordinary Boers, the hardship caused by the destruction of their homes and farms was greatly exacerbated by a series of droughts in 1902 and again in 1903. The numbers of whites in the Orange Free State living in poverty had been quite low before the war, in spite of an increase in the Transvaal. After the war, however, there were sharp rises in white poverty in both former republics, with landowners so destitute that they had not even the means of accommodating the landless. Joiners and hands-uppers were particularly hard hit.
Some of the landless and collaborators were rehoused in newly established settlements in the eastern and western Transvaal, but many formerly rural whites, left with nothing, made for the cities in large numbers, desperate to find work in industry and mining. Society consequently underwent some dramatic and not always desirable changes. Traditional rural life began to disappear with the growth of the urban base and the new prosperity brought by the influx of capital, mostly from Britain. A new generation of Afrikaners now found they had money in their pockets and began to harbor political ambitions.
Black South Africans suffered the greatest hardship as a result of the war. Resettlement of those blacks formerly accommodated in camps did take place, but proper recovery was hindered by the lack of farm tools and seed, largely because of the disproportionate assistance provided to whites. The Native Refugee Department in the Transvaal, for instance, received just over £16,000 compared to the nearly £1.2 million provided to the Repatriation Department for white resettlement and the rebuilding of farms. In several parts of the Transvaal, where the devastation had been particularly acute, thousands of blacks continued to suffer after the end of hostilities. With successive droughts worsening an already dreadful situation, many blacks had no choice but to become wage earners working for white farmers where, before, they were landowners in their own right. For blacks who had formerly been employed in the mines, there were no improvements in working conditions. Indeed, wages fell, controls over workers increased, and conditions declined.
Blacks also lost on the political front, for British victory did not bring the hoped-for political reforms necessary for the extension to the new colonies of the franchise already in force in the Cape. Not only were there no black representatives at the talks, their rights were not even represented. Vereeniging only postponed the resolution of the question of political rights for blacks, “coloureds,” and Indians until the new colonies achieved self-governing status. Milner’s administration did nothing to reverse this, and the treaty did not require the Boers to effect change. Laws in the Transvaal and Free State that discriminated against blacks not only remained in force but, in some cases, extended into new areas of life. All of this was tacitly sanctioned by the Treaty of Vereeniging, which effectively retained the status quo of white supremacy in South Africa. There was no reason to suppose self-governing Afrikaner states would freely extend the franchise to the black majority.
For white South Africans, the war had a number of effects on society and politics. Milner’s policy of Anglicizing the region in terms of both language and culture, and of discouraging Afrikaner nationalism, had failed utterly. Since the massive British immigration he had hoped for had not materialized, he had no desire for the new colonies to form any self-governing federation to include Cape Colony and Natal. Some Boers became permanent outcasts as a result of collaboration, but by embracing a policy of reconciliation Louis Botha made considerable strides in reshaping Afrikaner society, strengthened by general perceptions of the inadequacy of British compensation held by everyone from bitter-enders to joiners and resentment of Milner’s policy of Anglicization. General calls for forgiveness reached sympathetic ears for the most part. This process was helped by the fact that the Boers could focus outward on the British as the cause of their travails.
A war fought on South African soil, involving the citizens of the two republics, necessarily had a profound impact on Afrikaner identity. The Boer people had fought for the ideal of independence, they had produced great leaders, they had defied one of the greatest powers on earth, and they had suffered greatly in what some held to be a divine cause. This new sense of pride led to a cultural revival that established and promoted Afrikaans as a fundamental part of the region’s identity. Political revival went hand in hand with cultural revival. In the aftermath of war, several political parties sprang to life, such as the Het Volk party under Botha, Burger, Koos de la Rey, and Smuts, established in 1905 in the Transvaal. In the former Free State, men such as Barry Hertzog, Abraham Fischer, and Christiaan de Wet founded the Orangia Unie in 1906. Milner’s hopes of an end to Afrikaner nationalism were dashed within a few years of war’s end.
In Britain, the Liberal Party won the election of 1905, and Henry Campbell-Bannerman became prime minister. The implications for South Africa were significant in two ways: first, Milner was recalled, though his subordinates remained behind in the administration. Second, Campbell-Bannerman’s government granted self-rule to the Transvaal in December 1906, followed by the same concession to the Orange River Colony the following June. Louis Botha was elected prime minister of the Transvaal in the general elections of 1907, while in the Orange River Colony Abraham Fischer became prime minister. The Progressive Party, headed by James, won the Cape elections of 1904, but three years later, by which time all four British South African colonies shared similar political systems, interest within both British loyalist and Afrikaner circles turned toward unification. Afrikaner political ascendancy was achieved when in the following year the South African Party, led by John Merriman, won the general election in the Cape, leaving Natal as the only British colony in South Africa that was not under Afrikaner leadership. It was now only a matter of time before nationalists held sway over imperialists.
Thus, the creation of the Union of South Africa on May 31, 1910, as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire exposed the greatest paradox of the war: that Britain had emerged the victor nine years before only in the strict military sense. The Boers had clearly won the peace, for though the new nation comprised all four former British Crown colonies, Afrikaners, with Louis Botha the first prime minister, dominated its political and cultural life. The Boer republics had gone to war in the name of liberty and now they had achieved it—and more—with Natal and the Cape Colony being subsumed in the process.
1. Kitchener to Brodrick, July 5, 1901, National Army Museum (hereafter, “NAM”), 1971-01-23-33-37.
2. For readings on this conflict, see John Laband, The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War, 1880–1881 (London: Routledge, 2005).
3. For the origins of the Boer War, see particularly Iain R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War, 1899–1902 (London: Longman, 1996).
4. See, for example, Brian Robson, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War, 1878–1881 (Stroud, UK: Spellmount, 1980).
5. Quoted in Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa (London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 450.
6. Kitchener to Brodrick, December 20, 1900, PRO 30/57/20/Y9.
7. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 450.
8. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 450.
9. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 451.
10. Kitchener to Roberts, February 8, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-14.
11. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 459.
12. Kitchener to Roberts, December 4, 1900, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-4.
13. Circular Memorandum No. 29, December 21, 1900.
14. For this conflict, see John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
15. See Brian Roberts, Those Bloody Women: Three Heroines of the Boer War (London: John Murray, 1991); Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell (Cleveleys, Lancashire, UK: Wilding Press, 2011); Birgit Susanne Seibold, Emily Hobhouse and the Reports on the Concentration Camps during the Boer War, 1899–1902: Two Different Perspectives (Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem, 2011); Rykie Van Reenen, ed., Emily Hobhouse: Boer War Letters (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1920).
16. Hobhouse, Brunt of the War, p. 67.
17. Hobhouse, Brunt of the War, p. 71.
18. Hobhouse, Brunt of the War, p. 112.
19. Hansard, Vol. XCV, House of Commons Speech, June 14, 1901.
20. Hansard, Vol. XVC, House of Commons Speech.
21. Kitchener to Brodrick, March 7, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y30; March 22, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y33.
22. Kitchener to Brodrick, May 9, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y52(b); June 28, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y66.
23. Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32.
24. Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32; Kitchener to Lord Milner, July 4, 1901, Bodleian Library, Milner Papers, Microfilm 175, ff. 75–76; Kitchener to Brodrick, June 28, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y66.
25. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 21, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y62; Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32.
26. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 28, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y66.
27. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 21, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y62.
28. Kitchener to Brodrick, July 26, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y77.
29. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 453.
30. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
31. Kitchener to Brodrick, February 1, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y/19; February 16, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y23; March 7, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y30; Kitchener to Roberts, February 8, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-14.
32. Brodrick to Kitchener, February 23, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y27; May 25, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y57.
33. Kitchener to Roberts, February 28, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-17; Kitchener to Brodrick, March 15, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y31. Kitchener to Brodrick, March 22, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y33.
34. Kitchener to Brodrick, March 22, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y33.
35. Kitchener to Brodrick, April 26, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y48.
36. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO (War Office) 32/8034.
37. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
38. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
39. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
40. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
41. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
42. A small (1-pounder) 37-millimeter horse-drawn quick-firing cannon.
43. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
44. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
45. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
46. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
47. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, May 8, 1901, WO 32/8034.
48. Kitchener to Brodrick, May 9, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y52(b).
49. Kitchener to Roberts, May 24, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-29.
50. Kitchener to Brodrick, May 9, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y52(b); Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32.
51. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 21, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y62.
52. Kitchener to Roberts, May 9, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-27.
53. Kitchener to Roberts, May 24, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-29.
54. Brodrick to Kitchener, May 18, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y55.
55. Brodrick to Kitchener, May 25, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y57; Kitchener to Brodrick, June 7, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y60.
56. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 21, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y62.
57. Kitchener to Brodrick, June 7, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y60.
58. Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32.
59. Kitchener to Roberts, June 14, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-32.
60. Kitchener to Lord Milner, July 4, 1901, Bodleian Library, Milner Papers, Microfilm 175, ff. 75–76.
61. Kitchener to Brodrick, July 5, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-37.
62. Kitchener to Brodrick, July 5, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-37.
63. Kitchener to Brodrick, July 26, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y77.
64. Kitchener to Roberts, August 9, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-41.
65. Kitchener to King Edward VII, August 16, 1901, Royal Archives, Windsor, W60/130.
66. Kitchener to Roberts, August 23, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-43.
67. Kitchener to Roberts, August 23, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-43; Kitchener to Brodrick, August 30, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y82(a).
68. Kitchener to Brodrick, September 13, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y85.
69. Kitchener to Brodrick, September 20, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y88.
70. Kitchener to Brodrick, September 27, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y90.
71. Kitchener to Brodrick, October 11, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y94; October 18, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y95.
72. Kitchener had defeated the Dervishes in the Sudan campaign of 1896–98, which culminated in the decisive Battle of Omdurman. Though fanatical in the extreme and exceptionally tenacious, his adversaries did not enjoy the benefits of either mobility or firepower—horses or rifles—like the Boers.
73. Kitchener to Roberts, November 1, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-55.
74. Kitchener to Roberts, November 8, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-57.
75. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
76. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
77. Kitchener, Army HQ, Pretoria, to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
78. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
79. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
80. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
81. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
82. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, November 8, 1901, WO 32/8065.
83. Brodrick to Kitchener, November 16, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y104.
84. Kitchener to Brodrick, November 29, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y108.
85. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
86. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066
87. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066
88. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
89. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
90. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
91. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
92. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
93. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
94. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
95. Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, December 8, 1901, WO 32/8066.
96. Kitchener to Roberts, December 13, 1901, NAM, 1971-01-23-33-63; Kitchener to Brodrick, December 13, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y111.
97. Kitchener to Brodrick, December 27, 1901, PRO 30/57/22/Y11(b).
98. Kitchener to Brodrick, January 3, 1902, PRO 30/57/22/Y117(b).
99. Quoted in Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War, p. 459.
100. Christiaan De Wet wrote to Kitchener in March 1901, strongly objecting to the latter’s use of black troops as “against all civilized law of civilized nations, which you term yourselves.” De Wet to Kitchener, March 18, 1901, WO 32/7958.