Deneys Reitz was intending to set off early that morning, but he was concerned about his brother’s chestnut. As he was untying its fetters, the animal had savaged his arm. It had never behaved like that before. He saddled up all the same and rode off, following the oxwagon on which Arend was travelling. They would be several kilometres ahead by now. Some time later he realised that all was not well. The horse was foaming at the mouth and nostrils, which he knew to be a symptom of African horsesickness. He led the animal to an abandoned farm a little further along and put him in the shade. That was his only hope. He knew he was clutching at straws, but one could never tell. An hour later, the horse was dead.
This was his third horse to die of the dreaded disease within the space of a few weeks. He had been devastated the first time. He was still in the eastern Transvaal, at the time, in the vicinity of Ermelo, with Beyers’s commando. One morning his roan had come limping back from where it had been grazing. He had known at once. ‘Nosing against me he seemed to appeal for help’, but there was nothing he could do. ‘In less than an hour, with a final plunge, he fell dead at my feet.’ The loss of his ‘dear old roan’ affected him deeply. ‘A close bond had grown up between us in the long months since the war started, during which he had carried me so well.’
There had been other partings in that time, as well. Botha had remained in the Transvaal. Beyers and his men had gone north, to the Waterberg, where most of them came from. The Afrikander Cavalry had no ties with any particular town. Their new commander, Jan Nagel, had decided to return to the western Transvaal, to join De la Rey, and the Reitz brothers had accompanied him. Arend had given Deneys one of his two horses, a spirited animal called Malperd, which allowed only the two brothers to ride it.
After returning safe and sound to the Johannesburg area, they had spent a week in the Skurweberg, which was a serious mistake. In the rainy season it was tempting fate. The region was infested with mosquitoes carrying the horsesickness virus and the consequences were disastrous. They lost more than half their horses, including Malperd. Deneys reluctantly became part of the growing group of ‘foot soldiers’. They weren’t much use as commandos. At that point Nagel had decided to have a word with De la Rey: he might have horses for them. Half the men accompanied him, but the rest thought it futile. They had gone north, over the Magaliesberg and into the bush. So that was the end of the Afrikander Cavalry Corps.
Deneys and Arend had also gone north, but with a different destination in mind. Their father was probably still in the vicinity of Lydenburg and they assumed he would be able to arrange horses for them. It was another interminable journey, 500 kilometres, with one horse between the two of them, but there was nothing else to be done. Before long, they had a lucky break. They came upon an outspanned oxwagon, which belonged to a woman whose husband was fighting with De la Rey. When the British were approaching she had fled with her children and a black servant, preferring the hardship of the bush to confinement in a camp. All she possessed were the belongings she had been able to carry on the oxwagon. If Deneys and Arend would lend a hand, they were welcome to join her. It was a foregone conclusion.
They had travelled some distance when Deneys suddenly realised he had forgotten something. He no longer had a horse, but he still possessed saddlebags, and he had left them at the campfire that morning. They were valuable, particularly as they contained a supply of salt that he had managed to obtain a week earlier. He couldn’t just leave them behind. So it was agreed that he would borrow Arend’s chestnut and go back to retrieve his possessions. He would catch up with the oxwagon the following day.
His saddlebags were still there, but the next morning the horse died. He had no option but to follow the oxwagon on foot. As the sun was blazing down, he decided to rest until it grew cooler. Looking for shade, he went into the deserted farmhouse. The floor was littered with cigarette butts, matches and other debris. The British had apparently been here, too. He also found a bundle of newspapers, eight or nine months old, and settled down to read. There was a war in China, Queen Victoria was dead, Roberts had been replaced by Kitchener—he hadn’t known about any of this.
But what interested him most were the reports about Boer commandos in the Cape. He was riveted. The English papers spoke of rebels, desperadoes, bandits. To Deneys Reitz they were romantic heroes: Kritzinger, Malan and Gideon Scheepers, at 22, barely older than himself. He could picture it all. And he resolved to be part of it. No more fighting on these sad, wasted plains, no more struggling with ‘sore-hoofed, unshod horses—empty stomach—naked body’. There would be enough food and whatever else one needed to show that ‘you can’t make a Boer turn back, if he wants to go forward’—even all the way to the ocean. He had once boasted about this to his father. Now he was going to prove it.
He had no horse, his boots were worn out, but he had made up his mind. He wouldn’t go north with Arend. He wouldn’t ask his father for a horse. He was going south, in search of adventure.53
One man’s heroes were another’s desperadoes. There were two schools of thought about the Boer commandos invading the Cape Colony. Seen from the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, they were freedom fighters who kept alive the hope of an uprising that would change the course of the war. To the British military authorities they were lawless marauders, criminals, saboteurs, terrorists. The Cape’s civilian population was also of two minds. The Afrikaners were sympathetic and supportive. Hundreds joined them, and became known pejoratively as ‘Cape rebels’ by their English-speaking compatriots.
The split between the whites occurred along predictable lines. The indigenous population was virtually unanimous. The vast majority of the coloured and African people54 were vehemently opposed to the commandos. A handful, like John Tengo Jabavu, the editor-in-chief of the influential newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, protested on principle against the British undermining the independence of the Boer republics. But men like him were few and far between. By far the majority of Africans and coloureds took the side of the British against the Boers.
This isn’t surprising. The non-white population of the Cape Colony stood to lose a great deal—as they did wherever the Boer commandos came to power: freedom, a decent livelihood, the basic conditions for survival. The coloured and African communities had had a taste of Boer government soon after the war broke out in November 1899. Free State commando units had invaded many parts of the Cape Colony. They not only behaved like a military invading force, brandishing Mausers to seize whatever they wanted, but they also imposed a new social order, using the sjambok to enforce it. They regarded the districts over which they took control as annexed territory, and accordingly introduced the administrative structures they were accustomed to in their own republics: their laws, their rules, their newly appointed landdrosts and their systematic subordination of coloureds and Africans. Both groups were disenfranchised, compelled to carry passes and to work on Afrikaner farms. Any form of resistance was brutally suppressed.
It wasn’t difficult for black people to choose between the Boers and the British. They were more than willing to lend their support to the fight against the intruders from the north. The high commissioner, Milner, and others were soon talking about arming them, but that was a sensitive issue for the Afrikaner Bond. The Cape prime minister, William Schreiner, depended on the support of the Afrikaners and was anxious not to antagonise them, if only out of fear of inciting an uprising. The outcome was a reluctant compromise. Small auxiliary corps of coloureds and Africans were formed in regions under threat. Schreiner took cover behind the local military commanders, over whom he had no control, but that didn’t help him. He resigned in June 1900 over a dispute about sanctions against the Cape rebels.
By that time, all Boer commandos had disappeared from the Cape. Roberts’s incursions into the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had demanded their attention. But they returned after December 1900, still wielding the rifle and the whip: military campaigns combined with administrative reorganisation and the oppression of the African and coloured populations. They operated in the sparsely populated and predominantly Afrikaner north-east and north-west of the Cape, steering clear of the eastern region, which had the largest black population and the most militant black auxiliary corps.55
Boer commando raids were not confined to the border areas. Barry Hertzog and his men, for instance, advanced deep into the colony. They ventured as far as the Hantam mountains, 600 or 700 kilometres from the Free State border, and the last range before the Atlantic Ocean. One of the places they occupied was Calvinia, a small farming town with a few thousand Khoikhoi and San inhabitants, and a few hundred Afrikaners. There was nothing remarkable about this occupation, other than that it exemplified the way the Boer commandos operated in hostile territory, intentionally and unintentionally.
On 12 January 1901 Commandant Charles Niewoudt proclaimed himself landdrost and swiftly issued a warrant for the arrest of 14 ‘suspects’. He had got their names from Afrikaners living in the area. Nine of the detainees were coloureds, one being the local blacksmith, Abraham Esau, the undisputed leader of the coloured community. Esau had been educated at an English mission school. He felt and lived like a ‘Coloured Englishman’. For months he had been trying to mount resistance against the Boers and, unsuccessfully, to secure arms for his community. As far as Niewoudt was concerned, the case was cut and dried: a coloured who thought he was an Englishman, and a troublemaker to boot. He would teach him a lesson.
On 15 January Esau was tried by Field Cornet Carl van der Merwe. The hearing didn’t take long. He was convicted of slander against the Boers and of arming coloureds, and sentenced to 25 lashes. He was tied to a eucalyptus tree. Van der Merwe administered the punishment. After 17 lashes Esau lost consciousness. He was untied, held upright and beaten between the eyes with a stick. When he fell to the ground, he was kicked from all sides.
That wasn’t the end of it. He was tortured for several weeks. Finally, on 5 February, on Van der Merwe’s orders, Esau was shackled, bound between two horses and dragged a few kilometres outside the village. There, Stephanus Strydom shot and killed him. The Boer commando left Calvinia the following day. A British column was approaching.56
Abraham Esau’s death caused an uproar. In Calvinia, a mob of angry protesters threatened the Boer fighters, who fired warning shots to disperse them. The English press, in the colony and overseas, was scandalised. Politicians, especially in Cape Town, were furious. Milner had known Esau, or was at least aware of his insistent requests for the coloured community to be armed, and considered him ‘a most respectable, and for his class in life (a village blacksmith) superior man—far more civilised than the average Boer farmer’. Milner saw a pattern in it all: after Morgendaal and De Kock, now Esau. Murderous barbarians, those Boers.
In London these incidents had the effect of polarising political opinion. Salisbury had reorganised his Cabinet after the Khaki election of October 1900. At 70, he was no longer coping adequately with the combined offices of prime minister and secretary of state for foreign affairs. At any rate, this was his associates’ opinion. He resigned as foreign secretary, appointing Lansdowne to replace him. Lansdowne’s position as war secretary went to St John Brodrick, who had been under-secretary in the same department and at the Foreign Office. Soon afterwards, the British army came under a new commander-in-chief as well, when in January 1901 Roberts succeeded Wolseley. Joe Chamberlain remained as state secretary for the colonies, gaining increasing influence on foreign policy.
What didn’t change, in spite of Roberts’s pledges to the contrary, was the military reality in South Africa. The war was far from over. No sooner had Kitchener taken command than he asked Brodrick for reinforcements, ideally troops from the overseas territories, mounted troops from British India who, unlike their own bunch, ‘forget their stomachs and go for the enemy’. But Brodrick rejected the proposal. This was still supposed to be ‘a white man’s war’, at least in the eyes of the world. Even before Roberts returned to England, the new Cabinet had agreed to send 30,000 reinforcements—and as many horses—including new contingents from Australia and New Zealand.
This decision was grist to the mill of the Liberal Opposition, particularly to principled critics of the war like David Lloyd George. On 18 February 1901 the matter was tabled in the House of Commons. It was the first parliamentary debate on South Africa in the twentieth century, and the first under the new sovereign, King Edward VII. Lloyd George delivered a fiery speech. After all the disturbing reports about burning down farms, they wanted to send more troops? What better proof of the military and moral bankruptcy of the government’s policies? He had an axe to grind with one man in particular, General Bruce Hamilton, who had been responsible for the destruction of an entire village, the community of Ventersburg in the Orange Free State. ‘Brute’ Hamilton would be a more appropriate name, he suggested. ‘This man is . . . a disgrace to the uniform he wears.’57
After Lloyd George it was the turn of a Conservative member, someone who had witnessed the war at close range and could speak from experience. The Conservative speakers before him had opted for a counter-attack, drawing attention to the wrongdoings of the Boers. ‘Being loyal to the British Crown’: that and that alone had cost the lives of well-disposed citizens like Morgendaal, De Kock and, recently, Abraham Esau. The House was in suspense to hear what the next speaker would come up with. Young though he was, he was already known to be an independent thinker. At 26, he was a national and—since his recent lecture tour of the United States—international celebrity. But this was the House of Commons, the real thing. And this was his maiden speech.
Winston Churchill didn’t launch a counter-attack. He just stood there, rigid with fear. A fellow Conservative, a seasoned veteran, finally whispered a prompt, a swipe at Lloyd George. Then he was on his own. As usual, he had memorised the whole speech. His tone was moderate, his argument sensitive. Instead of attacking, he presented a defence in the form of an extraordinary trilogy.
First of all, he came to the defence of the discredited British generals: people he had come to know personally. There were few men, he assured the House, ‘with better feeling, more kindness of heart, or with higher courage than General Bruce Hamilton’. Churchill didn’t dwell on the specific allegations of farm burnings. Lapses, he said, are inevitable in any war, especially those in which a civilian population took part. What about the famine deliberately inflicted on Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, 30 years earlier? He could mention many more precedents, and on those grounds the British military authorities were within their rights. In his experience, the war in South Africa stood out for its unusual humanity and generosity.
But he had words of redemption for the enemy as well. ‘The Boer is a curious combination of the squire and the peasant.’ Under the rough clothing of the farmer there were often noble instincts. He could also understand what impelled them to take up arms. ‘If I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field.’ Chamberlain took exception to that remark. ‘That’s the way to throw away seats,’ he whispered to the person beside him, but Churchill only heard about it later. He continued by expressing the hope that the Boers could look forward to an honourable settlement.
But not at any price. They would have to come to terms, he made that perfectly clear. If they weren’t open to reason, it should be made ‘painful and perilous’ for them to continue. He wholeheartedly supported the government’s decision to deploy 30,000 mounted reinforcements. More than that, he proposed a British combat force in South Africa comprising 250,000 men, with casualties and troops otherwise unable to fight being automatically replaced. The next step was to augment that number at regular intervals, by another 2000 to 3000 men a month, so that the Boers ‘will not only be exposed to the beating of the waves, but to the force of the rising tide’.58
Deneys Reitz had met men of all kinds in his time, but his new companions were in a class of their own. They were conservative backveld Boers from Rustenburg,59 wary of his strange city ways. But they were ‘brave, unspoilt men’, and they got on well together.
The hardships they endured together forged a bond between them. Reitz had met them—50 horseless men hoping to meet up with De la Rey—soon after he had decided to go to the Cape. They had spent eight days together, hiding out in the Magaliesberg, taking refuge from the incessant downpour and a division of British troops. The soldiers had made themselves warm and comfortable in houses in the valley, while they had shivered under their shelter of overhanging rocks, without even dry kindling to build a fire. For eight days they had survived on biltong.
When the rain stopped, the British moved on and they descended to the valley. Reitz’s boots were ruined. He had to scramble down the sharp slope on bare feet, which were badly cut and blistered. Incapacitated, he spent a fortnight lying in a tobacco shed, where the Rustenburg men nursed him. One kind soul actually walked 30 kilometres to fetch a piece of rawhide to make him a new pair of shoes. Once he had recovered, Reitz was faced with a choice. Most of his companions decided to remain where they were, rather than take the risk of crossing the exposed plains of the highveld on foot. A few decided to continue south to join De la Rey, carrying their saddles and other possessions on their shoulders. Reitz wanted to head south as well. Thirteen of them, including himself, set off together.
Fate was on their side. They passed the spot where De la Rey had set fire to a British supply convoy in early December 1900.60 The wreckage was still there and Reitz thought they might be able to improvise a serviceable oxwagon from the undamaged remnants. They succeeded. The question of transport animals was just as easily solved. A few kilometres on, they found a large herd of trek oxen grazing in a kloof. It was De la Rey’s reserve supply. The herdsmen allowed them to take 12, and the Rustenburgers, who were born cattlemen, selected the best. They hewed yokes, wove straps and rope, and a few days later the party set off in high spirits, pleased with their ingenuity and the fruits of their handiwork.
But their mood gradually grew sombre. The land was a barren wilderness. Reitz had seen the same devastation in the eastern Transvaal: charred ruins, trampled crops, dead animals—the aftermath of a drive to denude the veld. For several days they trudged through a silent wasteland without seeming to move. Thirteen men on a life raft adrift on a smouldering sea.
They saw the first sign of life five days later, when they met a Boer woman who had taken shelter in a gorge with her children and a native servant. She told them that De la Rey was camped nearby, at a place called Tafelkop. They found him the following day, in a sullen mood. There had been an incident, a false alarm as it turned out, but his men had fled in panic and he was angry. He was worried, too. Besides his 1000 fighters, 200 refugees had congregated around his laager with all their wagons and possessions, and he was finding them burdensome. Reitz and his Rustenburg comrades were welcome all the same, but he was unable to provide them with horses. He had sent patrols to the Orange Free State for a new consignment and was still waiting for them to return. They would just have to be patient.
Reitz took the opportunity to explore the camp and become better acquainted with De la Rey. Like President Kruger on his veranda in Pretoria, De la Rey held daily meetings around his wagon to talk to his people. He was often in the company of an eccentric man with a long flowing beard and wild, fanatical eyes. Van Rensburg was said to be a prophet and a visionary. De la Rey trusted him implicitly.
Reitz was sceptical by nature, but an incident that occurred a few days later gave him pause for thought. Van Rensburg had dreamed about a fight to the death between a black bull and a red bull. The red bull was gored and lay dying, which Van Rensburg interpreted to mean that the British would suffer the same fate. Almost before he had finished speaking, with outstretched arms and eyes ablaze, he cried out, ‘See who comes!’ Everyone turned to look. In the distance they saw a horseman galloping towards them from the east. He was a courier, exhausted and covered in dust, bringing a letter from Louis Botha. De la Rey read it at once. His face lit up and, in a voice trembling with emotion, he announced, ‘Men, believe me; the proud enemy is humbled.’ The British had proposed peace talks. Botha was going to meet Kitchener. Everyone was amazed, Deneys Reitz, too, in spite of a sneaking suspicion that Van Rensburg had stagemanaged the melodramatic finale. Even so, it was impressive.61
Contrary to Van Rensburg’s account, the red bull was not at death’s door. It was attempting to lure the black bull away from the herd. Or, more prosaically, Kitchener had produced the bait and Louis Botha had agreed to talk to him. In mid-February Botha’s wife, Annie, brought the two men together after Kitchener had allowed her to visit her husband. The meeting would take place on 28 February 1901 in Middelburg, halfway between Pretoria and Botha’s temporary quarters in the eastern Transvaal. The date was carefully chosen. The hawks, De Wet and Steyn, were hundreds of kilometres away, hunting—and being hunted—in the Cape Colony. With luck, they would be captured before the meeting and Botha would be more amenable as a result.
Botha’s motives weren’t entirely clear. He was a strategic thinker from both a political and a military point of view. Kitchener had taken over as commander-in-chief, Brodrick as war secretary, Edward VII the new head of state: who knows, they might come up with something new. The best way to find out was by talking to them. At least Botha would hear what the options were, and he could always think things over. Acting President Schalk Burger and the state secretary, Reitz, approved the meeting. Still, there was something about it. A private get-together with the man who was hunting down his two closest allies.
The meeting in Middelburg—on the day that De Wet and Steyn were at Botha’s Drift, making their way back home—was relaxed and had an astonishing outcome. After irreconcilable opening statements—annexation or independence—and a volley of reproaches back and forth, about the camps, the deployment of coloureds and Africans and suchlike, the conversation turned to the matter of terms for a peace settlement. Five hours later, they had a plan on the table. Of course, it was subject to the approval of London and the Transvaal and Free State governments, but there it was, in black and white.
The draft peace agreement contained ten provisions: amnesty for all ‘bona fide’ acts of war, including those carried out by ‘Cape and Natal rebels’; the immediate return of all exiled prisoners of war; a transitional period as Crown colonies, followed as soon as possible by self-government in both territories; the use of English and Dutch in schools and law courts; respect for church property; taking over the national debt to a maximum of £1 million; compensation for the loss of horses; no further reparations; firearm licences on application; enfranchisement of non-whites to be negotiable only after the transition to self-government.
The first person Kitchener had to talk to was Milner. The high commissioner had recently been charged with the civil administration of the two new colonies and—one could call it coincidence—on the same day, 28 February, he boarded a train in Cape Town, heading north. On the journey, he received a telegram from Middelburg, reporting on the outcome of the talks. He wasn’t pleased. Unlike Kitchener—and his predecessor, Roberts—Milner was soft in wartime and tough in peace. His ultimate goal was a united and anglicised South Africa and every step had to lead in that direction. This peace plan failed to do so.
Kitchener and Milner met in Bloemfontein on 2 March 1901. Milner had pleasant memories of the railway station, where less than two years earlier he had driven Kruger to despair.62 But Kitchener was holding a stronger hand than the Boer leader had back then; or he was better at bluffing. Whatever the case, he conjured up a spectre of doom and disaster if the peace plan failed to go through. The British soldiers were fed up, he claimed, their morale was at a low ebb after their constant, futile pursuits of elusive Boer commandos. The war had to be brought to an end, if only (although he didn’t say so) because his eye had fallen on the position of commander-in-chief in British India, which would soon become available.
Milner grudgingly agreed. Kitchener had a firm reputation and was popular back home. It would be foolish to ruffle his feathers. The only condition Milner categorically rejected was amnesty for the rebels in the colonies. He demanded that they be brought to justice. And with that, the agreement was submitted to London.
The British government’s response came within a couple of days. A few amendments had been made to the text, mainly at Chamberlain’s insistence. The most substantial changes related to the first and last points. Milner got his way in the matter of amnesty. The rebels would be tried under the law of the land. As for enfranchisement, a clause was added to the document. Pending the introduction of voting rights for ‘Kaffirs’—which were to be ‘limited’, incidentally, in such a way ‘as to secure the just predominance of the white race’—‘coloured persons’ were to be given the same legal status as their counterparts in the Cape Colony.
Kitchener was disappointed, Milner relieved. Botha probably wouldn’t accept this, let alone the bittereinders, the diehards among the Boer leaders. He was right. On 7 March 1901 the proposal, now official, was forwarded to Botha, who discussed it at length with Burger and Reitz. His reply came on 15 March: out of the question. The black bull had returned to the herd.63