Smuts and Van Deventer were completely incapacitated. Bouwer, ill as he was, managed to order every man who could still handle a rifle to take positions on the crest and return the fire. It was nearing sunset. They would have to hold their attackers off. When night fell they would reconsider their position.
They succeeded. The British turned back and after a while lights shone on the opposite side. They were probably safe until the following day. What to do now? Half the men were seriously ill—the fruit was apparently poisonous after all—and those who weren’t were famished. Should they wait for the invalids to recover? They couldn’t afford to lose any time. The British would almost certainly be back before daybreak, and this time they would come in overwhelming numbers. They had to get away from here, no matter how. Fortunately, most of the sick men began to rally during the night, at least sufficiently to take a few faltering steps. About 20 were still too ill to move. Smuts was one of them, but he had come round sufficiently to take command again. He ordered them to saddle up and go deeper into the mountains. This was their only chance. Those too weak to sit upright were to be tied to their saddles. He himself had to be held on his horse.
And so they set off, shuffling down the slope into the ravine and then dragging themselves up the next peak. From a distance Reitz had been keeping an eye on Smuts. Around dawn he noticed that Smuts and the two men assisting him had fallen behind and had been spotted by British scouts. Reitz galloped to their rescue and distracted the scouts, enabling Smuts to be taken up the slope by a different route. The men assembled on the crest. Everyone had come out of it alive and, to their relief, the British had abandoned the pursuit. For the time being, at least, they were safe.
Now for something to eat. They were in the depths of the mountains, far from human habitation—well, white habitation, that is. They saw smoke rising from the forest a short distance away. Perhaps it came from a kraal, where they might find food. And, indeed, they came upon a cluster of reed huts. Their occupants had fled, but left a supply of millet behind. The Boers had eaten it before and liked it. It was simple, but at least it wasn’t poisonous, and there was enough to still their hunger.
Smuts remained pale and weak for a few days, but soon recovered his determination to press on. He said nothing about his plans, but from the reconnaissance missions he ordered, Reitz assumed he was still intending to raid Port Elizabeth. From the heights they could see the town in the distance. The British were apparently also expecting Smuts to head in that direction. They assembled their troops south of the Suurberg. The Boers wouldn’t be able to get through; there was only one other way out, and that was north, roughly the direction they had come from, but further to the west. It would take them into the Karoo.
They left the Suurberg before daybreak on 5 October 1901. When it grew light, Smuts called his men together. He told them they had reached a turning point in the expedition. From here on, they would start heading west and make for the Atlantic Ocean. There was still a considerable distance to cover, and to be on the safe side he would divide the force in two. Half the men would go with Van Deventer, the others with him. Reitz was pleased to be assigned to Smuts’s party. That afternoon they parted from Van Deventer and his men, and continued on their way.105
It was a daunting list. Articles 4, 5 and 7, articles 14, 15, 16, article 23 paragraphs c, d, e, f, g, article 25, and so on, plus 11 more, all of them provisions of the Laws and Customs of War on Land, which had been drawn up at the Hague Peace Conference and signed on 29 July 1899 by 26 states, including Great Britain. In the words of Willem Leyds, the Laws and Customs were ‘formally sanctioned rules of war between civilised nations’, and the British had violated them, one by one: mistreatment of prisoners of war, abuse of the white flag, coercive measures and systematic violence against the civilian population; the list went on and on. Leyds hadn’t compiled it himself. The list—in fact, the entire text in which it appeared—had been drafted by Asser, who had helped out as a legal ghostwriter once before.106
This was another letter, signed by Leyds and the three members of the delegation, Fischer, Wessels and Wolmarans, now addressed not to Lord Salisbury, but to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Like the Convention, the new court stemmed from the Peace Conference held in The Hague two years earlier. It had also been constituted there, in April 1901. Leyds seized the opportunity to make use of it. In early May he had contacted De Beaufort, president of the administrative council of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and Dutch minister of foreign affairs, requesting advice as to how the Transvaal should go about bringing an arbitration action. He received no reply. In September he tried again. By then the political landscape had changed. On 1 August Pierson’s Liberal government had been succeeded by a conservative Protestant administration under Abraham Kuyper. The new foreign affairs minister, and therefore also the new president of the administrative council, was Robert Melvil, Baron van Lynden. He was an amiable man and, in his brief term of office as secretary-general of the newly established court, an authority on the subject. Perhaps an official letter might help.
On 10 September 1901 Leyds and the other three envoys, acting on behalf of the governments of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, asked the court to hand down an ‘arbitrational ruling’ on ‘the war being waged in South Africa’. The main questions were ‘whether grounds exist for Britain’s claim that the two Republics [had] acted in a manner aimed at the oppression or expulsion of British nationals in South Africa’, and whether the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had committed ‘any other act’ which ‘by international principles, would give Britain cause to deprive them of their autonomy’.
They also urgently drew the court’s attention to Britain’s ‘persistent violations of the rules of war’. These had started at the beginning of the war and had continued ever since. A recent example was Kitchener’s proclamation of 7 August threatening the Boer leaders with lifelong exile, in flagrant violation of article 20: ‘After the conclusion of peace, the repatriation of prisoners of war shall take place as speedily as possible.’ There were other provisions as well that had been violated. The governments of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State would gladly submit evidence in support of their claims.
If Britain refused to cooperate, one would have to conclude ‘that it was reluctant to submit to the scrutiny of a scrupulous, competent and impartial court’. In that event, Britain would be responsible for ‘the continuation of the terrible and unnecessary war’. Such refusal would also amount to an implicit acknowledgement that Britain’s ‘conduct of the war is contrary to the principles of humanity and civilisation which it had ratified’.
This was strong language, but would it achieve anything? Even Leyds had his doubts. The new court would be getting itself into hot water. It wouldn’t be wise to antagonise mighty Britain right at the start. The court would probably find grounds to declare itself incompetent to hear the case. As a contingency Asser had added to the request for ‘your mediation’ the phrase ‘or that of the Governments you represent’. Leyds made a point of mentioning this to several people he knew in the diplomatic corps. At the opening of parliament in The Hague on 17 September, for example, he spoke to the Austro-Hungarian representative on the administrative council, Alexander Okolicsányi d’Okolicsna. He seemed to be interested.107
A chill ran through his body. It was stupid of him, but Deneys Reitz hadn’t given it a thought. For weeks he’d been strutting around in a British cavalry uniform, as pleased as a dog with two tails. The shiny buttons, the close-cut riding breeches, the skull-and-crossbone insignia of the formidable 17th Lancers. It had belonged to Lieutenant George Crespigny Brabazon, 4th Baron Vivian of Glynn and of Truro, which made it all the more special.
But suddenly there was an alarming piece of news. They had come to a large farm late in the evening. As soon as they arrived, the farmer, a man called Le Roux, told them what had happened. Earlier that day the British had captured a Boer fighter and executed him on the spot, for no reason other than that he was wearing a British uniform. It was Reitz’s friend Jack Baxter. At the end of September Kitchener had proclaimed—Le Roux produced a newspaper to show him—that ‘all Boers wearing khaki uniform are to be shot after trial by a drumhead court martial’.
He could so easily have suffered the same fate. Reitz thought about how the uniform had saved him, twice, in the past week. On both occasions British patrols had taken him for a compatriot. There was also the incident of the two Boers in khaki who ran into a party of British soldiers. On the spur of the moment, they had called out, ‘Don’t fire, we’re 17th Lancers,’ and subsequently proceeded to open fire themselves, killing two men, including Captain Watson, and wounding a third. Smuts was furious. That fateful incident may have been what prompted Kitchener’s proclamation.
Whatever the case, he couldn’t walk around like this anymore. Not that he felt remorse—he hadn’t intended to deceive anyone. It was just that his own clothes were worn to shreds. In the end he’d been reduced to wearing a grain sack. He had worn the British uniform out of sheer necessity. Anyway, now he knew it was dangerous. Le Roux, fortunately, was comfortably off and generously provided Reitz and his companions with civilian clothes.108
They set off the following day. There were eight of them. Delayed by their meanderings through the Karoo—to avoid British units—they had been unable to rejoin Smuts’s commando. Le Roux believed Smuts was heading for the Swartberg, about 70 kilometres south. They would have to follow his tracks. Hordes of British troops were pursuing him, so they would have to be vigilant. A party as small as theirs was vulnerable.
But they were resourceful as well and managed to forage for food on the way. At one farm they were offered a meal of fried ostrich egg; at others they took what they needed. They were often not the first to arrive. Once, in the middle of the night, in a valley in the Suurberg, they had presented themselves at the home of an Englishman. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘First come the Boers this morning and slaughter my sheep; then come the British, who kill more sheep instead of catching the Boers, and now I am hauled out of bed at this time of night by more Boers!’ From which they understood that Smuts wasn’t far ahead. They would soon catch up with him.
And they would have done, had it not been for the mistake they made the following day. Thinking that the British were only preoccupied with their pursuit of Smuts, they had let their guard down. They stopped for a meal in a spot from which they had no view of their surroundings. And there, Reitz had made a second mistake. Tired after a sleepless night, he had gone to rest in the shade of a thornbush, without telling his companions.
He was suddenly woken by the sound of rifle fire close by. Still dazed, he peered through the bushes just in time to see British soldiers, standing beside their horses, blazing away at his comrades. They were galloping down the valley as fast as they could. He was the only one left. The soldiers hadn’t spotted him, but they certainly would. His only chance was to head in the opposite direction. He had been too tired to unsaddle his pony, which was now a blessing in disguise. He edged forward, leapt in the saddle and galloped off. He didn’t get far. The British caught sight of him and, before he knew it, he was flying through the air. His pony was riddled with bullets and he himself crashed to the ground. A sharp pain shot through his hand.
With his good hand he grabbed his rifle and took to his heels. A small grove of trees on the right offered some cover. The soldiers were still firing at him and were joined by others heading in his direction. He felt something rip his boot. At a dry watercourse he hesitated for a moment while deciding whether to descend or climb higher up the slope. He glanced back to make sure his pursuers were watching him, then he sprang into the gully. Instead of turning left or right, as the soldiers would assume, he made a dash for the opposite side. He threw himself to the ground and hid among the bushes.
The ruse worked. The British split up into two groups, one heading down to the valley, the other up the mountain. Reitz lay motionless until the sun disappeared over the horizon. Then he emerged from his shelter and limped off; a bullet had torn his boot open, and a thorn, several centimetres long, had pierced the palm of his hand when he was thrown from his horse. But he was still alive and had managed to escape. Even so, he was despondent. He was tired, injured, hungry, surrounded by enemies, stumbling in the dark, alone in a foreign country and far from home. Only Providence could save him.
It did, but through its agents on earth. At first barely audible, then gathering volume, the strains of a hymn floated on the air, voices lifted in song to the accompaniment of a harmonium. Reitz knew that friends were at hand. He knocked at the door, introduced himself and was warmly welcomed into their midst. A family of Afrikaners, eager to feed him, tend his wounds and help him on his way. It would be too dangerous for him to remain there. The coloured labourers would betray him. It was the prerogative of the head of the family, a patriarch of 70, to guide Reitz on the first part of his journey. He couldn’t venture far, but he knew an old wagon path that would take Reitz in the right direction. West, that’s where he was sure to find Smuts.
Not that Reitz, alone and on foot, stood much chance of overtaking him, but there was nothing else to be done. He might come across his seven companions on the way. Perhaps they had made a detour to avoid the British. He was proved to be right. That very night, by the light of the moon, he picked up their spoor and even before daybreak he had found them, asleep. All were unharmed. They were amazed to see Reitz, as they had written him off.
After conferring together, they decided to stop following Smuts’s tracks, or at least not as closely as they had been doing. There were too many British columns on his heels, and they themselves had only three horses among them. It would be wiser to take a different route, through less hospitable countryside, but presumably with fewer British troops around. This meant they would have to cross the Swartberg again, cover a stretch of the Karoo again, cross the Cape Town–Bloemfontein railway line, and then veer off west to Calvinia.
They endured weeks of hunger and thirst, but, as they had hoped, encountered only the occasional British patrol. In early November they met up with Smuts’s main force. It was a joyful reunion. No one, not even Smuts, had expected to see Reitz alive again. But Reitz’s happiness was tinged with sorrow. Little remained of the Rich Section. Only two of its men had survived unscathed. Four had been injured, the rest killed or captured. It was the end of their small reconnaissance unit. Smuts assigned the two able-bodied men to Bouwer’s commando and Reitz to his own.
Reitz considered this a promotion, a reward for having overcome so many obstacles on his way. Smuts, however, probably saw it as a way to prevent the state secretary’s headstrong son from getting himself into trouble again. Be that as it may, they enjoyed the first few weeks after all the hardship and deprivation they had endured. There were few British troops here, in the western Cape, far removed from the railway lines. There was the occasional garrison and, from time to time, a column, but on the whole the men were able to breathe freely. Many more bands of rebels were roaming around the area and Smuts intended to organise them into larger commandos.
On 7 November 1901 they arrived at Elandsvlei, literally an oasis of peace, with waving palm trees and an abundance of water. This was the first time since their arrival in the Cape that they had spent more than one night in the same place. In the hills nearby Reitz caught a wild mule, ‘a powerful black, who squealed and bit and threw me several times before I mastered him’. Reitz was on horseback again.109
The foreign minister, Van Lynden, at least had the decency to break the news personally. On 22 November 1901 Willem Leyds was summoned to the ministry. He already knew what would happen. Van Lynden was friendly, but didn’t mince his words. The application from Leyds and the three other Boer envoys had been turned down. The administrative council of the Permanent Court of Arbitration had declared itself not competent to hear the matter of the Boer Republics vs Great Britain. It had a mandate to hear only administrative disputes.
This didn’t come as a surprise. But luckily Leyds had already sounded out the Austro-Hungarian member of the council, Okolicsányi d’Okolicsna, about the alternative he had thought up with Asser, namely, to submit their case to the signatory states directly. In particular, they had the new American president in mind. McKinley had been assassinated in September 1901 and succeeded by his vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, who did not, like McKinley, leave the country’s foreign policy entirely in the hands of the state secretary, Hay. The son of Dutch immigrants, Roosevelt made no secret of his sympathy for the Boer cause. Who knows, he might be prepared to stick his neck out.
Leyds was still pinning his hopes on official arbitration by an influential head of state. Nothing else would work. He’d heard enough well-meant but unsound proposals, mostly from shady characters with powerful connections in the realm of politics or finance. Only the day before, 21 November, a man who called himself Francis William Fox—no one had heard of him—turned up with a document which he said might serve as a framework for peace talks. It had been drafted, he explained, by ‘highly influential persons’. He had already discussed it with the Dutch prime minister, Kuyper, who had intimated that he was genuinely interested. So be it, but Leyds thought it a strange story.
His old business friend Eduard Lippert had proposed something more substantial. He had mediated on a previous occasion, at the beginning of 1899, before the war, at that time in the conflict with the Randlords.110 In the course of 1901 he had offered his services again. In July and August, on his own initiative—but with Leyds’s knowledge—he had held talks with Lord Rosebery, Lord Salisbury’s Liberal predecessor. One of the matters they had discussed was the possibility of granting Leyds and the members of the delegation a safe-conduct pass to South Africa to confer with the Boer leaders. The talks between Rosebery and Lippert were broken off twice, but Lippert got in touch with Leyds again in late November. Would it be a good idea to bring the matters they had discussed to the attention of the public? Lord Rosebery was about to deliver an important speech. It might be a suitable opportunity.
Leyds didn’t think it a good idea at all. He trusted Lippert, but not Rosebery. He would twist things ‘to suit his own party politics’ and present facts out of context, which would ‘give people the wrong idea about the situation’. There hadn’t been any real negotiations. ‘We listened to what you had to say, as a friend of our cause, expressly on that condition.’ Leyds also reminded Lippert of ‘the oath of confidentiality’ he had taken ‘regarding this matter’.
Leyds was soon proved right. Rosebery’s speech to a Liberal gathering in Chesterfield on 16 December 1901 was party political through and through. He declared himself in favour of forceful action against the Boers, who had committed ‘cold-blooded massacres of natives’ and the ‘almost unspeakable crime of flogging and murder in cold blood of an emissary of peace’. It wouldn’t be tolerated and they weren’t getting away with it. But this was not to say that the two republics should be completely depopulated, as Milner had recently suggested. Such a step was going too far. Peace talks would be a reasonable alternative, Rosebery suggested. Not face to face, on the spot, but through representatives of the Boers in the Netherlands. And they should be informal—nothing official. ‘Some of the greatest peaces, of the greatest settlements, in the world’s history have begun with an apparently casual meeting of two travellers in a neutral inn.’ The travellers he had in mind were undoubtedly Lippert and himself.
Rosebery could forget it, as far as Leyds was concerned. In an interview with The Times he refused to comment on Rosebery’s proposition. But he let fly when it came to his allegations. They were ‘monstrous and absurd’ and, in any case, too vague and sweeping to entertain. Except for the one specific case that Rosebery was presumably alluding to, the death of Morgendaal. It was true, Leyds conceded, that he had been shot on Christiaan de Wet’s orders. But Morgendaal wasn’t an emissary at all, he continued. He was a deserter and a spy. Imagine an Irish deserter doing something like that in the camp of an Irish regiment. Wouldn’t a British court martial sentence him to death?111
All this scheming strengthened Leyds’s belief in formal diplomatic procedures. Since being turned down by the administrative committee of the Court of Arbitration, he had drafted a petition addressed to the heads of government of nine countries: Russia, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and—the one he had the most faith in—the United States. The letters were sent on 17 and 18 December 1901. Besides copies of his earlier application to the court, they included an impassioned humanitarian appeal for ‘an end to the deplorable conditions which so many thousands of women and children have endured since the introduction of the concentration camps in South Africa’. The death toll was such that if nothing was done, ‘two nations would be annihilated’.112
The reports Jan Smuts drew up in mid-December 1901 sounded considerably more positive. It was all a matter of perspective and information. He couldn’t have known that the mortality rate in the camps had risen alarmingly since his incursion into the Cape. Nor, for that matter, was Leyds aware that the situation was in reality far worse than the official British figures led people to believe. From a military point of view the Boer commandos in the Cape Colony were doing well, at any rate in the west, where Smuts was now in command of 2000 men. Besides his own unit, he headed another 15 or so commando units from the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony itself. The forces in the eastern districts were poorly coordinated, but those west of the Cape Town–Kimberley railway line had only one problem: no horses. According to Smuts, there were thousands more Afrikaners wanting to join him, but the British had done a thorough job of ‘clearing’ the area of horses. If not for that, he could organise the longed-for uprising in no time at all.
Deneys Reitz knew all about the shortage of horses. He had been riding a mule since the beginning of November. It was a sturdy little creature, that wasn’t the problem, but its unsteady gait made it tiring to ride. And, since joining Smuts’s staff, Reitz had done his fair share of riding. He was deployed primarily as a dispatch rider, which meant he was constantly on the road, riding from one commando unit to the next to deliver instructions. He had covered hundreds of kilometres.
Smuts was a man who set store by order and discipline, even from a distance. Instructions for this, instructions for that. Point by point, he put everything in writing, orders to all commandos from field cornets, assistant field cornets and corporals: furlough by permission only, on pain of flogging; consumption of alcohol, ditto; horse-feed to be dispensed sparingly; no looting before the end of a battle, and only under officers’ supervision; correct treatment to be extended to all prisoners of war and civilians, including ‘coloureds and British sympathisers’; no burning or destruction of private property; receipts to be issued for requisitioned or confiscated goods. ‘Our aim is to win, through kindness and clemency, the support of people of all classes and stations who do not commit hostile acts against us.’ This was very different from Kritzinger, Smuts’s Free State counterpart in the Cape Colony, who condemned Africans and coloureds working for the British to summary execution.113
In between his organisational tasks, Smuts found time to draft dispatches to Botha and De la Rey as well as to Kruger, Fischer and Leyds in Europe. He could safely communicate with the latter via German South West Africa. Through the same channel, Smuts also sent a long, bewildered letter to the prominent British pro-Boer activist William Stead. ‘I cannot forget that I owe my education and some of the greatest pleasures of life to England, to its great literature and its profound thinkers.’ And that self-same country now seemed possessed by ‘this demon of Jingoism’. He expressed the greatest admiration for Stead’s courageous stand.114
In early January 1902, Smuts made his way to the north-west border zone to organise and coordinate the many small guerrilla bands scattered in that area. Reitz accompanied him. It was a gruelling journey over hundreds of kilometres, for the most part across desert. They travelled by night and sought shelter from the heat during the day. Kakamas, the settlement they were making for, was on the south bank of the Orange. Across the river was Bechuanaland. While Smuts went about his business, Reitz took time off to enjoy himself. There was food in abundance and he spent his days swimming in the river.
A fortnight later—it was already February—they rode back south, heading for Calvinia. On the way, at Middelpost, they came upon Van Deventer and his men, whom they had last seen in the Suurberg. There was little time for pleasantries. Van Deventer was doing battle with a British column escorting a convoy of 120 wagons. Many of the wagons were already burning, but their guards had not given up the struggle. Reitz joined in. He had arrived just in time to contribute to the victory and—just as importantly—share in the spoils. He came out of the foray with three horses, complete with saddlery. There were scores of them, enough for everyone, and Smuts approved their being taken, along with clothing, boots, ammunition and crates of horseshoes and nails.
This was an absolute windfall. Reitz was no longer a ‘ragged muleteer’, but better equipped than he had been at any time of the war. Everything seemed to be in their favour. In mid-February 1902, the commandos under Smuts, Van Deventer and Bouwer were reunited—with much cheering and merriment—for the first time since the Suurberg. Now the plan was to launch a joint attack on Vanrhynsdorp, which was occupied by British troops. On arriving there, they found the town deserted. The British had withdrawn to Windhoek, 15 kilometres away. That was where they would go. Reitz wasn’t present when they attacked. The evening before, Smuts had sent him to deliver a message to one of the sentries in the area and by the time he returned, the following morning, the fight was over. It had been fierce. Five Boers were killed and 16 wounded. The British had lost roughly the same number, as well as 90 captured. Windhoek was back in Boer hands.
It was 25 February 1902. They were only 40 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean. Smuts felt it was time for a break. He sent for all the men who had never seen the sea. As a boy, Reitz had been to Europe with his father, but this was an experience he didn’t want to miss. Smuts took a group of 70 men to a small coastal inlet called Fishwater. It was a wonderful experience. They arrived there in the late afternoon. A hush fell over them as they approached the edge of the dunes and beheld the infinite expanse of water. Then, as one, like the Greek mercenaries in Xenophon’s Anabasis, they surged forward, crying, ‘The sea! The sea!’ Soon they were on the beach. Whooping and laughing, they threw down their saddles, stripped off their clothes and, like a troop of wild centaurs, galloped bareback into the waves.115