THREE MONTHS AFTER the world powers made half-hearted pledges of peace at the Hague Conference of 1899, Britain had provoked the Boer republics into war. The British expected a cakewalk. The country’s newspapers sneered at their opponents, ignorant farmers led by a shabby hayseed with an unkempt beard and ever-present pipe—Paul Kruger, a fundamentalist Bible-thumper who thought the earth was flat. It was ludicrous. A handful of rubes in a backwoods country with no standing army were daring to challenge the imperial might of Great Britain. Surely the rustics would be smashed in time to give the Queen a Christmas present of all South Africa. The Boers’ terrible oppression of the natives would inexorably give way to the benevolent discipline of British civilization.
The rustics soon shredded these vanities of empire. Unlike Britain’s recent foes in Africa and India, the Boers were not poorly armed natives who obligingly attacked in dense ranks for easy slaughter. Daft old Kruger had been stockpiling supplies and munitions for years, and he had organized the burghers into commando units that could be mobilized in days to create an army of 50,000.
In the first two months of the war, despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered and outfinanced, the Boers outmaneuvered, outgeneraled, and outfought the British Army, leaving it dazed and bloodied. Instead of marching nobly into battle as soldiers were supposed to, the Boers laid ambushes, struck suddenly, melted away. They set up deadly fields of fire from camouflaged positions and used their marksmanship, honed by life on the veldt, to slice up any British regiments ordered to march splendidly into them. Like the Apaches, another outnumbered people, the Boers relied on mobility, surprise, improvisation, invisibility, and knowledge of the terrain. They always chose survival over a glorious death.
All this flummoxed the British Army. In mid-December, instead of mopping up the last of the Boers as most Britons had expected, the army suffered three successive defeats during what became known as Black Week. At Stormberg the army was routed and 600 men were taken prisoner. At Magersfontein the British scouts studied the plain ahead and failed to notice, less than a mile away, the trap set by the Boers: twelve miles of breastworks and trenches dug into the plain, camouflaged with grasses and acacias, where lines of marksmen waited invisibly. When the British forces entered the killing field, a thunderous fusillade cut them down. More than 200 British soldiers were killed and another 700 were wounded, compared to Boer losses of 90 killed and 190 wounded.
The third blot of Black Week happened at Colenso, where 143 British soldiers died, 750 were wounded, and 240 were captured, compared to Boer losses of six killed and twenty-one wounded. Further, the towns of Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley (with Rhodes inside) were under siege, and British forces had been unable to relieve them. Rhodes was threatening to save his diamond city by surrendering to the Boers.
The British Army and public were shocked. In addition to the heavy casualties, 2,000 of Her Majesty’s invincible troops had surrendered to a militia of ragged yokels in slouch hats whose officers wore old black claw-hammer coats and semi-top-hats. Many of these casualties and embarrassments could have been prevented, or at least reduced. Whether through arrogance or lack of trained scouts, British commanders often failed to gather intelligence or do basic reconnaissance, funneling their troops directly into the Boers’ waiting guns. And then, instead of withdrawing, commanders ordered the troops to march into the guns again, manifesting what the war’s best historian later called “one of the great traditions of the British army: courage matched only by stupidity.”
A few days after Black Week, the army appointed one of its most experienced generals commander-in-chief in South Africa: Lord Roberts. He had spent most of his career in India but also had fought tough campaigns in Afghanistan and Abyssinia. Sixty-seven years old and five feet two inches tall, he was affectionately referred to as Bobs, and was popular with his troops and the British public. By the time of the Boer War, Rudyard Kipling had already written two poems about him. Roberts’s eagerness to take over the army in South Africa went beyond the military. His only son had been killed in the disaster at Colenso.
To avert blunders and defeat the Boers, Roberts knew he needed accurate military intelligence about his enemies’ numbers, positions, supplies, weaponry, and movements. The Boers were mobile guerrillas, so the necessary information could only be obtained by scouting deep into their territory. This required skills that had been disappearing from Britain as the country’s rural population fell, skills that the British Army had long ignored as déclassé. Baden-Powell’s insistence on the importance of scouts was considered eccentric.
Then came the early fiascos of the Boer War. The rural aristocracy began raising companies of irregulars from the countryside, men who could ride and shoot and live outdoors. In Scotland, for instance, Lord Lovat (Simon Joseph Fraser) enlisted stalkers and ghillies from estates in the Highlands, forming a regiment called the Lovat Scouts. Desperation cast the net wide. Some men signed up as scouts because of the dashing image, but couldn’t track a horse across wet sand. “The cry for scouts of renown in the South African Campaign has gone forth far and wide,” announced one newspaper after Black Week. “The Maoris have been talked about, Canadian half-breeds have been requisitioned, and to America Lord Roberts has cabled for Mr. F. R. Burnham, who has immediately set sail in answer to the summons.”
It’s a measure of both Burnham’s reputation and the British Army’s need that Lord Roberts gave an American an officer’s commission and named him Chief of Scouts. Burnham left Blanche and the children in London and sailed for Cape Town on the SS Scott. The ship was crowded with British officers bound for the war. Burnham wrote to Blanche that two of the most interesting people on board were a striking newlywed couple, Richard Harding Davis, the dashing war correspondent, and his lovely tomboyish wife, the painter Cecil Clark Davis.
Burnham likewise impressed Davis. In his popular Real Soldiers of Fortune (1906), Davis wrote that every night during the seventeen-day trip between Southampton and Cape Town, a group of skeptical officers convened in the stateroom to shoot questions at the famous American scout and test his supposed uncanny woodcraft. Burnham’s inquisitors, noted Davis, were hardened soldiers who “had either held command in border fights in India or the Sudan or had hunted big game, and the questions each asked were the outcome of his own experience and observation.” How to tell, they asked, if a column of dust was made by cavalry or trek wagons? How to tell from a horse’s tracks whether it was galloping or trotting, and how to make a fire without becoming a target? A faker, wrote Davis, would have been exposed immediately. “And what made us most admire Burnham was that when he did not know he at once said so.”
Burnham amazed them. “The knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems little less than miraculous,” wrote Davis. “And when you ask him how he knows these things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, and botanist, and not merely a seventh son of a seventh son.” Within two nights, added Davis, Burnham “had us so absolutely at his mercy that we would have followed him anywhere; anything he chose to tell us, we would have accepted.”
In his letters to Blanche, Burnham didn’t mention these nightly jousts-turned-seminars. Instead, he entertained her with descriptions of a shapely widow in her mid-thirties, worth £200,000, who had a gaggle of older men responding to her every whim, fanning her and fetching her ices, “trot trot trot all day long.”
As they approached Cape Town, his excitement grew. “The blood is stirring in my veins,” he wrote to Blanche. He was too hyped up even to play chess. We’re nearly there, he wrote a few days later, “and I tingle to my fingertips.” He signed his letter, “Your wandering erratic demented but ever loving hubby.” He claimed to regret the necessity of war but rushed jubilantly toward it, with a peculiar confidence in his survival. Blanche tried to share that faith. “How such a peace loving woman came to have such a warlike husband is more than I can make out,” she wrote to him, “and she poor fool is proud of him too.”
He arrived in Cape Town on the morning of February 13 and left that afternoon for the front, to join Lord Roberts and his chief of staff, General Herbert (Lord) Kitchener. Lionized for his campaigns in Egypt and Sudan, the six-foot-two Kitchener shaded five-foot-two “Bobs.” Burnham reached headquarters soon after British forces relieved Kimberley on February 15. The town had been under siege for 124 days, and its recapture lifted morale on the front and in Britain.
The next target was the old Boer general Piet Cronje, whose retreat toward Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, had been halted by shelling from the pursuing British Army. Cronje had taken his column of 4,000 people, including fifty women, with their animals and covered wagons, into the bed of the Modder River. It was a placid stream lined with willows and tamarisks that wound through a plain near Paardeberg. While Cronje pretended to consider the British demand for surrender, the Boers dug themselves into the Modder’s overhanging banks and dry lateral arroyos. Then Cronje defied the British to come get them.
This played straight into the blunt-minded arrogance of Lord Kitchener, momentarily in command because Roberts was ill. Kitchener had learned nothing from the carnage of Black Week. On February 18 he bombarded the Boers from 120 pieces of artillery. Not a sound came from the Boer lines. Kitchener assumed they were either dead or stunned to the point of surrender. Against the advice of other officers, he ordered a mass frontal attack across 1,000 yards of flat treeless plain. At first there was silence from the Modder. Then the British lines stepped into rifle range and the Boers’ Mausers shredded them from invisible positions. Kitchener’s response: regroup and do it again.
The British suffered 1,270 casualties that day: more than 300 killed, nearly 1,000 wounded or missing. It came to be called Bloody Sunday, the worst single day of the war for the British. Kitchener’s report to Roberts described the day as a success. Others saw things more clearly. “Everywhere there was a terrible monotony about the experiences of the various regiments, which learned once again the grim lessons of Colenso and Modder River,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, who served as a volunteer doctor during this phase of the war. “We surely did not need to prove once more what had already been so amply proved, that bravery can be of no avail against concealed riflemen well entrenched, and that the more hardy is the attack the heavier must be the repulse.”
Roberts, perhaps alarmed by his chief of staff’s cavalier dismissal of heavy casualties, rallied from his illness and returned to his command the next day. The British had 35,000 men and heavy artillery surrounding Cronje’s 4,000. Instead of suicidal frontal assaults, Roberts decided on patient attrition. On February 20 he ordered an almost ceaseless bombardment of the Boer position. “It seemed that every living thing in the river bed must perish,” wrote Burnham to his uncle that week. The shelling splintered all of Cronje’s wagons and killed thousands of his horses and oxen, whose rotting carcasses began fouling the river and the air. “Still they held out,” wrote Burnham. “We could not understand it.” Every time the British sent an infantry probe, the silent riverbank erupted with gunfire.
Meanwhile it rained often, adding to the misery. The British had no tents. Burnham considered himself lucky to have a blanket. They were also on half rations (dry biscuits). They drew their water from the Modder, where dead swollen horses and oxen floated. Typhoid fever broke out, killing some and sickening thousands. A letter to Burnham’s Uncle Josiah offered a glimpse of conditions: “as I write, the wailing of the pipes tells of another last patrol. The miles of twinkling lights, the endless stream of convoys, the never ceasing boom of cannon goes on night after night. And I ride through this fringe of hell out into the darkness among the enemy who are hovering round our cordon trying to break it and free their general. This hour that I write I should be asleep as it rains a great deal and I get almost none at all.”
He was behind enemy lines almost every night. At one point he was asked to discover conditions inside the Boer camp. How many of their supply wagons survived the barrage? How many men remained alive and in what condition? Were they starving? Would another full attack be catastrophic for them, or for the British?
Though Burnham had crept close to the Boers’ trenches several times in the dark, he couldn’t get near enough to answer Roberts’s questions. He remembered a story about one of his military ancestors. This man had gathered intelligence about the Confederate batteries on Island Number Ten in the Mississippi by floating past them in a hollow log. Burnham adapted the ploy to suit the Modder, clotted with dead livestock. He built a rough box and stretched a fresh cowhide over it. He added a crossbar to hang onto and a few slits for peepholes. It wouldn’t fool anyone during daylight but might pass muster at night. He wouldn’t have to worry about crocodiles; the bombardment had pushed them elsewhere. As Burnham launched into the darkness, above the Boer camp, a native who had come with him said, “Good-bye, Baas. I think dem Boers shoot you sure.”
The current took him. The river was twenty feet wide and six to ten feet deep, red with mud. He felt claustrophobic inside the dark box. A bump from a carcass made him shudder. Eventually, he heard men speaking Afrikaans and drifted within a few feet of Boers cooking, eating, talking. Cronje’s men lined two and a half miles of the river. After floating for two hours, Burnham swam to shore.
For all his risk, he had learned almost nothing of value. He resisted the desire to look good to his commanding officers by feeding them information in which he had little confidence. He later learned that his waterline perspective had kept him from seeing all the men entrenched in the lateral arroyos, so any estimate of the Boer force would have been seriously deficient. “That night’s work showed with what care a general must sift and discount the reports of his scouts,” wrote Burnham.
A number of years later Robert Baden-Powell asked Burnham to critique one of his books about scouting. Burnham made only one suggestion: emphasize that a scout must develop the nerve to admit to his commander when he has failed. It’s tempting, wrote Burnham, to whitewash failures and substitute assumptions for facts. But if a commander bases a decision on faulty information, men may die. Better to tell the truth, wrote Burnham, even when it reflects poorly on oneself. Such honesty will earn the commander’s trust, so that if he gets conflicting information from several scouts or insistent “experts,” he will confidently act upon the intelligence of the scout he trusts most.
By February 27 the Boers on the Modder had had enough. They weren’t broken by the incessant pounding, terrible though that was, but by the overwhelming stench from heaps of rotting carcasses, with the attendant swarming flies. Even the vultures were too sated to eat. Cronje and more than 4,000 people surrendered. Their casualties had been light. As a student of military strategy, Burnham wanted to know why. He visited the abandoned trench works and saw that the Boers had dug small pits about five feet deep into the bank. The pits were only eighteen inches wide at the top, three feet at the bottom. A man crouching in one of these cocoons would be impossible to kill by bombardment except by a direct hit. The Boer marksmen didn’t even have to show their heads to sweep the plain with salvos. They just lifted their rifles parallel to the ground and fired. It was a new sort of warfare that would be brought to horrifying perfection in World War I.
The Boers’ toughness and self-reliance, their drive to carve farms from the wilderness, reminded Burnham of American frontiersmen, Mormons in particular. He compared their long-range marksmanship to that of the old buffalo hunters. He admired much about them and credited them with teaching him valuable lessons in African woodcraft. He sympathized with their desire to preserve a pioneer way of life. “Once a taste for that life gets into a man’s blood,” he wrote in Scouting on Two Continents, “it is hard to shake it off, and I, for one, would not willingly exchange it for the most magnificent residence to be found in the West End of London.”
Burnham also respected the Boers’ audacity at defending their territory against the might of the British Empire. In this he agreed with much of the world, including most Americans, who saw the conflict as David versus Goliath. The Boer cause drew volunteers not only from the United States but from Germany, Ireland, Russia, and elsewhere. Canadians and Australians rallied to the Union Jack.
People in the United States followed the war closely. Newspapers sent correspondents, most of them pro-Boer like their readers. During the war and afterward, several states in the U.S. offered free land to Boers who didn’t want to live under British rule. Just before Burnham left for South Africa, his best childhood friend, Arthur Bent, wrote that he was pulling for the Boers. Pasadena was so pro-Boer that Blanche instructed relatives there not to read Burnham’s letters to anyone outside the family. Burnham’s first cousin, the muckraking journalist Charles Edward Russell—who later ran as the Socialist candidate for governor of New York, U.S. senator, and mayor of New York City, and who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—wrote a number of caustic articles and poems in support of the Boers. He thoughtfully mailed copies to Blanche, who refused to forward them to her husband at the front. The Burnham family scrapbook features a line drawing of Burnham from an unidentified newspaper; an anonymous critic has scrawled alongside his face, “A dam [sic] pity the Boers didn’t get your measly carcass.”
Burnham understood the appeal of the Boers’ way of life and their armed resistance. But he also had seen the Boers up close and knew their world was doomed—and not just because they were outnumbered. Their willful ignorance and isolation, and their brutal repression of black Africans, couldn’t be sustained. The nineteenth century was over. The Boers would be swept aside by the future, which belonged to stronger powers such as Britain and the United States.
Burnham also knew that despite the Boers’ military advantages—their marksmanship and woodcraft, their skills with livestock, and their ability to travel across the veldt at night—they had crippling military flaws. Like the Apaches, every Boer was a general who resisted authority. He was required to report to his commando unit but didn’t have to fight. If a Boer disagreed with an order or thought it too dangerous, he didn’t have to obey it and could initiate a different tactic or simply withdraw. If a commander ordered him to burn his wagons or crops to keep them from falling into British hands, he often refused. Soldiers constantly went AWOL to check on their farms or to rest. Burnham believed the Boers’ lack of organizational discipline and their reluctance to sacrifice property for the war effort would eventually sink them.
Almost every night Burnham made a foray deep behind Boer lines, usually alone, probing for the edges of the Boer picket lines and looking for troop movements that might reveal plans. The terrain reminded him of the country east of the Rocky Mountains—plains, rocky kopjes, rolling treeless hills cut by steep canyons and arroyos.
Lord Roberts asked him to check out a rumor that Boers were massing at Petrusburg, about twenty miles east of Paarderberg. Petrusburg lay between the army and Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State and Roberts’s next objective. Burnham found the Boer picket line when a dark figure jumped in front of him and shouted, “Hands up!” Burnham threw himself backward off his horse as the Boer fired. His mount galloped off, drawing fire from two more pickets. Burnham lay still in the dark, about twenty feet from the Boers. He could hear them asking each other where he was, then they withdrew. He had a long walk back to Paardeberg, with nothing to report.
Roberts told him to try again the next night. This time Burnham took along a mounted native. He tried to avoid roads, where he might run into Boer patrols. That meant cutting across country, literally. The region was laced with barbed wire fences, typically with three strands. “Almost impossible to move in enemy lines without clippers,” wrote Burnham, “and the British had none for months. We sometimes charged through, killing the scouts’ horses and injuring good men for life.” He occasionally borrowed cutters. Otherwise he chopped the fences with a hatchet or broke them by hand. The Boers often posted mounted pickets along the wire fences. These men leaned their heads against a post so that when a wire was touched or cut, they immediately felt the vibration. Burnham used a similar tactic to help make up for the army’s lack of scouts. In encampments, he strung wire between bayonets; anyone approaching would cause the wire to vibrate and sing. On most nights Burnham also swam many streams. He avoided the regular “drifts” or fords where pickets waited, often riding miles to find a place where a cut in the steep banks allowed entry. It was tedious, solitary, dangerous work.
On the second foray, Burnham and the native cut fences as they crept toward Petrusburg. They suddenly found themselves in front of a large farmhouse. When Burnham sharply turned his horse’s head to steer clear of it, he ran right into another barbed wire fence. The horse panicked and began plunging. The saddle twisted under its belly, throwing Burnham inside the fence near the farmhouse. The noise roused twenty Boers, who streamed from the house with guns. The native, “with splendid presence of mind,” galloped alongside Burnham’s horse, grabbed the reins, and took off as the Boers shouted at him. After a while, Burnham crawled through the fence into the countryside, expecting another long walk home, but was delighted when the native responded to their prearranged signal. The stirrups had been torn from Burnham’s saddle. He remounted and they continued toward Petrusburg.
Within half a mile, Boer pickets challenged them, then fired at their fleeing figures. The scouts cut two more fences, but dawn was approaching and Petrusburg was still miles away. They had to return to Paardeberg again.
“It is always a most humiliating moment in the career of a scout when he is obliged to report to his commander and acknowledge that he has turned back from his objective and is defeated,” wrote Burnham. “In this instance, my whole scheme had resulted in utter failure.” Roberts and his staff asked him to try again later that day. The native companion wanted no part of another mission, so Burnham left alone, before sunset to give himself extra time.
Soon after crossing the Boer line, a solitary horseman appeared. He rode almost parallel with Burnham while gradually lessening the gap between them. The two men occasionally studied each other with binoculars. Because the terrain was so open, rival scouts often monitored each other during daylight. It was a peculiar game that Burnham often enjoyed. But this man’s tactics and deliberation made him uneasy. When the Boer was 800 yards away, he dismounted and prepared to shoot. Burnham galloped out of range, but the Boer quickly followed.
Burnham had seen that his stalker had a better horse, so he began looking for defensive ground. He made for a big anthill. The Boer saw the plan, dismounted, and began firing from a prone position. Bullets thudded and whistled around Burnham, much too close. From behind the anthill he could see the Boer’s horse standing on the veldt, but not the prone shooter. From the placement of the bullets, Burnham realized that the man intended to leave him on foot by shooting his horse, only partly protected by the anthill. Burnham reluctantly decided to use the same tactic. On his third or fourth shot, the Boer’s exposed horse tumbled. Burnham galloped off. He later learned that this man was Daniel Theron, the Boers’ best scout, who entered enemy lines as often as Burnham did. Burnham called him the Boer he most wanted to meet after the war. Theron was killed in September 1900.
With an hour of daylight left, three more Boer scouts spotted Burnham and spread out to flank him. Again Burnham turned and galloped, with them in pursuit. He used every rise and curve to shield himself from their gunfire, occasionally turning in the saddle to shoot back. Richard Harding Davis once asked him if he really could hit someone in that situation. “Well,” said Burnham, “maybe not to hit him, but I can come near enough to make him decide my pony’s so much faster than his that it really isn’t worth while to follow me.”
Darkness, the scout’s friend, finally descended, but Burnham had lost most of the ground gained earlier toward Petrusburg. He decided to try a long detour to the south, which took most of the night. Near dawn he rested himself and his horse in a brushy arroyo, determined to try for Petrusburg again that night.
Four hours later he heard voices and the creak of wagons. It was a Boer commando of forty horsemen and four wagons, moving toward a farmhouse a mile away. They laagered there. A few hours later two native boys from the column ventured into Burnham’s arroyo to play. They stopped short when they saw his horse, then began jogging back to the farmhouse. Burnham quickly saddled up and rode off.
He came across an abandoned farmhouse, intending to stay until dark, but within minutes several Boers driving cattle came over a hill and made for the house, so he had to flee again. Everywhere he turned, there were Boers and barbed wire fences. Cresting another hill, he saw a Boer riding with two natives. The man assumed Burnham was a countryman and pulled up to let the stranger join him. Instead, Burnham veered off. The Boer, now suspicious, sent one of the natives galloping over to identify the stranger and report back. When the native reached him, Burnham casually covered him with his rifle and told him that if he turned his head or tried to run, he would be shot. They rode side by side, always slanting away. The native told Burnham that the white man was Daniel Theron, and that the commando at the farmhouse was Theron’s celebrated unit of scouts. Burnham kept the native close for an hour, then released him.
These encounters had nudged him farther from his goal. He was going to fail again. “Mental depression and physical exhaustion seized me at this time,” he wrote. He turned onto a road, glum, eyes downcast. His powers of observation, crucial for survival behind enemy lines, had flagged. He almost rode right into a troop of Boers driving some horses and cattle. They had already seen him but assumed he was a countryman, an error they would correct if he got much closer.
Burnham’s instincts fired. He swerved and began riding slowly in a circle, studying the ground, sometimes pausing or backing up, always edging farther from the road. A couple of Boers shouted at him, but he ignored them, hoping they would think he was intent on tracking a lost horse and had no time for cordiality. It worked. That evening he returned safely to the British lines, but once again without the intelligence Roberts wanted.
Later, after the fall of the Boer capital of Pretoria, the British Head of Intelligence told Burnham that a dozen scouts had been sent to investigate Petrusburg and none had reached it. That was some consolation.
Yet successes outnumbered failures. His skills astounded his superiors. Richard Harding Davis:
Indeed, than Burnham no man of my acquaintance to my knowledge has devoted himself to his life’s work more earnestly, more honestly, and with such single-mindedness of purpose. To him scouting is as exact a study as is the piano to Paderewski, with the result that to-day what the Pole is to other pianists, the American is to all other “trackers,” woodmen, and scouts. He reads “the face of Nature” as you read your morning paper. To him a movement of his horse’s ears is as plain a warning as the “Go SLOW” of an automobile sign; and he so saves from ambush an entire troop. . . . Like the horned cattle, he can tell by the smell of it in the air the near presence of water, and where, glaring in the sun, you can see only a bare kopje, he distinguishes the muzzle of a pompom, the crown of a Boer sombrero, the levelled barrel of a Mauser. He is the Sherlock Holmes of all out-of-doors. . . .
In South Africa he would say to the officers: “There are a dozen Boers five miles ahead of us riding Basuto ponies at a trot, and leading five others. If we hurry we should be able to sight them in an hour.” At first the officers would smile, but not after a half-hour’s gallop, when they would see ahead of them a dozen Boers leading five ponies. In the early days of Salem, Burnham would have been burned as a witch.
Burnham rejected the idea that there was anything magical or romantic about his skills. “In the literature of the West,” he wrote in Scouting on Two Continents, “the hero, bad man, or sheriff is usually endowed by high Heaven with superhuman powers and has not found it necessary to go through long dreary months and years of training, like ordinary mortals; but I have never, in my experience, met either savage or white man whose natural traits without careful development would have made him distinguished.”
Once, Roberts got conflicting reports about the number of Boers gathered on a certain hill (from 300 to 3,000), and also about how many heavy guns they had and the guns’ positions. These numbers and positions could reveal the enemy’s plans and weaknesses, allowing a commander to plan an offensive or a defense. Burnham went through the Boer lines that night and found the tracks of the dragged guns. Because it was dark, he felt the tracks with his fingers and learned that the Boers had four guns, two heavy and two light. He followed the tracks and located a camp of 2,000 men, clearly the Boers’ main force. Then he returned and reported it all to headquarters.
Again and again he penetrated the Boer lines, eluded their patrols and pickets, and returned with actionable intelligence. He was as well-known to the Boers as Theron was to the British. His reputation and constant infiltrations peeved the enemy. They made his capture or killing a priority. “To overcome the keen wits of hundreds of able men alert to prevent the acquisition of just the particular knowledge which the scout is after,” wrote Burnham, “is the joy of the game and compensates for days and nights of strenuous effort and physical hardship.”