IT TOOK NEARLY a month for a letter to travel from the front lines to London. By the time Blanche heard from her husband, the news in his letters was old and she had no idea what had happened since. He often assured her that he was barely in danger. She tried to believe him. (His letters to his Uncle Josiah and others told a different story.) She studied the papers every day, especially the lists of casualties. She and Roderick tracked the army’s campaigns on a large map of South Africa.
“They are having real battles out there now and what is Fred doing?” she wrote to Burnham’s mother in late February 1900. “How anxiously I read the lists—no one knows. 130 in today’s list. War is a cruel thing between civilized nations. I wish Lord Roberts had not sent for Fred. I know and appreciate the honor and am very very proud of him but it is Fred I want.”
Bloemfontein fell on March 13 without a fight. Even better, the Boers had left warehouses, granaries, and pantries intact. For men who had been living on half-rations, Bloemfontein was a cornucopia. Burnham and several others settled into the abandoned house of the State Secretary. They raided the larder for a meal of turkey with trimmings and fresh bread, served on silver dishes, with wine in crystal glasses. Other luxuries: a roof and feather beds, though Burnham didn’t get to spend much time in his.
In the previous month the British had captured Cronje’s militia, relieved Kimberley and Ladysmith, and occupied the capital of the Orange Free State. Lord Roberts wrote to the Queen that victory was near. Burnham shared the general optimism. In late March, writing on rice endpapers torn from a book in the State Secretary’s library (paper was scarce), he told Blanche he expected the war to be over by May.
Meanwhile, he was spending most nights behind the lines, trying to intercept Boer dispatch riders or observe troop movements and artillery placements. On the afternoon of March 30 he was ordered to investigate a rumor that Boer troops were massing in the country between Bloemfontein and the hamlet of Thaba ‘Nchu, forty miles east in the foothills bordering Basutoland (now Lesotho). If true, the Boers probably were targeting the 1,700 British soldiers under General Robert Broadwood moving west toward Bloemfontein. Burnham couldn’t take his favorite horse because it was exhausted after being ridden 800 miles. Horses, like wire clippers, were scarce. He picked “two sorry nags” from the Remount Department and left that night for territory all new to him.
Before dawn he was near Sanna’s Post (Sannaspos), twenty-five miles east of Bloemfontein. In the graying light he saw the shapes of a farmhouse and a stone kraal. A door slammed. Beyond the buildings, a dark tree line marked a streambed, now mostly dry. He surmised this was Korn Spruit (a spruit is a small stream). He smelled a camp in that direction, and heard the soft click of stirrups. He hid his horses and crept toward the spruit. It was still too dark to see into the streambed, but the noises and smells told Burnham it was full of Boers, particularly around the drift (ford). Their presence there puzzled him.
He decided to skirt the spruit and find another place to cross, then to hide in the Bloemfontein Waterworks, whose tower darkened a sliver of sky in the distance. As he retrieved his horses, artillery fire began in the east, where Broadwood’s army was positioned. Another puzzlement.
Then the sun popped up and everything became clear. Hundreds of Boer horsemen were waiting beneath the high banks of the spruit. During the night they had ridden around and behind Broadwood’s troops. The Boers’ artillery barrage was now pushing Broadwood west, straight into the spruit ambush. This stratagem had been designed by the brilliant Boer general Christiaan de Wet.
Burnham felt helpless. He was on a hill in full view of Boer scouts on each side of him, 400 yards away. His clothing resembled theirs, and for the moment they assumed he was one of them. He was also in plain sight of the oncoming British wagons now nearing the drift. He could save himself by riding off, but the idea was impossible.
He pulled out a red silk handkerchief, two feet square, that he carried for signaling, and began waving it frantically. “But there was not a single British scout to observe my warning,” he wrote, “and no advance guard appeared in front of the oncoming transport wagons.” Another failure of basic reconnaissance. If any of the British noticed Burnham, they paid no attention, but the Boers soon did. Several came galloping over. Burnham knew his nag couldn’t outrun anything. He surrendered. They seized his horses and guns and took him to the stone kraal.
Through chinks in the wall, he watched the disaster of Sanna’s Post unfold exactly as de Wet had planned. As the British wagons rolled into the drift, the Boers pointed their Mausers and demanded surrender. Resistance would have been suicidal. The captured men and wagons were directed right and left into the dry streambed. No shots had been fired. Then a troop of cavalry rode up to the drift to see why the spruit seemed to be swallowing the wagons. Ordered to surrender, the cavalry officer barked a command to wheel and retreat. Burnham watched in horror as a salvo cut down the officer and many of the horsemen. Then real firing began, sweeping the exposed plain where the British forces marched.
Burnham began thinking about escape. He tied a shoelace tightly around his leg below the knee to remind him to limp. Then he knotted his red handkerchief around his knee as if he was wounded. When the British retreated and the battle finally ended, the Boers took Burnham, limping badly, down to the other verdomte rooineks—damned rednecks—detained in the spruit. The Boers had captured 428 men, 117 wagons, and seven artillery guns, while killing or wounding about 160. They also destroyed the waterworks, which led to epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera in Bloemfontein that killed several thousand more. (Burnham saw 1,100 men of the Guards Brigade buried in a common grave.) The Boers’ casualties were three killed and five wounded.
Burnham was directed onto one of the wagons carrying the injured. By ten o’clock that morning the column was on the move. They were headed for Winburg, where the prisoners would be put on trains for the notorious Pretoria jail. The prospect made Burnham shudder. They traveled until four o’clock, rested until dark, then resumed. The terrain was so flat and treeless, and the guards so vigilant, that Burnham saw no chance to escape.
The following morning, a Boer officer stared at Burnham and approached for a closer look. I know you from Rhodesia, he said. You’re the American scout Burnham. Burnham told the man he was mistaken, that he was a mapmaker snagged in the mess at Korn Spruit. The officer didn’t believe him and sent for someone from the Boer Intelligence Department to question the prisoner. If this was the famous scout, it would be a coup.
The intelligence officer had been educated in Britain and considered himself astute about the differences between mapmakers and American frontiersmen. Burnham discerned from the man’s questions that the Boers had accurate information about his physical characteristics, but also expected him to be a coarse half-savage from the Wild West. This stereotype, which Burnham detested and often mocked, for once worked in his favor. Playing to his interrogator’s biases, he turned the conversation to the African explorations of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, followed by reflections on some fine points of Christian doctrine. He sprinkled in verses of poetry, perhaps from his cherished Kipling or Burns. He may have casually referred, as he often did in his writings, to Caesar’s Tenth Legion, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and historical events from the days of Sparta to the present. The intelligence officer concluded that this educated, well-spoken gentleman could not possibly be the barbarous American scout.
In Real Soldiers of Fortune, Richard Harding Davis described the gap between Burnham and the dime-novel stereotype: “Personally, Burnham is as unlike the scout of fiction, and of the Wild West Show, as it is possible for a man to be. He possesses no flowing locks, his talk is not of ‘greasers,’ ‘grizzly b’ars,’ or ‘pesky redskins.’ In fact, because he is more widely and more thoroughly informed, he is much better educated than many who have passed through one of the ‘Big Three’ universities, and his English is as conventional as though he had been brought up on the borders of Boston Common, rather than on the borders of civilization.”
Burnham’s initial accuser remained suspicious. He assigned a Bushman to watch the prisoner closely. The native walked next to Burnham’s wagon tirelessly, all day and into the evening, barely leaving room for a shadow, much less an opening for escape. As the night march proceeded, Burnham grew more desperate. They were approaching Winburg. The next stop would be Pretoria jail. Better to die than be confined in a cell, he thought. He was perched on the front corner of the last wagon, alert for any lapse in the Bushman’s vigilance. Dawn would break in an hour. The guards, prisoners, and drivers all were nodding with exhaustion.
The Bushman walked forward to say something to the driver. An opening. Burnham dropped to the wagon’s disselboom between the oxen, then slipped onto the ground. An ox kicked at him and then the wagon passed over. He rolled a few times and lay still on the edge of the road. The rear guard, half asleep, thudded by him. He crawled into a field, then stood and ran. He had twenty minutes to hide before daylight.
The plain was flat and bare, with a few scattered kopjes. He ran toward one. Nearing it, he saw a small Boer farm with a kraal. Dogs began to bark, which stopped him. Dawn was breaking. Not far from the farmhouse was a small field, newly plowed. He ran into it and lay in one of the shallow furrows. He covered most of his face with his dust-colored hat, but much of his body was exposed. He lay without a quiver.
The furrow was about 150 yards from the road, which bustled all day with Boer horsemen and wagons. He didn’t dare shift position or lift his hat. Instead, to avoid cramping, he systematically tensed and relaxed every muscle. The day was sweltering, and by afternoon he felt addled from lack of water. He began to obsess about the ear of boiled corn in his breast pocket, convinced that it was jutting up like a beacon. The sun seemed frozen in the sky, but its rays finally slanted. He made himself wait for full dark before rising. After stretching the kinks from muscles stiffened by twelve hours of immobility, he started running.
Two miles later he found a small stream and drank like a camel. He was grateful now for the ear of boiled corn. He saved the biscuit in his pocket for later. He found a sheltered spot near a kopje and slept most of the day. That night he started back toward Bloemfontein, hiding during the day and traveling in the dark to skirt Boer pickets. It took him three days to slip through seventy miles of Boer territory. He reached a British outpost near Bloemfontein at four a.m. At eight he reported to Lord Roberts, relaying what he had learned about Boer numbers and movements.
To Blanche he wrote, “Again I write you, after one of those strange escapes with which my life seems dotted.” He also described the escape to his mother and added, “I would have been a Major General if I had had the education. I have the natural instinct of military position even on a big scale as I now see it. Where the firing line is 25 miles in length I can grasp it all. But in my own little field of scouting I am still far ahead of any other living man. I do not write such stuff as this to any one but you, not even to B.B. So destroy it at once.” (She didn’t.)
After the debacle of Sanna’s Post, the army made sure the war correspondents heard about Burnham’s capture and escape. The London papers were filled with it, a bit of good news. “You have created quite a stir my darling,” wrote Blanche. But she added that his confidence about the war’s imminent ending was wrong. “Eleven weeks day after tomorrow since you left, and it will be that many and maybe more the way things look now.”
He kept sending assurances that he took few risks and avoided battlefields. “So when you hear of great battles and charges I am only an interested spectator and not in the thick of it.” His idea of low-risk behavior, such as riding around in the dark behind enemy lines while pickets shot at him, struck Blanche as peculiar. In a letter to her at the end of April he wrote, “I am not going to be in any more fights. I am to go into the enemy’s country and send news back, so the worst that can happen is my capture. So don’t worry, my fighting time is over.” If this calmed her for a moment, the rest of the letter probably did not. He had just led twenty-five men on a raid into Boer territory. They captured 2,000 sheep, 40 horses, and 300 cattle, and, though chased, did not lose a man, but did get routed by a hive of bees. Milton Prior, a well-known war correspondent, wrote and illustrated a story about the episode.
But he was weary of these low-risk escapades. The army had been idling in Bloemfontein for six weeks while the command worked on logistics for the next phase. Burnham was impatient to push north and finish things.
On May 3 Lord Roberts launched what he expected to be the war’s final offensive, toward Johannesburg and Pretoria. His combined force included 58,000 troops and multiple thousands of horses, mules, and oxen to haul the supplies required by a vast army on the march. Opposing them were about 15,000 Boer irregulars.
On May 7 Burnham was given the mission of cutting a railroad behind the Boer forces to impede the transportation of supplies as they retreated. The Boers were using the same tactic, blowing up every bridge and culvert ahead of the advancing British. Most of the rivers in South Africa were too small for navigation, so bridges and railroads were crucial to move troops, guns, and supplies. Both sides devoted special units to quick repair of these damaged lifelines.
Burnham left on foot with two native carriers. They took eighteen pounds of explosives and rations for ten days, mostly biscuits, chocolate, and condensed soup. Burnham set a hard pace, an “Indian jog trot” that covered nearly forty miles before dawn. During the day they hid in native huts. The next night they passed through many pickets and three commandos. Burnham noted their numbers, armaments, and movements. They hoped to stay the next night at a farm owned by an Englishman, but found it occupied by a trigger-happy Boer, and then were chased by pickets. Burnham and the natives evidently got separated. Boers were buzzing around the countryside like disturbed bees. The cause, Burnham suspected, was an imminent clash with the British Army.
Near daylight, he began to hear gunfire. The bare plain offered no place to hide, so he approached a group of huts. An alarmed old woman there tried to shoo him off before the Boers saw him. They would punish her by burning her huts, taking her goat and chicken, and perhaps killing her. He calmed her with two sovereigns in exchange for letting him wait out the day in one of her storage huts. She brought him a dish of goat’s milk and shut the door from the outside by leaning a pole against it.
The gunfire intensified and got closer. Burnham poked a hole in the mud wall and watched the battle of Zand River from the Boers’ vantage. As the morning passed and they began to retreat, several of them chose the old woman’s huts as a resting place. They ordered her to kill her goat and cook it for them, then sat leaning against the storage hut. A commandant rode up and told the woman to open the hut so he could eat in the shade. She bustled around the door, making noise to warn Burnham. His eyes had long since adjusted to the dim light, and he had noticed several sheepskins and sacks near one wall. He quickly backed farther into the dark and pulled them over him, crouching with his knees against his chest.
Daylight fell into the hut. The commandant and two officers entered and sat inside eating and discussing their next moves, a few feet away from the inert scout in sheep’s clothing. This time he only needed to hold the pose for an hour or so before they finished and rode off. At dark he crept back to the British lines with the information he had gleaned.
The British had advanced so quickly that Burnham’s original railway target was obsolete. Instead, he was ordered to report to Major Alymer Gould Hunter-Weston, Royal Engineer, for a mission to blow up the railroad fifty miles above Kroonstad, now the center of the Boers’ concentrated forces. Hunter-Weston asked for volunteers, warning that the Boers would be expecting them, so capture or death was likely. Two hundred men stepped forward. Hunter-Weston chose fifty cavalrymen and eight sappers. The plan was to burst through the picket lines in the dark, and when the Boers responded, the cavalry would fight, creating a diversion that allowed Burnham, Hunter-Weston, and the sappers to slip into the night toward the railway, with Burnham leading them past other pickets.
The diversion worked as planned. By four a.m. Burnham’s group was fifteen miles behind the lines and within a quarter mile of the railroad. But the Boers had stationed a commando just at the place the British wanted to blow up. A road busy with patrols and convoys ran in front of a farmhouse where some of the commandos were asleep. Others were scattered along the road. Their horses were in an adjacent pasture, enclosed by a barbed wire fence. To minimize the risk of casualties, Burnham and Hunter-Weston decided to blow the railroad themselves. They cut the fence and walked their horses into the pasture among the commando’s herd. On the other side, they snipped the wires and exited toward the railroad. There Burnham covered the fuse with his hat and Hunter-Weston lit it.
As they hurried back the way they had come, an explosion shook the air. Startled Boers began dashing about, but chaos and darkness helped the two men reach their patrol and take off. After a morning filled with pursuits and evasions—one man wounded, one horse killed, telegraph wires cut, seven prisoners captured—they reached the British lines about eleven o’clock. “This happened on my thirty-ninth birthday,” wrote Burnham, “so we called it a party.”
Hunter-Weston recommended Burnham for captain. “I have brought your excellent service to the notice of General French,” he wrote, “and have told him what a pleasure it is to have to do with a man who like yourself combines caution of counsel with boldness and quick decision in action.”
The Boers quickly repaired the railroad, so the exploit had minimal impact on the war, but the cheeky dash of it made great newspaper copy. Once again Burnham’s exploits were splashed across the London papers and picked up in the United States. On May 14, Blanche wrote to him that he was “making a great stir in the papers again.” The Daily Telegraph had devoted two columns that morning to Bennett Burleigh’s interview with him about the escape after Sanna’s Post. The Daily Mail, the Star, the Sun, and the St James’s Gazette all were carrying stories that day about the blown-up railroad bridge, calling it “a very daring deed.” There was also a large sketch of him in that week’s Black and White, a popular illustrated weekly, that showed him riding through some amazed Boers to warn Broadwood’s convoy about the ambush at Korn Spruit (which he didn’t do). By the time Blanche continued her letter three days later, several other papers had run the railroad story. “I am prouder than ever of you,” she wrote, “but your work is very dangerous not withstanding all you tell me.” The campaign seemed to be climaxing, she added, “So don’t let anything happen to you now.”
She didn’t mention her depression of the previous two weeks, caused by his prolonged absence and her anxieties about him. “I had the blues so deeply tinged that it amounted to genuine black agony,” she wrote to Burnham’s mother. “I could not help it. I felt so discouraged. Usually I try to keep in good spirits for the boys’ sake, for where mamma is blue life is not very cheerful and I must think of my boys.”
Her mood, and the mood of the whole country, was lifted a few days later when cables brought news that Mafeking had been relieved on May 17 after a siege of 217 days. Mafeking’s commander, Burnham’s friend Robert Baden-Powell, had become a household name as all of Britain followed his stubborn, jaunty, and often ingenious resistance. The nation celebrated for nearly a week. Blanche and Roderick went to the Crystal Palace to watch fireworks, wave ribbons, and blow trumpets. Roderick shouted until he was hoarse. The delirium was so strong that the next morning Blanche made sure all her husband’s civilian clothes were in good order, as if he might walk through the door. Later in the day, after reading in the papers that the war might continue for another two months, “I returned to my sober senses,” she wrote, “and for a short time went to the other extreme.”
She didn’t get her usual letter from Burnham that week, which she depended on for peace of mind.
Toward the end of May, when the British were closing in on Johannesburg, Lord Roberts wanted to cut the railroad between that gold-mining city and the Boers’ capital of Pretoria. The goal was to prevent the evacuation of rolling stock filled with critical supplies that could help extend the war. Burnham was given the mission. He was told not to blow the railroad until the attack on Johannesburg began, so that the Boers wouldn’t have time to destroy the cars and goods. To accompany him, Burnham chose the toughest native scout. The target was about 100 miles from the British lines, and they might have to survive many days on meager rations before the attack started.
The flat, treeless landscape was teeming with Boer troops, so the two scouts traveled only at night. By day they paid a few coins to hide in native huts and perhaps buy some eggs or a tough old hen. After skirting the dust and lights of Johannesburg, they reached their destination, the barren country north of the Rand. To hide during the day, they curled themselves into abandoned aardvark holes, exiting at night to stretch and to drink at a nearby spruit. Their food ran out.
After two aardvark days and nights, they finally heard the boom of artillery from the south. They popped from their holes, placed their explosives, and blew up the railway above a small station called Zurfontein, about twenty miles south of Pretoria. They took refuge in a maize field. This became their home and commissary for four days. Grinding at the raw corn made Burnham’s jaws so sore he could hardly talk. While waiting for the British forces to reach them, they cut the railroad at another place hard to repair, on a curve between two culverts, then retreated to their maize field. When the Boers fixed the break, the scouts blew it again.
It was time to leave before their luck ran out. The Boers still controlled the area between them and Johannesburg. They set off south, toward the British lines, and as day broke they hid in a large plantation of blue gum trees. Not long after, a Boer commando rode into the plantation and set up camp, walking through the grove to pick up dead wood for fuel. Burnham and the native obscured their profiles with branches of blue gum, creeping into vacant parts of the plantation ahead of the foraging Boers.
The day was highly stressful. The scouts were also hungry and terribly thirsty. When night finally came, the native fell to pieces. He was terrified the Boers would catch them and flog him to death. Boers treated white prisoners of war decently but habitually killed any natives caught helping the British. Burnham advised him to crawl into the veldt alone, so that if he got stopped, he could say he lived in Johannesburg and was trying to get home. Burnham took him through the Boer lines, then they separated.
The countryside toward Johannesburg was thick with Boer pickets. Burnham spent that night and part of the next day crawling, listening, evading. When he reached British lines late that morning, he had been gone for eleven days. After reporting to Lord Roberts, he slept for fourteen hours. When he got up, he learned that his railroad blasts had enabled the British to capture a dozen engines and 200 cars filled with supplies worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For the British, the next prize was Pretoria, the Boer capital, forty miles north of Johannesburg. The Boers’ supply lines in the south had been cut off. The last uncut artery was the 400-mile railroad between Pretoria and Lourenço Marques, a port on the Indian Ocean in Portuguese East Africa. Supplies from Lourenço Marques, especially munitions from Germany, helped the Boer army keep fighting. Lord Roberts also wanted to stop the Boers from evacuating supplies and artillery out of Pretoria, and he worried that the Boers would use the railroad to transport several thousand sickly British prisoners from Pretoria to fever country farther east.
On the evening of June 1, 1900, Burnham led 200 men under Major Hunter-Weston on a raid to blow up some of the railway’s bridges, curves, and culverts east of Pretoria. The area was thick with Boers, and by dawn it was clear that the raiders not only couldn’t reach the railroad but were in danger of being wiped out by overwhelming numbers. They retreated, fighting constant rearguard actions, and were lucky to get back with only twenty casualties.
As Burnham and the others were escaping with their lives, Blanche was writing to him that yesterday would have been Nada’s sixth birthday. “Six years ago this very evening,” she continued, “you came home and saw your little daughter. How I hate war when I think what it has cost us.”
For Lord Roberts, cutting the railroad between Pretoria and Lourenço Marques remained a priority. On June 2, the day after the failed first attempt, Burnham was ordered to undertake the mission alone. To improve the chances of getting through, Hunter-Weston led a diversionary raid to the west while Burnham rode east on his favorite Basuto pony, Stembok. He carried twenty-five pounds of guncotton in his pack and a map of every curve, culvert, and bridge on the railway.
At dusk he met a troop of twenty cavalrymen en route to the rail station at Irene, which lay in his general direction. The commander asked him to scout ahead for them. “I very much disliked delaying my special mission,” wrote Burnham, but the Lancers didn’t have a scout or even a native guide, so he felt he couldn’t refuse.
Sometime in the middle of the night they approached a small rise covered with tall grass. To Burnham it looked like a prime spot for a Boer outpost, so he stopped the troop to investigate. Typically he would have dismounted and reconnoitered on foot, “but so much time of the precious darkness had been wasted that I decided to chance it by working along on my mount.”
All remained quiet as he neared the summit. Then twenty Boers jumped up from the grass, rifles leveled, and yelled at him to surrender. He shouted, “Frints!” (friends), which froze the Boers for an instant. At the same time, he jerked the reins and slid sideways on Stembok, Indian style, putting the horse between him and the Boers as he galloped away. They fired. The British cavalrymen answered with a volley. A half moon gave the Boers enough light to follow Stembok’s profile, so Burnham dashed toward a patch of burnt ground that he thought would swallow their shape. When he reached the dark spot, 400 yards from the Boers, he felt safe enough to slow Stembok and sit upright.
Despite the British counter-volleys, one Boer marksman had stayed focused on the fleeing horseman. One of his bullets found Stembok. “My last vision of my good Stembok was his silhouette against the sky, legs in air, directly over me.”
When Burnham awoke, the moon was setting. That told him he had been unconscious for about two hours. The night was silent. He remembered Stembok rearing and falling on top of him. Excruciating pain hit him. He thought his back was broken. His frightened impulse was to summon help, even Boer help, by shouting or lighting a fire. No one would blame you, whispered his pain. You’ve done what you can. Give up.
“But in the instant the terrible pain slackened,” he wrote, “another voice spoke, in the simple words of bygone ancestors who did the right thing in the right way without any heroics whatever.” The temptation to surrender waned, “but the lesson of that night has never been forgotten—not to judge too harshly what a man may do under intense physical pain suddenly inflicted.”
The pack filled with explosives was still on his back. He stood and began to stumble in the direction of his target. He found he could lessen the pain by pressing hard on his abdomen with both hands. When dawn streaked the sky, he needed a place to hide. The veldt offered no cover. About a mile in front of him was a small marsh with a farmhouse at each side. Horses grazing nearby told him that both farmhouses were occupied by commandos. Just ahead stood a native’s small stone kraal, about three feet high. He crawled inside and lay against the wall.
All morning he heard Boers passing. Waves of pain assaulted him again, and the impulse returned to cry out for help. He passed out. Awake again, he had a spell of intense nausea, then vomited a great deal of blood. That seemed to relieve him a little and also calmed him, because he now felt sure he was going to die. He scrawled a note to Blanche. He hoped the British would advance quickly enough to find him before the Boers did, so he didn’t die a prisoner. He slept most of the day. When he woke, he felt a bit stronger.
At dusk he watched the Boers post pickets. They left a gap at the marsh, assuming that no one would try to cross there. So that became his plan. As soon as darkness fell, he waded in. The water was cold but never rose above his waist. He was helped, too, by the Boers’ practice of gathering each evening for a religious service. From both farmhouses came the sound of commandos chanting psalms.
Just before two o’clock he heard a train whistle and saw the lights of a distillery, the marker for his target. At the railroad track he set his charge of guncotton, lit the fuse, and crawled off into a grassy dent in the landscape. The explosion stirred the Boers at the distillery, but they didn’t send out a search party, evidently assuming that the saboteur was long gone. A repair crew immediately went to work, and by four o’clock they were finished.
Burnham had another charge of guncotton. When everything was quiet again, he crawled back to the railroad. He lit the fuse on another bomb, then crept into a better hiding place, another plantation of blue gum trees. The second explosion woke the Boers in an angry mood. They knew their enemy was still nearby, and they saddled up. Day was breaking. Burnham watched them spread out and begin to search the area. They were clearly country Afrikaners, expert at beating the veldt to flush prey.
Combing the area on horseback yielded nothing. The commander ordered them to burn the grass. Nothing. Burnham watched them turn their attention to the last possibility—the blue gum plantation. He knew they would search it, and if by some miracle they didn’t find him, they would raze it.
At the plantation’s margin, a small spruit was fringed by a strip of green grass about a foot high. At the edge of this strip grew a stunted gum tree about four feet tall, with spindly branches. Burnham judged the green grass his only hope of escaping a fire, as the green corn had saved him in Minnesota. The spindly tree seemed his best hope of eluding detection, because it so obviously could not hide a man and might get less attention.
To break up the outline of his body, he stuffed grass into his hat brim and through his pack’s shoulder straps. Then he wrapped himself around the thin trunk of the gum tree and lay motionless on his side. Several times, Boers rode right past his little tree. The commander, more and more irate, ordered the grove burnt. Then the Boers dismounted and walked along the rows of smoking trees, passing close by Burnham’s tiny oasis. And then they were gone.
The rest of the day was a torment of pain and disturbed sleep. The night passed the same way, with the addition of intense cold. He had no blanket. The next day dragged, but he could hear big guns booming to the west, a sign that Pretoria was under attack. He later learned that cutting the railroad had allowed the British to capture five engines and several hundred cars filled with supplies bound out of Pretoria.
He waited for the arrival of British forces, but none came. Darkness fell again. He hadn’t eaten anything for three days. Hunger and pain made him too weak to walk. He knew he wouldn’t survive another day’s wait. He cut up the guncotton bag, wrapped the canvas around his hands, and began crawling toward Pretoria.
The whispering voice of surrender returned. He resisted it by vowing to pull himself to a bush fifty yards away, then another, and another. Eventually he heard the calls of British pickets. He later calculated it had taken him five hours to crawl three miles.
He cried out. Once the picket realized it wasn’t a ruse, Burnham was rushed to the field hospital and into surgery. A large abdominal muscle had ruptured and a blood vessel had burst in his stomach. He should not have survived three days on the veldt, much less been capable of staggering several miles to a railroad, blowing it up twice, and crawling several more miles to safety.
He showed his usual amazing powers of recuperation by being up and about within a week, but the doctors forbade him to ride or do anything strenuous for several months. For him the war was over. He was being invalided to London. He had penetrated the Boer lines more than one hundred times, far more than any other scout.
“It is a source of satisfaction to me,” he wrote to his Uncle Josiah from the hospital, “to know I can beat the Boer at his own game and in his own country. They boasted they would have this Yankee in Pretoria inside a week as a prisoner.”
While Burnham was away, Lord Roberts had promoted him to captain. After the heroics of the last mission, Roberts promoted him to major. He also sent a note that Burnham later called his most precious possession. It said in part, “I doubt if any other man in the force could have successfully carried out the perilous enterprises in which you have from time to time been engaged, demanding as they did the training of a lifetime, combined with exceptional courage, caution, and powers of endurance.”
Soon after, Roberts awarded Burnham £2,000 “in recognition of the valuable services you rendered while attached to the F.I.D. [Field Intelligence Department] out here, more especially with regard to the large amount of rolling stock captured at Johannesburg, mainly through your exertions.”