6

The South African War, 1900–2

In departing for South Africa in the unexpected manner in which he did, Kitchener was saying goodbye to Egypt and Sudan after nearly 17 years of military and pro-consular service there. ‘I was surprised by a wire to say I had to go to South Africa’, he wrote to another of his many female correspondents, Lady Ilchester, with whom he would develop an unrequited romantic attachment. But despite Kitchener's peremptory departure from Sudan he was determined to ‘get things square’ in South Africa and ‘to show the Boers a somewhat different war game to that they have been having lately’, he continued.¹ In what had become a wholly imperial life, Kitchener's task in South Africa as Chief of Staff to the newly appointed Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief, would see him continue to serve at the centre of British imperial and military affairs. But unlike the campaign that Kitchener had just waged so successfully in Sudan whose victorious outcome was essentially a foregone conclusion, the war against the Boers had begun badly for the British and showed no (early) sign of changing for the better. In the manner of the time for the British the war had commenced with the same spirit of invincibility as seen in Sudan, but very quickly any assumption that they would have an easy stroll across the veldt disappeared in a hail of bullets from the enemy's superior Mauser rifles. From the moment that the Afrikaners’ (‘Boers’, Dutch for farmer, as the British called them) had declared war on Britain on 11 October 1899, rather surprisingly they had been able to maintain the upper hand. Three signal and successive victories by the Boers in mid-December (‘Black Week’) had a devastating impact on British morale both in the field and back in Britain, imperiling the war altogether as far as the Salisbury government was concerned. Hence the call went out to Roberts of Kandahar – ‘the pocket Wellington’ – and to Kitchener of Khartoum – ‘the Sudan machine’ – the twin luminaries of late-Victorian British imperial arms. The prevailing belief was that in their perennially victorious and capable hands the recent British losses could be reversed and the war would move toward the inevitability of a triumphant conclusion.² To this end, having reached Alexandria on 21 December, Kitchener boarded ship for Gibraltar where he met up with Roberts who had just arrived from his former post as Commander in Chief in Ireland. Together they made a physically incongruous pair: Kitchener standing tall as we know at 6’2” beside the diminutive 5’4” Roberts. But in every other way except for height they were perfectly compatible and complementary. Their two-week passage to Cape Town beginning on the 27th was a time of much earnest conversation and strategizing about the state of the war, which included everything from leadership, to weaponry, to supply. Broken only by a New Year's 1900 toast on board the Dunottar Castle (on which Kitchener's bete noire, Winston Churchill, had also sailed to Cape Town just two months earlier), and dampened by Roberts's grief over the death of his only son, Freddie, at the Battle of Colenso just a few weeks earlier, they arrived in South Africa ready to turn around British fortunes.³ The cheers for their appointment and assumed success both there and in Britain were deafening.

In reaching Cape Town on 10 January, Kitchener was sailing into some 300 years of direct British engagement with South Africa. The Cape had long been of interest to the British because in the years prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 the journey to India meant an obligatory re-provisioning stop there en route. The ruling East India Company had foundered on the sharp crisis entailed by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, but the years of using Cape Town as its main port on the slow passage to the sub-continent meant that Britain's connection to South Africa was strong, especially so from 1806 when it had come under Crown control in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars.

By that year the descendants of the region's first European settlers, the Dutch, who along with a smaller group of Germans and Huguenots from France, had arrived in 1652, saw South Africa as their home and were disinclined to share any measure of it with the British. They called themselves Afrikaners and clung fiercely to a Calvinistic sense of their own destiny as participants in a land-based covenant with God, and certainly in superiority to the pre-existing native peoples.⁴ At first, after 1806, these old verities continued to be operative. The British were not yet very interested in colonization and Cape Town continued largely to be a trading and provisioning entrepot and therefore of no threat, as such, to the exceptional way in which the Afrikaners regarded their own burgeoning settlement in the Cape. Similarly, the nearby naval base at Simonstown was of strategic use only to the British and therefore of no day to day concern to the Afrikaners. But the British and allied victory at Waterloo in 1815 and the final end of the long period of war with French Revolutionary and Napoleonic France changed how Britain regarded South Africa. Consequently, the view from London progressively became more expansive and expressly colonizing and the die was cast for a much keener intra-European competition than had hitherto prevailed at the Cape.

Meanwhile, for generations, the Afrikaners had been gradually pushing north and east from Table Bay, moves that long pre-dated the British arrival. Indeed, this migration continued but with greater urgency after 1806 and it meant both interminable clashes with the native Xhosa and Zulu populations, as well as an unfolding problem for the extension of competitive British rule. In essence, the Boers’ trekking away from the Cape was an expression of their desire to avoid the inevitable anglicisation of the region by the paramount British. But it also had geo-strategic consequences because it spread the Boer population even more thinly than it already was, therefore obliging the British to either follow and potentially supervise and govern these remote settlements, or leave them be as quasi-independent and largely beyond their effective reach.⁵

Until the mid-1830s, leaving the Boers in situ was the prevailing British policy, but during that decade two sets of events altered significantly the approach the British at Cape Town took to their putative South African hinterland. The first was the Zulu uprising under their great chief, Shaka. The mfecane (crushing) that he unleashed resulted in the consolidation of a powerful nation of some 250,000 people, 20 per cent of whom comprised a celibate warrior elite. His creation of Zululand was both unifying and displacing, in that those who were not brought into the newly consolidated kingdom found themselves exiled beyond its traditional boundaries, which meant essentially north of the Orange river. This (forced) migration potentially extended the British zone of responsibility in ways that few in Cape Town saw as a good or manageable development. Second, and partly in response to the robust, military nature of Shaka's nation-building success, and partly as a result of the abolition of slavery within the British Empire in 1834, thousands of Boers decided that in order to escape beyond the reaches of both the ensconced British and the expanding Zulu they would migrate even further to the northeast and there found a new Boer homeland, which they did, calling it the Natal ‘republic’. The Great Trek, as this event became known, saw some 15,000 voortrekkers leave the Cape and set out on a hard and warlike journey to establish a new and remote home. This passage, especially, the decisive Boer victory over the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River in 1838, consolidated the necessary elements of land and covenant in their minds and contributed mightily to their self-understanding as a myth-driven people chosen of God.⁶

Faced with the political and geographic reality of Natal the British decided that the only way to prevent Afrikaner competition on the frontier was to formally annex the embryo colony, which it did in 1843. Annexation, in turn, led the outraged Boers to repeat the process of the Great Trek, though in a less dramatic but ultimately longer-lasting fashion, by founding two new republics, calling them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. For the next generation there matters stood, the British at the Cape (and in Natal) looking on in considerable discomfort as the Afrikaners gradually consolidated their ‘covenant’ society in the South African interior. Later, and spurred by the attempts of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, an unofficial imperial agent based in Natal, to conjure British federal control over the South African interior, the Transvaal was annexed in 1877. For a short time it seemed that British imperial power locally-exerted might just be strong enough to contain the proto-nationalism of the Boers (as well as that of the Zulu). But that assumption was given a sharp rebuttal through the signal defeat of the British by the Zulu at Isandlwana in January 1879; although that defeat was reversed a few months later when a decisive revenge was achieved by the British at the Battle of Ulundi.⁷ But the victory had a short-lived impact on Anglo-Boer relations because the crushing of the Zulu by the imperial fist worked as much in the Boers favour as it did in the British by allowing the Boers to consolidate their own strength in light of the destruction of that of the competing Zulu. By 1880 therefore, and under the defiant religio-political leadership of Paul Kruger, the Transvaal was in open revolt against the annexationist claims of the British. The next year a trio of surprising British military defeats culminating at the Battle of Majuba Hill put an exclamation point on the Boers’ refusal to live under outside rule.⁸ Faced thereby with an intractable enemy, the Gladstone government in London decided that there simply was no effective way of exerting British control over the Afrikaners of the South African interior so they negotiated the Convention of Pretoria and with it, in the words of John Darwin, ‘scrapped the Transvaal's annexation and threw away the federal plan’.⁹

Constitutionally and politically, the re-emergence of ‘stalemate’ in Anglo-Boer relations in South Africa might have continued uninterrupted except for the impact, first of the discovery of diamonds in 1867, and then of gold in 1886.¹⁰ Mineral wealth had already altered and would continue to change just about everything in imperial equation making in the region and it pushed the British to (re-)assert their regional suzerainty, a provision preserved for themselves in the Pretoria convention. Naturally disliked by Kruger, upon becoming Transvaal's president in 1883 he succeeded in having the suzerainty principle eliminated from the succeeding 1884 Anglo-Boer convention. But two years later, the Witwatersrand gold rush began and with it the so-called European ‘gold bugs’ – led by Cecil Rhodes – were determined not to let Kruger block their path to both riches and preponderant British control over the Transvaal, and indeed all of South Africa. For the balance of the 1880s and into the next decade the Transvaal thus became the fulcrum of the Anglo-Boer struggle for the interior of South Africa. Moreover, for Rhodes in particular, as a member of Cape Colony's legislative assembly and later its prime minister, he was determined to actualize his ‘big idea’, the dream of a constitutionally unified South Africa in which Anglo-Boer cooperation transcended old animosities and together (using the Cape as a model) the two peoples would create a society in which the whites were in the ascendant politically over the blacks and London was the paramount power of all.¹¹

By 1890, Rhodes had combined political power in the Cape with a persuasive imperial dream in London to yield a British government charter allowing for settler expansion north of the Limpopo river into what would become Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe). Indeed, Rhodes's plan for imperial aggrandisement knew no bounds; he would later lash out at Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal party leader and a vocal critic of his expansive plans, by saying haughtily: ‘Nobody is going to name a country after you’.¹² But these serial provocations – which included an enormous expansion in the non-Boer uitlander (‘foreigner’) population attracted by mineral-rich Transvaal – prompted Kruger to do everything possible to resist what to Rhodes at least was Britain's imperial manifest destiny. This resistance ultimately would prove unanswerable to Rhodes, and feeling the frustration that always arose when he was not able to ‘square’ a problem, he decided to hit Kruger hard because he more than anyone else stood in the way of his grand dream for South Africa.¹³ The desperate result was the so-called Jameson Raid carried out at the end of 1895. Launched peremptorily by Rhodes and financed with L200,000 supplied by one of the other leading gold bugs, Alfred Beit, the raid was an attempt to provoke an uitlander uprising against the Kruger government over its civil restrictions affecting what had become the Transvaal's majority non-Boer population.¹⁴ Ill-conceived and badly executed, the 500-man raid was under the direction of one of Rhodes's loyal associates, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, and ended as a fiasco. The outcome of the failed raid was three-fold: first, it consolidated Kruger's position both as President of the Transvaal and as the moral leader of the Boers throughout South Africa; second, it blackened but (owing to political chicanery in London) did not destroy Rhodes's public reputation; and third, it laid bare the likelihood of a future war between Boer and Briton in South Africa.

For the next three years, most close participants in or observers of the situation in the Transvaal and throughout South Africa generally assumed that it was now merely a matter of time before the two sides resorted to violence in order to firmly and finally impress upon the other what would be the victorious identity of the regional paramount power. ‘It is our country you want’, Kruger stated bluntly in mid-1899 to Sir Alfred (later Lord) Milner, the British High Commissioner to the Cape.¹⁵ The burly Boer was absolutely right. Coarsely, Milner admitted privately that he was out to ‘screw’ the Boers.¹⁶ And indeed, to most Boers such appeared to be the case. In London, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, a strong supporter of Rhodes's and Milner's view of the situation – ‘I believe in the British Empire, and I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen’ – plumped for war and in the event he got what he wanted when an exasperated Kruger finally issued a war ultimatum in the autumn of 1899.¹⁷ Chamberlain duly used it as a necessary casus belli to convince Prime Minister Salisbury and the Cabinet that given the circumstances going to war against the Boers was their only option.¹⁸ Accordingly, on 11 October 1899, the British having let the ultimatum expire, a column of Boers crossed the border from the Transvaal into Natal and the long percolating war boiled over into reality.

For the properly militarily confident British the first few months of the war would prove to be a sharp shock, however. Most assumed that the war would be a quick and decisive engagement against an obviously inferior enemy; ‘another Omdurman picnic’ as a young and cocksure British infantryman put it.¹⁹ Very soon into the war, however, the fierceness and unconventional fighting style of the Boer enemy, together with the as yet unrecognized mastery of their use of a superior weapon in the form of the German Mauser assault rifle, left the British reeling. Especially was this true after a triumvirate of defeats (at Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso) in December that collectively constituted Black Week to the British. ‘The feeling here,’ wrote Major General Hector MacDonald – like Kitchener having transferred from Sudan to South Africa – ‘though not openly expressed, is one of profound helplessness’.²⁰ Stunned, demoralized, and embarrassed by these losses, immediately following upon the Black Week disaster the call went out for fresh British military leadership to take control in South Africa and reverse the so-far disastrous course of the war. And so it was that Field Marshal Roberts – nursing the ‘terrible trial’ of the death of his 27-year-old son – and General Kitchener, directly from Sudan, steamed into Cape Town on 10 January 1900 ready to reverse the failed trajectory of the war in ways that would restore equipoise in the face of the incongruous reality that the greatest military power in the world was so far being bested in battle, as one newspaper had earlier derided the Transvaal, by a ‘trumpery little state’ led by its ‘impudent burghers’.²¹ No one was saying that any longer, however.

During the first four weeks following their arrival at the Cape Kitchener and Roberts mapped out the specifics of a new strategy aimed at winning a complete victory, plans that included importing the newly honoured Sir Percy Girouard of Sudan fame to direct railway expansion and transport. The preceding defeats were thought to be the fault of erroneous strategy, failed execution, and inferior supply, and the two generals worked immediately to rectify them all. The difficulties faced by the new British military brain-trust were made plain again, however, within a fortnight. On 24 January under the command of the hapless and recently-demoted-but-still-in-the-field General Redvers Buller the British had suffered yet another humiliating defeat, this time at Spion Kop in northern Natal. Over 1,700 British troops were killed there (compared to just 300 Boers) and any hope of relieving the nearby besieged town of Ladysmith evaporated with the comprehensive defeat.²² This setback was hardly what the new duo of commanders would have wished for, but it did reinforce the urgency with which they needed to act in order to turn the tide of the war in Britain's favour. To do so, their new strategy initially meant establishing a single thrust north in order to push back the hitherto successful Boer incursion of the northern Cape made under General ‘Piet’ Cronje. Accordingly, early in February, their plans now operative, Kitchener and Roberts secretly stole out of Cape Town by train and steamed north about 600 miles to the Modder river where almost 40,000 British troops were now encamped in accordance with their most recently issued orders.²³ Not very far away from them a surprised Cronje lay bivouacked with his troops. In the ensuing fight, as we shall see, he made it clear however that it would take more than famous generals and the element of surprise to best him and his tight and fierce band of Afrikaner men hunkered down in their protective laager.

The Battle of Paardeberg, as the Modder river engagement would be called, and fought from 18–27 February 1900, turned into a partial disaster for the British that threatened to make almost normative the narrative of their serial defeat which had so far defined the Anglo-Boer War. Paardeberg would prove also to be a highly frustrating experience for Kitchener and do nothing to burnish his reputation for victory so recently consolidated at Omdurman. Still, despite Paardeberg's uneven impact on both sides of the conflict, its outcome signalled the renewal of British fortunes in the war by beginning the steady march toward victories in the field, the relief of a number of besieged towns, and hence to a halting form of peace later that year.

In light of Black Week the uncomprehending British public were baying for a victory of any sort in South Africa. Kimberley's state of siege (along with that of Ladysmith and Mafeking) was well-reported in the press, and the inability of British commanders and troops to relieve its suffering inhabitants was a constant source of outrage to both journalists and readers well-used to the jingo model of British success rather than to the impotence of protracted besiegement. Leading the demand for relief was Cecil Rhodes himself, trapped in Kimberley and vociferous (even theatrical) in his calls for action. ‘In the interests of humanity’, he wrote in the local Diamond Fields Advertiser on 10 February, ‘the relief of this beleaguered city can no longer be delayed’.²⁴ In fairness to Rhodes, Kimberley had been under siege for some four months by then and the situation was indeed grim. Still, the state of affairs there was no worse than anywhere else in Boer-held territory, and Roberts was certainly moving at speed towards breaking the enemy's hold over the diamond capital of South Africa. But relieving Kimberley was only one piece of a larger puzzle that he was trying to solve. And in military terms defeating Cronje (with another strong Boer commander, Christiaan De Wet, also located nearby) was more pressing than acting on Rhodes's impudent demand sent to Roberts and containing the line: ‘It is high time you did something’.²⁵ Still, Rhodes got his wish on 15 February when Kimberley indeed was freed by British forces under the command of Major General Sir John French, who later would join other Boer War veterans like Edmund Allenby and Douglas Haig in going on to serve prominently in World War I.

The relief of Kimberley, though welcomed deliriously by the exhausted and dispirited inhabitants of the town, proved a prelude to the bloody Battle of Paardeberg. On the same day as Kimberley's relief was achieved, Cronje began to move his men from Magersfontein – site of one of the key Boer victories during Black Week in December – to the Modder river. By the evening of the 17th he and his roughly 7,000 troops were dug in along the north side of the river and had formed a defensive laager. Observing this typical Boer formation from a hill (kopje) on the other side of the river was Kitchener. Given the fact that Kitchener's force was vastly superior in manpower and guns, the battle to come should have been a relatively easy one for the British. But no such ease was found, however, over the ten-days that followed.

From the summit of ‘Kitchener's Kopje’, as it came to be called, Cronje's embedded troops appeared vulnerable to a sustained bombardment of their position. Such certainly was the view of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Kelly-Kenny, commander of the British 6th Division, and he was probably right. He was overruled, however, by Kitchener, who, in light of Roberts having just fallen ill with a severe fever, had been given overall command of the fluid situation on the banks of the Modder. Kelly-Kenny was unhappy about this state of affairs, which diminished his role, but he had no choice but to fall in train with Kitchener's decision to try and smash Cronje's position through a series of infantry attacks rather than through long-range bombardment.²⁶ Kitchener's instinct here was that of the predatory general in search of a decisive victory, not only because of what it would mean in the field, but even more because of its potential to significantly raise morale amongst the British troops in South Africa, as well as of people in England and throughout the Empire. Above all, given the war's prevailing situation, no one on the British side wanted to endure another siege.

‘It is now seven o'clock’, said Kitchener to one of his aides-de-camp on the morning of 18 February. ‘We shall be in the laager by half past ten’.²⁷ The bravado exhibited by Kitchener here might be understandable given the overwhelming nature of his still fresh-in-mind victories in Sudan. But archaically- and lightly-armed jihadists were a world away from the battle-hardened Boers who lay dug-in across the Modder river, and Kitchener's determination to break them in a direct attack was peremptory, if not reckless. In the event, he ordered the artillery to open up on Cronje's laager, followed directly by an infantry advance. The guns caused havoc, as expected, and he would have been wise to let them continue to do their destructive work. But ordering the subsequent infantry advance meant that British troops began quickly to die in droves, picked off with ease hundreds of yards before reaching the river by Boer sharpshooters using their accurately-sited Mausers. By 10:30, far from being in the laager, the battle was showing signs of a slog cum potential disaster as British casualties mounted in lock-step with the relentless rise in the day's temperature.

At Paardeberg Kitchener had adopted his usual sole-commander mode, partly as we have seen earlier out of habit, but partly too because in the hurried devolution of command from the ailing Roberts he had been left without a proper staff. As the day wore on the pattern of attack therefore continued unchanged. British infantry assaults from the south, east, and west were all parried by the Boers and the harvest of death continued apace. Supplementing the British were a contingent of recently-arrived Canadians, so-called ‘Imperial’ troops, the vanguard of which had departed Quebec City to tremendous fanfare at the end of October 1899. Thrown into action at Paardeberg, they fought well (34 were killed) in what amounted to the first-ever use of Canadian troops abroad.²⁸ More than any other single action during the early part of the war, the use of the Royal Canadian Regiment at Paardeberg made the actual fight against the Boers the business of the dominions within the British Empire.²⁹

By the evening of the 18th the stout defence that Cronje and his hunkered-down men (and women) were able to mount in their bowed but unbroken laager made it clear to Kitchener that a decisive victory was not going to come his way that day. In an earlier bid for a breakthrough Kitchener had ordered a mounted charge – ‘the laager must be rushed at all costs’.³⁰ Led bravely by Colonel Ormelie Hannay, the full-speed gallop by him and his chosen men put them directly in the line of fire and they suffered an unsurprising fate, even though the Boers themselves were reluctant to shoot such an obviously misguided target.

The day thus ended on a sour note for the British. Kitchener was intensely frustrated at the inability of his men to dislodge Cronje's troops and force them to surrender. Indeed, the day was shaping up as yet another British Boer War folly in the form of 1,270 British and Canadian casualties, including 303 killed, the number outstripping easily that which had been suffered at Omdurman.³¹ Indeed, no other single day in the South African War would offer up such dreadful figures, providing hundreds of examples of Thomas Hardy's fictional composite, ‘Young Hodge the Drummer’, his poetic memorialization of those who fell and were buried on a ‘kopje-crest that breaks the veldt around’.³² If Cronje's beleaguered force had been in such a hopeless position themselves, folly might have been exactly the outcome for Kitchener and the British. But the Boers had suffered too, and had neither the resources nor the manpower to absorb the relentless British pounding. Some 100 of them had been killed by bombardment, with a further 250 wounded. Hundreds of their horses had been killed also, their putrid and bloated bodies floating downriver and carrying disease into the camp of the British and the Canadians, the latter of whom promptly renamed Paardeberg, ‘Stinkfontein’. Given the over 2:1 British numerical superiority, their lack of mobility, and the unlikely nature of Boer reinforcements making it through to help them, Cronje and his men were themselves in a hopeless situation. But out of honour and defiance they chose to remain encamped along the Modder for more than a week. Having been informed by Kitchener that the laager had not been breached but that optimistically ‘I hope tomorrow we shall be able to do something more definite’, a recovering Lord Roberts arrived during the morning of the 19th and quickly surveyed the prevailing scene.³³ Kitchener, insistent that the battle could be won, pressed him hard to keep up the pressure on Cronje in an attempt to win an outright victory. But Roberts demurred. Meanwhile, Cronje asked the British for doctors (he had none) and a truce to bury the Boer dead. Rather inhumanely, Roberts refused. The stalemate thus continued. Nearby and still at large the tough and talented Boer commander De Wet – who later would be immortalized in one of Kipling's poems of the Boer War, ‘Ubique’, was hopeful that he just might be able to spring his comrades from the British noose.³⁴ But he was bombarded relentlessly and finally on the 21st De Wet simply gave up and retreated. Cronje now was approaching his wits’ end. Outraged that his request for a truce had been rejected, he defied the British to do their worst: ‘Do as you please. I shall not surrender alive. Therefore bombard as you please’.³⁵ But defiance in the face of a superior enemy usually has its limits and Cronje met his a few days later on the 27th. After a couple of final British and Canadian assaults on the Boer laager, he could stand it no longer and reluctantly raised the white flag. After a brutal ten days the Battle of Paardeberg at last was over.

By the time of the Boer surrender Roberts had ordered Kitchener to leave the battlefield in order to start preparations for the planned march on the capital of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein. Paardeberg had proved to be a necessary stop on the Field Marshal's drive northwards. The battle had been protracted, bloody, costly, not very well commanded, and, to some extent, inhumane. But it was a clear victory, the first significant one of the war for the British and one that in the minds of many had reversed the ignominious defeat at Majuba Hill, the 19th anniversary of which had come exactly that day. This fact was lost on none of the combatants. Criticism of Kitchener's command at Paardeberg, both then and later, was strong and in part is justified. But in his drive to attain victory in a war that hitherto had spiralled into ignominy he was prescient in understanding that in an age when war existed as a tripartite enterprise amongst the government, the military, and the public, the latter of these especially would welcome victory with little remonstration as to cost. He was exactly right in this assumption, and in both the view of the public and that of the government, the victory at Paardeberg was the catalyst that turned around British fortunes in the war. The sight of over 4,000 Boer soldiers being led away into captivity from the Modder river was graphic evidence that all could be right again for the British in South Africa and victory over those who were considered a lesser people attained.

Naturally, Kitchener shared the renewal of British martial spirit that accompanied the victory at Paardeberg and hoped that it portended more of the same in the immediate future. The overmatched Boers indeed now were reeling and as the British continued to blunt their enemy's offensives and relieve long-held towns such as Ladysmith (on 1 March) the turning-point that was Paardeberg became clearer still. To this end, Roberts and Kitchener continued to work very closely together in the late-winter and early-spring of 1900. The informal nature of Boer military service meant that an increasing number of their fighting men decided that in the face of burgeoning British power (both home and Imperial troops continued to flood into South Africa) returning to their farms and towns to defend their families directly was the right thing to do. Roberts wished to maximize every advantage that the recent victory afforded and within two weeks of Cronje's surrender he was marching with over 30,000 men, intent on taking Bloemfontein, which duly occurred on 13 March. The much-maligned Buller's success at Ladysmith – ‘General Buller Gets There At Last’, shouted a representative newspaper headline – sent an already heightened British and Empire public into paroxysms of celebration, giving the impression that final victory might now really be at hand.³⁶

Of course, such thinking would prove to be significantly premature, but in the glow of victory – and nothing would match the celebrations surrounding the relief of the 217-day siege of Mafeking (17 May) where Colonel Robert Baden-Powell had created an epic of survival, sparking sheer, unadulterated jingo joy across Britain and beyond – the end of the war seemed nigh.³⁷ In the meantime, Kitchener was tasked by Roberts with putting down rebellion in the Western Cape, which he did with his usual grim ferocity. As the war dragged on Kitchener's regard for the Boers sank ever lower. While admiring of their patriotic spirit, he considered their constant movement and wont to hide and dash about somehow unmanly in warfare and therefore faintly dishonourable. A fair fight meant mano a mano to Kitchener – notwithstanding, however, the tremendous mechanized pounding he had just recently inflicted on the Mahdi's Sudanese. But at least they had come on a straight line. Chasing the Boers, on the other hand, who ‘are always running away on their little ponies’, he complained, had become nothing but aggravating to him.³⁸

Despite such complaints the spring of 1900 would belong to the British. Following on Roberts’ taking of Bloemfontein in March his next major target was Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal. By April he was readying to make a direct march on it and in so doing, he believed, win the war. In support of this belief his army kept growing larger and larger. Roberts now commanded 170,000 troops in the field, and he intended to use over half of them to take Pretoria. In defence, the Boers could muster no more than about 30,000 men. Could David beat Goliath, or would this particular version of the story have a different ending?

A distance of 300 miles stood between Roberts and Pretoria. Beginning on 3 May he would traverse it in just 34 days. His passage was not quite an ‘Omdurman picnic’, but resistance to his passage indeed was limited, the Boers melting into the margins in the face of a swarm of British and Empire troops, well-armed and singing triumphantly: ‘We are marching to Pretoria!’ as they moved virtually unimpeded across the veldt. En route Roberts announced the annexation of the Orange Free State. Crossing the Vaal river the approach to Johannesburg was made with little resistance and on 31 May the Union Jack was hoisted over the nearly-deserted city. Pretoria was now just 35 miles distant. Within the city panic reigned as the British approached. President Kruger fled east, and would leave the country altogether in October, beginning a peripatetic exile through France, Germany, and the Netherlands before dying eventually in Switzerland in 1904. In the event, Pretoria's defences proved to be almost non-existent, reduced to a pair of battalions, and on 5 June the remaining denizens of the Transvaal capital witnessed the raising of the Union Jack over the central square watched keenly by a triumphant and satisfied Roberts and Kitchener. The Boers had been duly smote and the war was drawing swiftly to a close, or so it seemed.

As victory prevailed in Pretoria outside it in the Transvaal countryside a new kind of war was developing, however, which would prolong the Anglo-Boer conflict and prove to be a harbinger of many other twentieth-century wars to come. Thousands of Boers – some calling themselves bittereinders – were not willing to accept that their cause had come to an end with the fall of their capital cities and therefore they would fight on to the ‘bitter end’, guerilla-style. As stark as the symbolism of set-piece defeat may have been, the fight could and should go on, they believed, and with the inspirational leadership of a number of commanders remaining in the field – principally De Wet – such is exactly what took place. In light of this emergent development, Kitchener immediately was sent south by Roberts following the rapturous scenes in Pretoria to deal with De Wet's series of successful pin-pricks against British supply- and communications-lines. These raids were proving highly inspirational to those commandos who wished to maintain the fight against the British despite their defeat in otherwise conventional terms. De Wet's success and that of other field commanders such as ‘Koos’ De la Rey, Marthinus Prinsloo, and Marthinus Steyn, erstwhile president of the OFS, and what they represented, were of serious concern to the British and on 12 June, just prior to his 50th birthday, Kitchener experienced up-close just what daring Boer commandos could do.

On that day, merely a week after Pretoria had been taken, Kitchener was bivouacked not far south of the city at the Heilbron Road rail station after a day spent supervising a series of repairs to railway lines and bridges. As evening fell, De Wet and his men stole silently into the British camp and began to overwhelm and take prisoner a number of soldiers who had been guarding Kitchener and his work company. Alerted to the enemy's presence, Kitchener, his ADC, and a number of other men made immediately for their horses and swiftly set off cross-country to the safety of another British camp. At the outset, at least, it looked like only Kitchener would escape the Boer net.³⁹ Indeed, De Wet did not realize just how close he had been to snaring Roberts’ Chief of Staff and right-hand man, but Kitchener had come as near to being caught by the enemy as he ever would be while in a position of senior command.

The celebration that had resulted from the taking of Pretoria and the accompanying British assumptions about an impending end to the war thus rapidly became short-lived. Indeed, by the middle of June the situation was devolving into a full-scale guerilla war – much to the satisfaction of De Wet who had long advocated that an unconventional war was in fact the only way the Boers could hope to defeat the British – and Roberts responded by enunciating the manner by which support for the commandos could be interdicted and destroyed. Farm-burning thus became British policy (over 600 Boer farms were burned by the end of the year) when it could be shown that Boer commandos were gaining succour from the community in which their acts of sabotage and destruction were taking place. As a necessary corollary to this policy Roberts ordered that women and children resident on such farms were to be placed in ‘camps of refuge’ until such time as the war came to an end and they could return home. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1900 as some Boer fighters surrendered themselves to the British under a general amnesty, many thousands of others chose to defy the offer and remain in the field starkly refusing to lay down their arms. To have done so would have meant abandoning the hope of maintaining an independent Afrikanerdom. Roberts, now on the cusp of being named Commander in Chief of the British Army by the recently re-elected Salisbury Unionist Government, resigned and sailed for home at the end of November, his almost-full year fighting the Boers complete. Kitchener, likewise looking ahead to what might be in prospect beyond South Africa – ‘Am anxious to get India. Can you help?’ he wrote to St John Brodrick, Secretary of War – was named to succeed Roberts and wrap up the conflict.⁴⁰ Notwithstanding the success the commandos were having against the British Kitchener still considered the war to be ‘almost over’, as he wrote to the Queen just a few months before her death, and thus planning for the future must be made.⁴¹ But for Kitchener the really hard work of the war in fact was only just beginning and, as it transpired, the war would extend all the way until mid-1902.

The New Year 1901 opened with Kitchener strategizing over how to end the infuriating effectiveness of the Boer commandos. The ever-elusive Christiaan De Wet had acquired folk-hero status in the eyes of many of his sullenly defeated countrymen, one of the few bright lights that existed for patriotic Afrikaners in the aftermath of the annexation of their two erstwhile states by the British. Adding a cruel fillip to their conventional defeat was the fact that one of the chief architects of the war and the arch-enemy of Kruger, Sir Alfred Milner, was now in charge of the civilian administration of both the Transvaal and the re-named Orange River Colony. As suggested earlier, Kitchener's relationship with Milner was both perfunctory and testy. He was happy enough to let Milner go quietly about his work while he himself got on with executing the war, but they distrusted one another implicitly and Milner's ‘race patriotism’ – as he later called it himself – and insistence that the Boers must offer an unconditional surrender in the service of his imperial zealotry Kitchener found to be both distasteful and unrealistic.⁴² For Milner's part, he understood his own position, however, and was ‘quite willing to lie low, and let my administratorship [sic] be a farce, until the country is pacified, if there is only progress in that direction’.⁴³

And progress was exactly what Kitchener was planning to make when he settled upon a plan to break the commandos’ ability to harry and sabotage British troops, railways and rolling stock, and supply lines, the very work that would inspire Kipling to pen yet another of his odes to the Boer War, ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’.⁴⁴ Characteristically, Milner thought Kitchener muddle-headed in his being unable to come up with a plan to combat successfully the commandos.⁴⁵ Others shared the criticism and it is one that some biographers and historians have held since.⁴⁶ But given the circumstances, Kitchener's ruminations over what to do in order to win a guerilla war, something that (outside of the Spanish-American War of 1898) no modern commander fighting a mechanized war had yet been required to do, is hardly surprising. ‘I puzzle my brain to find out some way of finishing but without much result’, as he wrote to a friend in the midst of his attempt to work out an answer to the commando question.⁴⁷ Indeed, the only surprise is that it took him just a few weeks to come up with the rather ingenious plan that by building a series of linked blockhouses across the veldt Boers riding out on commando could be systematically funnelled into catchment areas and thereby have their raids nullified. By the end of January, and barely into the top-job, he was sure of the plan's potential and therefore implementation of it began. The task of constructing blockhouses was immense, however, but eventually over 8,000 of them were built connecting a network of lines almost 4,000 miles long. Linked initially by barbed wire before being replaced by stronger annealed cables highly resistant to cutting, the blockhouses stood about one and a half miles apart. Later the distance between them was cut in half. Almost immediately the impact of the blockhouse system was felt by the Boers. The ‘bag’, as Kitchener referred colloquially to apprehended Boer commandos, duly increased steadily: the old sapper now was at work, doing what he did best.

The main target in this new endeavor was De Wet and any of the other prominent commando leaders still at large. He proved, however, too slippery to catch and indeed came to make sport out of eluding his putative captors and their elaborate ‘spider's web’, as he derided the blockhouse system.⁴⁸ There's little doubt, however, that with the introduction of the networked blockhouse Kitchener and the British had increased greatly the territorial pressure that they could bring to bear on De Wet and his commandos. In conjunction with securing as many of the river drifts (fords) as possible, and continuing with Roberts’ policy of farm-burning, the blockhouse web was having the desired effect. Altogether, the war had turned dirtier than ever, however. Perhaps it is a romantic conceit to see conventional war as being more honourable than what the Anglo-Boer War had turned into, but clearly the conflict had devolved into a highly nasty scrap in which any and all means to defeat the enemy were being used by both sides. Britain's size advantage leant it considerable weight in achieving its military goals through reprehensible practices, but the Boers on a smaller scale re-paid their enemies in kind, including – and with considerable vociferousness – those black Africans who chose to support the British. When captured by the Boers summary execution was their usual fate. ‘It is a horrid war. No straight fighting,’ wrote Kitchener in April, and indeed that is exactly what it had become.⁴⁹ But worse, if there could be such a thing in this war, was yet to be seen.

Roberts’ decision in June of 1900 to begin to place Boer women and children (and some men) in camps of refuge had resulted in tragically unexpected ramifications. The impulse to establish camps to house those who were forced to evacuate their farms prior to the buildings being burnt, within the context of war, was a humanitarian one, though the plan became seriously flawed in execution. The burning of farms itself, while harsh, was not out of line as a tactic of war, and certainly given that the Boers had chosen to continue the war in guerilla style they had given to British command every justification for attempting to eradicate their method of sanctuary and supply. Still, to many at the time (and many more later), farm-burning and turning out of doors vulnerable non-combatants was seen as a reprehensible step by the British, especially as it led to the development of a series of so-called ‘concentration’ camps. (The Nazis’ later use of the term prior-to and during World War II has meant that it is almost impossible to examine the camps in an un-emotive way. Still, it was clear from the outset that neither Roberts nor Kitchener, nor anyone else directly involved in the construction and maintenance of the camps, harboured any of the sinister plans for systematic murder or genocide by which the Nazis would later become infamous.)

No one in British command liked doing what was believed to be necessary to speed up the end of the war by breaking the will and ability of the Boer commandos to remain operative in the field. Farms were at the very heart of Afrikaner society and setting them alight seemed an assault on its very essence, which it was. Indeed, many British soldiers tasked with the job of evacuating farm residents prior to putting their properties to the torch did so reluctantly, but accepted that the sooner the resistance could be broken, the sooner the war would end, and the sooner they could all go home. But pitiable sights in the process were unavoidable. ‘At another farm’, recalled one such British soldier, ‘a small girl interrupted her preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at us on an old piano. We were carting the people off … a miserable, hurried home-leaving … and this poor little wretch in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final defiance.’⁵⁰

During the latter part of 1900 and into the next year a number of refugee camps were established (some of which Kitchener visited⁵¹), most of them consisting of tented accommodation for the apprehended Boers with common eating and lavatory facilities. In the main the camps were ramshackle affairs for refugees, not unlike what is seen today under the United Nations flag in various world trouble-spots. Eventually, 45 such camps were built for Boer internees, with a further 64 for blacks. Designed as a temporary measure in response to a fluid battlefield situation they were not very well designed or administered. Meanwhile, those designated as Boer prisoners of war were mostly sent overseas to, among other locations, St Helena, made famous for its six-year service as Napoleon's island prison. Left behind, the families of the POWs were sent to the camps, which came to be scattered mainly across the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal, with a few of them located in Natal and the Cape.

Isolated, miserable, and unhygienic, the camps fast became riven with communicable diseases and the death rate climbed quickly to over 300 per thousand, a rate worse than in British field hospitals during the war but not markedly so.⁵² By mid-1901, however, the plight of the internees had become public knowledge nonetheless, mainly because of the visit to some of them by the enterprisingly dogged figure of Emily Hobhouse, secretary of the South African Conciliation Committee, a London-based group committed to ending the war. Forty years old, single, well-connected politically, and a life-long Christian social activist, Hobhouse had stood out against the war at its outset and from the summer of 1900 had become severely exercised by the grim news that hundreds of Boer women were being ‘left ragged by our military operations …. The poor women were being driven from pillar to post, [and] needed protection and organized assistance’.⁵³ Such protection she was determined to provide, and having formed a new society which she called the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, she sailed for Cape Town, arriving there on 27 December. Immediately, Hobhouse gained an interview with a dyspeptic Milner and in a decision that he would later (partially) regret, she was provided with a couple of railway cars in order to take supplies to the Bloemfontein camp. Upon arrival at the camp Hobhouse was appalled by what she found there. Labelling it and the others she visited subsequently ‘a wholesale cruelty’, she was especially galled by the impact of malnutrition and disease on the young: ‘To keep these Camps going is murder to the children’.⁵⁴ After touring the camps for a few months she returned to England in May 1901 (on the same ship as a vacationing Milner) and immediately wrote a damning paper on what she had witnessed in South Africa. Entitled, ‘Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies’, it had an electrifying effect on public opinion, especially that portion of it which was left-leaning. The first politician to publicly respond to it was the Welsh opposition Liberal party member David Lloyd George who accused the Salisbury government of carrying out ‘a war of extermination’ against the Boers. Then the Liberal leader himself, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, excoriated the same in a speech in London given on 14 June, by asking rhetorically: ‘When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa’.⁵⁵

Not everyone, of course, found the shrill critique of Hobhouse and the condemnatory words of Lloyd George and Campbell-Bannerman convincing. Both in South Africa as well as in England she was attacked by some for being disloyal and pro-Boer (which she was to a degree). Unsurprisingly, Kitchener found her dangerously meddlesome and selective in how she presented her findings. Parliament responded to the uproar with a full-blown debate nonetheless, producing a directive that Kitchener file a statistical report about the situation, which he duly did in July. The numbers were undeniably bad: almost 100,000 Boers were then being held in the camps (along with a similar number of blacks), and the death rate remained stubbornly high. To show its seriousness the Government appointed a commission with Millicent Fawcett, Liberal MP and leading suffragette, as its chair, and between August and December the commission carried out its own tour of the camps in South Africa. One of the ironies of the Fawcett Commission was that it finally gave Milner something to do in his capacity as civilian administrator of the former Boer republics because the camps were transferred out of military hands and into administrative ones. Having done so, significant improvements came about immediately, it must be said, but the early months of camp life had done their worst with the final statistics for them showing that about 28,000 Boers had died in the camps (out of a cumulative interned population of 116,000), of which some 24,000 were children. The figures for interned blacks were scarcely better: about 14,000 dead out of some 107,000.⁵⁶

The camps proved a very difficult trial for Kitchener, as did attacks – such as that made by Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Afrikaner general, in January 1902 in a reprise of Campbell-Bannerman's words – in which he referred to the British Commander in Chief as presiding over a campaign against the Boers of ‘unbelievable barbarism and gruesomeness’.⁵⁷ Kitchener, ever phlegmatic and fixated on ending the war before all else, took such hyperbolic criticisms in stride. Later, Smuts would come to count Kitchener as a friend. As for Hobhouse, ‘that bloody woman’, Kitchener thought her a cypher for leftist political opposition, which was much too quick to look for evidence of insidious military policy when in fact haste, circumstance, and the exigencies of war were to blame.⁵⁸ ‘Kitchener no more desired the deaths of women and children in the camps’, observes Thomas Pakenham persuasively, ‘than of the wounded Dervishes after Omdurman, or of his own soldiers in the typhoid stricken hospitals of Bloemfontein’.⁵⁹ Still, a good deal of the blame for the inhumane nature of the camps must fall on him. More could have and should have been done earlier to alleviate their dire condition and, if so, the disease and death rate would have fallen commensurately. Ultimately however, Kitchener was simply relieved to hand the administration of the camps over to Milner's civilian authority, even though ceding any degree of control in South Africa to his nemesis as a general principle he greatly disliked. The camps were Milner's problem now, ‘a bad business’ yes, he agreed, but no longer his to manage.⁶⁰

During the first half of 1901 the other great issue of concern to Kitchener was the apparent possibility that the Boers might finally be willing to agree to a negotiated peace, in lieu of a complete surrender, which he did not think either likely or even necessarily desirable. Kitchener's columns riding out on the veldt and funneling Boer commandos into the blockhouse net continued to have the desired effect. ‘The boers [sic] are growing very weak’, he wrote to a friend in July. ‘The constant drain of killed, wounded and prisoners is telling on them but they won't chuck it hoping for something to turn up’.⁶¹ In fact, Kitchener had assumed this weakness in the adversary for a considerable amount of time and it had spurred him already to seek a peace agreement with the Boer leadership in February. For critics of Kitchener then and later the attempt by him to bring the Boer War to an end as early as the first months of 1901 sits incongruously in the midst of his well-documented martial record. But given his growing understanding of the nature of the war he was fighting and (to him at least) the objectionable way in which the continued course of it would inexorably run, the fact that he extended the olive branch to the enemy should come as no surprise.

Kitchener, therefore, became a key figure in this attempt at brokering a peace. In it he had the clear backing of Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office, who now that the Boer republics had been defeated and partially occupied, was keen to bring the war to an end and put paid to the interminable guerilla attacks of the commandos. In this attempt the Colonial Secretary was supported by Salisbury, although the Prime Minister would remain wary of making concessions to the Boers that would allow them to ‘retain any portion of their independence’. The point for all those involved was to end the fighting as soon as possible and then turn to diplomacy in order to find the right way forward politically. But ‘we must be the masters’ Salisbury told the House of Lords in stentorian fashion in mid-February, because weakness now would simply open the way for the Boers to ‘accumulate new forces, new armaments, and prepare once a fitting occasion arises, for the same attack which we had to meet eighteen months ago’.⁶²

Kitchener's initial year of dealing with the Boers had taught him that far from their being a monolithic enemy – which Salisbury's words suggest was his own understanding of them – the Boer leadership cadre spanned a spectrum, from vitriolic belligerence to reasoned accommodation. By early 1901, with the blockhouse-and-drive strategy beginning to have a positive impact, thus making the Boers ‘more peacefully inclined’ than earlier, as he wrote to the Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick, Kitchener proposed to make a direct overture of peace to the Boers.⁶³ Indeed, Kitchener believed (rightly) that amongst the Boer leaders there was a great deal of pride at not ‘being the first man to give in, as he will be held to be a disgrace to his country ever afterwards’.⁶⁴ Kitchener calculated that in this regard his best chance of success lay with Louis Botha. Despite having defeated the Jameson Raiders back in 1895 and being a fierce commando general operating in the Transvaal, Botha was known to take the long view of the future of Anglo-Boer relations in South Africa.⁶⁵ Therefore, cannily using Botha's wife as a successful intermediary, the two men set up a secret meeting for the end of February at Middelburg, a town conveniently located for both of them along the rail-line running east towards Delagoa Bay. In so doing, Kitchener was counting on Botha's status amongst his peers and his powers of persuasion to convince men like De Wet, Steyn, and other leading Boers that a negotiated peace was the best way to end the war successfully and with honour.

Accordingly, on the morning of 28 February, and apprised by Brodrick of the British government's parameters for the talks and therefore hoping not to have to insist on ‘anything humiliating’ to the Boers, Kitchener met Botha at a requisitioned house in Middelburg.⁶⁶ The two men of military iron had a straightforward but respectful exchange, breaking for a reasonably sociable lunch and a rather severe-looking group photograph. Still, at the end of the one-day meeting they were mutually satisfied that what they had discussed and agreed upon together was something that both sides could potentially both endorse and enforce. Perhaps, however, the glow of diplomacy indeed was too bright; in Kitchener's case his highly successful foray into diplomatic negotiation with Marchand at Fashoda in 1898 may have made him too optimistic about the meeting, and in the event, the Middelburg overtures for peace ended in failure. Why?

Milner, Kitchener believed, was largely to blame for this failure because his strict ideological approach to the war whereby he resisted anything other than the complete vanquishing of the Boers stood in the way of the kind of accommodation required to produce a mutually acceptable peace. Botha had come to Middelburg with a ten-point list for discussion. Chief on the list was the post-war restoration of Boer independence, which Kitchener rejected out of hand in accordance with his instructions from London. But the other points were negotiable – at least in Kitchener's mind – and so he talked them through in good faith. Amnesty for Boer soldiers upon surrender? Yes. Money for re-building destroyed farms? Yes. A prohibition on voting enfranchisement for black Africans? Here, Kitchener counter-proposed that instead of a prohibition the decision should be deferred until self-government was eventually restored to the former Boer republics. Altogether, both men departed Middelburg on the evening of 28 February 1901 confident in the outcome of the day's work and properly hopeful that they would be able to convince their respective political colleagues that if such terms were accepted then peace might reign.

Following the meeting, at Milner's insistence, Kitchener met him at Bloemfontein to discuss the content of the cable that would shortly need to be sent to London informing the British government of the outcome of the talks. Their meeting was mostly cordial though occasionally testy. Milner's usual ideologically-driven position that the British needed to ‘knock the bottom’ out of the Boers was ever-present, although the only issue the two men in fact disagreed upon was the proposed amnesty for Boer soldiers. In principle, however, as Milner had always made abundantly clear, he was opposed to peace talks until the Boers had been beaten and forced to surrender. His grand imperial vision, the animating principle of his so-called ‘kindergarten’ of likeminded thinkers such as Lionel Curtis and John Buchan (afterwards Lord Tweedsmuir), who later would gather around him during South African reconstruction, simply rejected trying to accommodate the ‘weak link’ Boers in any version of a future South Africa.⁶⁷

The cable was duly sent to Chamberlain and on 6 March he replied. Immediately upon reading it, Kitchener realized that there would be no peace. Milner's ‘narrow’ attitude combined with Chamberlain's own wariness as to what might be given away to the Boers in such a negotiated peace, had swayed others around the Cabinet table (including Brodrick) to amend Kitchener's provisions in such a way as to render them unacceptable to Botha.⁶⁸ Kitchener knew that the revised terms (especially the British government's refusal to offer a full amnesty to Boer soldiers) would be impossible for Botha to finesse through the tangled thicket of Boer leadership. Privately, Kitchener thought the government's position to be ‘absurd and wrong’.⁶⁹ Accordingly, Botha responded just as Kitchener assumed he would. There would be no deal. Above all, the utter ‘destruction’ of Afrikanerdom was the message understood by the Boer leadership as salient to the British government's response. That this clearly was not Kitchener's own intention – despite being the government's chief sword-arm – is one of the starker ironies of the Boer War. Even Lloyd George, no admirer of Kitchener's either then or later, made plain his disgust at the government's inability to act on the Commander in Chief's recommendations and broker a binding peace. In Lloyd George's’ inimitable oratorical style he made plain to Parliament what Kitchener had offered, compared to what Chamberlain had scuttled: ‘There was a soldier who knew what war meant; he strove to make peace. There was another man, who strolled among his orchids 6,000 miles from the deadly bark of the Mauser rifle. He stopped Kitchener's peace!’⁷⁰

By the early-spring of that year the proximate opportunity for peace therefore largely had passed and the cruel but effective impact of the blockhouse network continued to weaken the ability of the Boers to operate in the field. Still, they gamely fought on, but still not in the way Kitchener would have preferred. ‘If they would only fight’, he complained again, this time to Lady Ilchester in a letter of 22nd March, ‘we could soon finish them off but they have quite given up any idea of doing more than cut off any weak party moving alone or blowing up a train by a mine set under the rails’.⁷¹ That summer the war continued, therefore, in its desultory, now even banal way in Kitchener's view. But one event in particular in August would, when ramified, both shock and appall not only the British and Boers, but for different reasons, do the same for Australian troops (as well as for their countrymen back home). They, like the Canadians and other colonial troops, had come in their thousands to South Africa in answer to the Empire's call. In the minds of many the event also (especially to Australians both then and now) confirmed the picture of Kitchener as a hard, remorseless military man for whom mercy could not be expected to be visited upon either foe or friend.

Earlier, as the guerilla war had rolled out in the first weeks of 1901, one of the additional responses to it by Kitchener had been to make routine the so-called work of the ‘flying column’. (Something that would be adopted more famously by both sides not very many years later in Ireland during the nationalist struggle.) Charged with apprehending as many of the Boer enemy as possible, certain of these columns had also functioned as irregular forces, indeed as ‘special forces’ in a way that subsequent generations would come to understand. In February one such force had been raised. Named the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC), it was a regiment of around 300 men, almost half of whom were Australian. Based in Pietersburg about 160 miles northeast of Pretoria, its field of operations was the Northern Transvaal, a remote and hard-to-control region from the perspective of British command.⁷²

Three of the many Australians serving in the BVC were Harry Morant (although English-born), Peter Handcock, and George Witton, all of whom would shortly be charged with shooting Boer prisoners in the course of their service and in so doing spark a controversial court martial, the impact of which is still felt today in Australian popular culture.⁷³ Although all three of them held the rank of lieutenant, Morant (born in 1864) was senior to the others both in terms of age and experience.⁷⁴ He was also relatively sophisticated in a way not shared by his two younger colleagues, as his published poetry suggested. A superb handler of horses (hence his nickname, the ‘Breaker’), Morant had migrated from Somerset to Queensland in 1883 and then spent the next 16 years living a ‘bush’ life in the wilds of the Australian Outback. Upon the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 he enlisted in the South Australian Mounted Rifles and by the spring of 1900 found himself on active service in the Transvaal. In the event, he served well, his cultured manner and outstanding riding ability winning him the admiration of both his peers and superiors. Morant had been part of Lord Roberts’ march into Pretoria, and otherwise saw action at Kroonstadt and at Diamond Hill. Later in 1900 he made a brief return to England, his first visit there in 17 years, where he befriended a certain Captain Percy Hunt, likewise home on leave from South Africa. Upon Hunt's signing on with the BVC early in 1901, he convinced Morant to do the same, which he did, obtaining a commission on 1 April. By that summer Morant was serving under Hunt and their BVC column was achieving considerable success in foiling Boer attacks in the violent Strydpoort district of the Transvaal, located not very far south of Pietersburg.

Up until the time of Hunt and Morant the BVC's early operations had been reckless and undisciplined. Looting of food and livestock was common and the men had established backcountry liquor stills for their own enjoyment. The regiment's main base of operations in the north had been established at Fort Edward, which was little more than an occupied farmhouse, located some 90 miles from Pietersburg in what was known as the Spelonken region. The BVC's original commander, Captain James Robertson, had been weak-willed, but a semblance of order had been maintained by Captain Alfred Taylor, a British intelligence officer sent north by an informed and therefore concerned Kitchener to assist Robertson. In July, unbeknownst to Taylor at least, a group of six Boer commandos had approached Fort Edward, intending to surrender. Instead, they were arrested and summarily shot. For being the commanding officer under which this brazen act had been carried out Robertson was forced to resign. His replacement was Captain Hunt. Accompanying him as part of a refreshed column were, among others, Morant, Handcock, and Witton.

Hunt, together with the stellar support of Morant, soon was able to restore considerable discipline to his new BVC column, although some of the longer-serving men were not pleased that their spoils of war now were being curtailed by the new leadership cadre. But these sorts of troubles would pale with what would come their way beginning on the night of 5 August 1901. Riding out of Fort Edward Hunt had taken a small detachment of men (not including Morant) to conduct a raid on the farmhouse of a leading Boer commando leader named Barend Viljoen. In making the raid, Hunt's men were unprepared for the surprise and strength of the Boers’ resistance. During the attack Hunt was killed, and allegedly mutilated by Boer commandos. When word reached Fort Edward about the failed raid and Hunt's purported ugly death, Morant became enraged and together with a similarly disposed detachment of men set out immediately for the Viljoen farm. Finding it abandoned they began to track the Boer escapees, coming upon their encampment the next evening, 6 August. Peremptorily opening fire by the itchy trigger-finger of Morant and therefore losing the advantage of surprise, almost all of the hunted Boers escaped. The unlucky one that did not, named Visser, was trussed up and severely questioned by the BVC detachment and the next morning while they were returning to Fort Edward, an angry Morant simply ordered him shot.

Despite the rough justice of Visser's execution Hunt's death continued to effect Morant deeply. During the ensuing days he allowed his grief to work itself into a vengeful lather and a little over two weeks later on 23 August he led a patrol to intercept an apprehended group of eight of Viljoen's commandos being brought into Fort Edward, and had them shot too in a roadside ditch. Regrettably, it did not end there, however. Their grisly deaths became linked to one more. A German-born Lutheran missionary, the Reverend C.A. Daniel Heese, who lived near Pietersburg at Makaanspoort, knew some of the arrested commandos and when he was informed that they had been shot told Captain Taylor that when he passed through Pietersburg he was going to report this outrage to British command. Shortly thereafter, he was found dead too, shot while driving south in his horse and buggy.

In fairly short order this spate of killings was reported to the British authorities and resulted in the arrest of seven men in October, including Morant, Handcock, and Witton. Their court-martial began on 16 January 1902 in Pietersburg with two hearings, one concerned the eight Boer prisoners executed on the side of the road, while the other focused on the death of Visser. Proceedings then moved on to Pretoria where the trial pertaining to the murder of the Reverend Heese was conducted. Ably represented by counsel (Major J.F. Thomas), they were acquitted of the Heese murder. But the case against them for the murders of the other nine men (including Visser) was proved. They were sentenced to death on 26 January, with Witton's sentence immediately being commuted to life in prison on account of his lesser role in the affair. The next morning Morant and Handcock were duly executed outside the fort, their death warrants having been signed by Kitchener, as he shortly informed Brodrick at the War Office.⁷⁵ ‘Shoot straight, you bastards!’ the irrepressible Morant is alleged to have called out to his executioners. ‘Don't make a mess of it!’⁷⁶

Morant said more than he knew. In what would prove to be the waning days of the Anglo-Boer War it indeed had become messy, and in addition to its many and sometimes nameless victims now were added those of these two unfortunate Australians. They were perpetrators much more than victims in this sordid case, to be sure, but in the context of the times when shooting Boer prisoners of war was believed by many – both in South Africa and in Britain, and in both civilian and military life – to be British policy, Morant and Handcock come off as considerably less villainous than their trial had painted them to be. Indeed, as far back as the beginning of the guerilla war some people had been questioning the conduct of British soldiers in South Africa under Kitchener. John Dillon, an Irish nationalist MP, for example, stated in Parliament in January 1901 that Kitchener had authorized that ‘all [Boer] men are to be shot so that no tales may be told’.⁷⁷ There were other reports also, spurring Roberts, now in London and in his new post as Commander in Chief of the British Army, to question Kitchener about their veracity. ‘Absolutely untrue’, replied Kitchener.⁷⁸ And there it was left. But for some the suspicion that an informal policy – as suggested by an unnamed Welsh soldier in a newspaper report, that ‘we take no prisoners now …. There happened to be a few wounded Boers left. We put them through the mill. Every one was killed’ – prevailed.⁷⁹ For such a view, however, no official evidence is extant and Kitchener was absolute in his denial that such a policy, either formal or informal, had ever existed.

In the aftermath of the Morant and Handcock executions the newly federated (in 1901) Australian government made an official request for an explanation from Kitchener, to which he was quick to reply. In a closely-worded telegram to the Australian Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, Kitchener explained why Morant ‘the originator of these crimes’, and Handcock, who ‘carried [them] out in a cold-blooded manner’ were properly sentenced to death. Kitchener's telegram was published in the Australian press, setting off what has become a never-ending public debate about the nature of the ‘Morant case’.⁸⁰ The transcripts of the court-martial were destroyed by fire in London in 1940 during the Battle of Britain so it is likely that the case will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. As folk-heroes in Australia, Morant and Handcock live on, however, inspiring an attempt as recently as 2013 to have them pardoned on the basis that ‘Kitchener conspired to get them executed’.⁸¹ But the modern penchant for conspiracy theories will not likely overthrow the fact that alleging a cover-up by the authorities in the case is simply not credible. Morant and Handcock had acted badly and with deadly force. They were not of course the only ones to do so in a war that had become notably dirty – ‘a new kind of war for a new century’ – but their culpability in the case was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.⁸² In the event, they were most certainly not, as Witton later named his memoir of the case, ‘Scapegoats of the Empire’.⁸³

By April, with the unfortunate Morant case behind him, Kitchener was now keenly hopeful that the war might well indeed be drawing to a close. Exhausted by the unending strain of conducting all facets of the conflict, he was anxious for the end to come, partly because of the interminable nature of the killing and destruction that singularly marked the Anglo-Boer conflict, and partly because he continued to anticipate a move to India in order to become Commander in Chief of the army there. But if Kitchener thought that the war would end with the Boers vanquished and in supplication, he continued to be frustrated that as successful as the blockhouse system had been in parts of the Orange River Colony and the eastern Transvaal, elsewhere Boer commandos continued to range widely and with attendant success. Men like Steyn, De la Rey, and of course De Wet – who jested now that the blockhouse system should really be called the ‘blockhead’ system – were at large, seemingly impervious to the determined attempt by the British to hunt them down.⁸⁴ On 7 March, Lord Methuen, who had been pursuing De la Rey in the western Transvaal, was attacked himself at Tweebosch. His men beaten and scattered, and having been shot in the thigh, the wounded Methuen had no choice but to surrender to the commando leader. It was a moment of deep humiliation for Methuen, as no other British general had yet been captured during the entire South African campaign.

News of the Methuen disaster landed on the already emotionally-rent Kitchener like a thunderclap. In response, for the next two days he created a hermitage for himself out of his bedroom at Melrose House headquarters in Pretoria, refusing to talk to anyone or to eat anything.⁸⁵ Finally, hungry and determined, he emerged from this slough of despond saying that regardless of this particular setback the war was inevitably Britain's to win, and victory would commence with an immediate response to De la Rey. He informed Brodrick at the War Office that he was going to hit him ‘hard as soon as possible’.⁸⁶ Fresh columns were duly sent to the western Transvaal and a ferocious fight began in late-March that would last into May.

Meanwhile, Kitchener could not have guessed given the recent successes of the commandos in the field, that the Boers – including De la Rey – were only steps away from utter exhaustion and consequent defeat. Notwithstanding their ability to resist and even from to time defeat the stronger foe, the relentless power and deep resources that the British were able to bring to bear on the strategic situation made moot ultimately the occasional Boer tactical success. While Kitchener's operatic response to Methuen's defeat and brief captivity might have suggested otherwise, the spent Boers were ready to deal, and by early April such talks were on the cusp of taking place, which they would do in earnest beginning on the 12th at Kitchener's headquarters in Pretoria.

The peace negotiations that would yield the binding Treaty of Vereeniging seven weeks later on 31 May were an exercise in realism, compromise, vision, irony, and for the Boers, the admission of defeat. At their request, a group of Boer leaders, principally Botha, Steyn, De Wet, and De la Rey, met with the British delegation headed by Kitchener (Milner joined later) in the elegant surroundings of Melrose House, a recently constructed Pretoria mansion that Lord Roberts had been offered by its (anxious) businessman owner after the city was taken by the British back in June of 1900.⁸⁷ Roberts had used it as his home and headquarters until succeeded by Kitchener in November of that year. Now, in the spring of 1902, Melrose House would serve as the main scene for the move from war to peace in South Africa.

Over the 15 months that had elapsed since the aborted peace talks of March 1901, Kitchener had remained realistic about what was good and desirable in the war's outcome. He, unlike Milner, was not doctrinaire about re-making South Africa into a thorough-going ‘British’ colony. That is to say, where Milner continued to insist upon the Boers’ unconditional surrender as a prelude to South Africa's complete anglicisation, Kitchener rejected the idea that the Boers’ language, culture, religion and whole way of life could somehow be done away with through diplomatic negotiation, or that such a drastic development would even be desirable. Without saying so he might have instanced the similar dilemma faced by the British after their victory over the French on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec in 1759. The right way forward then was to see the (early) British Empire as capable of absorption rather than of wholesale elimination, something that allowed for the continued existence and ultimate flowering of French-Canadian society within British North America.

The split over this issue between Kitchener and Milner was plain for all to see, as was a similar split amongst the Boer delegation. Some, such as Orange ‘Free Staters’ Botha and De la Rey, saw the Boers’ military situation as dire and un-winnable and therefore a negotiated peace was their best option; whereas the men from the Transvaal, Steyn and De Wet, were strong on the idea that if they kept fighting they would eventually turn the tide because despite Britain's overwhelming power a guerilla war was an extraordinarily draining style of fight to maintain, with a high political cost not easily borne by the faraway London government.

When the meeting got underway on the morning of 12 April, the sense of déjà vu in the room must have been strong because of the Boers opening gambit that independence was still at the top of their list of priorities. Once again, Kitchener had to emphasize the point that independence was not on the table. Back and forth the two sides went, Kitchener attempting to move the Boers off their insistence on independence while reiterating the point that self-government within the British Empire should be seen as a desirable outcome. Such, he implored them, should in no way be seen as a humiliating concession as they would be sharing it with leading dominions such as Canada and Australia, whose people obviously were ‘proud of their nationality.’⁸⁸ Kitchener made for a strong but magnanimous presence in the dining room at Melrose House, impressing – perhaps even over-awing – the Boer delegation.⁸⁹ Kitchener's strong position on self-government, however, did not ultimately convince them and so the telegram that was sent to London that evening went without much accompanying optimism for success.

Adding to the sense of relative gloom at the resumption of talks two days later on the 14th was the addition to them of Milner. His had been a spectral presence on the first day of the meeting but now here he was in the flesh. Accordingly, the Kitchener-Milner dynamic of mutual distrust permeated the proceedings, which was exacerbated by the ongoing, as Kitchener described it to a friend, ‘loathing for Milner’ by the Boers.⁹⁰ Still, the day went better than expected because the British government's response to the telegram of the 12th was more accommodating (and therefore much less sympathetic to Milner's intransigent position) than had hitherto been the case. Thus encouraged the delegates continued to negotiate for the next few days until on the 17th the meetings came to a successful interim conclusion. On that day it was agreed that the Boer delegates would report back to their constituencies and organize a general conference of 60 representatives (30 from each of the former republics) to discuss and vote on the framework of the treaty thus far discussed. There would be no armistice during this period, Kitchener ruled, so that the impetus to negotiate would not slacken. But all those involved in the prospective Boer conference slated for 15 May at Vereeniging – known to the British then only as the site of one of their discredited refugee camps – would be guaranteed safe passage and no fresh attacks would occur anywhere near the meeting site.⁹¹

For Kitchener the three weeks that followed were a time of considerable apprehension. As much as he relished the prospect of war's end – ‘It is quite exciting to think that by the 20th of next month we may have peace’ – he was acutely aware of the toxic effect Milner had had on all the major parties to the talks and he was under no illusion about the civil administrator's back-channel influence in London.⁹² Moreover, how would the Boers likewise ameliorate their own internal differences in such a way as to not scupper a peace, even if the British did not do so themselves? All was pins and needles at Melrose House as Kitchener read frequent intelligence reports from Vereeniging and awaited the outcome of the Boer plenary meeting there, news of which reached him on the evening of 16 May. The Boer delegates had met for two days in a park under a huge marquee and after much impassioned discussion and pointed debate the conference agreed to a set of four terms that were to be relayed to Kitchener and the British delegation in Pretoria. To do so, a group of Boer leaders consisting of Botha, De Wet, De la Rey, Smuts – a Cambridge-educated lawyer in addition to being a military man – and J.B.M. Hertzog, a rising ‘Free State’ judge and later politician, would travel by rail 65 miles north from Vereeniging to the erstwhile Transvaal capital. And there, on Monday, 19 May at 10 o'clock in the morning, the final act of the Anglo-Boer War commenced in the expansive and richly-appointed dining room of Melrose House.

Over the next 12 days the two delegations would work to achieve a binding treaty – modelled on the terms of Kitchener's attempted peace at Middelburg – that would bring an end to an enormously costly war. But the negotiations were riven by misunderstanding, disagreement, and frustration before yielding finally to a ten-clause document that all present could bring themselves to sign. Throughout the near-fortnight-long event Kitchener chaired the proceedings, clarifying, cajoling, and generally moving the Boer representatives (ten of them altogether) along with Milner to the point of a binding agreement. Kitchener's task was extremely difficult, and success depended upon the diplomatic and conciliatory approach that he had unwittingly rehearsed at Fashoda. On the Boer side, the most difficult member to manage was De Wet. A hard and uncompromising military man – indeed much like Kitchener himself – he was not sure that even yet the time had come to surrender.⁹³ Most of the rest of the Boer delegation were sure, however, that the Boer people – especially its women and children – had suffered enough and should not be sacrificed further on the altar of Afrikaner nationalism. Still, in remaining obdurate on the point De Wet drove Milner to distraction and the talks themselves seemed in jeopardy until Kitchener intervened with the welcome suggestion that on the finer legal points concerning surrender (Clause 1) the legal members of the conference – namely Smuts – be allowed to do their work exclusive of the representative members. This suggestion was agreed to, and with, the departure of De Wet and Milner from the room the heightened temperature of the talks fell immediately.

Similarly, on the question of self-government (Clause 7) and the rapidity with which it would succeed military administration in the two former Boer republics, Kitchener spoke privately to Smuts suggesting (presciently) that the Liberals under Campbell-Bannerman were likely to win office within two years and, if so, would probably move much more quickly towards its realization than would the Conservatives. So convinced was Smuts by the honest and forthright comments by Kitchener that later he credited him with having ‘accomplished the peace’.⁹⁴

Throughout the first week of the peace conference as the various clauses were debated and personal diplomacy reigned, the government in London traded telegrams with Kitchener and Milner.⁹⁵ Considering their usual disaffection the two men in Pretoria worked rather well together during this time. However, on the issue of the amount of financial compensation to be used for Boer economic restoration they disagreed sharply. Kitchener advocated for an amount of L3 million, with few encumbrances as to recipient. Milner thought this suggestion was both profligate and dis-honourable as it would make tangible a payment to the Boers for having been engaged in ‘fighting us’. Moreover, he believed that not everything need ride on the success of the talks anyway since his assumption was that the Boers now were so weak that ‘if the assembly at Vereeniging breaks up without peace they will surrender right and left’.⁹⁶ No one, however, could be sure of that, least of all the Cabinet in London. Chamberlain certainly did not want the talks to founder, especially on a money issue, a view made clear to both Milner and Kitchener. Accordingly, they set to work on a revised money provision with which they could agree, the result of which became Clause 10, and then at last the drafting of final terms.

On 27 May, shortly after receiving the Kitchener-Milner revision, the Cabinet cabled Melrose House with its own final terms and the next day they were delivered to the Boer delegates. They were given three days to take the ten-clause treaty to the assembled Boer representatives waiting patiently at Vereeniging for ratification or rejection. A yes or no answer to the terms as stated was all that would be accepted by the British, otherwise the war would continue to be fought. By this point the Vereeniging gathering had become an assembly of defeated people. The weight of almost three years of war lay heavily upon them. The present picture of their predicament was bleak; the prospect of fighting on even bleaker. All talked out by 31 May, Schalk Burgers, with the much-earlier departure of Kruger having now become the Acting President of the Transvaal, shared the sombre mood of the gathering when he stood up Pericles-like and orated emotionally that ‘We stand at the graveside of two Republics’.⁹⁷ The funereal atmosphere of the Vereeniging gathering meant that the vote could really go only one way. And it did, 54 to six in favour of accepting the treaty as drafted.⁹⁸ Late that evening at 11 o'clock, the ten Boer representatives, having returned by rail from Vereeniging, re-convened at Melrose House to sign the treaty. Beginning with Burgers’ signature the other nine Boers added theirs, which were then followed by that of Kitchener and, finally though reluctantly, Milner's. All was over. In the immediate aftermath of the dramatic late-night signing the room was awkwardly silent until Kitchener, maintaining his magnanimity to the very end, stepped forward and began shaking the hands of the Boer delegates and saying animatedly: ‘We are good friends now!’ Kitchener's unrehearsed gesture seemed to break the accumulated tension, for De la Rey then did likewise, adding with a rueful smile: ‘We are a bloody cheerful looking lot of British subjects’.⁹⁹

Kitchener could not have been more pleased about anything in his life up to that point than he was on the night of 31 May 1902. At long last the brutal Anglo-Boer War was over and soon he would be free to take up (hopefully) his sought-after post in India. As news of the treaty broke in London and around the Empire an undoubted victory was tempered by knowledge of the human and financial cost of the 32-month long war. Even the animals expended was part of the accounting. The bill in all these regards was exceedingly high. Some 450,000 British and Empire soldiers fought in South Africa with about 22,000 dying in action or from disease, and another 80,000 plus suffering wounds. Astonishingly, over 400,000 horses, donkeys, and mules used by British forces did not survive the conflict, a grim portent of World War I to come. On the Boer side, of the approximately 90,000 men who served some 7,000 had died with another 30,000 wounded. The camp deaths of women and children, as we have seen, were tragically high, perhaps as many as 28,000, while black Africans who died in the war numbered at least 14,000. The financial cost was similarly staggering as the war cost the British Treasury upwards of L200 million.¹⁰⁰ The long-term impact of the war on politics, race, economics, and government in South Africa, as well as that of the Treaty of Vereeniging and the period of reconstruction, is of course a topic which has occupied historians now for over a hundred years.¹⁰¹ Suffice it to say here that the cost paid by black Africans for the Boers and British to work out their enormously complicated relationship in South Africa well into the twentieth century was incalculably high.

For three weeks after the signing of the treaty Kitchener remained in Pretoria. A service of Thanksgiving was held following the treaty and then a victory parade and later a celebratory banquet. Part-way through this period of serial feting Kitchener was informed that the Salisbury government intended to offer him a viscountcy. This honour, which would make him ‘Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum, and of the Vaal in the Colony of the Transvaal, and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk’, together with promotion to full general and a Parliamentary grant of L50,000, put an exclamation point on the nation's thanks for the hard-earned victory in South Africa. But pomp and circumstance notwithstanding, the Anglo-Boer War was anything but a sterling victory. Against overwhelming numerical superiority the Boers had fought on long after the British thought that they should have succumbed to defeat. British generalship – at least early in the war – was not up to successfully facing down the Boers, and there was clear discomfort (and, by some, impassioned denunciation) about the methods used to eventually achieve a somewhat pyrrhic victory. Moreover, British military organization and supply were found to be inferior, and despite attempts by Roberts and Kitchener to improve both, at the end of the day most soldiers in the field knew that British might had proven to be anything but invincible. ‘We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good’, summed up Kipling critically of his country's military performance in South Africa.¹⁰²

These issues would take time to engender action, but when they did Kitchener would have a hand in some of the (military) reforms initiated by the war in South Africa.¹⁰³ Moreover, the war had already induced the crusading journalist John Hobson to dissect its alleged economic underpinnings in his book, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (1900), and from them fashion the first nuanced anti-imperial theory of a century that later would reject virtually every facet of empire as an acceptable basis for world order.¹⁰⁴ Hobson's comprehensive anti-imperial critique, contained in his subsequent book, Imperialism: A Study (1902), was not something that Kitchener ever considered directly (at least there is no record of him having done so).¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, it would seem reasonable to assume that he would have been aware of the nature of Hobson's politico-economic argument against (African) empire, although he did not live long enough to see its anti-capitalist features taken up with spectacular impact by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917.

But all of that could wait. In the short term, an exhausted though elated Kitchener simply wished to return home, and after a triumphant rail journey south to Cape Town he departed for England. Sailing into Southampton on 12 July 1902, he was met in much the same jubilant way as had occurred almost two years earlier upon his return from Sudan. And in a (recorded) first for Kitchener in public, he even smiled.¹⁰⁶