The Anglo-Boer War

This week we count the costs of the war and follow some of those involved as they begin the long process of recovery. First, the cost. There is still debate about some of the statistics as there always is after a war. However the general consensus is that more than 100,000 men, women and children died between 1899 and 1902. At first glance it appears to be insignificant compared to – The Somme, for example during the first world war, where on one day 40 000 British casualties were recorded – or Stalingrad where 44 000 civilians were killed in an air raid on one day in September 1942. What you have to remember is that the total population of South Africa in 1899 was around 4 million. Britain lost 22 000 - 5 774 killed by enemy action, the rest died of disease. The Boers lost around 14 000 men killed. More than two thousand of these were foreigners, Italians, Americans, Dutch, German, French, Swede, Norwegian, Russian who were fighting against the British. However it was the non-combatants who dominated the death roll with at least 26 000 Boer women and children estimated to have died. Some say this figure is closer to 30 000. Then the total number of black South Africans who died in the Concentration camps and in war-related conditions topped 30 000 although the latest research suggests more like 36 000. In the case of the Boers, the number of women and children who died in Concentration Camps amounted to almost 10 percent of the population of the Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These deaths are particularly bitter in the memories even to this day. tale of the father who comes home from St Helena seeking his wife and children in Bloemfontein only to be told that all died in the concentration camps. The British servicemen returning home by the end of the war are treated as heroes, but there were many in Britain who questioned the civilian deaths and the veterans were very sensitive about criticism – which veterans always are. Awaiting many of these men is the horror of trench warfare as they became part of the British Expeditionary Force or BEF in Flanders and France fighting and dying in the Great War of 1914-18. The Uitlanders in South Africa were incredulous at the terms of peace. The Boers would pay no reparations, in fact, it was the British who would fund rebuilding of the country to the tune of 3 million pounds. They supported Lord Milner’s view that Boers should be crushed and a whole new population be brought in to run the country.

Episode 141 is where the British and the Boers finally sign a peace treaty, but there’s quite a bit to cover as we go about watching the days between 19th and 31st May 1902. Remember how the representatives from both sides, Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, De Wet, Burger and De la Rey for the Boers, Milner and Kitchener for the British, had decided to try and write a treaty together rather than separately through a commission. Nowadays commissions seem to drag on for years – while the original concept of a commission was premised on the threat of a lack of quick action. There is no doubt that we have lost the ability in the modern world to think rapidly. Commissions in the 21st Century are proficient at wasting time pandering to expensive lawyers representing a thicket of politicians rather than a direct pursuit of an objective legal conclusion. Back in Lord Kitchener’s office in Pretoria in the week between 21st and 28th May 1902 the Boers were now aware that there was no way the British would ever agree to any sort of independence, and the British were aware that the Boers wanted to find an honourable way out of this war. Judge Hertzog put it in a nutshell when he said “I think that I am expressing the opinion of the whole Commission when I say that we wish for peace… we on both sides are really desirous of coming to a settlement…” This group of men then selected a sub-committee composed of Judge Hertzog and General Smuts along with Lord Kitchener and lawyer Sir Richard Solomon that drew up a schedule that included rules for those who refused to sign an oath to become citizens under the rule of his Majesty King Edward the Seventh. Before discussing that document Smuts asked “If we were to sign this document would not the outcome be that we leaders made ourselves responsible for the laying down of arms by our burghers?” To which the imperial hawk Lord Milner replied “Yes. And should your men not lay down their arms it would be a great misfortune.” And so they continued, debating each point but inevitably building trust and mutual respect. Nothing improves a relationship more than a desire to find an outcome rather than stating a position. The first draft had already been telegraphed to the British government on 21st May. Privately Lord Milner followed it up with a confidential note to Chamberlain saying he would have no regrets if the British Cabinet rejected or radically amended the proposals

The first large group of Boer prisoners were taken by the British at the battle of Elandslaagte on 21st October 1899. The army had failed to plan for prisoners because the idea was the Boers would be beaten in a few weeks so why spend money on POW camps? The first 188 Boers taken at Elandslaagte were temporarily housed with the naval guard in Simonstown on board the guard ship HMS Penelope. Several other ships were used as floating prisons until eventually permanent camps were established at Green Point, Cape Town, Bellevue and Simonstown. At the end of December 1900 more than 2500 Boers were placed on board the Kildonan Castle guardship where they remained for six weeks before they were removed to two other transports at Simonstown. The English army base at Ladysmith in Natal was used between December 1900 and January 1902 but was merely a staging area. Another staging area was established at Umbilo south of Durban in Natal where POWs would be placed on board ships and then routed to Cape Town. But it soon became clear that the Cape prisoner of war camps were targets for attacks and the British then shifted the burghers offshore. There were four main regions used to house Boer POWs, St Helena, Ceylon or modern day Sri Lanka, Bermuda and India. As you’ll hear in a moment, a few hundred were also taken to Portugal. During the war, the British captured around 56 000 Boer prisoners and eventually ran out of space in host countries. India was only used as a last resort after the other three main camps became overcrowded. Of course, the most feared of all these was the camp in St Helena, but by the end of the war disease was more rampant in the other regions – mainly because of the climate. St Helena has a fairly benign climate, its much cooler than Bermuda, Ceylon and India. One of the first contingents of Boers to arrive in St Helena included general Piet Cronje who was captured along with thousands of his men after the battle of Paardeberg in February 1900. Cronje and 514 his commando arrived on the island in the middle of the Atlantic after disembarking from the troopship Milwaukee on 27th February that year. Cronje had surrendered to Lord Roberts after being caught in the battle which shook the Free State Boers as Cronje was cornered with a powerful commando. Illustrating his arrival on the island of St Helena, Punch Magazine published a cartoon of the general saluting the ghost of Napoleon and saying “Same enemy, Same result..” Prior to the Boers arrival, the governor of St Helena RA Sterndale had published a proclamation which read : “.. His Excellency expresses the hope that the population will treat the prisoners of war with that courtesy and consideration which should be extended to all men who have fought bravely for what they considered the cause and their country” So as General Cronje prepared to make that winding march up the hill from the tiny port of Jamestown at St Helena, his men fully expected to be subjected to humiliation. Instead, there was silence, no jeering nor rude remarks, as the Boers passed the crowds of islanders on their way to Deadwood Camp inland. Being escorted along with Cronje was his wife, whom Lord Roberts had allowed to accompany her husband. The Boer general and his wife were accommodated at Kent Cottage, not in Deadwood Camp itself and were surrounded by a strong military guard which changed every day. Of course, Cronje was a general and for once, it was the Boers demanding special attention. Whereas the culture was supposedly based on a democratic principle of equality, Piet Cronje insisted that proper respect be shown to his rank and that a mounted guard should be provided.

Episode 139 is full of peace and a smattering of love as the Boers gather in Vereeniging to discuss the British terms of surrender. As you can well imagine, the moment is bitter sweet. Men who have not seen their children for years are reunited on May 15th, while further afield, in the prisoner-of-war camps, the news is greeted with both joy and sorrow. So here we are, in Vereeniging on May 15th 1902. It’s a settlement our narrator Deneys Reitz passed on his way back from the Natal front “This is a small mining village on the banks of the Vaal River, where nearly two years before, I had watched the Irishmen burning the railway stores during the retreat from the south” he writes. Remember he’s riding with Jan Smuts and the other representatives chosen by Boers in the Eastern Transvaal. There will be representatives from the Free State who will be housed in an array of British army tents along with the Transvaal emissaries, each region with its own section. The British had prepared this tented camp with precision. It was laid out in a square, with the delegates meeting in a large central marquees, mess tent on one side, toilets were long drops as they’re known in South Africa – pit latrines. But where was the stern General Christiaan de Wet ? Also missing were a handful of the Free State Delegates. Eventually on the morning of the 15th May, the day of the meeting, de Wet and a few hardliners arrived – fashionably late. The other senior political and military leadership were already in Vereeniging, along with Commandant General Louis Botha and de la Rey, Vice President Burgher of the Transvaal, members of the two government and of course, Jan Smuts. Reitz senior was also present, with JB Krogh, LJ Meijer, LJ Jacobs. Each Boer Republic was represented by 30 delegates. For the Free State Judge Hertzog was present, along with Secretary of State WJB Brebner, commander in chief de Wet and CH Olivier. Missing was his the man who’d survived so many incidents and battles on the veld – President Steyn.

We’re up to episode 138 and it’s a week to go before the all-important Boer Conference in Vereeniging starting May 15th 1902. Lord Kitchener has ordered his men in all intents and purposes to stop chasing the Boers, stop the burning of farms and to wait for the Boers conference. We have heard how Jan Smuts and Louis Botha met in the Eastern Transvaal, chose their representatives and now were making their way to the South Eastern border down on the banks of the Vaal River. That was on the 4th May 1902. The western Transvaal Boers were doing the same, selecting 30 representatives who would debate the future of their people, so too were Free State’s president Steyn and diehard General Christiaan de Wet – except for the outcome. They wanted the Boer conference to reject surrender and to push on to oblivion. Which is what awaited the hawks I’m afraid. Lord Milner the British High Commissioner also wanted the Boers to fight until they were totally crushed so that he could flood South Africa with English loyalists. In military terms, you know you’re in trouble when your most hated adversary thinks your strategy should be to fight to an inevitable death. That’s what the loyalists through South African wanted, the English speaking hard-core British iumperialists. Yes, they were shouting, keep it up Mr Boer until your terms of surrender at unconditional then you’ll be all but extinct and we can just take over everything you’ve built. The most vocal jingos of the day were actually despised the professional British officer corps in South Africa. The war needed to end so that they could get on with their careers. Winston Churchill was one of those who found what were known as loyalists as deeply concerning. He’d survived a Boer prisoner of war camp and many close calls and respected his former captors, there was very little rancor. While the Boers and the British were framing their views and devising their negotiation strategies, an incident in Natal on May 6th was to sharpen everybody’s minds. Some historians have suggested that what became known as the Holkrantz incident gave further impetus to the Peace Process and strengthened the hand of the moderate Boers like Smuts and Botha who wanted to end the war immediately. Steyn and de Wet on the other hand took the opposing view – fight on was their rallying call. Watching all of this closely was black South Africa. The massacre at Holkrantz shocked most Boers into accepting that the longer this war continued and the more unlawful the landscape would become.

First we join General Jan Smuts who has been waiting in Cape Town for the British to lay on a a train to take him inland where he will join the Boer political and military leaders at Vereeniging for a conference starting on May 15th. They gathered in order to discuss the British terms of surrender. Smuts was mostly silent while he waited with his brother in law Krige and Deneys Reitz our narrator. They were placed aboard the warship HMS Monarch in Simonstown. Just to set the record straight, I said last week this was an Orion class battleship but of course it was just a normal warship as her namesake was only launched in 1910. My apologies, but a quick description about both is in order. The Monarch was placed as Guardship in Simonstown port in 1900. This was one of the older vessels in Britain’s navy having been launched in 1868. It was also a symbolic vessel for Smuts, Reitz and Krige to find themselves. The design has been neither modern nor old. Built in the 1860s when sail was giving way to steam, wooden hulls were being replaced by iron, smoothbore artillery firing round-shot had been overtaken by rifled shell-firing cannon, heavy armour was being mounted on the sides. Mounted gun turrets were being mooted by the Navy top brass as well, but others more conservative opposed the upgrade. So she was a compromise and therefore pleased no-one. When it was built the Navy said steam engines were still not reliable enough so HMS Monarch was fitted with both engine, sails and even a forecastle. That prohibited the gun turrets from being able to fire forward – so in all intents and purposes she remained a man-o-war like the old wooden battleships of the 18th Century. After her renaming in 1902 as the HMS Simoon, the Royal Navy launched its new Orion Class dreadnoughts and the more modern HMS Monarch appeared in 1910. AS an aside, Monarch fought in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and her shells damaged the German Dreadnought, SMS Koenig. Back in Simonstown Deneys Reitz, his general and the General’s brother in law waited for their train. They were hurried through the suburbs of Cape Town in the dead of night so that no-one would catch sight of the famous General Smuts, then switched trains at the main line at Salt River. The next day they awoke in Matjesfontein in the Karoo. It’s also time to rejoin Boer Spy Johanna van Warmelo one more time. She asked and was given permission to visit Irene concentration Camp outside Pretoria. If you remember she had worked there as a nurse months before, when women and children were dying at a rate of up to a dozen a day. At the end of April 1902 Johanna was finally allowed to visit Irene and dreaded what was awaiting her there.

We’re back in the Northern Cape with General Jan Smuts. He’s been waiting in vain for more than two weeks for the British to send a relief force after he laid siege to the well defended town of O’Kiep having already seized Springbok and Concordia. Meanwhile, the first round of peace talks have already ended in Pretoria with the Boers undertaking to select representatives to appear at follow up talks set to take place at Vereeniging starting on May 15th 1902. Smuts has no idea that this meeting has already been agreed. As far as he’s concerned, the British will send a relief column by ship from Cape Town to Port Nolloth, and entrain from there to O’Kiep – which is a copper producing town of some significance. Compared to Kimberley and Johannesburg, hardly strategic, but important nonetheless. And with him is our young narrator Deneys Reitz, fighting on with the other bitter enders. “On the surface things looked prosperous..” he writes in his book Commando. “Five months ago we had come into this western country hunted like outlaws, and today we practically held the whole area from the Olifants to the Orange River four hundred miles away…” Except of course for a few garrison towns which had held out against Smuts. These were now hunkered down and the British inside the towns were unable to travel freely while the Boers roamed this vast territory at will. The success of Smuts’ commando were gratifying for the Volk back home in the Free State and Transvaal, as well as sympathisers in the Cape. Their spirits had been raised as reports circulated about General Smuts’ incredible attacks using hand grenades and trench type warfare at Springbok and Concordia. “Unfortunately while matters stood thus well with us, the situation in the two Republics up north was far otherwise..” Lord Kitchener’s drives and policy of scorched earth had worked in the end. Smuts had been out of touch from his own leaders since the previous September. That was almost nine months of no direct messages. Even guerrilla leaders must be in communication at some point or the entire idea of command and control evaporates in a mist of local delusion. “We had been out of touch with them for so long that we did not realise the desperate straits to which they had come..” Reitz along with Smuts had been trying to motivate the men while at the same time, realised that this war could not continue in the same vein. Something had to give. So towards the end of April, Smuts and his men were living in the town of Concordia which lies around four miles from O’Kiep. The British there were dug in and their defensive positions were too difficult to overrun. Smuts had assumed that eventually the relief force would arrive, and it would be large. This he believed, would mean the southern region of the Cape would have been weakened and then he could make a direct dash south and perhaps catch the British off-guard. Reitz presumed the dash included a possible attack on the outskirts of Cape Town.

While the Boer political and military leadership were huddled around a table in Lord Kitchener’s office, far off in the Northern Cape General Smuts and his commando had defeated the British at three small towns through the months of March and April 1902. We’ve heard about the assaults on Springbok, Calvinia and O’Kiep. Smuts was waiting patiently for the British to send their expected relief expedition via the Atlantic town of Port Nolloth to relieve O’Kiep. Smuts wanted to then head directly to Cape Town to catch the British unprepared. It was audacious but typically Smuts. He was not aware that he had literally missed the train to Pretoria and that Peace Talks were underway. He had ordered van Deventer and his commando to head twenty miles west and to monitor the main railway line from Port Nolloth to O’Kiep which was an important copper mining area. But 760 miles to the north East in Kitchener’s office, there was a slow change to the overall tenure of the discussions. Remember how the Boers had left the topic of the Boer Republics independence off their list of demands, in their view, this was non-negotiable. On the other hand, the British had expected the Boers to return to the negotiating table with the understanding that independence was impossible. Things became extremely complicated when Lord Milner joined Kitchener two days after talks began on 13th April – because Milner wanted unconditional surrender and he didn’t mind a few more months of war to subjugate the Boers completely. That was not the view of Kitchener and is aide – Ian Hamilton. At the same time the British standpoint was unequivocal, there would be no reversal of the annexation of the Republic of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Everything else however was open to discussion. President Steyn of the Free State was particularly stern in his opposition to the British position of fait accompli and in discussions with Acting President Burgher and General Louis Botha of the Transvaal, he managed to convince them of a last line of defence. The overall policy dominating Boer politics was the concept of a democratic decision taken by the people – they needed to poll the Volk for their point of view. Under the Boer constitution, argued Steyn, neither of the Boer government’s was empowered to authorise surrender without permission.

This is episode 134 and its April 1902. The Boer military and political leadership has been permitted by the British to travel to Pretoria by train and will meet with Lord Kitchener to talk peace. All the fighting of the previous two years and 6 months have led both sides to this moment. And yet, there is one more major bloody battle left which is difficult to fathom – other than to say the Boers launched a cavalry charge that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Napoleonic era. It was a hugely courageous attack led by Commandant Potgieter and General Kemp on the 11th April that both surprised and was admired by the English troops who watched. Viewing the details of the Battle of Roodewal now you can understand Kemp and Potgieters’ act as a brave yet suicidal final salvo from a pugnatous people. Roodewal means Red Valley and the valley surrounded by gentle slopes would be spattered with blood by the end of the day. It could have been worse, as we’ll see, with Ian Hamilton doing a General Buller and hesitating when his foe was clearly defeated and the Mounted Infantry’s woeful shooting. Roodewal is two hundred miles west of Pretoria and the very day that General de la Rey with Botha and De Wet steamed into the Transvaal Capital, his men were receiving a terrible hiding. The success was not so much the credit of Ian Hamilton, as to the officers and men of the thirteen columns who had finally caught up with a large Boer commando. It was perspiration, inspiration and sheer luck that caused the enemy to make a bad decision. Afterwards Hamilton and Kekewich called it a real soldiers’ battle, fought out on the kind of terms that British Generals had despaired of every seeing again in their lifetime. As Thomas Packenham calls it, the final reassuring echo from the 19th Century. The British troops had been frustrated for 30 months as they marched up and down the veld, hunting the Boers who were like ghosts. The terrain didn’t help. IT was half wilderness, these plains to the West of Johannesburg and Pretoria. A huge diamond shaped box enclosed by the lines between Lichtenburg, Klerksdorp, Vryburg and the Vaal River – two hundred miles of rolling sandy plains intersected by shallow meandering river valleys. They were mostly dry except in the rainy season. The news of this momentous battle reached Pretoria. It was the 12th April and the peace talks were about to start. As I explained last week, Kitchener had purposefully left Lord Milner out of the first round of negotiations because he wanted some kind of wriggle room – knowing of course that Milner was hoping to have complete control over South Africa in the future without interference from the troublesome Boers. President Burger of the Transvaal was gloomy as he sat down with Kitchener, remaining mostly silent after the Boers handed over their proposal to the British Army commanding officer. Kitchener was taken aback by the affrontery of the Boer demands. He expected them to address the elephant in the room – that is the continued independence of Boer Republics which was no longer viable.

As we heard last week, the Netherlands government had decided by January 1902 that the South Africa war was no longer viable for the Boers. Even the latest successes in March where General De la Rey and Jan Smuts had been victorious in battles in the western Transvaal and Northern Cape respectively had failed to really convince their closest ally in Europe that they were likely to defeat the British. The successes by Smuts around Okiep were more good news but all of these skirmishes were in the non-strategic parts of South Africa. The Boers could do nothing now about the increased production on the mines for one, which began producing gold and other commodities. While much of the country was still denuded, burnt, destroyed, the main cities were functioning and things were slowly returning to a version of normal. There were around 6000 gold mine stamps in South Africa at the start of the war. These are machines that crush rock, before the all-important metal within is extracted. Whether it is copper, gold, silver or any other precious mineral inside a rock, the mine stamp was used to pulverise the material, from where the ore would be removed. Most were steam or water driven and the vast majority had been mothballed at the start of the war as miners fled Johannesburg. But by January 1902 at least 1 075 of these mine stamps were functioning in the Transvaal. Gold output was surging. From a lowly 7 400 ounces in May 1901 to a much more productive 70 000 ounces in January 1902. The financiers were happier, the British Empire was getting some of its money back, things were looking up. February production climbed still further, to 81 000 ounces, and by March 1 700 mine stamps were online and 104 000 ounces of gold found its way onto the trains south to South Africa’s ports. That was still some way off the 300 000 ounces the mines were pumping out before the start of the Boer war, but you can imagine how each ounce was putting the bounce back in the bankers’ steps as they read weekly updates in their smoking rooms in London. Lord Kitchener had accepted a request by the Boers for their generals and political leadership to meet to discuss possible terms after he reached out to President Burgher of the Transvaal. In England, Rudyard Kipling was churning out his poems and stories and he wrote at this time that “Not by lust of peace or show, Not by peace herself betrayed, Peace herself must they forego, Til that peace be fitly made…” Like Milner, Kipling believed the Boers must be made to come to the peace table with cap in hand – not as equals but as a vanquished people. Meanwhile, that icon of empire, Cecil John Rhodes had died at the age of 48. The sudden announcement on March 26th 1902 was a shock to many, although the man who gave his name to an entire country was not exactly loved. Remember how he had bullied and mentally tortured the poor Kekewitch, commander of the British forces in Kimberley during the siege? His stint in Cape politics had also been a disaster. And he was arrested in September 1901 in an extremely unsavoury fraud case involving a promiscuous Russian princess. I don’t have the space to cover that here, but if you’re interested go Google princess Radziwill. She was one of a kind.

There are a few more skirmishes and one more big battle after this period with its frustrations for the British and determination by the Boer die-hards or Bitter einders to continue their war against an empire at its zenith. We will hear about General Christiaan de Wet and Lord Kitchener who are closer physically than at virtually any other time in the war. Kitchener arrived in the Transvaal town of Klerksdorp on the 26th March, de Wet has evaded Kitchener’s columns and blockhouses in the the Free State and is about to cross over the Vaal River to join General Koos de la Rey. More about that in a while. What these soldiers don’t know is that there have been peace moves afoot internationally for some time. The Dutch Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper, had sent a coded message to Lord Landsdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, on January 21st 1902. As was the case in those days, the language used was French - the language of diplomacy. And in his forthright way, The Hague was offering “en traite de paix” – a peace treaty between the British and Boers. The Dutch went one step further. They had already worked out a scenario. First the three members of the Boer Delegation which we heard about last year were still in the Netherlands. They would return to South Africa to confer with Boer leaders then return with an authorisation to conduct peace talks somewhere in the Netherlands. On the 29th January, Lord Landsdowne replied bluntly that the British government appreciated the humanitarian considerations that inspired the offer, but on principle declined the intervention of foreign powers in the South African war. Leyds, who was Paul Kruger’s secretary in Holland, heard about Kuypers offer through the newspapers and was not amused. Why had the Dutch Prime Minister not bothered to confer with him or Kruger? What also angered the Boer emissaries in Europe was the tone adopted by the Netherlands missive. The letter which failed to call on the British to end an imperialist war nor did it mention the abuses being suffered by Boer women and children in the internment camps. The Dutch message implicitly urged the Boers to give up a hopeless cause. Worse, that response came at about the same time another arrived from America which was negative. President Roosevelt told the Boers that his predecessor, McKinley, had offered his services as a mediator and had been turned down flatly by the British. So Roosevelt said any attempt at intervention would be folly.

General Jan Smuts and his commando have seized the small town of Springbok in the far northern Cape. As we heard last week, the town fell after a few hours of fighting and the surrender of the three forts that dominated its defences. After the town was taken, our narrator Deneys Reitz had fallen into a deep sleep have had no rest for three full days and nights. Reitz slept for 24 hours – and when he awoke it was to a surprise. “I found my friend Nicolas Swart sitting on the bed beside me. He was almost recovered from his wounds, and had just arrived from the south.” An extraordinary man, this Nicolas Swart. He’d been shot through the hip while leaning over and the bullet had passed through his body ending exiting through his chest. Reitz believed he was probably not going to survive. And that was only a few weeks after Swart had been shot in the arm, shattering the ulna. Yet here he was, less than a month after appearing near death. Meanwhile, in Pretoria, Lord Kitchener was tearing at his characteristic moustache. Remember how he had collapsed upon hearing about Lord Methuen’s defeat at the hands of General Koos de La Rey. How were the British to capture this large and well-fed marauder? He had escaped certain capture to turn on his pursuers three times in the last six months. First at Moedwil on 30 September 1901 when he had mauled part of Kekewitch column, then at Yzer Spruit on 24 February 1902 when he had devoured most of von Donops wagon convoy protected by a large force of 700 men. He’d seized 150 wagons of food and ammunition there. Then at Tweebosch, he had swallowed Lord Methuen whole. The British now regarded de la Rey as their biggest problem – far more deadly than both General Smuts and Christiaan de Wet. AS well as looting British bully beef and .303 ammunition, he had also looted six field guns, and machine guns. De la Rey’s men were now at the peak of their military power and of course the British were sending half trained yeomen into battle.

After the blood and guts we heard about last week, there is more of the same this time in the Northern Cape where General Smuts and his commando are sowing a certain degree of angst as he took control of large areas of the region. The only real problem was that capturing towns like van Rijnsdorp and Springbok were not going to win the war for the Boers. But the news of what Smuts was up in this harsh desert region had given the Boers a great deal of optimism. Those in the western Transvaal who had witnessed the battle of Tweebosch which we heard about last week were convinced the English were beatable – General Koos de la Rey particularly felt that they were on to something. After Lord Kitchener had recovered from his shock of losing Lord Methuen and an entire column in the battle, he was in depressed state of mind. He’d also heard that General Christiaan de Wet had burst through a cordon in the Northern Free State and this made matters worse. Was nothing going right in the Western Theatre? De Wet had led his men on a goose chase – except some of the geese had been caught by the New Zealanders who had trapped over 800 Boers on their all important Majuba Day. De Wet focused his remaining commando on the relatively quiet area of the north West Free State and set out at sunset from the town of Reitz on the 5th March. There were only two really active areas of the battlefront left – the Western Transvaal and the Northern Cape. Neither was of any real strategic significance. The gold mines were slowly returning to normal, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was dealing and trading, electricity was burning in the Kimberley streets once more. Remember Kimberley, oddly enough, was the first place in the world to use electric street lights, courtesy of Rhodes’ De Beers company support. No-one had yet told Deneys Reitz, our intrepid narrator, who was General Jan Smut’s scout, and at this point, believed emphatically that the British would one day turn tail and flee his South Africa. As Tabitha Jackson writes in her fantastic book called the Boer War which she compiled after producing the documentary series on BBC channel Four, the English would win the war but the Boers were about the win the peace. That would do nothing for soldiers like Deneys Reitz. He was currently in the northern Cape, sitting close to Van Rijnsdorp with Jan Smuts. Top the north of where they rested, around 150 miles away, was the important copper mining centre of O-Kiep. As I explained in episode 128, Smuts was convinced that if he created enough trouble for the Briitsh here, they would send troops out by ship, and leave the way open to the South for him to attack – perhaps even as far as Cape Town. Rmember I explained how Smuts had broken up his force into smaller units for the trip as there was not enough water for all to travel together. Finding the terrible massacre at Leliefontein, Smuts had continued onwards after a few days. They were heading for Silverfountains where Commandant Bouwer and his men were waiting, along with Maritz who’d managed to gather around him a large group of local rebels. Missing however, was Van Deventer commando.

In this episode we will hear how General Koos de la Rey captures Lord Methuen in an act that will push Lord Kitchener over a psychological precipice. Remember when we ended last week I explained how Lord Methuen was particularly despised by both de la Rey and General Christiaan de Wet because the British commander had personally overseen the destruction of both of their farms. But de la Rey displays the kind of chivalry in victory last seen almost a hundred years before this war. He will also allow himself to be swayed by angry men to execute British troops in cold blood. As for Methuen, he was someone with whom the Boers had an axe to grind. And with the capture you would expect that the Boers may have played hard ball – do some kind of swap at dawn. A General for a general as historian Martin Bossenbroek writes. This is not to be. General Koos de la Rey had been itching for something significant in the western Transvaal as he was pushed hither and thither by the British, and in turn, pushed them back and forth. It all started on the 25 February 1902 at Ysterspruit which is around 10 miles from Klerksdorp in the Western Transvaal. De La Rey caught the English napping, swooping on a convoy of 150 wagons, most of which were empty. It was what was protecting that wagons that the General was after. A machine gun, two cannons and a huge cache of rifles, ammunition, 200 horses, 400 oxen and 1500 mules. This came at precisely the right point for the Boers, and exactly the wrong time for the English troops who were going to be shot up with their own weapons shortly.

Episode 128 -The Leliefontein Massacre & de Wet runs into British trenches by Desmond Latham

We’ll kick off where we left off last week – where Jan Smuts’ commando was near Calvinia in the northern Cape evading the English. But its also where commandant Bouwer was surprised by a mounted infantry unit of the British – killing or wounding 17 men who were mainly skewered by swords as they slept. Remember I explained how the colonial Lem Colyn had ingratiated himself with Bouwer’s commando, lying that he had been sentenced for treason and escaped. Deneys Reitz, who’s memoir I’ve used throughout this series, called him Lemuel Colyn, but his real name was Lambert Colyn. And he wasn’t English speaking, but a Cape Afrikander and the fact he was an Afrikander doomed him as we’ll see. Colyn was a British spy and playing a dangerous game. Remember he arrived at Bouwer’s unit claiming he’d escaped from a Clanwilliam prison where he was charged with treason by the British. That was a lie, he was being paid by the British. After he learned enough about the commando’s daily life, Colyn disappeared one day only to return with the British mounted infantry – leading them towards the men sleeping under the trees at Van Rijnsdorp at dawn in mid-February 1902. This incensed the Boers who swore revenge on him and his Nemesis would be Jan Smuts. After Commandant Bouwer’s force had been surprised, he was smarting from the setback. Not only had he lost good men, but the British were now following up their attack by advancing in force with the clear object to retake the town of van Rijnsdorp from the Boers. Smuts had moved further westwards towards the Atlantic Ocean, which was now only 25 miles from his camp on the Olifants river so he decided it was time for a bit of unusual Rest and Recuperation. Smuts called for Boers who had not set sight on the ocean to meet him. About 70 Boer burghers arrived from this part of the northern Cape within two days. First Smuts and his posse passed the famous Ebenezer Mission Station, and then towards afternoon, they glimpsed something remarkable. The glint of the sea through a gap in the dunes. This curious commando of beach goes topped the last dunes, and stopped their horses to stare in wonder. Of course, that was only for a second. In a moment they turned back into children, soon they were throwing their clothes off and that’s when Reitz and a handful of the others who had experience of the sea began to save their colleagues from their own zeal.

This week we’ll find out what happened to Jan Smuts and his commando as they combine forces with Kommandant van Deventer who is in the middle of a major skirmish with the British near Calvinia in the northern cape. The war is sputtering, the Boers are faltering, the British are escalating – all in all – it’s a bit like the end of the line for Smuts and his men. But they’re not beaten yet. Many believe that they can give the British at least one more bloody nose, then perhaps sue for peace and keep their independence. This was hoplessly naïve as the British wanted the Boer Republics in their ambit partly because of world diplomacy and nationalism and partly because of the enormous mineral resources of the Transvaal and Free State. These had been developed into mines, and these mines were owned by English financiers. There was no way that such treasure would be allowed to fall into German hands, and the Germans were very busy both in the Eastern African region, and in nearby German South West Africa. While local issues were driving the short term responses by London, its eyes were very much on its own local European enemies. While the ramifications of this pre-World War one diplomacy is beyond the scope of this podcast series, we must keep in mind what was going on throughout the globe at the same time. Smuts however, was trying to make contact with another of his leaders, Commandant Bouwer who had been told to remain down on the plains near the Olifants River near van Rijnsdorp. It was time for Reitz to head off once more, now the main messanger for General Smuts as he had an uncanny knack of finding distant Boer commandos. It took him three days of riding, through the high plains, then the mountain passes, and finally he located Bouwer near Van Rijnsdorp camped along the Trutro river. It is close to the western coast of South Africa, where the icy cold Atlantic flows past bringing dense fogs. The town is on the edge of the Nama Karoo region and has ancient San or Bushman paintings – some of the oldest in Africa. Reitz was too busy to take much notice of its history. You see Commandant Bouwer had suffered a major setback on the previous day – and it was all because of a Colonial called Lambert Colyn. This one moment in the Boer war would later sully General Smuts’ name as he sought to reunify South Africa – this English speaker who told the Boers he would fight for their liberty.

February 1902 is full of surprises, not least for Lord Kitchener who has designed his great Drives which are similar to hunting Grouse on the moors of England. Lines of men walk side by side, twenty yards apart, driving the Boers before them until they are squashed against the blockhouses and posts where they are forced to surrender in droves. Well that is the theory. Sometimes is worked, sometimes not. In the case we’ll hear today where Kitchener’s second major drive was launched in the Free State, the theory and the practice were out of kilter. Because Major Rawlinson and his superiors were after the crafty fox, General Christiaan de Wet and President Steyn. Should they capture these two, the Boer war would surely splutter to a halt. De Wet and General Jan Smuts, along with General de la Rey were the symbols of freedom for the Boers, and it was vital for the British to bring them to book. In the Eastern Transvaal, General Louis Botha had fought his last battle as we heard in January, and was now making preparations for a shift in strategy – and region. He had decided that his commando would serve no purpose remaining in the Transvaal and he was headed to Northern Natal where he believed he would have more success. Lord Kitchener had an epiphany. Rawlinson had had one too – but far earlier. Other British commanders had similar moments when the phrase Eureka surely must have escaped their lips. The British drives had been designed as day-time operations, at night the thousands of men would stop and make fires for supper, which is when the Boers would slip between the clearly demarcated fire areas of sleeping English and make their escape. The epiphany was a set of orders that altered how the British army would deal tactically with their enemy - which they pretty much use to this day. In fact, when I was a soldier, we used some of the tactics which the Americans also employed in Vietnam. In a nutshell, it is understanding that owning the night is essential in any war. You control the darkness, you control the coming battle. When walking patrol or moving a group of men of whatever size, one of the most important things to do before the sun sets is to confuse the enemy by pretending to be in a place you are not.

This week we’ll concentrate on surely one of the more unique southern africans of the 18th Century, who’s descendents feature as a small independent people in modern South Africa, and who found themselves stuck in a British concentration camp in the northern Transvaal town of Pietersburg in 1901. I was going to return to General Smuts, but he’s still meeting with rebels in the far northern Cape. So this week its all about Coenraad de Buys, his long strange journey through southern Africa and how he and his vast family ended up close to the Limpopo river – far away from the Cape Colony. And how his descendants ended up in a British Concentration Camp. Pietersburg was the northernmost Concentration camp in the Transvaal system during the Boer war, isolated and difficult to access, with the road constantly under threat by Boers. By May 1901 the frontier territory was under threat from various directions. The British had secured the town, but Boer commandos continued raiding the region. Insecurity was rife, African societies around the town had never been fully subdued by the Boers when they expanded northwards from the Cape in the 1830s. The frontier area was considered a lawless region and few British troops operated there, except for the notorious Bushveld Carbineers who we’ve heard about already – remember the Breaker Morant sage. Yet, one of the families living here were the de Buys people who origin dated back to the 1700s. Now they were based near the Soutpansburg to the north, and were regarded as what at the time was called the “In Between people” – in other words, somewhat black, somewhat white, not quite coloured. That sounds mysterious, and the de Buys people are enigmas. I need to explain as their provinence is somewhat extraordinary and probably needs a Netflix series to do it justice. The de Buys people are descendents of a Cape colonial Boer renegade called Coenrad de Buys who escaped from British rule in the late 18th century. You’ll see why I need to go back that far in a moment. As with things South African, this story is not one of black and white, it has shades of pink, champagne, salmon, brown, mustard, burnt umber, chocolate and cocoa brown. Not to mention Khaki and smokey topaz. There are many shades of black and white, particularly when you realise the story of South Africa is actually a story of pink and brown. This tale also has shades of surprise for most who don’t know about Mr De Buys and his adventures.

This is episode 123 and its January 1902. The war has four months to run, and there are still a few big shocks. One would be Lord Methuen’s capture by General Koos de la Rey. More about that in just over a month. But in the Eastern Transvaal, the last major battle in the region took place in January, and as I’ve explained in episode 121, General Louis Botha was convinced that he could no longer fight effectively there because the British actions had been so successful. Before he left, there was one more piece of violent business to attend to – the Battle of Onverwacht which the British called the Battle of Bankkop. The action took place in the first week of January and I have used Robin Smith’s excellent report into the battle published in the SA Military Journal as my main source. So it was then that on the 4th January 1902, on a ridge overlooking a fertile valley on the farm Onverwacht, the advance guard of a British column sat down for their midday meal. The commander of the detachment of 110 men of the 5th Queensland Imperial Bushmen was Major John Maximilien Vallentin. He was also in charge of a company of mounted infantry of the Hampshire Regiment and some Imperial Yeomanry. Valentin was a major of the Somerset Light Infantry and had been in South Africa since before the Anglo-Boer war started in 1899. He had been recognised for conspicuous gallantry during the battle of Elandslaagte in October 1899. After contracting enteric fever, he rejoined Brigadier General Ian Hamilton in Bloemfontein in late 1900, and then had been the military commissioner in Heidelberg south of Johannesburg. His name was mentioned in despatches four times and he is described in the Times History as an 'officer of proven gallantry and capacity'. So on the 4th January, Vallentin had halted his men on a flat area on the summit of the Bankkop range of hills, 30km east of Ermelo. There are many small wetland depressions here called pans which were an excellent source of clean fresh water for the horses and the men, so they off-saddled and prepared a meal. In order to prevent being caught by surprise, Vallentin placed pickets along the ridge running a few hundred metres to their front in a line stretching about three kilometres. This was a very strong position, secure from attack in front by the steep ridge while behind them were the soldiers of the Hampshire Regiment and the rest of the 19th Company of Imperial Yeomanry, Scots from the Lothian and Berwickshire. Attack from behind across the flat ground was thus highly improbable – and he had the guards out just in case. Westwards, towards Ermelo, there was a column led by Brigadier General Herbert Plumer, nearly a thousand men with mounted infantry and artillery. Even closer, to the east of them, was another column of similar strength commanded by Scots Guardsman Colonel William Pulteney. So you could say that with so many British units around, Vallentin could be forgiven for believing that the Boers would not attack.

This is episode 122 and we will take a close look at the love-life of a Boer spy – who’s tale is laced with an unusual irony that involves a regiment called the Witwatersrand Rifles. The nature of the war had shifted again by January 1902 with the British system of blockhouses and drives beginning to create a major problem for the Boers – pushing the small number of commandos left into areas of the country that could hardly be called strategic. The guerrilla tactic has morphed again from hit and run, to a lot more running and far less hitting. The policy of no-longer forcing women and children into the Concentration Camps had also begun to pose a problem for the Boers in a way. While they were used to tough conditions, drought and poor crops returns in lean years, the increasingly volatile regions on the frontiers meant they were isolated and in danger from other forces. Near Swaziland the kiSwati chiefs had made it clear that they felt the need to launch revenge attacks on the nearby Boer homestead, so too in the North Western Transvaal, in the northern Transvaal, and along the border with Zululand. The basutho had not actively entered the Free State but there were real fears by the Boers that vast tracts of empty farmland would entice their traditional foe who had made it clear their interests lay with the British. In Pretoria, sitting at her desk was Boer Spy Johanna van Warmelo. After the war she was married and was known as Johanna Brandt, but that was later. WE have heard many stories from her as she kept three diaries, a personal, a public, and a secret spying diary. The Historian Jackie Grobler published these in one volume in 2007 – it’s a great read because she wrote as a young woman – and her point of view was mixed. She wrote also in English, while despising the English. Its January 1902 and Johanna has applied for a permit to travel between Pretoria and Johannesburg. Small parties of Boers have repeatedly attacked the railwayline between these two cities which are 43 miles or 62 kilometers apart. In 1902 that was a whole day by slow moving train, now the Gautrain travels the route in 35 minutes. There is an unusual connection between van Warmelo and her ex-fiancé Karel de Kock which involves the Rand Rifles. The deserve a special mention because like with many things about the Anglo-Boer war, their importance resonates to this day. After the Boer war, the Rand Rifles were absorbed with members of the Railway Pioneer Regiment into The Witwatersrand Rifles in 1903. This new regiment was to play a major role in South Africa’s military history over the next century. It saw action during the the Bambata Rebellion of 1906, when it deployed a contingent to Zululand. In 1907 the regiment was strengthened when it absorbed the Transvaal Light Infantry Regiment and was mobilised again when World War I broke out. The first action that it took part in was the South African invasion of German South-West Africa (now Namibia). After the successful conclusion of this campaign, virtually all members volunteered for overseas service. Most of the volunteers were consequently assigned to the 3rd South African Infantry Battalion. Unfortunately for these men, they ended up in the terrible Battle of Delville Wood during the Somme offensive where 3433 men went in and only 750 came out alive.

General Jan Smuts is making merry in the Cape, trying to stoke uprisings, while Lord Kitchener’s been more successful in clearing the Eastern Transvaal, forcing General Louis Botha to shift towards Vryheid and along the border between the Transvaal and Natal. General Christiaan de Wet is active in the Free State, while General Manie Maritz has continued his low level harassment of the British across the Free State and Cape. I haven’t spent much time on Maritz mainly because there is not a great deal of documentation about exactly what he got up to on a daily basis – unlike the other generals we’ve been following for two years. He is also one of the most bigoted, warped and psychotic men who held a weapon during this terrible war who tended to lie quite a bit in his memoirs. During the Anglo-Boer war he was the only Boer General we know about took a great deal of pleasure in killing blacks instead of British. He seemed inclined to shoot all blacks he found. His most heinous act was lining up all 35 men of a Khoi village at the end of the war and shooting them down in cold blood in what became known as the Leliefontein Massacre. I will have more detail about this in later podcasts. Maritz evaded execution at war’s end for what were really war crimes. After all, the Australian Breaker Morant the Australian was executed by the British for a similar spree as he went about executing at least a dozen Boers in cold blood. But back to 1902. General Koos de la Rey is also still free, roaming the veld in the far west of the Transvaal and he has been particularly successful around Rustenburg, Mafikeng, Marico, Zeerust and other smaller towns in the region. We will also hear about how Trek Boers ended up founding the Kenyan town of Eldoret. It was established by the Boers in the midst of the farms they created, and known by locals as Sisibo because of the main farm number 64 – or Sisibo in the local language. Sixty more Afrikaner families arrived in 1911, by then it had a post office and was officially named as Eldoret which continued to prosper. Eventually the railway line reached Eldoret in 1924 accelerating growth, then in 1933 electricity arrived along with an airport. By the 1950s the town was literally divided in two along the main street now called Uganda Road, with Afrikaners living in the north of the divide, and English speakers on the South.

Its new year – the first week of January 1902 and we continue to ride, or rather walk, with Deneys Reitz as he and seven other colleagues have been separated from General Jan Smuts who is on a mission to raid the Cape – and possibly – cause an uprising of Cape Afrikaners. By now Smuts has realised that the idea of Cape Afrikaners rising up is a pipe-dream, but wants to surprise the British close to Cape Town to prove to them that the Boers are still able to strike fear into British citizens. Remember last week we heard how Reitz and his fellow commando members had managed to give the English troops the slip over the Swartbergen somewhere in the Small Karoo to the north of Craddock. The eight had managed to cross the mountains but now had to make a difficult decision. Where the Swartbergen mountains had consisted of a single clearcut barrier … It was getting dark, and a heavy rain began to fall. They continued descending from the Swartbergen and needed to find shelter quickly. When the rain falls in highground, the temperature can slide from a balmy 30 degrees centigrade to a really chilly 12 degrees of less in a matter of half an hour. They found a overhanging rock and rested until daybreak, trying to sleep as the wind whipped rain into their faces. They scrambled down the whole day, until by around four in the afternoon they emerged from the mist and clouds and could see a long narrow canyon ahead. It’s sides were enclosed in perpendicular cliffs. Then they spotted huts around 1000 feet below and decided to go ask for directions out of these mountains. They were taking a chance, all eight together descending to the huts. Those with horses left them in a nearby ravine to look after themselves and scrambled down arriving at the huts as the sun sank below the western cliffs. They were faced with a number of huts designed in the Xhosa way but also featuring wattle and daub, the much fancied building technique of the early settlers in the Eastern Cape. “As we approached the huts, a shaggy giant in goatskins appeared and spoke to us in a strange outlandish Dutch…” The stranger was one of the oddest people Reitz had ever met.

Its summer – December 1901. General Jan Smuts is on the run in the Cape Colony being chased by tens of thousands of British troops who are fixating on the fact that they don’t seem to be able to pin down this mercurial general. With him is one of our war narrators, Deneys Reitz. Or rather was with him until he became separated in late November and since then has been following Smuts – and trying to stay alive. This week we will hear how he stumbles into another series of largely self-inflicted moments of terror. Reitz has a propensity for falling asleep at precisely the wrong time and as you’ll hear, his escapades in the Cape include another variant. It was close to the Kariega River in the now Eastern Cape where Reitz last rode with Smuts. Then he found himself with a rearguard unit of seven other men who failed to join up with the General after fighting a skirmish with the British. They were laid up at a friendly Boers farm in the district and the next day thought they’d rejoin the Boer commander. But it was not to be. He managed to change from his British khaki uniform which was a death sentence – remember that Lord Kitchener had issued orders any Boer found wearing British uniforms should be shot as spies. They began to ride north westerly and as they went, local farmers told them that a large British column was ahead, also following Smuts. Not for the first time, the small unit of Boers followed a British column following a commando. Then a bizarre moment for Reitz. He bumped into an Englishman who was a relative by the name of Rex. He couldn’t remember the man’s name when he wrote his memoirs in 1902 but recounts. “…a lineal descendent of George Rex, the morganatic son of King George III by Hannah Lightfoot, the Quakeress. George Rex had been sent out to South Africa in 1775 and given a large tract of land at Knysna, on condition that he did not again trouble his august parent..” His descendants lived there ever since and one of them had married Reitz’s mother’s brother. They were cousins.

This episode takes us to Christmas 1901 and the battle of Groenkop near Bethlehem in the Free State where General Christiaan de Wet catches the British offguard on the top of a two hundred foot high kopje. We will also hear how the opposition party leader Lloyd George narrowly escapes being lynched as a pro-Boer Brit in a night of extreme violence as you’ll hear. The wobble that Chamberlain the Liberal Unionist leader and Sir Alfred Milner were most worried about had begun back in England. The Tax-payer was now fully aware that they were funding a war in South Africa that never seemed to end. The Times newspaper had led a revolt against the government as we heard in previous podcasts. Lord Kitchener was ignored as he complained asbout the fact that most of the new soldiers arriving in South Africa could neither ride nor shoot straight. That was nothing new in the eyes of the British public. They had heard that excuse since October 1899 and it was now wearing extremely thin. Parliament had been prorogued until after the New Year but mounting expenditure and public anger might force government to go into session again at such a late date in the year. Winston Churchill was pro-government, yet was also warning about what he called a disquietening situation which in his words was as “momentous as it was two year ago”.

So its December 1901 Christmas is a fortnight away for the combatants and Christiaan de Wet was tracking his arch enemy, brother Piet. It was revenge he was after and as we all know – it’s a meal best eaten cold and unfortunately Christiaan was overheating. While he stewed on the information that his hated brother was instrumental in setting up the National Scouts, made up of Boer turncoats who now fought for the British, across the world the end of 1901 brought with it a number of fascinating events, incidents and issues. On December 1st : A crowd of 100,000 people turned out at London's Hyde Park to demonstrate in sympathy for recently fired British Army General Redvers Buller. He was now being blamed for the disasters at Colenso and Spioen Kop almost two years previously where the Boers had pulverised the British as they tried to relieve the siege of Ladysmith. But on matters more prosaic. On the 2nd December 1901 a man by the name of King C Gillette began selling his safety razors in the United States. He was inspired by something that could be used and then thrown away, thus ensuring future business. It’s a bit like Monsanto’s seed business these days, but that’s another story. Gillette applied for his US. Patent number 775 134 on December 2 1901. His American Safety Razor Company would become the multi-billion dollar behemoth Gillette Company. Bizarrely Following the commercial success of disposable razors, Gillette refocussed his attention on promoting his views on utopian socialism. Strange but true. On December 3rd 1901 the Australian parliament passed its Immigration Restriction Act primarily to restrict non-Europeans from permanently entering the country. Interesting. Then on December 7 1901 The United Kingdom and Germany delivered an ultimatum to the government of Venezuela, after the South American country reneged on bond payments. Venezuelan President Cipriano Castro was given 48 hours to agree to the terms, or to face a blockade of his nation's ports by the Royal Navy and the German Navy. Well some things never change. On December 9 1901 the first-ever Nobel Prizes were announced, with x-ray discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen receiving the first Nobel Prize in Physics, Emil von Behring being awarded the prize in medicine for his discovery of the first diphtheria antitoxin, Jacobus van't Hoff pioneering work in physical chemistry earning him the chemistry prize, Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy sharing the peace prize, and Sully Prudhomme winning the prize in literature. The bestowal of the prizes came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel who I mentioned in Episode 1 of this podcast series. The next day December 10 Joseph W. Jones was granted U.S. Patent No. 688,739 for his invention, "Production of sound-records", which was purchased immediately by the Columbia Phonograph Company for production of its disc-shaped Graphophone records. Jones was paid $25,000 – worth around 700 000 dollars in today’s moolah. Finally in this series of amazing things that happened in December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, sent 1,700 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England to Signal Hill, St. John's in Newfoundland in Canada on the 12th. December. It was the letter "S" ("..." in Morse code)., He is quoted as saying "there was no doubt that the principle of wireless communication had arrived on a transatlantic scale... This was a utility, and would prove itself beyond argument as a vital aid to shipping and military communication." And on the same momentous day, 12th December in South Africa’s Cape Colony, Lieutenant General French finally caught up to General Pieter H. Kritzinger, who had led the Boer incursions into the Cape on three occasion. Unfortunately for him, it was three strikes and he was out.

This week its all about the scandal of the Concentration Camps which breaks across Great Britain as the Fawcett Commission releases its initial report. We also continue to monitor General Christiaan de Wet who has a large commando of 700 men and is beginning the move towards the Cape once more. His plan is to increase the pressure on the English although his previous attempt a few months before ended in failure. But first, a reality check for Lord Kitchener who has led what has become known as the Drives across Southern Africa where tens of thousands of British troops have been mopping up the remnants of the guerrilla commandos, but at a cost. The Boer women and children have been herded into Concentration Camps along with their black workers and this has turned into a catastrophe. As Emily Hobhouse realised more than 9 months ago, squeezing civilians into camps without proper hygiene or sanitation is a disaster waiting to happen. The country didn’t have long to wait. The Fawcett Commission was made up of a fairly diverse group of women. It was a daring experiment, a women-only commission which would investigate conditions in the Concentration Camps and compile a report which would be given to the Government in December. Between August and December they steamed up and down the veld in their special train. They may have had diverse backgrounds but they were all united in one thing – they believed that the war against the Boers was just and that the civilians were part of the Boer support network and therefore should be punished. Led by Mrs Millicent Fawcett, a liberal unionist and feminist, she was also a leader of the women’s suffragette movement. Lady Knox was the wife of Major General General Sir William Knox, who was on Kitchener’s staff. The four other women included a nurse from Guy’s Hospital two doctors who were already living in South Africa.

This week General Christiaan De Wet who has been largely dormant for November awakens and begins to leer in the direction of the Cape once more while Sarah Raal continues to ride with Commandant Nieuwoudt and her three brothers but for how long? The presence of a woman fighting alongside the burghers in Nieuwoudt’s commando has become something of a problem for him. He’s worried that she’ll be killed while she simultaneously is creating propaganda for the Boers in her skirts and matching Lee Metford with a hat rimmed with gold, bandolier and serious attitude. The British are highly motivated to track her down so she has now attracting more columns to the Southern Free State. Nieuwoudt has tried already to suggest that she return to some kind of safety in a town – but Sarah refused to listen as she knew it will be straight to a Concentration Camp which she dreaded. Niewoudt was also threading his way through thousands of British troops and the going become increasingly difficult.

This week’s episode is dominated by a young woman who we heard about last week called Sarah Raal. While some of her exploits have been exaggerated for Nationalist reasons years after the Boer War, there’s no doubt that she was extraordinary by any measure. Remember she is in her early twenties and escaped from Springfontein Concentration Camp outside Bloemfontein heading to join her four brothers who were fighting with Commandant Nieuwoudt who was part of General Herzog’s commando in the Free State. It’s around November 1901 when she joins the commando, and immediately is thrown into the thick of action. Nieuwoudt and his men and one women head off to a place called Boomplaas. “I was apprehensive about going there as it was the scene of my previous capture” she writes in her biography published in English in 2000. The commando ended up in the small settlement of Excelsior which was only to become a town in 1910, well after the war ended. This is where Sarah caught sight of the mountains to the East which loomed in purple and grey tones, and appeared malignant. “The imposing mountains frightened me, they looked so mysterious and full of unknown danger that I felt as if some misfortune may befall us at any moment…” she writes. That was around 50 miles due east of Bloemfontein and the Sarah’s life became increasingly more desperate in the coming weeks. She was to face numerous skirmishes fighting alongside her Boer brothers, and as you’ll hear, Sarah became a target for the British who realised there was a woman fighting against them.

Episode 113 covers events happening in November 1901 with six months of the war and this podcast left to run. This week Deneys Reitz and his fellow Boers suddenly realise they should not be wearing British uniforms which they donned after running out of clothing. Lord Kitchener has issued a proclamation that any Boer found clad in British uniforms should be shot out of hand as a spy. We also hear about Sarah Raal - one of the Boer women who actively fought in the war and was eventually made a prisoner of war. Her story was captured at the time in various ways - not least by curious photographers who clustered around a railway line during her transit after being caught fighting as a commando member. Her courage and gall is legendary and has been somewhat buried over time.

The first week of November 1901 shipping records published in the Times of London featured regular updates such as this one: “The Armenian left Port Natal for Bombay on Nov 3 with Boer prisoners, 36 officers and 981 men. They were escorted by the following: 67 th Battery RFA – Major Manifold, Captain Tapp, Lieutenant Sheppard, 2/Lieutenants Newland, Russell and 157 men 69th Battery RFA – Captain Belcher, Lieutenants Clark, Herbert, 2/Lieutenant Shaw and 156 men The Times continues to list a contingent of 350 men to guard just over a thousand Boers. Then the report states: “The Menes has arrived at Gibraltar, from Alexandria, bringing 109 officers and men of the 1/Derbyshire Regiment for South Africa. They will wait at Gibraltar for the Manhattan, which will take these troops to South Africa.” Still they came, thousands of troops from across the empire, many serving more than one tour in Africa. And through late October and into November 1901 that the English press began to paint the war in South Africa as never-ending. The editorials for most part up until this period in the conservative press in particular had been in full support of the Anglos fighting the Boers - but a series of embarrassing reports from South Africa led to a reappraisal of both the strategy, and the tactics at times. It was Bakenlaagte where General Louis Botha had decimated Lieutenant Colonel Benson’s mounted column leaving the British with almost 350 casualties and the Colonel dead. There was General Jan Smuts who cornered a company of 17th Lancers killing or wounded almost the entire unit of 167. These figures shocked the public back home who had believed the final phase was under way, where a handful of bandits as they were known who were hiding in the vast veld would be tracked down and killed or imprisoned. The bitter end of this war is upon us. And it was troops like those on the Mendes who still faced a focused enemy in the Boers who had no-where to go and were fighting for their survival. Another battle that had shaken the British resolve back home involved Robert Kekewich. If you remember our previous podcasts, Kekewich made his name during the siege period at the start of the war in 1899 through to the second quarter of 1900. He was officer in command at Kimberley - remember his to-and-fro with the arch imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes? Yet, for all the bad blood, Robert Kekewich was a hero in the eyes of the English back home. As the hours of daylight shortened back home, as the Autumn dappled dark light settled into the grey of winter, the gloom quickened when it came to citizen’s perceptions of the South African war.

The scenes have shifted recently between the war in South Africa and the effect of the war in England. The press has begun to turn against the government with vitriolic attacks on war hero Sir Redvers Buller as we heard last week. There’s more bad new for the government in the form of the Fawcett Commission made up of women sent to assess the Concentration Camps in South Africa. What liberal activist Emily Hobhouse had been decrying for months was about to be confirmed by a group of distinctly pro-Empire Englishwomen, much to the chagrin of some government officials. The death rates in these camps has been climbing constantly as they fill with more and more women and children. The camps for Black South Africans are even worse. Both camp systems were riddled with disease and abuse. The last straw for the commander in Chief, Lord Kitchener, had been the Benson smash up in the Eastern Transvaal I covered last week. While the military gains for the Boers was somewhat limited, the affect on their morale was indescribable. General Louis Botha had made Benson pay with his own life. Combine that with the news about the 17th Lancers squadron which had been decimated by Jan Smuts in the Cape and you can see why Kitchener was deep in the doldrums psychologically. It was so bad that Lord Roberts back home in England had dispatched his closest ally, Ian Hamilton, back to South Africa to keep an eye on Kitchener as his chief of staff. That had been in October 1901, by early November Hamilton felt like a square peg in a round hole. Ktichener had no need of a chief of staff - he kept everything in his head. This by the way, was to prove as disastrous to the British during the first world war as it had during the battle Paardeberg in the first phase of the Boer war. The Destruction of Benson’s unit at Bakenlaagte had not been a complete disaster for the British, once Kitchener received the full report. Benson’s rearguard had fought heroically and actually saved the entire column from being crushed. The Boers had lost General Opperman during that attack which was a major blow to Louis Botha. Kitchener’s new grand strategy began to look more like Lord Milner’s. This was to establish protected areas centred on Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Johannesburg, then progressively worked outwards clearing the entire country of all guerrillas and simultaneously restoring civilian life within the protected zones.

It’s time for reflection - and to talk about General Louis Botha who’s invasion into Natal fizzled out leading to his commando being forced to flee Lord Kitchener’s columns back to the Eastern Transvaal. But all is not lost for the man who would one day become South Africa’s first Prime Minister. It’s the final days of October 1901 when he returns to his base roving the veld somewhere between Ermelo and the Swaziland border. It’s a region dominated by rolling grassy undulating hills, then high mountains further eastwards closer to Swaziland, as the landscape breaks up into dolomite fractures where whole armies lurk. The Boers have learned to keep well away from the Swaziland border where the chiefs have been palavering with the British. Back to Botha in a moment. First, let’s take a look at what was happening in Britain, where the war had dragged on for long enough for the tabloid press to begin a sharp campaign against General Buller. He had been replaced in South Africa by Lord Roberts, who himself had been replaced by Lord Kitchener. Buller was pilloried in newspapers through October 1901, particularly by the Times and the Spectator. “On Thursday Sir Redvers Buller, presiding at a luncheon given by the Queen’s Westminster volunteers” a Spectator editorial opined under the headline, The Mistake of General Buller. “made a speech in which we believe that the nation will find the best possible justification for the declarations which we and others have made that Sir Redvers Buller is not a fit and proper person to be entrusted with the great and responsible duties involved in the command of the First Army Corps…” Wait, it gets worse. “…We would fain say no more about the speech, for it is one which can only be fairly described as pathetic in its weakness and inconsequence..” Thats not all folks .. “…unfortunately it is impossible for us to pass it over, for it must be urged upon public notice as one of the reasons which oblige us to continue our protests against the recent appointment to the First Army Corps..” We can safely assume that the Editors do not consider Buller a great leader of men - although his men who fought with him in Natal would disagree. The reality of his meandering about and his blithe incompetence as he meandered about trying to lift the siege of Ladysmith - not to mention to terrible battles of Spion Kop, Dundee, Colenso and others where he’d been defeated by a much smaller army of Boers had sullied his name.

This week we pick up where we left General Jan Smuts and his commando as they writhed about in pain having eaten from a plant that they failed to prepare properly and had poisoned about half the 250 men riding with the general. Worse, they were forced to fight off a British attack on the Mountains above Port Elizabeth at the same time. They had managed to escape the British cavalry and mounted infantry unit, but were now deep in badlands country in the mountains of the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. There are steep sided, with deep ravines and thickets, dotted about with thorn bushes ready to rip at the unprepared. Matters were coming to a head in the Eastern Transvaal. General Louis Botha had been forced to retreat from northern Natal where he had launched an invasion with 2500 men. The British and the Zulu were waiting for his commando. Despite shattering Colonel Gough near Dundee as we heard, Botha’s invasion had been a failure. However the British found the task of tracking and destroying Botha was almost impossible. First, Botha left his wagons and resorted to high mobility - Boers on horses. The British were slowed down by having to destroy the farms as they moved through Boer support, and this meant drives through swamps, mountains, caves and forests. Botha was actually succeeding in something else - that was prolonging the dislocation of Kitchener’s troop arrangements. The areas that troops had been drawn from were now more isolated and immediate prey for the guerillas. Of course Louis Botha was still highly active back in the Eastern Transvaal. He had rejoined the government in hiding between the towns of Piet Retief and Ermelo but he was frustrated. In his absence, the man he’d left in charge Commandant Viljoen had been worse than useless. This was unacceptable and Louis Botha was chomping at the bit. What could he dream up to make the British pay for their continued actions in the Eastern Transvaal - and make up for the vacillating Viljoen.

This is an important week - it is the 120 anniversary of the start of the Boer War - which formally began on 12th October 1899. This week saw the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein host a conference as part of the commemorations. Amongst the topics discussed were how all communities were affected by this war, and those attending included both professional and amateur historians. On Saturday 12th, a monument to Australian forces was unveiled at the battle site of Driefontein. If you want more details about this museum and the conference, head off to the website wmbr.org.za . But back to October 1901. It has been an extremely busy past few weeks for both Boer and Briton in South Africa - and in England as we heard last week where Churchill and conservative party backbenchers had begun to criticise the British Army tactics. General Jan Smuts was beginning to cause serious consternation in the Cape - while Louis Botha had found it impossible to continue his attack on Natal. However, Botha’s actions were proving to be a thorn in the side of Kitchener’s army. He was forced to send forty thousand men in various units to try and surround and capture the Transvaal Boer commander. This weakened other areas and the number of guerrilla attacks on railway lines and other infrastructure began to increase. Smuts, meanwhile, was trying to stimulate the Cape Afrikaners into rebellion in the Cape by showing them how weak the English were. This did not turn out as planned - although he was still determined to create a gap into which General De La Rey was supposed to pour with a much larger commando in a month or so. The timing was unclear - because Smuts still had not succeeded in his mission. But first, there was a food poisoning incident involving what is called Hottentots Bread and it almost proved the undoing of all who ate this remarkable plant. ITs scientific name is Dioscorea Elaphantipes - or Elephants foot. IT is one of the most beautiful, weird and wonderful caudiciform plant in the world and has a deeply fissured surface resembling an elephants foot - thus its name. It is one of those plants you cannot ignore, and indeed, Jan Smuts and his men made the almost fatal mistake of regarding it as a source of nourishment. With correct preparation, this is a useful plant to eat. Prepare it incorrectly and its almost as dangerous as the Japanese puffer fish.

It's early Spring 1901 and in England there are now serious doubts about how the British Army is going about its campaign in South Africa. Winston Churchill had been elected as an MP for Oldham partly because of his fame as a survivor of a Boer prisoner of war camp. He took issue with the manner in which the war office under Brodrick was going conducting itself in South Africa - it alarmed Churchill. He believed the military policy was wrong. It had started back on the 12 March 1901 - three weeks after Churchill’s maiden speech in parliament. Now the future British Prime Minister was involved in a series of debates over the army. Yet, by May Churchill began to oppose what he thought of as a mistaken policy, both in South Africa, and generally by the war office. The main idea presented by Brodrick was that the British army should be modelled on the Continental example. He wanted it bigger in order to respond more effectively to acute crisis situations. Such as the outbreak of war in South Africa. Churchill thought this was a bad half baked idea, and said so. He said it was contrary to the nature of the British to have a large standing army. Both sides debated about the Anglo-Boer war, with Brodrick believing that the small size of the army in Africa had meant the war had lacked progress - at least from the British point of view. Churchill said the problem in South Africa was not the number of British soldiers, there were other reasons including a lack of horses and failure to manage logistics amongst others. Don’t forget that Churchill was a conservative and his attack on Brodrick didn’t go down well with his party. By Mid-July Churchill had formed a parliamentary faction with four other young conservatives known as the Hughligans, alluding to its leader, Lord Hugh Cecil. The group held weekly debates, separate from their party. This began to sharpen Churchill’s mind still further, and he slowly shifted his political allegiance to the left both on the issue of the war in South Africa. Not that he supported the Boers, he fully supported Chamberlain the prime minister and Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner in South Africa. At the same time, individual officers were showing how they could lead a proper response to the Boers when given the freedom to do so. One was Colonel Harry Scobell of the 9th Lancers who was about to crush Lotter's commando at Groenkloof farm in the Tanjesburg mountains between Graaff-Reinet and Cradock in the Eastern Cape.

This is September 1901 and it's been a wet Spring so far. The weather has caused trouble for both Jan Smuts and Louis Botha - but things are about to improve for Smuts after his daring raid into the Cape Colony almost ended before it started as you’ve heard. The number 17 shall feature strongly in this episode. We will hear how the 17th Lancers who were the first line of cavalry in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war, meet their match on the African veld. Twenty four hours after their horrendous ride known as the Night of the Big Rain, the 17th September dawned bright and sunny after days of rain. The men of Jan Smuts’ commando were cheerful as they rode in the sun, but there was little additional reason to be optimistic. General Haig and thousands of his men were searching the nearby hills and valleys for Smuts and the Boer General knew time to act was ebbing away. His men were down to their last few rounds and many were now on foot. Our intrepid narrator Deneys Reitz who’d joined Smuts was operating as one of the General’s Scouts as part of the quaintly named Rijk Section, or Rich Section, and he realised how critical the situation was. Still the sun was shining. After a few miles General Smuts ordered the Rijk Section - Reitz’s small group of scouts, to ride ahead of the commando and look out for trouble. That was when they ran slap bang into the 17th Lancers and a major battle developed.

An incredible turn of events was taking place after a few icy months of winter - the Boers were waking up like hibernating bears and there would be a sudden escalation in incidents across south Africa. General Jan Smuts led a commando of around 400 men. He had survived three near misses after entering the Cape in the first week of September 1901. Remember I’d explained how he was first attacked by a group of Basutho’s, then he was ambushed by a British patrol while conducting surveillance - losing three men and his horse, then he was surrounded on a flat-topped hill in the Stormberg range. He escaped after being led to a steep ravine by an unnamed hunchback. General Louis Botha meanwhile, had managed to invade Natal with a much larger force of around 2000 men in his commando and had savaged a British cavalry unit near the town of Dundee. I explained last week how Captain Gough had charged straight into this commando, and lost virtually all of his 245 men. Botha and his commando had been marching south skirting both Zululand and just clipping the Swaziland border. His men were riding fast - they had hundreds of pack mules and pack horses, leaving their cumbersome ox wagons. They had armed themselves with both Lee Metford and Mauser rifles so could take advantage of seized Britsh ammunition. As Major Hubert Gough had discovered, this commando was moving swiftly. Remember the invasion of Natal was the other half of the grand strategy agreed with Smuts at the meeting in Standerton earlier in the year. The military aim was to divert pressure from the occupied Republics, its political aim, to prove that the war was not over.

It’s mid September 1901 and Jan Smuts is about to face one of the most challenging moments in his illustrious career. He was only 28 at this point, yet was to achieve so much in the next few weeks and would forever be remembered as the remarkable soldier who led a tiny group of men into the mouth of the British Empire lion. His immediately challenge, however, involved the weather, rather than the British. In an event which became known in Boer storytelling as The Big Rain, his commando was caught on high ground and hammered by a biblical deluge that threatened to destroy his force A few days after crossing into the Cape Colony and being attacked by the Basotho, Smuts survived a second ambush by a British patrol that killed his three scouts as they rode to investigate reports of a large column nearby. That was at the aptly named Moordenaars Poort or Murderers Way. Among the dead was Neethling who was a friend of our narrator, Deneys Reitz, who has warned us how many of the members of the Rijk Section, the Rich section as they ironically called themselves, were going to die. Ironic because they were dressed in rags - one of the ten went further describing the band of brothers as the Dandy Fifth. By around mid-September they were riding into more hills, which of course is where moist air rises and it rains more particularly on the Southerly facing mountains of South Africa. It may be the first month of Spring, but it can still snow on the high ground and Smuts’ commando was caught in freezing weather. It rained constantly, sometimes sleeted, and the wind never abated. The continued lack of any sunshine made them even more dispirited, and Reitz began to wish he’d never left the Free State.

We continue to rid4 with General Jan Smuts and he has just entered the Cape Colony, an invasion that has been planned to coincide with Spring in early September 1901. The master guerrilla fighter and his commando of around 400 men are in a spot of bother, however. As they entered the Cape, their route took them through Basutho territory where they were set upon by around 300 warriors armed with rifles, spears and knobkerries. As we heard last week, they managed to fight off the attack, but lost 3 dead and seven wounded. They had also used up spare reserves of ammunition which was a big problem. This commando was supposed to immediately begin sowing mayhem inside the Cape but couldn’t do so without Lee Metford Rounds - their new choice of firearm replacing the German Mauser’s. The Boers were now armed with the same weapons as the British because their supply chains had dried up and were using attacks on the British to replenish ammunition and other material. Our narrator since the start of this podcast series, Deneys Reitz, had joined General Smuts along with ten others just before they crossed the Orange River into the Cape. He had only four rounds left after the clash with Basutho warriors that almost cost him his life. Invading hostile territory with a virtually empty rifle was not going to build confidence and Reitz fretted about this.

Spring is upon is in this podcast - so too the long-awaited invasion of the Cape Colony by General Jan Smuts and his commando. It has taken him almost a month of zig-zagging across the Free State from his base in the Eastern Transvaal to arrive at the border. Other Boer leaders had already been busy in the Cape, but they were operating in smaller units and were regarded as less significant at least from the point of view of the British occupying the territory. Smuts’ arrival was a completely different kettle of fish. He was the very symbol of resistance, but also a symbol of the contradictions that many Boers encapsulated as I’ll explain. While he remains literally a giant in the pantheon of South African heroes, he was not an easy man to travel with as Deneys Reitz would find out. Remember last week Reitz had ridden to within sight of the Orange River and its junction with the Calendon River in the southern Free State. That’s when Jan Smuts’ commando rode into view and our youthful narrator was seeking to invade the Cape himself with his new found friends - nine extremely young and radicalised teens who wanted to fight the British inside their own territory. But first a quick look at Smuts and why he was such an enigma in South African early politics. He deserves an entire podcast series himself his life was so rich - from his incredibly brave acts as a youthful Boer leader, all the way through to his involvement in the formation of the Royal Air Force during the First world War, his leadership during the second world war, his diplomatic skills and crucial role in the formation of first the league of Nations and then United Nations, and of course, as South Africa’s prime Minister decades after the Boer war. Strangely, he studied American poet Walt Whitman, and then wrote a book which remained unpublished until 1973 called Walt Whitman: A study in the evolution of personality. But as soon as General Smuts and his commando crossed the Orange River into the Cape Colony, they came under attack by Basotho warriors hired by the British to police the border.

This week we hear about the Dandy Fifth and Deneys Reitz. It’s also time to ride with General Christiaan de Wet as he sums up the Blockhouses. Reitz has fallen in with “this little band” as he calls them - and most would die tragically. There were Dandy fifth were actually nine in number and led by Jack Borrius who was a short thick-set man of 28 from Potchefstroom. We must stand back and take a look at what was happening across the battlefields at this time. For most of South Africa the winter period was a time of stagnation but significant developments were taking place. Remember how General Jan Smuts was already riding south towards the Cape Colony border and was planning an invasion with a crack squad of Boers. His plan was simple. Destabilise the colony and convince the Cape Afrikaners to rise up and join the two Boer states of the Transvaal and the Free State in their long war against the British. In the Free State, while drives, columns and patrols continued across the desolate plains, a lightning raid on General Hertzog’s commando laagered in the South West on the 25 August indicated new methods. The British were finally going Boer in their tactics. After the start of the guerrilla campaign in late 1900, the British continued concentrating their forces around the logistic centres like railway lines and towns. They also preferred moving during the day and the Boers had taken to sniping at these large columns but never facing them, then riding away and resting before resting for the night and then continuing the skirmishes the next day. IN the Eastern Transvaal Boer tactics had been successful in attacking the British during the night. Now things were changing in the Free State much to the chagrin and frustration of leaders like Christiaan de Wet who’d figured out long ago how to fight this war of attrition against the British Empire. Lord Kitchener, the Commander in Chief in South Africa, now ordered that each large column which moved through the veld to hand pick the most daring and skilled men on horseback to operate as special units. These were lightly equipped but proactive soldiers - the same kind of man as the Boer if you like. They could spend days on the veld living on next to nothing and sleeping in short bursts, but could pop up anywhere within a 50 mile radius of the columns and possibly catch the Boers unprepared. Kitchener went further. He set up special mobile columns in August which worked along a logic that would be called special force raids rather than a stolid slow march across the veld. The Drives as they were known were co-operative and therefore slow. Each section would have to move in relation to the other.

It’s an amazing to think that back in 2017 I was thinking about this podcast and whether I should go ahead and cover a topic that was missing on both iTunes and general podcasting. Jumping in and starting in October 2017, the plan was to follow the war as it wound its way through the next three or so years. Now we're on episode 100! We’re now well into year two and this podcast series will wrap up at the same time as the Boer war - in May next year. I’ve tracked the incidents, events and issues through the war on a week by week basis so we’re now in August 1901 and as you heard last week, Breaker Morant and his murderous Bushveld Carbineers have been busy across the north of the Transvaal. In the Free State, hundreds of Boers are beginning to arrive close to the Cape Colony border where they’ll join up with General Jan Smuts who has been riding from the Transvaal and plans an invasion into the colony. The winter temperatures begin to ease in August. South Africa’s high veld as I’ve explained experiences quite bitter winters with below freezing conditions for most of June and July. However by mid to late August, winds begin to blow and the sun which has been angled low in the north starts rising earlier, setting later and warming everyone. Not a moment too soon. In the Concentration camps now dotted around the interior, the death rate has been creeping up. There are now officially 100 000 Boer civilians - mostly women and children, who are incarcerated in these camps, with another 60 000 black civilians at least. These numbers are now known to have been conservative. Lord Kitchener had published his infamous proclamation of August 7th with an ultimatum to all the Boers’ political and military leaders from commandants down to the heads of what he called ‘armed bands’. Anyone who hadn’t surrendered by 15th September would be exiled from South Africa for life. What’s more, those who had families in the Concentration Camps would be forced to pay for their maintenance which naturally meant their land and property would be seized. This would hit them where it hurt most, he thought. And of course, it would. But General Christiaan de Wet and other hardliners shrugged off Kitchener’s threat. There were other ideas beginning to float around at this time. Why shouldn’t the British rid themselves of the Boers altogether? This has an ominous sound to it, doesn’t it? Kitchener ran his idea of rounding up all the Boers, women, children, old, young, from the camps as well as the 20 000 men in prisoner of war camps overseas. Why not pack these people off to a new region - Fiji perhaps? Willem Leyds had heard some of these wild plans before, but in August 1901 he was shocked when one of these wild plans came from a man by the name of Hyram Maxim. He was a 61 year-old American who had become a naturalised British subject and one of the last people that Queen Victoria had bestowed a knighthood before she died as I mentioned in an earlier podcast. The honour was conferred on Maxim as an inventor. He claimed to have invented the lightbulb, but that was debatable, but he had invented a number of machines including the mousetrap, the merry-go-round and, terrifingly, the machine gun. At the beginning of the letter dated August 1901, Maxim professed to be well disposed towards the Boers. Maxim wrote to Kruger that because of the British numerical superiority, they were inevitably going to win the war. But, there was a way out of this morass believed Maxim. And the horrible truth is that he was completely correct in his basic analysis. The British, by pure dint of their numerical and financial superiority, were going to win the war because they still wanted to win it. So what to do, thought Maxim? Simple, he said. The Boers were going to leave South Africa en masse to establish a new colony in the north of Mexico.

It’s early August 1901 and a series of events in a far off corner of the war would end up resonating internationally for the next one hundred and 18 years. These involved the Bushveld Carbineers, the unit of irregular troops from Australia that was eventually disbanded. I covered part of this story in an earlier podcast, Episode 72. Because most of these events happened in August 1901, and that's where we are in our podcast series, we must reconsider the story of Breaker Morant. The events that led to the Morant and his partner in crime, Lieutenant Handcock, are still clouded in controversy. Very few stories resonate so continuously as this. We need to take a closer look once more. By February 1901 a 320-man regiment had been formed by Australian colonel Robert Lenehan which was based in Pietersburg 180 miles north of Pretoria. It was called the Bushveld Carbineers As I’ve described, the northern Transvaal area where they were based is largely lowveld, extremely hot and dry, dusty in summer, warmer than the high veld where Pretoria is based. There’s a slow descent from Pretoria to the low veld town of Pietersburg which is known as Polokwane today. It was also a slow descent into the madness of war for the Bushveld Carbineers and their officers as we will hear. By the summer of 1901, rumours had reached the Officer Commanding at Pietersburg "of poor discipline, unconfirmed murders, drunkenness, and general lawlessness in the Spelonken.” That was the name of the region - Spelonken which itself has a discordant feel. Spelonken means caves in Dutch. The main example of indiscipline was rape. A local woman had accused British Army Officer James Robertson, the officer commanding of the Bushveldt Carbineers A Squadron of sexual assault. In response, Robertson was recalled to HQ and given an ultimatum. Court Martial, or resign his commission. He submitted his resignation and quit the British Army. Modern organisational planning includes what’s known as the culture of organisations. And alas, the culture of the the Bushveld Carbineers was steeped in abuse. Former Kitchener Fighting Scout Lieutenant Percy Frederick Hunt was ordered to the northern Transvaal and given command of the Bushveld Carbineers B Squadron. Before leaving Pietersburg in July 1901, the newly promoted Captain Hunt asked for a number of officers to be transferred with him to his new field of command. These officers were Lieutenant’s Morant, Charles Hannam and Harry Picton. An emblematic moment as we'll see. The Bushveld Carbineers were building a name for themselves in this region and it wasn't positive. With Hunt officer commanding the detachment at Fort Edward in Spelonken, both lieutenant Morant and Handcock began to reimpose discipline which had been lacking. They would take the concept of retribution far beyond what is acceptable in war.

It’s time for an exchange of letters and a proclamation or two. General Jan Smuts and his commando have broken into smaller units and are traveling from the Transvaal to the Free State / Cape border. They’re going to launch an invasion in a last-ditch attempt to entice their Afrikaner brothers living in the Cape Colony into an uprising. So far it's failed. The Cape Afrikaners are threatened with execution should they take part in the Boer war, as the British consider the Cape their Colony and all citizens should support the Empire. The Free State and Transvaal have also been seized by the British, but the rules of warfare still govern these two territories. That means any Boer citizen seized or taken prisoner is accorded the protection of the rules. But it also means that the Cape Afrikaners have much more to loose if they take part in this war. Not only will they be executed for treason, but it's likely their property will be seized and their families will lose everything. The cost of the war rose and by this period it was around 1.25 million pounds a week. The British government has been borrowing money to pay for the material and men its poured into South Africa - 250 000 in all. Lord Kitchener, who is commander-in-chief in South Africa, is trying to rush the war to an end but the bitter-einders are refusing to stop fighting. General Christiaan de Wet is active in the Free State and President Steyn has not been captured yet, although he has had two narrow escapes as we’ve heard. The British were also quickly building their blockhouse system along the railway line between Cape Town and Pretoria. They were also extending these military defensive positions along the lines to the western and eastern transvaal. They were immediately successful, as Boer generals have attested in their personal memoirs, including de Wets called "Three Years War" and published in 1902 at the war’s conclusion. “I now impressed upon my officers as forcibly as I could the importance of intercepting the communications of the enemy by blowing up their trains…” he writes. “A mechanical device had been thought of by which this could be done. The barrel and lock of a gun in connexion with a dynamite cartridge, were placed under a sleeper so that when a passing engine pressed the rail on to this machine, it exploded and the train was blown up…” Thus the Boers devised one of the first ever examples of an IED or improvised explosive device. I mentioned right at the beginning of this series how this war produced a number of firsts - or at least a modern use of new technology and the IED here was the first of its type. “It is terrible to take human lives in such a manner, still however fearful, it was not contrary the rules of civilised warfare and we were entirely within our rights in obstructing the enemy’s lines of communication in this manner…” But he must have felt discomfort in the idea that it was not a direct attack - it was indirect. It was a tactic we’ve come to know and fear as conventional soldiers in the world today. The carnage that has been sewn by IEDs and its more extreme cousin, the suicide bomber, is so established in guerrilla armies now its more usually found in training schedules than a knowledge of mine laying or grenade use.

This week we will hear about bandits at the Southern Border who are making the most of the guerrilla war raging around the Transvaal, parts of the Cape and the Free State. These motley laggards lurked close to towns and sometimes waylaid unfortunate men and women who passed by as they in turn were fleeing from the British - or the Boers. Of both. The small town of Fauresmith is a classic desert town on the edge of the karoo close to where the Free State and Cape colony border lay. This town had seen its fair share of skirmishes and battles during the first phase of the war and its residents were now exhausted by the ongoing fighting swirling around the veld. Riding towards this small town was Deneys Reitz and his new friend, Jacobus Bosman. Little did they know that also riding towards this part of the Free State was General Jan Smuts who was to meet up with his initially small commando of 350 men and launch a lightning raid into the Cape Colony. Meanwhile, Lord Kitchener was aware of the Smut’s commando plans and had mobilised another 15 000 men to march onto the semi-desert southern plains of the Free State in an attempt to surround this commando and once and for all deal a terminal blow to Boer sentiment. But we’ll start this week riding with Reitz and Bosman. They had begun their ride after bidding good bye to their commando led by Field Cornet Botha who had turned back saying it was impossible to cross into the Cape now. And disappointingly, his two German friends Haase and Pollatchek had decided to turn back as well. The Dirty dozen members had been reduced to two idealist youngsters - Reitz almost Quixotic in his belief in some divine order that was calling him to the Cape - Bosman equally motivated which was to be a terrible miscalculation as we’ll hear in later podcasts. So after spending the night at a graveyard where British soldiers were killed in an shootout with Boers in 1848 - the two awoke to a real problem. That night the little Shetland Pony that had wondered into the Boers camp shortly before had taken off again - and this time Bosman’s horse joined it on the expedition. Reitz and Bosman spent five hours on foot, hunting for the horses. Finally they located the two and rode them back to the graveyard to collect their saddles and other belongings. But these had disappeared. Bandits were busy and they obviously had spied on the two - perhaps even tried stealing their horses. They had made a big mistake however, as Reitz was by now more than an expert tracker. They had lost their bridles, saddles, cooking tins, blankets.

It’s the third week of July 1901 and this winter has been cold even by the standards of South Africa’s high plains. As I’m writing this, snow has blanketed parts of the semi-desert known as the Karoo and it was no different then. And Deneys Reitz is close to this region. He had found a bolt hole near the Lesotho border where he’d been hiding out with a handful of fellow travellers and his German colleagues. They’d been able to bathe for the first time in months having found a copper cistern. Reitz recovered during his short stint of R&R and was itching to rejoin the war. By the end of June the small band led by Field Cornet Botha started back down the mountains heading towards the Orange River which is the border between the Free State and the Cape Colony. AS they descended they saw a rider approaching. It was a young man named Jacobus Bosman. He would have been shot as a traitor. But Mr Bosman said it was worth the risk, so Reitz and his German troop enlisted him. Unfortunately for Bosman, he should have listened to the advice for as we’ll see, his is not a happy ending. After three days of progress the Quixotic group, or the dirty dozen as Dutch historian Martin Bossenbroek calls them, are back on the flat open plains within sight of the Johannesburg-Bloemfontein railway line. By now Lord Kitchener’s blockhouse system is causing the Boer guerrilla army some problems because these are close together and crossing the railway line has become very difficult during the day.

It’s mid July 1901 and it's a Southern Winter. We will also hear how the commanding officer in Pretoria, General Maxwell, meets a Petticoat commando member Johanna van Warmelo who unknown to him, is carrying explosives during their meeting. There’re awful resonances here with contemporary events. For example, Lord Kitchener writes in the London newspapers in 1901 that the Boer women and children are relatively healthy and well, and that the hygiene of the camps is at acceptable levels. Meanwhile, disease is killing hundreds, and eventually, thousands a month. Kitchener had written that the families in the camps “..had sufficient allowance, and were all comfortable and happy…” Emily Hobhouse the British humanitarian had visited these camps and she wrote in her diary how Kitchener’s claims were shocking because she knew that the people in the tented camps were ..” all miserable and underfed, sick and dying…” She realised that the British public was being sold lies. This brought her to an important decision. There was no way that Hobhouse supported the Boers political ambitions - those of remaining independent. Her report to the House Committee and eventually made public in late June was delivered purely on the belief that the reasonable government would respond to what was her obviously neutral description of how badly the camps were being run. Instead, she was fobbed off by the political establishment and it dawned on Emily Hobhouse that her personal sympathy for the Boers was being confused with political support. “It was no question of political sympathy” she wrote in a letter at this time “… on that score I always maintained a negative attitude…” It was now she was to make a telling decision. Her approach of working with government to find a solution had led to nothing. Worse, she was now aware that the censorship imposed by the British army in South Africa meant that the families in these camps were going to be facing an increasingly awful future in the frigid Highveld winter. She was going to fight the government in their own back yard, in London. The gloves were well and truly off.

It’s the first week of July 1901 and the British are about to break the code both the Boers and the Dutch have been using which has meant London’s military planning at times has been beset by guess work. Not that things have gone too badly in recent months for the British. The Boers have begun to surrender in larger numbers as it becomes clear that continued fighting was almost suicidal. There was only honour now, and when your women and children begin dying in concentration camps because you want to fight to the death, surrendering and ensuring your blood line isn’t such a crazy idea at all. Not that Generals Jan Smuts and Louis Botha from the Transvaal were for giving up just yet. It was really clear, however, that the British were not going to stop fighting although the war had now dragged on for 21 months. What the Boers did not know, was that their arch enemy in South Africa, the British commander in chief Lord Kitchener, had received a bit of shock from the war office in the form of a telegram. It outlined that the government was planning to trim his force of 250 000 by 110 000 men in order to save money. London was borrowing heavily to pay for the Boer war, and Kitchener was told in the telegram that he had until the end of Winter to ensure that Botha and Smuts and the hardliners General de la Rey and De Wet were defeated. As the code-breakers were breaking the Boer cypher, probably in their shirt-sleeves and late night oil lamps, back in South Africa the man who was the most determined to fight on was about to escape almost certain capture. Had he fallen into British hands now, it would have dealt the Boers a possibly fatal blow and it has been said by their own leaders including Christiaan de Wet, that the war may have ended then.

The winds of war have been blowing cold across the veld, shrivelling the corpses that lie across hundreds of kilometres in all directions. It is the beginning of July 1901. Emily Hobhouse was so excited because finally, after weeks of cajoling, she would have an opportunity to put her report on the Concentration Camps setup by the British in South Africa to a proper public debate. It had taken a month, but she’d managed to keep her vow to those suffering in the Boer Camps where women and children were dying in large numbers. She was going to talk to a full audience at Queen’s Hall in London. There she would tell the British people about the suffering of the civilians both black and white as Lord Kitchener’s camps began to descend into a disease riddled hell. Winter meant temperatures below freezing, children were dying of measles and pneumonia at a rate of up to 30 a day per camp. And there were more than two dozen camps. Things would not work out as she planned, however. But the costs are also ratcheting up, now more than £1.25m a week which in 1901 was a huge amount.As we’ve seen, the election of 1900 saw the coalition under Conservative leader Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister and his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as Leader of the House of Commons, win a clear majority. While various major posts went to the Liberal Unionists, most notably the Leader of the House of Lords, the Liberal Unionist Duke of Devonshire, and Joseph Chamberlain, who became Colonial Secretary. It was partly Chamberlain’s actions behind the scenes that eventually led to a new policy being formulated about South Africa in 1901. The coalition government decided to send a cable to Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of British forces in South Africa on the 2nd July. “‘we must now face the possibility that your winter campaign, however successful, will not conclude the war. Indeed the very success in reducing the larger commandos to small unorganised guerrilla bands may render some change in method necessary by the end of August…” This must have come as a shock to Kitchener, who had carefully manipulated reports back home indicating that he was on the cusp of victory. But the British intelligence system for all its shortcomings, was better informed. The leadership knew that the Commander in Chief was suffering the effect of being too close to the coalface to have all the facts. “The government does not think its either possible or desirable to continue indefinitely to spend 1 million 250 thousands pounds a week and keep in South Africa 250 000 soldiers to deal with an enemy who cannot be crushed simply because they are too few and too scattered.. estimated not to exceed 18 000 men… ”

This week we spend some time in England as the political fallout caused by the Anglo-Boer war grows, and meet an unusual man called Magistrate Kidwell. But first, Emily Hobhouse finally presented her report on the Concentration Camps to the English public - after government officials gave her the cold shoulder. While she was determined to be heard and for the government to act, the reality is the British political leadership was equally determined to force the Boers to surrender and believed that the deaths of civilians was part of what in modern discourse is called collateral damage. More importantly, they were censoring all news from South Africa in an effort to hide just how many civilians were dying. Hobhouses' fifteen page report to the Committee of the Distress Fund was first circulated amongst the members before being released to the public in early June 1901. Her conclusion about the camps was they were cruel and should be abolished. She also warned that the black population was beginning to take advantage of the ongoing chaos in South Africa and that would bode ill for any future British governor. This was the report coupled with her personal diary and testimony, that sent a shock wave through the pro-Boers in England. Lloyd George intensified his attack on the government in a debate on the 18th June. The report also dislodged Opposition leader Campbell-Bannerman from the tight-rope he’d been walking between two different liberal views in Britain at the time, forcing him into an increasingly radical position. On the 14th June Campbell-Bannerman had attended a liberal party dinner at the Holborn Restaurant where he publicly said he was sickened by the policy of sweeping women and children into concentration camps, as the Spaniards had done in Cuba. There were overtones of race here, how the white women were being treated like mulatoos and the blacks of Cuba, although he didn’t quite put it that way. He raged “A phrase is often used that war is war but when one comes to ask about it one is told that there is no war going on - that is not war…” The crowd in the restaurant laughed. “when is war not war?” he asked those assembled in Holborn. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa…” That phrase resonated throughout the world at the time. Also in this podcast, the curious tale of Magistrate Kidwell who surrendered after being attacked by the Boers in the village of Jamestown. He promptly took an oath of neutrality to save two black spies from being shot by the Boers. We'll also hear more from Johanna van Warmelo at Irene and have an update from the Boer leadership gathering at Waterval near Standerton which sets a new course, ordering Jan Smuts to launch an urgent invasion into the Cape Colony.

It’s mid June 1901. Winter in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Highveld or high plains of South Africa that means bitterly cold nights where the temperature can dip well below freezing. As I write, this, the temperature outside has dipped to 4 degrees centigrade in Johannesburg - or 39 degrees farenheit. Yes, its nothing like Siberia or Canada, but this is Africa and these kinds of temperatures catch the uniformed off-guard. It gets much colder in other parts of South Africa. In the Cape Province, the town of Sutherland is the coldest in the country with mid-winter lows that can drop to below -20 centigrade or -4 farenheit and where 3 feet of snow can fall. The British Army was not ready for these extremes, as the German army was not ready for the Russian Winter of 1941/2. While South Africa’s high plains winter is nothing like Russia’s, the point is the military underestimated the weather. The British were conducting what were known as Drives with columns of thousands of troops riding or marching across the veld rounding up small groups of Boers who were trying to continue the guerrilla war. While nights and early mornings can be bitterly cold, during the day temperatures rise to above 20 degrees Centigrade or 68 Fahrenheit, and it becomes extremely dry. Not quite the Atacama, but dry enough. Most of South Africa is a summer rainfall region, except for the Western Cape which has a Mediterranean climate, very similar to the San Francisco area of California. So Winter has come to the Anglo-Boer war and for many British soldiers its their second on the veld. The Boers meanwhile, have slowed their action with the lack of water for their horses and feed that has disappeared from the veld. General de la Rey for example has sent most of his men home and told them to wait out the winter for a renewal of guerrilla warfare in Spring. De la Rey heads off to join General Christiaan de Wet who is still fighting along with die hard followers of around one hundred burghers who had made it their mission to cause as much trouble as possible for the British in the Orange Free State. However, between 5th June and 20th June 1901 freezing weather had made their mission painful, and deadly. They were not alone. As I’ll explain, a blizzard that was about to sweep across the high veld would lead to deaths on all sides, not least the civilians cooped up in the Concentration Camps. That’s the contradiction that is South Africa. The dry winters are interspersed with icy cold fronts that are driven across the sub-continent all the way from the Antarctic, bringing frozen moisture that leaves high ground covered in snow.

This week we’ll focus on the British troops and discuss how British army tactics had changed, and the role that alcohol and prostitution played in the three year war. There were more 65 000 English casualties during the war and its effects tore across the Southern African veld between 1899 and 1902. 22 000 English soldiers died. To put this in perspective, 16 000 died in the Crimean War, fought ostensibly with muskets and canon, not smokeless magazine fed highly accurate rifles like the Mauser and Lee-Metford, nor the automatic canon called the pom pom, or the Maxim machine gun such as we’ve seen during this war. When conflict began English officers basically followed a system that they believed had been perfected over hundreds of years. What the military brains trust hadn’t taken into account was the effect of new technology. As I’ve explained since the start of this series, these men were caught between two continents, two eras and two worlds. Many grew up as the industrial revolution burst across England and Europe, but were also affected by the romantic era of battles that resonated for the entire 19th century. Admiral Nelson, the defeat of Napoleon, the charge of the light brigade, the suppression of the Indian subcontinent with its mysterious riches, the subjugation of the Sudan and India. Some of the fighting men had met veterans of the war on the Spanish Peninsular and had read or heard of the tales of heroism. But they were facing a 20th Century industrial war, where artillery had advanced and trenches were to become the preferred defensive method in order the escape the industrialised killing machines. The officers and men were steeped in tradition backed up by the narrative of an Empire in full flight, secure in its own history and positive about its future. Phalanx’s of infantry, steel and swords gleaming, marching in serried rows towards each other to fight a glorious battle, backed up by cavalry usually swinging around in some kind of flanking manoeuvre at speed. The Boer war was very different. It was fought at a distance at least between October 1899 through to December 1900. Then it morphed into a classic guerrilla campaign and the British troops came face to face with their enemy in an entirely different way. So this week we’re going to peek into the lives of some of these British soldiers. Its winter, early June 1901 and the war is stuttering. 240 000 British troops are now garrisoned and marching across South Africa mostly in Drives across the Transvaal and Free State, trying to mop up motley groups of Boers, the die-hards or bitter-einders, bitter-enders, as they’re known. Ordinary British soldiers in South Africa found life tedious, dreary and boring. Many wrote copiously about their experienced and as I’ve explained, this war was the first where rank-and-file men were educated through the development of the Victorian schooling system, so we have diaries, notes and letters from all classes. By June 1901 many Tommies began to display disorderly behaviour. As white colonials shied away from fraternising with blacks, Tommy Atkins created a huge hidden economy that ranged across the veld, following the columns of thousands of men. And they did fraternise with black South Africans directly. Often alcohol and prostitution played a part, but not always.

IT’s June 1901 and there’s trouble brewing like a north sea storm around the British Isles. The main force behind this political hurricane is a diminutive but loud woman called Emily Hobhouse. While the suffragette movement is in its infancy, there’s nothing about Hobhouse that is a wallflower. In fact, you could say that it was precisely because of courageous women like her that the entire suffragette movement gained momentum. Still, much of what was to happen in that social and political project emerged after the First World War, when women who’d been building artillery pieces and loading ammunition into crates suddenly were told that they needed to go home and put on curlers and become housewives again. After the freedom they’d experienced, and earning their own living, that was always going to be a tough sell as the soldiers marched back from the Western Front. But here we are, 13 years before the First World War, and tracking that truly fascinating person called Emily Hobhouse. Sir Alfred Milner, the Cape governor, referred to her as that screamer - always complaining. Milner ironically was on board the same ship that took Emily Hobhouse from Cape Town to Portsmouth in England - although the two gave each other a wide berth if you excuse the pun. So on the 8th May the Saxon set sail from Cape Town. As with the habit of those on these long journeys, Hobhouse sought out Milner in private but he avoided talking to her. Only after the Saxon had passed Madeira in Spain did an opportunity present itself. In the course of their conversation she found out whey Milner had been unwilling to meet her. In the preceding months he had received more than 60 reports all containing personal allegations against her. She was accused by the camp commanders of inciting unrest and playing politics. That was because Hobhouse was determined and had facts at her fingertips. So what better way to deflect her truths than accuse her of malicious political intent? I’m afraid this technique of dealing with uppity women continues to this day - and often ends in failure as it did in this case too. in Holland, President Paul Kruger was mulling over a coded letter sent by Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Remember last week I explained how Botha and Smuts had begun to question Boer tactics and Smuts in particular was growing more certain that this war could not continue. He was aware of the reports of the death of women and children in concentration camps, and his men had run out of just about everything. Even their will to fight. Kruger had installed himself in the Hotel des Pays-Bas in Utrecht in January 1901, but by June he’d moved to a guest house called Casa Cara in Hilversum. That’s where he and his secretary Leyds met to discuss Smuts’ letter.

Its the end of May and the guerrilla war has turned nasty as the coldest winter of living memory has started - bringing gusts of freezing wind which whipped through the Concentration Camps with their exposed bell tents a threadbare protection for the women and children. Also chilled to the bone was Deneys Reitz and his four German comrades who were riding south from the western Transvaal, heading for the Vaal River. Their plan was to cross in the Free State, then continue the four hundred kilometres further southwards in order to invade the Cape Colony. As we heard last week, the entire plan had a Quixotic flavour with Reitz the canny veld-wise Boer and his friends - two students, a businessman and a farm hand. It was the farm hand , Heinrich Wiese who had the first major problem. After the little group had bungled an attempt at capturing a spy the previous day, they set off before first light towards the Vaal River. The country-side was alive with British troops moving about on one of their drives ordered by commander in chief Lord Kitchener. They were burning farms and rolling up the Boer citizens forcing them into the internment camps. General Louis Botha, in command of the Boers in the Transvaal, was growing more concerned by the misery these people were suffering. His own private view now was that the Boers could not win, but he would carry on fighting based on his honour code. But he reached out to Lord Kitchener as we heard in podcast 86, asking for permission to send emissaries to Paul Kruger in Holland. Kitchener was also keen on ending the guerrilla war as fast as possible. The costs continue to rise, he now had almost a quarter of a million men in South Africa and the war that was supposed to last one to three months had now stretched to nineteen. While Free State President Steyn had sent a withering reply to Botha and Jan Smuts suggestion that a cease fire be negotiated, the Transvaal leadership stubbornly persisted in their plan and if an emissary was not permitted, they’d send messages.

This week we spend some time with Johanna van Warmelo and Deneys Reitz, the former who starts a new position as a nurse in a Concentration Camp at Irene outside Pretoria, and the the latter who has just convinced his German fellow travellers that an invasion into the Cape is feasible. Its mid-May 1901. President Steyn of the Free State and his Transvaal colleagues have had a disagreement about the possibility of a cease fire, but that has not stopped General Louis Botha who is in the Eastern Transvaal sending a note to British Army commander Lord Kitchener asking for permission to send an emissary to the Netherlands. Botha want’s to ask President Paul Kruger’s permission to embark on peace talks as he’s growing more certain that the Boers can’t defeat the British in South Africa. The Free State leadership are more intransigent and prefer to fight to the death, led by their fiery leader General Christiaan de Wet. The stage is set for more confrontations between the supposed allies, but as they grind their teeth, in Pretoria Johanna van Warmelo is now determined to assist her Boer sisters and their children who are squeezed into the nearby Concentration Camp. They are beginning to die in large numbers and with the temperature dropping, its bodes ill for the coming winter. Remember in Episode 83 I explained how Johanna and her mother were working as secret agents for the Boers from their strategic base at SunnySide farm on the outskirts of Pretoria. The British did not believe they were involved in spying, but that’s exactly what they were doing. We also heard how Johanna was keeping three separate diaries - one her open diary, the second her secret love diary, and the third her top secret war diary. Historian Jackie Grobler published a book in 2007 called "The war Diary of Johanna Brandt" which combined all three. She was still a van Warmelo during the war, and in May 1901 arrived at Irene Concentration Camp having volunteered as a nurse. Her initial job was to walk around the huge camp looking for sick Boer women and children and then bring these to the attention of the camp doctor. There were six Boer nurses in a camp of 5000 and by early May 3 people were dying a day. Far to the West, somewhere in the vicinity of Harts River, Deneys Reitz and his four German friends were holed up having been left behind by the Commando under the leadership of Mayer. General Koos de la Rey had ordered that the Boers return to their homes for the meantime as the cold weather drew in and the movement around the veld became more difficult. But Reitz was so isolated along with his colleagues that he had decided to take matters into his own hands. Remember last week I explained how Reitz had convinced his fellow travellers that instead of heading back to the north, they should try to enter the Cape Colony. “After I had explained my views…” he writes in his book Commando “…and had pictured the Cape to them as a land of beer for the taking at every wayside inn, they became eager converts, and we agreed to start without delay…”

We’ve reached May 1901 and surprisingly, General Louis Botha is trying to reach out to Lord Kitchener who is the British Army commander of the over 240 000 troops in South Africa. Botha wants special permission to send emissaries to Paul Kruger in the Netherlands to ask if a ceasefire could be arranged. But that only happened after Botha and Jan Smuts had collected as much information about the Boers position - and it was a depressing account. They were running out of weapons, ammunition, food, clothing, horses, money, everything as Historian Martin Bossenbroek writes. Could supplies be sent from Europe, through German South West Africa perhaps? Between the two countries was a significant desert, but was traversable - still this was indicative of just how desperate the Boer leadership was. While Generals Koos de la Rey and Christiaan de Wet and the other unconventional leaders were foraying back and forth, the echelon of senior leaders was growing more aware of an unsustainable situation. In the southeastern Transvaal reports emerged of British using Zulu warriors to loot cattle from Boers. There’s an allegation made that British officer Colonel Bottomley sent a letter to King Dinizulu suggesting he send his men into the region to grab cattle and around 6 000 warriors crossed to border between Natal and the Transvaal in May 1901. Meanwhile, far to the north west on the Transvaal border with Bechuanaland - modern day Botswana, Deneys Reitz and a small commando under the leadership of Commandant Jan Kemp were under orders to attack the railway line which was being used to ferry supplies into the Mafikeng. General de la Rey had divided his force into two parties, and took one of these south where he began to engage with British columns. Commandant Jan Kemp led his group westwards, and for two days in mid-May they rode through barren country until they reached a point on the Harts River. British troops could be seen along the River, watching for any Boer movement so they decided to make the crossing at night. Reitz was part of a German scouting unit led by the Johannesburg businessman called Mayer that was sent ahead of the main body, riding through the Cunana Native Reserve all night until four the next morning when they crossed the British border.

It’s the first week of May 1901, and winter has come early in South Africa. As I mentioned last week, at this point social activist Emily Hobhouse was on board a ship heading for England after experiencing the South African Concentration Camps first hand and she was to mobilise parts of British society against the war by recounting her stories. She was British first, so when she disembarked later in May, she headed straight to the authorities. Emily Hobhouse believed that when they heard her stories about the conditions in the camps, and the rising death rate, government ministers would be so embarrassed they would institute changes. As we’ll hear at the end of the month - and through June - she was sorely mistaken. But she wasn’t alone. The attack on the camp system was also taken up by two other MPs CP Scott and John Ellis. IT was these two who first used in arch an ominous phrase - concentration camps - taking it from the notorious reconcentrado camps set up by the Spanish to deal with Cuban guerillas. AS we heard previously the use of Block Houses by the Americans in the Cuban war was also going to be perfected by the British in South Africa. It was Ellis who had sent his relative Joshua Rowntree to report on the camps. When Rowntree was refused entry into the two new colonies of the Transvaal and Free State by lord Kitchener, his instincts were aroused. British Secretary for War St John Brodrick insisted that these camps were voluntary, that the workers, women and children were all there on their own volition. They had arrived on their own free will as prisoners. How many lived in them, asked Ellis in March, and how many had died? It was only at the end of April that the house of Commons heard the first statistics. In the Transvaal, 21 thousand one hundred and three. By May they’d heard there were 19 thousand 680 prisoners in the now renamed Orange River Colony and 2 524 in the Natal Colony. It was also becoming apparent that St John Brodrick did not have all the information about what was really happening in these camps, at least that was the allegations by Ellis and the opposition leader, Lloyd George. He quoted for example that many of these refugees are what he called coloured people.

This week, we’ll track a Londoner who rode with Rimington’s Tigers then there’ll be a quick story about a Maori who arrived in South Africa during the war to fight, but also carried a Violin. At the same time, information began to circulate about the British Concentration Camps where tens of thousands of Boer women and children were interned. And the information was worrying. Slowly the numbers began to be squeezed out of the British Government. There were 21,105 people in Transvaal camps in April, 19,680 in Orange River Colony and 2,524 in Natal . The number of deaths was equally difficult to discover because of censorship. Yet these numbers were leaking and they were not good news for those who believed this war to be honourable. Nor was it clear if the figures included the black inmates. We now know they did not. A second strategy launched along with the Concentration Camps was Lord Kitchener’s policy of great drives some over 80 kilometres long. These were his strategy to cope with the guerrillas and finish the war. He understood that he could not catch or destroy the remaining commandos without placing strict limits on their freedom of movement before sweeping them from the veld. This policy was not as clinical in practice as it sounded in theory. The sweeps were often accompanied by looting as well as destruction. Some of the British officer which had been based in South Africa for more than 18 months fighting the Boers had run out of patience and used these drives as an excuse to loot. For some of the soldiers under their command it became a kind of sport. Writing at the time, Captain L March Phillipps who was an officer in the Rimington Guides or Rimington Tigers as they were known began to have serious doubts about the nature of these veld clearing operations. The Tigers had been created by Major Mike Rimington and they were known Rimington’s Tigers due to the leopard skin hatbands worn on their slouch hats. They were also known as the Night Cats because of their many night marches and stealth. In January 1901 the force was reorganised as Damant's Horse under Major Frederic Damant, Rimington's second-in-command, but many continued to call this feared unit the Rimington Tigers. Captain Phillipps looked on exasperated at times during the Great Drives period of this war, March through September 1901. In one of his letters he writes about the British Soldier who was now known as Tommy Atkins. This generic title Tommy Atkins was used from at least 1743. There’s a great deal of debate about the exact origin of the title has been used as a generic name for a common British soldier for many years. The origin of the term is a subject of debate, but a letter sent from Jamaica about a mutiny amongst the troops says in 1743 includes the line "except for those from N. America ye Marines and Tommy Atkins behaved splendidly”. However, our letter writing Captain Phillipps is not as enamoured by Tommy Atkins during the great Drives across the Veld in 1901.

In this episode Easter Sunday had come and gone on the 7th April and for most combatants stretched across the vastness of the South African veld, it was characterised by fear and loathing. The concentration Camps were filling and women and children were beginning to die of diseases like enteric and typhoid. The numbers were in the hundreds a week, by August 1901 more than 1,800 would be dying a month - and a similar number of black men, women and children who’d also been herded into camps to keep them from supplying the Boers with food and logistic support. So it was just over a week after Easter, on April 15th, that Johanna van Warmelo and her mother took a train to try and see her brother, Dietlof, who’d been captured by the British and was being sent to Ceylon. There was no freedom of movement because of the war, and after initially being rejected for not having the correct signatures and paperwork, they made it on board and then chugged off for the 40 kilometre journey to Johannesburg - which even then Johanna calls the Golden City. All along the line one sees the signs of the war, here a blown-up bridge, there, the ruins of a whole train of trucks and carriages. They also took note of the British defensive positions along the line, the plates of iron leading to trenches, covered with sand bags, all around the network of barbed wire. That laughter dried up as they passed Irene just beyond the station, where they saw the women’s concentration camp. Thousands of women and children were living there in tents, they were the families of the men still fighting. Remember Lord Kitchener had ordered that these camps be set up across the north of the country to incarcerate families of the guerrilla soldiers, in an attempt to hurry the end of the war. Johanna was 24 years old. What is remarkable about her, is that she was keeping three diaries. One was her secret military diary, the second her secret love diary, and her third which you could call her open diary. Johanna and her mother were collecting information and spying on the British then sending their intelligence gathering to colleagues across South Africa - and the world.

Deneys Reitz had broken his own leg in a freak accident and was still hobbling about, his compound fracture causing some pain. General de la Rey ordered him to a small medical camp behind the lines near Hartbeespoort which is west of Pretoria. There he was recovering when the British launched an attack on the Boers. Reitz saddled his horse and galloped to the ridge overlooking the British. But there was no much they could do - there were about 12 000 English versus 600 Boers. The casualties were light, although the British artillery were accurate enough and caused the Boers to fall back from ridge to ridge. By two in the afternoon the English gave up the chase. They rested their horses after the Generals’ ironic speech, and then under the cover of dark rode further away. An amazing sight greeted the men as they crested a rise that night - it was called the Great Comet of 1901, Comet Viscara. But as they rode, a boyish voice from the darkness called out Vlug means retreat, another example of the sense of humour of soldiers making the best of a bad situation. The Royal Observatory in Cape Town, the Argentine National Observatory and the Government observatory in Perth Australia shared their scientific evaluation which put the Comet at 79 million miles from Earth. While the comet caused the Prophet van Rensburg some excitement, there was more excitement in the Cape. Kritzinger was back in the Midlands and causing trouble, while Gideon Scheepers was about to commit a war crime. He shot dead two black troops who'd fired on his men from a farmhouse, saying "it was a white man's war". He was to pay for that act with this life after being captured.

Deneys Reitz will experience a terrible wound to his leg and we will probe an issue that caused much gnashing of teeth - the role of Black South Africans in the war. A quick note for my American listeners, in South Africa people who are mixed race are known as coloured. I know the phrase is frowned on in the U.S., but here in Africa, it's accepted. I’ve tried to show how the myth that there were no black fighting men on both sides is just that - a myth - by using examples of how close black men and women were to the action throughout these podcasts over the last 18 months. Professor Bill Nasson published a book in the Anglo-Boer war series called Uyadela Wen’Osulapho - which is the cry of a fallen Zulu warrior, urging his comrades to carry on the fight. On the cover of his book is a black member of the British army in Mafikeng photographed alongside with lord Baden Powell. Inside the full photograph shows a group of black soldiers sitting with the famous general. All are stern faced, the soldiers holding their Lee-Metford Rifles and sporting large bandoliers around their shoulders. They were scouts and transport riders, armed to the teeth. When the war began in 1899, contemporary observers assumed that blacks would not be allowed to play any part in the coming hostilities but of course that was naive. A British commentator in the Fortnightly Review told readers that blacks in his words “would be impossible to control…” if they were armed. The risk of rebellion meant that the British in particular were petrified of stoking uprisings, considering what had happened to them in Zululand in 1879 where the Zulu had killed 1300 of their best troops at Isandhlwana. Jan Smuts too had written that this was to be a war between whites - saying that this was in the interests “of self-preservation” as he put it. Ironically, by the end of the war, Smuts was sending armed black men to fight in Namaqualand.

When we ended last week, Deneys Reitz had rejoined General de la Rey along with his Dopper companions, and had been regaled by the prophet, van Rensburg in late March 1901. The General was aware that the British drives were beginning to pay off - that was Kitchener’s plan to encircle the renegade commandos while conducting a scorched earth policy while his notorious internment of women and children in the Concentration Camps continued apace. So at the end of March 1901, Deneys Reitz and the de la Rey commando moved to Tafel Kop from their natural lake called Rietpan in the western Transvaal. That came after de la Rey had suffered a defeat in a skirmish with British troops and lost around one hundred men. He knew they were in an untenable position in the lowland, and wanted to move into broken country which meant escape was more likely when attacked. Remember many of the Boers were now without their horses, 18 months of war and disease meant a shortage was growing of horses, food, clothing, ammunition. This didn’t stop Reitz from continuing to dream about being part of a large scale invasion into the Cape colony. It was this kind of wishful thinking that motivated him along with the core of the Boers. And yet, here, far away from his loved ones, Reitz was about to turn 18 years old. This old young man had been involved in nearly all major battles in Natal starting in October 1899, dozens of skirmishes and near misses, now he was looking forward to legally being able to consume alcohol as his birthday approached. Not that he had avoided the brandy and schnapps over the past year when offered. Still he was clearly excited about his birthday in most endearing way and wrote about it in his book Commando. That excitement was rapidly to turn to exasperation and even fear as they readied the feast early in the morning, a thick mist hanging over their camp because a British patrol was close by. In the Eastern Transvaal, General French’s cavalry and mounted infantry had recovered from some of their supply problems were heard about in previous episodes, the weather had improved. It lost much of its impetus as lack of a supplies hampered mobility and their horses were weakened by the wet weather and lack of forage. The sodden terrain had been miserable for the English troops who laughingly referred to the weather as somewhat like Scotland. We'll also be introduced to General Sir Bindon Blood who had a great deal of experience in Africa, building bridges and pontoons for the British expansion in Zululand in the 1860s, then fighting the Zulus in the infamous campaign of 1879. Eventually he ended up in India and was then drafted back to Africa to fight the Boers in early 1901. With his fine head of silver white hair and a moustache to match, he was easy to spot in a crowd. But more about General Blood, Ben Viljoen and the Sikukuniland warriors clashes later this month.

Episode 79 is full of strange swirling tales where Deneys Reitz our intrepid Boer narrator has been separated from his brother near Rustenberg after riding to fetch his all important saddle bags. Then to make matters much worse, his only remaining horse died. This left the youngster in a pickle, adrift in the veld, alone, with his only plan now to reach General Koos de la Rey who’s operating somewhere in the west. Maybe he could obtain a couple of horses there he thought. Little did he know that de la Rey’s commando had been hit by the same horse sickness that had put paid to his favourite horse, Malperd, then his replacement animal a few weeks later. Across the region, the sickness was taking its toll on all commandos, as well as the British cavalry and mounted infantry units. Reitz meets a prophet by the name of Van Rensburg who believes he has powers of the occult and then witnesses an apparent miraculous event although remains sceptical of it all. Meanwhile, High commissioner Milner had relocated from Cape Town to Johannesburg. He was also planning to return to England for a short visit later in April but before then wanted to get the Gold Mines going to help pay for the war.

The ides of March were upon the British in South Africa as they continued chasing the ghost generals, Smuts, de la Rey, Beyers, de Wet across a cooling landscape that had begun its Southern Hemisphere Autumn in 1901. This week we’ll probe an American invention in Cuba called the Blockhouse chain as well as details of how journalist John Tengo Jabavu was publishing pro-Boer commentary against the wishes of both the British and most black intellectuals. We’ll return to his experiences later. The tactic of building a chain of forts is ancient, but the most recent examples before the Boer War came from the American War in Cuba. But this campaign had demonstrated that forts by themselves could not prevent guerrilla action and Lord Kitchener who was beginning to build them in South Africa knew that full well. Kitchener’s strategy therefore was to integrate the function of the fixed defensive units in fortified blockhouses with mobile attacking units on the drives. These began in January 1901, I’ve spoken about them in previous podcasts as the British tried herding or hustling the Boers into smaller areas of veld so that they could be overcome. Kitchener believed if the country could be divided into small areas by fortified lines, the Boers in each might be prevented from crossing to the next. His chessboard of maps across his HQ walls featured these regions with the addition of mobile columns that would be moved quickly by train from chess block to chess block while the blockhouses and barbed wire began to string out across the wide-open plains.

Episode 77 and the Great de Wet hunt sees the English cornering their quarry in the North East Cape Colony, close to Hopetown. The mercurial Boer general Christiaan de Wet has given up the plan to invade the Cape Colony and he’s doing all he can to remain on the loose. He felt even more responsibility about the future of his commando because Free State President Steyn is traveling with him. Not that far away, in Bloemfontein the Free State capital, the British Commander Lord Kitchener and Transvaal Boer commander General Louis Botha met at the end of February, then a second time on 7th March to discuss possible peace terms. Kitchener presented Botha with a set of ten terms which the English say they’ll accept to make peace. It seems an incongruous position - the Boers technically defeated most of the towns and villages in English hands, the infrastructure out of their control - and yet - here they are negotiating their position as if they had a choice. A guerrilla campaign has left most of the west, north and eastern regions decimated. Boer property was being systematically destroyed in these areas in an attempt to force the men still roaming the countryside to accept defeat - but these actions were embittering the hard core fighters. Politically, this action was to leave a scar which would sometimes burst into violence in the coming century with uprisings during the First World War. In the Second World War, hardline Boers felt empathy with the Germans and some left the country to fight in Europe. Others trained with the Germans then returned to German South West Africa to continue the war. Much of the animosity emanates from this period - and specifically from the early 1901 to early 1902 period when Lord Kitchener set the veld ablaze and ordered women and children into internment camps which were ominously known as Concentration Camps. So General Louis Botha was not really interested in the British terms but his wife had asked him to meet and simultaneously he knew his people were suffering greatly so hoped that some way could be found out of this war which he knew he could not win. Botha was also aware of the role that Sir Alfred Milner, High commissioner of the Cape played. Milner was monitoring developments and was pressing for a resolution. While Milner was concerned by Kitchener’s destruction of Boer property - he was more worried about the Cape Afrikaners rising up in support of the Boers - and the British High Commissioner was influenced by investors in London.

This week we continue learning about Americans in the war and ride with Christiaan de Wet as he scurries back across the Orange River - his attempts at invading the Cape ending in failure. There are also unusual peace moves afoot and a meeting between Lord Kitchener and Boer General Louis Botha takes place. First, the small matter of George Labram, de Beers company mine engineer extraordinaire. Even by the standards of the day, his manufacturing ability and constant innovation must still rank as some of the most creative examples of how to use engineering skills in the midst of war. He of course wasn’t the first innovator to help a town under attack - for example Archimedes brilliant use of a crane and claw to overturn attackers boats during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE. Born into poverty in Detroit Michigan in 1859, George Labram’s education was spotty, but his sister remembered that “his spare time was taken up with books on machinery and engineering.” In his mid-teens he went to work for a local machinery manufacturer, and eventually secured a better job in Chicago. Then he moved to the Silver King Mining Company in Arizona. Later, and after a stint running a Copper mine, he was spotted at the famous Chicago World Fair in 1893 when De Beers Consolidated Mines hired him to build and operate a mill in Kimberley.

This week I'm focusing on America and Americans who fought in the war. What made Americans travel half way around the world to fight for both the Boers and the English? The initial answer is obvious - given the Boer’s attempts at forging independence from the British Empire, something the Americans had done one hundred and 30 years before. “I have been absorbed in interest in the Boer War,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to his friend Cecil Spring Rice in 1899. “The Boers are belated Cromwellians, with many fine traits. They deeply and earnestly believe in their cause, and they attract the sympathy which always goes to the small nation. … But it would be for the advantage of mankind to have English spoken south of the Zambesi just as in New York; and as I told one of my fellow Knickerbockers the other day, as we let the Uhlanders of old in here, I do not see why the same rule is not good enough in the Transvaal.” He was not alone. Most Americans took a keen interest in this remote conflict, many espoused the same belief in what they earnestly believed was the British civilising influence in Southern Africa. Two years later later, though the former Senator and now president Roosevelt wrote: “I am not an Anglomaniac any more than I am an Anglophobe … but I am keenly alive to the friendly countenance England gave us in 1898. … I have been uncomfortable about the Boer War, and notably in reference to certain details of the way it was brought on; but I have far too lively a knowledge of our national shortcomings to wish to say anything publicly that would hamper or excite feeling against a friendly nation for which I have a hearty admiration and respect.” That contradiction was played out across the USA. Leading newspapers sent their correspondents to the front; the war was debated in Congress and discussed in Cabinet meetings; private organisations sprang up to help one side or the other; a surprising number of Americans actually made their way to South Africa and joined the fight; and toy stores stocked up on two new games, one called “Boer and Briton” and the other “The War in South Africa”. In addition, the United States sold the British tens of thousands of tons of preserved meat, hay, and oats as well as horses, mules and oxen. Boers and their friends in America tried to prevent such sales, and the Chicago branch of the American Transvaal League and the Boer Legislative Committee of Philadelphia lodged formal protests with Washington. Although publishing legend and businessman William Randolph Hearst thought Britain should win—because as he put it “civilization and progress demand it”—most American publishers and their newspapers were pro-Boer. For Example, the man who gave us the Pulitzer prize, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sided with the Boers and favoured American mediation. It even worked up a petition to the President urging this which was signed by 19 bishops and archbishops, 104 out of 442 members of Congress, 89 college presidents, 13 mayors of important cities, and many distinguished judges, editors, and businessmen.

The guerrilla campaign is moving ahead swiftly, while in the northern Cape, the Great De Wet Hunt is in full swing. In the Eastern Transvaal, General Louis Botha had attacked the British in a surprise move on 10 February adding to the confusion the English troops were experiencing. Between Christiaan de Wet’s confident departure from the north-western reaches of the Orange Free State into the Cape Colony - it would take the entire month of February for his men to complete a dash back across the Orange River in defeat. In the Western Transvaal, General Koos de La Rey was stranded as many of his men were without their biggest asset - horses. Sickness and exhaustion had led to many dying and the general was biding his time. He was also waiting for word from Christiaan de Wet in the Cape who as we’ll hear later in this podcast, was actually desperately trying to avoid capture as a huge British force was hunting him down. Koos de la Rey had other problems. His men were becoming less enthusiastic by the day about joining de Wet in the Cape in their attempts to foment an uprising. The stirring memories of their December successes against the British were fading. de La Rey was hidden in the bushy hills west of Rustenburg where he was ensconced with a small group of hand picked men and the only fresh horses they had. Most of the western Transvaal burghers had gone home. British commander Methuen bumped into a large group of Boers on 18th February in the South West of the Transvaal, and defeated them in a hard-fought action. It was noticeable that the tables were turning. In that clash, Methuen had been outnumbered by the Boers and yet had defeated the once invincible commandos.

This week Deneys Reitz finds himself walking, while the Great de Wet Hunt begins in the Northern Cape and Free State. I would like to thank listeners for the wonderful messages I've received and suggestions about topics for future casts. Over the last year a number of listeners have asked that I take a closer look at the American involvement in the Boer War, and I’m busy collecting stories and information for that episode which should pop up by the end of this month. Right now, we’re swinging into the saddle alongside Deneys Reitz However, Horse Sickness was beginning to take its toll in the damp conditions of the summer on the highveld. His own had succumbed a few weeks before and as we heard he’d been loaned that Crazy Horse called Malperd. The highly strung beast may have been hard to manage, but was an indefatigable mount. At the beginning of February 1901 Reitz and his brother Arndt began to move with the Afrikander Cavalry Corps or ACC. The unit was a shadow of its former self, decimated both by horse sickness and typhoid and other diseases. Half of the men were now forced to walk as their animals had died off. They had made the disastrous decision to seek shelter in the badlands to the north west of Johannesburg where fevers lurked.

This week we explore incidents involving Australians based in Pretoria who committed war crimes and were executed. But what really happened? I’m going to try and detach the myth from the reality about Breaker Morant, Bulala Taylor and the First Ever British Military War Crimes Court Case. It must not be forgotten that the Boer War was Australia’s first experience of a sustained imperial war fought beyond its shores. Just exactly what they did is still debated. I’ve researched these terrible incidents described by a doctor living in Pretoria called Doctor Alexander Kay. We’ve already heard from him, remember he was besieged in Ladysmith at the start of the war. Much of what he wrote about in his diary was corroborated by independent witnesses and court documents later. Still this remains an emotional tale so I’m going to have to tread very softly indeed. The trouble began at the end of March 1901, when a corps of volunteers was raised by the British in Pretoria under the name of the Bushveld Carbineers. In modern terms, they’d be somewhat like a band of mercenaries, mixed with imperialists, a sprinkling of criminals, some imbued with the character of vigilantes. Most were after treasure. Throw in greed, alcohol and a seriously warped sense of ethics, and that could describe the Bushveld Carbineers. At least, that’s what the facts say, so please don’t get angry if your ancestors fought in this unit. They were courageous, they were in a war. They were far away from home. The man who came up with the original idea of starting the Bushveld Carbineers was a barman who said he’d build a new unit for the British, but needed five hundred pounds to purchase equipment. As Doctor Kay writes: “…As a reward he was transformed from a bartender to a captain and paymaster…” Furthermore, this publican understood that if he played his cards right, great profits could be made. He could be granted land too, that most profitable of things, along with other financial and capital goods like cattle.

This week its all about Russians and with good reason. ‘I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal,’ Tsar Nicholas wrote to his sister at the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’ He was beside himself with glee. Yet a few years after writing this, Russia would be fighting as an ally with Britain against the Germans on the Eastern Front during the First World War. But that was 13 years later. At this moment, Tsar Nicholas was the enemy. The British and Russians had fought head to head during the Crimean War forty years before, and the Royal squabbles and empire building on both sides had alienated one from the other. Some of this week’s episode is drawn from the book “The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War” by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova published in 1998. I’ve also used historian RW Johnson’s comments at times too. The characters involved .. as usual .. are unforgettable. We've met people from all over the world who’ve had a hand to play in this war, and the Russians were some of the most colourful. By the way, its largely thanks to Sol who lives in Russia for prompting this episode. I hope you’re not too cold right now! But back to the episode… In 1899 the Tsar was particularly interested in the Boer War and Britain’s hold on South Africa because the route to India lay via the Cape, and Russia had its own designs on India. Even Leon Tolstoy had a view about the Anglo-Boer war, and he supported the Boers.

General Christiaan de Wet was gearing up for his attack on the Cape Colony. While that only took place in the last week of January 1901, his brother, Piet, whom he hated, was trying to convince the Boers to give up the fight. Remember Piet was the brother who had begun to work with the British after fighting for a year and realised that there was just no way the small group of farmers from Africa would ever be able to beat the grand British Empire. Piet was no alone in his attempts to stop the war. Even the wife of the great Boer General, Louis Botha, became involved in attempts to stop the carnage. But the bittereinders or bitter enders as they were called, were not to be appeased. Still, Piet who had surrendered in August 1900 saw the beginning of the wholesale destruction of Boer farms under orders of Lord Kitchener and he was determined to stop the wanton destruction. it was the death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd January 1901 that resonated around the British Empire as an entire way of life which had been known as the Victorian Era died with her. She was 81. Her end, many thought, had been hastened by the death of her favourite grandson. Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein died of the effects of malaria and then typhoid while serving in Pretoria, where he was buried. Queen Victoria had been following the war very closely, as you’d expect, and in the months leading up to January 1901 had knitted eight chunky brown woollen scarves.She made them to personally honour the bravery of eight British soldiers fighting in the Boer War. in this podcast, we also are introduced to Emily Hobhouse who was to become a real bane of the British army in the region, her reports about the treatment of Boer women and children caused the English severe embarrassment and she was hated by rank and file troops of the empire. It was in January 1901 that Emily Hobhouse took a train through the Karoo to Bloemfontein in the Free State in order to test reports that civilians were being mistreated by the British. Hobhouse describes this journey through the semi-desert, where sandstorms and thunderstorms followed one another in an endless cycle.

There’s going to be a lot of riding in this episode, much fighting, and some shock as the Boers in the field begin to observe at first hand the new British policy of scorched earth where all Boer property is destroyed in an attempt to bring them to heel. What a mistake. It’s a bit like the Bombing blitz of the Second World War in London. Hitler and his henchmen thought the English would crumble if their cities were attacked by air - all that did is convice the English to fight all the more and oppose the Germans to the death. Before starting this week, I have some good news. I have been approached by a film-maker to work on a fairly lengthy documentary series which we hope will air on a number of outlets once complete. In connection with this, we need to start compiling a great deal of images and even film. If you’re able to help, please do contact me through the website, abwarpodcast.com, or my email, desmondlatham@gmail.com. I’ll be providing more information about this in the upcoming podcasts. But exciting news nevertheless. Back to this week’s episode. So it was then in mid-January 1901 that Deneys Reitz was camping on open ground as part of the commando led by General Beyers known and under the overall command of General Louis Botha when the storm of war broke once more. Reitz was encamped at Olifantsfontein - or Elephant Spring - when Louis Botha rode up with a small escort. He had lost weight in the preceding months. Botha briefed the commando, saying the British had decided to bring the Boers to their knees by a series of drives, in which vast numbers of troops were to sweep across the country like a dragnet. Fifty thousand men had been assembled along the Johannesburg Natal railway line and these were ready to move over the highveld on a front one hundred kilometres wide. The idea was to clear the Eastern Transvaal and to take every single Boer fighter dead or alive. Reitz was not aware at this point that the British had begun to systematically burn farms, destroy crops and carry off the Boer women and children. The British had also been forcing black workers on the farms to join the prisoners in these Concentration camps.

It’s New Year 1901 and the Boers have been busy over the Christmas Period. Jan Smuts and Koos de la Rey defeated General Clements in the Magaliesberg. Two Boer commandos have also entered the Cape Colony and attacked British positions at various locations. On the 28th December a commando attacked Helvetia between Machadadorp in the Eastern Transvaal and Lydenburg when a British garrison was overrun with the loss of 200 men. Generals de la Rey and Beyers were harassing British convoys to the south and west of Rustenburg in the Transvaal. Jan Smuts targeted Modderfontein just east of Johannesburg and defeated a British force leading 1500 men having been reinforced with Liebenberg’s commando. He then defeated a British relief column of 3000 men sent as reinforcements just for good measure. On the other side of the Transvaal, action was taking place on a more massive scale as the plan took effect to combine General Louis Botha’s commando with General Ben Viljoen's burghers. They wanted to shut down the Delagoa Bay railway line which was now crucial for British supplies. While Milner worried, and Kitchener’s new scorched earth policy began to yield initial results particularly in the Eastern Transvaal, Deneys Reitz was dealing with a crazy horse as he and his brother continued on the campaign with General Beyers. In December, he had been part of the Koos de La Rey attack on General Clements in the Magaliesberg at a place called Nooitgedacht. Remember how the mountain fight had led to the British withdrawing and the Boers seizing a great deal of material. The first thing Reitz did was ditch his deadly Mauser in favour of the British Lee-Metford rifle. The Boers were running out of ammunition for the German weapons, and had seized tens of thousands of rounds from the British along with rifles, so naturally they kitted themselves out with the latest English equipment. He gave his large English chargers away in order to reduce his stable, doing as most Boers did - riding with one or two spare horses. Deneys, however, retained what he believed was probably one of the strangest horses in the entire Boer army. “My father had purchased him in the Lydenburg district from a homegoing burgher, who omitted to tell us that he was possessed of the devil…” The horse, in a nutshell, was crazy.

In this episode, I thought we should concentrate on the role that the media and propaganda played as the war moved from conventional to unconventional, from military camps to concentration camps. Despite Lord Robert’s declaration that the Boers were defeated followed his direct march from Cape Town to the Orange Free State capital, Bloemfontein, followed by the Transvaal Republic Capital, Pretoria - They weren’t. That declaration of victory was premature, perhaps similar to the recent declaration by American president Donald Trump that ISIS has been defeated in Syria. As the unique and eccentric historian Vico noted, history has a curious way of repeating itself - albeit in a spiral, never really returning to exactly what occurred before but elevated by technology and time. Let’s just leave that there for now. Politically loaded declarations about victories are often made to the detriment of the troops left fighting the real wars, and in 1900, Lord Roberts was about to leave for England believing it was job done. The irony was his own army could not move around the veld freely, and were constantly harassed by what he and others regarded as bandits, but were really extremely successful guerrilla war generals. In Syria too, the US special forces helping the Kurds have found their enemy continues to control territory despite apparently being defeated. You can believe what you want regarding Trump or Roberts - but reality always tends to leap up when least expected and subject those who ignore the truth to a reality check. As with the Boer war, let’s see what happens in Syria. Carl von Clausewitz had much to say about ignoring real threats. And the truth was that the Boers were undefeated. As von Clausewitz points out in his seminal work On War, The country must be conquered, for out of the country a new military force may be formed. And the country had not been conquered, the will of the people had not been crushed. A new military force was indeed formed, more mobile, more motivated, more dangerous.

It’s approaching Christmas 1900, but there’s no champagne for Broadwood who is based in Rustenburg west of Pretoria. That’s because the Boers first ransacked his supply convoy then attacked General Clements in the Magaliesberg. General Koos de la Rey was largely responsible for both upsets, along with Smuts and Beyers. The battle at Nooitgedacht had been short and brutal, with hand-to-hand combat on the side of a mountain over a thousand feet high. By the end, more than 100 British casualties were reported, two hundred more were prisoners and General Clements had retreated to Pretoria. As the long sunny days of Summer in South Africa approached 25th December, in Cape Town the High Commissioner Alfred Milner was growing concerned about what he called .. the Screamers. These were the liberals who were mobilising sentiment against the British actions in South Africa, with the first reports beginning to filter across the globe about the treatment of Boer women and children. We’re going to see how first stories garnered sympathy - and eventually by mid-1901, full-scale criticism of British policy. The bitterness that this era evokes to this day is extraordinary, but understandable. I’ll return to this in the months to come, but this podcast as a pre-Christmas special, begins with Milner, sitting in Cape Town. Four nights after the disaster we heard about last week at Nooitgedacht in the Magaliesberg mountains west of Pretoria, Milner was sleeping outside. He was caught by the notorious Cape Town wind called the Cape Doctor which blasts in from the South East in Summer, and can blow people off their feet. It was the 16th December when the doctor arrived in Cape Town, bullying the palm trees, rolling pebbles across Milner's grass tennis court, causing his roof to drum like the devils fingers were running along the slates. Lord Milner was a great believer in the stiff-upper lip - and when word came of the terrible defeat by General Clements he dutifully stiffened. He had already been thrown somewhat by the other reports reaching him earlier in December about two separate Boer commandos which had invaded the Cape. While we’ve heard about General Christiaan de Wet’s attempt to enter the Cape and how that was botched by bad weather - the wily general had achieved part of his aim. Remember I explained how he’d moved north, away from the Orange River which is the boundary between the Orange Free State and the Cape, hoping that two other two Boer divisions he’d sent South would be free to move. That was because the British were infatuated with de Wet, and wanted him out of the way. So they duly marched and rode north chasing their nemisis, thus leaving the area to the south open for General Kritzinger and Judge Hertzog.

On 12th December 1900, and in the United States, Winston Churchill was about to deliver a lecture about his experiences as a war reporter in South Africa, covering the Anglo-Boer War. Exactly a year earlier to the day on 12th December 1899, he’d escaped from a Boer prison in Pretoria, now he was standing in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was the haunt of the rich and famous. And for once, Churchill was nervous because he was being introduced by the great author, Mark Twain who was staunchly opposed to imperialism and at 65 with his shock of unruly white hair, Twain generally spoke his mind without fear or favour. Churchill was aware this could be a difficult evening. He had sailed from Britain after winning a seat in parliament for Oldham in the khaki election in October 1900, and now sought to grow his influence further afield by going on the American lecture circuit. He also needed cash to fund his political career. The show came with slides and what was known at that time as a magic lantern, an early form of slide projector, which projected images on a screen while Churchill spoke. He could do the lecture in his sleep, his oratory skills already sharpened. Churchill had presented this lecture 29 times before in every large British City, starting immediately after the elections on 30 October in St James’ Hall in London. Evening after evening except Sundays he addressed large halls full of an adoring public. Churchill had made a tidy sum out of the British lecture circuit because at that time, Members of Parliament received no remuneration. So he knew that he needed a war chest for politics, and what better way than to talk about a war with a multimedia show thrown in? Back in South Africa, the so-called bandits were about to deal General Clements another blow in the Magaliesberg Mountain range which lies west of Pretoria and Johannesburg. Remember last week Jan Smuts and Koos de la Rey had ambushed a large relief convoy and either seized or destroyed 118 wagons on the road to Rustenburg through the mountains. As I said, that was merely a precursor to a much more violent confrontation on the 9th December at a place called Nooitgedacht. loosely translated, it means Never Daylight. The success of the ambush had whetted Smuts and de la Rey’s appetite for bigger game. General Clements was that bigger game. He was a bull-necked Englishman who had done well in recent weeks in corraling the Boers and protecting the main routes out of Pretoria to the West. Towns like Rustenberg and Mafikeng lay along that route, and it was important to keep the road open to Bechuanaland, modern day Botswana. But one mistake changed all that. Smuts wrote later that General Clements had selected a terrible spot to bivouac his troops. “I do not think” Smuts said “it was possible to have selected a more fatal spot for a camp and one which gave better scope for Boer dash and ingenuity in storming the position..” There were shear walls one one side of a thousand feet, rearing over Nooitgedacht to the north and commanding the entire valley. Nooitgedacht, roughly translated, means NEVER DAY which gives you an idea about just how nestled this valley was - and how prone it oculd be to attack if you failed to control the high ground. Clements had two reasons to choose this site and neither had anything to do with defence. First, he need to place a signalling station on the summit of the large mountain in order to send messages to Rustenberg 35 kilometers away in the shimmering plain to the north west. The second reason was more prosaic - there was a magnificent mountain stream at Nooitgedacht which plunged down a series of waterfalls. This meant clean and clear water for this men as they camped.

This week its back to the guerrilla war but there are challenges for both sides. Not least being the weather. This had a major impact on Boer general Christiaan de Wet in particular, because a drought through November 1900 meant there was no easy way for him to move into the Cape Colony. Nature seemed to conspire against him as you’ll see, because when it eventually rained, that also proved to be a problem. Because he was deeply religious, he regarded this as a sign from above that invading the Cape might not be such a good idea after all. There was virtually no grazing through November and into the first week of December - at least in the southern Free State, the horses were growing weaker by the day. If they didn’t recover, they would have to be replaced or his venture was doomed. As de Wet and his commando moved southwards, they skirmished on a daily basis with English and Australian units in the area. Near Bethulie de Wet met up with General Piet Fourie and Captain Scheepers. He could no longer keep the prisoners he’d taken at Dewetsdorp, and set more than 60 black ox-wagon drivers free. Just to make sure they no longer could work for the British, he handed each a written pass to enter Basutoland. Closer to Johannesburg, though, General Jan Smuts was having slightly better luck. He was working with General Koos de la Rey and a golden opportunity arose for which these two leaders had been waiting. For three months ever since British General Clements had stormed up the Moot - or the valley in the Magaliesberg mountain range, the Boers had been on the defensive. Clements was adept at fighting a moving campaign, but every one has a bad day. His would duly arrive on the morning of the 3rd December. Meanwhile, in Cape Town This led to one thousand slightly drunk men marching from Maitland Barracks into the Cape Town bowl, the CBD, a journey of around 7 kilometres. One group hijacked a horse and cab, and a dozen climbed aboard as the skittish beast galloped off, bumping other carriages aside.

We’re going to ride with the French Colonel or "Die Franse Kolonel", Georges Villebois-Mareuil as he heads into the Free State with the International Legion. This episode is slightly longer than usual because the details of this Frenchman are so intriguing. We will also be introduced to some of the International soldiers who fought for the Boers, including artist Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Cor. He’s already been living in the Transvaal building locomotives for the President Paul Kruger’s government, and when war breaks out, naturally he signed up to fight for the Boers. The French Colonel Villebois-Mareuil, a man steeped in family military tradition, had arrived in South Africa soon after the war began in October 1899 and had travelled to Ladysmith in November. He was present at the battle of Colenso, and by January 1900 was well known to the Boer soldiers as he began to advise General Piet Joubert. This was a sensitive matter as Joubert brooked no interference, but at one point the Frenchman had suggested an attack on two British outposts that were critical for the defence of the besieged town. These were observation points known as Caesars Camp and Waggon Hill and they required attacking at night. On 2nd January General Joubert held a war council at his hooflaer or HQ above Ladysmith and it was finally decided to launch an attack on the town, preceded by the taking of Caesars Camp and Waggon Hill. On 5th January the Boers began to move - little knowing that fate was against them. One of the better organised British commanders, Colonel Hamilton, was in command at Caesars Camp and Waggon hill. Also, Sir George White, the Ladysmith commander, had issued orders for the various guns there to be moved out on to the plateau - dealing the Boers a blow before the battle started because the hustle and bustle of artillery moving around meant the British were very wide awake.

This week its Frenchman Georges Villebois-Mareuil whose military exploits echoed the wars of the 19th Century, particularly the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Villebois-Mareuil even spent time in what became known as Vietnam, fighting in French-Indo-China, and in Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s. But it was in Africa where he really excelled including fighting as a commander in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. He was admired by the Boers and became known as “Die Franse Kolonel” - The French Colonel. We’ve already heard about the Irish, the Americans, Canadians, Scots, Australians, New Zealanders, Germans, Scandinavians of all types, Dutch, and Portuguese soldiers who were active in the anglo-Boer war. There were Mexicans too, and Spaniards. This was a precursor to the terrible World Wars which shattered the 20th Century - and in many ways - those fighting were practicing for what seemed to be an inevitable cataclysm only fourteen years later. World War One was an inexorable calamity, and the Anglo-Boer war one of the early military steps taken by these nations. There were other international brigades in South Africa similar for example to those who fought on both sides in the Spanish Civil War. Some of the international cadres involved in the Boer war were mercenaries, some were romantics who believed in causes, others were adventurers. Perhaps one of the more complex was French Colonel, Georges Villebois-Mureuil - a swashbuckling veteran soldier of the Prussian wars who ended up dying in a battle during the Anglo-Boer war.

In episode 61 we traverse the width of South Africa to head back to the Free State after following the Canadians through the Eastern Transvaal last week. It’s in the Free State where General Christiaan de Wet remains at large. His plan is to head south through the Free State and into the Cape - although he did consider Natal as an option as well. The Boers wanted to incite the Cape Afrikaners to rise up against the British by an insurgency they believed had a good chance of success. It was an idea General Jan Smuts had put to the gathered Boer leaders at a meeting in October 1900 at Cypherfontein farm west of Johannesburg. But we also know that de Wet distrusted many of his fellow commanders, and would not support the first part of Smuts’ plan which was an audacious plot to send a combined commando unit to blow up Johannesburg gold Mines, before dispersing to launch invasions of both the Natal and Cape Colonies. Also this week, we hear how Transvaal President Paul Kruger arrives in Marseilles, France, to a rapturous welcome by 60 000 people. But the ageing Boer leader is doomed never to return to Africa again.

We’re still riding with the Canadians in the area around Belfast in the Eastern Transvaal, which is a short distance away from South Africa’s all important coal mines. Last week we heard how the icy rain had lashed Smith-Dorrien’s 1200 strong column as it tried to rid the region of a large Boer commando based at the nearby town of Carolina. That was a column of various English, Scots and Canadian units. He’d been forced to retreat after the effects of weather and Boer firepower at Witkloof and buried one of his top officers called Chalmers, but that didn’t deter Smith-Dorrien. A few days after his men arrived back in Belfast, bedraggled and ragged, he was planning a new offensive against the Boers. The first tragic expedition was merely a dress rehearsal for the battle of Liliefontein. The purpose of the second expedition was identical to the first. To destroy all the farms suspected of harbouring the Boer commandos who had been blowing up railway lines and committing other acts of sabotage. The British also wanted to lure the large Boer Carolina commando out of their lair along the Komati River and into battle. On the 6th November Smith-Dorrien once again set out under cover of darkness as he did last week but unlike the first expedition, there was no icy rain, no fog, no mist. It was in perfect weather that his column set off with temperatures even in the early evening in the mid-20s centigrade. There was one important difference this week. Smith-Dorrien had learned his lesson when it came to splitting up his force and the 1200 men moved as one unit.

Mercurial Boer commander Christiaan de Wet has just avoided being captured along with Free State President Andries Steyn at the brutal "small" battle at Bothaville. The Boers lost 25 killed and 130 captured. Another 30 were wounded. De Wet also was forced to abandon four Krupps field guns, a pom pom, and two artillery pieces captured from the British at the battles of Colenso and Sannah's Post. British losses were also serious: 38 men either wounded or killed in action. But now it’s time to direct our gaze back to the east of Pretoria, where the 14 year-old school girl Freda Schlosberg’s family had suffered the effects of the climate in the lowlands near Rhenosterkop. Her story was being repeated over and over as the civilians caught in this war tried to rebuild their lives once the conventional war ended and the insurgency began. She and her mother, father and a brother had been prevented by the Boers from leaving Rhenosterkop for their small holding near Pretoria at a town called Bronkhorstspruit. They had applied for a permit to move from the Boer General Erasmus in early October and it was now a month later and they were still refused permission to travel home. But there was to be good news for the family. In the North Eastern Transvaal, the Canadians and Australians in particular had been busy since mid October. To these men it seemed as though the solemn annexation ceremonies in Pretoria and the departure of some of their colleagues only seemed to encourage the Boer commandos to renew their offensive. Lord Roberts and Kitchener or Bobs and K as they were known, had ordered the scorched earth policy to begin in earnest. And the man charged with scorching the Eastern Transvaal area of Belfast and driving Boer women and children from their homes was the much admired General Smith-Dorrien. He was highly regarded by the Royal Canadians because of his active service throughout the war. An icy rain was to dent his image somewhat as we find out in this podcast.

This is episode 58 and there’s much excitement, General Knox catches up with de Wet for a second time and all hell breaks loose. Nothing damages you more in war than a lack of proper intelligence gathering. With information that is accurate and dispassionate, you can improve morale, skirmish successfully, offset equipment shortfalls, plan forward, restrict enemy incursions and avoid pitfalls. Victory is possible. Without proper scouts, victory is uncertain. So its the last week of October 1900 and General Christiaan de Wet has begun to really miss the scouts under command of Danie Theron. He’d been blown up in a British attack back in September. As I’ve prepared this series, there have been many characters that have come and gone, some survived this terrible war, others avoided capture, some succeeded, many died. But none, dear listener, has been as effective as part of de Wet’s commando as this one person. Danie Theron had a relatively small force under his command, between 60 and 80 men. But this organisation as its known in military terms, was imbued with a remarkable ability. The company could read the landscape and the enemy. And they did it surrupticiously. They could survive for months on end with one meal every three days, and water intermittantly. They understood the enemy more profoundly than themselves and were able to report unemotionally and with certainty at any time day or night. It was these men that Christiaan de Wet missed and in the space of a fortnight, almost cost him his life and freedom.

The guerilla campaign is now under way in late October 1900 and the leaders of the Boer commandos and their remaining political icon, Andries Styen the president of the Free State, are due to meet one hundred kilometres west of Johannesburg in the last week of the month. The gathering was scheduled to take place on the farm Cyferfontein where Louis Botha, Koos de La Rey and other commanders were heading determined to finalise the new strategy for the coming insurgency. Absent was General Christiaan de Wet, who’d almost been captured by General Knox at Schoemansdrift and the Boer General was now lying low in the Free State. Unfortunately for de Wet, General Knox and his men were going to attack de Wet once more, and this time, the November engagement would deal de Wet one of his worst defeats of the war. Meanwhile, in the northern Transvaal town of Pietersberg, Boers had begun to congregate determined to continue the war. Young leaders like Beyers and Kemp arrived in the town, while Koos de La Rey was active to the west, as he prepared for the late October pow pow. It was here that Louis Botha met with the new youthful and passionate leaders, and laid out his initial plan. Botha would maintain command of South East Transvaal, Ben Viljoen the north east, and the West would remain Koos de la Reys hunting ground. They all continued to make strenuous efforts to keep their men in the field, but it was difficult. And if you think it was just the British burning farms in order to send a message, you’re wrong. Louis Botha had also been indulging in a little arson to make a political point. “I will be compelled…” Botha wrote to one of his commanders later, “If they do not listen to this, to confiscate everything moveable or immovable and also to burn their houses…” Botha also revealed another plan he’d long been working on. To attack the Cape. This seemed impossible, rather like Stalin ordering an attack on Germany while fighting his defensive campaign in 1941 and 1942. But Botha was aware of the strength in mobility, and also that the Cape Afrikaners may decide to turn out and fight against the British if their brethren achieved successes in the Colony.

This is episode 56 and there are movements afoot. For instance, Transvaal President Paul Kruger is on his way to Europe on a diplomatic mission, Free State President Styen is moving through the Northern Transvaal, and General Louis Botha is harassing Canadian, Australian, and English troops stationed along the all important railway line between Pretoria and Delagoa Bay. Also moving through the veld are Generals Christiaan de Wet and Koos de La Rey. The former has made his way back into his beloved Free State, while the latter is making life difficult for the English across a broad swathe of the Transvaal. Steyn and the rest of the Free State government were returning to battle in the Free State after the all important meeting with Kruger in Nelspruit where it was decided to go ahead with the guerrilla campaign. The British, meanwhile, are considering winding down their forces in South Africa, with their commander in chief Lord Roberts planning his trip back home. The Boers have arranged a second major meeting of generals and government officials at Cyferfontein, a farm around 100 kilometres west of the gold ming city of Johannesburg set for October 25th. Steyn was en route here on his circuitous ride home, so too de le Rey and de Wet, while Botha would also rendezvous with these erstwhile Boer commanders. More about that gathering in coming podcasts. Lord Roberts has setup his army across South Africa to act more like police than soldiers. He believed the bandits, as he called these small groups of roaming Boers, would eventually surrender as long as their logistics could be smashed. So apart from ordering the farms destroyed close to where railway lines or bridges were blown up, he divided the country into areas of command. Garrisons were created in various towns and villages. To put down the insurgency in the countryside, he setup various flying columns. These were supposed to be highly mobile cavalry and mounted infantry units which were tasked with tracking down and trapping the Boer bands. In reality they could not obtain enough horses in order to achieve their main aim. However, the small bands of Boers began to multiply, and yet these flying columns could not locate the ever increasing commandos.

It’s October 1900, and Spring is a month old in Southern Africa. Some of the mountains in Basutholand (Lesotho) still have their snowy caps, but the temperatures are already climbing to 30 degrees in other parts of the region. In Cape Town, the Governor of the Cape Sir Alfred Milner was completely unconvinced by Lord Robert’s assertion that the war was technically over. Spring had come - but what was actually happening was it had breathed new life into the Boers. For some they reckoned this war was only just beginning. Valley after Valley of the South western Transvaal for example had slipped back under the control of Boer General Koos de la Rey. He was back in his happy hunting ground, snapping up convoys, swallowing prisoners, a swirling cloud on the horizon the size of a dynamited train as Thomas Packenham described it. At the epicentre of this miniature cyclone was de la Rey, and Louis Botha had requested all commanders to meet in the SwartRuggens ridge at the end of October. That was west of the capital Pretoria, a long line of steep hills that afforded a view across the flats of the Transvaal. Meanwhile Louis Botha remained active to the East of the capital. The curling smoke in the distance was not limited to British trains being blown up - Robert’s command for increasingly tough action against Boers including the destruction of their farms had begun in earnest. We heard last week how this decision to target civilians had led immediately to an escalation of the number of Boers who’d returned to the commandos despite taking an oath of neutrality. The debate about this moment in the war has literally continued to this day with biased views on both sides.

It’s the end of September 1900, an already the Spring rains have come to parts of Southern Africa. It’s a time when the dull dusty winter air is cleared by these first thunderstorms which flush the atmosphere clear and people awaken after a night of flashing lightning and growling thunder to blue skies and moderate temperatures. Generally the wind falls at this time of year, birds return from their winter vacation, the veld turns from a khaki and mustard brown or yellow to a tinge of green. The planting begins, farmers have a new glint in their eye as hope and climate prevail positively. It’s also the phase in the war where General Louis Botha has left the Eastern Transvaal with over two thousand men in order to begin the Guerilla campaign, while further to the West, General De Wet and de la Rey are cantering across the spring veld trying to mobilise a new army. The freezing highveld changes miraculously into a verdent landscape dotted with wetland - an oasis oozing life while around these pools both livestock and wildlife fatten once more. While this is happening, over five hundred international troops prepared to leave South Africa after surrendering. More than one hundred Irishmen for example board a vessel, defeated but not cowed - many of these men will use their military experience in a coming clash with the English back home. Before then he has some important family business to take care of. He must visit the grave of his only son, Freddie, who died at the Battle of Colenso. However, things were worsening for our schoolgirl, Freda Schloshberg and her family who were living not far to the south east of Pretoria at a place called Rhenosterkop, or Rhino hill, but who were under the control of the Boers. So much for Lord Roberts’ assertion that the Transvaal was now a British dominion. Hundreds of kilometers to the South West, the bane of the British in South Africa had plans of his own. General Christiaan de Wet had not been idle. He’d turned himself into a one-person Boer draft officer and was riding from farm to farm in the Orange Free State cajoling men in order to shame them into rejoining the war. But he faced an ethical dilemma. Many of these men had sworn an oath of neutrality after they’d surrendered to the British. General De Wet, a man of honour himself, had to find a way in which he could ensure the men could break their oath and remain diginified.

We are up to episode 53 and this week we’ll take a closer look at the use of Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs in the war. While not a new invention, a Scotsman fighting for the Boers used a new remote triggering mechanism which is illuminating. Nothing brings out innovation in humans more than creative techniques to kill and maim each other. The war at this point in the third week of September 1900 appeared to be in one of those natural lulls, where small skirmishes were reported, and a bridge or two was blown up. But the Boers were planning a long term strategy which the British were only now beginning to fully understand. And the IED was symptomatic of the new guerrilla war. We know that the British in South Africa were totally reliant on the railway lines that had been built through the 19th century. The British army needed these to transport men and material to the two main battle fronts in the Free State and Transvaal - and also to transport the injured back to the various ports in order to be shipped back to their home countries. That’s because the alternative to these railway lines, the paths, dirt roads and tracks, were unpredictable and susceptible to the seasonal conditions. Also, mechanised equipment was in its infancy - there were steam driven vehicles which the British used for example, but these were few and far between. Oxen and horses were expensive to ship and these supplies were not always easy to come by - we’ve heard for example how Argentina, Canada, the USA, Arabia, India and other parts of Africa had been tapped for supplies of mules, horses and oxen. More about this when we hear about the shipping lists in a while. It took months to source these animals, then load them aboard ships which would sail or steam to Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, East London and even Beira in Portuguese East Africa.

This episode features what’s known as the Khaki election of 1900 in England, German mercenaries, Portuguese East Africa, and another update from the teenage schoolgirl called Freda who’s unique view of this war continues through her diary. It also the point at which Lord Roberts makes another proclamation after his September 1st declaration that the Transvaal Republic is now officially part of the Queen’s dominion. As we know, that was somewhat presumptuous as the British did not control the territory within South Africa, only the main railway line and cities. The veld remained unconquered. Transvaal President Paul Kruger and his government had been pushed inexorably towards the Portuguese EAst African territory and were based in Nelspruit, only 85 kilometers from the border. The British under Lord Roberts were about to strike at the town and a meeting of Boer leaders including President Steyn of the Free State had decided that Kruger would have to make a sea journey to Europe in an effort to beef up diplomacy. It was also to protect Kruger. Had he been captured its clear that most of the Boers would have surrendered so his leaving Africa would be both strategic and tactical. He bowed to the decision apparently as the sentence of God and on the 11th of September he bid farewell to his friends and his government at Nelspruit. Though he was really only taking leave for six months, most wondered if they’d ever see him again. He entrained for Delagoa Bay and while the Portuguese government received him with full diplomatic honours as he awaited his ship to Europe, he must have realised that this was symbolic of a circle which began with the Dutch colonising the Cape in the 1600s, leading to the Great Trek, the war, and now he was to return to the Netherlands amongst other European countries.

This episode will focus on Australia - their troops had already had a major impact on the war particularly as they joined the Canadians in the relief of Mafikeng. When the Anglo-Boer war broke out in October 1899 most corners of the empire were convinced these handful of Boers would be brought under control within a few weeks. However, it was black week in December 1899 that shook the empire and its commonwealth. Remember those battles - Colenso, Stormberg and Magersfontein. After this, in Australia for instance, speakers toured the towns particularly in the South East of the country promoting the imperial cause and the demonisation of the Boers in the regional press was complete by February 1900. They were now “treacherous savages” who fired on hospitals, convoys of the wounded, women and children; they poisoned water, used dum dum bullets, buried their own critically wounded and robbed the dead. Membership of what were known as rifle clubs jumped after Black Week,where mainly urban Australians rediscovered their roots by training in the use of rifles. New clubs were formed, including some formed by women. But were the rifle clubs capable of defending their ownb colony in the event of an invasion? Apparently not, according to Yackandandah’s Councillor Beatty. In February 1900, he called for the establishment of units of Mounted Rifles or Rangers in every town and district. Although he had no criticism to make of the rifle clubs, he claimed, he believed that they would be virtually useless in the face of an invasion. It of course was not entirely clear who would be invading but the war in South Africa had applied Australian minds. Councillor Beatty had a son in uniform in South Africa and he reflected a long-standing demand in the region for local defence units that could defend both hearth and home. Beatty’s call sparked a number of public meetings across the region supporting his call for the establishment of Mounted Rifle or Ranger units. The government’s response, however, was cool. While this was the official reaction, in small towns across Australia contingents of men began to show up for assessment in order to be shipped off to the Anglo-Boer war — along with their horses.

The beginning of September 1900 is characterised by small skirmishes that continue to plague Lord Robert’s army in South Africa. It’s also the start of Spring - which came as a relief for the men who’d slept under the stars with winter temperatures slipping well below zero in many parts of South Africa. But they’d forgotten what happened in mid-Summer as the blazing sun bleached the bones of the dead and powerful thunderstorms lashed the living. September and October 1900 also revealed the limitations of the political will. Remember there’s been an uprising called the Boxer Rebellion in China which has occupied the minds of the citizens, whereas this show in Africa is receding in the public consciousness. The government of John X Merriman was to face more criticism shortly. Think about contemporary wars - the UN and American campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan for example. After initial reports from imbedded journalists with their dramatic stories, then the audience begins to wane particularly if the effect of the war is not immediate. Think too of how badly the Russians fared in Afghanistan after they invaded in 1979 - the result of which accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union. Unlike the first world war where people in England could actually hear the Western Front artillery barrages at times, or were bombed by Zeppelins, and in the Second world war where tens of thousands of civilians were killed in Britain, in the Anglo-Boer war the hospital ships limped into harbours with fanfare but no direct effect was felt. So the Anglo-Boer war drifted into the background, to be manipulated by political parties as they argued back and forth about ethics, empire and cost. Something like the American experience where the left and right grapple with internal issues through the lens of distant wars. For the Boers, however, this life and death struggle was very much front and centre, as it was for all South Africans. The Transvaal’s political leaders were now compelled to retreat further eastwards, towards the Portuguese East Africa border, while the Orange Free State President Styen had joined Transvaal President Paul Kruger as they moved inexorably towards Delagoa Bay. Portuguese East Africa was neutral territory, and Delagoa Bay was a short-term bolt hole that beckoned both political leaders. Steyn had arrived at Waterval Onder in the final stages of the battle of Bergendal which we heard about last week. He wanted to confer with Ooom Paul Kruger and the remnants of the Transvaal government. Both were forced out of this town and headed further east to Nelspruit, only 85 kilometers from the Portuguese East Africa border. A meeting was held on the 28th August in Nelspruit and apparently this was a memorable occasion. A number of decisions were made including the crucial approval of the new method of war espoused by both General De Wet in the West along with General Koos de la Rey, and General Louis Botha in the East.

We’re in the Eastern Transvaal where Lord Roberts large army mobilised once more in late August 1900 in order to march on Boer General Louis Botha. Robert’s had been joined by General Redvers Buller who’d made his way north from the Natal Colony, pushing the Boers before him. On the 13th Buller took possession of Ermelo. His advance was steady and led to the Standerton commando numbering 182 men surrendered to Clery. Buller’s men continued skirmishing with the Boers, for instance on the 15th, his men were at Twyfelaar, and had taken possession of Carolina. Here and there a distant horseman riding over the olive-coloured hills showed how closely and incessantly he was watched and snipers continued to fire on his flanks. Buller's column had come nearer to the main army led by Lord Roberts, but it was also nearer to the main body of Boers who were waiting in that very rugged piece of country which lies between Belfast in the west and Machadodorp in the east. A note here about the feud between Lord Roberts and General Buller. When the war began in October 1899 Buller had been the commanding officer of the entire British army in South Africa. He was demoted when Roberts had arrived in early 1900 and both neither liked the other. Curiously, they feuded from a distance, their first face to face meeting was on the 7th July. So when Buller joined Roberts in the Eastern Transvaal in August 1900 it was significant for it all boiled to a simple fact. Buller was in charge of what was known as the African British experience, and Roberts was the Indian British experience. Two worlds clashed along with these two men. Louis Botha’s army had grown - there were now 7000 men dug in along the edge of the escarpment and from this rocky stronghold they had thrown out mobile bodies to harass the British advance from the south, and every day brought Buller into closer touch with these advance guards of the enemy. On August 21st he had moved eight miles nearer to Belfast, French operating upon his left flank. Here he found the Boers in considerable numbers, but he pushed them northward with his cavalry, mounted infantry, and artillery, losing between thirty and forty killed and wounded, the greater part from the ranks of the 18th Hussars and the Gordon Highlanders.

This episode is dominated by a failed attempt by the Boers at international diplomacy, the continued zig zagging of General Christiaan de Wet, and Lord Roberts setting out his stall to attack Louis Botha in the Transvaal. So it was then that on the afternoon of Wednesday 15th August 1900, a train pulled into Moscow Station in Russia. It was carrying Boer emissaries led by Willem Leyds, who had been criss-crossing the world trying to drum up support for the Boers in their battle against the British. We’re heard in earlier podcasts how Leyds failed in both the USA and Holland - despite sympathies and even citizens of both countries fighting for the Boers. However the political situation was not in their favour. So Leyds and three other Boer emissaries, Fischer, Wessels and Wolmarans were on board the train in Moscow and looked out of their carriage. They were gratified to see hundreds of Russians cheering their arrival. But that was the only really warm welcome they received. It was quickly clear to these Boer emissaries that the Russian authorities regarded them as uninvited guests. Russian newspaper editors were ordered by the Tsar’s officials to avoid writing stories about the Boers arrival, or even interview the men. At the same time, Leyd’s was informed that the Tsar was unavailable. He was apparently on a tour of his military bases and had been gone for weeks. The Boers said they’d wait. While public coverage was limited and the Russian formal welcome was lukewarm, Leyds did eventually manage to secure a meeting with the Tsar along with Russian Foreign Minister, Count VN Lamsdorff. The meeting was accorded full diplomatic honours without Fischer, Wolmarans and Wessels. Count Lamsdorff made it clear that Leyds was the only real Boer diplomat and that the other three were not welcome. This was a bitter pill to swallow. The team had travelled the globe and now made the long trip to Mosco only to be told Fischer, Wolmarans and Wessels were persona’s non grata. In the meantime the ever resourceful Leyds printed 100 copies of the letter he’d received from the Russian government and had them distributed to media across the world.

In this episode General Buller makes a return and some of his slow moving tactics start paying off. Lord Kitchener complains after de Wet makes his escape with 2500 burghers, and the Canadians prepare to attack Louis Botha in the Eastern Transvaal. This war which was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks has now dragged on for 10 months and shows no signs of ending soon. This conflict is a precursor to many in the 20th Century where the civilians are part of the logistic support network for the defending national army. The Boers were receiving food, ammunition and transport from their countrymen and women across the length and breadth of South Africa Others, however, were cooperating with the British. Like Piet de Wet, Christiaan de Wet’s brother. Christiaan was a hero in the eyes of the Boers determined to fight on, and had led his division of 2500 men across the Vaal River into the Transvaal Republic. General Kitchener and Hunter were tracking him down, while Lord Methuen’s force was also searching for the fast moving Boer leader. The Canadians are attacked 11 times in 21 days east of Pretoria at a place called Nooitgedacht, and Louis Botha gets ready to relaunch his war against the British.

In July Lieutenant Hans Cordua who was a German, had led a plot to overthrown the British once they’d arrived in the Transvaal capital.   Lieutenant Cordua had fought for the Boers and was captured but later released on parole. He’d barely gained his liberty before he hatched a plot to assassinate Major Carl Barchard who as an officer of the West York Regiment. He also apparently planned to kill Lord Roberts who commanded the British army in South Africa.   The English were tipped off by a British agent who said Cordua would be dressed in British army uniform when he tried to kill Barchard, and that there would possibly be other assassins.   After a lengthy court martial, the German was found guilty and sentenced to be shot.   Cordua was brought before a ten-man firing squad after he’d written the last letter to his family. He preferred no blindfold, staring straight at his executioners.  Ready .. Aim .. Fire. After the execution it was found that seven of the ten rounds had penetrated his heart, so much for the theory that in a firing squad, only one rifle has a round - the rest blanks. It’s also to be noted that in shooting terms, this was quite an accurate grouping.   I found a San Francisco Call newspaper report into this incident published later, in 1903, which featured the headline “War Romance has sad ending” Court Martial Robs a Boer girl of her sweetheart…”   The story doesn’t quite end there. Apparently the sweetheart hired a hitman in Pretoria to climb through Major Blanchard’s window one night to kill him. Unfortunately for the sad Boer maiden, the hitman was expected and was shot dead by Blanchard who woke up with his window being raised, firing at the man at point blank range. Major Blanchard ended up in the USA and spent some time traveling about, spinning many a yarn about his experiences in South Africa.

That’s 45 weeks since the start of the war in October 1899. And this podcast series is following the weeks, so to speak. Right now, we’re in an interregnum. Not a dormant period and definitely not an hiatus. Boer General Christiaan de Wet still appears to have the initiative in the Free State, although only because he’s still free. But appearances can be deceptive because de Wet has a paltry 2500 men riding with him across the veld, while he’s being pursued by Lieutenant General Hunter with over 20 000. But Hunter is squaring off against a highly motivated and skilled enemy. The Boers regard the large British force as an illegal army, their families are adrift as refugees moving from place. Historically armies like this are notoriously difficult to overcome quickly, unless the invading force resorts to extreme tactics, such as those used by Genghis Khan. This is not possible in the modern era for obvious reasons. De Wet had retreated into the range of hills called the Rhenosterpoort dominated by a large Boer farm, which lies 35 kilometers away from the town of Potchefstroom. He had rested there for a few days while the English reinforcements marched steadily towards his lair. Meanwhile, Lord Roberts' wife, Nora, has arrived in Pretoria with their two children which was not what Queen Victoria had expected when she let it be known she preferred no "camp followers"...

This is episode 44 and comes with a smattering of snow, ice and a little about what’s known as the Dragon Mountains - the Drakensberg. It’s also called the Barrier of Spears because the lava flow which created the escarpment 160 million years before has weathered away revealing sharp spear like peaks that ascend to over 10 000 feet. These are real mountains, and both British and Boer were rightly respectful of their power. Free State commander General Christiaan de Wet was based west of this barrier, and decided to break his force of 5000 men into 4 distinct groups. De Wet then headed off north west on the 15th July with the largest division, and President Steyn in tow, along with the specialist mercenary unit under command of Danie Theron. This cold foggy weather seeped westwards towards the Caledon and the Brandwater Basin. It was through one of these deep mists on the 19th July two of the Lovats Scouts, who were colonial troops being used by the British, managed to slip through Retief’s Nek. What they saw on the other side of the Brandwater Basin mountains was that the grass was burnt for miles. This could have been linked to the Boers who burned the grass in front of their trenches and defensive walls making it more difficult for the British troops advancing to use the vegetation as cover. Or it could just be nature, or the local Basutho people setting fire to the grass to increase the fertilisation of the harsh terriain before the rains of summer fell. Hunter couldn’t be sure what was behind this great burning. However, the two Scouts he’d dispatched had more information that was vital. They saw what they reported was a large Boer division at Naaupoort. We know that it wasn’t the entire Boer army, in fact General Christiaan de Wet had purposefully left what he thought was a relatively insignificant part of his army behind so that the British wouldn’t waste their time attacking what he called “such a paltry force” . He would also face off against his brother Piet and the confrontation did not end well...