Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (24 page)

But, as so often happens in war, the crucial moment, the inflection point, is missed or misinterpreted—and the great victory or string of victories is not properly exploited. This was to be de Wet’s fate. Briefly, the situation now afforded him the opportunity to employ the regained initiative to launch a deep-striking raid into the Cape Colony. This move would completely cripple the logistical supports of the British advance, allowing the Boer sieges of Kimberley, Mafeking, and Ladysmith to come to successful conclusions. A deep raid by de Wet would also incite many of the descendants of those Boers who had refrained from making the Great Trek and stayed under British rule to rise up against the empire. Instead de Wet spent more than two weeks trying to wipe out a force of Boer Cape colonists who had decided to join up and fight on the British side.

These “turncoat” units that de Wet tracked down were Brabant’s Horse and the Cape Mounted Rifles. He thought of them this way: “They were Afrikaners, and as Afrikaners, although neither Free-Staters nor Transvaalers, they ought, in our opinion, to have been ashamed to fight against us.”
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They were indeed Boers, these two thousand men of the Cape who cast their lot with the British, and they fought hard and well. Although surrounded, they held off de Wet, who broke his own new rules about avoiding pitched battles. Out of hatred of these pro-British Boers, he kept calling in more reinforcements, eventually amassing about six thousand riders over the two weeks of the fighting. Still the Capemen held out; and when a British relief force arrived, de Wet barely made good his escape.

Thus the opportunity to take the war south was missed. De Wet would try to invade the Cape late in 1900, and again early in 1901, and would be driven off both times, as by now the British expeditionary forces were numerous enough to provide area coverage that made such deep strikes impractical. One of de Wet’s young colleagues, Jan Smuts, eventually mounted a major raid that wound up in the more poorly protected, more sparsely populated western reaches of the Cape colony, where he operated until the end of the war. But by the time of Smuts’s initiative, the main Boer field armies had long been defeated, the British logistical infrastructure was well secured, and the Cape Boers were largely cowed into quiescence. “Too late” is one of war’s most tragic refrains.

The strategic initiative was now back in Roberts’s hands, shored up by the more than doubling of his overall forces during 1900 to over two hundred thousand men. He made good use of his material advantages, advancing on more than one axis and benefiting from the willingness of the Boers to continue fighting him in mostly conventional ways. Soon the city sieges were lifted, the relief of Mafeking in May 1900 being most dramatic as its garrison commander, Robert Baden-Powell—later to be the founder of the international Scouting movement—had held out heroically against the Boers for 217 days.

With the sieges lifted, all that remained was for Roberts to make his way into the Boer heartland and capture the three main cities of Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. He was smart enough to know that he had to keep moving fast to avoid another “Boer revival” during a pause. So he drove his subordinate commanders and his field forces to the point of exhaustion. His risk in doing so was mitigated by what Winston Churchill—who was covering the war as a journalist—described in his articles home as the “feeble resistance” of the Boers still trying to block Roberts’s advance.
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De Wet’s raiders, however, operating far behind the lines of advance, comprised an element of the Boer resistance that was hardly feeble. He and his troopers continued to strike at will against the railroads as well as to swoop down on small garrisons and detachments on the move. In all, the actions of his handful of
KOMMANDOS
diverted roughly half of Roberts’s forces. Indeed, Roberts was so nettled by de Wet’s stinging blows that he began to organize formal “de Wet hunts.” The first employed almost fifty thousand troops in search-and-cordon operations—and was a complete failure. The second used fewer troops and began to rely more heavily upon several flying columns, the idea being to flush out de Wet, much as more than half a century earlier Bugeaud had used a similar technique to try to catch Abd el-Kader. This didn’t work either.

Still, the fall of Pretoria in June 1900 and the mopping up of other Boer main forces convinced Roberts—and Queen Victoria—that the British had won the war. Late in the year Roberts sailed for home, arriving in Britain on January 2, 1901, to a massive public welcome. He was then taken to see the queen, who made him an earl and a Knight of the Garter. On the basis of his triumph he was named Britain’s military commander-in-chief, replacing Garnet Wolseley, who was made the scapegoat for the string of early British disasters suffered at the hands of the Boers.

A few weeks later Queen Victoria died, bringing an end to a reign that had lasted more than sixty-three years and given its name to an era. With her also would die British Victorian notions of war as following set rules and conventions, as a noble undertaking guided by insights drawn from the Enlightenment. Christiaan de Wet and some of his more stalwart countrymen were about to herald the emergence of an age of full-blown guerrilla warfare; and the often savage British response to the challenge from these Boer holdouts soon wiped away any remaining Victorian notions about the basic forms and niceties of conflict. Total war was at hand.

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There was much consternation in the Boer camps after the fall of Pretoria. One of de Wet’s great compatriots, Koos De la Rey, tried to take the city back, massing some six thousand troops for the counterattack. But this was just the sort of fighting the British excelled at, and De la Rey was easily driven off. Many other Boers had surrendered—roughly fifteen thousand were now in captivity—and more were coming in every day to accept the British terms of surrender. Among them was de Wet’s brother Piet, whose capitulation Christiaan deemed so odious that he never spoke to him again.
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For Christiaan de Wet, the simple, pious farmer and father of sixteen children, there could be no question about whether to fight on. The Boer struggle for freedom was, to his mind, an unquestionably just cause; the only issue now was whether to adjust strategy once more. Given that the British were swarming throughout their country, and that the numbers of Boer fighters had been sharply reduced, largely by captures and surrenders that had taken twenty thousand riders out of their saddles,
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de Wet felt compelled to make yet another strategic shift.

At a remote farm where he was able to rest from pursuers and gather some key colleagues, de Wet outlined an ambitious plan for the next phase of the war. While steeped in the doctrine of hit-and-run raiding, de Wet’s strategy also called for a major organizational change: the
KOMMANDOS
were to break into even smaller units than their usual 100 to 150 riders, and were to be widely dispersed. Their goal was to cause the greatest discomfiture for the British. De Wet summed up the plan this way:

We were of the opinion that we should be able to do better work if we divided the
KOMMANDOS
into small parties. We could not risk any great battles, and, if we divided our forces, the English would have to divide their forces too.
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Over the next year and more, his strategy would not only do “better work”; it would give the British fits and drive them to practices that would come to be reviled around the world.

The principal target of this global opprobrium was to be General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who devised new methods for fighting the Boers that went well beyond the dispatch of flying columns. Kitchener, who had defeated Mahdist forces at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan just two years earlier, was given virtually free reign to do what was necessary to end a war that his government had believed was already over. His plan for South Africa was to control the countryside with a network of garrisoned blockhouses and barbed-wire enclosures. Hunter-killer patrols were then to drive the Boers into these fixed, fortified positions. Regarding the insurgents’ ability to hide among the people, Kitchener’s solution was to drain the
VELDT
of all sympathetic civilians, denying the Boers any sources of shelter and supply. In practice this meant herding tens of thousands of women and children into what Kitchener called “concentration camps,” and seizing or burning crops and farms.

Disease soon spread through the camps, causing thousands of deaths and kindling an antiwar rage among the world’s nascent civil society organizations. The best known protester was Emily Hobhouse of Britain, a leader of the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund and of the “Ladies Committee” that brought British and world attention not only to the squalid conditions of the camps but to the atrocities committed by imperial troops against Boer civilians.
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She interviewed many women in the camps, recording their eyewitness accounts of murder and rape. These revelations led to a firestorm of public criticism, increasing pressure on the government to rein in Kitchener. But the fact that his methods seemed to be working against the guerrillas made Whitehall slow to act. Indeed, the concentration camps would continue in existence for a year after the war’s end in 1902.

How well did this brutal approach work? Not nearly well enough. Many small Boer bands were caught by Kitchener’s methods, as his forces had now been doubled to more than four hundred thousand, and were able to cover or search most of the
VELDT
. But a few thousand Boers soldiered on, inflicting stinging blows and evading British pursuit. In tactical engagements they continued to hold the advantage in mobility, being all mounted, as well as in marksmanship at ranges up to and beyond a mile. The smokeless powder they used made it hard for the British to track them, even when they were enclosed in set traps.

De Wet discovered that, even when caught in a British “drive,” he and his men could still select which part of the line of blockhouses they would hit in their breakout attempt. Thus he was able to achieve local superiority long enough to escape, sometimes even to wait for pursuers to come to the breach he had made, ambushing them upon their arrival. On other occasions de Wet’s forces would break into many small groups and travel separately to a new rally point. The Boers’ supple organizational structure made all this possible. Indeed, it was this fluidity that most impressed the great American strategist and apostle of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who observed from the very outset of the war: “Every Boer organization seems susceptible of immediate dissolution into its component units, each of independent vitality, and of subsequent reunion in some assigned place.”
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Throughout 1901 de Wet was regularly able to elude his pursuers via this method of breaking down and later recombining his forces. Soon it became clear to him, as he noted in his memoir, that the British “had lost all faith in their blockhouses.”
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But Kitchener was a resourceful man with huge numbers of troops at his command, so instead of continuing in his attempts to drive the Boers into the fixed, immobile lines of blockhouses, he increased the size of his flying columns, put them on each compass point of massive squares he had drawn on his map, and ordered them all to move inward. Given that his walls were now moving, and “thicker,” Kitchener had posed a problem very nearly beyond de Wet’s ability to cope.

Perhaps the most dangerous of this new kind of British drive came in February 1902—still summertime in the southern hemisphere—when Kitchener amassed more than fifty thousand troops for another “de Wet hunt.” This time it seemed that none of the Boers would get away; but de Wet created his own series of flying columns bent on escape, staggering the timing of their movements so that British reinforcements would leap to join their compatriots who had made first contact, creating gaps other Boers could ride through.

In this manner de Wet and many of his remaining two thousand riders escaped the greatest of Kitchener’s traps—although one of his breakout groups was sacrificed and four hundred men were captured. Needless to say, this radical escape plan made it impossible for the Boers to bring their cattle along with them. So de Wet remained free to fight, but he and his men were terribly worn, hungry, and increasingly dispirited. Their only hope was that the British were just as war weary, that public opposition to the war had grown to a critical level, and that a negotiated peace was still possible. It was, despite all the bitterness on both sides.

In a development similar to the end of the French war against Abd el-Kader, mutual agreement was finally reached. It came in May 1902, and the terms, beyond calling for Boer recognition of British sovereignty, were surprisingly lenient—perhaps because of how hard and closely fought this war had been. Indeed, the Treaty of Vereeniging even called for the immediate payment of millions of pounds in compensation for the suffering of the Afrikaners, in and outside the camps. The agreement also held out the hope of self-governance and, later, independence.

It was a treaty good enough to bring even diehards like de Wet on board. He signed as president of the Free State and in a few years would actually join the government as minister of agriculture. Other fighters were also determined to remake their land under the rubric of British rule, Jan Smuts among them. But when World War I broke out in 1914, and imperial troops headed off to Europe, some old Boers, de Wet among them—though he was almost sixty now—decided this was the moment to strike again for their freedom. Their rebellion lasted about three months, put down by some of their old comrades-in-arms who saw only treachery in the uprising. One of these new loyalists to the empire was Jan Smuts, who would even hold a seat in the British War Cabinet. He would also play a role in the campaign against the Germans in East Africa, the subject of the next chapter.