History often reproduces without reference to nationality some particular
human type or class which becomes active and predominant for a time, and
fades away when its task is finished. It is, however, not utterly lost, for
the germ of it lies dormant yet ready to re-appear when the exigencies of
the moment recall it. The reserve forces of human nature are inexhaustible
and inextinguishable.
It is probable that few of the Boers had ever heard of Oliver Cromwell,
or that his life and times had ever been studied in the South African
Republics, and had influenced the Boer action; yet the affinity of the South
African burghers of the XIXth century with the Puritans and the Roundheads
of the XVIIth is striking. It was not so much a parallelism of aims and
hopes, for the struggle in England was political and not national as in
South Africa, as of temperament, character, and method. There was hardly an
individuity in the Boers of the War which might not have been found in the
followers of Cromwell. Like these they were fanatically but sincerely
religious, and their unabashed and fearless adherence to their beliefs and
their open observance of the outward forms of religion exposed them to the
same cruel and baseless charge of hypocrisy. Just as the aristocratic
followers of Charles I had jeered at the Roundheads, so did every
thoughtless officer and newspaper correspondent jeer at the psalm-singing
and the prayer meetings in the laagers. The Boers had the courage of their
religious opinions, and were not ashamed to proclaim them in the face of
man. The Bible was the only book they knew, and they guided themselves
according to their lights by its precepts. In opposing the English they
believed that they were resisting the enemies of the Almighty. Like the
Puritans they honestly thought that certain passages in the Holy Scriptures
applied to them as the Chosen People, and that they were assured of Divine
Protection; and if they erred in their exegesis their delusion at least
deserves respect. Yet all the while the Old Testament was the volume they
chiefly studied, and if they quoted the New Testament they sometimes
modified the context to their own advantage.
Each Puritan movement has derived its strength not so much from its abstract
merit as from the intense personal conviction felt by each unit engaged in
it, that the righteousness of the cause was unassailable. The Puritan never
wavered in philosophic doubt. No misgivings disturbed his soul, and he
pursued his object with all the strength of his body.
The Puritan stir in the reign of Charles I was a revival, almost a
continuation, of the half political, half religious activity which in the
previous century had effected the Reformation. The Boer movement in South
Africa, which sprang up after a germination lasting three generations, was
brought about by a recrudescence of the spirit which made the Boers of the
Netherlands rise against Alva and the Spanish domination in the XVIth
century.
In the XVIIth century the Boers of the Netherlands, made a voluntary
settlement in South Africa, and there under the Southern Cross they were
joined by French Puritans, who had fought under Condé and who left their
country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and also by some
persecuted sectaries from Piedmont. The two stocks, although one was of
Teutonic and the other of Celtic origin, easily came together, and under the
pressure of common interests and common dangers were consolidated and
vulcanized: and if in the previous generation the English Pilgrim Fathers of
the Mayflower had directed their course to the south instead of to the west,
and had cast anchor off the shore of that distant region of Good Hope, it is
probable that a mighty nation would have been founded in South Africa.
Cromwell as the military leader of the Commonwealth Boers is, at least in
England where the military art has not been scientifically studied, one of
the suppressed characters of history. His political achievements, as is
perhaps natural in a community which courts the voter and despises the
soldier, have put out of sight the means by which he mainly won them; namely
his genius as a cavalry and partisan commander. An ungainly, narrow-minded,
bigoted, bucolic squireen of Huntingdon, lacking in every quality which we
are accustomed to associate with a cavalry officer, inaugurated an era in
the history of Mounted Troops. His methods are studied on the Continent, and
the German Staff has recently discovered that he was the first leader to use
cavalry as a screen to hide the movements of the main body. Yet there is no
evidence that he ever studied the military art, and he did not become a
soldier until he had reached his fourth decade. In the Royalist Army opposed
to him were soldiers by profession and experience; officers and men who had
been under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War; for in the XVIIth
century the services of aliens were in request on the Continent, and at one
time no less than eighty-seven senior officers of British nationality were
serving in the Swedish Army, then the most renowned in Europe. Yet Cromwell
with his "Eastern Association," his Ironsides, his yeomen and raw levies,
beat the Royalist Army, officered from the same class which is still
believed to possess the monopoly of the aptitude for leading men in war, by
exercising the homely qualities of energy, self-control, endurance, and
practical common sense applied instantly to the occasion of the moment.
The lessons to be learnt from Cromwell's campaigns have been thus
epitomized by General Baden-Powell:—"There is one thing that ought not to
escape the attention of students, namely the success that attended
Cromwell's method of rallying his troops whenever they got dispersed. When
things looked bad, as they did on one or two occasions, when some of his
cavalry were defeated and the rest scattered, he never lost heart and his
men never lost heart; they knew they had to rally again and attack somewhere
else. Very often the enemy were deceived by that, thinking that the
Roundheads were scattered and broken up, and took no further notice of him
until they suddenly found him attacking from quite a new direction. That was
the secret of his success on many occasions, and one that has its lesson
to-day, just as it had in those days—that when all seems pretty bad and you
are scattered and broken, keep up a good heart and get together again and
have another go." With scarcely the change of a word these remarks will
account for the prolongation of the war for two years after the occupation
of the Boer capitals.
The Boer leaders, like their great prototype Cromwell, owed much of their
success to their novel and skilful use of mounted troops. The European
conception of the functions of mounted troops had been stereotyped for some
time; Cavalry screens an advancing army, prevents the enemy observing its
dispositions, acts as its eyes and ears; and so forth. It is true that Great
Britain had already for at least a generation employed Mounted Infantry in
colonial wars; but the innovation had never been approved of on the
Continent, where it was regarded as a cheap and inefficient British
substitute for Cavalry.
Yet the famous postscript "unmounted men preferred,"2 which
was affixed to the acceptance of the help proffered by the Australian
Colonies, shows that at first the power of mounted troops acting not as the
eyes and ears of an army, but as a mobile and supple "mailed fist," was not
understood. In ten weeks, however, the tune changed, and it was "preference
given to mounted contingents."
When the grand operations were over, the enemy's chief towns occupied,
and the lines of communication fairly secure, the necessity for mounted
troops became still more apparent. The Boers saw that it was useless for
them to campaign at large. They took to guerilla, and restricted themselves
generally to independent horse raids against which foot troops were
powerless. Gradually the proportion of horses to men in the British columns
rose, until practically all the combatants were mounted, and at last the
Cromwellian principle that the best military weapon is a man on a horse was
fully accepted.
The military qualities of the Boers, like those of Cromwell's men, were
useful but not showy. They came by instinct and not by acquisition, and they
cannot be sufficiently accounted for as the outcome of experience in the
pursuit of game on the veld. They were neutralized partially by
characteristics the reverse of military. The Boers were not remarkable for
personal courage. If there had been in the Boer Army a decoration
corresponding to the Victoria Cross it would have been rarely won or at
least rarely earned. There is scarcely an instance of an individual feat of
arms or act of devotion performed by a Burgher. On the few occasions when
the Boers were charged by cavalry they became paralysed with terror. They
were incapable of submitting themselves to discipline, and difficult to
command in large numbers. They could not be made to understand that prompt
action, which possibly might not be the best under the circumstances, was
preferable to wasting time in discussing a better with the field cornets.
They were subject to panics and, for the time, easily disheartened: and
their sense of duty was not conspicuous. The principles of strategy were
unknown to them, their tactics were crude, and with the exception of a very
few who had fought in 1881, they were without experience of the realities of
war.3
If in the month of September, 1899, an impartial military critic in a
foreign Ministry of War had been directed to draw up an appreciation of the
situation and to forecast the course of the impending struggle, he would
probably have expressed himself somewhat as follows:—
"An Army of 100,000 men is the utmost that Great Britain will be able to
place in the field in South Africa, for the Indian and Colonial drafts must
be provided for, and the Militia and other Auxiliary Forces, which are not
of much account, are tethered to the country; but it will be sufficient for
the purpose. Although the military system of Great Britain is hopelessly
behind the times, she has always done wonders with her boomerangs, bows and
arrows, and flint instruments. That Army will be fairly well furnished with
modern weapons and equipment, and the excellent personality of the soldier
will compensate to a great extent for incapacity in the Staff and superior
officers. With this Army she will have to meet a brave but undisciplined
opponent whose numbers cannot be estimated. Even if the Free Staters are
included it is improbable that more than 100,000 men can be put into the
field. These have had no military training, their leaders will be
unprofessional officers who will be unable to make good use of the munitions
of War which the two Republics have been strangely allowed to import through
British ports and to accumulate in large quantities. If the burghers of the
Orange Free State throw in their lot with the Transvaalers, which is
improbable as they have no quarrel with Great Britain, the numbers opposed
to her will certainly be augmented, but the task before her will be greatly
simplified. Instead of having to send one portion of her Army by way of
Natal to effect a junction in the Transvaal, with the other portion working
northwards through Kimberley and Mafeking, a campaign which would involve
two long and vulnerable lines of communication, she will be able to strike
at once through the heart of the Free State and will advance without much
difficulty to Johannesburg and Pretoria. The hardest part of her task will
be the passage of the Vaal, where a great battle will be fought, and the
capture of Pretoria, which is reported to be well fortified. With
Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, Pretoria and the railways in the possession of
Great Britain, the opposition will collapse in a very few weeks, for no
nation has ever been able to carry on a struggle when its chief towns and
means of communication are in the enemy's possession."
This hypothetical appreciation probably represents the general opinion
current both at home and abroad during the period immediately preceding the
outbreak of the War: but it proved to be mistaken from the first. The Free
Staters joined the Transvaalers and the allied forces assumed the offensive
over a wide area without delay. Kimberley and Mafeking were threatened on
the west, and on the east the Boers poured into Natal, upon which they had
for sixty years looked with the aggrieved and greedy eyes of a dog from whom
a bone, to which he believes he is entitled, has been recovered.
To Natal, in 1824, had come a handful of British pioneers. From Chaka,
the King of the Zulus, they obtained a grant of land upon the coast, and
after eleven years they endeavoured without success to induce the British
Government to recognize the settlement, which in course of time became the
City of Durban, as a Colony to which, in honour of the Princess heiress
presumptive to the Throne of Great Britain, they proposed to give the name
Victoria; and they were thus the first to associate her with the Empire,
which, in spite of reluctant politicians who did their best to restrict it,
was destined to expand marvellously during her reign.
The Natal settlement was frowned on by the Imperial Government, who even
confiscated a little ship which the pioneers had toilfully fitted out and
which was bringing envoys from the King of the Zulus to the King of England,
on the plea that it was unregistered and that it came from a foreign port.
In 1828 Chaka, who was not unfavourably disposed towards the Durban
pioneers, was murdered by his brother Dingaan, who succeeded him as King of
the Zulus. It is said that his last words to Dingaan were, "You think that
you will rule the land when I am gone, but I see the white men coming, and
they will be your masters."
His words were prophetically true, but there were two races of white men
hovering over Natal; and the Great King of the Zulus, a tribe held in little
account before his time, but which had under his leadership absorbed or
exterminated almost every other tribe from Pondoland to Delagoa Bay, was no
longer with them to choose between the rivals to his own ends and advantage;
and Dingaan inherited the cruelty without the ability or the statecraft of
his brother, the Napoleon of South Africa.
Of all the races of Europe the Low Germans of Holland seemed the least
likely to contract the migratory habit. The Hollander of the present day,
popularly but incorrectly called a Dutchman, is home-staying and
home-loving. The compact, well-cared-for, well-ordered homestead, village,
and town communities of the Netherlands are inconsistent with a roving
disposition, and yet the Hollanders of South Africa furnished the most
conspicuous example of Nomadism in modern times.
It may have been that the ordeal of Alva and the subsequent disturbance of
the Thirty Years' War had constitutionally unsettled the Hollanders to such
a degree that their descendants, emancipated from European ideas, became
prone to restlessness, for in a generation or two they began to trek; or
perhaps the magic of the spacious veld, with its clear sky and the mountains
and flat-topped kopjes sharply defined on the horizon, irresistibly lured
them on. In the land they had quitted the air was dense with moisture;
scarcely a hill was to be seen; they were hemmed in by sluggish rivers and
by the sea, which leaned heavily against the dykes and threw its spray
angrily down on to the reclaimed pastures which had been stolen from it.
The original Dutch settlement at the Cape was made by a Company of
Amsterdam merchants for the refreshment and refitting of their ships engaged
in trade with the East. The Company was a harsh and extortionate master, who
paid little attention to the needs and the welfare of the settlement, which
was regarded merely as a place of call. The discontented colonists began to
leave the seacoast and trekked inwards, where the heavy hands of the
cordially detested representatives of the Company could not reach them. Its
rule came to an end in 1795, when, at the request of Holland, Great Britain
took over the Colony in order to prevent it falling into the hands of
France. It was restored at the Peace of Amiens, but in a few years again
came into the possession of Great Britain.
The Colonies of the Empire were at that time administered by a Branch of
the War Office which regarded the Cape settlement much in the same light as
it had been regarded by the Dutch Company, as a necessary but troublesome
depôt on the way to the East; and had the Overland Route and the Suez Canal
been available a generation earlier it would probably have been abandoned.
The Boers hoped that their new masters, who at least were not an
association of Amsterdam merchants absorbed in their ledgers, would treat
them with more sympathy and consideration. But the only serious colonial
problem with which British politicians had up to that time been called upon
to deal was in North America, and they had disastrously failed in their
attempt to solve it. They were without experience in the management of white
plantations, they shirked the future and looked only to the "ignorant
present," and their policy in South Africa was based upon two principles:
that on no account must the boundaries of the Empire be enlarged and new
responsibilities incurred, and that in all quarrels between white man and
black man the presumption was that the white man was in the wrong.
The Great Trek of 1836-7 was brought about by the emancipation of the slaves
and by the refusal or inability of the Government to protect the farmers
against the raids of the "Kaffir"4 tribes on the border. There is
no doubt that enslaved Hottentots, Bushmen, and even Malays who had been
with the knowledge of the authorities imported from Madagascar and Malacca,
were often ill-treated by individual slave-owners; but the Boers resented
the charge of wholesale cruelty which was made against them, and the favour
and patronage bestowed upon native tribes. Moreover, although the
slave-owners were entitled to compensation for the loss of their helots, the
fund was administered in London, with the result that a considerable
proportion of the already inadequate sum was retained in the hands of
agents.
The object of the Great Trek was deliverance from the harsh and hostile
jurisdiction of the British Government, and the setting up of a new and
independent Boer community in Natal, which was reported to be a promised
land flowing with milk and honey. The Boers proposed to shake themselves
free from the Egyptian and to occupy Canaan.
The voortrekkers, among whom was the boy Paul Kruger, slowly passed away
towards the north and crossed the Orange River. Moshesh, the chief of the
Basutos, watched curiously from his mountains the trains of wagons strung
out on the veld, but refrained from molesting the emigrants. Not so
Moselekatse,5 a chief who had formerly broken away from Chaka and
had set himself up beyond the Vaal, and who subsequently founded the
Matabele Kingdom in which he was succeeded by his son Lobengula. He swooped
down upon the advanced parties, who defended themselves with success and
afterwards chastised him in his own country, in which, hidden from his eyes,
lay the gold-bearing reefs of Johannesburg.
Meanwhile the British Government had forged a useless and clumsy weapon
for the coercion of its "erring and misguided" subjects. It was held by the
lawyers that the trekkers could not at will and by the simple process of
migration throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England, and a
declaratory Act was passed under which all British subjects south of
Latitude 25, whether within or without the colony, could be arrested and
punished.
The Boer scouts discovered passes over the Drakensberg which gave them a
readier access than they had expected into Natal. It had not recovered from
the devastations of Chaka and was thinly inhabited. Settlements were made
near the banks of the Tugela, while Piet Retief, after a brief visit to
Durban, went on to negotiate with Dingaan at the royal kraal of
Umgungundhlovu in Zululand. He was received with some cordiality, but
accused of participating in a recent cattle raid. Retief, to show his good
faith, offered to catch the robber, a chief named Sikunyela, whose kraal was
a hundred miles away. He found Sikunyela, who greatly admired the glistening
rings of a pair of handcuffs shown him by the slim Dutchman, and who was
even persuaded that they would be a becoming ornament to a native chief. He
tried them on, but a more intimate acquaintance with the use of handcuffs
induced him to surrender the cattle he had stolen from Dingaan, the King of
the Zulus.
Again Retief with a hundred followers waited upon Dingaan at
Umgungundhlovu, and after military displays on each side received from him a
grant of the same land which Chaka had already given to the British pioneers
of Durban. Next day the Boers were received in farewell audience by Dingaan,
by whose orders they were treacherously surrounded and led out to the place
of execution, a hill of mimosas outside the royal kraal, where they were put
to death.
There remained the defenceless plantations on the Tugela. Before the news
of the massacre could reach them, and while they were hourly expecting the
return of Retief, Dingaan's impis swooped down upon them from Zululand. At
the cost of the lives of 600 men, women, and children, the tribes were
driven back, and the little town of Weenen, the "place of weeping," remains
to mark the spot.
Soon other parties of emigrants came in from beyond the Drakensberg, and in
1838 an expedition under Potgieter failed to punish Dingaan for his
treachery. Nor did an attempt to help the emigrants made by the British
settlers at Durban meet with success. A small force of Natal natives under
an Englishman named Biggar was greatly out-numbered at the mouth of the
Tugela and perished almost to a man. Dingaan retaliated by sending an impi
to Durban, which he held for a few days; the settlers taking refuge on board
a ship in the Bay.
The Boers were disheartened and many of them trekked back to the veld
beyond the Drakensberg passes, which is now the Orange River Colony. Their
position in face of Dingaan seemed hopeless; but in November, 1838, there
came out of the Cape Colony one Pretorius. He had heard of their distress,
and he organized a force of 500 men, with whom, on December 16, he
successfully encountered Dingaan's army and slew 3,000 of his warriors at
the Blood River, an affluent of the Buffalo. Dingaan fled and the column
marched on to Umgungundhlovu, where Retief's mouldering body was found on
the hill of mimosas, and on it the deed of grant of land at Durban.
Pretorius was ambushed by Zulus disguised as cattle, crawling on all fours
and wearing ox hides; but he escaped with slight loss, and returned to the
Tugela. "Dingaan's Day," December 16, is kept by the Boers as a festival of
thanksgiving and rejoicing.
Soon a new complication beset the harassed emigrants. In December, 1838,
the British Government, anxious to stop the wars between the Boers and the
natives and to exclude the former from the sea, sent one hundred soldiers to
Durban and issued a proclamation in which the Boers were declared to be
British subjects who had unlawfully occupied Natal, and who were morally
responsible for all the blood that had been shed. They protested against the
imputation and against the military occupation of Durban, but took no active
steps to resent the affront.
When twelve months had passed without hostilities between Boer and
native, the British Government withdrew its hundred warriors from Durban and
tacitly handed over Natal to the emigrant Boers. Hardly had the little
transport Vectis catted her anchor when the Republic of Natalia was
proclaimed and its flag run up on the staff of the forsaken British Camp on
Durban Bay.
But the dog-in-the-manger policy of neither incorporating Natal in the
British Empire nor frankly allowing the Boers to occupy it could not be
indefinitely maintained. Each present difficulty wriggled out of made the
future more embarrassing. Soon, as might have been anticipated, the Boers
were again in trouble with the natives. Panda, the father of Cetchwayo,
whose impis forty years after washed their spears in the blood of 800
British soldiers at Isandhlwana, broke away from his brother Dingaan, taking
with him into Natal many thousand Zulus who were awaiting an opportunity of
shaking themselves free from the tyranny and cruelty of Dingaan. Panda made
overtures to the Boers and was gladly received as an ally, and with his help
Dingaan was finally crushed and driven into Swaziland, where, in the hands
of a hostile tribe, he perished miserably by torture.
The emigrants were now favourably situated in Natal. They had established
an equitable if not a legal claim to it; Dingaan was out of the way; and the
British Government seemed indisposed to inter-meddle. But the fatal and
grotesque alliance with Panda, which culminated in his installation as King
of the Zulus by Pretorius in 1840, and which was entirely inconsistent with
the attitude hitherto assumed towards the natives, was the undoing of the
trekkers of 1836.
Panda's men as native auxiliaries eager to avenge themselves on the
common enemy Dingaan were all very well in their way. Most of them, however,
belonged to Natal and joined him in the hope of recovering the tribal lands
from which they had been evicted by Chaka and to which they had a better
right than the trekkers.
The Boers now began to reap the harvest of the Panda alliance. They
regarded the new arrivals as intruders, refused to acknowledge their claims,
and finally in August, 1841, decreed their expulsion from Natal. The
location chosen for their settlement was a district in Pondoland in the
possession of a chief under British protection, who already had had occasion
to lodge at Capetown a complaint against the Boers.
The British Government now found it necessary to intervene again in
Natal. A military occupation was announced by proclamation in December,
1841, and 240 men, under the command of an infantry captain named Smith,
were sent up to Durban to give effect to it.
When Smith, after a difficult march along the coast, reached his
destination on May 4, 1842, he pitched his camp on the flat which forms the
base of one of the promontories enclosing the Bay. He at once lowered the
Republican flag flying over the block-house at the Point, and soon found
that 1,500 Boers were occupying Congella on the shore of the Bay. An attempt
to surprise them by night failed disastrously; Smith's force was reduced to
half its strength, and the block-house was captured by Pretorius.
Smith was now besieged in his camp, and the nearest help that could come
to him was at Grahamstown, five hundred miles away. Thither a gallant
civilian named King, who was one of the pioneers, rode in ten days; and on
June 25, when the little garrison was in extremity, it was relieved by sea.
Pretorius withdrew into the interior, and the Volksraad at Pietermaritzburg,
the capital of the Republic of Natalia, voted the submission of the Boers.
Pending a final settlement it was allowed to remain in authority over the
settlers, but the district around Durban Bay was at once taken over as
British territory. In May, 1843, a year after the landing of Smith, the
Republic of Natalia passed away and Natal was proclaimed a British Colony.
The final settlement did not come for some time. The Volksraad was
abolished, but the claims of the Boers to the lands upon which they had
squatted were liberally considered. They were, however, dissatisfied because
the rights of Panda's men were also regarded, and many trekked away across
the Drakensberg. Those who remained protested that their lives and property
were insecure in the presence of the natives, and Pretorius was deputed to
go and lay their grievances before the British Governor at the Cape.
The ill success of his mission provoked him to reprisals, and he
proceeded to stir up trouble in the Orange River Sovereignty, which had
recently been formally proclaimed British Territory. If not actively loyal
it was peaceably disposed until the arrival of Pretorius, who soon drove out
the British Resident and the little garrison of Bloemfontein and set them on
the run as far as Colesberg in the Cape Colony. He was defeated at Boomplatz
in August, 1848, by Sir Harry Smith, a veteran of the Peninsular War, and
British authority was for a time reestablished over the Sovereignty. The
Colonial Office soon however tired of the new possession and gladly scuttled
out in 1854 in order to avoid the task of reaping the harvest of a clumsy
and grotesque policy, which it had formulated a few years before, of hemming
in the voortrekkers, who had settled north of the Orange River, with a
barrier of native states set up for the purpose on the east and west; and
which now threatened to involve it in a quarrel which naturally arose
between Moshesh, the Basuto chief, and the emigrants whom he had been
appointed to restrain.
Pretorius retired across the Vaal where he joined Potgieter, who, after
the failure of his attack on Dingaan in 1838, had gone into Moselekatse's
country and had driven him beyond the Limpopo. A Republic was set up beyond
the Vaal which the British Government recognized as independent in the Zand
River Convention of 1852.
Such is in brief the story of the Boers' claim to Natal. They considered
it to be their lawful heritage out of which they had been jockeyed, and in
October, 1899, they seemed to have a chance of recovering it. They boasted
that they would not only win back Pietermaritzburg, which was named after
two leaders of the Great Trek, Pieter Retief and Gert Maritz, but that they
would establish themselves on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was not the
vainglorious gasconade of a swashbuckler. Four months after October 11,
1899, when the Boer ultimatum expired, the British Army was still engaged in
endeavouring to drive out the Boers from British territory, and hardly a
rifle had been discharged in the enemy's country.
Napoleon was in the habit of impressing upon his officers the necessity
of studying past campaigns, both modern and ancient; but those who
anticipated confidently that the Boer War would soon be brought to a
successful close by the British Army were led into their error by the
history of past campaigns. There was, however, one campaign, the War of
Independence in North America, which the discerning might have recognized as
an analogous struggle; but it was overlooked, and the history of the great
European conflicts was established as the leading authority. The occupation
of the populous places and the control of the means of access to them, which
seemed to present few difficulties, meant the end of the war and the
subsequent negotiations as to the amount of the indemnity or other penalty
to be paid by the defeated.
But not only were the necessary preliminary successes deferred far beyond
the expected time of their accomplishment—Bloemfontein was not occupied
until five months, nor Pretoria until eight months had rolled by since that
October dawn when the Boers crossed the frontier into Natal—but the prospect
of the end of the War soon began to recede into the perspective of infinity:
and even now, after an interval of some years since the peace of Vereeniging,
when, like the proportions of some huge edifice which can be truly
comprehended only by the observer who views it from a distance, the various
incidents and phases of the War begin to assume their relative importance,
the difficulty of discovering some guiding principle which shall reconcile
the Great Boer War with other wars is as great as ever.
Sometimes a cause can be found a posteriori by groping in the dim and
deceptive light cast by an effect: or a process of exhaustion and
elimination may be set up in which the qualities common to each side are
cancelled and the result attributed to the credit balance which will appear
under one of the accounts. We saw for some months a gallant and well
equipped if somewhat amorphous British Army impotently endeavouring, though
in superior numbers, to make headway against an aggregation of Boer
commandos, and checked at various points on an arc drawn wholly in British
territory and extending in a circuit of over 500 miles from Ladysmith in
Northern Natal through Stormberg and Colesberg to Kimberley and Mafeking;
and at each extremity of the arc was a besieged city. Was the military art
as taught in Europe founded upon error, or had the British Army been
negligently instructed in it?
Yet no European troops had had so much recent experience of active
service. We had lately fought in the Soudan, in East and West Africa, in
Burmah and on the North-West frontier of India; there was in fact hardly a
year in the preceding decade in which the portals of the temple of a British
Janus would have been closed. Moreover, our fighting had not been against
trained soldiers, but against enemies who like the Boers were undisciplined,
collectively if not individually brave men patriotically defending their own
country. We therefore entered the arena with experience which no other
European army possessed.
Footnote 2:
In justice to the War Office it should be stated that this was inserted at
the instance of Sir Redvers Buller, who believed that he would be able to
raise in South Africa a sufficient force of mounted troops.
Footnote 3:
B. Viljoen in his "Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War" frequently complains
of the insubordination, the malingering, and the cowardice of his followers,
and of the incompetence of his superior officers.
Footnote 4:
"Kaffir" is an Arabic word meaning one who does not believe in the religion
of Mahomet. It was introduced into South Africa by the Portuguese and
subsequently applied to the tribes living on the N.E. of the Cape Colony.
Footnote 5:
Zilikat's Nek in the Magaliesberg is named after him.
