Episode 54- The flimsy Oath of Neutrality collapses at the start of a Southern Spring

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.