Episode 111 - Lord Kitchener and the Brat hunt a starling while de Wet broods at Blijdskap

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.