Episode 4 - Talana Hill & Elandslaagte

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.

27 Jan 201921min

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.

20 Jan 201918min

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.

13 Jan 201919min

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.

6 Jan 201918min

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.

30 Dec 201820min

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.

23 Dec 201819min

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.

16 Dec 201822min

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.

9 Dec 201819min