IV.

The Guerrilla War

Roberts was over-optimistic in believing that, with the British occupation of Johannesburg (May 31) and Pretoria (June 5), the undefended capital of the Transvaal, the end of the war was in sight. So were the British public, who took to the streets to celebrate the relief of Mafeking (May 17), where the inspiring leadership of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, during a siege which lasted 217 days, made his name. President Kruger left for the Netherlands, via Mozambique, later in 1900 and died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. But the Boer leadership in the field, among them Louis Botha, Koos de la Rey, and Jan Smuts (from the Transvaal) and President Marthinus Steyn and Christiaan de Wet (from the Orange Free State) determined to continue to fight and turned the conflict into a guerrilla war.

By 1901, a British army of over 200,000 was fighting an anti-guerrilla campaign against small bands of mounted Boer forces whose total number was no more than 25,000. The Boer commandos—living off the land and operating in terrain they knew well—proved adept at hit-and-run tactics, seizing British weapons and horses, destroying railway lines, and evading capture. Before Lord Roberts left South Africa, at the end of 1900, a policy of reprisals and destruction of Boer farmhouses had already begun. This developed into a thorough-going “scorched earth” policy—to remove sources of food and civilian support from the mobile Boer commandos—under Lord Lord Horatio Kitchener, Roberts’s successor as commander-in-chief. Some 30,000 Boer farmhouses were destroyed, along with crops and large numbers of livestock. A gigantic grid of manned block-houses was established, linked by hundreds of miles of barbed wire, within which the Boer commandos were gradually restricted and worn down. Captured Boer commandos were shipped off to prisoner-of-war camps overseas as far away as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), St Helena, and Bermuda.