Commando

A Boer Journal of the Boer War [Illustrated Edition]

Deneys Reitz

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787206243
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

During his exile in Madagascar, Boer soldier Deneys Reitz wrote about his experience of the Second Boer War (1899-1902). When it was eventually edited and published in 1929 as Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, it still had the freshness and detail of an account written soon after the war.Reitz' descriptions of the tumult through the eyes of a warrior in the saddle form not only a succinct narrative and important source for the Second Boer War, but his family connections (his father Francis William Reitz was State Secretary of the Transvaal), sheer luck, and participation at virtually every major event of the War all provide for a unique account.A vivid, unforgettable picture of mobile guerrilla warfare.Richly illustrated throughout.

 

COMMANDO

Victrix causa

Diis placuit

Sed victa Catoni.

 

CHAPTER I — ‘MEM’RY’S TOWER’

We lived in the Orange Free State.

My father was Chief Justice in Sir John Brand’s time and subsequently, in 1887, was himself elected President of the Republic.

Our home was at Bloemfontein, the State capital, and here my brothers and I grew up. There were five of us, two older and two younger than myself, and we led a pleasant Tom-Sawyerlike existence such as falls to the lot of few boys nowadays. We learned to ride, shoot, and swim almost as soon as we could walk, and there was a string of hardy Basuto ponies in the stables, on which we were often away for weeks at a time, riding over the game-covered plains by day, and sleeping under the stars at night, hunting, fishing and camping to our heart’s content, and clattering home again when we had had our fill.

Sometimes my father took us with him on his long tours into the remoter districts, where there was more hunting and more camping, and great wapinshaws, held by the Boer commandos to do him honour. Our small country was a model one. There were no political parties, nor, until after the Jameson Raid of 1895, was there any bad blood between the Dutch and the English. We had no railways, and the noise of the outside world reached us but faintly, so that in our quiet way we were a contented community, isolated hundreds of miles from the seaboard.

In 1894, when I was twelve years old, we were taken to Europe. It was a wonderful experience for inland-bred boys to journey to the Coast, to cross the ocean in a ship, and to see the great crowds and cities of the old world. We went first of all to England, where we stayed for a while in London, marvelling at the things we saw. Thence to Amsterdam to visit the senior branch of our family, that had remained in Holland when our ancestors emigrated to South Africa long ago. The head of the old stock lived in a house on the Heerengracht; a wealthy man apparently, for he kept many servants and had fine paintings on his walls.

As our republic had taken its name from the House of Orange, my father was well received by the little Queen of the Netherlands, and the Court and people made much of us. Next, we travelled to Paris to meet Casimir-Perrier, the newly-elected President of the French. He took us to lay a wreath on the grave of Sadi Carnot, his predecessor, lately assassinated by an anarchist at Lyons. From there we went to Brussels to see Monsieur Jesslein, our Consul. His house stood in the rue de la Blanchisserie, and he told us it was the one in which the Duchess of Richmond had given her famous ball on the eve of Waterloo. We were presented to King Leopold, an old man with a hooked nose and a long white beard, who extended only his little finger in greeting, perhaps because we belonged to a republic.

From Belgium we went to Hamburg to take ship across the North Sea to Edinburgh, and from there to visit the Cathcarts at Auchindrayne on the River Doon. My father had studied law in Scotland and my grandfather agriculture, and they had both spent much time at Auchindrayne, so my father wished his sons in turn to carry on the tradition of friendship which for nearly a hundred years had linked the two families.

My grandfather first went to Scotland in 1816. He met Sir Walter Scott, to whom he took a lion skin which the poet Thomas Pringle had sent from Cape Town, and he became intimate with the greater writer. In later days in South Africa, he loved to tell us of their meetings and of the banquet at which he was present when Scott for the first time admitted that he was the author of the Waverley Novels. Both my grandfather and my father had returned to South Africa with a deep love for Scotland and Scotch literature, and at our home scarcely a night passed without a reading from Burns or Scott, so that we felt as if we were among our own people.

From Auchindrayne we went to London in order to meet Sir George Grey, who, as Governor of the Cape, had been a friend of my father many years before. My father used to say that if the English had sent more men like him to South Africa our history would have been a happier one, and although I was only a boy, and Sir George Grey a very old man, he made a deep impression upon me—a something of inward beauty not easily described, but which I have not yet forgotten.

From London we sailed for South Africa.

On our return my brothers and I were received by our less fortunate play-fellows like pilgrims safely returned from Mecca, so hazardous an undertaking did our journey seem to them in those days.

We took up our old care-free life once more, unaware of the storm that was brewing between the white races in the Transvaal.

The Jameson Raid had not yet brought matters to a head, but already there was trouble in the air. President Kruger and the Commandant-General, Piet Joubert, came frequently to Bloemfontein on official visits to my father, and we eagerly questioned them and listened to their stories of hunting and of the wars against the natives and the British of long ago.

Lord Loch, Governor of the Cape, also visited us, as did Cecil Rhodes, a big florid man who cracked jokes with us boys, but on whose political aims my father looked askance. These two tried to prevent the Free State from entering into an alliance with the Transvaal, but they did not succeed, and a treaty was made with President Kruger wherein we agreed to stand by the Transvaal in case of war with England, a promise which the Free State loyally fulfilled.

My brothers and I did not understand the import of all this coming and going of noted men, and life ran on pleasantly enough, until in 1895 my father’s health failed and he had to resign. We went to live at Claremont, a cramped suburb of Cape Town, greatly missing our horses and the freedom of our wide Northern uplands.

When my father recovered from his long illness we settled in the Transvaal where he soon became Secretary of State under President Paul Kruger.

My eldest brother, aged nineteen, was now sent to Europe to study law, and after a while the rest of us were put back to school at Bloemfontein until the middle of 1899.

During our absence at the Cape the ill-fated Jameson Raid had taken place, and we found on our return that feeling was running high between the English and the Dutch, and even in the Free State, where differences of this kind had hitherto been unknown, there was so much ill will that people openly talked of driving the English into the sea, whereas previously we had not given these matters a thought.

By July (1899) the situation had become so serious that my father ordered us up to Pretoria, as war with England seemed inevitable. We said goodbye to Bloemfontein, the town where we had been born and bred and where we had spent such happy days, and journeyed north, leaving behind us the peace of boyhood, to face years of hardship, danger, and ultimate exile.

CHAPTER II — ON THE BRINK

When we reached Pretoria, affairs were moving to a climax. Peremptory notes had been exchanged between the Transvaal and the British Governments, and public excitement was rising as each cable and its reply was published. Already the Transvaal capital was an armed camp. Batteries of artillery paraded the streets, commandos from the country districts rode through the town almost daily, bound for the Natal border, and the crack of rifles echoed from the surrounding hills where hundreds of men were having target practice. Crowded trains left for the coast with refugees flying from the coming storm, and business was almost at a standstill.

Looking back, I think that war was inevitable. I have no doubt that the British Government had made up its mind to force the issue, and was the chief culprit, but the Transvaalers were also spoiling for a fight, and, from what I saw in Pretoria during the few weeks that preceded the ultimatum, I feel sure that the Boers would in any case have insisted on a rupture.

I myself had no hatred of the British people; from my father’s side I come of Dutch and French Huguenot blood, whilst my mother (dead for many years) was a pure-bred Norwegian from the North Cape, so one race was much like another to me. Yet, as a South African, one had to fight for one’s country, and for the rest I did not concern myself overmuch with the merits or demerits of the quarrel. I looked on the prospect of war and adventure with the eyes of youth, seeing only the glamour, but knowing nothing of the horror and the misery.

I was seventeen years old and thus too young to be enrolled as a burgher. President Kruger himself solved this difficulty for me. One morning when I was at the Government buildings, I met him and my father in the corridor and I told the President that the Field-Cornet’s office had refused to enrol me for active service. The old man looked me up and down for a moment and growled, ‘Piet Joubert says the English are three to one—sal jij mij drie rooi-nekke lever?’ (Will you stand me good for three of them?) I answered boldly, ‘President, if I get close enough I’m good for three with one shot.’ He gave a hoarse chuckle at my youthful conceit and, turning to my father, asked how old I was. When he heard my age he said, ‘Well then, Mr. State Secretary, the boy must go—I started fighting earlier than that’, and he took me straight to the Commandant-General’s room close by, where Piet Joubert in person handed me a new Mauser carbine, and a bandolier of ammunition, with which I returned home pleased and proud.

I saw a good deal of the President in these days as I used to go with my father to his house on the outskirts of the town, where they discussed State matters while I sat listening. The President had an uncouth, surly manner, and he was the ugliest man I have ever seen, but he had a strong rugged personality which impressed all with whom he came in contact. He was religious to a degree, and on Sundays he preached in the queer little Dopper church he had built across the street, where I sometimes heard him.

There was Mrs. Kruger too, whom I often saw with her pails in the yard, for she kept dairy cows and sold milk to the neighbours. Once she brought us coffee while we were looking at a picture of the statue of her husband that was being set up on Church Square. The President was shown dressed like an elder of the Church in a top hat, and the old lady suggested that the hat should be hollowed out and filled with water, to serve as a drinking-fountain for the birds. My father and I laughed heartily on our way home at her simplicity, but we agreed that it was decent of her to have thought of such a thing.

I also knew Piet Joubert, the Commandant-General, for, apart from his visits to Bloemfontein, his son Jan and I were friends, and I sometimes went home with him to talk about the coming war, and his father was generally there. He was a kindly, well-meaning old man who had done useful service in the smaller campaigns of the past, but he gave me the impression of being bewildered at the heavy responsibility now resting upon him and I felt that he was unequal to the burden.

One afternoon he showed me a cable which he had received from a Russian society offering to equip an ambulance in case of war, and when I expressed my pleasure I was astonished to hear him say that he had refused the gift. He said, ‘You see, my boy, we Boers don’t hold with these new-fangled ideas; our herbal remedies (bossie-middels) are good enough.’ Another time, when describing the festivities at the opening of the Delagoa Bay railway line, which he had attended as Commander-in-Chief, he told me that when the Portuguese paraded a thousand troops in his honour, he had gone down the ranks shaking hands with every one of the soldiers. I liked him very much personally, and to me he was always kind and fatherly, but I felt that he was unfit to lead armies, and it is a great pity that a younger man was not appointed in his place on the outbreak of the War.

And now the days were speeding by and in September of 1899 matters had come to such a pass that British troops were moving up to the western borders of the Transvaal and Free State, and other troops were on the water, while large Boer forces were mobilizing on the various fronts. Committees and deputations from the Cape travelled up to make eleventh-hour attempts to avert the catastrophe of war, but it was clear that the die was cast and that neither side was in a mood for further parleying.

My eldest brother (named Hjalmar, after a Norwegian uncle) was away in Europe studying law, and my father had already cabled to him to return. My next brother, Joubert, named after the Commandant-General, was a year older than myself, and although he, too, was ineligible for burgher-rights, he intended volunteering for service, but the two younger ones were put back to school.

Joubert and I had made our preparations long before. Our horses were in good fettle and our saddlebags packed. My brother had a fine upstanding chestnut, and I had a strong little Basuto pony, and we were eager to be off. Many of the country districts had been called up, but thus far no Pretoria men had gone forward. At last, on September 29th, the first batch from the town was ordered to entrain for the Natal border. The moment we heard of this we took our rifles, fetched our horses from the stable, and within ten minutes had saddled up and mounted.

We said goodbye to our step-mother and her children, for my father had remarried years before, and rode up through the town of the Raadzaal to take leave of him. We found him closeted with the President and members of the Executive Council, but we went in and, when we explained why we had come, all rose to shake us by the hand. The old President gave us a solemn blessing, and my father, who had not expected this sudden departure, bade us goodbye in a husky voice and said he knew we would do our best.

From the Government buildings we galloped to the station, where we found a great stir. Hundreds of friends and relatives had come to see the contingent leave, but, in spite of the crowd on the platform and the loading of baggage and batteries, we were able to truck our animals, after which we lent a hand with the stowing of the ammunition and other work.

When all was ready the train pulled out to the sound of the Transvaal National Anthem. There were enthusiastic cheers and the waving of hats and umbrellas by those remaining behind, and we were off to the front in good earnest.

As for my brother and myself, we were not Transvaal burghers, nor had we been called o...