Boer History1899 in South Africa: The Hague Convention, Derdepoort, and Jacobsdal
The Hague Convention — 29 July 1899
On the 29th of July 1899 the Laws and Customs of War by Land were signed at the Hague. That paper was not a Cape statute and not a republican law. It was an international convention on how an army was to treat people and property once war had opened. The two Boer states still standing in the interior were the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Britain held the Cape Colony and Natal. What hung on the July signing was the standard by which non-combatants in those Republics would be judged if the year turned into a war: unprotected women and children, farmhouses, food and shelter — not only men still under arms. [6]
One clause of that convention was later printed as Article 7. Prisoners of war were to be treated, as regards food, quarters, and clothing, on the same footing as the troops of the government which had captured them. The article is narrow. It does not mention a farmhouse. It sets a floor for a captured man: he was not to be fed, housed, or clothed below the army that held him. The same convention, in the form in which it was invoked once columns were in the field, was also cited for the position of people who were not fighting at all. That is why a July signature in Europe belongs on a South African year page. The Republics had women and children on the farms. Britain had a regular army and colonial troops. If war opened, the question would be whether those rules still bound an officer on the republican line. [6]
A reader who only knows later camp statistics still needs that July date in this year. The convention was signed three months before the fighting began. It was not written in Pretoria or Capetown. It was the paper later used to say that British commanders, already in the earliest stages of the war, showed a tendency to ignore its provisions on non-combatants inside the Republics. Farm burning and the driving of women are not Article 7. They are the test of the wider Hague rules on people who were not in the firing line. Calendar 1899 therefore opens, on this page, with a signature — not with a battle. [6]
What hung on the 29th of July was not a Cape annexation and not a new district on the eastern roll. It was a named international rule, in force before the first column crossed a republican fence. When houses were burned in November and December, the charge would not be that a local placaat had been broken. The charge would be that the Hague paper of this year had been set aside. [6]
Derdepoort — 25 November 1899
War between Britain and the two Republics opened in October 1899. The printed record used on this page does not give the hour of the first shot. It dates the first named breach of the Hague rules from the early hours of the 25th of November 1899, about a month after that outbreak. The place was the hamlet of Derdepoort. It was not a commando fight on an open ridge. It was a small settlement, white flags, and a mixed column that crossed a border it had been told not to cross. [6]
Linchwe’s people were put up to the attack and led by British officers, together with about 200 Rhodesian troops under Captain Llewellyn. The women in the hamlet raised the white flag several times. A number of the people who were not fighting were killed. Houses were burned. Several women and children were taken prisoner. That is why Derdepoort is this year’s first named case, and not a later camp. The Hague paper of July had spoken to the position of non-combatants. Here the non-combatants were in the hamlet, under a white flag, when the column came in. [6]
The captives were driven on foot to Linchwe’s kraal at Mochudi. Some were already wounded. For the 2 days they were driven they received no food. Llewellyn expressed regret that the women had become involved in the attack of “our soldiers.” He tried to excuse it by saying that his own men, who had supposedly been instructed not to cross the border, had got out of hand. No compensation was paid by the English for the damage “our soldiers” had done. The captured women were, at least, sent back. A war telegram of the South African Republic government recorded the incident the next day, the 26th of November. [6]
Who these people were still needs saying inside this heading. Linchwe sat at Mochudi. Derdepoort was the hamlet on the other side of the line his men were not supposed to cross. The Rhodesian troops were British colonial soldiers, not a Boer commando and not a Cape town guard. Llewellyn was the named officer with them. The white flag is why the case is not filed as a meeting of two armed lines. What hung on the morning of the 25th was whether the July convention still meant anything once a mixed column had burned a hamlet and driven wounded women on foot. [6]
The case remained an exception for about a month. That was not because the Hague rules had been accepted. It was because British columns were still held outside the borders of the Republics, and the fighting fronts still lay in British territory. Where English patrols did get across, even for a day or two, they did not scruple to break those rules at will. Derdepoort is therefore both the first named case and, for a short time, the isolated one. The rest of December would show whether the isolation would hold. [6]
Arundel, Colesberg, and Modder River — December 1899
By December the exception was already wearing through in British territory itself. The northern Cape districts then occupied by the Boers were not republican farms. They were Cape ground, under the same crown as the army that was burning firewood out of other people’s houses. That is why a letter from Colesberg side matters as much as Derdepoort. If private property was not spared in the Colony, the Hague test was no longer only a question for the republican line. [6]
On the 28th of December 1899 Bossley of the first Australian Horse wrote to a friend in Sydney. His division had seized a large number of horses, sheep, and poultry. The soldiers could get the fowls only by chasing them and spearing them with lances. Sometimes a whole division went out every morning on a plunder trek to collect firewood. In a district where fuel was scarce, they broke open furnished houses and destroyed chairs, tables, even pianos, in order to have something to burn. Arundel, from which he wrote, lay south of Colesberg — in the Cape Colony, not across a republican fence. [6]
Who Bossley was still needs a line. He was not a general and not a republican president. He was a colonial trooper writing home from a Cape camp. The first Australian Horse sat on the Colesberg front, where Boer commandos had come south into the Colony after the October opening. His letter is useful because it is not a later protest from Pretoria. It is a British colonial soldier describing what his own division did to houses that still held chairs and pianos. [6]
An artilleryman at Modder River said that the houses they broke open held everything that sat in an English town house, and that it was terrible to see what the soldiers carried out. That is the same December story from another arm of the same army, on the western line rather than at Colesberg. The point is not a catalogue of furniture. It is that the houses were not empty barns. They were lived-in rooms, opened for loot and for fuel, while the men who owned them were on commando or already gone. [6]
What hung on those December letters was the Cape half of the year’s charge. Derdepoort had been a hamlet on the republican side of a border. Arundel and Modder River were British camps in or against Cape districts. Private property was not being spared in either. The later protests of 1900 would not rest on empty ground. They would rest, in part, on Bossley’s pianos and on the artilleryman’s town-house rooms, already written down before the year closed. [6]
Jacobsdal, Lubbe, and the First Republican Houses — December 1899
Official information put a number on the Free State side of the same December. In the district of Jacobsdal alone, during December 1899 and January 1900, 18 houses were partly burned or laid in ruin. Jacobsdal is not Colesberg. It sat inside the Orange Free State, on the western front, toward the Cape line and the Modder. The count runs a few days into the next calendar. The named Free State farms were already down by the end of December. [6]
Near the Jacobsdal border, Commandant Lubbe’s dwelling and his farm Lubbeshoop were destroyed. The farms of his brothers and brothers-in-law at Weltevreden, Kareelaagte, Du Toitsheuvel, and Badenhorstrust were totally wrecked by British patrols by the end of December. Lubbe was a Free State commandant — an officer of the republican militia, not a Cape civil servant. His house was not a magazine and not a fort. It was a farmhouse on the Jacobsdal side, burned while the fighting fronts were still, in the main, on British ground. [6]
At Bloemdraai on the Orange a dwelling was emptied and then destroyed. Everything had been taken out of it by British troops before it went down. The Orange here is the river that had long marked the Free State’s southern line against the Cape. A house on that river, stripped and then wrecked, is not an accident of a single patrol lost on the wrong bank. It is the same December work that took Lubbe’s roof. [6]
A war telegram of the 27th of December 1899 recorded these as the first dwellings in the Republics that had been burned. Derdepoort in November had been the first named case of a hamlet attacked and women driven. The 27 December telegram is the first named burning of houses inside the republican line itself. That is why Jacobsdal closes the year on this page. The Hague signature of July, the October opening, the November hamlet, and the December farms sit in one order. [6]
What hung on those December farms was no longer whether Derdepoort would remain an exception. British patrols had now burned named Free State houses — Lubbe’s among them — while the main fronts still lay in British territory. The July convention had spoken to non-combatants and to private roofs. By the last week of 1899 those roofs were already down at Jacobsdal, at Lubbeshoop, at Weltevreden, Kareelaagte, Du Toitsheuvel, Badenhorstrust, and Bloemdraai on the Orange. The year ends on that list. [6]