Boer History1900 in South Africa: Roberts, Botha, De Wet, and the Camps
The Presidents’ Protest, Cronjé’s Surrender, and Roberts’s Word — February 1900
War between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — had opened in October 1899. Britain held the Cape Colony and Natal. By the end of January 1900 the destruction of unprotected farmhouses had gone so far, not only in the Free State but especially in the northern Cape districts then occupied by Boer commandos, that the two republican presidents were forced to act. On the 3rd of February 1900 they lodged a sharp protest with Lord Roberts, the British commander-in-chief, against the burning and dynamiting of unprotected farmhouses and the stripping of unprotected women and children of food and shelter, in the Cape Colony and in the Free State, without grounds allowed by civilized custom and without service to military operations. A like telegram went direct to Lord Salisbury. [6]
The protest did not rest on empty ground. On the 28th of December 1899 Bossley of the first Australian Horse had written from Arundel, south of Colesberg, that his division had seized horses, sheep, and poultry, and that furnished houses were broken open for firewood — chairs, tables, even pianos — in a district short of fuel. An artilleryman at Modder River said that the houses broken open held all that an English town house held, and that it was terrible to see what the soldiers carried out. On the 8th of January 1900 General Babington, on a reconnaissance from Heuningneskloof north of Graspan toward Koffiefontein, destroyed 2 houses on Commandant Lubbe’s farm and 1 on Zwiegler’s with fire and explosive, on the plea that the farms were a rendezvous for Boer spies; Lord Methuen, commanding in that sector, approved. In the district of Jacobsdal alone, in December 1899 and January 1900, 18 houses were partly burned or laid in ruin. Early in January the house of little Frans van der Merwe was burned. [6]
Roberts answered on the 5th of February that the presidents’ accusations were unproved, that the strictest orders had been issued to respect private property so far as operations allowed, and that wanton destruction, or injury to peaceful inhabitants, was contrary to British practice and tradition and would if necessary be vigorously repressed by him. On the 19th of February 1900 the presidents answered with named examples and told him that cases of needless destruction were so many that a thorough inquiry would prove the complaints. Roberts excused himself that too long a time had already passed for inquiry, yet remained convinced that no wanton destruction had taken place unless it was definitely necessary for military ends. Who these presidents were still needs a line inside this heading. They were the heads of the two interior republics, writing not as Cape civil servants but as the governments whose farms were being burned. Roberts was the field-marshal sent to finish the war. What hung on those February papers was whether his word on private property would still bind once his army crossed the republican line. [6]
The surrender of Cronjé and the large British entry into the Free State that followed were not at once followed by destruction on the scale later seen. When Roberts entered Free State ground he addressed a proclamation to the inhabitants: those who ceased hostilities against Great Britain would not be made to suffer in their persons or property for having taken up arms in obedience to the order of their Government. A second proclamation breathed the same spirit. He could not break that word while those 2 proclamations stood. Cronjé was not a Cape official. He was the republican general whose surrender opened the Free State to Roberts’s columns. The February proclamations mattered because they were a public promise, made on Free State ground, that a burgher who stopped fighting would keep his person and his roof. [6]
French, Pole-Carew, Rundle, and the Free State Farms — April 1900
When the two proclamations showed no noteworthy effect, the old level of warfare returned. On the 26th of March Roberts issued a proclamation that all persons in the Transvaal or Free State Republic responsible for or accessory to wilful damage to public or private property, contrary to the rules of civilized warfare, would be held responsible in their persons or property for such damage. From then the burning of farms and the destruction of property in the Republics went on again. Some British generals and subordinate officers seemed to vie with one another to leave a broad smouldering trail, sometimes on the army’s order, often on their own discretion — and Roberts approved, merely noting that operations required such destruction. A further proclamation of the 9th of April stood with that of the 26th of March. The March paper is why April’s path through the Free State was not a rogue column’s work. It was destruction under cover of the commander-in-chief’s own order. [6]
Under that cover the army divisions of generals French, Pole-Carew, and Rundle in April 1900 wrought unmatched destruction in the Free State. French and Pole-Carew burned almost everything along the trek-path. About 3500 cattle and sheep were taken, and hundreds of tons of wheat and forage destroyed. Rundle laid all in ruin; columns of smoke from the heaps marked his path. On one farm, where only women and children sat, a few guns kept for self-defence were found; the house had to be burned. The woman put her arms about the officer’s neck and begged that the dwelling be spared; it did not help. Who these three were still needs saying here. They were British generals under Roberts, not Free State commandants. The trek-path was the line of march through republican farms after Cronjé’s surrender had opened the way. [6]
Within 2 months of that burning the Free State already showed the marks of a British war policy turning into a policy of extermination. Already on the 28th of May 1900, at a time when whole Free State districts had not yet been subjected to destruction, the correspondent of the Daily Chronicle wrote, under the impression of what had already been done: “From end to end the Orange River Colony now lies ruined and starving.” The Orange River Colony was the Free State under the British occupation name. Another reporter wrote on the 8th of May from Dry Harts Siding that in 10 miles they had burned no fewer than 6 farmhouses, and that he had stood late the night before and seen the flames lick around each piece of poor furniture. A month later the Cape Argus could tell that between Bloemfontein and Boshof some 30 or 40 homesteads had been burnt down and utterly destroyed, and many others also; their homes destroyed, women and children had been turned out on the veld in the bitter South African winter. A Morning Leader correspondent saw a score of men with their feet on the necks of turkeys, ducks, and fowls; the women and children had been found in an outhouse; troopers poured paraffin about the flooring and walls; within 5 minutes the dwelling was ablaze, and still the women rushed in and out trying to save what they could. [6]
Against these acts the Boer officers protested. The Transvaal commandant-general, Louis Botha, wrote to Roberts on the 16th of May 1900; C. R. de Wet, Free State commander, wrote on the 19th of May. Botha reminded Roberts of Roberts’s own proclamation of the 16th of March, by which persons causing wilful damage to property were threatened in their persons and property; told him that large-scale destruction was being wrought in western Transvaal and about Vryburg; and reproached him that, unlike the government of the South African Republic which punished such things, he had still failed to impose penalties, and had even refused to inquire into cases repeatedly brought to his notice. De Wet, to take from the field-marshal the excuse that the charges were too vague, named 3 cases of farm-burning in the Bloemfontein district: Perzikfontein, the farm of Commandant P. Fourie; Paardekraal, the property of P. Fourie, junior; and Leeuwkop, the farm of C. Richter. English newspapers had already printed authentic reports, some from British troops themselves. Roberts still delayed over the matter. What hung on those May letters was whether the April path would be treated as a breach of Roberts’s own March order, or as the new rule. [6]
Botha, De Wet, Buys of Leeuwspruit, and the Mid-Year Protests — July 1900
After the fall of Bloemfontein and Pretoria many persons, drawn by Roberts’s proclamations, left the Boer ranks and sought shelter with their families under British authority. The British welcomed them, yet soon could not protect them on their farms: the commandos were still master in the open field, and when they came on such a man they forced him back to duty, sometimes roughly, or punished him by the land’s law. The British military authority protested loudly; the Boers refused to give up the right to punish or compel to service persons who were unquestionably liable subjects of the Republics. For the English there was then only one road: to carry the persons and families who begged protection to towns or other central points under English control, and there to house and maintain them. Those who nested thus under the strongest protector were generally styled refugees, a name allowable because they had for the most part moved of their own will. That is why the mid-year camps, while they still held those people, could still be called refugee camps. They were not yet the camps of families taken as prisoners of war. [6]
Already before the middle of July 1900 Botha of the Transvaal and De Wet of the Free State had to send a serious protest to the British field-marshal on the way his troops had kept house. The occasion of Botha’s protest was reports that private dwellings had been plundered and in some cases wholly destroyed, and that all food-stores had been taken from the women and children so that they were obliged to wander without food or cover. There was, for example, the house of field-cornet S. Buys of Leeuwspruit, Heidelberg district, burned on the 30th of June 1900. A field-cornet was a district militia officer of the Republic, not a British magistrate. On the 28th of June Buys had received a note from General R. G. Broadwood, then passing through the district: the main body of General Hunter’s army would soon be passing his farm; if he were away from home the farm might be damaged, but if he were present and handed in his arms under Roberts’s proclamation his property would be respected; Broadwood advised that course instead of continuing a brave but useless resistance. Buys, who was not an intended surrenderer, paid no heed. When the British arrived on the 30th of June they found only the women of the family. Mrs Buys was given 5 minutes to take clothes and bedding; she had them barely outside when the troops took them from her. Her food and sugar were taken; the key of the money-chest was demanded, one of the soldiers threatening her with his sabre; all the money in the house was taken, and all that could be carried, and the rest was set on fire. She had to stand and watch, and after they had gone to fend for herself. [6]
Other homesteads destroyed in the same manner were Botha’s own on the farm Varkenspruit, Standerton district, field-cornet Badenhorst’s, and that of Buys’s son. “I cannot believe,” Botha closed, “that such godless barbarities take place with Your Excellency’s consent; I therefore hold it my sacred duty to protest in the strongest terms against such revengeful destruction as wholly contrary to civilized warfare.” The letter was dated the 4th of July 1900. A telegram from Machadodorp went on the 20th of July. On the 17th or 18th of May the dwelling of old Van Niekerk, a helpless invalid between the Renoster River and Kroonstad, had been destroyed, and aged persons unfit for service, in some cases sick, had been taken prisoner of war. De Wet’s protest of the 10th of July 1900 sprang from what he himself had seen and heard: it was with a feeling of great indignation, he opened to Roberts, that he daily saw the reckless destruction. The burning of Buys’s farm had not taken place under any clause of Roberts’s proclamations, but simply because Buys would not surrender. The other farms named in Botha’s protest of the 4th of July — Zandfontein, Varkenspruit, and Koppie Alleen — though they lay near the railway, were, according to Buller, destroyed because they “were being regularly used as shelters for men who were hostile to us, and who were not under proper command, in fact, who were only acting as banditti” — a claim Botha denied with the greatest firmness. He could only conclude that the destruction of those houses had been done in a spirit of revenge, since his commandos there were stationed on the north-east of the railway, while the ruined houses lay mostly on the south-west. [6]
On the 9th of July 1900 Captain G. H. M. Ritchie issued at Krugersdorp a public notice that unless the men then on commando belonging to families in the town and district of Krugersdorp surrendered themselves and handed in their arms to the Imperial authorities by the 20th of July, the whole of their property would be confiscated and the families turned out destitute and homeless. The drift of that piece was so harsh that even G. Fiddes, district commissioner of Pretoria, an imperial-minded Briton, wrote against it. A Dutch notice of the 16th of July, also over Ritchie’s name as district superintendent of police at Krugersdorp, recalled the former notice and required those who came in with arms and ammunition to take the oath of neutrality and declare their cattle and stores by the 20th of July, failing which their whole stores and all their cattle would be exposed to confiscation. These 2 proclamations had the result that a great number of women and children became homeless or were carried off the farms by British troops, and they drew sharp criticism everywhere. [6]
On the 1st of June 1900 Roberts’s proclamation no. XV stood; on the 31st of May proclamation no. 1; on the 19th of June proclamation no. 6. He had arrogated to himself and his subordinate officers the power, when any damage was done to the British lines of communication, to burn the nearest farm and to take the civilian inhabitants prisoner of war; and lastly the right to destroy the property of any fighting burgher or officer responsible or accessory to any wilful damage to property, including public property such as railway lines. In their conduct Roberts and his subordinates did not keep within those proclamations, but exceeded them at will, wrecked houses where they chose and under all manner of pretexts, and no one was punished for it. On the 7th of August 1900 a Boer commando attacked 2 trains on the Pretoria–Middelburg line; a sharp skirmish followed, but the Boers had to fall back; after the fight 4 farms were burned the same day. On the 15th of August Botha had again to remonstrate against the cruel deeds and barbarous dealings of Roberts’s troops: small groups far from the main force, pretending to be scouts, went about to rob, and it could not be expected that such robbers, when caught, would in future be treated as prisoners of war. What hung on the mid-year protests was not a Cape statute. It was whether a field-cornet’s roof at Leeuwspruit, and a family’s stores at Krugersdorp, still counted as private property once the man of the house stayed on commando. [6]
The 2nd of September, the 14th of September, and the Guerrilla Proclamation — 1900
On the 2nd of September 1900 Roberts let Botha know that, because of the action of the Boer forces on the English lines of communication, he regarded the war as degenerating “into operations carried on by irregular and irresponsible guerillas.” The orders he had at present issued, to give effect to those views, were that the farm nearest the scene of any attempt to injure the line or wreck a train should be burned, and the civilian inhabitants taken prisoner of war. How far “vicinity” stretched he had not set out in the proclamations; the letter of the 2nd of September was the explanation. On the 4th of September Botha sent a full answer, rejecting the British commander-in-chief’s claim that the burghers in the field had ceased to be regular combatants. Botha was still commandant-general of a republic whose government had not surrendered. The September letter is why a farm near a railway, from this date, could be burned as a matter of declared policy and not only as a column’s discretion. [6]
On the 14th of September 1900 Roberts issued proclamation no. 17: since “the war is degenerating, and has degenerated, into operations carried on in an irresponsible manner by small, and in very many cases, insignificant bodies of men,” he would be failing in his duty to Her Majesty’s Government and to Her Majesty’s Army in South Africa if he neglected to use every means in his power to bring such irregular warfare to an early conclusion. He intended to employ means that would be “ruinous to the country,” and that would bring “endless suffering on the burghers and their families”; and “the longer this guerilla warfare continues the more vigorously must they be enforced.” The means to which he now resorted was the same already begun months before — the destruction of the country — but from now it would not be carried on on a limited scale and under all manner of pretexts, but on an unlimited scale. The clearly declared aim was, by destroying their property and by causing suffering to their women and children, to soften the hearts of the burghers in the field so that the war might be brought to a speedy and, for the English, favourable end. [6]
Roberts’s proclamations of the 14th of August and the 14th of September found echo among his subordinate officers, and the spring of 1900 opened with a campaign of destruction that, in the 3 months September, October, and November, was the period in which the field-marshal’s armoured fist was made to tell in the two Boer republics, before he handed the command to Lord Kitchener and himself went home. For September alone the burnings already outran the earlier months together; in October twice as many dwellings were laid waste as in September, and in November two and a half times as many. The difference in treatment received by the inhabitants of the various districts was so marked that Roberts found it necessary on the 28th of September 1900 to issue yet another proclamation “to insure uniformity in treatment of the inhabitants of the various districts,” with instructions as well. On the 22nd of September, at Pretoria, Government Notice no. III of 1900 was issued. [6]
An English captain of Rimington’s Guides, L. March Phillipps, wrote under date the 6th of September 1900 that the army seemed to be adopting very severe measures to try and end the campaign out of hand, and that the papers at home were loudly calling for such measures; great hardship and want, which might ultimately border on starvation, must be the result to many families; our troops are everywhere at work burning and laying waste, and enormous reserves of famine and misery are being laid up for these countries in the future. On the 23rd of November the same captain, operating in the Free State, wrote that farm burning went merrily on, and that their course through the country was marked, as in prehistoric ages, by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night; they usually burned from 6 to a dozen farms a day. On the 26th of September the district commissioner of Heidelberg wrote to the British authorities in Pretoria that Colonel Maxwell with his Brabant’s Horse of 600 men had burned everything: their path in that district had been one of destruction. [6]
“It grieves me to remark,” Botha declared on the 17th of October 1900 in a letter to the English commander-in-chief, that the barbarous deeds of His Excellency’s troops, such as the blowing up and destruction of private dwelling-houses and the removal of women, still continued. In the depth of his heart Milner did not believe what he had said to the prisoners of war on the matter. He had begun seriously to fear that the policy of general destruction would have serious political consequences. On the 31st of October 1900 he advised Kitchener, who was to take over the chief command from Roberts on the 29th of November, to occupy all the houses but to burn none unless treachery were proved. On the 18th of August the St James’s Gazette had argued that the Weyler method of destruction was the only one that would be effective in South Africa. By November the same paper could boast that “lord Roberts has come round to our view.” What hung on the 14th of September was no longer a dispute about a few named farms. It was a public notice that suffering to burghers’ families was now a means of war. [6]
Refugee Camps, Concentration, and the Women Sent East — September 1900
The policy of concentration to which Roberts resorted toward September 1900 took on the appearance of a continuation of a system that had already existed in August and had in fact been designed to protect British loyalists, traitors, and men who had laid down arms who might fall into the hands of the Boer forces. On the 1st of August 1900 the district commissioner of Potchefstroom proposed to military headquarters in Pretoria that provision be made for these people. The camps erected up to August could still be described as refugee camps, erected for the protection of surrenderer and traitor families. They were not meant for the housing of the families of burghers still in the field. From September 1900 one can definitely no longer speak of the camps as refugee camps. With a handful of exceptions the persons brought there were not refugees, but people taken as prisoners of war. Families of fighting burghers were, from September, taken prisoner of war and sent to various camps, some of which had until then existed as refugee camps; and with that the refugee camps lost their original character. [6]
On the 19th of July 1900 Roberts, by his own statement, carried out an order of his government by sending women and children of fighting burghers to the commandos for maintenance. About 600 women who could not provide for themselves, and whose husbands were still fighting, were sent from Pretoria by train to the Boer laagers near Van der Merwe station on the Pretoria–Middelburg line. That bringing of defenceless women and children directly into the sphere of the fight and of danger was only the beginning of a new policy — Roberts’s policy of using every means at his disposal to bring the war to a speedy end. The first train-loads were followed, during August 1900, while the Boer commandos were falling back eastward, by more. Before the end of August more than 1000 women with their little children had already been unloaded on the necks of the fighting Boers. On the 10th of August and the following days 450 women and 1550 children from Johannesburg alone were sent to the front. The hardships they had to undergo in open cattle and coal trucks were terrible. The ordinary highveld winter cold was worsened by a sharp south wind and falls of snow at intervals, and the impoverished women and children were not prepared for such a journey under such circumstances. Nevertheless they were full of courage, and when they steamed into Belfast station, the end of their journey, they did not weep or murmur but sang songs of freedom. At Belfast station they were delivered by the English authority to General Ben Viljoen, who sent them direct by rail to Barberton, where the Transvaal authority housed them. [6]
From mid-July orders went to the various district commissioners to get rid of the women and children in their districts in the same way — an order that could not everywhere be carried out because Boer commandos were not everywhere near. Toward the end of August a notice was again issued in Pretoria that the wives and children of burghers still in the field must report to the authority so that they might be sent to the Boer lines. Roberts wrote to Botha on the 2nd of September that he felt that when the war had once entered upon the stage of irregular or guerrilla fighting he should be neglecting his duty toward the nation if he did not use every means. Botha’s answer of the 4th of September rejected the unloading of women as a means of softening the burghers’ hearts. Chamberlain tried to defend Roberts’s policy of banishing women and children in the British House of Commons, but on the 7th of December 1900 he declared that “in many cases, the removal of the women has been with a view to protecting them. In some cases they have been deported from towns.” Who Chamberlain was still needs a line here. He was the colonial secretary in London, answering in the Commons for a policy already at work on the highveld. [6]
By the accumulation of prisoner-of-war burgher families in the various towns to which they were brought, the concentration camps arose. The English military authorities made no immediate or proper provision for housing the women- and child-prisoners whom their catching-columns brought to the towns. The poor people had for the time to make themselves at home under the open sky with their own scanty coverings, sometimes in the rain for a day or more, until accommodation was assigned. The accommodation they then received consisted of iron sheds, stables, rooms with private people, and tents. Before September 1900 at least, nurses and even physicians were appointed in the camps not on the ground of professional competence but of loyalty. On the 4th and 5th of July 1900 Mrs A. H. Bosman and Mrs H. S. Malan visited the Potchefstroom camp and wrote to the general superintendent of Transvaal camps that the high death-rate was to be ascribed in the first place to want. That July visit is why Potchefstroom is not only a name on a later list. It is a camp in which want was already being named as the first cause of death, months before the September turn from refugee to prisoner. [6]
In the Transvaal there arose during 1900 camps at Barberton, Heidelberg, Johannesburg, Irene, Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, Mafeking, Potchefstroom, Standerton, and Vereeniging. In the Free State, styled the Orange River Colony, there arose during 1900 Bloemfontein, Heilbron, Kroonstad, Norvalspont, and Vredefort Road. In Natal, Pietermaritzburg arose during 1900. In the Cape Colony, Port Elizabeth was founded during 1900. Several of these camps were at first refugee camps, but from September 1900 they all lost that character and became concentration camps. By November the need for central control of food-supply had grown with the number of camps, and it came into the hands of the military governor appointed in each of the two republics, each with his own ration scale for the camps under his control. What hung on the September turn was the name of the people inside the wire. A refugee had come in of his own will. A prisoner of war had been brought. From September the second name is the one that fits. [6]
Bothaville, Ventersburg, Dullstroom, and the Towns Laid Waste — October–November 1900
The English did not leave it at farms, and very soon villages came in turn. The first of these was the village of Bothaville, which in the second half of October 1900 was almost levelled with the ground by the troops of General Hunter. The district commissioner of Kroonstad accompanied this destruction-commando, which deliberately stripped the land so that the enemy could have no subsistence there. With the exception of public buildings, the parsonage, the church, and houses where the red-cross flag hung and which were therefore protected by the Convention of Geneva, the village itself was laid in ruin. Hunter received the order to destroy from his superiors and carried it out punctually: Bothaville was turned into a flaming inferno and furnished a typical example of the destruction that followed the Roberts proclamations. According to official British returns, between the 16th and the 24th of October, in the neighbourhood of Bothaville, 17 houses were burned. The town was wholly demolished in that on the 23rd of October 52 buildings, of which about 45 were dwellings, were burned and blown up. The reason given in every case was “laying waste country used as base by enemy.” [6]
Next Ventersburg came in turn. The British commander responsible for its demolition, Major-General Bruce Hamilton, distinguished himself by the particularly harsh manner in which he carried out his task. First he laid waste the neighbourhood of the village, then removed the town’s stores and partly burned them. In a proclamation that saw the light on the 1st of November he assured the women and children, whose means of subsistence had thus been limited, that no stores would be sent to the town. They must — that was his advice — go and knock at the Boer commandants for food; those would surely not like to see them die, and would therefore supply them. Finally he also gave the village to the flames. David Lloyd George later called Hamilton a brute and a disgrace to the uniform he wore, because the effect of the order was that defenceless women and children must die, or sit the ruins as bait for the commandos. Who Hamilton was still needs a line. He was not a Free State landdrost. He was a British major-general acting under the September proclamations, and Ventersburg was a town, not a railway culvert. [6]
Another village totally laid waste in November 1900 was Dullstroom. The Canadian officer E. W. B. Morrison, who under General Smith-Dorrien had a hand in the unbridled destruction of the Belfast district, Witpoort, and Dullstroom in November, told of it: the destruction took place in the midst of a heavy fight about the village; amid the roar of cannon and the crack of small-arms the soldiers set fire to the houses; first an ominous blue haze hung over the village, but very soon it was replaced by masses of smoke that plumed from the burning ruins and were visible 50 miles. The Boers in the koppies stood paralysed at the sight of such work of destruction, and ceased fire. When there was a pause, Smith-Dorrien, accompanied by several artillery officers, inspected the result. The former main street was full of smoke and glowing coals, and only the crack of flame-tongues that still licked furniture here and there was to be heard. Morrison wrote that the valley along which they moved had been fertile, well-watered, and full of fine farms and dwellings; when the British force drew near, the Boers left the dwellings and went away. [6]
In December 1900 Joseph Chamberlain boasted that never, in the history of warfare, had a war been conducted with the application of so much humanity on the side of officers and men as this one. The truth had nevertheless begun to reach the British public, and a chorus of protest from the ranks of the Liberal Party had been drawn out. In his speech in the British House of Commons on the 18th of February 1900 Lloyd George had already lashed the government for its destruction-policy and declared outright: “It is war not against men but against women and children.” President Kruger could not refrain, in a speech at Marseilles, France, on the 22nd of November 1900, from characterizing the British methods of warfare. The war had then, according to him, reached the extreme limits of barbarism. In his much-moved life he had many times had to fight against barbarous races, but the barbarians against whom the Boer people at that moment had to fight were much worse than all the others. He further mentioned that the British forces also armed African levies against the Boers, burned farms and demolished dwellings, and besides defied and punished women because their husbands fought, or were already exiles in other lands, or had already given their lives on the battlefield. Kruger was the president of the South African Republic, speaking in a French port after leaving the country. Marseilles is on this page because the charge he named there — farms burned, dwellings demolished, women punished for their husbands’ service — is the same charge the October and November towns had already made visible. [6]
Kitchener’s Command, Peace Committees, and the 21 December Memorandum — December 1900
From the beginning of December 1900 — that is, within a week after Roberts had handed the chief command to Kitchener — there was a great decrease in the destruction of dwelling-houses, which lasted until the beginning of the new year. Just before laying down the command Roberts issued an order by which the burning of farmhouses was placed under restraint. Henceforth all cattle, wagons, and foodstuffs were to be carried off the farms or, if that was impossible, destroyed; but the burning of the farmhouses themselves would be allowed only as punishment for acts of treason or for the destruction of lines of communication, or when they had been used as operational bases for raids, and then only with the written consent of the chief commander in the district. The new British commander-in-chief, whom Milner had already in October advised not to continue his predecessor’s policy of destroying dwellings, did not at once withdraw that order. Kitchener was the officer who had taken Roberts’s chair on the 29th of November. The December decrease is his first mark on this page, and it is a decrease in roofs burned, not in food taken. [6]
He counted on bringing the struggle to a speedy end by an intensive propaganda campaign calculated to undermine the morale of the burghers in the field. Immediately after taking up his post he therefore set himself to send Burgher Peace Committees, composed of Boers who had laid down arms, to the lines of the fighting burghers to convince them that the struggle was hopeless and to persuade them to lay down their arms. He spoke before the Peace Committee of Pretoria on the 21st of December 1900. That decrease in the destruction of dwellings — for the destruction of food-stores, vehicles, and the stripping of cattle went on without break — was only the quiet before the great storm. When toward the close of December 1900 it appeared that the Peace Committees accomplished nothing, and that the other means of propaganda Kitchener had used to end the war yielded no results, he decided to continue his predecessor’s work of destruction in order to close the so-called guerrilla struggle. [6]
On the 21st of December 1900 he addressed a memorandum to the British commanders in which he proposed, for the realization of that aim, a complete clean-sweep policy: from the districts successively occupied by Boers, all men, women, children, and even the African inhabitants were to be carried off. When Smuts had arrived in July 1900 in that part of the Krugersdorp district lying between the Magaliesberg and the Witwatersberg, the so-called Moot, one of the fairest, most fertile, and most cultivated stretches of South Africa, the region was still green with unbroken lands, gardens, and well-built farms and homesteads — a delight to the eyes and a proof of what the people had been able to achieve in 10 years of agriculture. Smuts was a republican officer, not a British commissioner. The Moot is on this December heading because the clean-sweep memorandum of the 21st is the order that would empty such a stretch: not only the men on commando, but the women, the children, and the African inhabitants as well. [6]
In 1900 Milner invited E. B. Sargant, then travelling in Canada and New Brunswick to inquire into educational systems, to accept the post of acting director of education in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. Sargant accepted the invitation but modestly doubted whether he possessed the capacity to handle so colossal an administration. On the 6th of November 1900 Sargant stepped ashore at Capetown from Quebec, and after several weeks spent on administrative affairs he undertook in December a circuit through the northern colonies. Already on the 2nd of December 1900 a deputation of a committee charged by the Afrikaans churches with the distribution of goods gathered by those churches for relief in the camps waited on the authorities. On the 19th of December Dr R. P. MacKenzie, acting as chief medical officer of the Racecourse camp at Johannesburg, wrote to his brother, the military governor of Johannesburg: “I consider the rations served out to the refugees to be insufficient to keep them in health.” He recommended that, in addition to the present ration of maize, meal, flour, coffee, sugar, and salt, meat and fresh vegetables should be supplied at least 3 times a week to those who could not buy them. From the start the rations the camp-dwellers received were insufficient; vegetables and fruit were not supplied; potatoes stood at threepence each, cabbage at up to 5 shillings a head, and eggs at 7 shillings and sixpence a dozen. What hung on that December was the 21st’s memorandum still in the commanders’ hands, the Peace Committees already empty, Sargant already ashore, and MacKenzie’s ration letter already on the military governor’s table. The year ends on that list. [6]