Boer History1909 in South Africa: The Camps’ Dead, and Vereeniging’s Two Grounds
The Camps Were Not Magnanimity
Peace between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — was signed at Vereeniging on the 31st of May 1902. Joseph Chamberlain and other British government persons proclaimed that the concentration camps had been raised to protect non-combatant Boer families. They were not an act of magnanimity. They were the outcome of the British military aim of bringing the war to a speedy end. From March 1900 the military increasingly set themselves to soften the resistance of the burghers in the field by inflicting suffering on their families. What hung on that aim was the peace signed two years later: the camps were a weapon, not a shelter. [6]
At first the military confined themselves — under various pretexts — to destroying the dwellings of fighting burghers near the railways and other lines of communication. When that achieved little, they, following the methods of General Weyler in Cuba, went over to a policy of total devastation. When devastation also failed to break the commandos, Lord Roberts tried to break Boer resistance by sending the families who, after the farms were destroyed, had sought shelter in the towns, out to the burgher commandos. The Boers were willing to receive those families and to let them go to Europe. That would have destroyed the military value they had for the British enemy. The military then decided, again following Weyler, to pen those families in concentration camps. The sight of starving women and children in the camps, the British authorities apparently believed, would soon make the burghers beg for peace. [6]
In the camps the families of fighting burghers were not given the treatment to which they as prisoners of war could lay claim under the Hague Convention. From the outset the camps — often erected on badly chosen grounds — were completely overcrowded and therefore ideal places for the spread of epidemics. No proper provision was made for medical care, still less for an effective system of sanitation, so the camps became breeding-places of disease. The camp population was not supplied with sufficient food, cleaning materials, or clothing. Resistance among those families was soon exhausted. So many camp inmates died that the whole civilized world was shocked. [6]
Roberts handed the chief command to Lord Kitchener in December 1900. Just before laying down the command, Roberts issued an order that limited the burning of farmhouses. Henceforth all cattle, wagons, and foodstuffs were to be carried off the farms or, if that was impossible, destroyed; but the burning of the houses themselves would be allowed only as punishment for treason or for the destruction of lines of communication, or when they had been used as bases for raids, and then only with the written consent of the chief commander in the district. Milner had already in October advised Kitchener not to continue his predecessor’s policy of destroying dwellings. Kitchener did not at once withdraw Roberts’s order. He counted on ending the war quickly by an intensive propaganda campaign meant to wear down the morale of the burghers in the field, and he at once 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. He spoke before the Peace Committee of Pretoria on the 21st of December 1900. [6]
Destruction of food stocks, vehicles, and livestock went on without a break. The lull in the burning of houses was only the quiet before the great storm. When, by the close of December 1900, the Peace Committees accomplished nothing, Kitchener decided to continue his predecessor’s work of destruction in order to close the guerrilla struggle. On the 21st of December 1900 he addressed a memorandum to the British commanders recommending a clean-sweep policy: from districts occupied by Boers, all men, women, children, and African inhabitants were to be carried off. J. C. Smuts put the result in the winter of 1901: almost all places and towns in both Republics were destroyed and burned; almost all grain and means of subsistence destroyed; almost all livestock killed. He took as example that part of the Krugersdorp district between the Magaliesberg and the Witwatersberg, the Moot, one of the fairest, most fertile, and most cultivated stretches of South Africa. When he arrived there in July 1900 the region was still green with unbroken lands, gardens, and well-built farms. Afterwards it was a barren wilderness: gardens cut down, farms burned, houses in many cases not only burned but blown up with dynamite so that not one stone was left on another. That was the country from which the families were then driven into the camps. [6]
Half-Rations and Lloyd George in the Commons
The families of fighting burghers were placed on half-rations. The food issued — especially the meat, sugar, and meal — was of wretched quality, while vegetables, fruit, and fresh milk were not supplied at all. That scale was not an accident of supply. The great majority of the inmates of the various camps, by being placed on the half-ration scale, were deliberately starved by the military authorities. The object was to force the Boer fighters, who had sacrificed everything for their freedom, into infidelity to their own ideals by the spectacle of their starving and suffering children. Lloyd George put that object in the British House of Commons on the 18th of February 1901. He was not the only prominent Briton who held that view. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, leader of the Liberal opposition, shared it, supported by almost his whole party and by several leading newspapers. [6]
Speaking in the same House on the 17th of June 1901, Lloyd George showed that the quantity of food was less than the amount allowed in England to criminals under hard labour. He said he had carefully compared it. That claim was never rebutted by the government. What hung on the comparison was not a debating point. It told the House that camp inmates were being fed below the scale the same state allowed to its own convicts at hard labour, while their husbands and fathers were still in the field. [6]
In the Free State camps, where rations were put out to tender, Champion and Co. held the tender at 9 pence a day per white inmate. A considerable part of that sum was profit, so the value of the daily ration to each adult stood below 9 pence — how far below was not established. Humphreys-Owen cited a letter from the public press working from the Blue Books the cost of rations in October at from 3 pence to 5 pence a head — nothing like sufficient for any but the poorest food — and remembered that as a gaol visitor it was thought they had done well if they fed inmates for 2 shillings 6 pence a week. Whatever the money value of the daily ration, the half-ration scale was the instrument. [6]
Chamberlain, in December 1900, 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. Questions in parliament he met by saying he had no particulars, or by assuring opponents that farm-burning, viewed from an economic standpoint, need not be taken too seriously, because a farmhouse in the Transvaal was little better than, if as good as, a labourer’s cottage in England, and accordingly the pecuniary damage was really not so very great. Campbell-Bannerman later told the same House that it was precisely the orders British officers and men had to carry out that he regarded as extremely barbarous. The half-ration in the camps was the same policy in another form: not the burning of a cottage, but the emptying of a plate. [6]
Hobhouse, the Ladies Committee, and the Fall in the Death-Rate
Child mortality in particular was terrible, and soon — especially after the revelations of Emily Hobhouse — raised a storm of criticism inside and outside England against the British government. Hobhouse was an Englishwoman who visited the camps of women and children and published what she found. The storm she raised was not a colonial quarrel. It was a charge, made in England itself, that the camps were killing children. To protect its good name, England was at long last obliged to send out a committee of ladies to investigate and, following their report, to bring revolutionary improvements into the camps. [6]
Those improvements were carried through only after the end of 1901. It was therefore only during the last few months of the war that conditions in the concentration camps were bearable. That state of affairs was reflected by the death-rate, which from the end of 1901 fell sharply in increasing measure, until against March 1902 it was normal. The Boer generals and fighting burghers did not know of this sharp decrease. The camps in the end served the military object for which they were founded. What hung on that ignorance was the peace itself: men still in the field judged the camps by the months when children were dying, not by the months when the rate had already fallen. [6]
In the Commons on Wednesday the 31st of July 1901, John Dillon told the House that when Britain failed to crush the Boers in the veld, it turned its weapons against the women and children, and, closing the channels of information and steeling its heart against the cry of conscience, had to take recourse to an infamous policy of farm-burning. He predicted that the farm-burning and its miserable consequences would brand an unforgettable hatred into the memories of the children and grandchildren of the Boer people, and would strengthen the conviction that the object of the war was to put the Dutch under the iron heel of the Anglo-Saxon. The land, he said, had been turned into a howling and black-burned wilderness, with suffering women and children persecuted and starved. The ground was already prepared for seed Britain itself wished to sow, and of which it would in future reap very bitter fruit. [6]
Flynn, a countryman of Dillon’s, spoke of whole families being turned out on the veld because the male members were fighting in the war, of furniture being ruthlessly destroyed, of little household objects being scattered, of homes being burned, and of helpless women and children being swept into concentration camps where disease was prevalent. Swift MacNeill declared that the war had been waged with a maximum of cruelty and a minimum of humanity, and that the farm-burning could scarcely be surpassed by the blood-stained annals of Turkey. The principle of farm-burning as a means of intimidation was wholly condemned even on the British side, and acknowledged as a complete failure — as anyone who knew the Boer people and their history would readily have predicted. The application of a system which, even in India, had long provoked criticism and disapproval was later set down as the least happy of Roberts’s inspirations and a serious error of judgment, due to the fact that he persisted in regarding the Boers, once their chief towns had been occupied, not as regular combatants but as rebels who rather required punishment than defeat. [6]
26251 Women and Children, and 1676 Men
The dying in the camps of 26251 women and children besides 1676 men above 16 — mostly greybeards — 1421 of them old men — softened the resistance of the Boers in the field. The number of young men above 16 who died there was therefore very small. Between a quarter and a fifth of those brought to the camps perished during a period of about eight months, May to December 1901. Those figures are why the camps served the object for which they were founded. The commandos in the field were not fighting only British columns. They were fighting the knowledge that their families were dying behind wire. [6]
The fear gradually seized the leaders among the fighting burghers that if no end were made to the concentration camps the whole Afrikaner people would die out. That fear was not a figure of speech. A quarter to a fifth dead in eight months, among people who had been driven in from burned farms, was a rate at which a small nation could not continue a war and still remain a people. The generals did not know that from the end of 1901 the death-rate was falling. They knew the months from May to December. They knew the children. [6]
President Kruger, speaking at Marseilles in France on the 22nd of November 1900, had already characterised British methods of war. The war had then, he said, reached the extreme limits of barbarism. In his long life he had often had to fight against barbarous peoples, but the barbarians against whom the Boer people then had to fight were worse than all the others. He added that British forces also armed Africans against the Boers, burned farms and demolished dwellings, and even defied and punished women because their husbands were fighting, or were already exiles in other countries, or had already given their lives on the battlefield. Marseilles was a French port on Kruger’s road after he had left the Republic. The charge he named there — farms burned, dwellings demolished, women punished for their husbands’ service — is the same charge the camps later made visible in the death-rate. [6]
Irish members of the British parliament threw their weight at once behind the Liberal opposition and criticised in the sharpest language the barbarous methods Roberts had applied in South Africa. Lloyd George, after the destruction of Ventersburg, called Bruce Hamilton a brute and a disgrace to the uniform he wore, because his action was in truth aimed at this: that defenceless women and children should die, or remain on the ruins of the destroyed dwellings as bait for the Boer commandos, so that those commandos could be led into a trap. Hamilton had first laid waste the neighbourhood, then removed and partly burned the town’s stores, and in a proclamation of the 1st of November 1900 assured the women and children, whose means of subsistence he had in that way limited, that no stores would be sent to the town. They must — that was his advice — apply to the Boer commandants for food. Those commandants would surely not wish to see them die, and would therefore supply them. He then gave the village to the flames. [6]
Vereeniging’s Two Grounds
The chief considerations that led, on the Boer side, to the conclusion of the Peace of Vereeniging were therefore two. First: that the war policy followed by the British military authorities had led to the total devastation of the territory of both Republics, with the burning of places and towns, the destruction of all means of subsistence, and the exhaustion of all resources needful for the maintenance of the families, the existence of the armies, and the continuation of the war. Second: that the placing of the captive families in the concentration camps had led to an unheard-of state of suffering and disease, so that in a comparatively short time about 20000 of their dear ones had died there, and the dreadful prospect had arisen that by continuation of the war their whole race might in that way die out. Those were not later glosses. They were the grounds named on the Boer side when the peace was made. [6]
The first ground was the country itself. Bothaville was turned into a flaming inferno by General Hunter in the second half of October 1900 and furnished a typical example of the destruction that followed the Roberts proclamations. Except for public buildings, the parsonage, the church, and houses where the Red Cross flag hung and which were therefore protected by the Geneva Convention, the village itself was laid in ruins. According to official British returns, between the 16th and the 24th of October, in the neighbourhood of Bothaville, 17 houses were burned; 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 the enemy. [6]
Dullstroom was totally laid waste in November 1900. The destruction took place in the midst of a heavy fight in the neighbourhood of 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; very soon it was replaced by masses of smoke that plumed up from the burning ruins and were visible 50 miles away. The Boers in the hills stood paralysed at the sight of such work of destruction, and ceased fire. When there was a pause, General Smith-Dorrien, accompanied by several artillery officers, inspected the result. The former main street was full of smoke and glowing coals, and only the crackle of tongues of flame that still licked up household goods here and there was audible. On the steps of the church a deserted little group of women and children huddled. The children apparently did not know whether they should cry or laugh at the scenes played out before them; the women, pale, with compressed lips and a grief-stricken look, stared at the place of former homes. [6]
Lloyd George, in the British House of Commons, declared it was war not against men but against women and children. He pointed out that the work of destruction had not remained at the burning of isolated Boer farms, but that towns had been laid in ruins. The destruction was not confined to the neighbourhood of railways: the whole terrain was plundered and demolished, as the destruction of Bothaville, Ventersburg, and Dullstroom showed. Other members of the opposition supported him with fierce criticism of the government. Outside parliament the opposition press waged a violent campaign against the policy of incendiarism. The first Vereeniging ground — total devastation of both Republics, with the burning of places and towns — was that policy named as a reason for peace. [6]
The second ground was the camps. About 20000 dear ones dead in a comparatively short time, and the prospect that by continuation of the war the whole race might die out, was the figure the Boer side used at Vereeniging. The later count of 26251 women and children and 1676 men above 16 did not lighten that second ground. It confirmed it. The peace of the 31st of May 1902 closed a war the camps had helped to end, at a cost the death-rate still named. [6]
An Offence against Civilization
The concentration-camp system thus answered the purpose for which the British military authorities introduced it. It brought the war to a favourable end for Great Britain. To obtain that immediate advantage, however, Great Britain inflicted irreparable damage on itself. In its history the concentration-camp system would always shine — as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman put it — as an offence against civilization, as a military mistake, and as a political disaster. He was the Liberal leader who had already shared Lloyd George’s view of the half-ration, and who had told the House that the orders themselves were extremely barbarous. The phrase was not a later decoration. It was the judgment a British parliamentary leader put on the camps while the war they served was still the war of his own country. [6]
That damage was not only to Britain’s name and fame among the other great powers. It kindled in the heart of the Afrikaner a fire of bitterness. Dillon had predicted that farm-burning would brand an unforgettable hatred into the memories of children and grandchildren. The camps did the same work with a death-rate. The military object was served: resistance in the field was softened, and Vereeniging was signed. The political disaster Campbell-Bannerman named was that the same camps that ended the war left a people who would not forget how it had been ended. [6]
The farm-burning he and Dillon condemned had not even succeeded as intimidation. Anyone who knew the Boer people and their history would readily have predicted the failure. Roberts’s error of judgment — treating the Boers, once Pretoria and Bloemfontein were occupied, as rebels who rather required punishment than defeat — left burned towns and then the camps. Kitchener’s clean-sweep memorandum of the 21st of December 1900 carried the same families off the land and into the tents. The Ladies Committee came too late to undo May to December 1901. The death-rate that later fell to normal against March 1902 was not the death-rate the generals in the field knew when they weighed Vereeniging’s two grounds. [6]
What hung on those two grounds was the end of the two Republics. The first named the burned places and the exhausted resources. The second named about 20000 dead in the camps and the prospect that the people itself might die out. Campbell-Bannerman’s three terms — an offence against civilization, a military mistake, and a political disaster — were the British parliamentary names for the same facts. The camps had done what they were built to do. They had also done what he said they would always shine as. [6]