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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
.Article – Online Historic Information | Military
.Page xvi
The Progress of the War
The war can be considered as falling into a number of phases and the chronology given in this book
has been arranged accordingly. The opening phase was that of the Boer offensive when their
commandos invaded Cape Colony and Natal. In the Cape the action was restricted to besieging
Kimberley and Mafeking, but in Natal the Boers went south of Ladysmith once the siege there was
established and obliged the British to fortify Pietermaritzburg in anticipation of their arrival. Indeed,
Durban itself, on the coast, was made ready for defence. The Boer leaders, older men who had fought
in the previous war against the British, decided to rely on the strategy that had won them their victory
in 1881: to wait for the British to attack, defeat them or hold them off and thus cause them to lose the
will to fight on. They therefore adopted static positions in place of the fluid front for which they were
so well suited and waited for their enemies.
The British reply began at the end of November 1899. Buller had advised against the attempt to
hold a line further north than the Tugela River in Natal, and was furious that he had been ignored and
that the siege of Ladysmith was taking place at all. His preference had been to strike at once and hard
for the Boer republics’ capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria from Cape Colony and ignore the rest
for the time being. As it was, Cecil Rhodes had contrived to get himself caught inside Kimberley and
was squawking for rescue and General White had managed to lock up a considerable number of
British troops in Ladysmith. Meanwhile the Boers had taken a number of towns in the north-eastern
Cape. Buller decided to adopt a holding stance in the case of the latter and to divide the rest of his
force in order to relieve Kimberley and Ladysmith.
On the western front, towards Kimberley, Lord Methuen made progress until, on 11 December,
he was stopped by the Boers at Magersfontein. In the centre General Gatacre was not content to adopt
a defensive approach and tried to improve his position by taking the railway junction at Stormberg.
He failed. Buller, apprehensive about the security of his lines of supply, attempted a frontal attack at
Colenso which he had the sense to call off before intolerable losses were sustained. These defeats
made up the events of “Black Week” and gave the Minister of War in London, Lord Lansdowne, the
chance he was waiting for to replace Buller with his former colleague in India, Lord Roberts.
As Roberts arrived on 10 January 1900 with his Chief of Staff, the man who had won fame in
Egypt and the Sudan, Lord Kitchener, the western and central fronts were inactive and the Natal front
was being prepared for an effort to outflank the Boers on the Tugela River by going to the west. The
attempt failed dramatically at Spioenkop and a second time at Vaalkrans. The Boer artillery
dominated the first of these battles, although at the end of the day both sides thought that they had lost
the action. The Boers reoccupied Spioenkop more through luck and a taste for early rising than by
force of arms. In the second of these two battles, the British artillery was much better handled, but the
Boers still had the advantage and Buller withdrew, rather than accept heavy casualties.
The third phase of the war was the offensive undertaken by Roberts. He had brought with him
substantial reinforcements, especially cavalry, and the British
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