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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
.Article – Online Historic Information | Military
.Page xviii
Roberts’s armies broke the final Boer entrenched positions at Bergendal (or Dalmanutha), well
to the east of Pretoria, on 27 August. Buller pursued some of the Boers to Lydenburg and eastwards
over Long Tom Pass while General Pole-Carew spent the next month pushing along the railway to
eject Kruger from his country by 24 September.
Guerrilla War
The fifth, the guerrilla, phase of the war now began. It was to last from September 1900 to the end of
May 1902. The Boers scattered from the eastern Transvaal and banded together under a number of
commanders. The major groups were those of Louis Botha in the south and eastern Transvaal, Koos
De le Rey in the western Transvaal, and Christiaan De Wet in the Orange Free State, although they
moved as freely outside these territories as within them. In addition to attacking any small group of
British they found, they derailed and ransacked trains and kept as many soldiers marching about in
futile pursuit of them as they could. In an attempt to add to British problems, the decision was taken to
send parties into Cape Colony and raise Afrikanders resident there in opposition to their British
colonial masters. Although about 10,000 responded, the vast majority decided they had no argument
with the British.
When the war entered the guerrilla phase, the British had to devise ways of catching the roving
commandos. The cumbersome British columns of marching infantry, ox-drawn supply wagons and
droves of black African servants gave way to more mobile mounted infantry and mounted black
Africans, but the vast open spaces of the veldt and the local knowledge of the Boers still gave the
latter the advantage. The construction of blockhouses, mainly along the railway lines, reduced the
territory open to the commandos, although to begin with the building of massive forts took too long
and was too expensive. Lord Kitchener was by now in command, and he turned to Major Spring R.
Rice, RE, who devised a circular corrugated iron structure that could be built in a day. These
blockhouses, with barbed wire fences between them, eventually spread like a spider’s web across the
land. More British soldiers arrived to man the blockhouse lines and more black Africans were
recruited and armed to patrol the intervals between the fortlets. The other step taken to curtail Boer
freedom of movement was to lay waste the farms. The policy created another problem for the British.
The old people, women, children and black people displaced by the scorched earth programme
joined the other refugees, those chased off the land by the Boers for co-operating with the British and
those fleeing the scenes of war. They were housed in camps. There the administration was
incompetent, the food and water inadequate or contaminated and the sanitation unequal to the task. A
few camps were well run, but, as Emily Hobhouse found to her surprise and horror, the majority were
death traps. The failure of the British to meet the challenge of the refugees (over 27,000 Boers died in
the concentration camps, and at least half as many black people) left an enduring bitterness in Boer
minds. Although, eventually, the worst of the errors were corrected, it was the abandonment of the
internment policy that helped to end the war. Who could be away on
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