Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive

15. Return to Pretoria

FIFTEEN Return to Pretoria 'I had thrown double sixes again.' WINSTON CHURCHILL, dispatch to the Morning Post, 22 April 1900 CHURCHILL'S DISPATCH of 16 April 1900 includes a passing mention of an audacious move by the Boers at the end of March: 'But while the army waited, as it was absolutely forced to wait . . . the Boers recovered from their panic, pulled themselves together, and, for the moment boldly seized the offensive. Great, though perhaps temporary, were the advantages they gained.' This was the advance by General Christiaan de Wet, the Commandant General of the Free State, who swooped into the southeast of the Orange Free State with a mere fifteen hundred men. Churchill was uncharacteristically brief in his account of events: 'I do not intend to be drawn into a detailed description . . . For many reasons it deserves a separate and detailed consideration, chiefly because it shows the Boer at his very best: crafty in war and, above all, deadly cool.' De Wet recognised that a guerrilla campaign was the only sensible means of engaging a British army which had overwhelming numerical superiority. His first target, the waterworks at Sannah's Post, only twenty miles east of Roberts's headquarters, brought him a haul of seven guns, over a hundred wagons and more than four hundred prisoners. Three days later he overwhelmed a British garrison at Reddersburg, fifty miles south of Bloemfontein. Churchill inclined his readers towards a tolerant view - 'Let us judge 192 Return to Pretoria no one harshly or in ignorance' - before revealing some telling figures: 'With a loss of eight killed and thirty-one wounded, the retreating troops surrendered when relief was scarcely five miles away.' He does not mention the numbers who surrendered: 546. That would have been too damning. After Reddersburg, de Wet moved seventy-five miles to the east and laid siege to the town of Wepener. By now the British cavalry and infantry in large numbers were catching up with him, so he withdrew to safety north of Bloemfontein. De Wet's sixteen-day rampage was a foretaste of the guerrilla war of which Churchill had warned when he advocated reconciliation at the end of the campaign in Natal. Political factors were also helping to stiffen the morale of many Boers who might otherwise have accepted Roberts's offer of amnesty. The British government's insistence that it was not prepared to acknowledge the independence of the Transvaal or the Orange Free State played directly into the hands of Kruger, who portrayed it as a threat to all that the Afrikaner held dear. 'The lately penitent rebels are stirring,' wrote Churchill as he set off to join the fighting in the south-east of the Free State, no doubt well pleased to distance himself from the headquarters of an unfriendly Commander-in-Chief. Anticipating the need to move rapidly around the new theatre of operations, Churchill equipped himself comprehensively, with a four-horse wagon from which to live and horses on which to ride with the cavalry. This gave him the ability to move 'sometimes quite alone across wide stretches of doubtful country . . . then dart back across a landscape charged with silent menace, to keep up a continuous stream of letters and telegrams to my newspaper'. No doubt the editor of the Morning Post thought it money well spent. Accompanied by his wagon and horses, Churchill took the train to Edenburg, fifty miles south of Bloemfontein. He then trekked for two days through the pouring rain until he caught up with the 8th Division, commanded by Major General Sir Leslie Rundle known as Sir Leisurely Trundle - whom he had known during the Omdurman campaign. 19s Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive Having enjoyed Rundle's hospitality, he hurried on next day to join Brigadier-General John Brabazon's brigade, which was scouting ahead. As always, Churchill wanted to be part of the action, but in this case there was an added incentive: Brabazon was 'a man of striking character and presence', the sort of soldier he admired. A friend of Lord and Lady Randolph, he had played an influential part in Churchill's early military career, for it was the regiment which Brabazon commanded, the 4th Hussars, to which Churchill had gravitated when he was commissioned. Thereafter the two men became lifelong friends. An impoverished Irish landlord, Brabazon had earlier, because of straitened finances, resigned his commission in the Grenadier Guards to...