The Hearts of Darkness

By Mayo Mohs

THE BOER WAR by Thomas Pakenham; Random House; 718 pages; $20

The Boer War was the British Empire's Viet Nam. Before it began in 1899, London had been asked for a mere 10,000 new troops to contain the Boer threat. Before it ended 32 months later, it had involved 450,000 imperial and colonial troops, of whom 22,000 lay dead on African soil. At least 25,000 Boers perished. And in this misnamed "white man's war," more than 12,000 blacks died on both sides. Its consequences still fuel hate in the Third World and guilt in the First.

The grim story has been told before, but never with such sweep and grieving comprehension. Part of the reason is new information, part is the skill and lineage of the author. Thomas Pakenham's mother, the Countess of Longford, is the biographer of Victoria and Wellington. His sister is Antonia Fraser, biographer of Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles II. Pakenham was able to prowl the great houses of Britain in search of long-lost letters, papers and diaries, took time to learn Dutch and Afrikaans, and early in his eight years of research recorded the memories of the last survivors.

The remote root of the conflict was idealism, the immediate cause, greed. Afrikaners--Dutch Calvinist settlers--had been in South Africa for 150 years when the British took over the Cape of Good Hope during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 1830s parliamentary idealists in London decreed an end to slavery in the Empire, and some of the Afrikaners, dependent on their slaves, trekked into the wilderness to the north. The leaders of these trekboers (wandering farmers) founded two independent republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. No one but the native blacks would have cared had not a rich diamond pipe been found at Kimberley in the Orange Free State and an immense stratum of gold at Witwatersrand ("the Rand") in the Transvaal. As largely British "Outlanders" poured into the Rand to mine the gold, Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes plotted an uprising against Transvaal President Paul Kruger. But a premature raid tipped Rhodes' hand, and the Boers armed.

Britain was ill prepared for conflict. Despite its burgeoning Empire, its army was small--fewer than 320,000 men, most of them already tied down in colonial duties. (France had an army of 4 million.) War was, in fact, totally unnecessary. The British wanted political representation in the Transvaal for the Outlanders. Kruger was willing to bargain, but South African High Commissioner Alfred Milner, unfortunately, was the go-between. He was a dedicated warmonger, secretly backed by millionaire gold entrepreneurs. Troops were sent. They marched into the first 20th century war ready to fight with 19th century tactics.

There were a few initial victories, but the mounted, mobile Boers with their magazine-loading Mausers and their devastating "Long Tom" artillery soon drove the British forces into siege positions at Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The lessons of preparedness were not lost on one of the Boers' early captives: young War Correspondent Winston Churchill.

Mafeking became a legend, holding out for seven months, but Pakenham shows it to be a legend with a stain. Its commander, Colonel R.S.S. Baden-Powell, later founder of the Boy Scouts, "played to win, and he made up his own rules as he went along." Baden-Powell's diaries, here freshly revealed, show that he short-rationed Mafeking's blacks in order to keep the garrison's white population comfortably fed.

The war did not turn in Britain's favor until the arrival of Lord Kitchener, hero of Omdurman. His forces drove into the Boer states, capturing the cities, restoring commercial life and making the two republics colonies. In the countryside, where the Boers waged guerrilla warfare, Kitchener adopted a sweep-and-scour policy, burning Boer farms, herding their women and children into refugee camps--dubbed by outraged members of Parliament "concentration camps" after the reconcentrado camps used by Spain in Cuba. Disease killed thousands. Feminist Emily Hobhouse, the Jane Fonda of her day, carried the cause to the British public; the camps fueled an antiwar campaign headed by Liberal Lloyd George, and provoked worldwide indignation.

London finally allowed the nearly beaten Boers to sue for peace. The tragic pattern was set. An infamous clause in the peace treaty reserved a decision on the vote for blacks until after self-government was achieved--a clause that swept away the right of blacks to vote in the once liberal Cape Colony.

"It was all for the gold mines," a surviving Tommy told Pakenham years later. So it seemed. Parliament rewarded Kitchener with a -L-50,000 victory purse--which he promptly cabled his brokers to invest in South African gold mining stocks. Since then, both the investment and the misery have soared. Their limits are still out of sight.

--Mayo Mohs

Excerpt

"The charge of two hundred horsemen galloping across a plain is designed to be an irresistible force. It does not stop simply because the enemy would like to surrender. 'Draw sabres--lances!' In neat lines, the Dragoons and Lancers began to thunder across the plain. . . Half a mile away, the Boers, unaware of their danger, had saddled up their ponies and begun to jog back the way they had come. The charging line of horsemen caught them broadside, like the steel prow of a destroyer smashing into the side of a wooden boat. People heard the crunch of the impact--steel against leather and bone and muscle--and saw the flash of the officers' revolvers, and heard the screams of the Boers trying to give themselves up. The Lancers and Dragoons swept on, leaving dozens of Boers, and some of their African retainers, spiked and splashed on the ground. Back came the cavalry for a second charge.('Most excellent pig-sticking . . . for about ten minutes, the bag being about sixty,' said one of the officers later.) . . . The Boers fell off their horses and rolled among the rocks, calling for mercy--calling to be shot, anything to escape the stab of the lances. But a story had got round that the Boers had abused a flag of truce and, anyway, the order was: no prisoners."

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