Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (12 page)

Early in the nineteenth century, soon after the British had made the Cape of Good Hope a permanent possession of the empire, two new generations of Bothas—Philip Rudolph Botha and his two young sons—joined the Great Trek. As they struck out from Cape Colony in an attempt to escape British rule, their slow, rolling processions of covered wagons pulled by long, serried lines of oxen were almost indistinguishable from the westward movement that was taking place at the same time in North America. In fact, like the American pioneers, the Boer
Voortrekkers
crossed part of a vast continent that was not only unknown to the outside world but inhabited by large groups of native people with whom they would spend decades
in brutal combat. Instead of the Cherokee and the Iroquois, however, the Boers faced the Zulu, one of the greatest warrior races in the world, and the Xhosa, the tribe into which Nelson Mandela would one day be born.

While many
Voortrekkers
settled in pockets of grassland scattered across an enormous, sweeping desert known to the Boers as the
Great Karoo, the Bothas skirted the eastern coast, passing from the desert into the veld and winding their way toward the Republic of Natalia.
It was here, about halfway between the port town of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, roughly fifty miles inland, that Philip Rudolph Botha and his sons finally stopped, establishing a farm and helping to build a railroad station in a town that would become known as Botha’s Hill.

It did not take the Bothas long to lose any trace, or even memory, of the Frenchmen they had been only a few generations before. Although the Natal had already fallen into British hands by the time Louis, Philip Rudolph’s grandson, was born in 1862, the family continued to lead a solitary, fiercely independent way of life that was stubbornly Boer. They had no interest in any land beyond Africa, no tolerance for any man or institution meddling in their lives, and no allegiance to any flag other than the thick, colorful stripes of the two remaining Boer republics—the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

Although technically a British citizen by birth, Louis Botha had had the most traditional of Boer childhoods.
He grew up in a family of thirteen children on an isolated farm in Greytown, about a hundred miles from Durban, and, between a German mission school and a traveling tutor, had received only a couple of years of formal education. He was, however, fluent in several languages, including Zulu and Sotho, both of which he knew better than English. He also learned how to shoot a rifle as soon as he was strong enough to hold one.

Like most Boers, Botha’s family had spent the great majority of their lives at war, in one form or another. As a child, his mother had hidden with her grandmother, the two of them frantically making
bullets, while her family desperately tried to repel a Zulu attack. Botha’s father often clashed with nearby Zulu who, while fighting the Boer incursion onto their land, had on several occasions burned down their farmhouse.
Louis himself had fought not only against the Zulu but with them. In 1884, when he was just twenty-two years old, he had formed and led a group of Boers who, in exchange for vast swaths of land, had helped Dinuzulu, crown prince of the Zulu nation, defeat his rival for the throne after his father’s death.

In fact, Botha had nearly been killed during that war, not by Dinuzulu’s rival, but by his own men. After a long day riding by himself through Dinuzulu’s territory, setting up landmarks for the other men, Botha had come upon an abandoned shanty, where he decided to sleep. In the middle of the night, he was awoken by the sound of chanting. Peering through a window onto the moon-drenched veld, he saw to his horror that he was surrounded by Zulu, all armed with assegai, or throwing spears, and chanting in unison, “We have come to kill the white man.” Leaning out the window, Botha shouted in Zulu, “Who are you?” “We are the warriors of Dinuzulu,” came the reply. “But I have been fighting on
your
side!” Botha shouted back. The chanting immediately ceased, and the men lowered their weapons. As Botha walked out of the shanty and stood in the moonlight before the men who, moments earlier, had been about to slaughter him, he was hailed as a friend and fellow warrior.

Perhaps because of his long experience in battle, Botha did not like the idea of killing other men.
When tensions with the British had begun to rise, he had hoped that war could be averted.
He had even been among the handful of men in the Volksraad who had voted against sending the ultimatum to England. Finally, however, he had come to the conclusion that if his people wanted peace, they must first have war. “
The Transvaal has done all it can in order to preserve peace,” Botha had said in a somber speech to the Volksraad, “but I think that we have now gone far enough.”

On October 12, the day after the deadline for the ultimatum, the Boers burst southeastward out of Pretoria like the breaking of a dam, rushing toward Natal, the British colony on the Indian Ocean coast that had once been theirs.
It was raining in heavy sheets, and a fierce, freezing wind was blowing off the mountains, but the men, most of whom had neither tents nor overcoats, took little notice. “
As far as the eye could see the plain was alive with horsemen, guns and cattle, all steadily going forward to the frontier,” Deneys Reitz would recall years later, when he was no longer a boy. “The scene was a stirring one, and I shall never forget riding to war with that great host.”

The next day, the Boers crossed into Natal, and, with a suddenness that would leave the British military reeling, the war began. Although he had hoped for peace, Botha was among the first wave of horses and men surging out of the capital. Breaking away with a small group to capture the first British prisoners of the war, six frontier policemen who were so shocked and unprepared they were able to put up no resistance, he rejoined his commando, a Boer combat unit, just beyond the Buffalo River.
By the time they merged with another commando, they were eight thousand men strong, all sweeping eastward with an irresistible force toward the little coal-mining town of Dundee, where the commanding British general, Sir William Penn Symons, had set up his camp at the base of Talana Hill.

In Natal, Penn Symons and his counterpart, General George White, were equally unconcerned about the tens of thousands of burghers surrounding them from nearly every direction, and had decided to divide their already woefully inadequate force. Of their roughly twelve thousand men, some eight thousand had gone northwestward to the British garrison town of Ladysmith with White and the other four thousand farther north with Penn Symons to Dundee. Both towns were beyond the curving Tugela River, which Buller had repeatedly warned them not to cross until he arrived.

By the time he reached Ladysmith, White, taking in the stark terrain and the tension that seethed in every town he passed, had quickly realized that he had made a serious mistake. “
Goodbye dear
old lady,” he had written miserably to his wife. “We should have 20,000 more troops in South Africa than we have.” Penn Symons, however, continued to insist that there was no cause for concern and confidently marched his small brigade even farther north than Ladysmith, to Dundee, where he planned to set up camp.

In Dundee, Penn Symons ran his brigade much as he had in India. He hosted guest nights in the regimental mess so that his officers might bring their wives, encouraged his men to wear their scarlet and green dress uniforms, and cheerfully discussed plans for Christmas dinner in Pretoria. Even as his scouts warned him that the Boers had begun to descend upon Dundee, Penn Symons scoffed that no Boer commando would dare to attack a British brigade, no matter its size. “
I feel perfectly safe,” he coolly told the agitated officers under his command. “I am dead against retreating.”

At 5:00 on the morning of October 20, after a night of rain so heavy the British were certain it would deter any man, even the Boers, from scaling the hills surrounding their camp, a shell suddenly rent the quiet morning air.
Penn Symons was just about to sit down to his breakfast when the second shell thundered down in the midst of his tents, missing his own by only a few yards.
Outraged by the Boers’ impudence, he smoked a cigarette as he began issuing orders, commanding his men to train their guns on Talana Hill.

For Botha and his commando, watching from the same hill on which Penn Symons had set his sights, the entire British brigade, racing from tent to tent, scrambling to respond to the attack, made a stunningly easy target.
No man among them, however, was more conspicuous than Penn Symons himself, who insisted that his aide-de-camp ride by his side, holding a dashing scarlet pennant. Within minutes, nearly every inch of ground surrounding the camp was, in the words of one British soldier, “
literally rising in dust from the bullets, and the din echoing between the hill and the wood below and among the rocks from the incessant fire of the Mausers seemed to blend with every other sound into a long drawn-out hideous roar.”

In the midst of the onslaught, Penn Symons refused to find cover or take even the slightest precaution. Angrily climbing over a low
wall that was impeding his force’s progress, he disappeared from sight, making his way over ground that was littered with the bodies of his men. Minutes later, he returned to his aide-de-camp, his face strained and pale, and tersely informed him that he had been shot in the stomach and was “
severely, mortally, wounded.”

The Boers, who had only three artillery guns to Penn Symons’s eighteen, could not sustain the attack and were finally forced to retreat. But they had accomplished what they had come to do—shatter their enemy’s confidence. As Botha’s commando disappeared in the distance, a veil of rain obscuring their tracks on the muddy veld, they left behind more than five hundred British casualties, among them Penn Symons, who lay dying in a hospital tent while his second-in-command, Brigadier General James Yule, hastily ordered his brigade to pack up what they could and flee southward to Ladysmith.
Two days later, a Boer commander taking possession of Dundee would find Penn Symons dead and stand watching, hat in hand, as the fallen officer’s body was sewn into a British flag and buried in the yard of a local English church.

On October 26, nearly a week after the Battle of Talana Hill, Yule and his five thousand men finally reached Ladysmith, following an exhausting and harrowing journey. They quickly learned, however, that they had hardly outmaneuvered the Boers. Not only had the British lost another three hundred men, wounded and dead, in the Battle of Elandslaagte, less than twenty miles away, but George White’s regiment was also completely surrounded. Worse, the Boer force deploying around Ladysmith was not eight thousand strong but twenty thousand.

As he had been in Dundee, Louis Botha was situated on a prominent hill overlooking Ladysmith, ready for the battle to begin. This time, however, the order to fire would come not from the commando’s leader, his old friend and mentor, Lucas Meyer, but from Botha himself. Soon after reaching Ladysmith, Meyer had fallen ill and Botha had quickly been chosen to take command, making him the youngest Boer commander in the war. “
He had already won confidence all round by the clearness of his views and the intrepidity of his
actions,” the Irish journalist and activist Michael Davitt, who covered the Boers during the war, wrote of Botha, “and his promotion to the command in question became exceedingly popular, especially among the younger and more ardent Boers.”

The Battle of Ladysmith lasted only a day, but it had devastating consequences for the British. It began on the morning of October 30, and by the time it ended that night, the British had lost twelve hundred men, a tenth of their troops in Ladysmith. Perhaps most stunning of all, the British army had been forced to retreat, and they now found themselves under siege, their water supply cut off, railroad links and telegraph lines severed, and their only hope Sir Redvers Buller, who had yet to even land in Cape Town.

After the battle, Botha did not stop to celebrate, or even rest. Leaving a few thousand burghers to guard Ladysmith, he and Joubert turned their attention to a small town named Estcourt, forty miles south, where a British force of some twenty thousand was rumored to be headed after landing in Cape Town. Now that Ladysmith was under siege, Estcourt was the new front for the war.

Botha knew the region well. He had been born nearby and had grown up herding cattle over hundreds of miles of its scrubby grassland. The British, on the other hand, knew almost nothing about Estcourt or its surroundings, and had no idea what tactical opportunities or dangers it held. By the time Buller’s men reached Natal, they would be exhausted from a long journey, disoriented by their strange new surroundings and shocked by their recent losses to an enemy that, until only a few days before, they had believed to be hopelessly unequal to the task of fighting the British army. Most of them still refused to acknowledge that the war would not be over by Christmas, when in fact, the Boers were determined to prove, the new arrivals’ bloodshed and hardships were just beginning.

CHAPTER 7