Granted, this is not exactly a new release (it’s almost as old as I am), but being a Bookgeek sometimes means grabbing that book you have been meaning to read for ages and then telling the world about it. Thomas Pakenham made his name writing about the Europeans in Africa, firstly with this volume and then with the ‘prequel’, The Scramble for Africa. As a student of history, I always felt I knew too little about the Boer War, often seen in retrospect as being the first ‘modern’ war and a harbinger of some of the horrors experienced in World War One. I knew Winston Churchill was gallivanting around in South Africa as a journalist, at one point getting captured by the Boers; I knew Baden-Powell, creator of the Scouting movement was involved; I knew there were some sieges (Mafeking, Ladysmith, Kimberley); and I knew that the British invented the concentration camp. Clearly there were some gaps to fill in!

If you are interested in the topic and have your own gaps, you can’t beat Pakenham’s account. He covers the politics, the personalities and the military campaigns in impressive detail. The first surprise for me was that the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Alfred Milner, in league with the owners of the lucrative new gold and diamond mines, set out to manufacture a political case for a war that he decided was necessary in order to change the balance of power in Southern Africa. By provoking disagreements with the Boer nation of the Transvaal over the political rights of non-Boer, mostly British immigrants (Uitlanders), and over the rights of coloured British subjects, he got the backing of the British Cabinet – but in the negotiations that followed, he deliberately prevented settlements by moving the goalposts. At the dawn of the age of instant communication, he had a huge amount of power to determine events – and he did indeed get his war, though it did not go remotely as he had imagined it would.

The Boer War was a new kind of war, an asymetric war – the big British batallions, used to fighting actions against poorly equipped native forces in Africa and India, marching to fight against the independently-minded Boers, fighting with no uniforms and exceptional mobility, and equipped with the latest Mauser rifles and Kruppe field guns from Germany. Deciding to take the fight to the enemy, they invaded the British colony of Natal, laying seige to key towns and engaging the British deep in their own territory. Many of the battles that followed were a taste of the trench warfare that was to blight Europe in the Great War – both sides fired smokeless ammo, meaning that well entrenched troops could be deadly while never revealing themselves to their foes. Throw in barbed wire and the forerunners of the machinegun, and the balance of warfare was tilted drastically in favour of the defending side. It took the British Army, mired in political machinations between rival ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ camps, quite some time and the loss of many lives before it evolved the tactics necessary to take on the Boers – and it was not helped by numerous and striking instances of incompetence by many formation and unit commanders, often but not always under fire (the decision to change the transport system, made by Lord Roberts from the comfort of a desk, was to have serious consequences).

The invasion of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State by the British did not end the war, but saw it enter a new phase of guerrilla engagements and raids, and led the British to criss-cross the country with blockhouses and barbed wire in an attempt to constrain the Boer fighters, as well as to imprison women and children in awful disease-ridden conditions that were one of the true scandals of the war. The end, when it came, was anticlimactic – by virtue of applying overwhelming force (the largest British army since the Crimea), the Boers had been ground in to dust, lost their independence and their statehood (but the coloured subjects of the British, whose rights were allegedly one of the causes for war, were conveniently forgotten).

Pakenham chose an ideal time to write this book, the late 70s – the men who ran the war were all long dead, the papers he needed were available in govenment archives, and importantly, private soldiers from both sides who had fought in the war were still alive for him to talk to in person. It would not be possible to achieve the same feat now – and a great feat it is, a very humane and balanced account which avoids both patriotic drum-banging or post-Imperial hand-wringing, which recognises the suffering of both sides, and which never loses site of the fate of the natives in this so-called ‘White Man’s War’. Highly recommended.

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