Boer War ghosts roam plain

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

Boer War ghosts roam plain
2010-07-01 11:55

Magersfontein - Springboks bound amongst the thorn bushes of Magersfontein during a sun-filled South African day.

But local people say that the night belongs to the ghosts of Scottish soldiers who were cut down by Boer bullets in a battle here more than 100 years ago.

A Celtic Cross memorial dedicated to the dead of the Highland Brigade sits atop Magersfontein Koppie.

The view across the veld from the rocky hill looks just as it might have done that December day in 1899 - a vast, flat expanse of beige grass, boulders and small trees.

The Boer trenches from where withering gunfire tore into the marching, kilted Highlanders still lie at the foot of the hill.

"Scotland is poorer in men but richer in heroes," the inscription on the memorial reads.

The Anglo-Boer War battle took place during the Boer siege of Kimberley, a strategic diamond mining town. A British relief column advanced along the Cape railway line and in three earlier clashes, forced the Boer commandos to pull back.

The Boers planned to make a stand at Magersfontein, an outcrop about 30km south of Kimberley. But instead of defending from the heights of the koppie, as the British assumed they would, they dug camouflaged trenches around its base.

Hundreds dead

For two days, the British poured artillery fire on the hill. At dawn on December 11, the Black Watch advanced in massed ranks. Unaware of the Boer trench line, they were 400m from the hill when their foes opened up. They were cut down in scores while the bagpipers played on.

The Highland Brigade commander, Major General AG Wauchope, was among the first to die.

The Gordon Highlanders were sent in as a second wave only to suffer a similar fate. All day the wounded lay under the beating sun, crying for water while Boer snipers picked them off.

After a Boer counter-attack, confused orders led to the troops retreating. Casualties lay on the battlefield all night although stretcher bearers ventured out with lanterns to rescue those they could.
A truce was called the next day.

The British withdrew to the Modder River and it was not until February that the siege of Kimberley was broken.

The Highland Brigade suffered 202 dead at Magersfontein, and 37 soldiers from the Guards and other units who also fought in the action were killed. More than 660 British troops were wounded.

History preserved

The Boer forces lost 87 men, including 23 Scandinavian volunteers. All have their own memorials at different sites of the battlefield.

Marta van Schalkwyk has run the Bagpipe Lodge and cafe on the hill for the past 30 years.

Asked about legends that the place is haunted and pipes can sometimes be heard at night, she said: "I cannot see ghosts but my son, he can. Many times he has. Men with rifles, marching forward. He says 'Mama, I don't like it here'."

Many visitors from Scotland, England and Scandinavia have come over the years, she said.

"People say 'I want to see where my grandfather died'. All the names are in the museum."

As well as plaques with the names of the dead, the little museum has guns and equipment from the battle and photographs from both sides. An audiovisual recreation gives a chilling account of the dawn advance and subsequent carnage.

One photo shows an unnamed adolescent drummer boy. The Black Watch memorial lists a Drummer W Milne among the dead.

Modern parallels

As a conflict where modern and old-fashioned tactics and strategy collided, the Boer War has long held interest for military historians.

The troops of the mighty British Empire were left blundering after fast-moving, irregular troops defending their homes.

US expert Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute, speaking at a security conference in the United States in June, drew a parallel between Britain's experience in the Boer War and the current American involvement in Afghanistan.

"My worry is that Afghanistan becomes America's Boer War," Singer was quoted as saying by the Washington Post. "Great Britain got engaged in a grinding war where by the end of it, its definition of success was just to get out."

British troops, including the Black Watch and the Scots and Coldstream Guards, are also fighting in Afghanistan.

Asked if a long-ago battle between Europeans meant anything to black South Africans who had to wait nearly another 100 years for their freedom, Van Schalkwyk paused then said:

"It's not very nice what happened here. I just ask myself - why?"

[Bob Molloy]

There is a one word answer to Marta van Schalkwyk's question. The word is greed. Put simply, the Brits who at that stage ruled most of the known world and certainly owned the Seven Seas, wanted control of the newly discovered gold fields in the Transvaal.
The dirt poor De Beers family, on whose land the first gold was found, were bought out for next to nothing by the first entrepeneurs but their name still carries on in the mighty mining empire headed by the De Beers.
In those days the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were autonomous Boer republics. As such their very existence was an insult to the land grabbing Brits. The diamond fields had already been wrested from them with the removal of the Kimberley district. The discovery of gold called for a bigger effort. With a little pressure from Cecil Rhodes and his vassal, Leander Starr Jameson who led a raid into Boer territory, the Brits soon had a war going. They should have been warned by the outcome of the Jameson raid. That whole ragtag bunch was rounded up in hours by a small group of boer farmers who should have blown their heads off when they had the chance, but instead did the gentlemanly thing and returned them as prisoners to the Cape.
In the first 18 months of the Boer War a few thousand farmers on horseback met and defeated the armed and trained might of the British Empire, a force of some 300,000 professional soldiers. 
And that would have been the end of that except that Whitehall couldn't possibly allow the two upstart little nations deal them a bloody nose and get away with it.
Their solution: scorched earth, ethnic cleansing and concentration camps for the women and children (where more than 17,000 died of disease and malnutrition). The Brits burned all the farms, killed the stock and carried off the families to an imprisonment that would end the lives of nearly a quarter of the population, a holocaust that per head of population far outstripped anything seen in World War Two.
The boer commandos, living on what they could scavenge from the bush, fought on for almost another two years before a ceasefire was called at Vereeniging. By that time the Brits had almost half a million men in the field. The armistice forced the boer republics into union with the Cape and Natal, giving the Brits not only the gold but also the land. The Afrikaners got a vote. They spent the next four decades mourning their dead and politically consolidating to the point where they could legally take back their country.
That was 1948.
The rest, as they say, is history. Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

[Michael Alexander]

One can only wonder how different things might have been if those two republics had remained intact and not been involved in a Boer war...

One figure banded about, was the fact that there would have been about 4 million extra Afrikaaners in Africa today........

[henniek]

Re ; Boer war ghosts roam plains.
I am told that the Scottish ghosts occasionally play their bagpipes in the vicinity of Magersfontein kopje . Apparently confirmed by scores of people over the past 100 odd years
A historian who is also an engineer of repute , irregularly organizes a "ghost tour " in and around Kimberley . As it was said that one can not depend on the ghosts to perform on that specific night that people are on a ghost tour , he occasionally organized a  bagpipe player to hide on Magersfontein kopje who played a short piece of music , very softly and barely audible ,  while the people on the tour overlook the area in the light of a full moon. Can you imagine the frightened tourists?
I forgot the Historians name , but he designed the much improved steam locomotive . Named the "Red Devil" which was much more efficient than the ordinary loco's used by SAR .