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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'A precious and rare publication … The moving stories of love, longing and suffering provide valuable new insights into tumultuous times that helped shape South Africa.' – Max du Preez It is nine months this evening since I last saw the light in my own house, when I had to tear myself away from all that is dear to me. And today is also my little son's birthday. Oh, how I long for home. So wrote Michael Muller in 1901 as he gazed at the lights of Cape Town from a ship bound for Bermuda, after months of internment in a British POW camp in Simon's Town. The camps were full, so Boer prisoners were being sent to other parts of the empire. Michael's brothers, Chris and Pieter, were exiled to Ceylon while Lool was held in the Green Point camp in Cape Town. Remarkably, three of the brothers kept diaries, the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. The scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the legendary Magersfontein battle, the rain-dashed pages written by Lool in Colesberg, and the angry words penned by Michael about his treatment at Surrender Hill have the urgency of men determined to go on record. When Beverley Roos-Muller began to explore writing about the Boer experience of the war, she read the tiny diary of Michael, grandfather of her husband, Ampie Muller. It led her to the discovery of the other diaries and many more documents. She also records the brothers' difficult return home and examines the consequences for South Africa of the bitterness this strife evoked. This is a beautifully told account of the fellowship of four brothers in war, their capture and eventual recovery.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Dedication
Contents
The Muller Family Tree
The Muller Brothers
Introduction
Some explanatory notes
PART I: WAR BEGINS, 1899
1. A perfect shot
2. Four Free State brothers ride to war
3. Magersfontein’s big victory – Chris and Pieter
4. Digging in: the cannons say good morning
5. Fight and flight
6. Their last stand: the chaotic Prinsloo surrender
PART II: LOOL’S WAR, 1900
7. Cheerfully off to Colesberg
8. Hunting for horses
9. Ladybrand: farewell to war
PART III: CAPTIVES OF WAR, 1900
10. The Great Vlei of Green Point: Lool’s last days
11. The shock of surrender – Chris, Pieter and Michael
12. Simon’s Town: a tent with a view – Michael
13. Food fears: tinned cat and a ruined Christmas feast – Michael
PART IV: INTO EXILE, 1900-1901
14. ‘The land weeps’: Chris and Pieter to Ceylon
15. Deadly disease in Ceylon’s camp
16. Ships, storms and fire in the Cape – Michael
17. Michael’s unspeakable voyage to Bermuda
18. Touchy days in Ceylon – Chris
19. A prisoner in Bermuda – Michael
20. Chris struggles with the Boer ‘boys’
21. Linked by letters: Michael on Darrell’s Island
PART V: GOING HOME, 1902
22. ‘The Peace’ and unrest in Ceylon
23. Chris’s long trek home
24. Back from Bermuda: Michael’s return
PART VI: AFTERWARDS
25. The ugly consequences
26. The war’s aftermath for the Mullers
EPILOGUE: The enigma of Magersfontein
Notes
References, resources and further reading
Original letters and documents
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Imprint page
Four brothers ride to war, 1899-1902
BEVERLEY ROOS-MULLER
Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg • Cape Town
This book is dedicated to
Ampie (Adriaan Diederichs Muller)
(in memoriam)
and
Nandi Roos and Anneke Muller
Contents
The Muller Family
Names in bold: writers of the Muller war diaries
The Muller Brothers
Introduction
FOUR BOER BROTHERS, all young adults, readied themselves late in 1899 to defend their sovereign country, the Free State, against the invading British Empire. Three of them kept diaries, the only known instance that this happened in this war. Their powerful and often painfully honest daily entries disclose their remarkable voices within the context of the great and awful circumstances that had suddenly overtaken them.
The gradual discovery of these fraternal diaries, and their other war documents, was particularly significant in that it offered a unique opportunity to examine and contrast how very differently each brother responded to the challenges of war, capture and exile. It is also possible to see their family’s struggle to survive as a close reflection of the war’s effect on the small Boer population.
This band of brothers from the eastern Free State were Michael Muller, the eldest, then Chris (both of them already married, with very young children), Pieter, and Lodewyk (Lool), the youngest, aged 22 when the war began.
And what remarkably literate, expressive brothers those Mullers were! Full of need to capture their experiences (all written in Afrikaans-Nederlands), sometimes in the thick of battle: the scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the Magersfontein battle in December 1899, and in the days thereafter, under fire; the rain-dashed pages written by the youngest brother, Lool, at Colesberg; the angry, tightly written diatribe penned by Michael about the insults of his treatment at Surrender Hill – these have the urgency of men determined to go on record. All fought bravely, and all were captured as prisoners of war (POWs). One of them did not survive.
Michael, a gentle, pious man, was not a natural soldier, though he was a stoic one. The war would shake him to the core and ruin him; his grandchildren said that he never really recovered from it.
Chris, then 28, the second son, was a natural leader, confident and handsome. A brave soldier, he rose rapidly through the ranks – unlike in the British army, officers were chosen by their men, for they would not follow someone they did not trust. He quickly became a veldkornet (equivalent to the British rank of captain), and then commandant (similar to lieutenant-colonel) of the Ladybrand commando, a rank his elder, Commandant APJ Diederichs, had held at the time he was killed at Magersfontein. These two families not only fought together, but later became even closer, through marriage.
We know less about Pieter, who did not keep a diary, although his brothers wrote about him, and he was mentioned in their war letters. It seems he was a sturdy and reliable man.
The cheerful, much-loved youngest, Lool, rode off to war in high spirits, as do many young men, thinking this might be his great adventure. It was, for a short while; then the critical loss of his horse and his ensuing capture woke him to harsh reality. His last months in captivity were a heartbreak for him, and a reflection of how the effects of war can bring low the strongest spirit.
The Commissiepoort Debating and Sharp-shooting Society, 1898. Lool, with a moustache and bow tie, is seated in the front row, between two of his sisters, Martha and Hannie. Chris is confidently in the centre, also in a bow tie. Eldest brother Michael is to his left, wearing the bowler hat. Pieter is next to Michael. Directly behind the three brothers, in the centre, is paterfamilias Petrus Johannes Muller, in hat and dark glasses.
Famous war diaries are frequently written in grandiose terms by the well connected or those with an agenda. When written by those less important, less well known, such as the Muller brothers, they give an unabridged view of exactly what the writers experienced. These are the authentic, unedited voices of what happened and when it happened.
It is arresting to see how often they differ from the formal histories. Their authenticity is, on the whole, implicit, for they are writing without the benefit of hindsight, and there is no foreknowledge of the outcome of the battles and the prisons and the exiles, and the final victories or defeats. All that exists is in the present, and that is all they record.
When captured in 1900, as all four brothers were, their diaries gave them the only agency they had left. They did not shy away from detailing all the large and little events, the many curiosities, the indignities they experienced; they honestly recorded their intimate thoughts and turbulent emotions. Their witness forms part of that endless human chain of yearning to be heard, on parchment or paper scraps, cut into concreted walls, hidden in attics or under the floorboards of ghettos: the sounds of the silenced, made visible.
Of the three brothers who left diaries, by far the most fulsome was Chris, who left eight surviving diaries from the beginning of his war to its end in 1902, including his return from exile. An additional diary of his, written in mid-1900, was lost, perhaps mislaid in the post, for as he completed each one, he sent it to his parents for safekeeping (on the whole, the postal service functioned with impressive efficiency). Fortunately, a memoir of Chris’s close friend, Andries Meyer, helped complete his record.
Colleen Muller Loesch, the granddaughter of Chris Muller, inherited all his war material. These boxes of mementos included souvenirs, letters and photographs from Chris’s POW days in Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), and even the bandana, flecked with blood, that he used to bind up his wounded leg in 1900. She granted me the right to use the contents of all eight of his diaries, covering the full two and a half years of his war, including his baptism of fire at the legendary battle of Magersfontein, a famous victory by the Boers in December 1899.
The pages of Lool’s single diary, a sturdy notebook, are filled halfway, from the beginning of his war in January 1900 until his early and tragic death in Green Point camp in mid-1900. During his active service it is written in calm, measured script, much as if he were sitting in a classroom: this seems remarkable under such dangerous circumstances. After his capture in March 1900, however, his handwriting becomes quite uneven, and never quite returns to his earlier, smooth cursive style.
A quality notebook, Lool’s is the smartest of all the Muller diaries. The inside is well preserved. His entries are clear and well formed under the circumstances, easier to read than the diaries of his elder brothers, Michael and Chris.
After his death, Lool’s partially filled diary was cared for by a fellow POW, who took it with him to the POW camp on St Helena. When the war ended, Lool’s friend, Dawid Kriel, who had been with him on commando, wrote down the details of his death and funeral, and returned the diary and Lool’s few belongings to his parents. Such acts of duty and kindness, performed so often by surviving comrades-in-arms after wars have ended, are of extraordinary value to bereaved families. Often they provide the only direct information and connection to those loved ones severed forever, in sad circumstances. The grateful Muller family would certainly have noted that Lool’s last coherent thoughts, in his diary, were of longing for home. Despite its great value to his parents, his diary was later mislaid for decades, and rediscovered by chance only while preparing this book – so easily does such precious material vanish.
Michael began his diary at the end of July 1900, when he was captured. From that moment, he kept a complete record of his captivity until he was shipped off as a POW to Bermuda nearly a year later, from Cape Town. He recorded the date and day of the week, the weather (as a farmer, this was a natural obsession), the view, anything that struck him as either important or curious, and his deepest feelings.
It is remarkable he was able to capture so much, for his cloth-covered diary is surprisingly slim. Smaller than his hand (it measures 13,5 x 8 cm), it would have fitted into a shirt pocket (which would have helped to conceal and conserve it), and so slender that it seems barely possible it contains more than a hundred pages of writing in his carefully formed though not especially skilled hand.
After he had filled the entire notebook, Michael began to use a few tiny sheets of almost transparent paper, gleaned from somewhere (paper was at a premium in the camps), carefully folded into tiny double pages, tucked inside the back of the cloth book. Hardly robust; how it survived is a mystery. A magnifying glass is needed to read it, and some words are so close to the eroded edges of the pages that they can no longer easily be deciphered.
After the war, Michael wrote over his original entries in ink, to ‘fix’ the words on the page – diaries were usually written in pencil, which was less likely to run during wet weather; also, carrying ink and a pen was difficult on the move. The rewrite was quite a labour for him, and it is clear that his handwriting had either improved by the time he inked it, or that the roughness of his earlier hand reflected the roughness of his POW days.
During my research, a missing page of Michael’s diary – a frail, minute scrap of paper – was found squashed at the bottom of a box sent from Bloemfontein. I remember the exact moment I pulled it out, without too much interest, and then instantly realised what it was. I had spent years poring over Michael’s original diary (inherited by his eldest son Pieter, born in 1897, then passed on to Pieter’s son, Ampie, my husband) and was intimately familiar with its size and his handwriting; I had known that there was a missing page because of his meticulously kept dates.
Those tiny, fragile pages, half the size of a playing card, when placed together with the other loose pages tucked inside his diary’s back cover, fitted together absolutely precisely, as if they had never been parted. Where this small single sheet, folded over, had been, and why it had been parted from the original diary, is unfathomable. These are the moments a writer of history lives for, and a prickly reminder of how fragile our stories are if they are not preserved.
Another discovered treasure was a thin journal belonging to Nelie, Michael’s devoted wife. She had written it many years after the war, when she was widowed, and much of it is domestic. But there are some crucial pages about her war experience, on the run with her two tiny boys between enemy lines, starving and frightened. It is especially precious, for it is the only direct example of a Muller woman’s voice in this war.
There are, too, letters between the brothers, and to Nelie from her husband Michael in his POW camp, and other documents and photographs, that amplify all their stories.
These are the brothers who wrote about the war, those brave and unforgiving years now made present in their words.
The diaries: Michael’s, top left (his name written on the back); one of Chris’s, written in Ceylon (bottom left); and Lool’s (bottom right), with the 1898 Debating Society photograph. This is the only time the diaries written by the three Muller brothers came together, more than a century later. (Photo by author.)
*
When asked why I wrote this book about these four Boer brothers, there are two answers, one quite grand, the other practical: I was gently handed the task.
The first, grander reason was drawn from something that Archbishop Desmond Tutu once told me, as he has so many others: that unless we understand each other’s stories, we will never understand each other. His wise perception is ingrained into this book: to provide new insight into an old war, one that so deeply affected so many, with long-lasting consequences.
Most English-language books written in the decades after the Boer War of 1899-1902 reflect the Anglophile position, partly because the Empire eventually won, and also because English historians were unable to read the language of the Boers or were reluctant to access their stories. So a one-sided and often deeply inaccurate view of them was offered, even in the best histories. There was an almost entire lack of understanding of Boer culture, how their army operated, and even, earlier on, how super-skilled they were in the saddle and with a rifle – a misjudgement that was soon painfully discovered.
The Boers were far from the ‘wild and woolly’ figures so parodied in British newspapers, easy propaganda that ridiculed their enemy – even though it then raises the question of why it was so difficult to conquer them! The Boer army was a citizens’ army that also included volunteers from other countries and the Cape Colony, and had no mighty Empire to resupply them. After months on commando in the veld, they were indeed in rags. Yet photographs of the Mullers, even while in captivity, show their pride in who they were, their sense of dignity.
The four Muller brothers had been ‘properly brought up’; decent living was important – manners, education, the correct outfits for church and outings. The Free State was, in the late 1800s, a pious and ordered community with mutually beneficial relationships with its Sotho neighbours, who were trading partners and provided vital seasonal workers. The Free State also had good relations with the Cape Colony, and especially welcomed the many incomers who were of Scottish descent, with similar religious background; some of those Scottish families fought on the Boer side.
The agricultural, settled Free Staters considered themselves very different from their northern neighbour, the richer Transvaal, with its local prospectors, gold-hunting foreigners and mining towns that were typical of wilder, frontier societies. These two nations, among the smallest in the world, were separate and sovereign and, on the whole, didn’t always much care for each other.
The British had assumed that the Free State would not support the Transvaal in the war; in this, they vastly underestimated the value that the Boers placed on loyalty to their own allies.
My second and more direct reason for writing this book is because my husband, Ampie (Professor Adriaan Diederichs Muller), was the grandson of Michael, eldest of the four Muller brothers. Soon after we met in Cape Town in 1997, he showed me a tiny booklet – the war diary of his grandfather. Naturally, I ignored it: the cramped, spidery writing looked indecipherable, and we were both deeply involved in our work, and each other.
Yet, while preparing to write about another freedom struggle, it occurred to me to look within this little diary’s covers, and I began to appreciate Michael’s engaging war story. His diary, and a group photograph of a debating society pasted to a ragged mount, were the only two documents with which I began this complex journey of tracking and sourcing information, after more than a century had passed. The discovery of Lool’s diary, and then those of Chris, and Nelie Muller’s little journal, all lay ahead, along with so much more material. Luckily, extended families often have someone whose task it is to be ‘the rememberer’, and families everywhere tend to cache war material, those mementos that connect them to a greater history beyond their own, individually lived experiences.
Ampie, who was born in 1930, had known some of that war generation, including both his Boer grandfathers – Michael Muller and Jan Diederichs, his maternal grandfather – both of whom had fought and both of whom he adored. He also remembered Chris Muller, and had attended his funeral. This war was not distant history to Ampie, and was part of the reason he devoted his life to human rights, becoming a co-founder of the South African Centre for Conflict Resolution.
He relished taking me to meet his enormous family of Mullers and Diederichs scattered throughout the country – I teased him that he seemed to be related to just about everyone we met, as so many Afrikaners are. We visited battlefields and graveyards, sites of POW camps, archives in South Africa and in the UK, former family farms, and ports from which the brothers had sailed into exile. Many of Ampie’s wonderful elderly aunts (alas, no longer alive), of whom he was so proud, generously provided insight and detail – for they had known the survivors. I took many notes while talking to them, and also requested that, where possible, they write down their recollections.
As the recorder of the Muller war stories, I was not perhaps the most obvious candidate despite my being a writer, and having married into the family. I come from an Irish family, so could not speak a word of Afrikaans until I was sent, at the age of 12, to an Afrikaans boarding school in the Boland. On my arrival at the school, some (by no means all) boarders accused me of being responsible for the Boer War. This was awkward: I had no idea what they were talking about. We learned nothing at school about this war1 although we heard plenty, during long, dull sessions in history, about the Great Trek, which we all wished had been much shorter.
This now recovered story of the four Muller brothers is offered as part of what Irish philosopher Richard Kearney called ‘a hospitality of narratives’: different and informed perspectives of shared events. For those who would like to more fully understand the Boer War, their diaries offer an unprecedented opportunity.
And it is worth wondering about their parents, and what sort of people they were, to have raised sons who, in the middle of the most chaotic and life-threatening moments of their lives, could keep their heads for long enough to record, daily, their experiences, thoughts and emotions.
Diaries can be both fascinating and boring. Battles are full of excitement and vigour but war is a long affair. The endless days of waiting for ‘the next thing’ to happen as soldiers, followed by the brothers’ drawn-out months as POWs in South Africa and then in exile, were static by definition. Many entries are as dull as ‘Today it is raining’ or ‘Nothing happened’. Unpacking them demanded much dexterity, to penetrate the core of the brothers’ stories: their hopes and dreams, their loves, their challenges and courage, and their grief.
Their own experiences were forged in a particular war; yet on a broader, more universal level, these remarkable Muller brothers well reflect the agonies of war anywhere, at any time.
Dr Beverley Roos-Muller
2023
Some explanatory notes
ALTHOUGH THE WAR of 1899-1902 affected most of South Africa, it was and is referred to as the ‘Boer War’, a term that is historic and widely recognised. This book is particularly about the Boers’ war, and not a British version of events, of which plenty exist.
I have, wherever possible, included information about the disastrous impact of the war on black South Africans; they certainly paid a terrible price, then and later.
I use the term English, in italics, to describe the British, for that is how the Boers referred to them (die Engelse). They would often refer separately to the Scots, whom they admired as a fighting force.
The Orange Free State was one of two Boer republics invaded by the British (the other being the Transvaal), and was so referred to in official discourse; but it was more generally referred to simply as the Vrystaat (Free State), the term all the Mullers used throughout their diaries.
The imperial measurements of the day – miles, yards and so on – as well as currency have been retained. So too have place names such as Basutoland (today Lesotho).
Very occasionally there are terms included that are considered pejorative and/or racist today but were at the time officially, and widely, used. Where essential for accuracy, they have been kept in the body of this story, marked with the caveat [sic]. The author appreciates the offensiveness of such terms and identifies with the sensitivity with which they need to be addressed and contextualised.
Map of the Orange Free State and surrounding region prior to and during the war
The natural boundaries of the Orange Free State, founded and recognised in 1854, met at the confluence of the Vaal and Orange rivers. After Kimberley’s diamonds had been discovered in 1871, that area was ‘annexed’ by the UK as a Crown Colony. The land between the newer frontier and the earlier one is therefore shown as contested, running to very slightly east of Kimberley and Magersfontein. There was no rail line between Kimberley and Bloemfontein as a result of the disputed annexation: the sole rail route from the Cape to Johannesburg’s gold lay through Bloemfontein.
PART I
WAR BEGINS
1899
1
A perfect shot
AT THE EXACT MOMENT that his commander is killed in the early morning of 11 December 1899, Chris Muller is crouched on the ridge of the Magersfontein koppie, ducking under a hail of bullets. This big battleground is 19 miles south of Kimberley, and is now a frontline of the war.
Chris sees the old man drop onto the flat veld before him: the bullet has torn straight through his heart. Streaking through the noise, dust and heat, the men caught on barbed wire, the wounded mules bellowing, the huge cannons thundering, the lyddite smashing, it is a perfect shot.
Commandant APJ Diederichs senses at once that his wound is fatal. It thuds into the centre of his chest, spreading his rich arterial blood across his white shirt and the lower whiskers of his white beard. He has been in war before, and has seen men and beasts killed often enough to sense this is a mortal shot: he has no more time.
The veteran Ladybrander slips to the ground and releases his old rifle, a Martini Henry as familiar to him as his own hand. The long barrel hits the veld. With his final breath he turns to his friend, Veldkornet Jan de Wet, and says, ‘Buurman, ek het ’n doodskoot.’Neighbour, I have been mortally shot.
He is 58 years old, a father and grandfather. He looks older.
Under ceaseless fire, Chris sees the dreadful sequel. Jan de Wet, brother of the famous General Christiaan de Wet, falls too.
On that day the two men die together as they have lived: neighbours, kinsmen and close friends, with adjoining farms in the distant, lovely eastern Free State. They breathe their last at one another’s side on this deathfield.
It is a hard beginning of a long day of blood, heat, and victory for the Boers.
Commandant APJ Diederichs of the Ladybrand commando, 1897.
The young soldier on the ridge, Chris, is also seeing his destiny. In the coming months he will be baptised in the field, first as Ladybrand veldkornet, then as trusted commandant, replacing Diederichs. Still in his 20s, he is relatively young for such a heavy responsibility. Boer leaders are usually selected from older, battle-bruised men. But this is not a usual time.
As Chris digs in, he sees (and later records) their wounded:
A Liebenberg also, J Taljaard was wounded by a rock that was thrown up by a shell. G Lourenz was rendered unconscious with a shell. The rest of our burgers go to the south side, where the fighting was the heaviest. We get the news that many known to us have fallen.
Neither he nor his younger brother, Pieter, can rescue their own men yet; the barrage is too great. Like the British army, they will have to wait and see, for no outcome of this battle can be predicted, though it will be legendary, unprecedented – a mighty upset for the English, their greatest loss since the Crimean War of 1853-1856.
Meanwhile, Chris is too busy to think about history. He writes later,
At the foot of our ridge are many horses, shot dead in heaps. From where we sat, we had a good view of the battlefield. In our vicinity, where the battle started and is still continuing, the enemy’s dead and wounded are still lying and those who behave as if they are dead are spread all over the ground. Some of them are trying to stop the bleeding with handkerchiefs. Others cry from the pain.
His ‘good view’ is that of the notorious wide-open natural gap at Magersfontein, prepared beforehand with small stone walls and trenches by the Boers to cut off their enemy, a neat and necessary ruse laid for them by the cunning of veggeneraal (combat general)Koos de la Rey. He had plotted to lure the English into a traditional game trap here: leave open a narrowing space and the hunted animals will head for it. There, you wait. And it had worked.
It is still early morning, a hot day after a cold night. The Boer Ladybranders – including Chris and Pieter – are already tired, having ridden back in the early, sodden hours to the farm nearby to secure their horses and fodder, after the Enslin Siding Skirmish many miles south (closer to Hopetown than Kimberley), hard fought on both sides. They had been weary but content, chattering and watering their horses and readying for rest, before the great booming of guns had reached them. They had had to remount and ride rapidly towards the distinctive koppie of nearby Magersfontein in the dawning light.
Rain, which had fallen heavily, had now stopped; the wet earth looked red, like blood, and smelled fresh.
When they arrived at the battlefield it was already rancid with the spilt odours of war. Commandant Diederichs, a calm, experienced man, now led a group of his Ladybranders forward to the gap.
Boer officers do not sit at the back of a battle. They lead their men, ride or run with them, for these commandos are family: son and brother, uncle and father, grandfather and nephew; neighbour, friend. They have known each other from childhood, and ride out regularly with horses and guns, warming themselves at fires at night on the open veld of the wide Free State. Ladybranders had placed their trust in Diederichs, a vrederegter (justice of the peace), and akinsman and intimate of their esteemed young Free State president, Marthinus Steyn.
It is hard for them to grasp that their commandant is dead; yet in the months to come, his men will place their trust in Chris Muller as he leads them through other, fiercely contested fights.
The night before had been dark with lashing rain, but now the African sun glowers down on the battered hats of the Boers, on the tender skin of the panicking, pink British (the backs of the knees of the Highlanders, wearing kilts, are badly blistered). The worst, the Boers say afterwards, are the screams of frightened, dying men. Lying on the wide field of Magersfontein, these foreigners are pinned down by the Boers, skilled beyond imagining at sharpshooting, for they do not miss a speck of movement.
Their enemy is trapped, hiding behind the thigh-high anthills that are their only cover, crying out for their mothers. They call for water.
The Boers, who are family men, are horrified. This is intolerable.
At dusk, Chris and his men are ordered to climb down from the ridge of the koppie and take up positions in and around the trenches, where they will spend an exhausted, jumpy night, for it is not yet clear who the victor is.
As night falls – late, because it is almost the midsummer solstice – the Boers cannot bear the suffering they hear. Take your men, they say, we will give you safety.
Some of the British troops break that trust, or misunderstand, and, advancing close to the Boer trenches, they open fire. They are shot.
Stop that, says the Boer messenger, and there is another lull filled with the noise of agony, before the dying and wounded can be moved back to their own lines. Many remain.
Later, Captain Fichardt will note in his telegram to President Steyn, sent from Jacobsdal at 10.25 pm, that he had personally counted 24 ambulances lumbering back to the English camp. In his diary, Chris Muller noted them too: ‘The ambulances from both sides are continually busy.’
The Boers have lost about a hundred men, Fichardt tells the president, mainly on the distant side of the gap from the Magersfontein koppie. Here, the Scandinavians,2 a unit of Boer supporters who took up an exposed position on a flattened knoll, have paid a terrible price. They fought until the last of them was overrun; a handful of their survivors were wounded and taken prisoner.
But the English have lost many hundreds more. The famous Black Watch is almost destroyed, Fichardt reports. It is terribly true: the Scotsmen have paid a shocking price for the blunders of the senior English officer on this bad, sad day, and there are traumatised towns in Scotland gradually receiving news of the disaster. The bodies of Scottish soldiers lie in their hundreds on the sandy open veld, far from their green glens.3 The Boers have deep respect for the courage of these Scottish foes.
On the field lies the flaccid, heavy body of the English observation balloon. The Boer men had fretted about it – ‘above it all, is a [hot]-air balloon to spy on us,’ Chris observed – yet it was sent up far too late to be of benefit. It is only one of many costly mistakes the English foes have made.
The corpse of a falcon, shot in the melee, lies bleeding on the field. It is remarked on by those who saw it fall, as not fair game; yet none of this is. Mules that carried the ordnance to the trenches and had no protection lie blasted on the field of death: behind the koppie, hundreds of Boer horses have been killed.
The body of Commandant Diederichs has lain, lifeless, throughout all of this fierce day. When respite comes in the cooling evening, his son, Jan, the young husband and father alongside whom Chris had ridden at Enslin, must bury his father. Men open the ruddy ground with spades and place him carefully alongside the bodies of his comrades.
Jan is a strong man, a quick thinker. He looks around for a marker. He cannot use the stock of his father’s rifle, for that will be needed. He takes a long murgbeen (marrow bone), the strongest bone from an animal carcass, for there are plenty of those. He drives this into the ground next to his father’s shoulder. It will act as a memory marker, and years later he and his siblings will return for their father and carry him home to his eastern Free State farm, where he will be reburied in the soft, receiving soil of his fields at Haltwhistle farm. This long bone will prove to a sceptical Kimberley magistrate (who tries to refuse the reclamation) that this body, is, indeed, that of the most senior Boer to die at Magersfontein.
Telegrams are sent and despatches written in the aftermath, in the lengthening night. Some of them are accurate. President Steyn hears of the great success at Magersfontein, vindicating his controversial choice of the junior combat generalDe la Rey’s tactical planning over that of the more senior general Piet Cronjé. But along with it comes also the grievous news of the death of his Diederichs kinsman, to whom he has personally made a solemn promise, just two days previously, that he will never sign his hand to a surrender. He keeps the promise, never forgetting the dead veteran to whom he made it.4
The president writes telegrams that, as a soldier and friend, he hoped he would never have to send: among them to the newly widowed MMM Diederichs5 on the farm Haltwhistle, near present-day Hobhouse, and to the family of Jan de Wet on the neighbouring farm, Juistzoo. It is a hard thing to have sent men you know and respect to their execution.
The farmhouses of both families will soon be burned to the ground by the enemy.Both will lose children; the De Wets will lose almost everyone.
This day, this epic battle at Magersfontein, left long stains, of both success and slaughter. Chris Muller, newly blooded in battle though not yet wounded, recorded the events in flowing detail that night in his fast, scrawling hand, the first of his war diaries. In his later years, he will write an heroic yet conciliatory poem about this battle, that is also a praise-song to Diederichs.
Meanwhile, it begins. It is almost the end of 1899 and this war inflicted on the Boers is under way. Shots have been fired, widows have already begun to grieve.
Four Muller brothers ride to war from the eastern Free State. Three will survive, though they will be POWs for longer than they were ever in the saddle.
This is a war that nobody wanted, except for the already very rich.
2
Four Free State brothers ride to war
WHEN THE FOUR elder Muller brothers saddled up to defend their country, the Free State, they believed that God and justice were on their side, that a win was inevitable. It was an opinion shared by those around them.
In less than a year, all of them had been captured.
That grim fate was not, of course, in the forefront of their minds in 1899. The certitudes of war – death, separation, long hardship – are seldom in the minds of the still-youthful. Quite the opposite: for them, war may be regarded as an adventure, a chance for new experiences and a proving of their mettle.
At least three of the four brothers shared something of this view. Only the eldest, Michael, dreaded what lay ahead. The energetic yet quietly spoken farmer found it unbearably hard to leave his young family behind, not only because of his affectionate nature but also because they were so vulnerable.
Michael was 33 years old at the end of 1899. Slender and mild mannered, he was the father of a toddler and a new baby – Pieter (Petrus Johannes), born on 2 November 1897, and Chrisjan, born on 13 December 1899. His wife, Nelie (Cornelia Christina, nee Van den Heever) was 21 years old at the time, barely 16 when she had married; it would be a long and loving union, but never prosperous.
The second brother of five, Chris, was in his late 20s. Handsome and a born leader with a charismatic flair, he was also married, with a daughter, Joey (Johanna), and an infant son, who died in the first months of the war, early in 1900.
Then there was Pieter, 26, the middle brother, a responsible and serious-minded soldier who was sight-impaired.
The fourth was cheery, lively Lool, 22, full of the nervous energy of a young man keen for excitement.
The fifth and youngest brother, Daan, was aged 9.
There were also five sisters: Non, Hannie, Minnie, Mart and Ellie, most of them married.
The Muller brothers joined, at different times, about 20 000 fit-for-service Free State burgers and about 30 000 more from the Transvaal, as well as some foreign Boer-supporting troops – far more than the British War Office’s estimates had guessed at, which would prove one of many costly misjudgements for them.
Chris and Pieter were the first to leave, both dressed in semi-uniform (Boers had no ‘official’ uniform; as civilian soldiers they wore their own clothes into battle), riding off together to the muster at Hexrivier farm in the Ladybrand district.
Battle ready, November 1899: Chris is at the far right, standing, with Pieter on his right. The others are (according to Chris’s diary) Johnny Brink, Z and J Joubert, G Delport, E Kriel and G Laurenz. (Photograph: The War Museum of the Boer Republics, Bloemfontein)
From there, Chris left with Pieter and his commando on 26 November 1899 for the western front of the Free State war; soon they would take part in the triumphant but bloody battle of Magersfontein.
Lool, the youngest, left on 15 January 1900 for Colesberg, raring to get stuck into the enemy.
These Mullers had been residents of the eastern Free State for a single generation. The father of the ten Muller children, Petrus Johannes Muller, born on 7 May 1844, was a direct descendant of the original Muller stamvader (founding father), Antonie Michael Muller, who had arrived in the Cape in 1753, and some of whose descendants were still living on their original Riversdale farm, Zeekoegat, in the Cape Colony.6
In 1876, along with one of his brothers, Frikkie (George Frederick), Petrus moved with his wife Martha (nee De Jager) and other family members to the fertile Ladybrand district of the Free State, where he bought the farm Palmyra.
By the time the many children of this large Muller family had reached adulthood, their branch of the family was settled in the Commissiepoort region of the Ladybrand district, with a well ordered way of living. They were literate, devout, hard-working and agricultural-middle-class, well off by farming standards. They and their neighbours were very far from the witless peasants described in the British press and, less forgivably, by British officials who, had they read their colonial reports more carefully, should have known better.
The home of these Mullers lay in the lovely borderlands of the eastern Free State, alongside a seam of the Maluti mountains that divided them from the high kingdom of then-Basutoland(today Lesotho) along the Caledon River. This border had always been porous, and that would prove useful to the Boers during the coming months and years of war.
The great Sotho king Moshoeshoe, after decades of strife and sometimes bloody battles with local tribes and Boers but never having been vanquished, had established his permanent ‘mountain kingdom’, though ruling over less land than his ancestors had controlled. It was now a British Protectorate and outside the reach of any further invasion.
The local Boers had settled into a working relationship with Basutoland, often with good trading, farming and political connections – in the eastern section, most Boers spoke Sotho from childhood.
The entire area is dotted with the caves of the long-dead and the valleys of ancestors so hidden that few outsiders have ever seen them – though anyone is welcome there, to pay respects. Boer women and children hid in them during the war. Drums calling the ancestors sometimes thunder off the golden buffers of the sandstone cliffs. Everything is larded in meaning.
Above all else, the land is extraordinarily, perfectly beautiful. The light is clear and unpolluted and soft. In the early morning, the wide plateaus open up to the horizons and small koppies float on them as if sailing over the plains. In summer, huge thunderhead clouds stampede across the deepening blue skies and unleash life-giving rain, filling the rivers and dams and waterfalls. In winter, the peaks whiten with snow, and in kraals the lifestock huddle together to fight off the freeze. Eagles soar over the Golden Gate buttresses, and within overhangs and crevices, if you know where to look, are the marks of the small hunters who once roamed this rich ground before it was fought over and fenced and farmed. It is lush territory, and desirable. It is contested territory, and its history has often been deadly.
The name ‘Free State’ represented what these Boers had chosen to become but it would not help them avoid the war. The Free State Boers were an agriculturally grounded, pious people with no desire for more expansion – they especially did not want the war. But their attractive geography, though perfect for farming, would be their downfall, because they were in the way.
Cecil Rhodes had again lost office as the prime minister of the Cape Colony after a second corruption scandal (more recently because of the Jameson Raid and his lying about it afterwards). Despite this, he and his wealthy cohorts in Britain still fixed their eyes on the Transvaal and its gold, hoping it would springboard them to an even bigger prize – the hinterland of the north, where they believed, inaccurately, lay fabled riches. The Free State is in the very centre of South Africa, landlocked, in the crosshairs of travellers north or south, east or west. By its very locality, it was caught up in this unwanted strife.
The Free State’s fate lay in that it was inconvenient, a large island of land plonk in the middle of the most efficient, direct and only train route between Cape Town and Johannesburg via its capital, Bloemfontein. Its greatest treasure, diamond-rich Kimberley in the west, had been silkily siphoned off by the British Crown on 27 October 1871 with an annexation that placed it under direct British rule as the Crown Colony of Griqualand West.
This annoyed the Cape Colony, which desired Kimberley itself (and incorporated it nine years later), almost as much as it upset the Free State within whose natural boundaries it had belonged.
This dry area had been largely ignored until 1869, when a rich diamond-digging site later known as the ‘Big Hole’ was revealed. Ownership became a huge prize. British officials who masterminded the 1871 land grab claimed they did so because of the Boers’ propensity to grab land. Apparently they were unable to see the irony in this. No one was fooled: it would become the richest diamond dig in the world.
The British government eventually, in 1876, payed ‘compensation’ of £90 000 to the Free State for Kimberley, an overt admission of their culpability, and also one of the most valuable finesses the Crown ever made.
By the time of the Boer War, British investment in Kimberley was worth a colossal (for the time) £40 million sterling, and this fact, linked to Rhodes’s protective zeal for his wealth there, would have a significant effect on the route the war took in those early months, and therefore on the Mullers and their companions.
The choice for Free Staters was to either provide free passage to the north-bound British, or support President Kruger’s forces in what they believed, in their heart of hearts, would be an impossible war to win. The latter also meant joining the Transvalers, a citizenry that many sober Free Staters despised for their wild ways.
It is important to recognise that these Boer republics were two tiny separate countries with quite different views of how to live. It was not a given that Britain would wage war on both of them: in fact, quite the opposite. There was no appetite in Britain for drawing President Steyn and his small Free State republic into the conflict. The young, well-educated head of state, who had been called to the bar at the Inner Temple in London in 1882, was well thought of in British circles of influence. Also, fighting two Boer republics, rather than just one, would double the effort needed to conquer their sole objective – the gold-rich Transvaal.
Steyn, under agonising pressure, upheld his loyalty to the Transvaal despite his honest assessment that the war could not be won. But he also knew that any appeasement to the Cape colonials and imperialists would be shortlived, and come with too high a price-tag: if Kimberley could be casually annexed, so too could the entire Free State at any future date. Neutrality was therefore not a viable option, though it might have been one that many Free Staters longed for. There was little enmity against the English in the Free State, unlike in the Transvaal; many Free State dominees (ministers) and landed families were of Scottish descent.
War happens, goes the saying, when diplomacy fails. Steyn struggled to find the ‘anything but war’ route, including at his Bloemfontein peace conference from 31 May to 5 June 1899. There, Kruger was persuaded to agree to compromises demanded by Britain’s high commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, who was present under the false pretence of possibly agreeing to a peaceful solution – therefore, Kruger’s offer was rejected as too little, too late. In fact, the decision by the UK to go to war with the Transvaal was already a done deal. Kruger had not been wrong when, at the end of this failed conference, he bluntly told Milner that it was not their land he wanted, but their gold.7
Steyn battled to avert conflict until the first fatal shots were fired in October 1899, unaware that the decision to take the Transvaal had already been fixed in the early months of 1899 by Rhodes, using cohorts such as Jameson as go-betweens. Proof of this was exposed during the post-war Royal Commission of 1902-1903; presented to the Commission were the private ‘hurry up’ telegrams sent by Miss Fiona Shaw to politician Dr Leander Starr Jameson early in 1899 on behalf of the Colonial Office, urging him and Rhodes to double down on inciting war.8
Late in March 1900, when Michael’s firstborn, Pieter, was 3 years old, he came around the corner of their farmhouse on his stick horse – and there was a kakie (khaki, or British soldier). He ran, fell, got up and ran, fell again, and rushed inside bawling. He just couldn’t make sense of it. He had seen men in rokke (dresses). He had seen women with beards!
These startling creatures, burly men in skirts, were Scottish troops in kilts which are not useful for fighting under a burning sun, and certainly odd-looking enough to give the youngster his first major fright – one that, years later, he would tell his own children about.
The khakis began to appear in the Ladybrand district where the Mullers lived around March 1900, but the finale in the eastern Free State did not come quickly. The town of Ladybrand, named after their former president’s wife, Lady Brand, had been taken for one day at the end of March by the British, who were forced to retreat immediately. The town was besieged and retaken by both sides until September 1900, when it was occupied finally by the British, months after the fall of Bloemfontein in mid-March (Pretoria had surrendered in June).
Despite their losses, the Free State commandos had fought on towards their easternmost territory, increasingly with their backs to the river border of high Basutoland. By then, the English
