Brothers in arms and scars that remain to this day

• In this extract from her book, Beverley Roos-Muller writes about a forgotten war still painfully present

Four brothers from the Eastern Free State, all young adults, rode to war late in 1899; three of them kept expressive, powerful and at times painfully honest diaries, the only recorded instance of this happening.

These brothers were, in order of age: Michael Muller, then Commandant Chris (both of them already married with very young children), Pieter, and the youngest, Lool, who was 22 when the war began. As part of the Ladybrand Commando they fought bravely, were captured as prisoners of war, and sent into exile. One of them did not survive. Their experiences were unique to them as individuals, yet not very different to those throughout history who have endured war and/or imprisonment — courage unremarked, of loving and longing, and later, rebuilding of a scorched world.

The grandson of Michael was Professor Ampie Muller, my late husband, who had inherited Michael’s diary — it was the first document with which I began researching this book, to describe the Boer experience of this invasive war — including its brutal effect on the black population. No less than 66 squalid British concentration camps were created for black prisoners. The empire’s promises to them were promptly broken at the end of the war in 1902, inevitably leading to another freedom struggle.

We cannot claim to understand the troubled course of history in SA throughout the 20th century unless we acknowledge what this conflict had destroyed, and the painful legacy it left behind.

A war wanted by nobody, apart from the already rich. Below is an extract from my book, ‘Bullet in the Heart’, on the consequences of a war that remain with us still.

All wars eventually end, and seldom well; this one was no exception. Rudyard Kipling later said that the Boers had given Britain “no end of a lesson”. It is a strange way to describe a win, though he was not wrong.

The empire had eventually struggled to its drawn-out victory by sending out its largest army ever overseas, almost half a million men in number, and by spending unprecedented sums of money — £1,250,000 every week — in their costliest war until World War 2.

In contrast to this, when the Free State government was captured at Reitz in July 1901 (President Steyn, in pyjamas, managed to escape on his trusted horse, Scot), their whole treasury was only £11,500, mostly in Free State notes — useless to the captors. This may be one of the more incredible aspects of this conflict: that the determined Boers were fighting on little more than a wing and a prayer.

Afterwards, many in Britain, including Winston Churchill and the royal family, viewed the Boers in a different light. Churchill, who had served in many military campaigns, believed that the Boers were his finest foes ever. He developed a mutual admiration society of two with General Louis Botha. He also picked up a few Afrikaans phrases that appealed to him: he enjoyed using “alles sal reg kom” , if slightly inaccurately.

The brilliant, Cambridgeeducated Boer General Jan Smuts later became Churchill’s favourite Commonwealth prime minister, trusted adviser and lifelong friend, and ensured that SA joined the Allies in both world wars.

From the moment he signed the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902, Smuts devoted his long life to the daunting task of reuniting Boer and Brit, and regaining the shattered SA. (The whataboutism of why Smuts didn’t resolve the “colour question” is self-evident: he recognised that the black population, some of whom had been comrades during battle, had been badly treated; but, gifted as he was, he was not a miracle worker. That would take a new freedom struggle.)

Under his guidance, less than eight years later, the Union of SA was formed, with Louis

Botha as the first prime minister, followed by Smuts. These two admired Boer leaders had continued to the bitter end of the war; their stalwart persistence in no small measure contributed to their now controlling not only the two former Boer republics of the Transvaal and Free State, but also the large former British colonies of the Cape and Natal a breathtaking political finesse, perhaps the most unanticipated outcome of the war.

When the guns fell silent in 1902, the Boers had had to face their future as British subjects in a land that had been vacuumed up by the mighty empire.

What is more, the Boers were threadbare. In the worst cases — and this was widespread — they faced a literal wasteland. At least 30,000 farms, along with livestock and crops, had been deliberately destroyed by fire or dynamite. And not only were their buildings burnt down and/or vandalised, but the very fields were often salted, creating soil conditions unsuitable for growing crops for some time to come.

Some of the worst war recollections came at its very end: those thousands of returning Boer exiles, streaming along the roads towards a terrible silence, dreading what they would find, or not find.

More than 40 small towns had been utterly demolished; many returning Boers had no family left at all. When men go to war, they assume that it will be them, not their women and children, who will be most at risk of dying. Never had the Boers imagined the opposite might become true.

The iconic short poem “Dis al” by the poet Jan FE Celliers (with whom Lool fought at Colesberg) hung on the wall of virtually every Boer home for generations to come. The second and last stanza (translated) reads:

An exile came home from over the sea

A grave in the grass, a tear breaking free.

That is all.

In the original language, it has devastating power, and evokes the plight of those homecoming soldiers who had lost everyone. This was the Boer takeaway from the war: that in order to win, their enemy had been prepared to oversee the deaths of their women and children. In the years immediately after the war, empty classrooms testified to a whole generation lost.

T he surviving Muller brothers had loved ones to return to, but they were not unscathed. Lool’s grave was 700 miles away in Cape Town; Chris had lost two infant sons in the war; and Nelie’s younger half-brother and half-sister were buried in the Bethulie concentration camp’s cemetery for children. Their homesteads

were lost too, burnt to the ground, as well as their possessions, including livestock, destroyed.

Their comrade Jan Diederichs’ two teenaged brothers, Roelfie and Albert, noncombatants, had been captured and taken to St Helena without their mother knowing what had happened to them — the ultimate nightmare of missing children. Only one returned; Roelfie’s grave is still in St Helena. Their mother, greeting a gaunt stranger at the door of her lean-to on the burnt-out ruin of Haltwhistle, did not recognise Albert, now aged 17, until he spoke her name: “Moeder”. He suffered from traumatic survivors’ guilt for the rest of his life.

Like so many warriors returning home, the men seldom spoke of their war. It remained for women to talk of it in muted tones, while children played at their feet, little ears flapping — the way war stories are often preserved. Returning to their farms was not an enshrined right: Britain considered itself the rightful government of the two former Boer republics, so could (and did) revoke bonds because the soldier-farmers had been unable to repay anything during the war years.

These were the years before the Landbank (a later statefinanced co-operative to fund

agriculture), and actual cash or loans were difficult to secure for returning Boers; some were helped by sympathetic friends and even distant neighbours who stood surety for loans, but very many lost their farms. Most valuables, except for those buried at the beginning of the war (such as Nelie Muller’s china and big kettle) were gone for good.

Painful Boer “piano stories” crop up frequently in the literature of the war: a family’s prized piano, treated with such tenderness that only the Moeder was allowed to dust it, was roughly hauled out of their

home and often chopped up before being set on fire. There were people on both sides who had not imagined a conflict so bereft of ordinary decencies.

Other valuables “went missing” taken by none-toohonest neighbours and not always returned after the war: hensoppers went from farm to farm and simply helped themselves to goods belonging to Boers who had fled or been captured.

The Mullers were among the many who confronted new poverty: often merely the clothes they stood up in. It was the beginning of something the self-sufficient Boers could never have foreseen, that large numbers of their people would have no way of sustaining themselves.

The Transvaal, at least, had its mines to offer work. But the majority of Free State farmers came home to an unrecognisable world. Even those in professions found it difficult to sustain a living, due to a lack of ready money within their much-diminished population.

So began the era of “poor whites” on an unprecedented scale; untold conflict lay ahead, as they began competing for jobs with black South Africans.

This war, founded and fostered in Britain, had the result of binding two separate and defeated Boer nations into a common destiny. Theologian Dr John Daniel Kestell (“Vader”

Kestell) recognised this: “God has formed the Africander nation in this great struggle,” he wrote in 1903.

It would have ugly consequences.

Professor Pumla GobodoMadikizela, recorder of apartheid atrocities, wrote in 2012: “Without any attempt to compare the evil of the British concentration camps to the evil of the Nazi camps in Germany and Poland, I wonder why [this] atrocity on SA soil has not been addressed with equal force?”

British statesman Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, prime minister after the war, was equally emphatic in a speech on June 14 1901 when the war was still in full swing: “When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in SA.”

Campbell-Bannerman’s opinion was far from isolated. There had been almost universal condemnation of Britain’s war of aggression in SA. Influential voices in neutral countries such as France, Russia and the US, and in British colonies such as Australia and Canada, and in particular Ireland, felt that the war on the Boers had been deeply unjust, based on the thinnest of pretexts.

But the Boers had learned that even their traditional allies, the Netherlands and Germany, had not come to their aid. Their fight for their freedom including their language had not been won, despite all the sympathies offered.

Journalist Max du Preez said in the Cape Times in April 2004 that “the Anglo-Boer War had a huge impact on the Afrikaner psyche, and on their ethnic nationalism in the decades after. The war and its aftermath, involuntary urbanisation on a large scale, extreme poverty for many, and an overwhelming sense of insecurity and inferiority, influenced Afrikaner thinking.”

He also recalled his grandfather repeating the adage: “The sun never sets on the British Empire want God kan nie die Engelse in die donker vertrou nie’” (because God cannot trust the English in the dark). It was a dark quip borne out of painful experience, one that is unforgotten.

This war had become a bullet lodged in the hearts of Boer survivors, boring into their lack of security. This resulted in a deep mistrust of others, leading to both mental and emotional isolation.

Their destiny would never be allowed to lie in anyone else’s hands again.

WAPARTHEID WAS A CRUEL BUT NOT UNFORESEEABLE OFFSPRING OF THIS WAR: BAD CHOICES BASED ON FEAR

hen the moderate government of Smuts lost power in 1948, populist nationalism formalised an existing racialised system. Apartheid was a cruel but not unforeseeable offspring of this war: the Boer descendants were not the first, nor would they be the last, to make bad choices based on fear, so that it would never happen again amplified in later decades as generational trauma.

To grasp this tragedy, we need to understand how close the Boers believed they as a people and a culture had come to the edge of deliberate annihilation: at least a sixth of their population died in the war, though the actual figure is likely to have been higher.

The war’s aftermath led to a new broedertwis in families, between those Afrikaners who supported reconciliation between Boer and Brit, and those who would never accept such attempts.

Later, during the apartheid years, these families were further torn; some of the most effective dissidents were Afrikaners, less easy to dismiss than English-speaking activists. These included the Oxfordeducated advocate Bram Fischer from the politically prominent Free State family, whose grandfather Abraham Fischer was a prime minister of the postwar Orange River Colony; Bram defended Nelson Mandela and other antiapartheid activists in the Rivonia Trial, before being imprisoned until the end of his life.

This broedertwis affected the Muller descendants and relatives too.

Apartheid-era president Nico Diederichs was the son of Jan Diederichs, whose grandsons Ampie and Piet Muller (also Michael Muller’s grandsons), while maintaining civil and even close family relations, chose to take an active part in the progressive Afrikaner movement known, not always kindly, as the verligtes (enlightened).

Wars end, but their impact may last much longer. From this turn-of-the century invasive war, another freedom struggle was born, on these same bloodied fields, on the bones of so much grief.

‘Bullet in the Heart: Four brothers ride to war 1899-1902’ by Dr Beverley Roos-Muller is published by Jonathan Ball