Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Page B

England would find itself in a war unlike anything it had ever seen. Buller knew South Africa, and, more than any other general in the British army, he knew the Boers. In fact, when the members of the War Office’s Intelligence Branch had rushed to gather everything they had on the Boer republics, bind it into two volumes and send it to him, he had dismissively sent it back, attaching a note wearily reminding them that he already “knew everything about South Africa.”
    Twenty years earlier, during the Anglo-Zulu War, Buller had fought with the Boers rather than against them. He had won his Victoria Cross, the highest award given by the British military, for his gallant conduct during that war, and he knew that he owed much of his success to the Boers who had ridden next to him time and again, untiring and unafraid. As the British secretary of state for war, Henry Lansdowne, had disdainfully remarked, Buller “talked Boer,” and, in stark contrast to nearly any other man in the British military, he openly admired their courage and skill.
    Buller, however, like Churchill, was trapped on the sea, while other men were running the war. Worse, those in charge, Penn Symons and General George White, were quite possibly the last men who should have been chosen for the job. White, who had won his Victoria Cross in Afghanistan, had never before fought in South Africa. “The Army at large was quite as much astonished as the civilian world at the appointment of Sir George White to the command in Natal,” a reporter for the Daily Telegraph wrote. “In the clubs and messes it had been taken for granted that the head of the force sent to the Cape would be men having experience of South African warfare.” Penn Symons knew South Africa, but had no respect for or interest in the Boers. “Whatever the estimate formed of the fighting quality ofthe Boers,” Leo Amery, a journalist for the London Times , wrote, “no one rated it lower than Sir W. Penn Symons.”
    Although Penn Symons and White had only twelve thousand men between them, and were surrounded by more than four times that number of fighting Boers, they did not for a moment worry that they would have any difficulty holding the enemy at bay until Buller arrived. “Personally,” White had nonchalantly told a friend the day before he set sail from Southampton, “I don’t believe there will be fighting of a serious kind.”

CHAPTER 6
“WE HAVE NOW GONE FAR ENOUGH”
    W hatever waves of panic the British army might have imagined rippling through the Transvaal as news of war spread to its farthest reaches, the reality was starkly different. In the days leading up to the ultimatum, the Boers were not frantically preparing for war, rushing to gather maps and men, supplies and ammunition. They didn’t have to. There had never been a time, either in their own lives or in those of their forebears, when they had not been ready to fight. For the great majority of Boers, as soon as war seemed imminent, there was little to do but leave for the front.
    In isolated farms across hundreds of miles of southern Africa, from the Drakensberg Mountains to the vast plateaus of the Highveld, every Boer man and boy between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and many much older or younger than that, set out for war. There was no need to enlist in the army because there was no standing army, and there was no need to find a uniform because there were no uniforms. Uniforms were something soldiers wore, and Boers were fiercely adamant that they were not soldiers, a term they found deeply offensive. They referred to themselves only as burghers, or citizens.
    When he left for war, a Boer pulled on the same clothes he wore every day—homemade shoes, a pair of stiffmoleskin trousers and awide-brimmed hat to keep the sun and rain out of his eyes, all of it in the same drab grays and browns. The only flourishes he might allow himself were affixed to his hat, either a small flag of the Transvaal sewn into the