Boer War

There are several 'preserved' blockhouses one can visit in South Africa. An especially good one is beside the N1 (main Johannesburg - Cape Town highway) a few hours outside of Cape Town - might even be the one in the photo. It was evidently built to protect the old iron railway bridge which is still visible next to it.

Unfortunately it suffers from the main draw-back of any fixed fortification: the Boers would quickly have found out about it, and simply avoided it. As they were generally unencumbered with artillery / wagons, they could avoid the beaten track much more easily than the British. Also bear in mind that there were plenty of traitors / sympathisers who would keep the Boers informed as to every move of the British - it is small wonder that the Brits often dealt with such people harshly.

Ah! Very delicate ground here. But if I can just interject, I see that Bulldog has said 'sympathisers/traitors', so I'm guessing, but it would seem they're the same animal, sympathisers if you were a Boer, and traitors if you were British. Also, apparently it was a point of honour for many Boers to take an oath of alliegence to Queen Victoria to allay suspicions so that they could go on doing exactly what they had been doing. I realise that this is a contentious statement and one which I could not prove; nevertheless it seems to crop up a lot as a general statement and comes under the belief of 'where there's smoke there's fire.' But if it could be proved, those who took part would be traitors, no matter how noble their motives.

At the time of the Boer War, the Boers were mostly farmers with little or no education, with only a spoken language but no written language and with no schools or universities. English speaking and German speaking schools opened in Johannesburg in the early 1900s and 'High Dutch' was taught alongside English in schools until the 1920s when Afrikaans was added. The Boers had strong moral ethics, but many thought that these did not apply if they were dealing with the British or the blacks, both of whom they considered reprehensible races. They considered that the British had coralled them in the centre of the nation, trying to prevent their expansion and many British were patronising and demeaning in their dealings with the Boers. It was said that President Kruger would not allow Cecil Rhodes' name to be uttered in his presence. As a gold mine owner, Cecil Rhodes probably felt much the same about Paul Kruger who pirated the gold mines and expelled an American Jewish Rabbi for giving public expression to his opinion of the persecution of the Jews and the Catholics in the Transvaal. (New York Times May 7th 1900) (The racial discrimination against Jews became especially difficult because most of the gold mine owners were Jewish.)

Hahahahahah. I found your post really funny, Nick. Yes, it seems that the British caution of change realy gets in the way of their progress. And even though the Brits had gone into khaki for the Second Boer War, their modus operandii had not altered since the Crimea. Hence the shudderingly awful start start to the Boer War when men were marched shoulder to shoulder to their deaths, against an elusive and fleet-footed Boer army who were creating the blueprint of modern warfare. It took the close cooperation and friendship of Winston Churchill and King Edward VII to start the modernising of the War Office.

Sorry, have no knowledge of WWI - apart from the throwing of horrendous numbers against the Germans without winning any ground. However, despite this, much needed reforms had started in the War Office. In Queen Victoria's day, her cousin Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, was an arch conservative and die-hard, who opposed any reform on principle. British officers, so far as he was concerned, were gentlemen and sportsmen, but entirely wanting in military knowledge; something he deemed unnecessary. Their drubbing at the hands of the Boers was not considered too serious as the Boers were considered a backward rabble. It took the mighty disciplined German army to convince them they had a problem, that their army was minute and led by incompotents, and that their navy was not going to be the be-all and end-all of defence. Until 1900 the British navy could take on any two navies in the world simultaneously. When the Kaiser targetted huge increases in the German navy, and with an already enormous mighty and efficient army led by Prussian army officers (now that was terrifying) the British knew that time was of the essence. The Kaiser hid his machinations so clevery behind his Secret Service allocation of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year, but he meant business.

As this photo demonstrates, some of the Boers' soldiers were very young. One of the British generals was shot dead by a 12 year old boy

Did the boys volunteer or were they conscripted? From my understanding, the Boer commandos were a sort of citizens' army where everyone had to take part

That's interesting Jaj. What other aspects of indigenous culture did the Boers adopt?

Some more info on the Boer Commandos. After the ANC abolished them, the crime rate shot up