(1899–1902) which established B-P’s reputation. The wars between the two settler communities of South Africa were set off when the longer-established descendants of Dutch settlers determined to defend their autonomy against the expansionist ambitions of the British Empire. Since the British had no shortage of men in uniform – they would eventually have to send 500,000 soldiers to fight in South Africa – and the Boers had no formal army at all, their inability to assert British rule in the first conflict came as a terrible shock. The siege at Mafeking in the second war vividly demonstrated their difficulty. The British had become accustomed to getting their way in colonial battles, a success they generally attributed to superior training and moral values, but which was really much more to do with the fact they usually had more sophisticated weapons. This time, the Boers had gone on an arms-buying spree before the war began and equipped themselves with modern rifles and even some artillery. This was to be no one-sided ‘tussle with the niggers’, and the Boer ‘commandos’ had one other great asset: as a light, irregular force ready to live off the land, they could fight the most mobile and effective guerrilla campaign the British had ever faced. The war developed into a vicious and very squalid conflict, in which the conventions of ‘civilized warfare’ were repeatedly ignored.* The British would eventually win – how could they not, against a scrappy bunch of bandoliered farmers cantering around the veldt? – but only at the cost of tremendous damage to their reputation, when the world learned that the response to the Boer offensive had been to burn down their farms, poison their wells and intern women and children in ‘concentration camps’, where many died of sickness and hunger. The exposure of the appalling conditions in the camps was largely the work of Emily Hobhouse, another member of that small, heroically subversive band of women who insisted on sticking their noses into the work of imperial menfolk. One can date the beginnings of the terminal sickness which carried off the British Empire to the South African campaigns. The British won the Second Boer War too, but lost something much more important. Too many people knew that the texts of sermons on Britain’s civilizing mission were hanging on the barbed wire of the South African veldt.
In 1899, Colonel Baden-Powell had been sent to rustle up new recruits for the second British war effort, and had not been much impressed by the calibre of men he found. ‘They are bad riders and bad shots,’ he reported – quite the opposite of the Boer irregulars. Any plan to use his recruits to harry the Boers was not going to work. Instead, in October 1899, B-P assembled a mountain of stores and settled down inside the town of Mafeking. Large claims were later made, not least by Baden-Powell himself, for the importance of the siege which soon became inevitable. It is true that the town sat on a railway line and that, despite its small population (about 1,700 whites and 5,000 black people), it had the appurtenances of a little sophistication – library, prison, hospital and so on. But one could as easily say that the siege which then developed became an immensely famous action for a mainly fatuous target (Kitchener is said to have claimed later that there were people in the War Office under the impression that the town – about as far from the sea as you can get in South Africa – was the nearest sea-port to Pretoria). In later life, B-P seemed increasingly unsure how many Boers had been besieging the town. He could not have known with any precision at the time, but as the years went by his estimate rose, from 8,000 in his report after the engagement, to 10,000 in his autobiography thirty years later, until by the time of a radio broadcast in 1937 he was claiming to have tied down 12,000 enemy. In fact, it seems that many of the Boer besiegers had left after a few weeks, but that, of course, did little to lessen the horror of the siege. B-P’s defenders claim that in keeping his force inside the