Fire in the Sky: The Destruction of the Orange Free State, 1899-1902/The Great Escape of the Boer Pimpernel, Christiaan de Wet: The Making of a Legend

African Studies Review, Sep 2003 by Dale, Richard

Fransjohan Pretorius of the University of Pretoria is a highly regarded historian of the 1899-1902 conflict, and this volume on General De Wet provides a welcome supplement to his award-winning Life on Commando dunng the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1999). The focal point of this study is the conduct of Afrikaner guerrilla and British counterinsurgency operations, thus providing grist for the mills of war colleges and university strategic studies centers throughout the world. As his fellow Afrikaner historian André Wessels made clear in his incisive The Phases of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 (Bloemfontein: War Museum of the Boer Republics, 1998), the Anglo-Boer War was a series of overlapping set-piece, conventional, and guerrilla battles taking place in different theaters and at different times. This interpretation chips away at the rather commonly held view of two wars in one (conventional and guerrilla), neatly split into two sequential phases.

Although one can regard Pretorius's work as a narrative of Afrikaner derring-do (and corresponding British pluck), it is much more than a mere recounting of escapes and martial blunders. Leadership and resource management are the themes that implicitly inform this work of exceptional imagination and meticulous documentation. Drawing upon a vast array of published and unpublished works (in Dutch, Afrikaans, German, and English) supplemented by battlefield tours and interviews, Pretorius is able to reconstruct, day by day, if not hour by hour, the moves of the protagonists, which are carefully plotted on eight maps and set forth in the chronology. The actual core of the book analyzes only the first (July-August 1900) of three British chases after General De Wet, chases which created the legend of this Boer will-o'-the-wisp commando leader. Compared to the more traditional European and North American armed forces, the Boer army was a fluid, democratic, and consensual band of brothers whose military organization was minimally hierarchical and locally based. Leadership was thus at a premium, and Pretorius demonstrates how General De Wet was able to boost sagging Afrikaner war morale not only by his indomitable spirit but also by his David-like deeds against the British Goliath. Propaganda by the deed was crucial to Afrikaner tenacity.

Both sides had to contend with logistical encumbrances, such as railroads and ox-wagons, and the British in particular were dogged by mediocre intelligence-gathering networks and ensnared by a rather convoluted communications system which more often than not undermined coordination between the several columns pursuing General De Wet. What advantages the British enjoyed in infantry, cavalry, and artillery superiority were frequently forfeited by lack of speed and coordination among their own pursuing units. Counterinsurgency demanded speed, stamina, first-rate intelligence about enemy deployments, strength, and movement, and often more than a dollop of sheer luck. Despite their three hunts, the British never captured General De Wet, whom Pretorius (following Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel) appropriately terms the Boer Pimpernel.