A tale of two statues
John Wallace explores the life and legacy of the Boer soldier and politician Deneys Reitz, who maintained an emotional link to Scotland through the work of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, as well as through the Royal Scots Fusiliers
John Wallace explores the life and legacy of the Boer soldier and politician Deneys Reitz, who maintained an emotional link to Scotland through the work of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, as well as through the Royal Scots Fusiliers
There are two statues in Ayr’s Burns Statue Square, which must each in its own way have held great significance for one of the most unusual commanders of a Scottish regiment in wartime.
The less familiar of the two is the colonial wars memorial of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Deneys Reitz of the Orange Free State, one of the smallest and newest of nations, enjoyed childhood familiarity with Scottish literature. He also made the exceptional but not unique transition from seventeen-year-old Boer guerrilla who describes killing a considerable number of British soldiers in ‘the old war’, to lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in France. He made staunch friends at all levels of British society, and became an imperial cabinet minister in one of history’s most admirable reconciliations.
Origins of his Scottish connection
His affinity with British and in particular Scottish culture was as much inherited as acquired. Many Dutch Reformed Church ministers avoided the hardship of the Great Trek into uncolonised lands, so the trek-Boers welcomed Scottish Presbyterian ministers, just as the British army later would a willing Boer. Deneys’s grandfather was christened Francis William because a Scottish predikant refused to use anything as outlandish as François Guillaume.When he studied law in Edinburgh, he became a friend of Sir Walter Scott by taking him a lion skin as a gift from the poet Thomas Pringle, and attended the dinner where Sir Walter admitted authorship of the Waverley novels.
The enforced christening did not rankle, for he passed on the names to Deneys’s father, who became president of the Orange Free State, a pioneer in the evolution of Dutch into the modern Afrikaans (then as controversial as Burns’s choice of broad Scots), and a noted translator of British comic verse.
Deneys and his brothers enjoyed an idyllic childhood, frequently out on the veld and yet meeting the Free State’s small political elite, in an age before politics became impersonal. In 1895, as their father recovered from hepatitis, the family toured Europe, including a visit to the Cathcart family at Auchendrane, four miles south of Ayr. It is unlikely that the boys failed to visit Burns’s cottage, long since a place of pilgrimage. On their return Deneys’s father became State Secretary of the Transvaal, in a time of growing tension.
War clouds in Southern Africa
With the discovery of gold, the Transvaal had painted itself into a corner. Mostly British miners, far outnumbered what white people would term native Transvaalers, had brought great wealth to a country previously
as pastoral as the Free State. So the government imposed a voting age of forty for the naturalised, and that after fourteen-year residence and membership of the Dutch Reformed Churches. During the family’s absence Cecil Rhodes’s henchman Dr Jameson (formerly of Edinburgh and Stranraer) had failed in a coup. Neither side’s solution would do for us nowadays.
A Parliamentary Select Committee, which some called the lying-in-state at Westminster, did not resolve to the modern mind whether the British government, and particularly Joseph Chamberlain, put Rhodes and his henchmen up to it. On the face of it, both governments did an admirable fence-mending job. The Transvaal obliged by repatriating Dr Jim, and the British obliged by sentencing him to fifteen months in Holloway, the sole conviction in 150 years of the Foreign Enlistment Act. He was released early on health grounds, in which being a medical doctor may have helped. Although severely criticised in the Wigtownshire Free Press, with no reference to his father having been its editor, he became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1904, and a privy councillor. Even his enemies liked him most of the time.
By 1899 the British were exerting pressure, some way short of threats, for civil rights. So after an ultimatum to remove troops from southern Africa (possibly, like Austria-Hungary’s to Serbia in 1914, intended to be rejected), the Transvaal invaded Natal.
Anglo-Free State relations were exemplary for most but not all of the latter’s independent existence. But the Free State, with none of the Transvaal’s grievances, and cynics surely thought nothing worth stealing, went to war out of solidarity as a Boer nation. President Kruger himself authorised the underage enlistment of Deneys and a brother, and the commander-inchief, General Joubert, handed him a Mauser rifle.
A seventeen-year-old at war
In Commando Deneys tells of an extremely hard war, with a conspicuous absence of hatred on both sides, and perhaps the only large war in which the individual soldier’s rifle, an instrument of art and science in such hands, has been the dominant weapon. As with submarine and aerial warfare, a disproportionate amount of the damage was done by the best, and while the Boers had their incompetents too, Deneys was extremely good. He describes killing several British soldiers, and in the big long-range battles it was surely many more. He was present when his father refused to release Winston Churchill, on the grounds that while a correspondent might legitimately arm himself in the Sudan, it denied him non-combatant status when fighting a civilised foe.
Wars are not won by exploits, but by the achievement of war aims. Deneys is scathing about what many see as early Boer successes, which frittered away a magnificent field army while the British learned to be Boers, turning cavalry into mounted infantry, and cutting off the enemy’s sources of supply. After participating in most of the great battles Deneys joined the commando of the brilliant young lawyer-philosopher General Smuts, on his great raid into the Cape Colony, and a most significant incident took place at Eland’s River.
Smuts’s commando, increasingly harried by the British in a time of cold, hunger and torrential rain, suffered heavy attrition in men and horses. Deneys had two cartridges left and was wearing a grain-bag as a tunic, which froze to his chest like armour, when they discovered a camp of the 17th Lancers. General Smuts knew they had no choice but to attack or surrender to them.
They surprised the camp in the absence of its commander, Douglas Haig, and took it in a brief but fierce combat in which Deneys describes killing three men. Afterwards he assisted the wounded Lieutenant Lord Vivian, who suggested he search his tent for items which he might find useful. Deneys left on the splendid Arab horse of Churchill’s newly-deceased cousin, with Lord Vivian’s spare uniform and LeeMetford sporting rifle.
Deneys’s father signed the surrender, but felt that his personal position required exile rather than swear allegiance to the crown. Deneys, with no very pronounced views, felt obliged to follow suit, and lived very hard again in Madagascar while trying to set up a wagon haulage business. He returned, weakened by fever, when Mrs Smuts told him that what was good enough for her husband was surely good enough for him. After collapsing in a public park, he was nursed back to health by the Smuts family in their home, and with the encouragement of General Smuts, studied for the law and founded his own practice.
What the war meant to him?
His narrative begs the question whether he experienced, as it has been called, ‘the last of the gentlemen’s wars’. Neither side achieved anything so superhuman as war without deplorable incidents, but amicable
relations between combatants, at all ranks, were commonplace, and Deneys says both sides confidently left their wounded to the enemy.When my teacher tried to stop me bringing Commando for free reading, the very old men said ‘She wasnae there, and we were.Ye’ll read it’. I doubt if she knew of his lethality, and probably only thought a book for grown-ups was liable to cause neurological burnout. Even as an eight-year-old I wondered that education should require me to hide serious memoirs inside my ‘Oor Wullie’ comic-strip annual.
In 2017 a 1930 edition was auctioned in the USA, inscribed with the name of the Austrian Count Arco, who was rather apologetically sentenced to five years for assassinating Kurt Eisner, the Jewish socialist premier of Bavaria. It included letters from Reitz’s sister to Arco. Endorsing assassination is perhaps less likely than showing him that magnanimity pays better.The extracts I have seen are inconclusive, but suggest less than her brother’s unwavering admiration of General Smuts, whom she calls ‘the soulless opportunist’. She says Deneys ‘has, alas, suffered revision at the wish of General Smuts for fear of its arousing old divisions’, and ‘from the book is now missing all the spontaneous bitterness of a fine warmhearted lad’.This may also explain the delay in publication until 1929 of a book written mostly in 1903.
Several close comrades were executed by the British, including colonial British subjects for treason, but most for wearing khaki purely from lack of other clothing. Still, Deneys acknowledges one case of Boers posing as British cavalry in order to fire first, and there were others. Similarly, the mortality among Boer families in the British camps, rectified but rectified late, must be seen in the light of two-thirds of British war deaths being from badly-handled disease. But both grievances festered in the Afrikaaner consciousness for many decades.We may guess at specific areas of bitterness which did not detract from his fundamental belief in reconciliation.
A soldier of the king, and minister of the crown
In 1914 Deneys had a close escape from Maritz’s pro-German Boer rebels, and fought the Germans and their native askari in German Southwest and German East Africa. After commanding a mounted infantry regiment he bought his own ticket to London and enlisted as a private. But General Smuts was in London, and through his influence, Deneys embarked on a rather thorough course in modern war at all levels from private to major.The British army is good at ad hoc authority, and he describes a drill-sergeant of the Grenadier Guards saying ‘Sirr, you make me weep tearrs of blood’.
We may sense the unseen hand of Smuts’s friend Churchill, for there would be improbable coincidence in his eventual command of the First Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, in which Churchill had commanded another battalion. He encountered industrialised war long after the heady days of August and September 1914, when the Boer War proved priceless in the way of which Kipling wrote:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
He was twice wounded in France, and appears to have been an efficient and popular battalion commander whose friendships crossed ranks, who frequently undertook dangers a battalion commander could have delegated, and yet believed in getting his people safe home. In the Royal Highland Fusiliers museum in Sauchiehall Street, which inherited his regiment by amalgamation, he is remembered as a colonel they were lucky to get. He later wrote that he thought the war, terrible but not degrading, could have been won at far less cost in lives and money. But he came away with a higher, not lower, opinion of his fellow men.
He appears to have been of liberal sympathies in parliament, and in 1920 married Leila Bussine Wright, a noted suffragist of British lineage, who became South Africa’s first woman MP. He did not live to see apartheid as overt policy, but as well as great warmth towards Africans who ‘knew their place’, he shows considerable appreciation of those who had previously been out of it.
In 1927 the Nationalist government discovered that this staunchest of empire loyalists had never signed the 1902 oath of allegiance, and therefore was not only ineligible to sit in parliament,
but liable to a rather immense fine, levied per diem, for having done so. Despite the frequent vehemence of South African politics they were extremely good about it, passing the Deneys Reitz Relief Act on his behalf.
In 1935, as Minister of Agriculture, he attended a conference of the Empire Parliamentary Association in London, which was noteworthy for two incidents among many. A ‘grizzled soldierly man’ was shown into his office in Grosvenor House, and turned out to be Lord Vivian, who returned the Mauser rifle Deneys had abandoned at Eland’s River. He had been wounded in a confrontation of a few against a few, and very likely by Deneys himself, but it was not the only friendship to grow from such beginnings. In certain circles of the time, it was not quite the thing to hate the man who shoots you, as long as it is covered by some equivalent of the
Army Act. It looks too much like playing to win.
a memorable visit to glasgow
On a visit to Glasgow, Deneys told how he had once believed that his father wrote the Burns poems, and some fellow of that name translated them into a rather odd kind of English. On the strength of that he was taken to the museum at Alloway, where his first sight was his father’s handwritten version of Tam O’Shanter in Afrikaans, presented by a Cape Town lady some years before.There exists a letter from him to Colonel T.C. Dunlop, proprietor of the Ayr Advertiser and a trustee of the museum, thanking him for the four facsimile pages which were hanging in his office. As his father’s signature was faded, Deneys send him a land transfer document of the defunct Orange Free State, most impressively signed and sealed. I have examined it by courtesy of Mr Chris Waddell of the Museum, to whom I am deeply indebted.
The translation, although written in Burns’s racing iambic tetrameters, is not a literal one, but transformed into the adventure of Klaas Gezwint, a bibulous and henpecked Hottentot. It appears not to single out the Nannie, immortalised in engravings and clipper-ship as ‘Cutty Sark’. The equivalent to Tam’s great indiscretion runs:
De goed was byna poedel kaal. En zie! Die vrouwens was te skraal, Maar een daar van een bietje dikker Maak zoo’n uitgehaalde flikker, Dat Klaas plaas van zyn bek te hou, Schree,‘Arrie! Dit was flucks van jou.’
Their forms were almost poodle-bare, With some among them built too spare, But others just a little thicker
And made the light and shadows flicker,
Till Klaas, instead of keeping mum, Cries,‘Hurrah!That was bravely done.’
It is unlikely that Francis William would have called his version the equal of Burns’s, and neither, it emerges, is mine. Unable to get past that puzzling canine, I can only surmise that in 19th-century Africa a close-trimmed dog was cause for great wonderment. Clearly though, he was far from the usual image of an Afrikaaner politician.
But here my muse her wing maun cour; Sic flights are far beyond her pow’r; To sing how Nannie lap and flang (A souple jade she was and strang), And how Tam stood like ane bewitch’d, And thought his very een enrich’d; Even Satan glowr’d, and fidg’d fu’ fain, And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main:
Till first ae caper, syne anither, Tam tint his reason a’ thegither, And roars out,‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’ And in an instant all was dark;
In the Second World War General Smuts, a prime mover of the League of Nations and United Nations, walked with the great, spending much of his time in London. So Deneys’s role as deputy chief
minister, became very like ‘a combination of premier and a sort of junior War Lord’. Between them they adroitly handled the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag, performing a masterly job of steering a still divided nation to a wartime role disproportionate to its white population of only three million. In 1943, the year No Outspan was published, he became high commissioner in London, and died there the following year.
History leading in unexpected directions
There is a subtle link between Deneys Reitz and historical events. Few British generals emerged from the Boer War with a greatly enhanced reputation, but one who did was Sir Hector MacDonald, ‘Fighting Mac’, a former private of the Gordons. But in 1903 he was accused of homosexual misconduct with Ceylonese schoolboys in a railway carriage. Lord Roberts recommended that he return to Ceylon to face a court-martial which would clear his name. There appears to have been no real evidence of anything but choosing his nightclubs unwisely. A government inquiry later cleared him in fulsome terms, and savaged his accusers as being basely motivated. But enemies, in the meantime, had leaked the scandal, and he shot himself in a Paris hotel.
Two years later it was becoming obvious that Douglas Haig, a bachelor in early middle age, was a leading candidate for high command. It seems likely that it was suggested to him that the army would feel more relaxed if he were married. After a two-day courtship while on leave from India, he married the sister of his former brother officer, Lord Vivian.
History has oscillated widely on Haig’s reputation as commander-in-chief, but there is no doubt that Lloyd George detested him in a most intemperate manner, or that King George V had great influence on governmental affairs. Lady Haig’s having been lady-in-waiting to Queen Alexandra probably assisted Haig, in the same way as Marlborough and Sarah Jennings.
One wonders whether Haig anticipated this, but anticipation is not motivation. I know of no suggestion of the marriage being other than sincere and devoted, or of what used to be termed unnatural affections. Haig had been a busy man, and perhaps being the nearest the 1900s offered to a female brother officer, conveyed more than it would today.
The trouble with history is that we can hardly ever trace anything to its beginning or its end.Who is to say how history might have been different, if Deneys Reitz’s shot at Eland’s River had been differently placed?
Originally from Stranraer, where his family has lived since the Napoleonic wars, JohnWallace is a retired English teacher. Initially working in Stranraer, he has also taught in London, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He has published various contributions on the history and science of firearms.