How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History by Erik Durschmied

Author:Erik Durschmied
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781628726442
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Queen Victoria, when told about ‘Black Week’, replied: ‘There is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’

Sir Redvers Buller was replaced by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar seconded by Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. The war took a change and the Boer Army was battered into submission. On 27 February 1900, General Cronje surrendered his 4,000 Boers and Kimberley was delivered. A day later Buller entered Ladysmith following a siege which had lasted 118 days, Roberts took Bloemfontein on 13 March, Johannesburg on 31 May and Pretoria on 5 June 1900. President ‘Ohm’ Kruger fled to Holland. Transvaal and the Orange Free State were annexed. The struggle by the Boers continued for two more years, mainly as hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. Lord Kitchener responded with a brutal scorched earth policy.

This war brought no glory to the British Empire. It was the British in South Africa who first put to use that institution of terror, the concentration camp. Their military rounded up entire Boer villages and dragged men, women and children behind barbed wire. One out of every six captives died of malnutrition. The government tried to deny the camps’ existence. The press reported on the atrocious conditions, anti-British riots flared up. In the House of Commons it was denounced as ‘methods of barbarism’.

‘Nothing, not even the incapacity of the military authorities when charged with the novel and distasteful task of herding large bodies of civilians into captivity, could justify the conditions in the camps themselves’, wrote Winston Churchill in The Great Democracies.

The Second Boer War came to an end on 31 May 1902.

A few days later, Cecil Rhodes died. His prophetic final words were: ‘You think you’ve beaten the Dutch. It is not so. The country is still as much theirs as yours. You will have to live with them now as in the past.’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.