14. The Children of the Second Boer War
In the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), Britain had a rough go of it trying to subdue the Boers of the Orange Free State and of the Republic of Transvaal. The British initially assumed that the fighting would be quickly over after a swift campaign, but their opponents proved tougher than expected. Although greatly outnumbered, the Boers went on the offensive and achieved some remarkable early successes. Before they knew it, the British had a full-scale war on their hands, that required the commitment of roughly 600,000 troops and auxiliaries to the fight.
The Boers’ numerical inferiority forced to avoid pitched battles, and rely instead on hit and run tactics and guerrilla warfare that flustered the British. In late 1900, Herbert Kitchener was put in charge of the British effort, and he proceeded to defeat the guerrillas by depriving them of the civilian support upon which they relied. The British adopted a scorched earth policy of burning down Boer farms and homesteads, killing their livestock, poisoning their wells, destroying their crops, and salting their fields. By the time the British were done, tens of thousands of civilians – mostly women and children – had perished. Things got worse when the British rounded up Boer civilians and sent them to concentration camps.