A classic in context: a historian on literary commando

Almost 100 years after his classic, Commando, appeared, Deneys Reitz has got a makeover. Never out of print since it was published by Faber & Faber in 1929, the story of a young man at war in SA has had many guises but never before has it been placed in such detailed context.

Reitz went to war at 17, in 1899, fighting on the side of Paul Kruger’s Transvaal republic in its alliance with the Orange Free State against imperial Britain. The old president even arranged for him to receive a Mauser, a rifle used effectively in the conflict known as the Anglo-Boer War, or the politically correct but anodyne South African War 1899-1902, but likely to be always known as the Boer War, especially if your point of entry is Thomas Pakenham’s excellent single-volume history.

Reitz was a conventional teenager of the veld, caught up in the emotions of the time and riding off to war in adventurous ignorance (as many young men did). But he was also a worldly kid of the social elite (his father, FW, had been chief justice and president of the Free State republic before becoming state secretary in the Transvaal). He grew up in a home full of books, travelled to Britain and the Netherlands as a 12-year-old and was educated at good schools — a year at Wynberg Boys High in Cape Town and the rest at Bloemfontein’s Grey College. “He hated every minute” at Wynberg, according to former headmaster Keith Richardson, possibly because he missed the “pleasant Tom Sawyer-like existence” of the veld that he describes on the first page of Commando.

With all that education and reading, he developed a literacy that would lead to him writing his wartime memoirs in 1903, in Dutch, then translated by him into English in the 1920s and edited down from the original 1,147 pages to about 180 or 250, depending on which edition you read.

Jan Smuts, in his foreword, extols Commando for being “wonderful in its simplicity”, while Pakenham (in an introduction to a previous Jonathan Ball edition) believes he has identified the secret of the “runaway success of a war diary written by an unknown 21-year-old serving in an obscure Boer commando, and not published till the war seemed almost forgotten”. The author of The Boer War says Reitz “lived through these harrowing experiences and yet could still describe them, after the bitterness of defeat, with a kind of boyish innocence ... One is astonished by his fair-mindedness. He does not romanticise the war. Nor did war brutalise him.”

Commando inspired others to read more about the war, not least Fransjohan Pretorius, professor emeritus at the department of historical and heritage studies at the University of Pretoria. Like many first-time readers of Commando, Pretorius came across the book in his father’s library as a 12-year-old boy, without a wider understanding of the war but gripped by an adventure story that “played a pivotal role in shaping my identity as a historian”.

Now Pretorius has joined, so to speak, Reitz on commando. Where Pakenham says in his introduction that there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Commando, Pretorius, one of the finest historians of the war, has gently stepped in to help. Pretorius has corrected mistakes, explained exaggerations and provided fascinating background with his annotated footnotes in Jonathan Ball’s new edition.

In Commando, “an American colonel named Blake” turns out to be a graduate of the US military academy, West Point. Blake commanded the Irish brigade on the Boer side, a “band of 200 adventurers whose roistering habits and devil-may-care methods suited his own”. In an interview, Pretorius takes it even further: one of the brigade was John MacBride, who would be executed by the British during the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. His son Sean would become an international anti-apartheid campaigner. Such are the ironies of history, and also the gems of Pretorius’ insights.

Another concerns the weapons used by the Boers: 49,800 Mausers, 43,600 Martini-Henrys, 6,150 Geudes (an Austrian rifle also used by Australians in the war), 2,640 Lee Metfords (the standard British rifle of the war) and 100 Krag-Jorgensens (standard issue at the time in the army of Norway).

Reitz mentions the black participation only in terms of an agterryer, Charley, “an old native servant” to him and his brother Joubert whose arrival in their camp shortly before the outbreak of war was “a pleasant surprise”. Charley was “a grandson of the famous Basutho chief Moshesh” (1786-1870), so his age is guesswork, possibly in his late 30s or early 40s considering how the youthful Reitz boys imagined “old” and how fit Charley must have been to accompany them.

Charley was one of between 9,000 and 11,000 black men accompanying the Boers, according to a Pretorius footnote, “tasked with tending to the Boer masters’ livestock, guarding horses during battles, driving carts, riding spare horses, collecting wood, lighting fires, brewing coffee and preparing meals”. Quite a load off the ordinary burgher. “Many of them belonged to families who had been living on white farms for generations. Charley was most likely an indentured labourer who had been captured during the wars against the Basotho,” writes Pretorius.

It was not only as agterryers that black people were caught up in the war. It touched thousands, some in huge migrations trying to escape it. Fred Khumalo writes lyrically in his novel The Longest March of the 8,000 miners and their families who walked home from Joburg to Zululand when they were denied passage by rail. A white mine agent, John Marwick, helped arrange the migration, especially in warning farmers on the route that the horde approaching them was not an invading army. The group took 10 days to reach Ladysmith, a path Khumalo himself walked to raise awareness of the event.

One of the terrible incidents involving black people was the killing — by mistake Reitz suggests, in the confusion of a skirmish — in Bechuanaland (Botswana) where his group were attempting to derail and capture a supply train of the Rhodesian railways. Under command of “a little hunchback” (these were not sensitive times) called Mayer, four civilians were killed in fleeing the fighting. Two were women.

Pretorius’ footnote explains that black involvement in the war, in many cases as victims but also as active participants, became an early phenomenon. He suggests the further reading of Peter Warwick, Stowell Kessler, a US historian who has written about black people in the concentration camps, Garth Benneyworth and Bill Nasson.

Black or white, life on the open veld in the war was mostly an ordeal, vividly described by Reitz in Commando and by Pretorius in Life on Commando, the English version of the original Op Kommando, a groundbreaking study. In an amusing Pretorius family aside, the historian’s father, encouraging his young son’s growing interest in history, would joke that JH Breytenbach, who’d been anointed official state historian of the war and had written five volumes on it, personally knew every burgher in the field.

You could almost say that about Pretorius minor today: he knew almost everything else about them, from what they carried in their saddlebags to where they were on any specific day between the outbreak of the war in October 1899 and the eventual peace in May 1902. “I'm afraid, after 55 years, I still don’t know all the names of the boys who were on commando,” he says with a smile.

But it made him the perfect person to give Reitz the makeover. Indeed, with his trim silver-grey beard, sharp eyes and dapper dress sense, you can almost imagine the 75-year-old prof, even now, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and breeches, on the back of a splendid roan leading men across the veld and urging them to “los jou ruiters” (in Christiaan de Wet’s famous mutterings under breath to the indecisive Piet Joubert to unleash his cavalry when the Boer commandant-general had at his mercy an outnumbered British force retreating to Ladysmith; the British got away).

There’s no false modesty about the makeover either. “I’m sorry for boasting, but it was as if the project was made for me,” he says. He was eminently qualified. Having studied for three years at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he could read Reitz in its original Dutch (now kept at the Brenthurst Library in Johannesburg).

He’d not thought about dressing up Commando with the annotations “because people don’t like footnotes. [But] I’m glad they got me. It’s just a magnificent project. What a pleasure to pay tribute to Deneys Reitz in this way.”

It also called for difficult decisions in augmenting events, such as the Battle of Dalmanutha, near Belfast in Mpumalanga, at the end of August 1900. Reitz was there but doesn’t give it context. “It’s the end of the conventional part of the war, the last set-piece battle [to be followed by the guerrilla war].

“And if you choose something, what do you say? And how much do you say? Ten lines on Gen Gravett [head of the Boksburg commando who would be killed a few months after Dalmanutha], that’s too much, because he doesn’t deserve that. But if you give 10 lines on Smuts’ entry into the Cape in September 1901 that’s fine, because that was a crucial moment in Deneys Reitz’s life. So, yes, information and context, or explanation, or illumination, whatever you could call it.”

He picks out Reitz’s mistakes: the British commander, Gen Redvers Buller, did not have 44,000 men at Colenso (an early Boer War battle) but 19,400; Reitz kills off Commandant Abraham Malan of the Africander (sic) Cavalry Corps at Ladysmith but Malan survived what Reitz believed was a mortal wound and died only in 1910; he has the wrong British colonel presiding at the court martial of the Cape rebel leader Gideon Scheepers; there were three, not one, naval battles in the war (if they could even be called that: Boers firing with their rifles at Royal Navy ships and the ships firing back with rather larger ordnance).

Reitz also claims too much, such as having heard De Wet’s “los jou ruiters” muttering; and meeting Winston Churchill (then a prisoner of war, soon to escape) in Pretoria, which is not in the original Dutch manuscript and which Pretorius suggests might have been told to him by his father afterwards. If all this seems fussy to conservative readers at a time of no Google or a research team to assist Reitz, Pretorius’ annotations will enlighten newcomers.

Then there is the quality of Reitz’s writing. “When I first read this, what I remember was that this guy was full of humour. He wrote superbly well. He’s a wordsmith. If you compare his 1929 English first edition with the original manuscript, the pages written in Madagascar in 1903 are too loose. He doesn’t get things together. And then, later on, when he’s 47, he writes this magnificent piece of work.”

In his editing and rewriting, did Reitz have someone looking over his shoulder, offering advice? A Smuts perhaps? Reitz had accompanied Smuts from Namaqualand, where the Boers were besieging the mining town of O’Kiep, to planned peace talks in the Transvaal at Vereeniging. By sea from Port Nolloth to Cape Town and then by rail north, Smuts’ small party arrived in Kroonstad to be confronted by their nemesis, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, British commander in SA and perpetrator of the scorched earth tactics that had driven the Boers to submission.

In his original English translation (before publication), Reitz had written: “[Kitchener] had the high colour and paunchy eyes of a drinker, and in the battle of wits was no match for our chief, who played him round like a rapier against a bludgeon and he took his leave none the wiser for the interview.” Those lines do not appear in the 1929 edition and Pretorius has resurrected them, adding: Editorial footnote not in original handwritten English manuscript: “I don’t know whether you should leave this reference to Kitchener’s drinking etc for I agree with Winston Churchill that he, more than any man, was the sheet anchor of his people in 1914-15, which was years later — moreover he was a generous enemy. Ask Oom Jannie.”

Pretorius doesn’t think Reitz was being censored, and the advice appears not to be from Smuts, but suggests it might have been NJ de Wet, Louis Botha’s military secretary and later chief justice. That seems likely, but it is tempting to think it might have been Smuts’ wife, Isie, to whom Reitz had become close and who had written to him when he was in self-imposed exile in Madagascar, making a hardscrabble life as a transport rider. She urged him to put aside his anger at having to live under British rule. If Gen Smuts could do it, she told him in the letter, so can you. Reitz came home.

As for the manuscript that would become Commando, Pretorius has no doubt it was all Reitz. “Looking back at the original manuscript, the Dutch, and then the English translation, and then the later one, I can see that this is the same person. I can see this is the same person who wrote it, who, after 25, 26 years, had matured as a writer. When I read a sentence — and there are many of them — they are superb. I pause, and I go over it again because this is the way it should have been said. And it was that way.”