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After the fall of Pretoria and the relief of the Mafeking siege on 17 May 1900 there was a heavy movement of supplies along the road between the two towns and a massive build up of stores accumulated at the Elands River staging post in the Western Transvaal. These supplies were coveted by the Boers and on 4th August 1900 the Boer General, De la Rey, surrounded and laid siege to the post which was defended by 505 men, mostly Australian Bushmen. De la Rey’s force of 2,500 burghers was vastly superior and was equipped with many modern artillery pieces which pounded the post in its exposed position. The garrison belatedly entrenched their position and, defying offers of safe passage out with their arms if they surrendered, doggedly fought on for 12 days. A relief force from the west commanded by General Carrington was driven back by the Boers and another from the east commanded by Baden-Powell failed to relieve them. Lord Roberts’ Headquarters thought it impossible for the garrison to hold out and presumed that the post had surrendered. When this was found to be incorrect a very large column commanded by Kitchener himself marched to the relief of the post. They could not believe the devastation which they saw. As well as the shells and the sniping and the loss of 12 killed and 58 wounded, the defenders fought through the stench of their 1,500 dead horses and transport animals which had been killed by the Boers early during the siege. A British officer with the relief force wrote to the London TIMES “I do hope that Great Britain will show its gratitude to those Australians for the brightest page in the history of the war” A few days after the siege some 25,000 relieving troops were camped around the Elands River Post. Bill Woolmore 4 August 1900 Bushmen from five Australian colonies and other British Empire troops became involved in the defence of a staging post in Western Transvaal against a force of between 2,000-3,000 Boers. The post at Elands River held a large stockpile of supplies used to offset the disruption of the supply chain between Mafeking and Rustenburg. It was garrisoned by a small detachment of Rhodesians considerably reinforced with troops including 140 QMI soldiers and commanded by Lt Col Hore. By August 1900 the post consisted of a telegraph station, a stone ammunition store, 100,000 worth of military supplies, a hundred wagons, more than 1,500 horses, mules and cattle marked for evacuation or slaughter, thirty beleaguered loyalist awaiting military escort out of the troubled region, a small number of African labourers, drivers, servants and runners, and more than 500 solders. Not quite 300 of the soldiers were Australians, all from Citizen Bushmen contingents By the last day of July the Boers were commandeering men and cattle from surrounding farms and setting fire to the grass around the post to starve its animals. Patrols sent out by the garrison and an isolated outpost to the south sensed the enemy’s new ascendancy, and two New South Welshmen were badly wounded. Clearly an attack was imminent. The garrison prepared to meet it by rising early, heaping boulders and stones into crescent-shaped ‘sangars’ or ‘schanzes’, and surrounding the rise in barbed wire. To secure their water supply, small detachments under two lieutenants from Thomas’s squadron – Richard Zouch, a tough Bungendore grazier in his early fifties, and William Cope, almost as old as Zouch, a Sydney solicitor and horseman and a veteran of the Sudan War. They occupied and threw up schanzes on the ‘eminence’, henceforth known as Zouch’s kopje, and on the double-headed hill just south of it, soon to be called Butters’ Kopje after Butters, and some Rhodesians took up its defence. The junction of Elands River and Doornspruit could now be swept by rifle fire. But the little garrison was stretched across eight to ten hectares of land. At daybreak on 4 August most of the garrison had been dismissed from its usual pre-dawn alert and was about to eat breakfast when some rifle shots cracked in the cold morning air. ‘Boss! Boss! James Green’s African servant yelled, ‘the Dutchmen!” ‘Nonsense’, Green replied; it was the butchers slaughtering some cattle. But it was Boers all right, crawling along the river bed towards the post. There was little time to digest the disturbing discovery; Boer guns promptly opened fire from distant hills. The second shot tore down the telegraph line and interrupted a distress signal being relayed to Zeerust. In minutes the post was a shambles of smashed wagons, broken shale, and bleeding chunks of animal flesh. Gartside watched the tiny flash of flame in the mouths of the Boer guns when they fired. Exactly six seconds later, he calculated, and another shell would crash down on the post and add to the confusion. The soldiers rushed to the schanzes they had built – Ham and some Victorians to the river side, Thomas and some New South Welshmen to the east. It was the first time most of these men had been shot at. The big guns of the Boers were out of range of the sole 7 pounder in the camp, which was of little use to the defenders, although they managed to score a direct hit on a farmhouse from which snipers were operating. Major Tunbridge worked untiringly under fire, to try and keep the gun in service; four times it had to be dismantled to effect repairs. Tunbridge spent a day and a night with a file repairing some of the shells, many of which had been damaged in transit. The defenders suffered 32 casualties including Pt. S. Masteron, the first Queenslander hit, who was to die later in hospital. Lieutenant James Annat led a patrol of twenty-five Queenslanders in an effort to silence a particularly troublesome pom-pom. By crawling through the grass for more than two hundred metres the patrol opened fire so effectively that the Boers were forced to retire. Later Annat unsuccessfully sought permission to take a raiding party out at night to try and capture the gun. Lieutenant Annat had taken part in the relief of Mafeking. He served with the distinction in the early days of the siege and he often went out into enemy-held territory for hours to signal back the range of the Boer guns. When darkness fell, the defenders worked tirelessly to develop trenches with overhead cover that were impervious to shellfire. The siege was to last two weeks before the Boers withdrew in the face of overwhelming British reinforcements.
5 August 1900 After the initial Boer gun fire of Day 1 of the Siege, the 500 troops defending the Elands Post were cheered by the sight of forward elements of the remaining Rhodesian Field Force commanded by Maj Gen Carrington approaching along the Reit Valley but were dismayed as thery observed the Boers move several guns and 100 riflemen into a position to engage the relief force None were regular soldiers, almost none had been in battle before, and Carrington had never faced the Boers before. He cautiously left a third of his column guarding the wagons before entering the valley slowly, in extended order, behind advance patrols of Bushmen and Imperial Yeoman. De la Rey recognised the raw column as a target, not a threat. He considered letting it enter the post then bottling it up too. Then he changed his mind, deciding to defeat it before the garrison’s eyes. He dispatched a commando under Lemmer to do the job. It proved easy enough. Carrington later praised his scouts, including Lieutenant Richard Doyle from Mackay’s regiment, but they could not find the Boer positions let alone get around them. In contrast, Lemmer’s commando quickly crept round the column and swept the valley with fire from the surrounding hills. Their bullets ‘seemed to whistle about in all directions,’ Lieutenant Granville Ryrie recalled later. Carrington backed out of the trap and retreated all the way to Zeerust. The retreat so resembled a panic flight that some of the garrison wondered at first if it were a ruse. Reaching within four kilometres of Eland River, Carrington withdrew to Marico River at 16:00 after Boer artillery successfully targeted his headquarters and the gun teams. 8 August 1900 On 8 August, the Boer commander, De la Rey sent a messenger under a flag of truce to advise Lieutenant Colonel Hore that the relief forces had withdrawn and to let them know that the whole area was in Boer hands. He offered to escort the force to the nearest British post provided that none of the supplies within the camp were destroyed. He concluded, “Your commissioned officers, in such a case, will retain their arms in recognition of your courage in defence of your camp 12 August 1900 On 12 August, De la Rey sent a second offer of honourable surrender to which Colonel Hore replied, ‘Even if I wished to surrender to you – and I don’t – I am commanding Australians who would cut my throat if I accepted your terms.’ The active Boer attacks on Elands River Post dwindled away to nothing after the refusal of the garrison to agree to a surrender offered by Gen De la Rey. Never in the course of this war’, Smuts believed, ‘did a besieged force endure worse sufferings’. It has shown ‘magnificent courage’, albeit fortified by dugouts and drink, and had taught local Boers ‘a proper appreciation of the Australians’ that overturned the contempt engendered at Koster River. But the sufferings were now over, any courage superfluous, De la Rey, Smuts, and most of the Boers left the scene to reorganise and quash the Kgatla, now their main concern in the region. Soon only 2009 men of the Wolmaransstad commando were surrounding the post and its 500 defenders. Hore and his men failed to take advantage of their greater numbers, or even to detect they had an advantage. A post-war account of the siege claimed that Australians launched daring night-time raids on the Boer positions. If any raids were conducted, they failed to reveal the Boer departments, let alone hasten them. The garrison seemed content to hold on to its trenches and reflect on what it had done. Kitchener relieved the post on the 16 Aug as part of a 10,000 force in the vicinity. De Wet had escaped the attempt to trap him by slipping north through the Magaliesberg Range a few days before. The Bushmen were proud of their two-week stand, even if it had not been the kind of fighting they had expected or wanted on enlistment. “We look back at all the drill we have done preparing to meet the enemy’, David Ham wrote, ‘and it seems strange that we could not use it. We were sent out as scouts (but) we are never used as such’. Most of the Bushmen’s liberators, ignorant of the relaxed last week of the siege, were equally impressed. De Lisle’s men marvelled at what seemed a ‘splendid stand’ that cost ‘one hundred casualties in four hundred’. An officer with Broadwood’s brigade wrote to the London Times that the ‘four hundred Australians’ – the Rhodesians and the Kgatla were already forgotten – had given ‘the most gallant performance of the whole war’. It certainly ‘was the most marvellous piece of heroism’, Hubert Murray believed, especially since the garrison had obviously been ‘shamefully abandoned’ by Carrington and Baden Powell. The myth of Elands River had begun. The cost of these few months might have been felt in Australian reputations as well as Australian lives had the press reported the brawls in Beira and the drunkenness at Elands River. As might have been expected of barely trained soldiers led by inexperienced officers, the Bushmen had not taught the Boers how to ride and shoot. On the few occasions they had been given the chance to scout they had sometimes bungled the job, and the failure o exploit the decline in the number of besiegers of Elands River Post was damning. In part the Bushmen were of little mind to apply themselves to war. They had expected to come in on the action as glamorous outriders, saviours of the empire, just as the fighting was ending. Instead they found themselves garrisoning a pestilential pirates’ fiefdom, and plunged into a hunt on unfamiliar ground for deadly bandits who had all the advantages of local knowledge, battle experience, and sheer desperation.” They had been outnumbered by four or five to one, they had been massively out-gunned but had not shown the slightest sound of surrendering. They had lost heavily in horses, over 1400 of the 1550 in the post were killed. Among the men the casualties had been amazingly light; of the seventy five wounded only five had died. Describing battle at Elands River, a Boer wrote: For the first time in the war we were fighting men who used our own tactics against us. They were Australian volunteers and although small in number we could not take their position. They were the only troops who could scout into our lines at night and kill our sentries. Our men admitted that the Australians were more formidable and far more dangerous than any British troops Australian Troops Involved Included:
Other Significant Troops Involved Included:
Defenders Weapons:
References:
Major John Baines August 2011
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“When the ballad makers of Australia seek for a subject, let them turn to Elands River, for there was no finer resistance in the war.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
© National Boer War Memorial Association Inc ABN 49 709 547 198
 
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