Mafeking is a dull, unimportant town in the veld with a history that attracted the Boers to it.

They considered that, like Natal and Kimberley, it did not rightfully belong to Great Britain. They were a community of trekking and centrifugal atoms, especially in the direction of territories in the possession of native tribes, and their own country, though sparsely inhabited, was not spacious enough for them. The bucolic ambition of the Boer, which is to dwell in a house from which he cannot see the smoke of his nearest neighbour's chimney, can be satisfied in a flat country only when the house stands in the midst of a farm many thousand _morgen_ in extent.

For a generation or two before the war, the Transvaalers had been encroaching upon Bechuanaland. A Baralong chief named Montsioa was dispossessed of Mafeking and could obtain no redress from the British Government, which at that time was in an intermediate frame of mind, and did not necessarily act on the assumption that in every dispute between white man and native the latter was in the right.

Thus encouraged, the Transvaalers annexed Bechuanaland in 1868, but three years later it was taken away from them under the Keate award, in an arbitration to determine the respective rights of Boer and native over the debateable territory.

After the war of 1881, the Transvaalers supposed that the British Government would be unlikely to assert itself, and two little impudent republics of adventurers were set up in territory which the award had declared to be within the British sphere of influence. Montsioa fought for his rights, but the British Government lay torpid for some time.

Finally it was goaded into action by a proclamation issued by Kruger annexing the territory to the Transvaal. He soon found it advisable to cancel the proclamation, and in 1885 the Republics of Goshen at Mafeking and of Stellaland at Vryburg were effaced by an expedition led by Sir Charles Warren. Bechuanaland was again annexed by proclamation, but on this occasion to the British Empire.

The resentment of the Transvaalers against Mafeking, which originated in the conviction that they had been wrongfully deprived of it, was aggravated by the fact that it was the starting place of the Jameson Raid.

On October 13 nearly 7,000 burghers, with six guns, under P. Cronje, sat down before it. He expected to have little difficulty in recovering it.

Appearances were encouraging; the town was open and defenceless, and he was probably aware that it was held by a weak garrison. Why the British should have occupied such an out-of-the-way place as part of their plan of campaign, he could not understand, but there it was, inviting attack.

Of the half-hearted measures taken by the War and Colonial Offices in 1899, when a war with the Transvaal seemed to be more probable every day, one of the most intelligent was the commissioning of R.

Baden-Powell, who had formerly served in Bechuanaland and had recently commanded the 5th Dragoon Guards, to "organize the defence of the Bechuanaland and Rhodesia frontiers." It would neither involve a great expenditure of money, nor be likely to wound the susceptibilities of the Transvaalers, who might be provoked by more vigorous and minatory measures: and thus little harm would be done if after all it were found to be an unnecessary precaution.

For these reasons it commended itself to Pall Mall, but its chief merit was that it sent to South Africa a capable, versatile and zealous soldier, whose mind did not run in the grooves. Yet if Baden-Powell had been sent to Kimberley instead of to Mafeking, Kimberley would probably have fallen--after an outbreak of civil war within the lines between him and Rhodes. It would have been impossible to insulate the personal electricity with which each of them was so highly charged, and short circuiting must have occurred.

The object of the contemplated display upon the Bechuanaland and Rhodesia frontiers was twofold. They ran through the indefinite border belt which separated black from white territory, and activity on them would not only be witnessed by the tribes and exert an impressive influence on the native mind, but would also draw away the Boers and prevent them concentrating their forces. The central position of Mafeking on the Western line, and the stores and supplies which had been collected in the town, attracted Baden-Powell to it. It was singularly ill-adapted to hold defensively against an active enemy.

In spite of recruiting difficulties raised by the Facing-both-Ways Ministry at Capetown, which in a less tolerant and philosophic age would at once have been swept away by a storm of indignation, he raised two irregular regiments: the Rhodesian Regiment, which was sent into Rhodesia under Plumer, and the Protectorate Regiment under Hore.

The Cape Ministry did what it could to prevent the Protectorate Regiment going to Mafeking, and the corps was in fact mustered outside the Cape Colony, and only entered the town a few days before war was declared. As at Kimberley, so also at Mafeking, the Schreiner sect set itself placidly to thwart the gentle and tentative early efforts of the British Government to deal with the situation.

When P. Cronje appeared before Mafeking, Baden-Powell had a force of less than 1,200 men, none of whom were regular soldiers and less than half of whom were efficiently armed, with which to sustain the siege of an open town by 7,000 Boers. He had also four small field guns of obsolete pattern, to which were added later on a home-made howitzer and an ancient man-of-war's smoothbore, which had left the foundry during the Napoleonic wars. In its youth it had probably fought the French through a porthole, and now having in the interval trekked across the South African veld into the possession of a native tribe, was discovered in a Baralong kraal, restored to active service, and, mounted on a Dutch wagon, aided in the defence of a little settlement 400 miles away from the sound of the sea.

In one respect only Baden-Powell had the advantage over Kekewich at Kimberley. His burden was not increased by discord within the lines. The civilians behaved with exemplary composure and put themselves unreservedly into his hands.

An archaic but effective simplicity characterized the methods of the defence. Baden-Powell eked out his slender stock of men and instruments with tricks and devices that might have been employed at the siege of Troy, but which none the less deceived and confounded the slow-witted besiegers, whom he scandalized with gibes and taunting messages. When asked to surrender to avoid further bloodshed, he replied that the only blood hitherto shed was the blood of a chicken in a compound; and on another occasion he reproved Cronje for inactivity. Many of the incidents read like passages from the Iliad. The besiegers were allured into determined attacks upon dummy trenches; deceived by bogus orders shouted for their information through a megaphone; alarmed by the sudden appearance of cavalry within the lines, for did they not see the glint of lances? The lances were weapons that had been forged in the railway workshops, and carried round, as it were in a parade before the footlights by a body of supers making a gallant show upon the stage.

What should be done in a besieged place with such an embarrassing asset as ten tons of dynamite? Buller would have handed them over to his second in command for disposal, and then if any accident occurred would have disclaimed responsibility for it. Gatacre would have taken the chances, but would not have hesitated to pitch his tent if necessary beside them. Colvile would have searched his orders for instructions.

Baden-Powell, not being able to rid himself of the explosive by firing it, arranged that it should be fired by the enemy. He loaded it on railway trucks, which he propelled a few miles out of the town and then abandoned. There was no Laocoon to warn the Boers, and they rushed at what they thought was an armoured train in trouble. In the skirmish the dynamite exploded, and although no one was hurt the enemy was terribly scared, and the resisting powers of the garrison virtually augmented.

Baden-Powell thoroughly understood the Boer temperament. Many generations' isolation from the progressive European world had rendered it peculiarly liable to be ensnared by simple expedients. It was not wanting in "slimness," but it was the "slimness" or cunning of a primitive race, and was easily gulled by wiles that might have been employed against a tribe of Red Indians. Baden-Powell alone of all the British leaders was aware of this, and he owed much of his success to the knowledge. With but one man to defend each ten yards of his perimeter of seven miles he hypnotized Cronje, a dull man bewildered by a resourceful. His versatility instantly found a way out of each difficulty that beset him. Before he sent out a party detailed for a night attack that might easily go astray, he bethought himself of the device by which a ship is often guided into her haven, and hung up two lamps in the town as leading lights across the veld.

Cronje soon found that Mafeking was not an easy prey. Although in all probability he might at any time have overwhelmed it by sheer weight of numbers, he refrained from making the attempt. It hit out so vigorously and was believed to be so well protected by mines that he requisitioned a big gun from Pretoria, which was mounted south of the town and came into action on October 23. With a weapon throwing a shell more than three times heavier than all the shells that could be fired in salvo by the artillery of the defence, there was no doubt in his mind that the place must fall before the end of the month.

The arrival of the gun quickened the attack for a time. The native location S.W. of the town was made the object of a feint on October 25 to be immediately followed by a real attack elsewhere, but the Baralongs, who had been armed, resisted so stoutly that the operation failed. By the beginning of November the Boers had been cleared out of a newly made advanced trench on the east side; and Cannon Kopje on the south, the possession of which by them would have made a considerable section of the defence works and perhaps even the town itself untenable, was held under a converging fire of artillery by fifty troopers of the British South African Police against a thousand Boers.

Five weeks of Baden-Powell were enough for Cronje, who on November 19 trekked away to the south, leaving Snyman and 3,000 burghers to continue the siege. His self-esteem had been wounded because the walls had not immediately fallen to the sound of the big gun, and by Baden-Powell's refusal to take a serious view of the situation in the frequent communications that passed between them. It may be said that Cronje was "chaffed" away from Mafeking; the gibes put him out of conceit with himself, and instead of stimulating him into activity only made him more dull-spirited than he was by nature. He had none of the instinctive military genius which showed itself so notably in most of his colleagues, who, having turned their ploughshares into swords at a moment's notice, were generally more than a match for the professional soldiers against whom they were pitted. He had the misfortune of meeting almost the only British leader then in South Africa capable of instinctively assessing him on the spot at his true valuation; and like a timid poker-player with a good hand, he allowed himself to be bluffed by the flourishes of his opponent. He held good cards, but he feebly threw them down. At Magersfontein he played his hand with skill, but lost the deciding game at Paardeberg.

Baden-Powell was too zealous a soldier to conform to the schism that the operations of war were akin to athletics or sport. Externally his predilections were for the drama. He was a competent actor and manager, and he rejoiced in Mafeking as in a stage play.

Many of his devices were as unsubstantial as stage scenery; the besiegers were the villains of the piece who would meet with their deserts before the curtain fell; there was comic by-play in his ways of beguiling the tedium and the lassitude of the siege, in the bantering messages he sent out to the besiegers, and now and then even in his garrison orders. The little garrison was permeated by the exosmose action of his cheery optimism and humour during seven weary months of waiting; and while it might seem to some that he was treating the serious situation with unbecoming levity, he wisely kept the tragedy of it, of which he was fully conscious, in the background.

His methods were so far successful that in a few weeks he had driven away two-thirds of the force originally opposed to him, and had firmly gripped the place. The enemy's superiority in artillery was neutralized by the construction of underground shelters and warrens in which the women and children took refuge during the daytime, leaving an apparently deserted town to be bombarded. Thus Baden-Powell was relieved from the moral pressure which a large number of casualties among them would have caused; and the garrison suffered but little in the redoubts and trenches. Supplies were plentiful and the water supply secure.

What Cronje had failed to do, Snyman could hardly be expected to accomplish with a considerably reduced force, and the attack became more faint-hearted. He carried out the Cronje policy of comfortable, lethargic squatting, doubting not that the place must fall into his hands sooner or later. Friends and relations tripped over from Johannesburg to admire and encourage his brave burghers at their posts, and some were even allowed as a treat to fire a shot at the Khakis.

No serious operation occurred until the end of the year. On the morrow of Christmas Day, Baden-Powell made an unsuccessful attempt to carry a fort on Game Tree Hill, which commanded the approach to the town from the north. He was unaware of its strength, and the casualties amounted to nearly one-fifth of the force engaged, a loss which he could ill afford; but early in January he compelled the big gun, which could neither face the shells of his little battery of 7-pounders nor the rifles of his marksmen, to withdraw to a more distant emplacement east of the town. Towards the end of the month an encouraging message was received from Lord Roberts at Capetown.

The Boer line of circumvallation was in plan an irregular hexagon, of which the north-east face was pushed inwards and a re-entrant angle formed at the Brickfields; where a fort was built nearer to the town than any other post of the attack, and the operations during February and March were mainly a struggle for the possession of it. After several weeks of sapping and counter sapping, the Boers, though supported by the fire of the big gun in its new emplacement, were expelled from the Brickfields on March 23.

April was marked by the final withdrawal of the big gun, which, after a heavy bombardment on the 11th, was sent away to Pretoria; and by the appearance of young Eloff, fresh from the capital, with instructions to do what he could to stimulate the attack, for once in a way, into real activity. More than a fortnight elapsed before he succeeded. Snyman gave him little encouragement, but could not oppose a mandate from Kruger, Eloff's grandfather.

The Molopo River, after passing south of the town, runs through the only weak place in the defence, the native location, which during the first few days of the siege had been attacked without result by Cronje.

Westward of it the steep banks of the river afford a covered way of access to the thickly clustered huts lying within the perimeter of the defence, which Eloff saw might be turned if he got a footing among them.

Early in the morning of May 12 a heavy fire was opened upon the town from the east, but was soon discontinued; and then an alarm came from the S.W. It was Eloff, who, with 300 burghers, had wriggled up the river bed through the outposts and had set fire to the native huts: a signal for the reinforcements which Snyman had promised in writing. It also warned the garrison. The natives were too much terrified to offer resistance, and Eloff, leaving the greater part of his force to hold the location, advanced upon the town. The police building in the open was surrounded and the detachment holding it taken prisoners. A pause was now made to allow the promised reinforcements to come up.

Eloff's gallant thrust gave the garrison the opportunity for which it had long been hoping. The troops of the western section of the defence closed in and were manoeuvred by Baden-Powell through the telephone. The door by which Eloff came in was shut, not only to a retreat but also to the reinforcements which timidly knocked at it; the burghers holding the location were overpowered, and Eloff's party was penned up in the police building with its prisoners, whose condition was suddenly dramatically reversed. Eloff, seeing that Snyman had failed him, surrendered to the men he had captured a few hours before, within the walls of the prison in which he had confined them.

The ordeal of Mafeking soon came to an end. On May 15 it was reported that the relief column under Mahon, who on that day joined Plumer at Massibi on the Molopo twenty miles from Mafeking, was approaching. The combined forces, though vigorously opposed by Delarey, whom L. Botha had sent when the news of the advance reached him, entered the town on May 17 and ended a siege of 213 days.

Mafeking, the last and most instructive of the sieges, proved that there was hardly any disparity of numbers or preponderance of available military resources that could not be neutralized by good leadership opposed to bad. Baden-Powell had not only detained a considerable Boer force on the edge of the storm, but with a body of irregular troops had beaten the men of Magersfontein, Colenso, and Spion Kop.

The relief of Mafeking, however, did not vitally affect the general situation. The capture of the town during Lord Robert's advance would no doubt have caused annoyance and trouble, but if necessary it could have been retaken without much difficulty. Nor would its fall have greatly benefited the enemy, who probably would have been tempted by the success to hold an unsound position and detain in it commandos urgently required elsewhere.

Kimberley, Mafeking, and Wepener, more than the operations at large, demonstrated the anomalous character of the war. Hitherto, invaders had been accustomed to besiege the invaded, in South Africa the invaded besieged the invaders. Such a reversal of the order of things military had rarely before occurred. The sieges of the Peninsular War are not an exception, for Wellington was from a military, though not from a political point of view, as much an invader as the lieutenants of Napoleon.

Baden-Powell is a suppressed personality whose merit was not fully recognized. With scarcely an exception, no individual leader was more self-reliant, or handled imperfect tools with greater skill. For seven months he kept the flag flying over the lonely Baralong kraal in the veld. His unconventional even theatrical methods were not to the taste of his serious superiors, who underestimated his success. His only reward was the Companionship of the Bath, which was also bestowed upon the militia colonels, most of whom, from no fault or no want of zeal on their part, but from lack of opportunity, never met the enemy except in some casual paltry skirmish.

The junction of the two columns advancing to the relief of Mafeking--Plumer's from the north and Mahon's from the south--was effected at the right moment, for it is doubtful whether either of them acting alone would have been able to deal with Delarey.

Plumer with the Rhodesian Regiment had been trekking here and there and skirmishing with the enemy for seven months. On the eve of the war he was sent by Baden-Powell to Tuli, a village in Rhodesia not far from the right bank of the Limpopo, which is the northern boundary of the Transvaal. His instructions were "to defend the border, to attract the enemy away towards the north, and then in due time to co-operate with the British force," which it was expected would soon be invading the Transvaal from the south, and also to overawe the doubtful native tribes between Tuli and Mafeking, a distance of 500 miles; and he had under his immediate command at Tuli one irregular regiment 500 strong.

He remained for some weeks seeing to the drifts, which were now in his possession and now in that of the enemy. A Boer raid into Rhodesia on November 2 forced the outlying detachments back upon Tuli, which was seriously threatened by some commandos under F.A. Grobler of Marico. The Government of Pretoria, however, growing anxious at the presence of British troops elsewhere, vetoed a promising enterprise and recalled him. The raid of November 2 was answered a few weeks later by Plumer, who, finding the drifts unoccupied, reconnoitred thirty miles towards the south. Nearly six months elapsed before another British soldier set foot in the Transvaal. A subsequent reconnaissance again found no trace of the enemy on the left bank of the Limpopo, and showed that it was unnecessary for him to remain on the river. He had the advantage of being cut off from communication with superior officers ignorant of local conditions, and was able to act freely upon his own responsibility.

He soon heard news which clearly indicated the way he should go. The railway from Buluwayo to Mafeking was held as far as possible towards the south by patrols of police under Nicholson, and the Rhodesian Volunteers under Holdsworth were also on the line. In the gap between the railhead and Mafeking, a Boer commando, said to have been detached from Mafeking by Cronje, was at Sekwani on the N.W. border of the Transvaal and within striking distance of the Western line. It was face to face with the border tribes and was soon in trouble with them.

Although they were not allowed to attack Sekwani independently, they were permitted to co-operate as non-combatants in an attack which Holdsworth was about to make on it, but only on the condition that they did not cross the Transvaal border. This was a refinement of policy which they could hardly be expected to understand, and they precipitated Holdsworth's action by attacking the Boer laager, which lay but a mile or two across the border, on their own account, and the operation had therefore to be abandoned. To avenge this native attack, in which several burghers had been killed, reinforcements were brought over by the Boers from the Pietersburg line, and Holdsworth's position at Mochudi on the Western line, whither he had retired after the Sekwani failure, was endangered.

This was the news which reached Plumer at the end of the year. His original instructions were obsolescent and he readily adapted himself to the altered situation. He saw that it was more important to clear the railway north of Mafeking than to remain where he was on the chance of a Boer invasion of Rhodesia, of which his reconnaissances south of the Limpopo saw no sign. The nearest station on the Western line was Palapye, and on December 27 he set out on his midsummer march of 170 miles to it. Within a fortnight, his little force of irregulars, which three months before had been sent out into the South African wilderness to perform duties that might have engrossed a division, passed away from Tuli beyond the Limpopo on to the visible stage of war near Mochudi.

In the middle of January, 1900, he reached Gaberones. On his left flank Sekwani was still occupied by the enemy, though in reduced numbers; in front of him the Boers were not only strongly posted on the railway at Crocodile Pools, but able to draw upon Mafeking for reinforcements, by the help of which they successfully resisted an attack on February 11.

Plumer's force, though augmented by detachments he had picked up on the line, was unequal to the task of advancing along it. He therefore decided to diverge from the railway and advance by way of Kanya, a native town lying twenty miles west of the line.

On March 6 he reached Lobatsi, where he was forty-five miles from Mafeking. He found, however, that it was an awkward place to defend and soon quitted it, as Baden-Powell seemed to be in no immediate need, and was in fact averse to Plumer's small force throwing itself upon the besiegers. With the greater part of his command, the rest being sent back to hold the railway at Crocodile Pools, he withdrew to the base which he had established at Kanya; afterwards advancing to Sefetili, thirty miles from Mafeking, where he awaited the approach of Mahon's relieving column from the south. Baden-Powell, rejoicing in his siege, was not anxious that the game which he was playing so well should be brought to a premature conclusion, and was more afraid for Plumer than for himself.

Plumer filled in his two months at Kanya and Sefetili by occasional raids in the direction of Mafeking and by an expedition towards Zeerust.

The column in the south, of whose movements many false reports reached him from time to time, seemed to be tarrying by the way, and it was not until May 12 that he received a message from Lord Roberts that it was nearing its destination.

For some weeks after his entry into Bloemfontein, Lord Roberts was unable to arrange for the direct relief of Mafeking by a column specially detailed for the purpose. He had originally intended that this should be done by Methuen, but subsequently ordered him to operate in the Free State on the left flank of the advance on the Transvaal. He hoped to apply his favourite method of an automatic relief, brought about by external pressure elsewhere. At the end of April, however, when it had become an urgent matter, he ordered Hunter, who had recently arrived at Kimberley from Natal, to send out a mounted force under Mahon, following it himself with the rest of the Xth Division.

He left Kimberley on May 3, and on the following day Mahon set out from Barkly West on his 230 miles' march to Mafeking. Mahon advanced wide of the railway up the Hart's River, which joins the Vaal at Barkly West, his right flank being covered by Hunter, who kept close to the Vaal.

Mahon met with no serious resistance until he had covered 200 miles of his journey, when he found a, force which had been sent down from Mafeking across his path, and which diverted him to Massibi; where he joined Plumer on May 15.