"Regrouped into small, mobile units, Boer commandos became adept at guerrilla warfare, sabotaging railway lines, ambushing supply columns, destroying bridges, severing telegraph wires and raiding depots, running rings around British forces with hit-and-run tactics. Their leaders – Louis Botha in the eastern Transvaal; Koos de la Rey and Jan Smuts in the western Transvaal; Christiaan de Wet in the Orange Free State – grew into legendary figures. De Wet's exploits, in particular, confounded the British at every turn. During July and August 1900, the British chased De Wet for six weeks across the Free State and the Transvaal, deploying more than 30,000 troops in a bid to catch him. In November, with British forces in hot pursuit, he briefly captured a British garrison at De Wets Dorp, a Free State village named after his father. In February 1901, he crossed the Orange River into the Cape Colony, hoping to inspire rebellion there, outrunning fifteen British columns sent to capture him for six weeks, before returning to the Free State.
The British high command was totally unprepared for this kind of warfare. Their forces, short of mounted troops, scouts and intelligence, lumbered about the countryside in large numbers but with little effect. ‘As for our wandering columns,' wrote Captain March Phillipps, in his book With Rimington, ‘they have about as much chance of catching the Boers on the veldt as a Lord Mayor's procession would have of catching a highwayman on Hounslow Heath . . . [The Boers] are all around and about us like water round a ship, parting before our bows and reuniting round our stern. Our passage makes no impression and leaves no visible trace.'
Unable to get to grips with Boer commandos, the British high command adopted increasingly brutal tactics towards the civilian population who supported them. Before he left for England, Roberts initiated a policy of collective punishment of civilians living in the vicinity of guerrilla attacks, burning down farms, destroying reservoirs and seizing livestock. ‘Unless the people generally are made to suffer for the misdeeds of those in arms against us,' said Roberts in September 1900, ‘the war will never end.'…"
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