We attended a Military Odyssey in Kent during the weekend of 28 August 2016.

To our surprise, one of the first re-enactments of the day was of the battle of Putfontein that took place during the First Anglo-Boer War in 1881. During this particular battle all those years ago, the British forces totally underestimated their opponents and treated them with extreme disrespect. The outcome was a total defeat and a humiliating retreat. The war went from the initial defeat at Putfontein through a number of similar misadventures and ended in the signing of a peace treaty at O’Neil’s Cottage at the foot of Majuba (Zulu for Hill of Doves) where the British met with the greatest defeat of the war.

The outcome of this peace treaty was the independence of the Transvaal, which lasted up to the start of the Second Anglo-Boer War or South African War in 1899.

Although there were no true “Boers” in the re-enactment group, their effort to portray the details of the Boer forces was commendable. As it were at the time, the Boers did not have a standing army but every man was expected to enrol in the “commando” active in his region. He had to supply his own horse, rifle, ammunition, uniform and provisions. The government of the day did supply a number of Martini-Henry rifles though, as supplied to them by the British during the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War. Nobody received any pay and most served out of a love for freedom. Most did not wear any sort of military boots, but rather “velskoene”, a type of shoe made from really tough ox skin, still favoured by numbers of Boer descendants. (There is a similar shoe in the UK; it is called a “desert boot”.) The only form of rank was worn by the “commandants” or officers; it consisted of his Sunday best and a top hat.

In some cases the women accompanied their husbands into the field, attired also in the clothes of the day – flowing dresses and wide bonnets – but this was the exception rather than the rule.

The horses that were used were the offspring of the tough little Basuto ponies, inured to hardship and accustomed to live off the veld.

It was a sad conflict, highlighting the clash of imperial ideas with freedom-loving citizens, typical of the wars of the time.

“The Battle of Bronkhorstspruit was the first major clash of the First Boer War. It was a battle between a British army column and a group of Boers, fought by the Bronkhorstspruit River, a few miles east of the town of Bronkhorstspruit, Transvaal on 20 December 1880.”

Source: YouTube, 28 November 2015. [online] Available at: <https://youtu.be/iiU1rAkrQBY>