The year is 1903. On the dunes at Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a powered glider takes to the air for the first time. This was the product of two brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright. They….oh wait, you said Boer War of 1899. To the Time Machine!

The year is 1899, the Boers of Transvaal and the Orange Free State have invaded the British colonies of Natal and South Africa. The British Empire, stretching across the globe, had to respond. They needed to get men, weapons, horses, and other materials to the battlefield from all corners of their empire, and in 1899, there aren’t a lot of options.

To start with, my opening statements on the first powered flight are intentional. Flight was not an option for transporting armies to the front at this point in history. It would take an additional 2 decades past the Wright Flyer before we would really begin to see air travel becoming more viable, and even then, it wasn’t until the Second World War and afterwards when militaries could use it as a fairly reliable method of transporting necessary troops and war material. However, there are still things you cannot transport by air (at least not easily or in bulk). At the time of the Second Anglo-Boer War, hot air balloons and gliders were essentially the pinnacle of military aerial technology.

So what about horses? Your biggest problem here is Africa, literally. Outside of South Africa, the next largest and most important British territory on the continent was Egypt. There, the British maintained forces there to ensure control over the Suez Canal as well as to continue to fight the Anglo-Sudanese War which was a very recent conflict at the time. For these forces to South Africa from Egypt/Ethiopia/Sudan, they would have had to traverse some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. Deserts, jungles, savannas. Fighting off hostile peoples, crocodiles, hippos and other fauna, disease, heat, and dehydration. Any such trek is a monumental undertaking. So horses are probably not an option for our desperately needed army. And for the same reasons, lets throw out camels.

How about rail? Well, first you have to build it, and in 1899 there was no rail connection that existed between Cape Town and Cairo. There were railroads in South Africa and Natal, which I will touch on later, but for now rail is not an option getting to the theater. The only remaining option is by boat, and at this point in history, England ruled the waves.

However, before we dive into how they got to the theater, let us first look at the climate that caused the Boer War in the first place. After gold was discovered near Johannesburg, the Boers found their territories increasingly populated by uitlanders (outlanders, foreigners) who were mostly of British origin. In addition, Boer protectionist policies, which favored their railroads, strained the relationships between them further.

In 1895, a British colonial politician in Johannesburg attempted to provoke an uprising of the British against the Boer government. It was an embarrassing failure. Nonetheless, it did little to help the tension that had built up between the Boers and the British colonies. In 1899, in response to these rising tensions, the British relocated more military forces to Natal. To this, the Boers issued an ultimatum. When the conditions were not met, Boer armies invaded Cape colony and Natal and quickly outmaneuvered or surrounded British forces in the region. Very quickly, the towns of Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley came under siege.

In command of the British forces in the region was General Redvers Buller, who struggled to reverse the course of the war. Although the Boers themselves struggled in their sieges, the British struggled to compete in the field. Regardless of their initial difficulties, they more than made up for it in their ability to get the necessary forces to the front. Aside from a few ships from the Royal Navy, the vast majority of vessels carrying war material came from the British merchant fleets and contracts to ships of foreign merchants. These ships were chartered to carry everything from weapons to food to horses and mules to South Africa.

These ships were destined for several major ports in the region including Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. However, Cape Town was one of very few ports where ships could dock at the wharfs and goods could be unloaded directly. The other ports had to unload by way of intermediate vessels. This was offset by the status of the railroad networks of South Africa at the time as Cape Town was the farthest, by rail miles, to the front lines. These rails remained crucial arteries for the British army throughout the entire war, and reports afterwards suggested that 300 rail wagons of material were needed daily to support and provision their armies.

The war was fought in primarily 3 phases, the mobilization and initial losses under Buller, the offensive campaign by Lord Roberts, and the guerrilla phase under Lord Kitchener. During the latter two especially, the Boers attempted to mitigate the British advantages by targeting or avoiding railways which required the British to also maintain ox or mule driven wagons to supply their forces in the field. This was all supported by the remount efforts, which I have covered in the past, which also relied on the merchant fleets and charters for a steady supply of livestock.

As a side note, in the army of General Redvers Buller, there were two future world figures present in the same place at the same time. Both Gandhi and Winston Churchill were present in the Boer War, the former was part of an ambulance unit from India and the latter was a war correspondent.

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