Guerrilla War
In early March the Boers decided to detach their troops from supply wagons and become much more mobile. This decision had immediate success. On March 31, 1900 a new charismatic leader of the Boers, Chirstaan De Wet along with his brother Piet De Wet organized and led a successful raid against the water works of Bloemfontein. Using a highly mobile force and a tactic of hit-and-run the Boers lured the British into an ambush where at the cost of 13 killed and wounded the inflicted 159 casualties, and captured 373 personnel, seven guns, and 116 wagons from the British.1 Although no one knew it at the time, the war was changing from a conventional war into a guerrilla war.
The Boers did not hope to defeat the British in this manner. Instead they hoped to wear down the British will to fight and make them recognize their colonies as independent states. The British had successfully forced the government of Paul Kruger to leave, but they just couldn’t win the war. Captain March Phillips of the British Command wrote:
It is generally considered rather a coup in war, I believe, to take the enemy’s capital, isn’t it? Like taking a queen in chess. We keep on taking capitals, but I can’t see it seems to make much difference.2
The British commander, Lord Kitchener originally tried to chase the Boers through the countryside but could not capture the highly mobile Boers. He then decided that the way to defeat the Boers would be to isolate them and drive them like game. In March of 1900 the British had begun the construction of a line of blockhouses along railroad lines to protect the railways. 
Kitchener believed he could expand the blockhouse and fence system, throughout the Orange Free State, Transvaal, the Cape Colony and Natal and drive the Boer forces into these lines. This plan was very labor intensive and took a long time to complete.
Kitchener then began the most controversial part of his strategy. In order to cut off the support given to the Boers in the field, he began looting and destroying everything owned by Boer families. He took the women and children of the Boers and relocated them into concentrated areas. These “Concentration Camps” became the symbol of the brutality of the British during the war. In October of 1901 the camps had a thirty-four per cent death rate and in the ten months from May of 1901 until February of 1902 over twenty thousand whites and twelve thousand blacks 
were killed in the English “Concentration Camps”.3
The Boers and British had enough of war. The British public were disgusted with the tactics of Lord Kitchener and demanded the war be ended. The British wanted to annex all of the land that they had conquered and the Boers wanted their countries to be recognized as free independent states. In the end the peace treat allowed the British to annex the gold and diamond fields and allowed the Boers to have independent states. In the 1970’s survivors from the war were interviewed and described the war in phrases like, “It was a cruel war it was…I never saw the point of it…It was all for the gold-mines.”4
