Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 337 - The First Boer War: Part 2

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

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Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDMerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also Ed by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. We have once again enlisted in the British military, leaving behind our day jobs of doing something unspeakably evil to the local population of South Africa circa the 1800s in order

to do something unspeakably evil to the local population of South Africa, but in uniform. As much as we love our jobs doing menial paperwork for Supervillain Incorporated, we long for adventure. Our commanding officer, Sir Reginald Small-but-Eagerbottom, First Lord of Upper Dicker, has ordered us to march into the plains of Africa, but has forgotten to supply us with food, water, or a map. It's getting dark. We're cold. We're tired and the bushes are starting to speak Dutch. How you doing fellas? Very excited to learn about weird guys trying to make, you know, the Neo version of hard tack, but out of like dose.

I was just going to say about the upper Dicker is that if you've ever looked on the map, it's not just that there's also Lower dicker and the dicker No, there's not there's the definite article and then there's upper and lower, you know, it's I don't know there's something very funny about that like, you know, sometimes things are funnier because like someone said them in Spanish or in Portuguese I know this is stupid but like the job It's like the crushed the squished gyro ball scenario video is funnier also because said them in Spanish or in Portuguese. I know this is stupid, but the crushed, squished Gyrebol scenario video is funnier also because it's in Portuguese.

I don't know why some of these things are like Gyrebol scenario saying, okay, a Uma golden shower or whatever on Twitter. That's funny. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes things like upper Dicker or the Dicker is just funny because of the definite article. There's the meme that went around of the weird chair that exists on every Dutch So correct me if I'm wrong, but cuckstool like is that like to look no it literally meant cuck chair, but like in Dutch It's like cuckstool and one word and so Shit on the cuckstool because okay for people who aren't as Internet brain as we are and also don't live in the Netherlands for some reason on NS trains and HTM trams, there's always just

one chair by itself in the corner. And like the idea is like, you know, for handicap people, maybe like mothers with the strollers or whatever can sit and hold on to them. But in the poisoned adult bite of all of us, it looks likeuck chair and someone I don't know where that picture was posted I'm going to go on a limb here and say Amsterdam because someone shit on this chair and they said like just the Dodger said is someone shit on the cuck stool on the train. But I love now that like people are identifying cuckools in like other places. Like someone, you know, someone identified one in the fucking head office of the EU.

It was definitely like installed there by the Dutch to feel at home in the, in the trams or whatever. But yeah, sometimes there are sentences that do not need to be translated. Pooping, sharpening or whatever. I do recall, like I said, and I know I've mentioned it before, but I'll just do it again because it's funny that one of my mutuals describing studying in the Netherlands and getting off the Gyarra star in Amsterdam and wondering, am I going to be able to survive not speaking English, like having to be in a Dutch speaking environment, even having studied the language. And she said, and then

I stepped out of Amsterdam Central and saw a sign that said, Han pooping you here. And I was like, yeah, I'll probably be okay. Even better is some like far right Dutch rag media thing took the kakstuur meme and said like, the kakstuur meme is a perfect example of degenerate things in the Netherlands. But like, once again, it's like the kakstool degenerate. It's just like, yep, you don't need to translate this.

You have it in serious progress. But like, how can you be like a Dutch far right person and go on about degenerations? Like the Dutch are a degenerate people by definition. I remember that there was a early a website that had digitized a lot of like the kind of Dutch weed growers, collective like Mzeens and stuff from the 70s and 80s. And their logo was like a cartoon drawing of a stone guy with a joint with a huge erection because it was like the weed is so good. You're always hard.

Like, yeah. So it's like that. And that was just like, oh, isn't isn't that a funny thing? There was a club doing like a postering near my tram stop. And the poster was literally just like two dudes vigorously fucking on a couch and it was like a Cartoon sticker. I'm just like alright like Told me a story about a commercial in the Netherlands that he saw growing up Where it's like the like the world's gayest man steps out of a pink house, of course, like to make him extra gay He has to be in drag because apparently that's in the 90s

The only way you can see of drag was just extra gay. Like there was no concept of gender identity, at least not in advertising. Anyway, he like gets in a cab and like kisses the cab drivers just like the world's most obnoxiously gay man. And then at the end of the commercial, the text appears, at least he doesn't smoke. That's what's so funny about like everyone thinks like places like Berlin or like, Oh, this like Bohemian like weird sex place. And it's like, no, the real centre of it is just the Netherlands as an entire country. And the difference is, is like, if you do that stuff in Germany or Berlin, you're cool in the Netherlands. That's just normal. You're shart and pooping in the cookstool. I'm going to admit as like, as someone who lives here, I don't really see any of that unless it's

in Amsterdam. It seems to be self-contained. And I mean, I haven't been to the entire country, but the Hague and the outlying areas are seem remotely not weird and over the top. And if they are, I don't fucking care. I don't give a single shit a shart and pooping. And speaking of the Dutch, yeah, in the lowlands they're doing a, you know, Bible play and in the boers we're also doing weird ethno Bible play. The Dutch urge to radiate and intensify your kink. It translated into boer culture, but in the worst way possible. I mean, to be fair, a kink in the Netherlands is just like warming your sandwich up because they insist it must be cold

But I have to give us one thing before we move on here To the first bar war part too and that is we made it through a whole episode last week We were talking about Boers or talking about the Dutch and nobody made a single blackface joke I think we all need a round of applause We did it. We did it. I feel like it's fair to point out that Tivart to Pete and all that stuff in Dutch culture is European Dutch stuff and the Boers didn't need a blackface holiday tradition to be racist. Yeah, we don't need to make fun of like Holland Holland Dutch, where the Afrikaans are the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

They're so far on the spectrum of racism that they're just off the charts. It's like, we don't need the boot polish. Like, oh, that's cute. Anyway, we are on part two of the first Boer War, and when we left you last time, a bunch of turbo-racist duck farmers popped up a couple republics in South Africa and were slowly being taken over by the British Empire. The British, doing what the British do best, eventually pissed these guys off, leading them to declaring independence once again and vowing this time around to resist the

British with force of arms. However, there's still a whole lot of imperial edging going on here. I don't feel good saying that. Thousands of Boers had gathered, swearing allegiance to the Republic of the Transvaal, newly independent once again, and they knew that the British would come around and eventually kick them in the teeth. But the British made no real moves to do that at first, and instead the governor of the colony, Garnet Wozoli, treated

this as unseriously as he treated the entire Boer independence movement so far. Remember in the last episode, he's telling them fuck their petitions, telling them if they gather together, he's going to try them with treason, which means like the death penalty. But then he doesn't do that. He doesn't think any of this is serious. I mean, in an American comparison, it's like when all those weirdos in like Oregon and Washington insist they're gonna start the state of Jefferson. It's like, yeah, that's cute. Shut the fuck up and go back to working at the tractor store. Yeah, I mean, they normally just turn their housing subdivision into its own town, and then it has its own mayor, and then all it does is just have speed traps and only pull over people who aren't white and give them tickets that's called the entirety of greater st. Louis. I mean that's that's enough

about suburban San Antonio. He didn't even attempt to reinforce this tiny garrison he had overseeing the entirety of the Transvaal. It was like we said last episode about 1,750 soldiers. He didn't even tell London about how bad things were getting. He didn't do anything. All while Brits and Loyalist Boers in the colony were telling him, hey, something's seriously going to pop off soon and you should be ready for it. Everything was a powder keg and everyone involved was waiting for one big fuck up to set the whole thing off. And don't you worry the British administration is about to cause it. Oh no, oh no. Now remember when

the main, I guess you could call it societal identifiers of the Boer culture is they really don't want to pay taxes. And that has continued. They constantly skirt taxes. They consider it not only like they're right but also a fuck you to the British, right? Like not to mention they just declared independence in the Transvaal. They're going to refuse to pay those taxes because they're like, I'm not going to pay taxes to a foreign power. Yeah. They're operating on like the same maxim of like a A Chan poster on a politics board who lives in Thailand.

It's like, I'm not paying taxes. They're, they're, they're Boer Sovcits. Oh god. Hey Brew, am I detained? Yeah, administering like your, your HOA, like your own fiefdom. Yeah, pretty much. They were doing it first. I mean, that's pretty much what the Republic of Transvaal was.

Just a guy going around with a ruler measuring people's grass. The Republic of the Transvaal is exactly like if like the Bundy Ranch people started a country. And to combat this, Wozoli simply ordered his administrators to crack down harder on Boers who weren't paying their taxes. This led to a policy of like if they catch you transporting goods, whether their goods be like a horse, a wagon, something in that wagon being carried by horse, it would be confiscated if you didn't

have a tax stamp and then sold at auction with the proceeds going to the colonial coffers. So in November of 1880, a colonel named Owen Layen, he was like a dual army officer plus colonial administrator. He ordered soldiers within the town of Potsch to seize a Boer's wagon because they knew he didn't pay taxes. That wagon was then going to be put up for auction and word of this eventually got to Heath Cronje who was a local Boer leader who immediately put the call out to the local commando, remember their militia, volunteer based militia, to go get your guns because they were not going to let the British get away with this shit. Soon a hundred men gathered and they

simply marched into Potsch to reclaim the man's wagon. The local soldiers immediately backed off because they were so badly outnumbered and Lanyon put orders out to other local garrisons to kind of get out of these smaller towns and concentrate the majority of their strength back at Praetoria. Because these farmers got big ideas and we can't hope to fight them off in these little groups. Because, like, Wozli is such a fucking moron that his garrisons are in a very small, almost like circle in Transvaal, with like 60 guys here, 100 guys there, you know, 30 guys there, no force really whatsoever. They're barely

even a police force. So yeah, it's like a smattering of troops if you would. Yeah. And so we have to pull everyone back to Praetoria if we hope to kick the Boers back down a bit. He also ordered 700 of the garrison of 1750 to center themselves on a few smaller towns that led directly to Praetoria creating a kind of defense in depth against the Transvaal Boers to show them, hey, if you want to try to march on Praetoria, you're going to have a fight. At the town of Leidenburg, Colonel Anne Struther got orders to withdraw his 300 men back to Praetoria, which was a journey of a hundred and eighty eight miles over incredibly harsh terrain that the

British were not that familiar with. But orders are orders. He eventually loaded everything he had into 12 wagons and his unit began to make their trip on December 5th. That was supposed to be an easy journey because there is a road. There's one road that connects the two, easy enough. But recent rains had washed this road away. So the wagon train gets lost, it gets stuck in mud, everything is reduced to a thick goo that kind of traps everybody in. And they get out of that mud and slowly make their way back onto what remains

of the road in order to cross a local river, which was of course surging from the same rains. Uhhhh, not good. Yeah, their progress was only 3 miles per day, which if you happen to be say a bower patrol in the area who normally track much faster moving things than 12 wagons moving at the speed of smell. They're being shadowed pretty much the entire time by Bowers tracking their movements the whole way. And it's not like Anne Schuthor doesn't know this. He's being warned by his scouts that he's like, you know, we're seeing some suspicious shit, you know, some possible insurgent activity.

And he ignored it. And this is a very bad idea because the new Boer government had passed orders to the local commandos to stop Anne Schuthe's withdrawal to Praetoria. They selected Francois Yobare, the son of one of the government's three heads and a member of the People's Assembly, to take charge of the efforts. And I should point out here, just a little bit to talk about the Boer's chain of command and how their military works, that that is pretty much it. There's no structure, no overall command, anything, just you, a farmer or elected representative who's also a farmer, dudes like, take these other dudes and go that way. There's no like platoon, company, battalion, brigade, nothing.

It's just group of dudes go that It just group of dudes go that way. Group of dudes go that way. There's no dude in the middle of those two groups of dudes to coordinate their efforts. Yeah. It's like farmer versus farmer, but like I can't get this all out of my head. It's like, once again, how bad the trench foot would have been like wading through all this like fresh rainwater mud. Oh yeah. The Brits are having a really bad go of things and the Bowers are mostly mounted

on horseback. So cause that's their use of this shit. Yeah. Yeah. Remember we talked about in our last episode, the Bowers are psychotic violet racists who live to die in the bush. Like they're fueled by shit misery yeah Jesus like just imagine being like a tracker like on this just in this general area just the

terrible fucking heat the rain all of the dust the likelihood of being killed by a wild animal or the various smattering of African tribes who all hate your fucking guts because you enslaved their children. Yeah, yeah. Not, I have no sympathy for these guys. No, not at all. They're nuts. They're as close to humankind as come to creating like a strange society of Terminator murderer bots.

Yeah, we've made, we've made the Terminator and given them a fucked up accent. There was no uniforms or anything. There was a rough agreement amongst the commandos to wear tan or brown clothing Though no kind of official rule if you only had a blue shirt or whatever you were a blue shirt to do your violence that day Mm-hmm as far as the commandos went they're unpaid volunteers And if they wanted to do war They would have to bring everything with them that they would need to do war from home Their own guns their own ammo their, their own horses, their own food, their own water, everything.

Just like, yeah, because I suppose like, it's not like they're living really in an area of abundance and logistics of stuff being transports. I was like, do you have a sword or a gun? Well, that's one thing. Bring it along. They'd at least all have a rifle because they were hunters. But outside of that, most of these dudes were desperately, horrifically poor. Yeah. And most of the guns that the Bowers did have were not war rifles. They were for hunting. And as far as their training went, Bowers were legitimately incredible shots because they had

to be. They trained to hunt. And I'm not a hunter, but as is explained to me from a very young age you generally only get especially back then with bolt action rifles you only get one shot and if you're very lucky two so they have to make their first shot count every time but if you are going to get the second shot you have to reload very very quickly And so the Boers were trained to effectively double tap everybody. Yeah. Which is very uncommon for military training at the time, but no one that was ever shot by the Boers during this conflict was only shot once. The one thing that hadn't bought themselves was bullets. That is 100% accurate. But as far as military training went, they didn't have any, nothing

formal. Because the way of their existence on the South African frontier, one of constant war and violence and hard living, most of these men had seen combat or falling short of combat had seen plenty of just outright murder. So what they had was rifle training from a young age followed by on the job training for violence. And also as well, like probably an incredible ability for tracking as well. Obviously if the majority of your, I suppose, skill with a rifle is through hunting and especially like the hunting that was going on in the Cape at this time, like you were tracking

stuff for days. Yeah, they were very, very good scouts. The Brits never went anywhere without the Boers knowing. And I have to say though, the on-the-job training they got was admittedly very, very good, because if you didn't learn, you would die. The Boers often fought African tribes, and they generally learned how to fight by reacting to how the African tribes fought. Mm-hmm.

They used small groups on horseback to conduct hit and run attacks supported by infantry that did not fight in a standard line formation that would still be common for the British back then, or most European countries. Rather they fought in small units in ways that would look very familiar to like Nate and I. Effectively platoons, 30 guys-ish give or take. There's no standard formation for the commandos. Each one would break into smaller groups and support the other's movement by fire. And they would stick to terrain to cover their movements rather than favoring a wide open battlefield. This feels like it was specifically designed to cause problems to an organized large-scale military

formation that's really into being dogmatic and one size fits all. Pretty much. And I know that's an oversimplification of the British military, but that is definitely what they defaulted to. I mean, it's kind of accurate because if you think the Boers were not soldiers, they were farmers who did violence on their free time against locals, generally speaking. And sometimes against each other as well, but they learned how to fight by fighting Africans.

How did those Africans learn how to fight that way? By fighting other Europeans. So it's like a reaction to reaction to reaction all the way up until Bowers are doing fire and manure tactics on the British in 1880. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My name is Quentin Higgins Bottom. I've decided to serve my country abroad in Queen Victoria's army. And I have decided that on day one of being a soldier abroad, it would be a really great idea to go, PhD thesis defense and guerrilla warfare. I think I'm going to do great. I also am just laughing at this too, because what you've

described when you said there are farmers who kill locals and occasionally each other, it's like, so it's basically the entirety of Bleeding Kansas. It's basically like the guys John Brown was killing. It would be like Bleeding Kansas if everybody involved was pro-slavery. Fair, yeah, fair enough. That's one thing all the Bowers, because there was the Transvaal Civil War and the takeover of Zalpontsberg and stuff like that. Their disagreements had nothing to do with individual rights.

They were all 100% on board with the same thing, which black people don't get any. Yeah, they're just like, fellas, fellas, fellas, look, let's put down our arms for a second. Let's all talk. There's one thing that we can agree on. Black people aren't human. Okay. Okay. We'll just establish that going forward. Now let's, you know, get a huddle going. We'll hop on a, a bore version of like a Slack call. We can organize like what our rights are as you know, sovereign citizens the trans for the Transvaal Republic early think tank The orange group every now and then you say a sentence that my immediate reaction is like that would make me want to kill Myself if that existed now it would get like half a billion dollars of mysterious funding and have from Peter T I'd from have a headquarters in DC right next to like the Atlantic Council

and they'd have lunch together. Yeah. And then their European headquarters will be in Dublin and they wouldn't pay any tax. And yeah, yeah. And being a commander of one of these commandos was mostly based around respect and the general belief that everyone else thought that you would know what you're doing and sometimes by a rough vote amongst the men in the commando. If failing, if there was one guy in your group that like nobody could kind of agree on is like, you know, used over there is the best at violence, they would have to hold a quick vote. Yes, they call me used violence.

Used vanderkil. Now I don't need to go into detail about the British army. That's the one the strongest in the world and the best equipped. Remember, this is like one of the pinnacles of British imperial power here. Though they were in that infamous era of the red jacket still. They are still 100% red coats and this war is one of the reasons why that stops. So they're still dressed like absolute clowns. It is also clear in this scenario that they just didn't see the Bowers as a threat. Even in this situation when they're in the most kill zone kill zone that's ever been developed in the middle of a flood, everybody's already declared

independence against them, threatening them with violence, and they're just walking down the street in their unarmed, like barely guarded wagons. They still don't see a threat. They don't see any reality where boars could pose a serious danger to them. And during the journey to Praetoria, Anne Struther saw, for example, a ton of horses tied up outside of a local farm, which is a telltale sign that there's a large gathering of boar men there. And there's only one reason that like a hundred fucking Boers would be in a single place at a single time because remember most of these dudes fucking hate one another on a political ideology alone they do not want to interact in large groups

maybe they're just you know they have like a reading group together or something no be fair a Boer reading group is probably reading the most racist scientific like evidence ever yeah a Boer like book club is just reading siege if it existed oh cry and in another case he stopped through a town to resupply but he only resupplied food and water for the journey he did not bother to resupply, but he only resupplied food and water for the journey. He did not bother to resupply ammunition, despite the fact his men were only carrying 30 rounds a piece, rather than the British regulation of 70. Nor did he bother to send out additional scouts, because the scouts he had kept saying, hey there's something going on. He's like, nah fuck off, I'm sick of these

scouts telling me there's boars in the mountains. he brought the band who he ordered to play music the entire time you just hear like fucking Oompa music so I mean what's nice is we get the dulcet tones of a man's death rattle funneled through a horn rather shortly it's real like kind of administrative lay by I was like, Oh, there's, there's like a hundred boards over there, but I really don't want to do this. I have so much stuff in my in tray. Like maybe there's just like having a Beyblade competition or something. I don't fucking know.

Everybody knows the Boars love Beyblade. Yeah. The Boar Beyblade, except it's probably the Beyblade is someone's skull. The only Beyblades made out of human bones She's Let him rip Brublade I was gonna say you you're trending towards the idea of we're inventing Boar Yugi Oh from first principles Except Boar Yugi Oh would instead of having to sacrifice three cards to summon like the Blue-Eyes White

Dragon or whatever, you just have to turn and shoot three people. You've activated my trap card, Kaiba! Just, yeah. There was no bow or character in that show for a reason, they had to settle for an American. The Millennium Puzzle is just a giant piece of b on. Oh God, that puzzle, instead of summoning the Egyptian Pharaoh, it just summons Paul Kruger to scream and punch horses everywhere. But like a hundred percent there was a guy who was around at this time in South Africa who just had the same affect as Maximillian Pegasus. Ooh, Yugi boy. Oh God.

I'm frustrated because I went on the Wikipedia page for Yu-Gi-Oh and there is not a Afrikaans language version of the article. There is a Dutch version, but sadly- This is Afrikaans discrimination, which we could all agree is a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to believe our Afrikaans listeners are just nodding their head sagely like yeah we get it guys it's fine. Yeah that's fine. As the British forces, God this name is fucking awful. Approach the Bronchor Spruet River. You shouldn't have let these guys name things I'm sorry. That's just like a that sounds like a Dutch tongue twister. A bronc horse brood is what happens

with a certain kind of dinosaur gets fucked at both ends. Did you know, as a side note, just because you bring it up and it sounds similar, that the reason why the broncs is a definite article in English as the borough of New York City is that it was originally called the broncs farm. Mr. Bronc, B-R-O-N-C-K, owned a farm. And it's, yeah, it's the broncs. No, I hate that. It's the broncs, yeah, the broncs live there, and that's why it's the Bronx farm. Like Mr. Bronc, B-R-O-N-C-K owned a farm. And it's, yeah, it's the Bronx.

It's the Bronx. The Bronx live there and that's why it's the Bronx. I hate that. I hate Mr. Bronc. Me too. Mr. Bronc sounds like the Ur-Brock-Lesnar for some reason. Yeah. Robert Moses wasn't just an assimilated Jew

who became an Episcopalian and it was really, really racist in classes. He actually hated the Dutch. He's like, I will destroy, I will destroy the legacy of the Dutch in America. You know what? We've renamed Bowery, re-spelling it in English makes sense because God knows you don't want to spell Bowery in Dutch if you're an American. But no, the Bronx, you know what? We're all going down to the Bower-eej.

Bower-eej? Yeah, I have no idea. Coming soon to WrestleMania. Boar Hulk Hogan versus Mr. Bronx. God damn it. Got any racial purity, brother? You know, that only works with Hulk Hogan because he has been caught being racist on multiple occasions. Recording and on photo being racist.

Like there was him doing an autograph signing from like a couple months ago with a dude that a giant SS arm tattoo I'm just laughing at the idea of Hulk Hogan You know he tweeted one time saying like I need a cup of serious mud brother And it's like he could be describing a camp meal during the first Boer war Hulk Hogan seeing the fucking SS. I do say hell. Yeah, brother. I'm a big fan of electricity Hell yeah, brother. let's shoot some British. This independence doesn't work for me bro. Now, the Boers decided to set up an ambush for them just off the road behind a nearby

ridge. However, it was only when the Boers began to climb down into their position that they discovered that it was full of thorn bushes and not like the pissy thorn bushes that probably fucked me up when I was a kid These are thick and strong enough to tear the uniforms from their backs. Yeah, they're like brambles Yeah, I actually know a guy who grows stories skip ahead like 30 seconds to a minute if you don't hear this But I know got his ball sector open by a bramble Do I want to ask what he was doing to make this possible? Was he also

ambushing the British? Did this happen in 1980s Northern Ireland? He was trying to like climb over a bramble bush and like was wearing shorts and it like cut the shorts but the bush was wide enough that he kept going and it literally like nicked his balls open. Gotta watch that nut sack brother. You gotta watch yourself when you're getting over a bramble bush, brother. You don't want to lose a nut Damn it. I hate Boa Hulk Hogan so much It's just one of those things too because like the Hulkamania Phenomenon was such an 80s thing and I can really recall it when I was a kid I got Boa Mania running through my parade brother

Yeah, you know what? It's like of all the things from our childhoods that we could pick to that It just becomes I mean, I guess he sort of forced himself to be relevant by being such a dickhead It's just very funny to me. That's like, you know, I can think of a million other things like I suppose It's sort of like if a ecto cooler had been proven to be racist We don't know if the Ghostbusters themed high sea juice drink that has no actual fruit juice in it What does the sea stand for was bright green because it was like slimer? It was the Irish Yeah, it turns out that ecto cooler is actually just like the runoff from the Chicago River after st. Patrick's Day

They just bottle it and sell it to hapless American children. Yeah. Like ever since we recorded that episode last week, I've been doing the whole code and accent alongside my Werner Herzog impression. I feel as though like those are words that when said together, like awaken an ancient curse, bring about the end. The curse is called Bower Hulk Hogan. You see the modern gladiator that is Hulk Hogan. He is fighting with the Boers in South Africa outside Pretoria. He is shameless in his fornication. You see Hulk represents a morbid American dream where you too can become the Obamanch.

But the real Obamanch at this time was getting his balls cut open on a bramble bush. Yeah, Hulk Hogan, or rather Hulk Hogan slash Werner Herzog listening to this episode and then just says, speak to his interlocutors, just says, yeah, but you should never listen to this. You should destroy this. You should not listen to the lions led by donkeys hudcast. It should be destroyed. It poses itself as military history, but it is mainly a vehicle for grown men to make

jokes in weird accents. So at this point, you have the Bowers low crawling through brambles, getting their shit turned into like confetti or whatever by this natural cheese grater that they, I need to like reiterate here, are not backing down from that like oh we need to get around this like no no just crawl through it headfirst it's fine. Oh god. Then a British scout ran back to Anne's truth and said look I saw 12 Bowers running across the road from a nearby farmhouse to the ridgeline. There's obviously an ambush.

We need to send forward more scouts to cut them off. They're clearly lying in wait for us. Anne Schuthe said, look, calm down. Those are not boars. You saw cows. Which I know is an issue I have frequently, where I mistake cows running across the field for militant South African white men.

Yeah, stumbling across the boar furry convention and being very, very confused. Those are just Nazi furries. So Anne Schuthe's column just marched on, and at this point the boars were hiding behind the ridge and the ones in the bramble pit have crawled within a hundred yards of the British column, dragging themselves through this shit the whole way. And it's been noted like, for Santa Casa, they're all bleeding profusely from thorn wounds.

However, this is where things get weird. A detachment of bowers on horseback under a white flag approached the British. One bower who spoke decent enough English told the British to turn around because they were not gonna be allowed to go to Praetoria. And Schuthe then responded something to the tune of, well, I have my orders, that's where we're going, but I don't wanna fight you.

He then asked the Boer to bring the message to his commander. And we aren't exactly sure what happened next, but as this first group turned around to leave, a second contingent of Bowers mounted on horseback, charged down the road, jumped off, formed a skirmish line and began pumping rounds into the British, aiming for the NCOs and officers first as they always did. And there's just like six of them pulling the ripcord on the world's biggest Beyblade. I mean, Beyblades they are really an effective like combat weapon because you can't really direct them unless

you're like fighting in a giant kind of concave arena. It's like a weapon for 40k only. I'm really excited for the gladiator 2 release when we find out that Ridley Scott put a giant Beyblade in the Coliseum. This is why Russell Crowe is not coming back, also because his character is dead. And then after the skirmish line opened fire, the ones in the bramble pit opened fire, and within the first volley, virtually the entire British command structure is killed or wounded.

And then when the British attempt to return fire, they found a problem. They couldn't hit anything. They were all shooting high. And for some reason, nobody's ever been able to figure out all of their sights on their rifles were set like a hundred meters too high. So they're just sending air balls into the distance. Also, the band was still playing. They didn't even have weapons. Also, the band was still playing. They didn't even have weapons. Return fire. It's the guy at the flute. Like I'm trying as hard as I can. But it's like for it to be that pervasive a problem, like across the whole unit, like surely that had to be like some sort of like environmental factor that affected all of it.

Nobody's sure. Nobody has any idea how or why this happened. Because nothing with ancient truth or mission whatever you would as you want to call it Nothing about it was within British Army regulation at the time Which is one of the reason why he catches all of the blame rightfully so afterwards like he doesn't have enough ammunition He doesn't have enough scouting parties every single soldier under his command seemingly forgot to use a rifle The band is playing sick tunes while getting punched with like eight rounds apiece. It's interesting because it's like they think of you know this is the era that you get towards the zenith of the British Empire and you know everything regarding like the Victorian era of British history, English history, etc.

And yet this seems like they're getting their ass kicked by an even dumber version of the American colonists, dumber and more racist You know what I mean? Like it's very funny that this keeps happening to them. Yeah, they have a lot of successes I think something that these two conflicts have in common is in the beginning stages The Brits were caught completely flat-footed and wildly Relaxed they didn't see anybody as a threat. Nobody could possibly hurt our hold You know that they're complacent like yeah They got killed by complacency like these dudes march with not even half of the ammo

They were supposed to have if the Brits had worn their reflective safety belts. They wouldn't have Mission I mean they kind of were they're wearing their red jackets Yeah, but you know what like they don't reflect light at night the way that the reflective safety belt does. You know what I mean? And so like complacency does in fact kill. They didn't do a risk assessment. They doesn't. They didn't even send fucking scouts forward. And when they did answer, there's like,

now these dumbasses are just seeing cows again. Yeah. So the whole unit is being ripped apart by gunfire. Meanwhile, the band is playing headstrong. I'll take on anyone. They're playing the Cantina song from Star Wars. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do screams are being funneled through their horns or whatever, and within seconds there's no leadership, no one is left to try to slap this chaos into a firing line of some kind. They were all slaughtered while standing confused and doing nothing in the middle of the road. According to eyewitnesses, most of the British soldiers didn't even attempt to try to take cover behind the wagons, except the band because they didn't have weapons, so maybe they were a little bit more conscious of how you know out there they were they're not gonna Bludgeon anybody to have their oboe or whatever This is the guy with a tuba who's like trying to hide but it's sticking up over the wagon tuba getting shot full of holes

Now he was able to scare them off by playing the bassoon and they thought it might be will-to-beast coming to fucking charge at them. And the Boers also had effectively yeeled ghillie suits. They covered themselves with branches and trees and dirt and the hills so nobody could find their snipers and even when they didn't cover themselves with shit, they were still dressed in earth tones. Well, that's just the base state of the Boers of like being smelly, dirty and covered in leaves. The murder Amish. I'm just laughing at the idea here that we call them ghillie suits and but the word in Afrikaans is like

a ball rippers but with a J in there for some reason because they've got the thorns on it. Yeah bro, you're wearing a ball ripper. Yeah, we're going up. We're going sniper on the hill, bro. Tom, I didn't realize that the Boers were fucking delivery guys with Bengali accents in Britain dude. If you interpret them as Bengali that's more you than me. You literally you're drifting into sounding like that guy but I just love chicks man. The more you love the more your faith in God the more you love chicks man you say Mashallah that's what you sound like but you're calling it Boer. To quote, uh, Pete Yobare, Masha'la, bro. Wait, I'm getting a phone call from the Masha'la department. That's such a great book.

Oh, man. But Kruger's gonna be really confused. They memorized the wrong book. This went on for 15 minutes until Anne Stuther, who had been shot five fucking times at this point, ordered his men to surrender. And that was another part that the Brits discovered, that if you went down, the Boers would just keep shooting you until they decided you were obviously dead. So unless they scored like the goriest headshot known to man they just keep pumping your corpse full of bullets which is like all against the genteel ideas of war that the Brits had at the time hence you know the red jackets and all that shit yeah

it's very hard to go up against an enemy who fundamentally does not respect you or your existence yeah they're not like that's the thing that was like if there were shooting the Boers were absolute murder machines But once it was over again huge asterisks here assuming you were white They took pretty good care of you the number of British casualties changed depending on who is telling this battle story But according to the British Telegraph who published an account immediately after the battle 120 British soldiers were killed. You want to guess how many of the Boers lost? Five. One. And he wasn't killed by the Brits.

He was shot, his horse got scared and ran him over. I was literally about to say is like he definitely didn't die by the British. It was like he accidentally shot himself in the foot and then like died of gangrene. Oh that'd be even better. The Boers immediately descended on the wagon train and looted everything they could, leaving some supplies for the British since they had no intention of taking any of the wounded with them. Rather than executing them, which is normally how that sentence ends, instead they'd just be free.

Did they just be left behind with enough supplies to take care of the wounded? But some of the non-wounded were also let go to go forward to Praetoria to send ambulance crews back. Ambulance wagons, doctors, whatever. And then the majority of the prisoners were taken in and then released across the border into the Orange Free State after Pinky promising they would not fight them anymore. And Schuthor had one of his legs cut off because it was mostly blown off by a rifle shot. But because it's 1880, this caused him to get a horrible infection and die slowly and painfully because that is how someone that gets shot five times is bound to die in 1880. Oh yeah.

Like you're in, you're in 1880s. South Africa is warm. Field hospital is dusty and like, yeah, I can only conceive of this era of the weird bad movies I've seen and then the random like 10 minute segment of Deadwood I watched once because my friend was watching it at the apartment. It's a great show. Where the guy is getting like basically getting kidney stones jacked out of his dick in a saloon or something.

And I think of like, oh yeah, medicine in the 1880s. You have to go to a saloon and get your dick jacked. Getting like agonizingly jerked off so that you can pass stones and like, yeah, that's what pass, that's what we call medicine. But then it's in South Africa and there's like weird we're, you know, like I said, termite termite mounds, the size of the Capitol dome and shit like that. I mean, remember one of the, the, the Boer cures for an infection was just sticking your hand in a, in a goat stomach. So like medicine is not high.

See you know, what's the thing is, is it like similarly cut off from the world's an isolated country Afghanistan, but they have way cooler remember remedies Which are just shotgun opium like it's way better. Yeah solves a problem I mean at least you won't be in pain when you die Mmm now the British probably less pain than if you stick your hand in a goat's stomach No, I'll have to find out hey I mean don't get those two things confused and you go into a dead wood slew to get painfully jacked off by a goat's stomach Yeah, exactly. You thought that they were gonna shotgun hits of opium to you while get painfully jacked off by a goat's stomach. Yeah, exactly. You thought that they were going to shotgun hits of opium to you while

they painfully jack you off, but instead they're just like, here's the goat's stomach, you know what to do. But you know what, like- Figure out the rest, brother. Which appendage do I stick into this thing? Any of them will do, it's fine. Big respect to the Wild West sex worker who was like the resident kidney stone solver. I'm a urologist, that's fine.

If I remember correctly from the, this was like 20 plus years ago, there's like a kind of drunken grizzled cowboy guy who's instructing these sex workers on what to do. And it involves basically like this guy is passing the stone and they've given him some kind of tincture and a lot of alcohol and they more or less have to jerk him off. It's like a team sport, like giving CPR. Cause I don't know if anybody's listening has ever actually given CPR, but you need to rotate out because your arms get tired. Yeah, you get tired.

And when you're jerking off the kidney stones, you get tired. You got to switch up hands. You got to move down the firing line. But didn't you guys watch Dead? You guys watched Deadwood for a long time. Yeah, yeah, it was great. So I was just like, I just remember that 10 minutes or so, I mean like, wow, that's really dark and grim and it's HBO, of course., I mean like, wow, that's really dark

and grim and it's HBO of course. And I was like, okay, I guess this is what kind of show Deadwood is. All right, I don't necessarily know if I ever need to watch this, but- Hey, don't forget what Big Pharma has taken from you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The British government, both in the colony and in London, were immediately on the defensive after being so badly humiliated.

Instead of ree-evaluating anything they had done leading up to that point, they simply blamed everything on Anne Struther, who was dead, which is pretty convenient. They said he was unprepared, ignored signs of Boer anger and organization, and showed bad leadership, which to be fair, is all 100% true. However, the British hand waving away of the entire situation totally ignored how badly the government and the governor of the colony, Wozily, had fucked up in order to get to this point. They sent Anstruther to the cookstool of history.

They cut his leg off and set his corpse weirdly off to the side of the rest of them. There's just one seat in the wagon that's away from everyone else. The Brits previously had written off the Boers as a fighting force, and this battle did not make them change their minds. To them, this was a failure of Anne Struther, not a failure of their military or their colonial administration. The Boers were still backwards racist farmers who couldn't hope to confront the army, and to the British defense, 50% of that is true.

Small problem though, the Boers were immediately moving to confront the army. Word of victory at Bronchorst sprue it, spread quickly because amongst the Boer population, this was a big fucking deal. They had met the Brits and they defeated them. And soon more and more people were volunteering to fight. A lot of these guys were already hardcore believers in the cause and were just showing up because they expected more fighting. However, there was another more important portion of that population and I would argue the most important population of any revolutionary group and that is the guy who was offense centered. The guy who believes in the concepts of Boer statehood and nationalism and the Transvaal and all of that,

but thought fighting the Brits was certain death. But now they have a victory under their belt. This feeling of hope and possible victory galvanized them, and it was not just confined to the Transvaal, but rather all of Boerdum. Even in the Orange Free State, who saw the possibility of a Transvaal victory as promising to their own situation. So soon, Free State Boers began crossing over to volunteer in the Transvaal, as well as Boers from the British colony, like the ones at the Cape

colony or the Natal. Soon, it was a weird Boer Mecca of everybody heading this way to do violence against the Brits. Oh, when you said, as soon as you said that both me and Nate like looked at the camera. Yeah, it's gross. Whatever Boer Mecca is a place I don't want to go. God, Boer Mecca is just like, you're doing Hajj for the most racist English people in the 1980s. Yeah, Boer Mecca is a Facebook group you definitely either don't want to be a part of or definitely

do if it's a different meaning of Mecca. It's members of Boers who have received the light of his law. NARESH And once again the martial law department is calling. AARON It sure is. NARESH And the Transvaal government had a pretty simple plan to keep pressing the Brits. They knew as well as the Brits did that they didn't have much of a garrison available in the colony to stamp out the rebellion. Despite the orders to pull men back to Praetoria,

virtually none of them had. And all of them were now sitting in the remote postings after the defeat at Broncors Spruitt. I can't say that name without that annotation in my voice. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was going to say Broncors Spruitt also sounds like one of the stops that you don't know about because it's on the Metro and one of the Metro North lines in New York City. You're like, wait, what the f- what the f- there's like this huge city of like tall condo buildings and it's just stopped called Bronco or Spruitt.

Or alternatively, it's just a beer made by like Allagash or something. That's just only available in Oregon. Yeah. The Bronco or Spruitt IPA. Cause it's in Oregon, you know, it's an IPA and none of these garrisons were going to chance the march to the relative safety of Praetoria anymore thinking They could be the next ones to be ambushed The Boers also knew as did the common British soldier that the Brits only hope for actual victory was waiting for Reinforcements and they were coming to be fair, but they had been dispatched from India and England

So they're gonna take a hell of a long time to get there The Boer plan for victory was easy if we we're going to win, we have to win fucking fast. They knew as well as the British did that once the evil empire dumped the full weight of its resources on them, they would be fucked. So they would need to act immediately. Virtually as soon as the smoke settled on their last victory, commandos from across Transvaal got orders to grab their shit and start marching towards all of the British garrisons in the colony at once. Which was made easier due to very bad English planning because none of these garrisons are

further than 50 miles from one another. So it's very very easy for the commandos to get there all at once. As long as you know it doesn't rain and everything turns to mud and then you're going three miles a day. See, that only slows down the British. The Boers eat that shit up. They're like, fuck yes, this sucks! They're like the... Inuit, like, snowshoes, but for mud. It's just their horses. They don't walk anywhere.

Yeah. Jobeir didn't have a ton of soldiers himself, and instead would send just enough men to lock these outposts down. Not enough men to overrun them or anything, but just enough to keep the Brits from leaving. Some of these outposts had a few hundred men hiding inside them while places like Leidenberg only had 50 after Anne Struthers attempted march. Then Jobeir took a thousand men, the majority of the entire Boer fighting force, and invaded Natal. Now there's a very good reason for this. There is one area called Langsnek, maybe it's Lansnek, I don't fucking know, which was a harsh mountainous area, but also the main road that went from the Boer

Republic of Transvaal to the Natal and they knew any British reinforcements or resupply would have to take that road. So he decided that we're gonna park right fucking here and the Brits thought the Boers were such a non-threat that they didn't build a fort there, they never put a garrison there, they never once thought this is a tactically important area at all. Now it was fully in control of the Bowers. Great. I mean, they tend to do good things when they're in charge of anything. I'm sure this is going to go swimmingly.

Though it was clear that the Bowers thought the British in these small garrisons would be easy to clean up. Like the idea was, we can avoid actually fighting them. They're going to show up, surround them, tell them, look, we have you surrounded. You can just leave. Go to the Orange Free State. We don't have to fight. And they assume that these small garrisons would take the easy way out because I know I would if I'm surrounded by murder farmer Amish people, like wanting to kill

me, I'm like, I'm not fucking died for this place. yeah I'll go to Praetoria, it's fine with me." Yeah. Unbeknownst to the Boers, the British had already preempted their plan. They had sent orders to all of their outposts to remain in place and defend them no matter what and to not accept any offers of surrender or armistice from the Boers. Defend it to the last. In order to make this story easy going forward I'll talk about all of these sieges one at a time, but it's important to remember

they all start seemingly simultaneously, because they're all hit within a few days of another on purpose. The first to be put under siege was Rustenburg, garrisoned by 62 men of the Royal Scots under the command of Captain Auchinlek who were wearing the sick uniform of red coats with kilts. You know, really making yourself a target, you know, double-esoul wearing the red coat and the kilts. I mean, you're already wearing a red coat. You can wear bright pink fucking Janko jeans if you want underneath of it. They're already going to see you.

We're sending the Zoomer Revolutionary Guard to take over? No, no, no, no, you're sending like young Gen X and old millennial. That would be what me and Nate would be when we're like, oh no, like 21 year olds are wearing big jinkos now. I know that. Wait, they came back? Yeah. Oh no, the original vibe though, the original stupid vibe, you know, that's who you gotta

send. You gotta send some like full on, you saw a flip phone in the matrix and thought it was the future level of like old Millennial culture that's you got to send down You know what they're gonna do the Boers are gonna distract them with 19th century Napster and they're just gonna be like, oh wow I totally found this badass song by Eve six and they're gonna completely forget about fighting a legion of Like 17 18 year old men back then wearing Janko jeans You can hear them coming for miles away due to the vast array of wallet chains dangling from them The wallet chains wind chiming like a jingle truck is gonna be insane and the Boers are like I have a plan We will send one emo girl with a stupid fucking haircut cut to the right

And the whole legion will follow It's just like the the very famous like news report on YouTube of the emos versus rocker war in Mexico City Actual violence though. They don't have a marching band They have one guy with a cotton-mouthed King CD on a disc man And he's cranked it up really loud on a pair of headphones and they can all hear every time they march forward it skips He didn't get the anti skip version he was too cheap That's that's just me. That was just me. There's never a cotton-mouthed Kings fan But yeah, I never had a skip proof CD player those things constantly fucking

I had a pretty good one because my friend's dad worked at Kenwood and I got like a he had like a bunch of sample things They'd given out and one was like a Kenwood Discman and the cover got broken at a swim meet So I put it back together by slapping a huge radio head sticker on it The bear with the spiky teeth or whatever the foot that that logo. Yeah, so, you know what like that's the level of late 90s Shit, I'm operating on. Now, Achilleck had gotten orders to reinforce his position and he did. He built trenches, he built sandbags, he planted mines and all of the approaches. So even with all that, their main and only really reinforced position was a

tiny mud fort measuring just 25 yards across. What he couldn't fix though was your terrible supply situation because they virtually lacked everything other than ammo. So I suppose it could be worse. They had plenty of bullets, but you can't eat or drink bullets. They can't all just live off of like brown brown from Lord of War doing fat lines of gunpowder. On Christmas Eve 1880, a force of 600 Boers appeared and demanded their surrender, but Captain refused, leading the Boers to attack immediately and constantly. Things in Rustenburg would go south very very very quickly as the Brits quickly became trapped, meaning they would have to rely on their tiny store of food and water, which would only

last a week with some pretty serious rationing. The Boers really couldn't assault their position though because they didn't know how. Like they weren't trained in assaulting a fortified position with trained soldiers manning it. But it was enough to keep the Brits pinned down and keep the pressure up. Just as the Brits are running out of water though, they were safe. A torrential downpour of rain began and they suddenly had as much water as they would need But it would not stop raining for a month Oh God their trenches flooded their outhouse flooded the sickbay flooded and sued this cocktail of shit in human misery

Mixed together with the dirt to create what I have dubbed the plague mud. Oh disease soup That's that that's the cup of serious mud that Bo or Hulk Hogan wanted you're gonna dip into the plague mud brother you gotta drink the plague mud brother you want you ever had cholera I mean they all everybody here now has cholera yeah yeah disease and starvation swept through the ranks so they did have plenty of water now yay just running around with your mouth open staring at the sky is like I'll never be thirsty again. Taking in rainwater in one end, sheeting out bloody diarrhea in the other. Finally the

endless rain stopped only for the Brits to realize that Boers had been building a trench from their position all the way up to the British fort the whole time they thought everybody was washed out. As Ancelet peeked over the walls to get a look at this Bower trench line, he was shot directly in the face, blowing out his cheek and sending several teeth flying into the air. The Boers were using proto-Alvin York automatons, Dwemer technology to dig these trenches. But he survived it sounds like. Yeah, he did survive He was quickly patched up and by patch up

I mean he had some reused bloody cloth jammed into the gaping face hole Since they had run out of medical supplies weeks before and that's 1880s medical supplies This is kind of an it's like a new version of you know This sort of his like academic historical doctrine here instead of the great man theory of history you have the hard man theory of history that you just shot a big Scottish dude in the kilt in the face and he survived I don't know how it's going to turn out but he does live I will say he does live significantly uglier than he was before but lives nonetheless that same night he leads a raiding party out of his shit flooded fort directly at the Boer forward trench Which imagine this scene if you were a Boer a man with half of a face

Leading a charge of mid so starved their kilts are falling off their asses all covered in diarrhea mud Goddamn, I'm about to die by the hands of Scottish Grendel Like this is probably the only situation the Boers have ever respected anyone in their life. Like ah I see you also love violence and misery. He's running at you with a bandage around his jaw tied at the top with a knot looking like a fucking Looney Tunes cartoon. They only think holding his jaw on. But as soon as Ochilleck steps up from behind the fortifications, the lead has been from the front, his elbow gets blown off by another gunshot.

Again, this does not slow him down. He simply starts, he simply pulls out his pistol and starts leading with that because his other arm is flopping around like a loose noodle because he doesn't have a fucking elbow anymore. He's following the Adrian de Weert doctrine of combat. His men continue to press the attack forward and force the Boer withdrawal from their trench line but the siege remains in place. Yeah, this is basically the only way you can experience what the Boers are experiencing watching this guy move is to go into a pub in Pollock Shields and have an incorrect opinion about Rangers.

Just getting shot by the Boer war, Francis Bagby. By December 20th, the Boers hit Staderton, a tiny garrison inside of a tiny town with a population of less than 500. The garrison had built their own heliograph out of some people's mirrors so they could remain in contact with other nearby garrisons. Not that it matters, you're just able to transmit, hey are you under siege too? Yes, Captain Shotted Face, please send help. Sheeting out my doo doo ass, dying painfully. Like nobody could help anybody here. But they did manage to keep the Boers at bay with a combination of countering raids and something straight out of Acme. They

built a giant fake wooden cannon because the Boers were terrified of artillery because they had none. So they just had this giant fake cannon, they would point at the direction, which was enough to scare the Boers away. Despite the fact, none of them began to ask questions as to why they weren't shooting it. Just running up to the Boers with my like hand underneath my shirt and pointing it out like a gun.

It's the artillery version of that, yeah. The Boer raiding party was actually led astray because someone painted a cave on the side of a mountain. I'm just laughing. It's like you went full on cargo cult in the new Hebrides building an entire airfield and fighter squadron out of vines and reeds and these guys are like, oh shit, they've got air support. What the fuck is a plane like they're being led by fucking general Roadrunner then the Boers would have their fucking minds

blown if someone would have pulled a card trick on them like bro they fucking wizards let's get the fuck out of here I mean like they're the murder Amish you know like they're very easily tricked at this point. You hold up a like a falsified document teaching people how to be more racist and their eyes pop out of their heads and their tongue rolls out like a carpet. Auga! Spelled with J's. Lidenburg would be the next to be put under siege on January 6th, 1881. The tiny garrison of 50 men was under the command of a man named Lieutenant Walter Long, who immediately put his men to work building a fort out of anything they could find, which ended up being mostly loose stones around a wall with some thatch huts in the middle

of it. And I don't really want to be in a firefight in a thatch hut, but I assume it's better than nothing. Yeah. They're going wattle and daub. They're building like crannogues. Like, Oh God damn it. Lieutenant, Lieutenant Long is a, is a, is a trad building, bro. Everything has to be wattle and daub. I mean like it'd be very efficient to build wattle and daub, you know, fortifications because they have just such a excess of daub coming out of their ass at every second.

Bro, we have so much daub right now. We're daub maxing. Daub game incredible. Daub. I don't know why I find this so funny. Daub on the wall It's like in fortnight when people panic and start building things But they're just shitting into their own end and slapping it into a wall to the wall

Again, the boards are like I thought we're playing no build mode fuck's sake we agreed on this to the waddle to the dog To the ship falls out my drawers We gotta build these all these English We want an award for best history podcast The one thing long did have other than an endless supply of dog on course spree spree spree spree spree To the Broncores spree spree spree spree spree spree To the Broncores spree god damn Alright, I'm done. I promise. Adulge little John

He shoutin' yay up with his loads of J's in it Yeah, little Jan Little John's big Dutch brother, big John Hruthian. Now, one thing Long did have other than endless supply of daub was a storehouse full of food and ammo, which had been left behind by Anne Struther, but again, they had no water. The Boers rode right up to the fort and demanded its surrender, which was answered by the Brits telling them to piss off and opening fire directly in their face. The Boers had finally managed to get their hands on a cannon at this point, and wheeled

it up to shell the fort, which immediately terrified the British, who were then, of course, immediately relieved to find out that none of the Boers knew how to actually use the goddamn thing, so they just kept wildly firing shells into the distance. No weapon operated by morons shall prosper against me. After these initial blowups, the siege quickly fell into a pattern of sniping attacks and raids. The Boers didn't have enough men to just storm the fort. But the Boers are not the only people raiding.

The Boers' main mode of defensive war, pretty much ever, was called a logger, which was not a beer, though that would be funny, it's literally circling the wagons. Inside the circle they'd keep their livestock, which the commandos actually did bring livestock with them on the march to eat, and they would also sleep inside with the wagons acting as a wall. Oh, I thought your men, like, they'd sleep inside the livestock in the same way they put the wounds inside the gul. They sleep inside the livestock in a different way.

The Mr. Hands way. Hey, don't, don't groan at Boer culture. Like that old culture needs to be respected. Boers, we're specifically talking about you. The Brits set out teams of soldiers to drag themselves through the dirt in the middle of the night, just outside the loggersers and then throw homemade fire bombs over the walls of the wagon into the middle. These exploded and the resulting fires caused the Boers livestock to panic and run around this inner circle of the wagons trampling commandos while they slept. Some of the cows

and horses caught on fire and then spread the fire to the wagons as they ran off into the distance Yeah, it's a quick quick the QRF gets on station starts shooting a cannon middle of fucking no Can you imagine quick bro get on the can and just annihilate the cow If you're like the cholera certified British raiding party that instigated this and you see the cows basically all running in concentric circles Stomping dudes what guys are just firing a cannon at the moon The moon the true enemy of the boar they're going after the moon Turk You'd think that the Boers would have a fondness for the moon since it is white It's the only planetary body they respect

The Boers responded by raiding the British back and setting several of the thatched huts on fire, but Tom. I know it's not crazy in there All my shit hooks on fire. I don't know my job But sweet succulent job It's dog all the way down the daub. It's daub all the way down. After this the Bowers were just they settled down into it's the simple siege waiting for British supplies to run out and they were. They had thousands of bullets tons of meat and vegetables but their water was running virtually out immediately. Then of course the rain started because this is all happening the same time. This is when that deluge of rain starts. And then

they get pissed off realizing they're not going to starve them out. While this siege is ongoing, Bower Commandos circled other garrisons. At Mabaristadt, the Brits had received the same orders to defend and prepare for a siege. The Brits there oversaw a population of thousands of Africans and the smaller population of British settlers. So the local British commander E.S. Brooks ran around town telling everyone, hey, the Boers are coming. Unless you want to be controlled or enslaved by them, we need your help. So immediately hundreds of locals grab weapons, go off and join them. They also just rob outlying villages blind for food and water and pull it all in. The most reinforced,

and say, get us 50 British men who used to be soldiers and 50 Africans who are members of what was called the Transvaal Mounted Police Force. But they did get reinforcements, even if it did require descending upon local villages like a band of locusts. Once that was done, they dug in, they built trenches, earthworks, and things like that, and then the Boers show up. A quick firefight left a few men dead on either side. But then the leader of the Bowers, Baron Vorstur, sent word to Brooks at like, look, we really don't feel like fighting, but we can't let you leave. So if you just stay in there, don't try to

break out. We'll stay right here and we can just stare at one another. So they did. In the middle of all these sieges, the British army already in Natal was trying desperately to slap some kind of relief force together so they could advance into the Transvaal and try to stabilize things ahead of the main reinforcements, which would take weeks or months to get there. We need reinforcements. We need to gather our biggest shitters. Well, kind of. What? Enter General Sir George Pomeroy Collie, Governor and Commander in Chief of the Natal. And in case you're wondering, Tom, born in County Kildare. Ah, he's from the pale. He's not really Irish.

Colley was what you could consider a military academic rather than a battlefield commander. He was a professor at Sandhurst, spent his time as an assistant and a secretary to various important people and got into the world of colonial administration. He was not a decorated battlefield commander in any stretch of the imagination. He was not a decorated battlefield commander in any stretch of the imagination. He was a paperwork guy, not a combat guy. And nothing wrong with that. Paperwork guys are way more important

than combat leaders, I must say. But to his credit, he wasn't an idiot. While Wolsey had slept through the opening stages of this rebellion, telling London there was nothing to worry about, Callie had been sounding the alarm bells the entire time, of course only to be ignored, but he was trying. Now he was left to clean up the mess that Woesley had left him, and was struggling to put together a force of anyone worth a shit in Natal in order to respond

of what was going on inside the Transvaal. Anyone in uniform that he could find, regardless of their job, was conscripted into being a foot soldier and what became known as the Natal Field Force. This included supply clerks, admin people, band members, dudes from the Royal Navy, and some African cops. Though there was a competent corps of infantry and artillery considered the elite of the British military in Africa, the Highlanders. Like they had fought the Zulu War, for example, so they know what they're doing. While Kali was putting this force together, he proved that while he wasn't an idiot that

didn't see the rebellion coming, he still thought nothing of the capabilities of the Boers. He was, after all, afflicted with the terminal condition of being British. He penned a letter to Pete Yobare that said, quote, The men who follow you are, many of them, ignorant and know little of anything outside their own country. But you, you're well educated and have traveled. You cannot but be aware of how hopeless the struggle you've embarked upon and how little any accidental success gained can affect the ultimate result. And to be fair, he is right, but he told him

to lay their weapons down and his army wouldn't march. Simply surrender and all this can end. But he didn't actually wait for a response. Not that Yobere would have ever agreed to this and surrendered, but it did make the British look like dishonest pricks to the Boer leadership. Eventually, Kali was able to field around 1,200 men and began marching for the Transvaal, directly toward Laing's neck, where the Boers were waiting for them. The Boers had reinforced the area with at least 400 more men in the ridges and the hills, as well as another 1,500 in the general area. They held the high ground and even though they lacked any artillery, they assumed they

would be safe from British artillery due to their position, their elevation, and total command of the approach that they would have to take to attack them. The British scouts saw the Boer positions, and Kali went forward to demand they move and allow them to pass into the Transvaal. The Boers of course refused, saying they were independent and the Brits can fuck right back off into their colony. Which is ironic because the Boers were inside the British colony at this point, they were not in the Transvaal.

But whatever, fuck the Brits. I don't know who to pick in this fight, they're both terrible. Kali did what any military manual at the time he should do. Sit back behind his cannons and shell the ever-living piss out of the Boers to soften them up for an infantry attack. Because he had complete artillery superiority. He did this for 20 minutes, which is not that long. It was only when his bombardment stopped and the infantry advance began to climb the hill towards the bar positions that they found that the artillery had done fuck all. That's because the Bowers had prepared for this. Every single one of their positions had a fallback trench

on the reverse side of the hill and ridges position so it couldn't be seen from the downslope of the attack where the Brits would be coming from. So once the shells began to fall, they simply walked back to the rear trenches, waited for the bombing to stop knowing that signal and infantry advance, and then walked back to their forward positions completely unbothered at all from the artillery. The Boers did not lose a single person from Collie's artillery. Then the British would walk right up on their trenches, assuming they had been blasted apart because the Boers would also lie in wait, effectively like don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes type shit, and then destroy them in a volley. Also, the blasted landscape created by Collie's artillery bombardment

made his infantry advance even harder because now the ground is all broken up with craters and whatnot it makes it harder for a line to advance together. As soon as they cross the hill to attack the Boers they're being shot into pieces. Now Kali senses things are going sideways so he orders a cavalry charge on the Boer flank. They charge across the broken ground, advance up the hill and apparently didn't think anything was weird about the fact that nobody had bothered to shoot at them yet. That's because this time the Boers fell back into their reserve trench once again to leave the top of the hill open for the cavalry to just walk on top of on the horizon. Once they crested the top of the hill, they were hammered by Boer fire, which as always

targeted NCOs and officers first. After taking a few volleys of that smoke, the cavalry retreated back down the hill. As this cavalry attack was being repulsed, it didn't mean the infantry had ever stopped though. They continued to march forward into a hail of bullets, only to discover another hidden Boer trench that was hidden only 150 meters away away that had held their fire under concealment all the way up until they had gotten there. Oh shit.

This ambush took out the majority of General Colley's general staff. But don't worry, General Colley himself remained safe in the rear as his staff and aides got slaughtered by Dutch farmers. British officers for you. Collies sitting back and waiting to maybe send in the rest of his men decided to break off the attack when he saw that the Boers were beginning to counterattack because his cavalry had been driven so far off it opened a massive gap in the British flank and the Boers were about to charge right down into him.

So he retreated from the field and the Boers did not press a counterattack. This ended the battle and gave the Boers their second major victory of the war. Another 84 Brits were dead, which is bad, but what is worse was unlike the last time when they're ambushed on a road and defeated, this time the British had lost a pitched and prepared for battle. The British retreated back to their camp located on Mount Prospect and began to reinforce it. Collie hoped that he could drag the Boers into trying to attack his reinforced camp, which was supported by cannons and in the wide open. But of course, they didn't because that's not how they fucking fight. They just left them alone. Instead,

they had another target in mind, the lifeblood of Collie's army his entire supply train and that is where we'll pick up next time in our conclusion of the first Boer war part three! Part three brothers! Part three brother! Go for your house and shit in straw! Get that daub! Put it on the wall! Let it on fire! Hit the daub! How you boys feeling after three hours of Boer? If you smoke that shit mud, they call it hitting the daub rig The daub too loud I'm smoking on that real pack that waltz and all shit haters will be waiters at your table of daub Boys that is the Boer war part two

Boys, that is the Bower War, part two. Thank you so much for joining me again. You have other shows. Plug those other shows. Trash future podcast about the tech industry being bad and funny, but in a bad way. What a hell of a way to add a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military and also being a parent. You should be a parent if you want to be, but you shouldn't join the military. I do not enlist to be a father.

And Kill James Bond, a very, very funny film podcast. Those are my three shows that I produce. And then this is the other one. I'm just a part of. I'm a producer, executive producer, manage, talk, insert jokes about Waddle and Dob, little John Riffs. Executive Dobber. Executive Dobber.

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know what else to what else to tell you support the show and patreon thank you so much for listening and until next time shit on the walls light it on fire Yeah, don't do that. But if you do, you know what have some early 2000s crunk playing while you're at it might as well