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Hey everyone and welcome to the Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast. I'm Joe and with me, it's 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 super villain and incorporated,
we long for adventure. Our commanding officer, sir Reginald, small but eager bottom, 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 the neo version of hard tack,
but out of like, dulse. I was just going to say about the upper dicker. If you've ever looked on the map, it's not just that. There's also lower dicker and the dicker. There's no middle dicker. No, there's not. There's the definite article and there's upper and lower. There's something very funny about that. Sometimes things are funnier because someone said them in Spanish or in Portuguese. I know this is stupid, but the crushed, squished, gyro Bolsonaro video is funnier also because
it's in Portuguese. I don't know why some of these things are like gyro Bolsonaro saying, okay, um, um, golden shower, 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 existed every Dutch tram or train. And it is like, someone just has some a shart poop now, like, cut stool.
So crap me if I'm wrong, but cut stool, like, is that like to look? No, it literally meant cut chair, but like it, it, it, it Dutch, it's like, cut stool and one word and poop and shart or something. Yeah, shit on the cut stool 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, uh, mothers with the, when they strollers or whatever can sit and hold on to them. But in the poison to addled by the of all of us, it looks like the cut chair. And someone, I don't know where that picture was posted. I'm going to go in a limb here and say Amsterdam because some would shit on this chair. And they said, like, just the Dutchers said,
this is some would shit on the cut stool on the train. But I love now that like, people are identifying cookstools in like other places like someone, you know, someone identified one in the fucking head office of the EU. It was definitely like, it's still there by the Dutch to feel at home in the, in the trams or whatever. But yeah, uh, sometimes there are sentences that do not need to be translated. Yeah, yeah, 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. One of my mutuals to describing studying in the Netherlands and getting off the Gerrstar at Amsterdam and wondering, am I going to be able to survive not speaking, you know, English, like having to be in a, 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, hon poop in your ear. And I was like, yeah,
probably be okay. Oh, even better is some like far right Dutch rag media thing took the Cuckstool meme and said like the Cuckstool meme is a perfect example of degenerate things in the Netherlands. But like once again, it's like the Cuckstool degenerate. It's just like, yep, you don't need a chance like this. I have it in serious progress. But like how can you be like a Dutch far right person that ungone about degenerations? Like the Dutch are a degenerate people
believe definition. There was a early a website that had digitized a lot of like the kind of Dutch weed growers collectives like machines and stuff from the 70s and 80s. And their logo was like a cartoon drawing of a stern 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, it's, it's not a funny thing. There was a club doing like a posturing 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, all right. Like what? He's told me a story about a commercial in the Netherlands that he saw growing up where it's like the like the world's gazed 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 driver. It's just like the world's most obnoxiously gay man. And then at the end of the commercial, the texture appears at least he doesn't smoke. That's what's so funny about like everyone thinks like places like Berlin or like all this like bohemian like weird sex place. And I was like no, the real center 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. Your sharton poop and in the cook's to I'm gonna admit is like as someone who lives here. I don't really see any of that unless it's an Amsterdam. It seems to be self-contained. And I mean, I haven't been to the entire country, but the hagg and the outlying areas are seem remotely not weird and over that happen if they are. I don't fucking care. I don't give a single shit a sharton poop and
and speaking of the Dutch. Yeah, in the lowlands, they're doing a, you know, bible play. And the in the boars were also doing weird ethno bible play. The Dutch urge to radiate and intensify your kink. It translated into boar culture, but in the worst way possible. I mean, to be fair, at 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 boars, we're 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 to bar to pee and all that stuff in Dutch culture is European Dutch stuff. And the boars didn't need a blackface holiday tradition to be racist. Yeah, we don't need to make fun of like Holland Dutch with 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. They're like, oh, that's cute. Anyway, we are on port two of the first boar war. And when we left you last time, a bunch of turbo racist induct farmers popped up a couple republics in South Africa and were slowly being taken over by the
British Empire. The British doing with the British do best eventually pissed these guys off, leading them 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 boars had gathered, swearing allegiance to the Republic of the Transvol 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 Lozeli, treated this as unseriously as he treated the entire boar independence movement so far. Remember the last episode he's telling them fucked their petitions, telling them if they gather together, he's going to try them with trees in 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 insists they're going to 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 that 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. That's enough about suburban San Antonio. He didn't even attempt to reinforce this tiny garrison he had overseeing the entirety of the transvolves. 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 boars 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 that 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 transvolve. 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 maximum 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 boar subsets. Hey, Bru, am I detained? Yeah, administering like your your H.O.A. like your own fiefdom. Yeah, pretty much. They were doing it first. I mean, that's
pretty much what the Republic of Transvolve was. Just a guy going around with a ruler measuring people's grass. The Republic of the Transvolve is exactly like if like the Bundy Ranch people started a country. And to combat this, woe'sly simply ordered his administrators to crack down harder
on boars who weren't paying their taxes. This led to a policy of like if they catch you transporting goods, whether they're 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 an auction with the proceeds going to the colonial coffers. So in November of 1880, a colon named Owen Layin, he was like a dual army officer plus colonial administrator. He ordered soldiers within the town of POTCH to seize
a boar'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 heat cronia is a local boar leader who immediately put the call out to the local commando. Remember their militia volunteer base militia system 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 POTCH 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 the string back at Praetoria because these farmers got big ideas and we can't hope to fight
them off in these little groups. Because like the woesley is such a fucking moron that his garrisons are in a very small almost like circle in Transval with like 60 guys here, a hundred guys there, you know, 30 guys there, no force really whatsoever. They're barely even a police force. So it's like a smattering of troops if you yeah. And so we have to pull everyone back to Praetoria if we
hope to kind of kick the bowers back down a bit. He also ordered 700 of the garrison of 1,750 to center themselves on a few smaller towns that led directly to Praetoria creating a kind of defense in depth against the Transval Bowers to show them hey if you want to try to march on Praetoria, you're going to have a fight. At the time of Leidenburg, Colonel Anne Struthur got orders to withdraw his 300 men back to Praetoria, which was a journey of 180 miles
over incredibly harsh terrain that the British were not that familiar with. But orders or orders, he eventually loaded everything he had into 12 wagons and his unit began to make their trip on December 5th. But was supposed to be an easy journey because there is a road. There's one road that connects it to easy enough, but recent rains had washed this road away. So the wagon train gets lost, they get 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 the way back onto what remains of the road in order to cross a local river, which was of course surging from the same rains. Not good yet. Their progress was only three miles per day, which if you happen to be a Boer 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 Boers tracking their movements
the whole way. And it's not like Antshooter 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 insertion 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 Antshooter's withdrawal to Praetoria. They selected Francois Yobair, 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 Boers 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, you know, dudes like take these other dudes and go that way. There's no like platoon company, battalion, brigate, nothing. It's 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 the thought out of my head as like once again, how bad the trench foot would have been like waiting through all this like fresh rainwater mud. Oh yeah, the Brits are having a really bad go of things. And the Boers are mostly mounted on horseback. So because that's their use of the shit. Yeah, yeah.
Like we talked about in our last episode, the Boers 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. No, not all the nuts. There is close to humankind has come to creating like a strange society of Terminator murderer bots. Yeah, we 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 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 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? Oh, that's one thing. Bring in love.
They 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 bovers did have were not war rifles. They were for hunting. And as far as their training went, bovers were legitimately incredible shots because they had to be. They trained to hunt. And I'm not a hunter, but as it's 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 bovers were trained to effectively double tap everybody. Yeah. Which is very uncommon for military trading at the time. No one that was ever shot by the bovers during this conflict was only shot once. This is the one thing that happened to
build themselves was bullies. 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 a probably an incredible ability for tracking as well. Obviously, if the majority of your, I suppose, scale with a rifle is very 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 bovers 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 bovers often fought African tribes. And they generally learned how to fight by reacting to how the African tribes fought. 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've bought 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 others 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 it at organized large scale military formation that's really into being dogmatic and one size fits all pretty much. And I know that's an over-siplification
of the British military. But like 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
boers are doing fire and manure tactics on the partition 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 to like, you know, 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 they're 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 guy's John Brown was killing it. I mean, it would be like bleeding Kansas is everybody involved with pro slavery. Fair, fair, fair enough. Yeah. That's one thing all the boers because like there was like the Transvall civil war and the takeover of Zalpantensburg and stuff like that. Though their disagreements had nothing to do with individual rights. They were
all went 100% on board with the same thing, which were 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 just established that going forward now. Let's, you know, get a hold of going and 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 of
the Transvall. Transvall Republic early think tank. Oh god. The orange group. Every now and then you say a sentence that I'm 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. Yeah, I'd from have headquarters in DC right next to like the Atlantic Council. They'd have lunch together. Yeah, and then your peanut 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 them in the commando. If failing, if there was one guy in your group that like nobody could kind of agree on like, you know, used over there as the best at violence, they would have to hold a quick vote. Yes, they called me used violence.
Use van der Kiel. Now, I don't need to go to 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 the 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 the scenario that they they just didn't see the boars 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 Pretoria and Struthersaw, 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 boar 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 boar reading group is probably reading the most racist scientific like evidence. Yeah, I mean, a boar re like book club is just reading siege. If it existed, all crimes. 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 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, ah, fuck off. I'm sick of these scouts telling me there's boars in the mountains. Also, he brought the band who he ordered to play music the entire time. You just hear like fucking oompa music. So 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 label. It's like, oh, there's like a hundred boars over there, but I really don't want to do this. I've so much stuff in my intray. 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 school. The only Beyblade's made out of human bones.
She's got let me ruin. I was going to say you're trending towards the idea of we're inventing a boar Yu-Gi-O from first principles. Except boar Yu-Gi-O would instead of having to sacrifice three cards to summon like the blue eyes white dragon. You just have to turn and shoot three people. You've activated my trap card, Kaiba. Just yeah. There was no boar character that show for a reason they had to settle for an American. The Millennium puzzle is just a giant piece of
build on. Oh, God, that puzzle instead of summoning the Egyptian Pharaoh. It just summits Paul Kruger to scream and punch horses everywhere. But like a hundred percent there was a guy who was around at this time instead of I forgot who just had the same affect as Maximilian Pegasus. Oh, Yu-Gi-Boy. Oh, God. I'm frustrated because I went on the Wikipedia page for Yu-Gi-O and there is not a Afrikaansling which version of the article. There is a Dutch version.
But this is the 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. As the British force is God, this name is fucking awful. Approach the Broncoors spruet river. He shouldn't have let these guys name things. Oh, sorry. That sounds like a Dutch tongue twister. A Broncoors spruet is what happens with like
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 Broncos definite article in English as that the borough of New York City is that it was originally called the like the Bronx farm like Mr. Bronk, BRO and CK owned a farm and it's yes, the Bronx. The Bronx live there and that's why it's
the Bronx. I hate that. I hate Mr. Bronk. Me too. Mr. Bronk sounds like the Ur Bronch Lesnar for some reason. Robert Moses wasn't just an assimilated Jew who became an Episcopalian and 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 the Bowery respelling it in English makes sense because God knows you don't want to spell Bowery in Dutch if you're in American.
No, the Bronx. Go down to the Bowery. The Bowery. Yeah, I have no coming soon to WrestleMania. Yeah. Bowery. Hulk Hogan versus Mr. Bronx. God, dammit. Got a new racial parody 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 like, do 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 Bower War. Hulk Hogan seen the fucking SS tattoo as I 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 Bowery's decided to set up an ambush for them just off the road behind a nearby
ridge. However, it was only when the Bowery 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 pair the uniforms from their backs. Yeah, they're like brambles. Yeah, I actually know a guy who growls or he's skip ahead like thirty seconds to a minute if you don't want to hear this. But I know God is ball sucked or 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 widened off 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 Bowery Hulk Hulk it's so much. It's just one of those things too because like the Hulkomania phenomenon was such an 80s thing and I can really recall it when I was a kid. God Bowermania 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 just 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 somehow. I'm like we would be making jokes about Bower Ecto cooler. We don't know if it's not we don't know we don't know 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? It was bright green because it was like slimer baby it's the Irish exactly yeah it turns out that Ecto cooler is actually just like the runoff from the Chicago River after St. Patrick state they just bottle it and sell to tapless American children. Yeah like ever since we recorded that episode last week I've been doing the whole coke and oxen 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. Yeah 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 phonication. You see Hulk represents a morbid American dream where you two can become the Obermensch but the real Obermensch at this time was getting his balls cut open on a bramble
wash. Yeah Hulk Hogan or rather Hulk Hogan slash Werner Herzog listening to his episode and then just says speak to two is interlocutor it just says yeah but you should never listen to this. You should destroy this. You should not listen to the lions led by Donkeys hot cast. It should be destroyed. It holds this 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 Boers low crawling through brambles getting their shit turned into like confetti or whatever by this natural cheese grater that they I need to like read right here are not backing down from not like oh we need to get
to get around this like no no just crawl through it head first it's fine. Oh god then a British scout ran back to answer and said look I saw 12 Boers running across the road from a nearby farmhouse to the ridge line there's obviously an ambush we need to send forward more scouts to cut them off
they're clearly lying in wait for us and shooter said look calm down those are not Boers 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 yes something across the bore for a convention of being very very
confused those are just Nazi buries yeah so and shooters column just marched on and at this point the Boers 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 first head of cats that they're all bleeding profusely from thorn wounds.
However this is where things get weird a detachment of Boers on horseback under a white flag approached the British one Boer who spoke decent enough English told the British to turn around because they were not going to be allowed to go to Pretoria and shoot through then responded
something to the tune of while I have my orders that's where we're going but I don't want to fight you he then asked the bar 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 Boers 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 rip cord on the world's biggest bayblade I mean bayblades they're really an effective
like combat weapon because you can't really direct them unless you're like fighting in a giant kind of concave burrito yeah it's it's like a weapon for 40k only I'm really excited for the gladiator to release when we find out that Ridley Scott put a giant bayblade in the Coliseum this is why
Russell Crowe is not coming back also because his characters dead and then after the skirmish line open fire the ones in the Bramble pit open fire and within the first volley virtually the entire British command structure is killed or wounded and then with a 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 oh oh oh oh return fire is the guy at the flute like I'm trying to start us again but it's like for it to be that pervasive of a problem like across the whole unit like surely that had to be like some sort of like environmental factor that affected all of nobody's
sure and nobody's any idea how or why this happened nothing because nothing with this and 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 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 see we forgot to use a rifle the band is playing sick tunes while getting
punched with like eight rounds a piece 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 area 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 colonist dumber and more racist you know what I mean like it's very funny that this keeps happening to them yet 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 flatfooted and wildly relaxed they didn't see anybody as a threat nobody could possibly heard 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 warned their reflective safety belts they wouldn't have exactly this mission I mean they kind of were there wearing their red jackets true 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 to this like now these dumbasses are just seen cows again yeah so the whole unit is just being ripped apart by gunfire meanwhile the bond is just playing
headstrong take off anyone they're playing the cantina sock from starhorns and the band at first hides behind the wagons which leads to their kneecaps getting shot out so all their 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 well 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're a little bit more conscious of how you know out there they were they're not gonna bludgeon anybody to throw oboe or whatever there's just a guy with a tube who's like trying to hide what it's sticking up over the wagon
to be getting shot full of holes you know he was able to scare them off by playing the bassoon and they thought it might be will debase coming to fucking charge at them and the the bowers also had effectively yield 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 boars of like being smelly dirty and covered in the murder onish i'm just laughing at the idea here that we call them
ghillie suits and but the word enough for conscious like ball rippers put with a J and there for some reason because they've got the thorns on it y'all bro you you're wearing a ball rip by y'all we're going up we're going sniper on the hill bro Tom I didn't realize that the boars were fucking
delivery guys with Bengali A accents in Britain dude if you interpret them as Bengali that's more you than mainly you literally you're drifting into sounding like that guy but I love just love chicks man the more you look the more you're fainting god the more you love chicks man you say my show
love that's what you sound like but you're calling it boar to quote uh Pete you bear bashe law bro way I'm getting a phone call from the martial law department that's such god that's such a great meaningful book oh yeah but cruikers have be really confused they memorized the wrong book
this one for 15 minutes until and stuther who had been shot five fucking times at this point ordered his men to surrender and that was another part that the the brits discover that if you went down the boars would just keep shooting you until they decided you were obviously dead so
unless they scored like the glorious headshot down demand they just keep pumping your corpse full of bullets which is like all against the gential 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 those like if there was shooting the boars were absolute murder machines but once it was over again huge asterix 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 when 120 British soldiers were killed you want to guess how many the boars lost five one and he wasn't killed by the brits
he was shot his horse got scared and ran him over I was it's like he definitely didn't die by the British is like he accidentally shot himself in the foot and then like died of gangrene oh that'd be even better the boars immediately descended on the wagon train and looted everything
they could leaving some supplies for the British since they had no intention taking any 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 supply so 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 shoot their head 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 the die in 1880 oh yeah like you're
in you're in 1887 Africa is warm and a field hospital is dusty and like I can only conceive of this era of the weird bad movies I've seen and then the random like 10 minute segment of dead wood I watch once because my friend was watching it at the apartment of each of where the guy is getting
like basically getting kidney stones jacked out of his dick in a saloon or something and I think I'm like oh yeah medicine in the 1880s you have to go to salute and get your dick jacked getting like agonizingly jerked off so that you can pass stones and like yeah that's that's what
past that's what we call medicine but then it's in South Africa and there's like we're you know like I said termite termite mounts the size of the capital dome and shit like that I mean remember one of the the borer 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 it like similarly cut off from the world in 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 hmm now the British probably less pain than if you stick your hand in a goat stomach now I'll have to find out hey me don't get those two things confused and you go into a dead one salute to get painfully jacked off by a goat stomach yeah exactly you thought that they were
gonna shotgun hits a rope him to you while they painfully jack you off but instead there's like here's the goat stomach you know what to do but you know what like figure out the rest brother with which appendage do I stick into this any of them will do it's fine big respect to the
world west sex worker who was like the resident kidney stones over I'm a urologist it's fine if I remember correctly from the this is 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 stand and they've given him some kind of tincture and a lot of alcohol and they but more or less have to jerk him off it's like a team sport like giving CPR because I don't know if anybody's listening to actually given CPR but you need to rotate out because your
arms get tired and when you're jerking off like the kidney stones you get tired you got to switch up hands you got to move down the fire and watch dead you guys watch dead with yeah yeah great just for like I said I just remember that 10 minutes or so I mean like wow that's 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 dead with is all right I don't necessarily know if I ever need to watch this but hey don't forget what big far must take it 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 reevaluating anything they had done leading up to that point they simply blamed everything on a and shruth her who was dead which is pretty convenient they said he was unprepared
ignored signs of boar 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 woesley had fucked up in order
to get to this point they sent on stuether to the coax dole 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 C in the wagon that's away from everyone else the brits previously had written off the boars as a fighting force
and this battle did not make them change their minds to them this was a failure of and shruth not a failure of their military of their colonial administration the boars 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 boars were immediately moving to confront the army were to victory at bronchor spruet spread spread quickly because amongst the boar population this is a big fucking deal they in met the brits and they defeated them and soon more and more people were volunteering to fight
a lot of these guys are already hardcore believers in the cause and we're 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 is a fence center the guy who believes in the concepts of boar statehood and nationalism and the transvolve 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 galvanize them and it
was not just confined to the transvolve but rather all of boardom even in the orange free state who saw the possibility of a transvolve victory is promising to their own situation so soon free state boars began crossing over to volunteer in the transvolve as well as boars from the
British colony the ones that you know the the Cape colony or the Natal soon it was a weird boar mecca of everybody heading this way to do violence against the brits all when you said soon you said that both me and Nate like looked at the camera yeah it's gross it whatever boar mecca is
the place I don't want to go god boar mecca is just like you're doing hodge for the most racist English people in the 1980s yeah boar 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 met with boars who
received the light of his law once again the martial law department is college sure is and the transvolve government had a pretty simple plan to keep pressing the brits they knew as well as the brits dead they didn't have much of a garrison available in the colony to stamp out the rebellion
despite the orders the pull men backed praetoria virtually none of them had and all of them are now sitting in the remote postings after the defeat at broncore spru it I can't say that name without that in a tation my voice I was a broncore spirit 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 what the fuck is up there's like this huge city of like tall condo buildings and it's just stop called broncore spirit or alternatively it's just a beer made by like allegage or something that's
just only available in Oregon the broncore spru it IPA because it's an 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 boars 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've been dispatched from india and england so they're going to take a hell of a long time to get there the bowler plan for victory was easy if we're going to win
we have to win fucking fast they knew as well as it british did that once the evil empire dump 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 transvol
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 on everything turns to mold and then you're going three models a day see that only slows down the british the bowers eat that shit up they're like fuck yes this sucks that they're like the in you it like a snow shoes but for more it's just
their horses they don't walk anywhere yeah you'll bear 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 all places like lightenburg only had 50 after andstruthers attempted march then you'll bear took a thousand men the majority of the entire borer fighting force and invaded the tall now there's a very good reason for this there is one area called Lang's
neck or maybe it's land snake I don't fucking know which was a harsh mountainous area but also the main road that went from the borer republic of transfall to the natal and they knew any british reinforcements or resupply would have to take that road so he decided that we're going
to park right fucking here and the brits thought the borers were such a non threat that they didn't build a fourth 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 borers 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 borers 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
gonna fucking died for this place yeah I'll go to praetoria that's fine with me yeah unbeknownst the borers 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 borers 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 roostinburg garrisoned by 62 men of the royal scots under the command of captain auction lec who were wearing the sick uniform of red coats with kiltz you know really make in yourself a target you know double diesel wearing the red coat
on the kiles I mean you're anywhere in the red coat you you can wear bright pink fucking genko jeans if you want underneath of it there are they're gonna see you we're sending the zoom or revolutionary guard to take over no no no no you're sending like young gen X and old millennial
that would be when me and Nate would be would be like no no like 21 year olds are way I know that wait they came back yeah I don't know the original vibe though the original stupid vibe you know that's who you got to send you got to 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 borers are gonna distract them with 19th century Napster and they're just gonna be like oh wow I totally found this badass song by eves six and they're
gonna completely forget about fighting a legion of like 17 18 year old man back then wearing janko jeans you can hear them coming from miles away due to the vast array of wallet chains dangling from them wall of chains win chiming like a jingle truck is gonna be insane and the boars 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 emails versus rocker war in Mexico city they don't have a marching band they have one guy with a
cotton mouth 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 exactly shit fuck it's 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 mouth king's fan but I never had a skip proof CD player those things constantly fucking bad I'm a pretty good one because my friends dad worked at Kenwood and I got like a he had like a bunch of sample things they had given out and one was like a a Kenwood disc man
and the cover got broken into swim meat so I put it back together by slapping a huge radio head sticker on it the bear with the spiky teeth or whatever the for that that logo yeah so you know what like that's the level of late 90s should I'm operating now archa lec had gotten orders to
reinforce his position and he did he built trenches he built sandbags he planted mines and all of the approaches but even with all that their main and only really reinforce 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 liked everything other than ammo which so I suppose it could be worse they had plenty of bullets but you can't eat or drink bullets they're all they can't all just live off of like a brown brown from lord or doing fat lines a gunpowder on christmas Eve 1880
a force of 600 boars appeared and demanded their surrender but captain refused leading the boars to attack immediately and constantly things in russian burglary goes out very very very quickly as the brits quickly became trapped meeting they would have to rely on their tiny store food and water
which would only last a week with some pretty serious rationing the boars 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 keep the pressure up just as the brits are running out of water though they were saved 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 sick
bay flooded and sued this cocktail of shit in human misery mixed together with the dirt to create what I have dubbed the plague mud disease soup that's that that's the cup of serious mud that poor Hulk Hogan wanted you got a tip into the plague mud brother you got to drink the plague
mud bro you want you ever had cholera I mean they all everybody here now has cholera yeah yeah disease and starvation swept through the ring so they did have plenty of water now yay just running a rain with your mouth open staring at the sky is like I'll never be thirsty again
taking in rainwater and one edge heating up bloody diary of the other finally the endless rain stopped only for the brits to realize the boars had been building a trench from their position all the way up to the British for the whole time they thought everybody was washed out as aren't you like
peaked over the walls to get a look at this boar trench line he was shot directly in the face blowing out his cheek and sitting several teeth fly into the air the boars were using a proto a alphan york at omitons dweller 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 in it's like a new version of you know the 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've just shot us big Scottish dude and killed 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
but significantly uglier than he was before but lives nonetheless that same night he leads a raiding party out of his shit flooded for directly at the boar forward trench which imagine the scene if you were a boar a man with half of a face leading a charge of mid so starved their kiltzer falling
off their asses all covered in diarrhea mode god damn I'm about to die by the hands of Scottish Grendel like this is probably the only situation the boars have ever respected any wooden their life like I see you also a violence at misery he's running at you with like a bandage around his jaw
tied at the top with a not looking like a fucking loony tunes cartoony only think holding his john but as soon as the archer like steps up from behind the fortifications to lead his men from the front his elbow gets blown off by another gun shot again this does not slow him down he simply
starts he simply pulls out his pistol and starts leading with that because his other of his flop it ground like a loose noodle because he does have a fucking elbow anymore he's following the Adrian de Weir's doctrine of combat has been continued to press the attack board and force the
borer withdrawal from their trench line but the siege remains in place yeah this is what this is basically the only way you can experience what the boars are experiencing watching this guy move is to go into a pub and polycheele's and have an incorrect opinion about rangers
just getting shot by the borer war fronzes beg me by December 20th the boars hit statterton a tiny garrison instead of a tiny town with a population of less than 500 the garrison had built their own heliograph out of some like people's mirrors so they could remain in contact
with other nearby garrisons not that it matters you're just able to transmit hair you under siege too yes captain shot in face please send help sheeding out my do do ass dying painfully like nobody could help anybody here but they did magic keep the bars at bay with a combination
of countering raids and something straight out of act me they built a giant fake wooden cannon because the boars 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 boars away despite
the fact none of them began to ask questions as to why they were shooting it just running up to the boars with my like hand underneath my shard and pointing it out like a gulm it's the artillery version of that yeah the boar rating party was actually led astray because someone painted a cave
on the side of the mountain I'm just laughing it's like you you went full on like cargo cult in you know the new hebrides building like a entire airfield and like fighter squadron out of you know vines and reads 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 road runner the boars would have their fucking mines blowing 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 oh oh uh so you've smelled with j's lighter burg 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 Wattlandob. They're building like crannogs. Like, oh god, damn it.
Lieutenant, Lieutenant Long is a, is a, is a trad building bro. Everything has to be Wattlandob. I mean, like it, it's very efficient to build Wattlandob, you know, fortifications because they have just such a excessive dog coming out of their ass on every second. And we have so much dog right? We're dog maxing. Dog game and cripple. Dog. I don't know why I find this so funny. Dog on the wall.
It's like in four night 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. To the walls are like, to the door playing no build mode. Folks, hey, we agreed on this. To the wall, to the dog. Yeah, to the ship falls out my draws. We got to build these wall, these English bro. We wanted a ward for best history podcast. One thing long did have other than an endless supply of dog.
The Broncore spree spree spree spree spree. To the Broncore spree goddamn. All right. I promise. Don't you little John? He shout, yeah, what is Lullet Jason? Yeah, little Yon. Little John's big Dutch brother, big John. Root Yon. Now, one thing long did have other than an endless supply of dog was a storehouse full of food and ammo, which had been left behind by an stuther, but again, they had no water.
The Bowers rode right up to the fort and demanded its surrender, which was answered by the Brit telling them to piss off and opening fire directly in their face. The Bowers had it finally managed to get their hands on a cannon at this point and wielded up to shell the fort, which immediately terrified the British who were a then, of course, immediately relieved to find out that none of the Bowers knew how to actually use the goddamn thing.
So they just kept wildly firing shells into the distance. No weapon operated by morons, she'll prosper against me. After these initial blowups, the siege quickly fell into a pattern of sniping attacks and raids. The Bowers didn't have enough men to just storm the fort, but the Bowers are not the only people rating. The Bowers 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 commando's 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 liked it sleep inside the livestock in the same way they put the wounds inside the guise. They sleep inside the livestock in a different way. The Mr. Handsway. Hey, don't, don't grown at Bower culture. Like that all culture needs to be respected.
Bowers were 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 loggers, and then throw homemade fire bombs over the walls of the wagon into the middle. These exploded and the resulting fires caused the Bowers livestock to panic and run around this inner circle of the wagons, trampling commando's while they slept.
Some of the cows at 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 QRF gets on stage and starts shooting a cannon middle of fucking nowhere. Can you imagine quick broken other cannons that annihilates a cow? If you're like the collar or a certified British rating party that is a guy, this and you see the cows basically all running in concentric circles stomping dudes, what got to 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 Bowers would have a furnace for the moon since it is white. It's the only planetary body they respect. The Bowers responded by rating the British back and sitting several of the fatched huts on fire. But now my notes smell crazy in there. It's almost shit, it's on fire. I don't know my job. My sweet succulent dog. It's dog all the way down.
After this, the Bowers were just, they settled that 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. And then of course, the rain started because we're 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 the siege is ongoing, Boer commando circled other garrisons at Mabarashdoth. The Brits had received the same orders to defend and prepare for a siege. The Brits there oversaw a population of thousands of Africans in the smaller population of British settlers. So the local British commander, ES Brooks ran around town telling everyone, hey, the Bowers 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 were members of what was called the Transvolmated 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 Bowers show up, a quick firefight left a few men dead on either side. But then the leader of the Bowers, Baron Vorster 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 what another.
So they did. In the middle of all these sieges, the British Army, already in Nepal, was trying desperately to slap some kind of relief force together so they could advance into the Transvol 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 Colley, Governor and Commander in Chief of the Natal, and in case you're wondering Tom, born in county killed there. Ah, he's from the pale. He's not really Irish. Colley was what you consider a military academic rather than a battlefield commander. He was a professor at Sanders, 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 at 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. Well, Wozli had slept through the opening stages of this rebellion, telling London there was nothing to worry about. Colley 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 Wozli had left him, and was struggling to put together a force of anyone worth a shit in they tall in order to respond of what was going on inside the Transvol. 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 core 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 Colley 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 Bowers. He was, after all, afflicted with the terminal condition of being British.
He penned a letter to Pete Yoberr that said, quote, the men who follow you are many of them ignorant in no 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 Yoberr would have ever agreed to this and surrendered, but it did make the British look like dishonest pricks to the Bower leadership. Eventually, Colley was able to field around 1,200 men and began marching for the Transvol. Directly towards Lang's neck where the Bowers were waiting for them. The Bowers had reinforced an 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 Bower positions and Colley went forward to demand they move and allow them to pass into the Transvol. The Bowers of course refused, saying they were independent and the Brits can fuck right back off into their colony, which is ironic because the Bowers were inside the British colony at this point. They were not in the Transvol. But whatever fucked the Brits. I don't know who to pick in this fight. They're both terrible.
Colley 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 Bowers the softened 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.
They just 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 single infantry advance and then walked back to their forward positions completely unbothered at all from the artillery.
The Bowers did not lose a single person from Colley's artillery. Then the British would walk right up on their trenches assuming they had been blasted apart because the Bowers 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 Colley'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 crossed the hill to attack the Bowers, they're being shot to pieces. Now Colley's senses things are going sideways so he orders a cavalry charge on the Bower 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 Bowers 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 Bower 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 his 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 discover another hidden Bower trench that was hidden only 150 meters away. They 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 were made safe in the rear as his staff at AIDS got slaughtered by Dr. Farbers. British officers for him. Colley's sitting back and waiting to maybe send in the rest of his men decided to break off the attack when he saw that the Bowers were beginning to counter attack because his his cavalry had been driven so far off it open a massive gap in the British flank and the Bowers are about to charge right down into him.
So he retreated from the field and the Bowers did not press a counter attack. This ended the battle and gave the Bowers 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. Colley hoped that he could drag the Bowers into trying to attack his reinforced camp, which was supported by cannons and in the wide open. But of course they didn't because they it's not how they fucking fight. They just left them alone.
Instead, they had another target in mind, the lifeblood of Colley's army, his entire supply train. And that is where we'll pick up next time in our conclusion of the first Bower War. Part three! Part three brothers! Part three brother! Go for your house and shit and straw! Get that dog! Put it on the wall! Lay it on fire! Hit the dog! How you boys feeling after three hours of Bower?
If you smoke that shit mud, they call it hitting the dog rig. The dog too loud. I'm smoking, I'm not real pie. Not Wattland dog shit. The haters will be waiters at your table of dog. Boys, that is the Bower War. Part two! Thank you so much for joining me again. You have other shows. Plug those other shows.
I'm not a 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. Kill James Bond, a very funny film podcast. Those are my three shows that I produce. This is the other one. I'm just a part of. I'm a executive producer, managed, talked, insert jokes about Wattland dog. Executive dober? Executive dober. They call it Mr. Dobby. Call me Mr. Dobby because my shit is so crazy.
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Don't do that. But if you do, you know what, have some early 2000s prunke playing while you're at it, not as well.