This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Once again the British were to prove that, in the nineteenth century, their armies either did not have the mindset or the tactical appreciation to succeed beyond the traditional battlegrounds and scenarios of Europe – and even that assessment must be theoretical. Since Waterloo, British forces had not been tested other than in the colonies. The British fighting on a grand scale against an enemy who agrees to traditional military terms represented a considerable and feared force. The British facing an irregular opposition, especially in alien territory, was rarely impressive. British military history from the American War of Independence onwards supported this hypothesis. When adopting similarly irregular tactics, British (mostly junior) commanders could exhibit military wizardry. Now in this Second Boer War, there were moments when the British appeared to have failed to learn the lessons of 100 years of skirmishing. The highly mobile, irregular and committed Boer troops were able to take on the more formal and structured forces of the British.

  Before the end of October, Mafeking and the British force led by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) were under siege. The following month, November, the second famous siege by the Boers, that at Ladysmith, was underway and was not relieved until the last day of February 1900. If there is a distinguishing mark of the Second Boer War, it is a sense there was no memorable set-piece battle. The commando tactics of the Boers made this unnecessary. While not giving an analysis of this war, there are points to be considered that have a bearing on how the Empire was perceived at home and abroad. When Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February 1900, the 22,000 inhabitants of the besieged township had suffered most of their casualties by disease. The British public saw only a military success. In fact, more British soldiers died of disease in the Boer War than by enemy action.

  Second, the British introduced into this campaign a draconian tactic which social and military historians would argue over through a century to come. General Kitchener, who was by now commanding the British forces, saw that the simplest way to reinforce his own military strength was to adopt a so-called scorched earth tactic. This meant moving into an area and torching it, so making it uninhabitable. The second stage of this policy was the introduction of concentration camps into which Kitchener ordered mostly civilians, including women and children. In those conditions many died.

  Less than a half a century later, Britain was reminded publicly that it was they and not the Germans who had introduced concentration camps into conflict.

  The British now appeared to be in the final stage of the war. By the spring, Bloemfontein, the capital of Orange Free State, had fallen and within weeks it was annexed by the British. Towards the end of May 1900, the British invaded the Transvaal and, by July, President Kruger had fled the country. But the Boers had not gone.

  They now returned to the warfare they understood best. They mounted guerrilla operations and moved, apparently freely, against British targets including troops and their logistical formations. Anyone who has watched the inconclusiveness of the wars in the twenty-first century in Afghanistan and Iraq would be seeing a repetition and a lesson of the vulnerability of supposedly victorious forces to hit-and-run tactics. It was at this point and because of these tactics that Kitchener scorched the Boer lands and imprisoned the women and children into concentration camps.

  When the Boers attacked in greater numbers, as they did, for example, in February 1901 in the Cape Colony, they were defeated. Kitchener pressed on and established killing zones whereby he had pillboxes within gun-sight of each other. Into these killing zones the British forces tactically drove the Boer fighters. By the end of the year there was not much Boer resistance effectively outside north-east Transvaal. By May 1902 there was none at all and a peace treaty was signed.

  Having beaten the Boers, what were the British supposed to do with their victory? Around 4,000 Boers had died and about 5,774 British; tens of thousands on both sides had been wounded. The British had got 40,000 Boer prisoners of war. Presumably, it had been worth it?

  The war began in the last years of Queen Victoria. Those who surrendered were now asked to swear their allegiance to her son, Bertie, King Edward VII. That was about all the British demanded of the recalcitrant Boers. None was imprisoned; the survivors were allowed to resume their way of life. The Dutch Reform Church would be paramount, the courts and schools and councils would use Dutch as their first language. True, the Boers were very much part of the British Empire, but the way in which they were administered was to be left to a constitutional commission and even the original British objection to the Boers’ treatment of blacks was to be left for further discussion. Little wonder that after the ruthlessness of the conflict there was an impression that it had come to its various conclusions by gentleman’s agreement.

  This was the final of the wars of the British Empire. There would be further skirmishes, battles, even campaigns that were the result of Britain having had an empire – for example, the war against Mau Mau in Kenya, Communist confrontation in Malaya, indirectly anti-terrorist campaigns in Palestine and Aden and against the separatists in Cyprus. There would, however, be nothing further on such a grand scale.

  What was not finished was the consolidation of the remarkable assets of the British in the African continent. Once more we have the reflection that the Empire was built for commercial reasons. The true picture is more complex. The biographies of great industrialists often show that their expansionist ideas were developed not simply because they wanted to make money. There was more than money at stake. The profit and loss accounts reflected power. Often, the famous magnates had visions of expanding power-bases and that the commercial establishment of those bases was the way in which they knew how to work. The multinational corporation is the result of someone originally having a good idea, being even better at exploiting it and then finding themselves in the global market-place where people, corporations, ideas and industries are bought and sold until commercial empires emerge. The British Empire is an awesome label. Not only revisionists feel embarrassment and even anger. However, the sentiments of awe and anger are easily found when inspecting any empire, whatever its historical or commercial origins and association. It is worth considering this idea when we think not only how the whole British Empire developed, with its political and strategic imperatives as well as economic incentives, but in its individual parts.

  Like the man who famously liked the product and therefore bought the company, a nineteenth-century individual emerged with that same philosophy. Cecil Rhodes could not think small. There is much in his life which suggests it should have been possible to have all of the world held in the hands and name of the monarch. For although the British were never comfortable, constitutionally and militarily in Africa, people like Rhodes appeared to claim commercial, territorial and political success in the way their ancestors might have done if the American War of Independence had gone the other way. Africa, for some, became the America that never was. Rhodes was among that number.

  Rhodes represented the surviving instincts of that eighteenth-century Protestant arrogance which demanded the British rule the world and not just the waves. It was as if he believed that individual races could not be protected from broader and imperial ambitions. This was not the survival of the fittest, the corrupt version of the origins of species. Rhodes, for example, saw simply that the fittest would and should rule. The weak would be the servants. Perhaps crudely put, his ruthlessness and grabbing instincts were very useful to British governments. Governments normally prefer uncompromising characters to do their work, even, or especially, when some of it is dirty. Society can then drag down those who successfully carried out their tacit, even implicit, wishes with the charge that it was all very well, but, it might have been done differently. Thus, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the most successful general in British modern history, was vilified – except by his military adversaries. Robert Clive was similarly exposed to the jealousies and high-mindedness of a generation who had grown up very pleased with the glory he h
ad created. Rhodes would later inspire an ambivalence among those who could never quite display the stomach for fulsome exploitation of circumstances. Rhodes, never in poverty, exploited every opportunity to have more, almost for more’s sake.

  Rhodes was a useful tool for British policy in Africa. One example regards Bechuanaland (later Botswana). This was the home of the Bamangwato people. It lay between two great rivers, the Zambezi and the Orange, so, north of the Cape. In the late 1870s there had been much movement by the Boer settlers and from German explorers and colonists. The view in London was that if this continued, two disturbing possibilities arose: the Germans and the Boers might see the advantages of joining together to oppose British interests and, by doing so, they would control what was then thought to be huge profits to be made from exploiting minerals.

  Kruger saw great advantages of having German colonists on his side, which meant making sure that the German government could be relied upon to agree Boer policies, especially against the British. We should not forget the web of dynastic lines that linked Victorian England with Germany. The German in-laws and cousins might be relied upon in Europe – for the moment – but the way of true diplomacy, politics and commerce was more realistically expressed when considering the opportunities for wealth in Africa. After all, it was this emerging Germany that looked jealously at the growth of the British Empire and felt, indeed, like a poor, well-dressed relation.

  The two main British interests in Africa were commercial and religious. Rhodes, representing the counting house, saw a German–Boer axis as a direct and physical threat to his ambitions. The missionaries, representing even higher authority, saw a threat to their work. (The combined efforts of the Lutheran Dutch Reform and Calvinistic persuasions rarely ran smoothly.) Rhodes, supported by the Evangelical Church, appealed to the then Prime Minister, Gladstone. Did the British really want the Boers, maybe with the Germans, occupying Bechuanaland? The answer was obvious when, towards the end of 1884, the British moved in a small army and declared Bechuanaland a British protectorate. Bechuanaland itself had no great value; it was what led from it that particularly attracted Rhodes. Five years later, in 1889, in the great tradition of the early British colonists in the West Indies, America and India, Rhodes established the British South Africa Company (BSAC). Africa under British influence now had a series of trading organizations, each of which commanded political as well as commercial influence in London and could so easily decide the futures of whole territories in the continent of Africa. Just as the English East India Company had ruled the sub-continent on behalf of the British, so the likes of Rhodes ran corporations that were established to do exactly that in Africa.

  The companies in Africa, including Rhodes’ BSAC and the British Imperial East Africa Company, so clearly followed the sixteenth-century patterns of commercial authority. They controlled troops, administrators, district officers and, importantly, the judiciary. They also bought off tribal chiefs. Just as the British in India had paid off princes with lump sums, pensions and promises plus nominal authority, so the British South Africa Company bought the tribal chiefs and kingdoms. When, for example, King Lobengula of the Ndebele handed over rights to exploit the land of his people, the Mashona, he would never again have the opportunity to regain his independence. Lobengula can easily be forgiven for giving so much away. It would take a decade for his people to understand that the few hundred original settlers now ruled their lands in all but name. The consequence was the Matabele Wars. The first one took place during 1883 and 1884. By this time the advances in weaponry were considerable and the Company militia had a fearsome advantage over the traditional warriors. The biggest advantage was the Maxim machine gun. The brochure’s description of this weapon’s devastating fire power was reluctantly endorsed by the Ndebele. The British had a simple philosophy. The blacks had to be either killed off or herded into central Africa. It was not an exclusive philosophy. There were many in the United States of America who would have nodded sagely at this opinion. There seems to have been little compassion for those commonly (and not necessarily, then, offensively) called niggers. Rhodes thought the 1890s a time to thrash the black Africans until they learned their lesson and began saying their prayers. This did not quite conform to the Christian fellowship of the missionaries.

  The lesson teaching was not confined to what was by now Rhodesia. Nor were the Company troops, financed by Rhodes, pink-faced soldiers from Britain. Mercenaries and regular forces had been brought in from outside, including Sikhs from India. Here was the spirit that the British saw as the right way to bring to heel recalcitrant parts of its almost completed empire. It was as if there was some belief of God’s calling that the whole continent of Africa had been set aside to be a new Britannia. Could people have imagined a transformation of ancient lands from the Sahara to the southern ocean which, for ever more, would speak English and recognize the monarch in Windsor Castle as its paramount chief? Whether or not successive British governments puzzled over the worth of Empire, the likes of Rhodes and the imperial corporations, they founded had no doubts whatsoever.

  This, of course, was not the settlement of the Victorian Empire in Africa. That tale is a bizarre expression of colonial right. The British had gone to Africa as part of the cautious exploration of the more southern latitudes and had discovered it as an economic viable business. Africa was a huge playground peopled by its own controversies of inter-tribal conflict, jealousies and discrimination. The peoples on the banks of the Niger and Congo rivers were as different as those who followed Chaka and disputed the tributaries of the Vaal. The East Africans were as philosophically and physically different as those who lived in the darker and lusher regions of the Great Lakes. Into this enormous playground came the Dutch, the Portuguese, the British and, to a lesser extent, the Belgians, the French and the Germans. The British especially brought with them the motives and capabilities of empire. They were, by then, professional imperialists, if we do not always use that term in a pejorative sense. The Industrial Revolution and expansion of the British Empire produced managers who did what Britain did best in the nineteenth century: commercial development. Even in Africa, the sense of the British had to be expansion. It mattered not that native peoples were caught in this trampling of old orders. Britain might even wish to rule the whole continent as in India and, as in that place, no prince could ever imagine being the overall king. Whatever Chaka’s warlike tendencies and arrogance, he would never have been able to summon the resources to have his Zulus rule all sub-Saharan Africa. There was no need for him to do so. He did not have the knowledge of the rest of Africa nor the incentive.

  When the Second Boer War ended in 1902, the terms were generous and led to the final agreement in 1906. Within a few days of the war ending, Cecil Rhodes died. Salisbury resigned and his nephew, Arthur Balfour, became Prime Minister.

  At the dark point of the conflict, the so-called Black Week in December 1899, the Queen had stiffened the resolve of her government. ‘Please understand,’ she had said, ‘that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’ But when the news of the final surrender was brought to the monarch, it was brought not to Victoria. The Queen who had come to the throne in the first half of the nineteenth century was dead.

  A young Welsh lawyer, by the name of David Lloyd George, joined the minority of radicals who saw the war as an indictment of Britain’s imperialist policies. Around 6,000 troops had died in action, and 16,000 had died from diseases. More than £220 million had been spent. But there was little to suggest that the public at large supported his view. For example the leaders of the Independent Labour Party and the trades unions opposed the war. But they had to accept that predictably the working class they represented was swept up in the general patriotic atmosphere, especially over Mafeking.

  When, for example, the Queen visited Wellington College, news had just arrived that the siege had been lifted. Over the college arch was the slogan, ‘Welc
ome to the Queen of Mafeking’. For Victoria, this was the time to be seen. She wanted the people to see her take her daily drives in her coach. Gone was the reclusive Queen who refused to be the people’s Queen for so many years after the death of ‘Dearest Albert’. And she made clear that she wanted every dispatch, every military and political report of the war, to be on her desk. It was soon known that although she was now eighty, with her eyesight failing and a tendency to nod off after lunch, Victoria read piles of war reports, questioned her ministers, wept for her ‘dear brave soldiers’, knitted them scarves and, in 1899, sent her troops a personal Christmas present – 100,000 tins of chocolate, many of which remained unopened and more prized than any campaign medal.

  In October 1900, the British commanders appeared to believe the war was all but over, yet Victoria did not believe this. She told Lord Salisbury, her Prime Minister, as much. And she said that in the light of her ‘great experience’ she knew that the British always withdrew too soon and ended up having to send in more troops to sort out the mess.

  But Lord Salisbury, encouraged by the advice of the Commander-in-Chief himself, Lord Roberts, decided to exploit the good news of war and called what became known as the Khaki Election. His Conservative government was returned with a big majority – the Boer War factor had done for the Conservatives what another conflict, the Falklands War, was to do for them eighty years later. But by the end of that year it was clear that the old Queen’s health was dramatically failing. The first page of Queen Victoria’s journal for 1901 makes sad reading: ‘Another year begun and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly.’