Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  The British won, of course, and the Peace of Vereeniging was concluded at their dictate in May, 1902: but the protracted guerilla campaign, the sordid anticlimax of it all, the thousands of deaths by disease or neglect, robbed the victory of any grandeur. In London the treaty was greeted far less boisterously than the relief of Mafeking two years before. The Queen had died, Rhodes had died, ‘Bobs’ had come home long before, Salisbury retired as soon as the war ended, Kitchener’s bludgeon methods had taken the fun out of following the flags. Never again did the British go to war with the old imperial éclat, or greet their victories with their frank Victorian gusto.

  The peace settlement was widely greeted as generous, especially by the British. It handsomely compensated the Boers for the devastation of their country, and it eventually gave them full equality, of law as of language, within a self-governing African union of all four European colonies. It seemed a peace of reconciliation. In this as in much else, though, the Boer War was deceptive. The treaty was magnanimous, but by its terms the British hoped to establish a secure, British-dominated South Africa, to establish a lasting hold over the gold of the Rand, and to ensure some measure of fair play for the black peoples of the land. The Boers were no less calculating, even in defeat. They reasoned that within a constitutional union they might one day achieve mastery not only of their own former republics, but of all South Africa, with complete control of its wealth, and with the freedom to treat their Kaffir subjects just as the Old Testament suggested.

  They were right. Some Afrikaners became enthusiastic supporters of the imperial cause, and the Boer generals were greeted as prodigal sons when they visited London after the war—‘Welcome to the dear old flag!’ said a souvenir postcard, with portraits of three fierce commando leaders nestling incongruously beneath the Union Jack. But the Boer conviction proved, in the long run, more obdurate than the British: Jehovah survived the Queen-Empress, and the Boers were to win the Boer War in the end.1

  1 Pronounced ‘Reevers’—or later in his career, ‘Reverse’.

  1 ‘Ah!’ said the Public Orator of Oxford University, in Latin, of this sorry adventure, ‘let not excessive love of country drive to rashness, and do not resort more than is proper to alliances, stratagems and plots!’ He was addressing Rhodes, who was getting an honorary degree nevertheless.

  1 There are fuller accounts of all these events—the Great Trek of the Boers, Majuba, the Jameson Raid—in the opening volume of this trilogy, Heave’n Command (London and New York, 1973).

  1 Hardly less tribal was the message once urgently flashed by heliograph, uncoded, to the half-starved garrison of Ladysmith: SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE GOVERNOR OF BOMBAY HAS BEEN MADE A PEER

  1 He died in Switzerland in 1904, but his body was brought home to Pretoria, and he lies now in the Old Cemetery, West Church Street, not far from Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, who died of enteric fever in 1900 while serving with the British Army against the Volk.

  2 And at home a magazine for girls held a competition for limericks to commemorate the victory. Here is one of the winning entries, kindly sent to me by Mr C. P. Wright of Wolfville, Nova Scotia:

  There was an old man of Pretoria

  Who said ‘My! How I pity Victoria,

  Oh, summon the ranks

  And let us give thanks!’

  But something went wrong with the Gloria.

  1 Communications were never broken, though the London Times correspondent in town complained that the postal service was quite deplorable.

  1 Nothing has greatly changed, in these four battle-grounds. Though Dixon’s Hotel has been demolished, and the African township is today the capital of the Tswana ‘homeland’, Mafeking remains much the same little dorp it was in 1900: the brass-bound steam trains still puff away to the Rand, some of the defence positions can still be traced, and in the station yard a statue of Rhodes gazes wistfully up the track in the general direction of Cairo. At Paardeberg no memorial marks Cronje’s last laager—unlike the British, the Afrikaners prefer to forget their defeats—but people still find shell fragments and sad mementos in the river-bed: on the Magersfontein ridge a series of monuments have been erected, including one to the Highland Brigade—‘Scotland is poorer in men, but richer in heroes.’ Spion Kop, though, is the most memorable of them. Though it too is crowned by a clump of memorials, and though the line of the British trench is marked by whitewashed stones, it is a marvellously peaceful and gentle place, and of all the battlefields I have visited, seems the most truly regretful.

  1 Though presently retired on half-pay, under the shadow of his failures in South Africa, Buller remained a popular national figure until his death in 1908—hot-tempered, bibulous and jolly to the last.

  2 For example: The Commissioner has observed there are signs of wear/On the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square./Unauthorized persons are not to climb/On the Landseer Lions at any time.

  3 It turned out to be, when he did reveal it fourteen years later, a system of smoke-screens much used in the First World War. Dundonald was an ingenious inventor himself, once having himself pulled across the Thames in a watertight bag of his own design, while his grandfather was better remembered as Lord Cochrane, Father of the Chilean Navy and honoured eponymously by Chilean warships ever since.

  1 They are overlooked now by a bust of de la Rey himself, who is buried close by, and by a monument to his eldest son, who died of wounds at the Modder River in 1899. When I was there in 1975 I thanked the gardener for tending the British graves with such care. ‘So long as you’re satisfied’, he gently replied.

  1 He came from Kinlet in Shropshire, and the Childes own land there still, so unfailingly rooted in Englishness that when I recently inquired after them a villager actually referred to the present head of the family as ‘the young squire’. The Major’s grave has since been moved, and is now in a small military cemetery among the outbuildings of an Afrikaner farm, near the hamlet called Acton Homes: but the epitaph remains, and the old soldier still lies within sight of his one victory (for it is thought to have been the only time Major Childe-Pemberton went into action).

  1 The bitterness of the Boer War was never quite expunged, and was fostered by the more extreme of the Afrikaner nationalists. When I first went to South Africa, sixty years later, people still told me of the ground glass allegedly put in the porridge of the internment camps, and showed me horrific pictures of black men armed by the British, while the Women’s Monument at Bloemfontein, commemorating those who died in Kitchener’s internment camps, was a national shrine outranked only by the memorial to the Voortrekkers at Pretoria. I must add, though, as an old admirer of the Boers, that when I explored the battlefields of the war in 1975 I heard not a word of reproach, triumph or resentment from the many kind Afrikaners who showed me around, even in my Jingo moments.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Wearying Titan

  THE world watched thoughtfully. ‘My dear, you know I am not proud,’ wrote the Tsar Nicholas II to his sister during the Boer War, ‘but I do like knowing that it lies solely with me in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa. The means is very simple—telegraph an order for the whole Turkestan army to mobilize and march to the Indian frontier. That’s all.’

  He was exaggerating in fact, for until his central Asian railway system was complete he had no way of getting the Turkestan army to the Indian frontier, but he was only expressing the instinct of the nations. The Boer War had cracked the British mirror; the Jubilee was over; the Empire had grown too big for itself. It had seemed to most of its citizens invulnerable because of its very size, but now, it seemed, it was size that made it vulnerable. Empire gave the British a finger on every pulse, a say in every conference; but at the same time it made them subject to all the world’s anxieties, innately responsive not merely to the Mauser of a Boer, but to the whim of any foreign despot.

  The Boer War showed that it was getting too much for them. In the 1860s Matthew A
rnold had portrayed Great Britain as a weary Titan—

  with deaf

  Ears, and labour-dimmed eyes,

  Regarding neither to right

  Nor left, goes passively by,

  Staggering on to her goal;

  Bearing on shoulders immense,

  Atlantean, the load,

  Well-nigh not to be borne,

  Of the too vast orb of her fate.

  This prophetic picture would have been unrecognizable only five years before, but in 1902 the world, thoughtfully watching, saw its outline dimly delineated in the aftermath of war.

  2

  The scale of the Empire, which so sustained the confidence of the British themselves, had bemused other nations no less. The Empire was so inescapable, seemed so old, bore itself so majestically, that it had become a universal fact of life, something natural to the world.

  It spilt far beyond its own frontiers, too, for its power was tacitly present everywhere, wherever a merchantman docked, a banker checked an exchange rate, or a statesman contemplated a course of action. It was protean in its forms. To Americans the Empire was Canada, or the Caribbean, or Pacific power, or sea-blockade, or hard cash from the City. To the Russians it was India, the Mediterranean and the Eastern Question. To France it was Africa. To Germany it was the Royal Navy. To the Japanese it was an instructive model. To the Chinese it was a cultural humiliation—‘I began to wonder’, wrote the young revolutionary Sun Yat Sen, ‘how it was that … Englishmen could do such things as they have done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within 70 or 80 years, while in 4,000 years China had achieved nothing like it….’

  Sea-captains of every nationality knew the Empire as a chain of harbours and coaling-stations, and the most ubiquitous of maritime aids. Financiers saw it as the power of the pound sterling, the king of currencies. To Argentinian commuters it was the Buenos Aires Tramways Company, British owned and operated. To Italian railwaymen it was the familiar Adriatic specials, the trains which, speeding from Calais to the waiting India liners at Brindisi, sent the Anglo-Indians back to their labours in the east. To the pleasure cities of Europe it was bronzed but skinny tourists with money to spend, talking to each other in inexplicable jargon, and frequently meeting colleagues in the public gardens—‘Dammit, Hodgson, Helen, good to see you! Well I never! Care for a spot of tiffin? Found yourselves somewhere decent to stay? Damme, what a long way from Jacobabad, ain’t it?’

  The ampleness of it all impressed foreigners despite themselves. It was sometimes hard not to be obliged by its noblesse, and some of the Empire’s most vicious foreign critics were relieved, nevertheless, to cross a distant frontier and see before them, billowing on fort or hilltop, the Union Jack that promised them order, security and a cup of thick sweet tea. The Royal Navy especially, that supreme emblem of Empire, found loyalties everywhere. When the Americans began to build a new Navy of their own, in the 1890s, they adhered so closely to the British manner that the first of their new armoured ships, the New York, even had an admiral’s walk at the stern, a direct and quite unfunctional tribute to the Nelsonic tradition.1 As for Admiral von Tirpitz, the creator of the new German Navy, he carried his respect to still further extremes, and sent his daughter to be educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

  3

  The spectacle of the Boer War tempered all these emotions, and presented the British Empire in less flattering lights. It was clear to everybody now, as it had been clear to the Tsar, that a single colonial war, against an enemy with a population half that of Birmingham, had tried the Empire to its limits. The British admitted as much. Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister, said publicly that its drain upon the imperial resources had reduced Britain in effect to a third-rate Power. The Viceroy of India had been warned, at the height of the war, that the last division was mobilized, and that if Russia did attack, he might expect no help from home. Lord Kitchener said the imperial armies were incapable of fulfilling all their commitments—‘we are in the position of a firm which has written cheques against a non-existent balance.’

  This was a far cry from the rodomontade of the Jubilee, and the nations responded predictably. The first humiliations of Black Week, which convinced many Europeans that the British were actually going to lose the war, had vividly revealed foreign feelings about the Empire. The British indeed had supporters in every country, from the Anglophiles of the eastern United States, who hardly felt themselves to be foreigners at all, to Greek and Italian liberals who still saw in Britain the old champion of their freedoms. But they had far more enemies. ‘Splendid isolation’ had been a flattering Canadian conception of Britain’s lonely magnificence,1 but in the worst days of the Boer War it acquired an uncomfortable new meaning—as though, wrote Salisbury himself, ‘the large aggregations of human forces which lie around our Empire seem to draw more closely together, to assume … a more and more aggressive aspect.’

  The German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s own grandson, kindly though he had cabled Rhodes at Kimberley, had been openly pro-Boer ever since the Jameson Raid. The Boers were armed mostly with German weapons, and their artillery was actually officered by Germans. After Black Week most of the other European States declared their sympathies too, if only unofficially. Editorialists damned the British, cartoonists lampooned them, public opinion everywhere was at once shocked by Britain’s policies, and entertained by her discomfitures. From many parts of the world young men volunteered to fight with the Boers: Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, and a ferocious and treasonable corps of Irishmen, Blake’s Brigade. A Scandinavian corps played an important part in the defence of Magersfontein. ‘Fashoda is revenged!’ a Frenchman cried as he climbed to the roof of a captured British fort outside Mafeking, carrying a bottle of brandy.2

  They were inspired partly by idealism, partly by a taste for adventure in an adventurous age, but largely by the resentment with which, beneath the unwilling respect, the world had long regarded the British Empire. It was a resentment often envious and often hypocritical (was Europe, incredulously asked the playwright Henrik Ibsen, really on the side of Kruger and his Bible?), but none the less profound. To the British themselves the Empire might seem a mighty force for good in the world, to their foreign contemporaries it was all too often an overweening, greedy and sanctimonious cabal—‘a kind of octopus’, as Lord George Hamilton, a percipient Under-Secretary of State at the India Office, interpreted the general feeling, ‘with gigantic feelers stretching out all over the habitable globe … preventing foreign nations from doing that which in the past we have done ourselves’.

  The artist Pablo Picasso, who was eighteen at the start of the war, expressed these antipathies aptly when, one day during the war years, he scribbled a few doodles on his writing-pad: for there, out of his subconscious perhaps, he idly portrayed a cast of British comi-villains in the veld—toothy and monocled young subalterns, all drawl and languid stoop, preposterous apoplectic generals, bovine Tommies in approximate Highland dress looking at once ridiculous, brutal and half-witted. It was not at all how the British saw their brave troops, on the souvenir plates, cards, flags and albums which were lucrative by-products of the war.

  4

  For the first time since the Indian Mutiny people wondered how long the British could hold their Empire. ‘The fact is’, said Henry Campbell-Bannerman, ‘we cannot provide for a fighting Empire, and nothing can give us that power.’ The white colonies had staunchly supported the Mother Country in the struggle. Some 17,000 Australians, 8,500 Canadians, 8,000 New Zealanders had fought in South Africa, and there were white volunteers too from India, the Malay States, Burma, Ceylon and most of the scattered island possessions.

  Black and brown volunteers, however, were not invited, and among the coloured subject peoples the loyalty was not so absolute. Though the Nation-State was still an unfamiliar concept in Africa and Asia, the Boer War gave some encouragement to those few visionary leaders who saw that the British Empire would not last for ever. I
t took vision indeed to see it, from the wrong side of the colour-line. Across the globe the British presence still lay apparently immovable, and so immeasurably superior was the white race in all the techniques of command, so cowed were the coloured peoples by European technology and assurance, that the Empire really did have an eternal look. Governors and Commissioners moved freely about without bodyguards, and the Viceroy of India sometimes went walking all by himself through the Calcutta slums; for the Englishman was to his subject peoples, Gandhi thought, as the elephant was to the ants.

  But in the years after the Boer War the ants began to stir. In Ireland, where patriotism had survived 800 years of British occupation, the old undercurrent still ran, secret societies drilled and plotted, and the Irish people only needed another in their long line of heroes to inspire them into rebellion. In Burma the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, building upon its Christian model, advanced from healthy sports and social work into nationalist discussion. In West Africa the Sokoto people rebelled, in South Africa the Zulus, in East Africa the black tribes of Kenya. In Egypt a wave of anger and sorrow followed the public hanging and flogging of some villagers accused of attacking British officers on a pigeon-shoot—‘everyone I met’, wrote the Egyptian writer Qasim Amin, ‘had a broken heart and a lump in his throat.’ Most tellingly of all, in India, much the greatest of all the imperial possessions, a thin tide of patriotism was beginning to flow.

  Indian nationalism had already found a voice in the Indian National Congress, originally dedicated to co-operation with the Raj, later developing more militant postures, and it had an inspiring spokesman in the Hindu visionary Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had already been imprisoned for subversion, but was irrepressible. No country, though, was less likely to coalesce in rebellion than India—fragmented into a thousand parts by race, religion, history and geography, held so long in fee to the British that the habit of obedience was deeply ingrained in the people, and most citizens could no more conceive of an end to the Raj than an end to the world itself. Since the Indian Mutiny, half a century before, India had been held severely in check, even the Indian Army, the pride of Anglo-India, being deprived of artillery and watchfully attended, wherever it was, by British Army units. It was only after the Boer War that a mass of the people first took part in a nationalist demonstration, and the most prescient of their leaders began to see how independence might one day be achieved.