For two days Jameson had carried on a running fight against the commandos. The Boers had got wind of them from the first. Jameson’s men had cut the Boer telegraph wire at Malmani, but too late. (People said afterwards it was the fault of some troopers who got drunk and cut the fence wire instead.) At first the Boers had hung on their tail, picking off stragglers. Jameson’s men had fought back as they had learnt to fight the Zulu impis: with the rattle of Maxims, the crash of shrapnel from the field-gun and the charge to the death. But the only dead were British. How could they fight mere puffs of smoke? That last night they had huddled together in a rough square formed by the ammunition carts, the ambulance wagons and the horses. The troopers fired into the darkness across their saddles.25 At dawn Jameson sent a last laconic message to the men in Johannesburg. Though they had had two ‘scrimmages’, they were all right; but they would like a little help if it could be spared.26
If help didn’t come, Jameson and his officers well knew what England expected of them. This was the moment they had been trained for ever since boyhood. It was the picture of the Last Stand above the fireplace in the schoolroom and the mess and the rectory. The Gatling has jammed; the colonel, eyes uplifted, grasps his sword; the little band sings ‘God Save the Queen’; and, one by one, they fall.27
By eight o’clock Jameson’s little band had suffered sixty-five killed and wounded. Inspector Cazalet was hit in the chest, Major Coventry in the spine, Captain Barry was dying.28 And then reality at last broke in to Jameson’s world of make-believe. Someone lifted a white flag – not a very good white flag, but the best they could do in the circumstances. It was made from the white apron of an African servant girl.29 The firing ceased. From all around them, the Boers rose up out of the ground, ‘like ants’, as one officer put it.30 Most of the Boers were dressed in ordinary brown working clothes, but a few had come straight from New Year festivities and had slung their rifles and bandoliers over their black Sunday best. The Boers disarmed the British, assisted the wounded and seized the baggage. In Bobby White’s black tin box were found the code telegrams from Rhodes in the Cape and from the other plotters in Johannesburg. There was a spare copy of the ‘women-and-children’ letter, and the code book to go with the code telegrams.31 It lay among the empty champagne bottles.32
The humiliation was complete when the dead were counted before burial. The British had lost sixteen, the Boers one man – one less than they had lost at Majuba.
Weeping, Jameson was led away in a cart to the gaol at Pretoria.33
PART I
Milner’s War
‘The Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war in the Great Anglo-Boer conflict…. And that is so in spite of the four years truce that followed … [the] aggressors consolidated their alliance … the defenders on the other hand silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable.’
Jan Smuts, 1906
“Won’t be happy till he gets it.”
CHAPTER 1
Out of the Abyss
SS Scot and South Africa,
18 November 1898 and before
As he spoke his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall a little over his keen grey eyes. In a flash the phrase of Scudder’s came back to me, when he had described the man he most dreaded in the world. He had said that he ‘could hood his eyes like a hawk’. Then I saw that I had walked straight into the enemy’s headquarters.
John Buchan (Sir Alfred Milner’s Private Secretary in South Africa, 1901–3), The Thirty-Nine Steps
In the small hours, Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa and Lieutenant-Governor of Cape Colony, was woken by a bright light in his eyes. He had a stateroom on the starboard side of the upper deck. It was 4.00 a.m., he noted in his diary (the small red diary which was the only companion and confidant of his travels). That must be the Ushant lighthouse, the first land they had sighted since Madeira. The wind was still blowing hard, but a big ship like the 7,000-ton Scot took it in her stride.1 Making 18½ knots, she was the holder of the record for the Cape Town run.2 If she kept this up, Milner would be in time to see Chamberlain at the Colonial Office on the 22nd. And tonight he might be able to dine with his friends at Brooks’s. How very jolly it would be to see the blessed old boys again!
Milner slept once more and when he next awoke it was morning: a fine morning, though cold. They were now about 120 miles from the Needles. Grand. After eighteen gruelling months at the Cape, he felt he had earned a holiday in England, even if it was to be a working holiday. His friend, Philip Gell, his closest friend since schooldays at King’s College, knew what he meant when he wrote to say how he was longing to be back at ‘Headquarters’.3 Cape society he had not enjoyed, to put it mildly; as Ozzy Walrond, his Private Secretary (and a treasure), remarked, Cape Town was a fourth-rate provincial town full of ‘the most awful cads’.4
His own feelings for the dark continent were, understandably, more complicated, though he once admitted to Philip that Cape Town ‘was a rather beastly hole’; in fact, when Milner compared his life at the Cape with his life in Egypt six years before, as Baring’s financial secretary, he could find nothing whatever in favour of the Cape. The people – the whites, that is – were much more congenial in Egypt. It was nearer England. Besides, Egypt, run by the British, was a place where it was easy to get things done.5
Of course, he had not arrived at the Cape at the best moment to enjoy its amenities. It was 1897. He had been sent out to pick up the pieces after Jameson’s Raid.
The Raid: that had been the most extraordinary business. Despite the choppy seas and the cold wind, Milner spent most of the day pacing the port side of the deck, as one by one those delightful landmarks of the English coast swung into view: the Dorset Downs, the Purbeck hills, and the heady curves of Portland Bill.
His thoughts returned to South Africa. The ‘Higher Powers’ (as he put it in his donnish way) seemed to have achieved a miracle for the Afrikaners twice in the past. First at Majuba, then at Doornkop. How to avoid their winning a third time? He had views about that – increasingly strong views, although these had to remain, for the time being, a private heresy of his own.6
By now, Milner was a familiar sight to his fellow-passengers – fellow-prisoners, he would have called them – on the interminable voyage from the Cape. He hated the trip, tired as he was, for he hated being cooped up for nearly three weeks in a tub of a liner. He had always tried to play his part in the jollities on board ship, including (and this proved an appalling experience) some amateur theatricals. But for most of the voyage home he paced the deck, read the annual report of the Inland Revenue, or worked at his black box full of papers.7
The other passengers probably thought him a shy, austere, melancholy man. People generally did. With his long, thin face and downcast grey-brown eyes, he looked older than his forty-four years, and sadder than a brilliantly successful diplomatist should be. In fact, nothing surprised people, on first meeting him, more than his appearance. Was this really Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner and Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape? Was this the man chosen by Joe Chamberlain to cut President Kruger down to size? He looked so gentle and detached. There was a whiff of All Souls or the British Museum about him.
People who knew him intimately received quite a different impression. When he began to talk his expression was as mobile as a kaleidoscope, and his smile was a sunburst. Suddenly that cold, thin face, the colour of ivory browned by age, became extraordinarily sweet and gentle.8 Of course, few people ever did get to know him intimately. To these friends he showed a side of his nature that was both ardent and affectionate. As for his enemies, they hardly existed at this time, though soon enough he was to have his share.
To what did Milner owe his meteoric rise in the public service? It was a question he sometimes asked himself. Certainly not to his family connections – though in a different sense he felt he owed everything to his family. His parentage was unusual. If you listened hard when he pronounced his ‘ths’ there was a trace of a Ge
rman accent. He was born in Giessen, near Frankfurt-on-Main, the son of a half-German medical student and an English gentlewoman who had come to Germany in straitened circumstances. His upbringing was divided between Germany and England, and marred by the fecklessness of his father and the ill-health of his mother. When he was fifteen his mother died, and he was sent to school in England. All these experiences left their stamp on him.9 His heart was still to some extent divided between the two countries; his schoolboy heroes included Bismarck and Frederick the Great, as well as Cromwell and the younger Pitt; in the hurly-burly of London and South Africa he often longed for the solitude of the Bavarian woods.
But it was his English mother who was the driving force behind his life. At eighteen he won a senior scholarship to Oxford, an unheard-of feat for a boy from a London day school. He carried off the Craven, the Hertford – a whole litany of university prizes. He became the most brilliant son of Balliol, the Oxford college where Dr Jowett held court among a golden generation of undergraduates. As he progressed from prize to prize and triumph to triumph he had only one regret: if only she had lived to see it all.10
Against his father he was in complete reaction, so it appeared, though not at all disloyal or unfilial. That relentless capacity for work, that single-minded devotion to a cause – it was almost as though young Alfred was doing penance for the sins of his father.
Yet behind the upright young man, the paragon of English Victorian virtues, private and public, people occasionally detected something different. There was a frighteningly strained air to his self-control, as though most of his life was lived against the grain of his nature. He had strange eyes: keen grey eyes which he could hood like a hawk’s. Inside Milner, repressed but not altogether extinguished, was something of the spirit of his father – romantic, Bohemian, restless, and perhaps even reckless as well.11
Of course, this dualism in his nature was well concealed from all but his closest friends. Milner’s rise to fame could, as he reckoned himself, be attributed to one thing above all: he was absolutely sound and reliable. This was the reason, not merely his flair for writing or his financial expertise, for his having proved so useful to the leading men in both political parties: first as private secretary to Goschen, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer; next, as financial secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), the British ruler of Egypt; then, as Chairman of the Inland Revenue, right-hand man to Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal Chancellor.
In due course, he was promoted by Joe Chamberlain to his job as High Commissioner – the man responsible for British colonies in South Africa. Milner was not told exactly why he had been chosen. But no doubt he had been given a shrewd idea by Joe and his Cabinet colleagues. They had had enough of men like Jameson and Rhodes – of schoolboy heroes and bungling empire-builders. Milner had a solid reputation in imperial questions. His best-selling book, England in Egypt, sounded a trumpet call for the Empire. But he was also an expert on death duties – not a bad preparation, perhaps, for the deadly grind of modern diplomacy. At all events, Milner was selected for his strength of character and his patience.12 It was impatience, as the current Chancellor, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, observed to Milner, that lay at the root of all Britain’s mistakes in the past – from before Majuba to the Raid.13
Milner undoubtedly agreed. His own comment on his appointment to the Cape was characteristically modest. His only fear was that the job might fall through because no one at the Cape had ever heard of him. ‘It would be rather awkward,’ as he had told Philip Gell, if they jibbed, taking him to be ‘the nephew of some great man who had to be provided for, or an inconvenient official who had to be got rid of’.14
In fact, few colonial viceroys had ever had a more splendid send-off than Milner’s, when his friends gathered at the Café Monico to honour him before he left England. Numerous Balliol contemporaries attended – fellow-disciples of the great Dr Jowett: not only Philip Gell but Gell’s brother-in-law, St John Brodrick, and Henry Asquith and George Curzon, the rising stars of the Liberal and Tory parties. ‘Hurrah for the meek and the humble men of Balliol,’ someone remarked, ‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ Leaders of the main political parties were there too: Joe Chamberlain shared with Asquith the honour of proposing Milner’s health, and made a rousing imperialist speech – too rousing, some thought. In reply, Milner struck a more sympathetic note. He was cursed with the ‘cross-bench mind’. He tended to see too many sides to every question. Though he added, disarmingly, that there was ‘one question’ on which he had ‘never been able to see the other side’, and that was imperial unity, the consolidation of the British Empire.15
And so he set off for the Cape, fêted on all sides, so charming and tactful and clever, so sound, above all, as everyone said at that dinner – the perfect emissary to restore British supremacy in South Africa and consolidate the far-flung Empire.
Two years at the Cape had taught him that his patience had a limit. It was not merely the endless wrangling with the Transvaal over minor issues, and the wrestling with the Afrikaners at the Cape. It was the legacy of the past that so appalled him – not merely the Raid but the chain of mistakes that preceded it. ‘I hope South Africa is not going to be our one point of failure, but I feel very uneasy,’ he wrote to Gell in April 1898. ‘Somehow or other the more I know about it, the more profound is the abyss of our blunders in the past.’16
What did men like Milner mean when they talked in that mystical voice of ‘imperial unity’ and ‘consolidating the Empire’? Was it all rhetoric, just a mood and an enthusiasm?17 One must look back into South African history, into that ‘abyss of blunders’.
Milner, he himself confessed, could not see two sides to the imperial question. In his eyes the nineteenth century in South Africa was a century of struggle for supremacy between Britain and Boer – and of abysmal blunders from the imperial standpoint.
During most of the century British policy was weak and vacillating, like British imperial policy in general.18 On three occasions a positive attempt was made to solve the Boer question by adopting an active ‘forward’ (that is, expansionist) policy. On each occasion, and for various reasons – including impatience and the see-saw of party politics – the forward policy ended in disaster.
Yet the alternatives proved a set of still bigger blunders: years of drift and compromise. All the time their Boer adversaries, expanding their strongholds in the interior, squeezing the natives into the poorest land, yet still leaving an Afrikaner (Afrikaans-speaking) majority at the Cape, grew richer and more numerous, more dangerous to Britain and her Empire.
The first to seize the South African nettle was Sir Benjamin D’Urban, appointed Governor of eastern Cape Colony in 1833. It was by then forty years since Britain had first annexed the Cape, seizing the colony from Holland, for reasons of strategy, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The strategic motive was compelling for England – as it was to remain. Hold the Cape and she could protect the sea lanes to the East. This was the main reason why the Dutch had originally founded Cape Colony in the seventeenth century; it was a stepping-stone on the way to the Dutch East Indies. Now for the British it could be the Gibraltar of the South, the chief link in the chain of imperial defence between England and her most important overseas possession – India.
But how to ensure that the Cape remained under British control? This was the political puzzle that haunted Sir Benjamin D’Urban, and was to haunt all his successors. For the Cape was more than a base; it was a colony; and a colony whose Afrikaner inhabitants’ loyalty was (to put it mildly) not beyond dispute. In this respect there was soon no parallel with the problem of the French in British Canada or any other British colonial problem. For the flood of British immigrants that would have provided a pro-British majority never materialized at the Cape. The country was too poor and arid to attract British immigration on any scale, and only for a period during the 1820s did the British government subsidize immigration. As a result, the Afrikaans-speakin
g South Africans remained a majority, and a stubborn one at that.19
When D’Urban arrived in 1833 he found the place in turmoil. With their seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant tradition – fundamentalist and egalitarian – the scattered Dutch colonists had always proved awkward to govern. In the days of Dutch rule there was frequent friction with the colonial government, and occasional bloodshed. After the British take-over, there were risings in 1795, 1799 and 1815. The 1815 affair resulted in the hanging at Slachter’s Nek of five men who came to be regarded as the first political martyrs of the Afrikaner nation, though in fact they were condemned by Dutch-speaking judge and jurymen; moreover, they had forfeited the sympathy of most of their countrymen by a reckless alliance with some Xhosas, the local African tribe who greatly outnumbered both white communities combined.20
It is at this point – when one touches on the native side of the problem – that the difficulties of policy-making in South Africa, for both a colonial governor and his home government, become apparent. For it was not only the British who remained a minority among the population as a whole. The whites were a minority among the Africans. Any humanitarian attempt to reconcile the interests of the black majority with the colonists was certain to compound the other two problems: to reconcile two rival colonial communities with each other, and their interests, in turn, with those of the imperial power. In short, history presented South Africa with a triple formula for conflict – black against white, white against white, white against the mother country – and only a miracle could spare South Africa from an endless war.21
In the event, Sir Benjamin D’Urban was no miracle-worker. He was a heavy-handed veteran of the Peninsular War. He sacrificed the black Africans’ interests, and bowed to white political pressures, in just the same way as so many rulers of South Africa were to do in the future. To conciliate the Boers – the frontier farmers – and unite the colony in loyalty to the Crown, he adopted a tough ‘forward’ policy towards the Xhosa. He supported the Boers who were in a state of endemic feud with the Xhosa over the frontier lands. He sent English red-coats to help locally commandeered troops – the Boer commandos. Together, D’Urban and the Boers sliced off a hundred-mile strip of new territory to add to the Cape. But, meanwhile, vacillations at Downing Street had hardened into a determination not to increase the size of the colony at the expense of the natives. Under pressure from British missionaries, the Colonial Secretary of the day repudiated D’Urban’s annexation. Worse than this, from his own point of view, D’Urban was, in 1834, now instructed to put into effect a humanitarian new edict outlawing slavery from the British Empire, which he did with characteristic heavy-handedness.
The Boer War Page 3
