Milner himself watched the death struggles of the Rand with apparent composure. He saw the Cape Town refugees on one of his morning rides down to the sands.4 In one sense he was glad. Milner had never visited the Rand. Now the Rand had come to Cape Town. The Mountain had come to Milner.
Of course, he was sorry for the men who had lost everything – and for the destitute women and children. Luckily, Lady Edward Cecil had proved a tower of strength on the Ladies Relief Committee. The ladies had to go at all hours of the day and night to meet the refugee trains at the station.5 Milner himself arranged with Eckstein and his associates that he should launch a refugee fund in Britain; it would be a Mansion House disaster fund on the scale of the funds launched for famines in India; Beit and Wernher, and J. B. Robinson, the three biggest London gold-bugs, would contribute £10,000 between them, which would do wonders for their reputation with the British public. (Rhodes was too mean, or too broke, to give more than £700.)6
Outwardly, Milner remained calm and restrained. This was the peak of the crisis – ‘the most critical point in the long game’, he called it – and somehow he must soldier on.7 ‘More tired today,’ he wrote in his diary on Saturday, ‘than I have been yet during this business … all the time such a head-ache that I can hardly see to write.’8 But he had one great comfort. Between drafting cables to London and wrangling with Schreiner about colonial troops to defend the Cape, he would snatch a moment to walk side by side with Lady Edward in the gardens of Government House. Without Violet the strain would have been unendurable, he was the first to admit. Then, after the ominous lull in the week before the ultimatum, the storm had burst on Monday 9 October.9
It was nearly midnight. To get a respite, Milner played two games of billiards with Hanbury, and then returned to his room to continue working. He was interrupted by his secretary Ozzy. Ozzy brought the cable from Greene with the text of the ultimatum.10
It was, it seemed, the moment of triumph for Milner. To induce Kruger to send an ultimatum, and invade the colonies – that was the key to political success, both with the ‘wobbly Liberals’ at home and the ‘mugwumps’ like Schreiner at the Cape. He had taken the last trick by a finesse, so to speak. He had forced Kruger to play a card that could only lose him the game.
In that moment the overwhelming weight of anxiety he had carried so long began to slip from Milner’s shoulders. He was still worried about the military situation. He did not doubt that the Transvaal was a real adversary, a real military power; he believed in the Boers’ capacity for war more than any British politician or soldier – except Sir Redvers Buller. But he had had to conceal this belief from his political associates, especially Chamberlain. Rhodes insisted that Kruger would never fight. If Kruger did, the Boers’ military strength was the ‘greatest unpricked bubble in existence’. Well, Milner was the first to admit Rhodes was a ‘very great man in many ways, but judgement was hardly his strong point’.11 Milner himself had not made the mistake of underrating the Boers. Nor the mistake of being too frank about it with Joe and the British Cabinet before they committed the country to war.
It was now a relief to be able to admit his fears to Chamberlain. He was anxious about Natal. He was also anxious about the strategic border towns in Cape Colony north of the Orange River: Kimberley, Rhodes’s diamond capital, west of Bloemfontein; Mafeking, the Raiders’ old base, due west of Johannesburg. He had done his level best to see both towns defended. He had encouraged Baden-Powell to abandon an idiotic plan to invade the Transvaal from Rhodesia; Baden-Powell was now dug in at Mafeking with six hundred Rhodesian troopers.12 On 7 October he had finally persuaded Schreiner to allow colonial troops to be used to defend Kimberley. Most of the imperial troops – there were five infantry battalions in the Cape now that the reinforcements had arrived – were to be deployed holding Orange River railway bridge and the three railway junctions south of the Orange: Stormberg, De Aar and Naauwpoort.13 These were the keys to the way to Bloemfontein. They would be needed by Buller and his Army Corps, when this was ready in two months’ time to roll north like a great steam-roller. Meanwhile, Milner was ‘uneasy’; that was the word he used in his diary. But in the ‘wild, rushy days’ that followed the ultimatum, nothing occurred especially to alarm him.
On Thursday, the telegraph line to Mafeking went dead, and the Boers were said to have crossed the frontier and torn up the rails. On Friday, there was some sort of incident involving Mafeking’s armoured train. On Saturday, the line to Kimberley went dead. By Sunday evening, they had lost touch with all the country down to the Orange River. It was also clear from Hely-Hutchinson’s cables that Joubert was taking the offensive in Natal. But Milner found the details of these skirmishes ‘satisfactory’. Hardly a shot had been fired, hardly a life lost. There were ‘panicky telegrams’ on Sunday, it was true, from Kimberley. Milner kept his uneasy calm.14
With regard to the two strategic border towns, Kimberley and Mafeking (in fact both under siege since 14 October), Milner’s private feelings were unusually delicate. Milner had not opposed Baden-Powell’s decision to hold Mafeking. Yet he knew it would be besieged, and now he even feared that it might be forced to surrender. Why, then, take the risk of garrisoning it?
Part of the answer was the pressure of public opinion in the Cape. To abandon Mafeking would have outraged the loyalists.15 But there was probably another rather more subtle reason. Milner had set his heart on the Boers’ invading the territory of the colony. Stationing Rhodesian troops at Mafeking, the Raiders’ old base, made it an excellent bait. Kimberley, too, made a meaty piece of bait. Kimberley was the town which had been grabbed from the Free State when it was found to contain the largest diamond pipe in the world. And on the very day before the ultimatum had expired, who should appear at Kimberley but the bête noire of the Transvaal, Cecil Rhodes himself.16 Of course, the garrisons might have to be sacrificed. But, as Selborne put it (in a very private letter), better to lose Mafeking than lose the chance of a war.17
There was, in addition, an even more delicate issue involving Mafeking. Major Lord Edward Cecil – the Prime Minister’s son and Violet’s husband – was Baden-Powell’s second-in-command. His marriage was, to tell the truth, a most unhappy one. Lord Edward had volunteered to go on this dangerous mission – had sent himself, almost as the biblical Uriah was sent to the front of the host. Death and glory. The Last Stand. It would make a fine ending for poor Lord Edward, who had long wished, as he later told Violet, that he were dead.18
As Milner waited for the news of the first battles of the war, a great hymn of congratulation began to reach him from England. Joe Chamberlain and the Tories, Edward Grey, Richard Haldane and the Liberals – now at long last they all agreed with him. He had proved it. War with Kruger had always been inevitable.19
Inevitable? It would have been easy, Milner later confessed to his intimates, to patch things up with Kruger, and settle those difficulties with the Uitlanders in a Greal Deal that could have lasted five, ten or fifteen years. He had resisted the temptation, and ‘precipitated’ a war before it was too late.20 The truth was that Milner believed in ‘the clean slate’,21 and the ‘Big Things in Life’.22 He had long been determined to ‘burst the mould’ of Kruger’s Transvaal. War was the only means. Britain would annex both republics for the Empire. That would finally ‘knock the bottom out of “the great Afrikander nation” for ever and ever Amen’.23 He would rule South Africa as Cromer ruled Egypt.
Already he had begun to outline his vision of the great Union of South Africa which he would create. ‘The ultimate end,’ he confided to his ally Percy Fitzpatrick, ‘is a self-governing White Community, supported by well-treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to the Zambesi.’24 He would rebuilt the stricken Rand from its foundations and on the Rand he would build South Africa. Dams, schools, agricultural colleges – all the unglamorous but essential prerequisites of civilization – would overwhelm the veld. British settlers would pour into South Africa. This was the imperial mission.
This was the great exercise in remoulding a nation and a landscape, the grand design that would follow the war – his war, as he boasted in private,25 and the Pax Milneria that would be his monument.
Despite his utter exhaustion, and despite his anxieties about the border towns, Milner could feel a kind of exultation when he contemplated what he had done for the Empire. ‘It is a great thing,’ he had told his old friend Jim Rendel at the darkest hour of the crisis, when he thought Chamberlain might throw him over, as Bartle Frere had been thrown over before him, ‘It is a great thing to be, even for a few brief days and weeks, the leader of a people.’26 How much more exultant he could feel now that his leadership was permanently assured!
Milner’s achievements were indeed extraordinary. It was almost exactly a year since he had sailed to England, determined to reverse Chamberlain’s ‘no-war policy’. Despite Chamberlain’s discouragement, he had decided to take things ‘forrarder by his own efforts’. He had decided to play the Uitlander card, to put that fool Jameson back on to his horse. And so he had done – in a manner of speaking.
It was true that Jameson himself, like the rest of Rhodes’s men, had proved somewhat difficult to control. Jameson had in fact just gone to Ladysmith, with his fellow ex-Raider, Sir John Willoughby. No doubt Rhodes and Jameson and Willoughby all intended to be up with the field, when the time came to invade the Transvaal.27 But the point was not what had happened to Rhodes and Jameson: they were a spent force, and their antics were largely irrelevant. The point was what had happened to the ex-Reformers, led by Alfred Beit.
Wernher and Beit had proved Milner’s chief support at every stage in the game: in the Great Deal, at Bloemfontein, and in the final crisis. They had now agreed, so to speak, to pick up the bill for the war. At any rate, they had accepted without flinching the enormous losses to the gold industry (over £4m losses – in the short term – as it turned out) that the war would entail.28 Without Wernher and Beit, Milner would have had to throw in his hand.
In a sense, Beit, the paymaster of Raiders and Reformers, had been persuaded to change clothes with Joe Chamberlain. At the time of the Raid, it was Chamberlain who stood in the shadows, waiting to exploit the situation if Rhodes and Beit succeeded. Now it was Beit who stood in the shadows, waiting to exploit the successes of the imperial troops. Beit’s men – the Johannesburg Reformers – were now the ‘Imperial’ Light Horse. (‘Beit’s Horse’ would have been a better name. Or, best of all, the ‘Trojan Horse’.)
If Milner exulted in this private alliance with Wernher-Beit and the Uitlanders, he had also to admit to one striking omission. He had not yet stirred a finger to help African and Coloured British subjects in the Transvaal. ‘You have only to sacrifice “the nigger” absolutely,’ he had told Asquith in 1897, ‘and the game is easy.29 For the last two years, that was certainly the game he had played. Milner claimed he had two great principles in his work in South Africa. The first was to ‘secure for the Natives … protection against oppression and wrong’. The second was to secure the loyalty of the very men – the Uitlanders – who were determined to keep the natives oppressed. And this second principle, of course, took priority for the time being, even if the ultimate solution was to see the natives ‘justly governed’.30
The conflict of principle had in fact been exemplified that week in the most cruel way. In terms of human misery, the chief sufferers from the decline and fall of the Rand were not the Uitlanders, but the African mine-workers from Natal and the Cape, and the Cape Coloured population. They were the ‘mine-boys’ and the artisans. Now their employment had gone. They had little money saved, and the Boers were quite prepared to let them starve on the veld.31 Should Milner intervene? It was a question that he could not flinch from. Milner was one of the founders of Toynbee Hall and he had shared his friend Toynbee’s philanthropic zeal. In a fortnight he had raised £83,000 for the Uitlanders. Could nothing be spared for the tens of thousands of other British subjects, those who were coloured, coffee and black? What about the proud claim in Chamberlain’s ultimatum to give coloured British subjects ‘most favoured nation status’?32
By 6 October Milner had learnt of the plight of seven thousand African mine-workers from Natal, and of other Africans from British territory. It was a British official who cabled the news, a man called Marwick who worked for the Natal Native Affairs Department on the Rand. He reported that the Zulus and other Africans for whom he was responsible had lost their jobs. ‘If left to find their own way back to Natal, [they] would starve on the veld.’ Despite discouragement from the Natal Ministry, Marwick decided to try to bring the Natal refugees out by himself. The authorities refused to provide room on the railway. There was only one solution, Marwick cabled again to Natal. ‘So that my proposed action may not embarrass you, please suspend me from office. If I get natives through without loss of life, you could please yourself about re-instating me.’ His offer was accepted. He was proposing to walk with the three thousand Zulus and four thousand other Africans all the way to Natal.33
There had been strange scenes in the great exodus from the Rand, but none stranger, perhaps, than the scene that followed. At the head of the Marwick’s procession of Africans were a couple of drunken Boer policemen. Behind them, marching thirty abreast, were a group of musicians, playing concertinas. They played popular African tunes. Behind the musicians marched an immense body of men, Zulus in African or European dress, all the tribes of Natal. To Marwick they displayed a touching respect: ‘Child of the Englishmen,’ they saluted him, ‘but for whose presence no one might brave the Boers … Gather the orphans of the Zulu.’ At the rear of the procession came the stragglers, many of whom were sick men, women and children. Marwick did his best for them. He had brought a pony for himself; the pony was given to a sick African to ride; other Africans were put on a kind of trolley that could be pushed along the road. On the 7th they reached Heidelberg; on the 10th Waterval, over a hundred miles south-east of Johannesburg; by the 13th they had marched the 170 miles to Joubert’s camp at Volkrust on the Natal frontier.
By now the ultimatum had expired and Natal was at war with the Transvaal. Many of the natives were starving, as few of the shopkeepers on the road had been able or willing to sell them food; indeed, some Boers had fled from natives in terror. Each day the great procession lengthened as the stragglers fell further behind. Marwick brought up the rear, doing his best to encourage the old and the sick as they limped along the dusty track. On the Natal side of the frontier the procession was stopped by some burghers of Joubert’s army. Despite the fact that Marwick had obtained safe conduct papers for his flock, papers personally authorized by Kruger, the State Artillery Commandant refused to let the procession past. It was a bad moment for Marwick. As he later put it, ‘With 7,000 natives on the verge of starvation treading on the heels of three thousand armed Boers there were the elements of a great massacre of defenceless people.’ Then the Commandant relented.
Four hundred of the Africans were temporarily commandeered. They dragged Joubert’s siege guns up to the summit facing Majuba. At dawn next day, the whole procession passed through the Boer lines. On the 15th they staggered down to Hatting Spruit, close to Symons’s camp at Dundee – 240 miles from the Rand and almost in sight of home.
Marwick’s epic march had saved seven thousand Natal Africans from starvation. Milner read the cables and no doubt approved.34 But for the thousands of African refugees from the Cape Colony and Basutoland – the people for whom Milner, as High Commissioner, was directly responsible – Milner did nothing.35 He had to play the game. And the game, easy or not, was to ‘sacrifice “the nigger” absolutely’.
‘Boot and Saddle!’ Dust swirled across the Ladysmith parade ground as it had swirled across the parade grounds made by Dr Jameson at Pitsani and Mafeking, three and a half years before. ‘Dress by the left! Bugler!’ The words of command floated across the Klip River. Slouch hats, Lee Metfords, brown gaiters and green-khaki uniforms: the six hundred men of the Imperial Light H
orse – ‘Beit’s Horse’ – looked uncannily like the men who had ridden with Jameson. In fact, Jameson was himself there at Ladysmith that morning, and perhaps he and Frank Rhodes and Johnny Willoughby came to see the ILH leaders, Woolls-Sampson and Karri Davies; they had also, of course, been fellow-inmates of Johannesburg prison, though the Raid had led to an estrangement between Rhodes’ men and the rest.
On their part, Beit’s men were already thinking, like Milner, of the new Transvaal they would build after the war. Kruger must go. That was the first principle: ‘Insist on Kruger, and all his crowd, being sent out of South Africa,’ as one of the officers put it. The Boers were ‘like a pack of sheep’. Take away ‘their biblical shepherd’ and they were ‘mere animals to be driven’. Second, there must be a clean sweep of the Transvaal ministries – those Augean Stables. Bring in Englishmen. Get rid of that clique of Hollanders and Germans. That was the plan. Of course, the heads of the departments would have to be Uitlanders. Already jobs were being canvassed: Woolls-Sampson, Wybergh, Dodd, Mullins and so on were the leading candidates.38 The capital of the new colony would be Johannesburg. ‘Joe burg’ – it was appropriate enough as a name. Although, as one of the Uitlander leaders put it, ‘Milnerton’ would be the best name of all, for ‘H.E. has indeed been our champion.’39
As for the next moves, the Uitlanders’ plans coincided almost exactly with Milner’s, though they lacked the fine moral polish that Milner added to imperial ideas. Swamp the Boers, kill off pan-Afrikaner nationalism, then ‘thoroughly anglicize the country’. Otherwise, as Wybergh bluntly remarked, ‘the war is wasted’.40 Above all, the ‘unctuous rectitude’ (quoting Rhodes’s famous sneer) of the British public must not be allowed to ruin the settlement. No votes for the coloured people in the Transvaal at all costs. There was only one set of laws in the Transvaal that the Uitlanders considered really ‘excellent’: the laws ‘to keep the niggers in their place’. They were glad to think that this was a subject on which they believed that H.E. was as ‘healthy’ as on the rest of the points.41
The Boer War Page 20
