So the voyage passed, in the ‘heavy silence’ of the sea, as Churchill called it.10 There were the usual ship’s games. And for those who could (literally) stomach them, there were typhoid inoculations dispensed by Captain Hughes, Buller’s doctor. Apart from these diversions, and the sight of a whale pursued by small fish11 – a disturbing omen for the Army Corps – the voyage was notable for only one incident.
On Sunday 29 October, two days before they were due to dock, they saw a small tramp steamer, which turned out to be the Australasian, heading away from the Cape. She altered course to pass close to the Dunottar Castle. She must have left Cape Town three days earlier, and must have news. A rush for the rail followed. Buller himself emerged from his private saloon on the lower deck and the Biograph made its third capture as he raised his field-glasses. A storm of excitement. What was it to be: war, a truce, a Boer surrender?12
As the Australasian foamed past, without slackening speed, people saw a huge, long blackboard hung on her rat lines. Chalked out on this were the words: ‘BOERS DEFEATED – THREE BATTLES – PENN SYMONS KILLED.’ There were no shouts in reply, just a shocked silence.13 For both pieces of news were bad: the death of the General, and the likelihood that, by the time they arrived, the war would be over.14
On this latter score anxiety was soon removed. At 9.15 on Monday evening, in pouring rain, the Dunottar Castle steamed into Cape Town harbour. As Churchill and the other war correspondents struggled to find a Cape newspaper, the secret war cables were read out to some of Buller’s staff in the half-darkness of the deck. They included White’s reports. The fiasco of the Battle of Ladysmith and the crushing disaster at Nicholson’s Nek had occurred a few hours earlier.15
Soon after 9 o’clock next morning, Buller disembarked and drove in procession to Government House to see Sir Alfred Milner. The news of the disasters in Natal had not yet been published and the streets of Cape Town, like those of Southampton sixteen days earlier, were lined with Union Jacks and bunting. Once again it was as though this were the homecoming of a victorious general. Buller played the part expected of him. He drove in an open landau – General Sir Redvers Buller, VC, medal ribbons a chequerboard on his chest, John Bull personified. General Bulldog. Cape Town gave him a Roman triumph.16 Then the play was over. At ten, the procession reached Government House and Buller was shown into the small, austere, book-lined study where Sir Alfred, his face the colour of ivory, was awaiting him. Buller was handed the decoded cables from White with fuller details of the Natal disasters.17
When Buller sat down to write his first private letter to Lansdowne after landing, he said, ‘The general fear seems to be that we are in measurable distance of a Dutch rising [in Cape Colony]. In our unprotected state that would mean almost a walk-over, I fear. I hope and believe we shall tide over that danger.’18
Was Buller exaggerating the perils of the situation? Was he a prey to a despondency more disastrous than the supposed dangers themselves? So it was to appear to many people, especially Milner’s admirers, in the years ahead.19 Yet, from unpublished documents two things emerge. First, the dangers were real enough. Second, it was not Buller who showed weakness and despondency at the news. Buller was the man who breathed new life into the quaking garrison at Cape Town.20 It was Milner who was in a state of despondency bordering on panic. ‘Things going from bad to worse,’ he wrote in his diary; ‘matters look extremely black … the blackest of black days … everything going wrong….’21 To Chamberlain: ‘I write this quaking, for one fears every hour for Kimberley.’22
It may seem odd that Milner, the firebrand, should quail at the first sight of the flames he had lit. But then Milner’s morale, always delicately balanced, had suffered the sort of shock he found hardest to bear: humiliation. He had been proved wrong, absolutely wrong, in his forecasts.23 By every mail-boat Milner was receiving those letters of congratulation from his imperialist disciples. The war would be the making of the British Empire. It would be the ‘crucible’, the great steel smelter into which those four weak ingots of British metal in South Africa – Cape loyalists, Natal loyalists, Uitlanders from Johannesburg and Rhodesians – would be cast into imperial steel, fusing with the stronger metals from the mother country.24 But Milner’s political chemistry left little margin for error. To succeed, the casting process must be short and sharp.25 Now Milner saw nothing but months of disaster ahead.
He was terrified by the thought that White’s garrison, locked up at Ladysmith, might be forced to surrender. Even if they held out, there was every likelihood, he thought, of the Boers getting to Durban. Either event would be a blow to British prestige that would send a shock-wave throughout the world. Yet Milner was now still more alarmed by the dangers facing Cape Colony. The day that he called ‘the blackest of black days’ was 4 November. It was then that he heard that the Boers had decided not to be content with laying siege to border towns: to Mafeking, in the far north, and to Kimberley. They had crossed the Orange River and driven into the heartland of rural Cape Colony.26
Why did the invasion of the Cape alarm Milner more than the threat to Natal’s capital, Durban, and the possibility that the Boers should capture all the colony down to the sea? A successful invasion of the Cape might prove a political disaster that was irreversible. Nine-tenths of the Natal settlers were British; their loyalty could not be conquered, even if the Boers occupied their country. In the Cape, on the other hand, loyalties were a great deal more complicated. Two-thirds of its white population were Afrikaners, whom Milner believed would side with the Boer invaders, given the opportunity. The other third was British, but not true-blue British, like most of the men of Natal. In the days before the Raid, when Cecil Rhodes had been Prime Minister, they had displayed almost as equivocal an attitude to Britain as the Afrikaners. The Raid had changed all that, of course. And Milner had since made an unspoken personal compact with the Cape loyalists: they must put themselves in his hands, commit themselves to him body and soul, and in return he would defend them with the ‘whole force of the Empire’.
The ‘whole force of the Empire’. It was actully a phrase Milner had coined to describe the reinforcements to be sent out to Natal, General White’s force of ten thousand men.27 But what had he done for the Cape? The total number of imperial troops in the Cape at the outbreak of war was about seven thousand.28 And now Boer commandos had hemmed in the two chief towns, Mafeking and Kimberley, and were threatening the scattered British communities right across the east of the Colony.29 Milner’s feelings can be imagined. At the centre of his nightmare was the word the first British settlers in the Transvaal had used after the Majuba settlement in 1881: betrayal.
To add to Milner’s misery, there was the problem of Rhodes. The Boer invasion had made Kimberley the symbol of imperial resistance in the Cape. Kimberley was Rhodes’s diamond capital and Rhodes had rushed out there hell-bent, it seemed, on ruining everything. It was characteristic of the man that when he saw the stage set for a siege, he should make a dash for that stage; that, in his new role as the arch-imperialist, he should wrap himself in the flag, so to speak, and that, when the moment came, he should betray the flag.
This was the truth, and Milner found it most distressing.10 A stream of cables had come from Kimberley since the siege had begun. ‘My opinion,’ cabled Rhodes on 5 November, ‘is that if you do not advance at once from Orange River you will lose Kimberley.’ ‘Urgent relief necessary,’ cabled the Mayor the same day. ‘If lives of inhabitants are to be spared help must come immediately.’ ‘Town guard,’ cabled one of the financiers, ‘cannot last much longer … already some have died … very great excitement among natives.’ ‘You must admit that the fall of Kimberley would be most disastrous on account of politics,’ cabled Rhodes on the 7th.31
In his replies to Rhodes, Milner tried to calm him with the sort of language British officers were supposed to use to their troops – ‘You absolutely must hang on a little longer. It is beastly being shelled. But … I hope you will keep up courage of inh
abitants, and not let a few croakers demoralize the rest. Relief of Kimberley is going to be turning point of the whole business.’32 But the drift of Rhodes’s blackmail was clear enough, as Milner pointed out to Buller. They must send a relief expedition immediately, or Rhodes would surrender Kimberley to the Boers.
The strategic situation, as Milner saw it, was thus dominated by three things: the danger of Kimberley’s surrender, of the Boers sweeping down on the British communities of the north-eastern Cape, and of a general Afrikaner rising all over the colony. He begged Buller to keep his Army Corps in the Cape: that is, to keep all three infantry divisions and the cavalry division, and so on, totalling forty-seven thousand men, to defend the Cape and rescue Cecil Rhodes. In fact, as we saw, the War Office plan when Buller left London was that the Army Corps should be landed at the Cape ports and then roll forward irresistibly across the veld towards Bloemfontein and Pretoria. So Milner was able to say to Buller: stick to your original plan, but, at first, instead of launching an invasion, let the Army Corps repel one.33
Yet implicit in these plausible-looking arguments of Milner’s was a proposal of a perfectly abject kind: in effect, a plan to sacrifice the Ladysmith garrison and all Natal except Durban. For if the Army Corps were kept together in the Cape, there would be no spare reinforcements for Natal. Even if a successful advance on Bloemfontein brought in due course relief for the garrisons in Natal, it was barely conceivable that Buller could reach Bloemfontein before January; probably he would take longer. Ladysmith had only supplies to last sixty days – to the end of December. And the Boer commandos might at any moment sweep down on south Natal, which was defended by only two battalions.34 To this Milner’s reply was: ‘I think the time has come to be ruthless [in Natal] and sacrifice everything to military necessity.’ In fact, he meant the opposite. He was proposing to sacrifice twelve thousand imperial troops – the British regulars of White’s garrison – to the political necessity of defending the Cape loyalists, and above all of extricating Cecil Rhodes and his fellow-financiers from their theatricals at Kimberley.35
What was Buller to make of Milner’s extraordinary proposal? Behind that square jaw and the iron-grey moustache, Buller was an intensely emotional man, as passionate as Milner. In a letter to his younger brother Tremayne, written soon after his first interview at Government House, he burst out, ‘I am in the tightest place I have ever been in, and the worst of it is I think none of my creating.’36 What was he to do now? To strike for Bloemfontein, as originally planned? To take all his army to Natal? Or to compromise, to break up the Army Corps, and spread its battalions wherever the need was greatest?
By 4 November, Buller had made his decision: to break up the Army Corps. It was an excruciating decision – and surely the correct one. Buller could not abandon Ladysmith and Natal to their fate and the two battalions in south Natal could not save the colony.37 By now Buller had had confirmation in a final cable from White that White was unable to break out of Ladysmith and retreat behind the Tugela. White’s cable contained appeal – not a howl like Rhodes’s, but still an appeal – for rescue.38 A few days later Buller received fuller details of the sorry state of Ladysmith, brought in person by General French and Colonel (as he now was) Douglas Haig. At Buller’s request, they had taken one of the last trains to leave the beleaguered town, and had nearly been shot in the process. Supplies of food and fodder, they reported, were sufficient for two months, but the garrison was short of ammunition for the naval guns – the only guns capable of matching the Boers’ Long Toms. Worse, morale among the troops was undependable, after the defeats at the Battle of Ladysmith and Nicholson’s Nek, now christened Mournful Monday. Haig also listed in painful detail White’s mixture of weakness and rashness.39
Meanwhile, the authorities in London had tumbled to White’s appalling strategic blunder in allowing himself to be north of the Tugela at all. Wolseley told Lansdowne that White must be sacked and Lansdowne had cabled to Buller on 1 and 3 November to ask him whether he would oppose this decision.40 In his reply to the first cable, Buller hesitated: ‘I am not in a better position to decide than you, indeed worse, as I have not seen the Natal reports.’41 It was not until 8 November that Buller learnt the full truth about White’s blunders and cabled to Lansdowne that day: ‘French is here, conversation confirms doubts I have of White’s ability. Besides evident want of military precautions, White seems to have been weak and vacillating and much influenced by [Ian] Hamilton, a dangerous adviser.’42 In a private letter in reply to this, Lansdowne confirmed that he now agreed with Wolseley: White must go.43 But meanwhile, of course, the siege of Ladysmith had begun. So White must first be rescued, before he could be sacked.
How soon could rescue come to Natal? That depended on the Army Corps, and not a ship of the great fleet carrying it to South Africa had yet docked in South Africa, except the Dunottar Castle. The planning of this splendid expeditionary force, it will be recalled, had been the subject of endless wrangling between Lansdowne and Wolseley, and of scathing comments from Lansdowne’s own Cabinet colleagues. The ‘scandal’, as the Prime Minister had called it, was the expected delay of four months between ‘pressing the button’ and the moment when the Army Corps would be ready in position to invade the Boer republics. An extra six weeks’ delay had been caused by the need to order £645,000-worth of mules and oxen from all parts of the world.44 The button had not been pressed until 22 September. So, if the War Office arithmetic was correct, the Army Corps would not be ready to move till 22 December.45 However, nearly half the troops were now on the high seas, and, whether mobile or not, they would be in Cape Town before the end of the month. In fact, the first two troop transports, the Roslin Castle and the Moor, were due to dock at Cape Town on 8 and 9 November.46 The leading brigade of the Army Corps would reach Durban by the 15th. They would be followed by the rest of the 2nd Infantry Division, led by Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Clery. This was the time-table, as Buller described it to Milner on 5 November, and he added ruefully, ‘10 days seems to be a long time to wait in a crisis like this, is it not? It seems to me a lifetime.’47
If Milner was still quaking about Kimberley and only half-convinced by Buller’s plan to go himself with the twelve thousand men to save Natal, relations between the two men were surprisingly cordial. War makes strange bedfellows. It would be hard to imagine two men more strongly contrasted in appearance and manner – The General, red-faced, stolid, bluff, inspiring confidence with every heavy stride; Milner, austere, donnish, his ivory skin strained taut by the pull of events. Moreover, Milner had received that week a private warning to beware of Buller. His crony at the War Office, Fleetwood Wilson, had written that General Buller was ‘alarmingly influenced by [General] Butler. Verb sap’.48 Yet, it turned out that Milner and Buller had important qualities in common – patriotism and ambition – hidden under their different uniforms. And when it came to the point, Buller could hardly have behaved less like Butler. Butler had frustrated every scheme of defence and sided with the Bond ministry, led by Schreiner, in blocking Milner’s efforts to arm the Cape. Buller flung himself heart and soul into his job, so much so that Milner became alarmed that Buller’s forthrightness might provoke a political crisis to add to the military disasters.49
The problem of defending the Cape, in Milner’s eyes, was bedevilled by two related facts. First, Schreiner’s ministry were neutral, at best, towards the war; second, outside the coastal towns, most of the population were Afrikaners who would be only too keen to rise and join the Boers, once they invaded. In this delicate situation, Milner found himself dancing what he called ‘a most peculiar egg-dance’. He depended on Schreiner’s ministry to restrain the would-be rebels. He depended on the Cape loyalists to hold the fort until the imperial troops were in position. Hence, he must arm the latter without alienating the former. In practice, this meant calling out the colonial volunteers in only a few areas – those where it would be certain that the arms would not get into the wrong hands – and not even allo
wing the imperial troops into those districts where the Afrikaners were most likely to rise.50 But the daily ‘egg-dance’ with Schreiner was almost more than Milner could bear. In his heart, he longed to provoke a crisis and force Schreiner’s resignation. But he knew – and this was agreed with Chamberlain – that he could not afford to do that for the time being.51
In the event, Buller and Milner hammered out an agreed policy on most of their common problems. The worst wrangles with Schreiner concerned colonial volunteers, martial law, and natives – above all, the natives of the Territories and Griqualand East (today the Transkei). Both Milner and Buller wanted to arm these tribesmen for their own good; already Boers had raided the native districts of Zululand and parts of Bechuanaland, taking cattle and other loot. But Schreiner insisted on the principle that this was to be exclusively a ‘white man’s war’.52 As Milner bitterly told Chamberlain, ‘I believe he would rather see the whole country overrun than see the natives protect themselves against white men.53 Eventually, Schreiner agreed to let these native territories be placed under the overall command of Buller, and Buller arranged for native levies to be raised accordingly. Schreiner was also persuaded, for what it was worth, to agree to the proclamation of martial law in districts that had actually gone over to the enemy.54
With other delicate political questions Buller had less success. He wanted the British navy to be ordered to impose a complete embargo – on the import of food as well as arms into the Boer republics – at the Portuguese port of Delagoa Bay. Milner backed him. But the British Cabinet would only agree on an arms embargo, and this seemed easy to evade. Buller was also anxious to impose news censorship in the colonies; this was blocked by Schreiner.55 In desperation, Buller devised a scheme for arresting the most notorious Afrikaner agents at the Cape and shipping them off to Durban, after giving the captain orders to take a month, instead of the usual three days, for the voyage. But after the agents had been loaded on board, and the ship had steam up, Milner’s nerve failed him. The men were released and went back to their spying.56
The Boer War Page 26
