The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Part of the reason was Buller’s behaviour the day after the battle. Methuen had raised a storm of protest by dressing down the Highland Brigade the day after Magersfontein: ‘There are three things I want you to remember; your Queen, your Country and your regiment.72 Buller was as tactful in handling his troops as he was clumsy in handling ‘Clan’ Lansdowne and George White. He went to the survivors of the abandoned batteries, the 14th and the 66th, and personally thanked them for their gallantry. He breathed calm and stolid self-confidence.’73 John Atkins, perhaps reflecting many men’s feelings, wrote about the withdrawal from Colenso: Buller ‘gained laurels from his defeat that are not always won by victorious generals…. A weaker man, a less correct soldier, would have carried the position with an appalling loss of life. Buller’s decision to retire was a proof of his bravery and good generalship.’74 Churchill later wrote, ‘If Sir Redvers Buller cannot relieve Ladysmith with his present force, we do not know of any other officer in the British Service who would be likely to succeed.’75

  The men at Frere returned to what was the normal routine of army life: drill and parades, regimental cricket matches, a point-to-point for the officers – the ‘Colenso Plate’ and the ‘Tugela Handicap’.76

  In fact, Buller’s own morale, too, was back to normal. After getting those cables off his chest, he felt more philosophical. He began to plan a new flank march to relieve Ladysmith. He wrote to his wife to reassure her. He was, he claimed, ‘lucky’ not to succeed:

  I had to have a play at Colenso, but I did not think I could get in. I had my try on the 15th and did not get in, but I am all the better for it. One knows the worst at any rate – I think quite between you and me that I was lucky in not getting in as if I had I should not have known what next to do [because the worst fighting was still ahead]. But I was much disappointed, and the more so that had I been well served I ought I think to have got in. Kismet. Better luck next time.77

  While he was writing this letter, the blow fell that Buller had half-expected – indeed, almost courted. A cypher telegram arrived from London: he was superseded as GOC in South Africa, and relegated to the command in Natal.78 The man appointed over his head was not, however, the man whom Buller had expected would be the government’s choice, Buller’s own patron, Lord Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief of the British army.79 Instead, Lansdowne had appointed his own personal friend from Indian days, Lord Roberts.

  The news was painful to Buller, though he accepted that the show ‘was too big for one man’.80 Roberts was the leader of the rival Ring to Wolseley’s. There was no love lost there. And Roberts was absolutely out of sympathy with Buller. An added twist to their tense relationship was given by the tragic news that Buller had learnt only the previous day. He had himself just drafted the cable – blunt, yet not without emotion: ‘Your gallant son died today. Condolences. Buller.’81

  CHAPTER 21

  Black Week, Silver Lining

  British Isles,

  16 December 1899 – 1 February 1900

  ‘I’m coming, Oom Paul Kruger,

  To have a talk with you;

  A word into your ear, old man –

  I am the kangaroo

  The emu, and the ’possum,

  And the eucalyptus tree –

  In other words Australia;

  And this I say to thee –

  Now Mister Oom Paul Kruger,

  Just let my father be.’

  Sydney Bulletin, December 1899

  The first cabled report of Buller’s reverse at Colenso, printed in the later editions of the morning papers, reached Lord Roberts at Kilmainham Hospital, the ramshackle seventeenth-century HQ of the British army in Ireland, at breakfast time on Saturday. There were, as yet, no casualty lists.1 Roberts must have been apprehensive about his son, like thousands of other British parents who read their papers that morning. But his overwhelming fears – and hopes – lay in British strategy. Now he must seize his chance with both hands.

  It was the chance of a lifetime. ‘For years,’ as he put it, ‘I have [been] waiting for this day.’2 He scribbled a long, outspoken cable to Lansdowne, and rode off to the cypher office at Viceroy’s Lodge, on the other side of Phoenix Park. The cable was for Lansdowne’s eyes, and for no one else’s at the War Office, least of all Wolseley’s. It warned the government that unless a ‘radical change’ in both strategy and tactics was made ‘we shall have to make an ignominious peace’.3

  How to effect the radical change? Appoint himself C-in-C in South Africa.

  ‘He says his prayers every night, and leaves the rest to God.’ So Lady Roberts described her husband.4 They were odd words to choose, but Nora Roberts, the daughter of an Orcadian squire living in County Waterford, was known for her odd remarks. Her husband’s friends found Bobs left remarkably little to God – except in the sense that he believed God helps those who help themselves.

  He was the epitome of the ‘political’ general. In his forty-one years in India he had dominated the great sub-continent. From his father, also a political general, he had inherited power – transmitted through the nexus of British families who controlled the Indian army and civil service. He was a born diplomat. He had a way with viceroys like Lansdowne.5 He had a way with the men – so Kipling had told the world in his ballads. ‘Little Bobs, Bobs, Bobs Pocket-Wellin’ton,’ went the jingle.6 Other people called him a ‘pusher’ and a ‘self-advertiser’. Even his staff laughed at the lengths to which he went to advance his career: inspiring articles about himself in the Press, cultivating the female relations of British politicians when they came to India.7 The one thing he could do nothing about was his size. Though broad-shouldered, he was absurdly short: about five foot two. Now sixty-seven, he was a lithe, grey terrier of a man. But every inch a pro. No one would say he was too much of a gentleman – like Buller – to push his claims with Lansdowne.8 He knew where the most decisive battles are won: in the War Office and the Cabinet room. He knew that politics, for a general, is war by other means.

  His cypher cable to Lansdowne was the climax of a four-year siege of Lansdowne and the War Office. In 1893 he had returned from India, a national hero whose laurels had lost their freshness. It was thirty-five years since he had won his VC in the Indian Mutiny, thirteen years since his famous march to Kandahar. The supreme prize – to be Commander-in-Chief in England – was snatched from him by Wolseley, one year his junior. Buller got Aldershot. Bobs was fobbed off with a barony and a field-marshal’s baton, and put out to grass at Kilmainham.9 He wrote soon after, ‘I have never had occasion to ask for an appointment, and would not for the world do anything myself, or ask my friends to do anything to help me in the future.’10 Then he proceeded to do exactly that. He wrote to both Lansdowne and Chamberlain, proposing himself as the Commander of the expedition to South Africa that was mooted in 1896. After this he kept up a stream of helpful letters to Lansdowne; to help him see how Wolseley’s system at the War Office was bound to end in disaster.11

  When the war broke out he became still more pressing. On 8 December – a week before Colenso – he wrote to Lansdowne suggesting they superseded Buller and installed himself instead. He had been reading Buller’s telegrams, he said, and it was clear, before he had ever fought a battle, that Buller had lost his nerve. Roberts begged Lansdowne to keep the letter secret from Wolseley and his Ring, who ‘would prefer running very great risks rather than see me in command’.12 On 10 December he slipped over to the War Office for a secret, one-day visit to see Lansdowne and his friend Sir Henry Brackenbury, the Director-General of the Ordnance.13 Brackenbury told him of the desperate shortage of heavy guns, and other material, which confirmed his opinion of Wolseley.14 He also received a reply from Lansdowne to his letter proposing himself as replacement for Buller. They could not sack a general ‘merely on account of the gloominess of his views’. But he would show Roberts’s letter to Salisbury. The proposal would be ‘constantly in his thoughts’.15

  In fact, on Friday evening, Lansdowne had already
moved, with uncharacteristic swiftness, from thoughts to deeds. The moment he received Buller’s first cable – the self-confident public one, sent immediately after the battle, regretting ‘to report a serious reverse’ – Lansdowne decided that Buller must go. But there were two solid obstacles: Wolseley himself and the Queen, both of whom, for different reasons, could be relied on to fight to save Buller. How to outwit them? Plotting was not quite Lansdowne’s style. He appealed to his friend, Arthur Balfour, deputy Prime Minister, and the master of the Whitehall backstairs.16

  That Friday evening, Balfour was dining at the house of St Loe Strachey, the editor of the Spectator. He was there to meet young Percy Fitzpatrick, the agent of Wernher-Beit, who, by arrangement with his employers and Milner, had remained in London to keep the government up to scratch in the post-war settlement. Balfour himself was waiting on tenterhooks for the news of what had happened that day at Colenso, and after dinner he was summoned to the War Office. He returned with the astonishing news: failure. Fitzpatrick later described Balfour’s reaction: ‘The serene unshakable faith in the people, the lofty inspiring calm of a leader, the firmness, the nerve, the finest-tempered courage.’17’ Doubtless Balfour needed all these qualities in the resolve he now made. He and Lansdowne would sack Buller, without informing either Wolseley or the Queen.

  Buller now played straight into his hands. Early next day, Saturday, Roberts was told to make himself ready to go out to South Africa; the message crossed with Roberts’s own cypher cable to Lansdowne. Later, Buller’s second cable arrived, the one he had written just before midnight in a mood of black rage and resentment: ‘My view is that I ought to let Ladysmith go.’18 A copy was sent to the Queen at Windsor. Preposterous, said that smooth courtier, Lord Esher. The cable was the main exhibit when the Defence Committee of the Cabinet met that evening. Buller had lost his nerve and proposed to leave Ladysmith to its fate. The Cabinet agreed to send Buller a telegram to bring home the enormity of this proposal: ‘The abandonment of White’s force and its consequent surrender is regarded as a national disaster of the greatest magnitude.’ The Cabinet also agreed to replace Buller as C-in-C by sending out Roberts; Buller would remain in charge of the Natal army.19 At Salisbury’s insistence, Lord Kitchener, the Sirdar of Egypt and the gallant young hero of Omdurman (he was nearly eighteen years younger than Roberts), was to join Roberts as Chief of Staff. Yes, said Lansdowne, the public would like it.20

  That Buller’s despondent ‘let-Ladysmith-go’ telegram served as a pretext for sacking him, in Lansdowne’s mind at any rate, is made clear by one simple fact. The ‘radical change’ telegram sent by Roberts from Dublin, the morning after Colenso, was in some respects more’ despondent, and ‘preposterous’, than Buller’s. The text of this astonishing cable has never before been published. It read:

  Methuen cannot apparently force his way to Kimberley. He should therefore be ordered to withdraw to the Orange River without delay. Otherwise his line of communications will be cut and as he cannot have any large amount of supplies and ammunition he would have to surrender. Kimberley and Mafeking ought not to have been held after the Orange Free State declared against us, and though their being left to their fate now would be deeply regretted it seems unavoidable. Ladysmith also ought not to have been retained but as White’s force especially the Artillery and Cavalry portion would not easily be replaced it should be relieved and to do this effectually Warren should be sent round with every available man. Meanwhile Buller should be ordered to act strictly on the defensive….21

  Order Buller to act ‘strictly on the defensive’ until Warren’s 5th Division could be brought up. This was precisely what Buller had himself proposed in the ‘let-Ladysmith-go’ telegram. But to leave both Kimberley and Mafeking ‘to their fates’ was to out-Buller Buller.

  What did Salisbury and the Cabinet make of this ‘surrender’ telegram of Roberts? There is no reason to believe that they ever saw it.22 The strategic situation improved; and Roberts, like Buller, recovered his nerve. Before he left England a compromise strategy was agreed by Roberts, Balfour and Lansdowne. Buller was to relieve White, extricate the garrison, and then abandon Ladysmith itself to the Boers. By the same token, Methuen was to relieve Kekewich, extricate Rhodes and the rest, and then abandon Kimberley, diamonds and all. It would be humiliating, and, of course, Milner would shriek, but the government now recognized that this was the strategy that should have been followed all along. Military necessity must finally take precedence over political considerations. The alternative was the ‘ignominious peace’, and that, of course, no one was contemplating.23

  Having squared Salisbury and the Cabinet, Lansdowne and Balfour had the delicate task of tackling Wolseley and the Queen. Wolseley was ‘dumbfounded’, he said. He warned Lansdowne that Buller would resign rather than suffer this humiliation, and said that, even if Buller had made mistakes, he was a better man than Roberts. The Queen expressed her astonishment through the medium of her Private Secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge, Buller’s most intimate friend. Her Majesty, said Bigge, was deeply aggrieved at the Cabinet’s behaviour on numerous grounds: for not telling her of the decision to appoint Roberts, not seeking her advice, not consulting her before cabling Buller, and failing to consult Wolseley.24

  However, Balfour went down to Windsor to see the Queen, and found ‘no great difficulty in smoothing things down’. The Queen, he told his uncle Robert (the Prime Minister), was taking the disappointments of the war with ‘wonderful good humour’. She was now in her eighty-second year. She said herself at this time, ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.’ But she was appalled by the losses of men (and horses, too). ‘No news today,’ she wrote in her Journal, ‘only lists of casualties.’25

  The most painful part of the business, it now emerged, involved Lord Roberts. When the cheerful plan to sack Buller had first been mooted, no one – neither Lansdowne nor Balfour – had dreamt of the personal tragedy overshadowing Roberts’s appointment. In succession, the cables reached London: Lieutenant Roberts gravely wounded, Lieutenant Roberts dead. Roberts had meanwhile taken the boat from Ireland, and in the afternoon went to Lansdowne House to receive confirmation of his appointment. Lansdowne had to break the news of Freddy’s death. He said later, ‘The blow was almost more than he could bear, and for a moment I thought he would break down, but he pulled himself together. I shall never forget the courage which he showed….’26

  A week later, Lansdowne and many others went down to Southampton to wish Roberts Godspeed on the journey to South Africa. It was two days before Christmas – a raw and cheerless day, fit for the occasion. The ship was the same one, the Dunottar Castle, on which they had wished Buller Godspeed to South Africa two and a half months before. The same scenes repeated themselves – respectful crowds, the patriotic songs, the jolly ship’s captain with the white whiskers, Captain Rigby. But Roberts and his party made up a sombre group at the quayside; Lansdowne and the others wore black in deference to Roberts.

  Roberts silently paced the deck. To his wife he wrote later that the ‘rent in my heart seems to stifle all feelings…. I could not help thinking how different it would have been if our dear boy had been with me. Honours, rewards and congratulations have no value to me….’27

  Balfour – ‘divine Arthur’, as his friends called him – was deputy Prime Minister, and on his shoulders, elegant, but hardly broad, rested the main burden of directing war policy. Lansdowne, of course, worked industriously away at the War Office. But in Cabinet Balfour seems to have been the leading spirit. It was no great distinction. On the day before Colenso, Selborne wrote to complain to Balfour about the lack of a proper Cabinet committee to handle the war: Chamberlain was away in Birmingham half the time, Salisbury down at Hatfield; and there was no one to take the responsibility of answering urgent cables from Buller and Milner.28

  There was, indeed, a lifelessness about Salisbury’s government which the reverses of the war seemed only to intensify. Part of the reason was that in
November Lord Salisbury too had been prostrated by grief. His wife, the prop of his political life for half a century, had finally succumbed to cancer. By now, he himself was slowly recovering. But managing a war was hardly his style. His interests centred on diplomacy, not on the results of its failure. Having been outwitted, on his own admission, by ‘Milner and his jingo supporters’, he regarded the war with a kind of sardonic detachment. If he intervened at all in military affairs (except on the subject of Kitchener’s appointment as Chief of Staff), his intervention seems to have been negative.29 ‘By eliminating your most interesting paragraphs,’ he had once written to George Curzon, when editing Curzon’s Persia, ‘I shall always feel that I have had a negative share in a great work.’30 He might now have said the same, with even greater Schadenfreude, about the cuts in Wolseley’s army.

  For now Britain’s modern army – the brainchild of Edward Cardwell (Gladstone’s War Minister), Wolseley and Buller, starved by Lansdowne, cabinet and country – this ‘small-war’ army had a big war on its hands. Somehow or other, it must be inflated to a size even Wolseley had never envisaged. This was the obvious lesson of ‘Black Week’, as the dismal week of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso came to be called. The problem was how.

  To expand the British army in South Africa was not merely a question of recruiting the troops, hiring the ships, and sending them steaming off to South Africa. It was complicated by two political pressure waves, freak storms of public opinion, now making the windows rattle in Whitehall. The first was to prove, for the government, a blessing in disguise: an emotional spasm – astonishment, frustration, humiliation – that shook the British at home and in the Empire when they read the Black Week cables. The second was ominous for the whole world: a shock-wave of anglophobia vibrating across the Continent, precipitated by the war, and prolonged by Britain’s failure to win it.