First, the spasm of emotion in Britain. ‘Picture the newsboys at the corners,’ wrote an Englishwoman in early November, ‘shouting “Terrible Reverse of British Troops – Loss of 2,000”…. Imagine the rush for papers as we all stood about the streets – regardless of all appearances…. People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering, while ever echoed round the shrill and awful cry of “Terrible Reverse of British Troops”…. The War Office is besieged – no one goes to the theatres – concert rooms are empty – new books fall flat – nothing is spoken of save the War….’31 Another contemporary wrote, ‘The dark days of November and December… who will ever forget them? And who does not remember with pride the great outburst of patriotism which, like a volcanic eruption, swept every obstacle before it? …’32 Looking back on it from the perspective of the thirties, J. L. Garvin commented, ‘Our national life and thought never were the same again.’33 What was happening? Had the Victorian public lost their heads at the first whiff of grapeshot?
In fact, the public soon saw that Black Week was not the ‘darkest hour’ of the war – as Chamberlain called it. It was the culmination of tactical reverses. But the tide of war had actually turned in mid-November, driving the Boers back in both Natal and the Cape. After Black Week it seemed possible that, despite their inferiority in numbers, the Boers might return to the offensive. This did not happen. The British garrisons of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking remained in danger. But, taking the war as a whole, it was the Boers, not the British, who now had their backs to the wall.34
So there was no sense of national emergency in the days that followed. It was a black Christmas for the restaurant trade: nothing to celebrate; this was the gut reaction in the West End. Publishers complained that no one read any books except war books. The key to the public’s mood was disappointment that victory was so long postponed.35
The people of Britain had had war on the cheap for half a century. Small wars against savages: the big-game rifle against the spear and the raw-hide shield. Small casualties – for the British. To lose more than a hundred British soldiers killed in battle was a disaster suffered only twice since the Mutiny. Now, in 1899, they had sent out the biggest overseas expedition in British history to subdue one of the world’s smallest nations. It would have been odd if the public had not shared the government’s confidence in a walk-over. The resulting casualties were thought shattering: seven hundred killed in action or dead of wounds, three thousand wounded since October.36 Still more shattering was the list of those who had not been either killed or wounded – and had surrendered. There was no precedent in British military history for this kind of battle honour. To the white flags of Majuba and Doornkop had now been added an endless line: the flags of Möller’s cavalry at Talana, White’s infantry at Nicholson’s Nek, Gatacre’s infantry at Stormberg; there were more than two thousand of these heroes now in Pretoria.37 This was at the root of the public’s humiliation. Then the spasm of bitterness passed.
It was the Opposition leaders – Asquith and Campbell-Bannerman – who adopted the most statesmanlike tone in the aftermath of Black Week. Not that the government had any objection to their speeches. Asquith himself had inspired the phrase ‘Black Week’. But he warned people that it would be ‘grotesque’ to get these reverses out of proportion. He compared the present ‘humiliations and mortifications’ with periods of real national crisis during the Napoleonic War or the Indian Mutiny. How would Marlborough, Wellington or Havelock have survived this ordeal by telegraph – every blow they struck and every blow they received made subject to hourly scrutiny by the public? His conclusion might have been drafted by Milner himself. The struggle now went much deeper than a mere question of ‘asserting and maintaining our position in South Africa. It is our title to be known as a world power which is now upon trial.’38
Campbell-Bannerman’s adoption of the same broadly pro-government stance was still more significant. He had long been hostile to Chamberlain, and was beginning to suspect Milner’s part in making the war. But, as the new Leader of the Opposition, he had a hard row to hoe. He must rally support in the country, and also try to hold the party together. The lessons of Black Week – that the war was to be long and arduous, and that Britain needed a bigger army – made this job almost impossible. For the country’s new instinct was to close ranks, while the Liberal Party seemed keener than ever to smash itself into fragments. So C-B had no choice but to avoid controversy about the government’s bungling of the war,39 insisting that the government should set up an enquiry into the war when it was over.
Four days after Colenso, C-B addressed the electors of Aberdeen with these reassuring words: ‘The end cannot be doubted [cheers]. We have in the field the largest army that ever left these shores. It can readily be reinforced. We have a united people in the country and in every part of the Empire [cheers] and with these forces on our side – moral and material – success is certain.’40
All this support was heartening, and, if any man needed it, the man was Chamberlain. His own reaction to Black Week was characteristically emotional. He was afraid that the government might fall – an extraordinarily unlikely possibility, given the mood of the country and the ineptness of the Liberals.41
What lay behind Chamberlain’s fit of gloom? It was partly the personal eclipse he had suffered as a result of the war. Chamberlain was a light-demanding plant; he needed the political sunshine. It must have seemed like being in a morgue, those days spent inside the lead-carpeted corridors of the Colonial Office. The war in South Africa had decreased, not increased, his own ministerial duties. The military work was handled by the War Office. The day-to-day political work was handled by Milner – still ‘quaking’ about the precarious situation of the Cape.
Chamberlain’s relations with Milner were strained once more. It was Milner’s predictions that there would be no war – or only an ‘apology for a war’ – that had given Chamberlain his original over-confidence. Now it was Milner’s gloom that rubbed off on to his chief. Encouraged by the Boer successes, the Afrikaners in the Cape were reported to be on the verge of rebellion. Milner said that any moment he might have to turn out Schreiner’s ministry and rule the Cape directly as a Crown Colony. Chamberlain forbade it.42
Still, there was one result of Black Week in which Chamberlain, the champion of imperial unity, could only take pride. A wave of colonial patriotism, much more astonishing than the home variety, had been set in motion among British people all over the globe.
Why did the governments of the white dominions, with the single exception of Cape Colony, unanimously take sides with Britain and her subjects in the Transvaal? Certainly, blood was thicker than water – the intervening water of the Pacific and the Atlantic. British Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders felt a natural solidarity with the mother country. They could also identify with the Uitlanders to a degree that the public at home could not. They were of the same class. They had shared experiences: cattle-ranching, gold-mining, making fortunes and losing them again. And many of the Uitlanders actually were colonials.43
Hence Chamberlain’s own task in rallying support in the self-governing white colonies was a light enough burden. The problem had been how to restrain the colonies’ enthusiasm. Characteristically, the War Office had done its best to confuse the situation. That autumn they had given Chamberlain the text of the telegram to send to each colony, describing the type of soldier required: ‘Infantry most, cavalry least serviceable’.44 What the War Office meant to convey with this cryptic message was that they intended to make MI (mounted infantry) out of the colonial contingent. In fact, the confusion made little difference to the type of soldiers sent: the colonies despatched both MI and cavalry. But the story spread in England, politically damaging for Chamberlain as well as Lansdowne, that offers of mounted men had been refused. At any rate, the first contingents had sailed that autumn, and were already playing some part in the war. These contingents were only token forces – 1,019 from Canada, 875 from Australia and
203 from New Zealand. But no one could now write off the self-governing Empire as an anachronism. That ‘slender thread’ holding it together, in Chamberlain’s famous phrase, now carried more than the force of sentiment. Soon it was to bring twenty-nine thousand white colonial troops to South Africa.45
A united country, a united Empire – at any rate more united than ever before. Chamberlain’s gloom that January might seem hard to understand. But there was a good reason: that shock-wave of anglophobia on the Continent, and especially in Germany. Two months of war had revealed to Britain that there was another side to the ‘splendid’ isolation (not an adjective used by Lord Salisbury, though it aptly described his policy). If Britain’s Continental rivals chose this moment to intervene, amicably or not so amicably, Britain would be in a splendid mess. In fact, intervention, though discussed by the other Great Powers in Europe – Germany, France and Russia – was not to prove a practical possibility. But in the autumn of 1899, the German government had come to a momentous decision: to double the size of the German navy by pushing a great Navy Bill through the Reichstag. It was a new phase in the European arms race.
In the meantime, a violent propaganda war had broken out on the Continent. Kruger’s envoy in Brussels, Dr Leyds, fanned the fervour of the anglophobes. The Press of all the major European powers was rabidly anti-British. The public believed, or appeared to believe, the most absurd atrocity stories (the British tortured and murdered prisoners); and the best that was said about the British was that they were the dupes of Jewish financiers.46
Unlike Chamberlain, Wolseley was finding the war a great relief to his feelings. He grumbled, as usual, at ‘little Lansdowne’s utter small-mindedness’.47 But everything in the War Office seemed to be going Wolseley’s way. Treasury Bills were flowing like water. Till September, the Cabinet had jibbed at a mere £645,000 for the most essential war preparations, like making transport wagons serviceable. Now the Treasury was planning for a war costing nearly £10 million.48
The latest reverses of the war caught Wolseley, like many soldiers, in a strange conflict of emotions. He was insular and patriotic, and proud of his army’s reputation. He regarded the surrender of White’s infantry on Mournful Monday as the most humiliating disaster for half a century: ‘As a soldier I blush to think that two of our brave Battns should have to surrender in open fight to such canaille as the boers [sic] 40 officers taken prisoners I know who is to blame for it, my blood boils with indignation.’ He reproached himself for one thing: ‘For it was I who selected White – faute de mieux … he was always crammed down my throat as a great general.’49 But he principally blamed Lansdowne – and the ‘Indians’.
The bitter and sometimes childish feud between Lansdowne and Wolseley – and between ‘Indians’ and ‘Africans’ – was the root cause of so many of the disasters in South Africa. As we saw earlier, the fundamental strategic mistake of the war consisted in sending out too few troops in September, led by the wrong commander and pushed too far forward into Natal. Both Lansdowne and Wolseley had to share the blame for this triple blunder. On the other hand, it was Lansdowne’s caution that was the main cause of the four-month delay in the arrival of the Army Corps. If Wolseley was a ‘fifth wheel’ on the War Office coach, as he bitterly complained to Lord Salisbury, then Lansdowne was the brake. Quite apart from the direct effect of this – time lost, battles lost – there was the indirect effect of his negative influence, discouraging and dampening all initiative within the War Office labyrinth.50
A dramatic, almost farcical illustration of this was provided on 15 December, to add to the news of Colenso. Brackenbury, the Director-General of Ordnance, had made a detailed investigation of reserves: clothing, stores, guns, ammunition and so on. He was appalled at what he had discovered. He told Lansdowne: either the system was changed, or he would resign.51
Brackenbury’s report showed that the War Office had not even succeeded in their limited aim of having an army of about a hundred thousand equipped for overseas service. In the first two months’ fighting, less than fifty thousand men had gone to the front. To keep this small force in action for only two months had strained War Office reserves to breaking-point.52 It had simply never occurred to anyone there that a war might mean more than a one-day event, that a field-force would need more than a field-day. In a few weeks the reserves were exhausted. Indeed, it was worse than that. The War Office had first proposed to send out Buller’s Army Corps in lightweight khaki drill, then decided (the rainy season began in October) to send them in khaki serge. So there was, for a time, no cloth at all.53 It was the same with the 303 magazine rifles. The army had just decided to change its standard rifle from Lee Metford to Lee Enfield. The two weapons were the same, except for the rifling, but no one had noticed that this changed the sighting. Consternation in the War Office that December. Twenty-five thousand reservists had gone out with rifles that fired eighteen inches to the right (at 500 yards). All these rifles had now to be resighted.54
With the ammunition itself, there were other embarrassments. That summer there had taken place at The Hague the famous convention on war methods. Among other things, this convention outlawed expanding rifle bullets, such as were used at Omdurman to give better stopping power: ‘dum-dum’ they were called, after the name of the British arms factory in India. Britain did not sign the convention, but accepted that, at least for a ‘white man’s war’, it had a certain moral force. Hence the decision not to use the reserve supply of 303 ammunition in store, politely called MK IV and MK V, and meaning ‘dum-dum’. Unfortunately, some found its way to South Africa, and had to be recalled in a hurry. (Other ammunition, labelled ‘Dum-Dum’, was captured by the Boers and caused an international furore; it was actually innocent enough, simply made at Dum-Dum.)55
These were some of the War Office problems in resupplying the first fifty thousand men at the front. When it tried to equip a second army corps, the cupboard was bare. To find the minimum of three million rounds of – 303 ammunition a week required was impossible for the civilian suppliers.56 Brackenbury had to go to the highways and byways to scrounge equipment. The lack of heavy guns and their ammunition was most serious of all. On 15 December, Brackenbury was trying to replace three howitzers; two had to come from the fortress armaments in England. Later, Britain had to buy heavy guns abroad. Ammunition had to be borrowed from the navy and from India; but still Brackenbury could not meet Buller’s needs.57’
Brackenbury’s astonishing report – DGO’s ‘cry of distress’, Lansdowne called it – naturally strengthened Wolseley’s hand. So did the three battles of Black Week. The day before Colenso, Wolseley had insisted that they must now flood South Africa with reinforcements. ‘We are face to face with a serious national crisis,’ he told Lansdowne on 14 December, ‘and unless we meet it boldly… [it will] lead to dangerous complications with Foreign Powers.’58 His proposals were far-reaching. They included plans to mobilize the 7th Division (to complete a second army corps) and the 8th Division (the last organized division of regulars in the home army), and to accept civilian volunteers. Together, the reinforcements would total about forty-five thousand, almost doubling the fighting force in South Africa.59
On 16 and 18 December the Army Board met, and the War Office generals endorsed Wolseley’s scheme. On the 20th, Wolseley was astonished to hear that Lansdowne agreed – or rather, that he had accepted a scheme for raising civilian volunteers of a much more sensational kind than Wolseley’s.60
The origin of the scheme actually lay in a cypher telegram from Buller sent on the day after Colenso. ‘Would it be possible for you to raise eight thousand irregulars in England,’ Buller cabled. ‘They should be equipped as mounted infantry, be able to shoot as well as possible and ride decently. I would amalgamate them with colonials.’61 This telegram marked Buller’s own final recognition that the War Office had sent out the wrong sort of army to South Africa.
George Wyndham, Lansdowne’s junior minister and leader of the Milnerites in the House
of Commons, grasped Buller’s point at once. He told his chief next day that, whether or not they relieved the besieged garrisons or ‘abandoned them to their fate’, British mobility must match Boer mobility. At present, their own infantry, even if superior in numbers, could hardly move more than eight miles from a railway line. He agreed that seven thousand volunteers should be sent to help regular MI units. In addition, he suggested raising, as ‘a matter of immediate urgency and permanent importance’, a total of twenty thousand irregular MI: mainly in South Africa and other colonies, but at least five thousand in Britain.
What especially attracted Wyndham to this idea was the ‘singular oportunity’ to make a ‘revolution’ in the existing Yeomanry at home. The best men at present regarded their service as a ‘farce’ and a ‘sham’. The Yeomanry were ‘still too largely a theatrical reminiscence of the Cavalry which fought in the Crimea and the Peninsular’. But the material was excellent – better than the men recruited for the regular army. He advised Lansdowne to be guided by some friends of his: ‘They are men of affairs, and as masters of fox-hounds, they are in touch with the young riding farmers and horse-masters of this country.’62
Three days later, the newspapers carried the announcement of the birth of the ‘Imperial Yeomanry’. It was Wyndham’s ‘hunting and shooting’ yeomanry in all its magnificent amateurishness. The regular army would have almost no control over its formation. A committee of fox-hunting gentlemen was to organize it; two rich peers offered to pay part of the cost. A much larger sum – £50,000 – was subscribed by Wernher-Beit, presumably at Percy Fitzpatrick’s suggestion.63 Fitzpatrick wrote to Balfour, explaining how the loyal Imperial Yeoman of today would be the loyal South African settler of tomorrow.64 Perhaps Fitzpatrick, who knew Wyndham, had, for political reasons, inspired the scheme all along.
The Boer War Page 40
