As for Wolseley, he was furious to find his own scheme so dramatically trumped. He protested officially that to go ‘into the highways and byways’ and pick up civilians, ‘quite regardless of whether they have learnt the rudiments of discipline’, was a ‘dangerous experiment’. The eight thousand Yeomanry would be ‘very little use in field’. Lansdowne’s comment was: ‘The Boers are not, I suppose, very highly drilled or disciplined.’65
December 1899 passed into January 1900, January into February, sleet and fog into drizzle. From high summer in South Africa came a cloud of telegrams: ‘Lord Bobs’ preparing a great flank march; Sir Reverse Buller suffering fresh disasters;66 Milner ‘croaking’, as he called it, about the Cape rebellion. In London, the first Parliament of the 1900s emerged – as bland and lifeless as the last one of the 1890s. No effective voice was raised in opposition to the government’s handling of the war.67 Asquith danced a graceful pas de deux with Balfour in the debate.
Amid all the self-congratulation, no one noticed one dismal blunder of the Cabinet’s. In December, they had conceded a request from Milner for the navy to search foreign ships believed to be carrying war material for the Transvaal or Free State. In succession, three German passenger ships, the Bundesrath, the Herzog and the General, were stopped and forced into port, and then suffered the humiliation of being searched. The search was negative in all three cases, and this only fed the flames of anglophobia in Germany. How dare the British navy stop our mail steamers, cried the German Press.68 And how convenient it all was for the German government, whose great Navy Bill steamed majestically through the Reichstag. However, this did not worry the British, whose fleet remained more than double the size of her enemies’ fleets, as the German Ambassador to Britain noted grimly.69 Who could have guessed that these earth tremors of 1900 were to lead to the earthquake of 1914?
At the time, the most striking fact about Black Week was that it seemed to have, for everyone except the Boers, a silver lining. The government found that the new Imperial Yeomanry caught the imagination of Press and public. In sporting circles, there was a rush to abandon the fox and pursue the Boer; large crowds formed outside the recruiting office in London;’70 the City of London itself offered and paid for one thousand volunteers.71 Thirty-four MPs and peers rallied to join the new Yeomanry. People began to talk of the war as a ‘national’ war, and the several thousand ‘gentlemen-rankers’ – stockbrokers, journalists, dons and even one MP serving in the ranks – brought a new whiff of democracy to the barrack room and the camp-fire on the veld.72
CHAPTER 22
Christmas at Pretoria
Pretoria,
12 December 1899 – 1 January 1900
‘We hope to be lunching at the White Hart, Pretoria, in about a month’s time….’
Lieutenant Reggie Kentish to his mother, near Ladysmith, 12 October 1899
‘Lunch is at one o’clock & consists of Bread & Bully beef … vegetables, cheese, fresh meat… & the towns people parade in front of our cage eyeing us up and down as though we were some weird objects….’
Lieutenant Kentish to his mother, Model Schools (Prisoner of War Camp), Pretoria, 9 November 1899
‘De God onzer voorvaden heeft ons heden een schitterende overwinning gegeven….’ ‘The God of our forefathers had given us a dazzling victory ’1 ‘Yesterday was not only a dazzling victory for our burghers but a new spirit is born….’2 As the battle telegrams – and nine hundred British prisoners of war – converged on Pretoria, confirming that the enemy had been thrown back at Colenso, Magersfontein and Stormberg, men of other nations might have allowed themselves a day’s public rejoicing. Kruger’s people were not like that: too modest, perhaps, or too God-fearing.
Up at the war fronts, it is true, there were celebrations – impromptu sports, ironic renderings of ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ sung by the burghers, and ‘Maggie Murphy’s Home’ played by the Zarp Police Band.3 The Boer heliograph at the Tugela teased the British with ‘How is Mr Buller today? What has Mr Buller done that Roberts is coming out?’4
But in the capital, always solemn and God-fearing, the church bells rang only for the dead. On Tuesday, the day after Magersfontein, there was a State funeral. Shops were closed; the vierkleurs hung at half-mast on Government Buildings; and a special train steamed into Pretoria with the coffins of burghers killed in battle. A cortège of 120 carriages, including the State Secretary’s, clattered down to Church Square. Five thousand people lined the streets, mainly women and their African servants; most of the Boer menfolk were away at the front. Military victory brings everyone mixed feelings. To the volk it brought a double shock: relief and delight at their achievements, bitterness at the cost.5
Four coffins led the cortège – Pretoria’s own share of the hundred-odd Boers and foreign volunteers who had so far given their lives for the two republics. Only four coffins (and one of the dead burghers was a Jewish-American Uitlander from Ohio),6 but it was almost more than Pretoria could bear. ‘Notwithstanding yesterday’s victories,’ one of the papers said, ‘the feeling of sorrow and gloom over the sad losses … is more intense than ever.’7 In fact, the price of victory had been heavier for the volk, proportionate to their numbers, than the price of defeat for the British.8 Besides, in the eyes of the volk, surrounded by black enemies, no white man’s death, even a white enemy’s, was much cause for rejoicing.
In addressing his people, on the day after Colenso, Kruger had no need to refer to the British dead. It was Dingaan’s Day, the Day of the Covenant, the day when the Lord had shown, by the destruction of Dingaan and the Zulus at Blood River, that he had made a covenant with the voortrekkers. For the sixty-first time, Kruger celebrated the great anniversary. In the small Dopper (Baptist) church, packed with women, he shuffled to the rostrum, eyes blinking painfully, black suit hanging in folds, voice hoarse and frail; yet in spirit the epitome of strength and defiance. Perhaps he took his text, as did a speaker elsewhere that day, from Exodus 15:10. ‘The enemy said: “I will pursue. I will overtake. I will divide the spoil. My lust will be satisfied upon them…” They sank as lead in the mighty waters.’9 To Kruger, there was indeed a marvellous symmetry about the pattern of his long life. Blood River, Majuba – now Colenso. Three times in the green hills of Natal, the Lord had delivered them from their enemies. Hence the overpowering simplicity of his call to the volk: put your trust in the Lord; He will protect His people as He protected your forefathers from Dingaan.10
Simplicity, of course, was not a characteristic of Kruger’s mind. Nor was Dingaan’s fate directly relevant to the fate of the British. With the British Empire, Kruger wanted agreement: the final settlement, giving unqualified independence to the Transvaal, which had been the goal of all Kruger’s manoeuvring. As he struggled away hour after hour in his small office in Government Buildings, from eight in the morning, when he read the first telegrams from the war fronts, till eleven at night,11 he had to face a strategic dilemma of extraordinary difficulty. How could he turn tactical successes into real strategic victories, and both, in turn, into a winning seat at the conference table?
Could he, on the one hand, make Colenso into a second and better Majuba? Or must this be a war of attrition against the British, a Fabian war, in which conventional military objectives are hardly pursued at all, and everything subordinated to the supreme (and negative) aim of preserving unbroken the spirit of the volk, both in military victory and the reverse?
The first alternative, a new Majuba, might have seemed a tempting option. The parallels between the events of 1881 and 1899 were uncanny. In both wars Joubert had crushed a British general – Colley in 1881, now Penn Symons – trapped in the northern prong of Natal. After that, the war had turned on the fate of the British garrisons – then within the Transvaal, now on its borders – trapped by Boer forces. The British public’s response to the disasters in 1881 and now was much the same: a spasm of humiliation and patriotism; the call for a military hero to go to the rescue – in both cases, General Rober
ts – and the sending of a large relief expedition. Here the parallels diverged. In 1881, Gladstone’s Liberals had just taken office, pledged to cancel the Tories’ annexation of the Transvaal four years before. In 1899, there was a Conservative government, pledged to consolidate the Empire. In 1881, it was questionable whether Majuba itself had helped or hindered Gladstone in making the settlement that followed.12 In 1899, it was certain that Boer military successes had done wonders for the cause of the jingoes in Britain, and further reduced the slender minority who believed in a negotiated peace.13
Kruger may not have grasped all the niceties of British politics, but the Boer newspapers printed plenty of British political news, and Kruger understood these sad truths well enough.14 The spirit of John Bright was dead, one of his officials had said when war broke out.15 It was true. Even Henry Labouchère, the most outspoken member of the Gladstonian wing of the British Liberal Party, had now declared his belief in the doctrine of ‘my country right or wrong’. The danger of Britain’s being humiliated in front of the other Great Powers, he said, outweighed the moral disadvantages.16
There was, of course, one way that Britain might be forced to the conference table, other than by the pressure of British public opinion: by public opinion in other countries – in other words, by intervention of one sort or another. But, here again, Kruger was not so simple as to think this a likely possibility, nor did he choose to raise false hopes, just at the moment, by pretending that it was.
Dr Leyds, the Transvaal Ambassador in Brussels, had struggled for the last few months to persuade Britain’s rivals – France, Germany and Russia – to make common cause against Britain. That autumn he told a French newspaper, in an interview reprinted in Johannesburg, that ‘we have the sympathy of all Europe. I know it and see it. But Europe will not intervene in our favour; at least not at the present moment.’17 In fact, all Dr Leyds achieved was to inspire a couple of hundred foreign volunteers to fight on the side of the burghers, and to channel public sympathy in a number of countries into providing small ambulance teams for the war fronts. Both of these moves provided practical help, and they were still more useful as tokens of moral support, like the small contingents already sent by Britain’s white colonies.18 But Holland, the country which, for obvious reasons, felt most identified with the Boer cause, was no military power. France and Russia, which were, had to keep a weather eye on the British navy. They did actually offer to intervene – amicably – if Germany would join in. Germany would not.19
For both these reasons – lack of moral support in Britain, and of military support on the Continent – there was no chance of Colenso or the other victories turning, of themselves, into new Majubas. Could the Boers, then, follow up their successes and strike offensive blows against the British in Natal and the Cape while the British were still off balance? Many historians have said yes, and criticize the Boers for not having adopted this strategic policy.20 In principle, Kruger favoured this option, and so did Steyn; still more so, the younger generation of Boers, Smuts’s friends, Fischer and Grobler.
But was it practicable? General Cronje, the commander at Magersfontein, was asked to block Methuen’s lines of communication. Seize Belmont again, said Steyn, make it a strong-point, and prevent any supplies or reinforcements reaching Methuen.21 Take fifteen hundred of your best men, said Kruger, with a good field-piece, ‘shoot to pieces’ the English armoured train, and break up the railway line behind the British.22 Impossible, said Cronje. The terrain was too flat for offensive action; there was no water there; the commandos were exhausted and so were their horses. Then what about a direct attack on Methuen, said Kruger; it was ‘not an order’, he said, ‘but only a suggestion’. To this, Cronje, outnumbered by nearly five to one, gave an understandably flat refusal. Kruger could only reply ‘something must be done’ or the English would hold Cronje at Magersfontein, and send other troops to outflank him.23 But neither Kruger nor Steyn felt sufficient confidence in the possibility of real offensive strategy to replace Cronje with one of the two Generals, De la Rey or De Wet, who might have adopted it.
It was certainly an error, as events would soon show, to leave a man like Cronje in such a position of importance; though whether De Wet or De la Rey would have succeeded in cutting off Methuen for long is another question. What evidence there is on the Natal side suggests that the Boer governments, like their British counterpart, had failed to recognize how the new conditions of war – this war of smokeless, long-range magazine rifles, used by infantry concealed in slit-trenches – had dramatically tipped the tactical balance in favour of the defence. Hence, in turn, they underrated the difficulties of offensive strategy.24 On 15 December Kruger had received Botha’s stirring telegram about Colenso: ‘The God of our forefathers has given us a dazzling victory.’ Excellent, said Kruger.25 Why not then smite the enemy ‘while the terror is still so great’ in their hearts? Impossible, replied Botha, just as Cronje had: ‘There are no hills [around Buller’s camp at Frere] nor the least cover between us and the enemy and I am afraid to undertake something which, if it goes wrong, will hearten the enemy.’ More relevant, the burghers’ morale, always volatile, might collapse completely, if they were sent on such a risky venture.26
If Botha, both the boldest and the most level-headed general of the Boer armies, thought Buller too strong to attack, who is to say that Cronje was wrong to adopt the same view towards Methuen – and the Boer governments wrong not to insist on a counter-offensive? By default, at any rate, Kruger had now chosen the second of the two strategic options: to fight a war of attrition against the British. The two republics’ military objectives were now limited to trying to block the progress of the two relief columns, and, meanwhile, to squeeze the three beleaguered garrisons – Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. It was not a strategy that could win them a seat at the conference table – not directly, at any rate. To capture all three garrisons – White’s, Kekewich’s and Baden-Powell’s, totalling nearly thirteen thousand British regulars – would deal an intensely humiliating blow to the British.27 In strictly military terms, however, it would leave the task of Buller and Roberts somewhat easier. Relieved of these entanglements, they could make straight for Bloemfontein across the open plains of the Free State.
Kruger regretted Botha’s and Cronje’s inability to smite the enemy, yet he was soon reconciled. It was, after all, a war of attrition that came naturally to the Boers, not only among the commandos in the field, but among the people as a whole. Kruger himself had fought an eighteen-year diplomatic war of attrition against the British; he had tried to wear down the stronger adversary, as he had worn down those lions he had hunted as a young man. The Transvaal was now prepared for a war that would ‘stagger humanity’. Its strength lay, above all, in its self-sufficiency, which no strategic blockade of imports via Mozambique, no blockade, imposed by the British navy, could injure.28
There were three civilian cornerstones to Kruger’s state, viewed as a military power. The first was the pro-Boer Uitlanders, an important minority of the men who had come to seek their fortunes in this industrial state, with the richest gold-mines in the world. The expulsion of the pro-British Uitlanders, essential on military grounds, had certainly weakened industrial efficiency. But the Netherlands Railways still ran – manned by Hollanders. They were the strategic key to all communications; and in their railway workshops the Boers’ field-guns were ably serviced and repaired (including a Creusot Long Tom damaged, as we shall see, on 8 December at Lady smith).29 The Transvaal dynamite industry also flourished. This had been organized by the French and German businessmen who had secured the monopoly. Now it proved a godsend, improvising Mauser bullets and Krupp and Creusot shells alike. And the mines could be brought back into production, even if at a reduced level. The coal-mines were needed to supply the motive power on which the railways and all industry depended. The eight gold-mines, restarted by the government, would pay the entire cost of the war – about £100,000 a month.30
But who was to wo
rk the mines? There was a second, and less visible, cornerstone: quarried from the vast black reserve of African labour. When the young Welsh MP, David Lloyd George, talked of Britain fighting two nations whose population totalled less than that of Flintshire and Denbighshire he forgot the invisible majority: the Africans. In 1899 there were thought to be 754,000 Africans living in the Transvaal, and a further 130,000 in the Free State.31 Some, it is true, had been expelled, with the pro-British Uitlanders, in the great exodus from the Rand; these were Africans from Basutoland, Natal and the Cape. But over ten thousand ‘mine boys’ remained – more than enough to work the coal-mines and gold-mines at a reduced level.32 Everything in the Transvaal depended, ultimately, on the gold-mines. And all the gold-mines depended, in turn, on a supply of cheap African labour.
There was a fundamental irony about the war which would not have amused the British financiers, Beit and Wernher. Their strongest single motive for making that secret alliance with Milner, which had set Britain and the Transvaal on a collision course, was to reduce the cost of African labour on the Rand.33 They were outraged by having to pay fifty to sixty shillings a month to African miners (though this was, of course, far less than white South African miners received, or those of the rival mines of Australia and California). They blamed the ‘outrageous’ wages of Africans in the Rand on the incompetence and corruption of Kruger’s government.34 But wartime regulations had transformed the mining industry of the Rand. At a stroke, African wages had been cut to a maximum of one pound a month. Africans, found living illegally in the locations, were commandeered, like the mines themselves, and forced to work.35 It was a drastic solution – slave labour of a sort – and one which many British mine owners had long tried to persuade the Boers to adopt. Today the roles were reversed with a vengeance. The Boers taunted the British mine owners with having been ridiculously soft. They themselves knew how to use a ‘firm hand’. The Standard and Diggers’ News, which spoke for the pro-Boer Uitlanders, crowed loudest: ‘The very people who Were never credited with any governing capacity or industrial acumen – that is to say, the Boers – solve the whole problem in an afternoon, put the Kaffir in his proper place … and establish a new sound and healthy order of things from one end of the Rand to another.’36
The Boer War Page 41
