The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  This sudden declaration of war caught Campbell-Bannerman majestically returning from the spa at Marienbad, where he had gone, as usual, for his summer holidays. His party remained in total disarray.9 ‘The political position is just maddening,’ wrote Herbert Gladstone, the Chief Whip, ‘with CB away. The whole party waits for the smallest scrap of inspiration, but it is all smothered in Marienbad mud. The situation is grotesque…. Our efforts to find a leader are about as successful as Tommy Atkins’s efforts to shoot a Boer.’10 CB reached England on the 22nd, unruffled as usual. He had published a kind of manifesto in June, around which he hoped to unite the party. The theme was reconciliation: between Britons and Boers, and thus among the Liberals, too. He hoped for an honourable defeat in the election. But the best anyone could expect was that the government might come back for a new seven-year lease of life, without an even bigger majority; they had had a 130-seat majority at the dissolution. No one imagined that the Liberals, whose wounds still gaped so wide, could actually win.11

  ‘The war, more than any other in modern times, was and is a popular war.’ So The Times declared on 18 September, speaking with the self-satisfaction of one of its principal promoters.12 In fact, it was hard to say how much part ‘Khaki’ played – directly – in the election. Of course, the war was popular in a negative sense. There was no outburst of pacifism. On the other hand, there was no evidence of war-fever; no jingo mobs – now – to break up the meetings of the ‘pro-Boers’, as David Lloyd George’s had been broken up in March at Glasgow, and in April at Caernarvon. ‘Good-humoured indifference’ was the way one paper described the public’s attitude to Leonard Courtney, one of the few MPs who actively opposed the war. Probably it was true. John Bull had run the gamut of emotions in the last few months. The decisive election issue was not particularly emotive. It was, simply, how could a divided Opposition govern?13

  How different it had been only a few months earlier! Between Black Week and Mafeking night (between mid-December 1899 and May 1900), the war had been the burning topic – a ‘nightmare’, indeed, as Balfour said, when it looked as though White and his twelve thousand troops at Ladysmith might be forced to surrender.14 Hence the hysterical jingoism of that period, and the popular fury directed at the so-called ‘pro-Boers’. The word was merely a gibe, when applied to British MPs. CB had successfully persuaded most of the radicals, including John Morley, Sir William Harcourt, and even young David Lloyd George, not to imperil their own and their party’s electoral chances by supporting anti-war resolutions in Parliament. By contrast, John Redmond’s Irish nationalists took an unashamed delight—patriotism, Irish-style – in British humiliations; and they did vote for the Boers. In February they supported an amendment: ‘The war… should be brought to a close on the basis of recognizing the independence of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.’ Only a couple of dissident Liberals supported this resolution.15 Morley and the rest contented themselves with attacking the government where most Liberals could find most common ground: in bungled war preparations, and a bungled war itself. In June, CB made them swallow the pill: accept the fait accompli, annexation of the republics.16

  It was the end of a long struggle for CB’s own survival as a credible party leader. His differences with the Liberal imperialists had become increasingly public. Rosebery still played Achilles, sulking in his splendid tent. Grey and Haldane hoped to oust CB and restore Rosebery. Asquith was less hostile to CB, but thought he would resign.17 This was wishful thinking by Margot Asquith, Milner’s go-between. She confessed to Milner on 9 July, ‘I feel strongly tho. entre nous that CB is not the man to lead us.’18 Actually CB, exasperated as he was, had no intention of resigning. And he had a strong suspicion who was the man who kept the Liberal imperialists so alienated: ‘One of the main influences causing the determined support given by them to the Govt. SA policy has been Milner-worship.’19

  In the event, the election restored CB’s morale, although not the party’s fortunes. The Tories’ tactics were obvious enough: to impale the Opposition on the issue which above all divided them – South Africa; and to tar all Liberals, except the Liberal imperialists, with the ‘pro-Boer’ brush. The methods they used recoiled on them – at any rate, on Chamberlain.

  It was Chamberlain who was thought to have taken to extreme the use of ‘pro-Boer’ taunts. He chose as a kind of slogan the remark said to have been made by Whiteley, the loyalist Mayor of Mafeking (actually troublesome enough to B-P during the siege). The remark was: ‘Every seat lost to the government was a seat gained by the Boers,’ and it proved an explosive bullet indeed when Chamberlain’s speech was telegraphed to Lancashire with ‘gained’ accidentally transcribed as ‘sold’.20 In fact, other Conservatives and Unionists chose weapons equally remote from the unofficial Hague Convention usually observed at elections. A political cartoon, showing Liberals cheerfully supporting the Boers in the firing-line, was issued by party headquarters. Gerald Balfour, brother of Arthur and Chief Secretary for Ireland, used a stirring poster depicting K of K and Bobs alongside the patriotic text: ‘Our Brave Soldiers In South Africa Expect That Every Voter This Day Will Do His Duty Remember! To Vote For A Liberal Is A Vote To The Boer.’ And there was an uncharacteristic crudity about young Winston Churchill’s poster at Oldham: ‘Be it known that every vote given to the radicals means 2 pats on the back for Kruger and 2 smacks in the face for our country.’21

  The response was equally obvious, equally crude: to ‘go for Joe’ (CB’s phrase) and make Joe the Aunt Sally of the election.22 Dislike of Chamberlain was one of the few things that Liberals did not have to pretend to have in common: it came naturally. And it certainly suited CB to call this ‘Chamberlain’s election’, just as they talked of the war as ‘Chamberlain’s war’. There stood Joe, the Brummagen Goliath, challenging all comers. How CB was sickened by his vulgarity! The Liberals had been trapped: unable to broaden the election to include bread-and-butter issues, on which they could win seats and unite the party. So why not narrow the issue down to ‘Pushful Joe’?

  And this time, Goliath seemed to have met his David – David Lloyd George. ‘Unionists very glum,’ wrote CB on 30 September, after a barn-storming tour of Scotland. ‘Joe has overshot the mark, and three things damage him – the election trick, the publication of private letters, and the shares in contracting companies Then AJB is drivelling – and the others nowhere.23

  The last of the ‘three things’ had been most skilfully exploited (venomously, some said) by Lloyd George, the pushing young Liberal member for Caernarvon. Lloyd George’s charge was quite simply that Joe was a war-profiteer, exploiting the war to swell the profits of his family’s armaments firms, including Kynoch’s and a naval contractor’s called Hoskins.24 Kynoch’s was the principal private firm supplying the army with small-arms ammunition, and Joe’s brother, Arthur, who had taken over Joe’s business interests, had recently become chairman and a substantial shareholder.25 An irony probably not known to Chamberlain’s enemies was that the firm was actually in very bad odour with the War Office, because of late delivery and poor quality. In January, General Brackenbury had protested to Lansdowne (adding pointedly, ‘You can show the letter to Chamberlain’) that nearly half of Kynoch’s 303 ammunition — 1,749,000 out of 4,035,116 ball cartridges sent that week – had been rejected as below standard.26

  Most of Lloyd George’s political ammunition was also below standard. The charge of Joe’s war-profiteering because of his links with Kynoch’s, was just rhetoric. Joe and Arthur Chamberlain were two very different people, as Joe Chamberlain duly pointed out. Joe had sold all his shares in the family firms when he took office – at a loss, so he said. And, anyway, Kynoch’s was losing money. He answered these ‘abominable’ charges with the same maddening, all-steel, hand-on-the-heart manner that he had used to answer the charges of complicity in the Raid. (An extra irony was that Arthur Chamberlain was actually an old-fashioned Liberal who deplored Joe’s conversion to Unionism; Joe’s ‘wrong-doing’ and ‘reac
tion’, he told his own children, had brought ‘shame’ on the family.27)

  Lloyd George was unrepentant, and, on the charge that Joe’s family had profited from the naval contractors, Hoskins, he turned out to have a point – a debating point. Austen, Joe’s elder son, and a junior member of Salisbury’s government, had a small holding in Hoskins. Although, in fact, defence contracts were only a small part of Hoskins’s business,28 it was enough to poison the election from Chamberlain’s point of view. His frustrated anger, his sense of outrage at Lloyd George’s tactics (‘an avalanche of mud’ assailed him, wrote his shocked biographer),29 surprised even Tories like Balfour, who knew him well.30

  One sort of mud, however, was notable for its absence in the election campaign. The Liberals made almost no references to the drastic methods which Roberts had begun to adopt in an effort to end the war. Perhaps they were still unaware of the realities of war; even The Guardian’s war correspondent was slow to recognize the implication of Roberts’s farm burning, just as he had been slow to spot the scandal of Roberts’s hospital arrangements.31 On the other hand, they were acutely aware of the political danger, in a Khaki election, of attacking the gentlemen in khaki. Yet it is odd, considering the political storm that would soon burst over the government’s head because of farm burning, how meekly the Liberals accepted the policy at the time.

  Muddy or not, the ‘Khaki election’ certainly looked conclusive in its results. To say that it was a ‘drawn contest’, as The Daily Chronicle claimed, seemed an odd way of representing the polling. As predicted by Chamberlain, the government gained an even more copper-bottomed majority: 134 seats more than the Liberals and the Irish Nationalists combined. In votes, however, the country was more evenly divided: 2.4 million for the government, against 2 million for the Liberals, without counting the Irish votes. (So if every vote for a Liberal had been a vote for the Boers, as the Tories claimed, the Boers had won two million.)

  Naturally, these results raised the government’s spirits. Another six-year lease of life for a government that not even its best friends claimed was popular: this was a bonus that no one could have dared predict a year earlier. Despite the ‘abominable flood of slanders … on my unfortunate head’, Chamberlain was satisfied. He was delighted to hear of the victory of young Winston Churchill, for whom he had gone down to Oldham to speak (he owed it to Lord Randolph’s memory). He thought it curious that there were so few other changes on either side.

  That autumn, the weather was again glorious, and he found solace in reshaping his beloved garden at Highbury. ‘We are hard at work on the changes in the garden,’ he wrote on 12 October. ‘Austen has been indefatigable … in pruning trees and there has been a great deal of lopping of the old oaks.’ A fortnight later he was off on holiday to Gibraltar, sailing (to Punch’s mirth) aboard a warship called HMS Caesar.32

  The same glorious autumn weather found Salisbury at Hatfield, reshaping his Cabinet. He did not prune many of these trees or lop many of these old oaks. In fact, the changes, though small, certainly justified the gibes about Salisbury’s running the government like a family business, the ‘Hotel Cecil’ (himself, the two Balfours and Selborne). Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, was dropped overboard. Salisbury’s son-in-law, Selborne, came up into the Cabinet to replace Goschen. One old oak did receive some lopping: himself. He could no longer carry the double burden as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, so he gave Lansdowne the Foreign Office and Lansdowne handed over the War Office to St John Brodrick. New blood in the government included his own eldest son, Cranborne, as Lansdowne’s Under-Secretary.33 The ‘Hotel Cecil’ had increased its accommodation to five.

  Despite the massive majority against them, the Liberals drew comfort from the results of the election. There was a feeling that the government had played a fast one on the electorate, and they would not be forgiven.34

  CB himself was hopeful: ‘In the circs, we have not done badly.’ The results in Scotland had been ‘horrid’; his own majority had been cut to 630, as the Catholics voted for a Liberal Unionist. (The victory of Lloyd George at Caernarvon he no doubt regarded with mixed feelings.) CB was sure that ‘we shall never have so many adverse conditions again’. The natural divisions in the party, he believed, were not as great as people imagined, though there were extremists. The Roseberyites he regarded as ‘more insidious and deadly’. Indeed, it was on them that he largely blamed the fiasco of the last five years in opposition. ‘As long as he hangs on our flank we are paralysed.’35

  Another five years in the wilderness; it was, indeed, to be the fate of the party. Yet that paralysis was soon to be relieved by exciting events in the quarter least expected: in South Africa.

  The newly installed War Minister, St John Brodrick, had still hardly found his feet in the labyrinths of Pall Mall when he received a long, emotional, and disheartening letter from Milner. Brodrick was one of the few people to whom Milner could speak absolutely frankly. Brodrick was one of the ‘Souls’; his sister had married Philip Gell; Milner was one of her trustees. The letter, written in early November, predicted disaster in South Africa unless they adopted a more systematic military strategy. The men at the front were ‘all tired’. But the war was not, as Roberts still claimed, ‘practically over’. It had burst out in October in a more virulent form: guerrilla war. Milner put the blame fairly and squarely on Roberts. His arguments were of the same sort, though more violently put, than some of the ones Buller had expressed earlier:

  The fatal error is not to hold district A & make sure of it before you go on to district B-I mean the fatal error latterly, not at first when you had to rush. The consequence is we have a big army campaigning away in the front & the enemy swarming in the country behind it But it is no earthly use dashing about any more when there is nothing to get at the end of the dash, & you only wear out your footmen [sic] and kill your horses. The time for over-running is over … stage 2 is a gradual subjugation, district by district, leaving small entrenched & well-supplied garrisons behind your columns as they sweep the country & mounted police to patrol between these posts.36

  Milner regretted that Roberts had stayed so long; but he had little more confidence in Kitchener, who was shortly to replace him. ‘Kitchener, a man of great power, is stale. Worse than that, he is in a hurry. Now the essence of the business in its present form is that it must be done gradually.’ Milner boasted to Brodrick that he could do better than the generals. ‘What classical character does A. Milner most resemble?’ wrote Milner. ‘The answer is Cleon. Yes Cleon. He was, as you remember, a loud-mouthed, pushing demagogue (parallel perhaps not quite perfect [Milner’s own comment] at this point). But the great feature of his history was that he appealed to the Athenians against the military.’37

  What was Broderick to make of this extraordinary outburst? An increasingly bitter guerrilla war, an increasingly bitter rift between Milner and Kitchener: these were indeed serious matters. And Brodrick’s instructions from Salisbury and the Cabinet were based on Roberts’s opposite advice: that the war was ‘practically’ over. There were plans for bringing back various regular battalions. Already it had been agreed that the Canadian contingents should sail for Canada. The Imperial Yeomanry were leaving, too. The CIV had marched back into London at the end of October, their procession from the docks a kind of victory parade.38

  Was Milner exaggerating the dangers? The War Office, in December 1900, gave Brodrick little help. Wolseley’s twenty years of power were over. But Roberts himself was not due at the Horse Guards till early January.39

  Understandably, perhaps, Brodrick did not raise the alarm after receiving Milner’s private letter. At any rate, he took no steps to halt the planned reduction of the army in South Africa.[sup]40[/sup] That question would have to await the arrival of the new C-in-C at the War Office. Meanwhile, he reassured the Cabinet and hoped for the best.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Worm Turns

  South Africa,

  30 October – 16 December 1900r />
  ‘Low types of animal organism will survive injuries which would kill organisms of a higher type outright. They die, too … but it takes time. For the moment the severed pieces wriggle very vigorously …’

  Alfred Milner to Richard Haldane

  21 January 1901

  Milner was not exaggerating. Indeed, it is Roberts’s optimism that now seems so astonishing, considering the set-backs the British had suffered in the weeks before Milner wrote that letter. Spring had come, breathing new life into the veld, and into the commandos scattered over it. With spring came an intoxicating belief, fed by small successes in the field – a belief that the war was only just beginning. Valley after valley of the rugged south-western Transvaal had slipped back under the control of De la Rey’s guerrillas. In the great open plains either side of the Vaal, De Wet was back in his hunting-ground, snapping up convoys, swallowing prisoners; a small, swirling cloud on the horizon, the size of a dynamited train.1

  At the epicentre of this miniature cyclone, for a few days at the end of October, was a Transvaal farm called Cypherfontein, belonging to one of the Grobler family. It was in the Zwartruggen Hills, about seventy-five miles west of Pretoria. From this ridge, you could see for miles: to the south, the western Witwatersrand, grassy downs along whose crest Dr Jameson had ridden on his way from Mafeking to Doornkop; to the north, a chain of fertile valleys, watered by the rivers that flow down from the Witwatersrand – the Marico, the Elands, the Kosters and the Selous; to the east, the jagged grey crescent of the Magaliesberg, a safety curtain between these wooded valleys and Pretoria.

  It was a delightful place to camp in spring, Cypherfontein; so the State Attorney, Jan Smuts, now De la Rey’s second-in-command, later described it. ‘Our tents were hidden by the sweet-smelling mimosa now in full blossom, the grass was excellent for the animals, all around lay a district rich in forage for the horses, and oranges and nartjes [tangerines].’ In fact, the farm was strategically placed at the head of the Kosters River valley, near enough for attacking the lines of communication between Rustenburg and Zeerust, yet secluded enough to be safe from British farm-burning expeditions. Apart from the attractions of being, literally, a land of milk and honey, it had other amenities. There was a helio-graphist to exchange on-the-spot reports with the local commandos; the command of such a wide sweep of country made it an ideal helio-station. There was also a telegraph line a mile beyond the farm to give up-to-the-minute reports on their enemies. Incredibly, it had never dawned on Roberts’s Field Intelligence Department that their military telegraph line – the main line connecting Pretoria with Rustenburg and Zeerust – could be tapped by the Boer telegraph operator at this aptly christened farm of Cypherfontein.2