There were times when his vision of the ‘big things’ (and the ‘Greater Britain Idea’ was the biggest thing in his life, a shining sword, Excalibur, held out in a mystic white hand to his Knights of the Round Table), there were times when these Arthurian colours faded and the imperial vision blurred. Then he would tell his most intimate friends, playing Jonah, half seriously, in his letters that this endless grind could not continue. ‘I am naturally lazy.’4 Sometimes, during these black moods, he yearned to return to a life of ‘contemplative obscurity’;5 then he half-decided he would give up trying to make history and make millions instead. He actually wrote, that month, to warn Clinton Dawkins, now working for J. P. Morgan, the American financier, hinting that he might after all be available soon to join him in the City.6 He would throw up this whole Herculean labour in South Africa. Not that Hercules ever had this kind of bungling soldier, like General Clements, to deal with. He felt more like Sisyphus, fighting a war, his war, which kept rolling back on its author like a gigantic stone.7
Of course, these black moods soon blew themselves out, like the odious Cape south-easters. But he needed a break, a run home to England, he knew that. He would go in May if the war could spare him. Not that it would be much of a rest. Three years before, when there had been a lull in the diplomatic struggle with Kruger, he had taken a ‘holiday’ in England; and, delightful as it had been, it was a ‘rushy’ time (apart from the stolen five days on a bicycle with Cécile), so busy was he ‘sowing the seeds’, interviewing everyone who was anyone, ‘without seeming to run after them’, and stamping on ‘rose-coloured illusions’.8 He would have plenty of stamping to do on this coming visit. Besides, he had an exciting task: to recruit imperially minded young men (Cromer had set the style in modern Egypt), his own ‘Kindergarten’ they would be called, for the much bigger task of nation-building in modern South Africa.9 Thus, the visit to England would mark the beginning of peaceful exploitation of the war — provided always that K of K and his blundering generals allowed the process to begin.
K of K! What a chaos of emotions the initials aroused in Milner’s mind. There were few, if any, great men (apart from Rhodes) whom Milner so admired, and so fundamentally distrusted. With Buller, there was now no ambivalence on Milner’s part. Buller he accused of being ‘pro-Boer’, presumably meaning that Buller, as an old-fashioned Liberal, did not share Milner’s zeal for imperial expansion and believed that conciliation was the way to the hearts of the Afrikaners in the Cape. Kitchener could hardly have been accused of such sentimentality! Yet Milner, while recognizing K’s titanic qualities (since Roberts’s departure there was ‘a remarkable increase of energy, and more sense in the military management all round’), resented his tactless and autocratic way of handling things. He had blurted out to Violet Cecil, even before K had succeeded Bobs:
Kitchener! It is fortunate that I admire him in many ways so much, and admiring, that I am prepared to stand a lot and never take offence I am determined to get on with him, and I think he likes me and has some respect for me, if he has for anybody. But shall I be able to manage this strong, self-willed man ‘in a hurry’ … and to turn his enormous power into the right channel? At present he is wasting himself utterly … as he frankly confesses, he has no plan, is puzzled. I have a plan, but as yet he is unconvinced. …10
Now that K was in the saddle, would he be more susceptible to Milner’s whispered advice? It was hardly in character. Milner was now, in theory, civilian administrator of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, but was pointedly kept ignorant about plans for the war.
Kitchener is absolutely autocratic…. But I don’t mind that, if he will only end the war. I am quite willing to lie low, and let my administratorship be a farce, until the country is pacified, if there is only progress in that direction. And I know that he wants to go as soon as he can – therefore I shall just possess my soul in patience, till he has finished his rough work in his own strong way and not interfere with him. My only fear is that he may make promises to people,’ to get them to surrender, which will be embarrassing afterwards to fulfill. …11
‘Progress in the right direction.’ There was irony enough in the phrase. Ever since the capture of Pretoria, they had, Milner felt, been slipping slowly backwards. The month since K had taken over from Roberts had proved a month of rapid progress in the wrong direction.
Lord Bobs himself had been given a triumphant send-off from Cape Town on 10 December. No one could have felt warmer feelings towards the ‘little man’ than Milner, or felt a deeper sense of relief that he was going. It was not only that Roberts seemed ‘stale’ and played out. By his misplaced optimism, by claiming the war was practically over, Milner believed – and events were to prove him right – that Roberts had done great damage both at home and in South Africa. Hence Milner’s mixed feelings, expressed to Violet Cecil, about the great ovation for Bobs when he finally set sail. ‘We have all shouted ourselves hoarse over him and I am glad for his sake…, But I must own that, apart from him, there is something ill-omened, and bizarre and almost repulsive in all this triumphing and congratulations – in the middle of war.’ However, Milner could not help enjoying one part of the celebrations. There had recently been a ferocious attack on him, as a war-monger, in the local newspapers. Now, when Milner’s health was proposed at the banquet, a tremendous roar of applause broke out among the loyalists present, ‘which I was amused to see altogether bewildered Lord Bobs’s staff’.12 Milner had always prided himself on not caring a hoot about personal honours. When they came, he felt all the more surprised and touched.
The news of Clements’s disaster had followed in the week after Bobs’s triumph, and tonight, 17 December, the news was worse.
The telegrams reported the invasion of Cape Colony by three thousand Boers (actually two thousand) led by General P. H. Kritzinger and Judge Barry Hertzog. Although De Wet had been foiled in his own attempt to lead them across the Orange River, Kitchener in his turn had been foiled in his attempt to trap De Wet in the south of the old Free State, between the Orange and the Caledon Rivers. So it was still on the cards that De Wet would break loose again, follow Kritzinger, and raise the Cape.13
The fact that these Boers from the Free State could slip through the hands of the enormous number of troops guarding the frontier, and spill out again, nearly a year after the collapse of their first invasion, into the great empty plains of the Cape, was naturally most depressing to Milner. The political consequences of the invasion were what terrified him most. Milner shared with Smuts (though neither could yet have known it) the heady belief that a general Afrikaner rising in Cape Colony was to be expected, once given the lead. Milner believed that, despite their firm measures to stamp out the Prieska revolt six months before — the arrest of Afrikaner rebels, the collection of arms and ammunition, and the gathering up of food and horses that could be used by the enemy – the whole of Cape Colony, outside the main towns, where the British were in the majority, was still tinder-dry for revolution. He attributed this almost entirely to the effective propaganda of the Afrikaners, who were, of course, the white majority in Cape Colony. It was partly the ‘saturnalia’ of violence in the Cape Assembly, during the three-month session that had ended in October; open defiance of the government and ‘outspoken treason’ by members of the Afrikaner Bond, encouraged in its turn by the absurdly ‘meek and apologetic’ attitude of the loyalists in the coalition government, led by Rhodes’s nominee, Gordon Sprigg. It was also due to the ‘unbridled influence’ of Press and pulpit. Parsons of the Dutch Reformed Church, as leaders of the local farming communities, were reported to be preaching a crusade against the Empire. Together, these ‘rebels’ had seized on certain ‘acts of harshness’ by British troops in the last few embittered months of guerrilla war and distorted them to create an atmosphere of ‘national hysteria’.
How was he to cope with this doubly alarming situation: the guerrilla war in the ex-republics, which was spreading down into the colony; and the enemy wit
hin, the Afrikaner ‘traitors’ who were egging on the Boers to invade? Milner had absolutely no doubt what should be done. First, if he was not allowed to suspend the self-governing constitution of Cape Colony (‘the system is an impossible one’), at least the loyalists should be armed in their own defence, and martial law proclaimed to help deal with the traitors.14 Second, in the two new colonies, Kitchener should adopt his – that is, Milner’s – military plan.
In fact, the invasion of the Cape by Kritzinger and Hertzog, painful though Milner found it, provided him in the next fortnight with exactly the opportunity he needed to achieve the first of these aims. Every mile that Kritzinger’s commandos rode southwards brought martial law nearer. By the end of December, Kritzinger was riding (literally) down to Bangor, and Milner was writing, exhausted but triumphant, in his diary: ‘Dec 31: I managed by a gigantic effort to galvanise people into activity today. Prolonged interviews with Sprigg, the General, and Rose Innes [Attorney-General], finally resulted in a “call to arms” of all loyal inhabitants issued by the military. I am also pressing for Martial Law.’15
By 17 January, Sprigg had grasped the nettle in both hands: martial law for virtually all the colony, except the native districts and the Cape ports; the creation of a loyalist militia that was soon to comprise ten thousand men. And, as if by magic, Kritzinger’s invasion began to fizzle out.16
If only, thought Milner, he had had the same help from the Boers in dealing with Kitchener, and so pacifying the Transvaal and the Free State. Indeed, the precise opposite was to be the case. Milner soon found himself paying the political price for Kitchener’s military blunders at an exorbitant rate of interest.
The military plan that Milner had proposed first to Roberts, then to Kitchener, could hardly have been more different from the one actually adopted. It was a plan for progressive reconquest of the two new colonies by ‘gradual securing of each district before tackling the next, and slowly occupying the country, bit by bit, rather than rapidly and repeatedly scouring it’. Milner believed (and, as we have seen, Buller shared this view) that Roberts’s fatal mistake, the result of his misplaced optimism, had been his failure to garrison and police each district before marching on to the next one. ‘What the bulk of the people [in the new Orange River Colony] require is protection not punishment,’ he told Kitchener in October. ‘I do not mean to say that they do not all hate us. They do. But they love their property more than they hate the British and … would be glad to see the back of the Guerrillas.’
As well as being the most efficient way of ending the war, this system would have two other vital advantages. First, it would avoid the need further to devastate the country, with all the legacy of bitterness that would create. Second, the key to the Transvaal was, of course, to get the wheels of the gold-mines turning. And the moment Johannesburg was made a protected area, the mines could begin to reopen and the Uitlanders, howling in the refugee camps of the Cape, could be allowed back up the railway to their homes in the Rand.17
Instead, repeated Milner in early January, it was a ‘farce’ to talk of himself as administrator of the new colonies, as the government was only holding the lines of the railway and a few big towns and ‘confining our operations in the rest of the country to chasing commandos whom we never catch’.18 Of course, he did not doubt that, with such overwhelming military superiority, they would wear down the guerrillas in the end, whatever policy they adopted. ‘But I fear that on present lines we shall be at it for another 12 months, and that the amount of destruction [and, he might have added, political damage] will be enormous.’ It was this unnecessary devastation, the burning of crops, the burning of houses (as opposed to Milner’s plan simply to remove horses), the sieving, scrubbing, scouring of the whole countryside, that sickened Milner.19 ‘I believe if we were to devastate the whole of South Africa,’ he had forecast ‘— an impossibility anyway – we should only find that we had a greater number of roving blackguards to deal with.’ He added (and it was a prophetic phrase, though he scratched it out with his pen) ‘besides tens of thousands of homeless women and children to keep and feed – Heaven knows how or where’.20
This was Milner’s bitter forecast to which he still held fast in February. Now, however, his thoughts turned to a prospect that he regarded with still more horror than that of a protracted and destructive war: the prospect, offered by a plan for Kitchener to parley with Botha at Middelburg, of an immediate negotiated peace. This was the short-cut he dreaded: some kind of botched-up settlement, a ‘Kaffir bargain’, he called it. It would not only save the faces of the Boer leaders, but preserve the separate identity of the volk as a political force after the war. Anything rather than accept that: even the risk of a ‘smash-up’, meaning his own resignation.21
Privately, he felt ‘totally opposed’ to any peace terms for these ‘banditti’. ‘It is a question of staying power pure and simple,’ he wrote to a trusted New College friend. ‘The future is all right here, if we can bring the war to a clean finish. Otherwise we had better clear out bag and baggage at once. There is no room for compromise in South Africa.’22 He repeated the same message – the arcana imperii — to the Liberal imperialist he trusted most, Haldane. They must shut their ears to the ‘pro-Boers’ and ‘screamers’. They must get the job ‘cleanly done’, finished once and for all. They must be ‘victors, out and out, and past a doubt.’23 That was his aim: total victory, ‘to knock the bottom’, he revealed in a phrase his biographer excised later, ‘out of the “great Afrikander nation” for ever and ever Amen’.24
Milner was certainly correct about one thing: that Kitchener, confident as he was of victory, was baffled in his search for the means needed to achieve it.
Ironically, these peace talks with Botha, now planned to take place at Middelburg in the eastern Transvaal at the end of February, were indirectly the result of one of Milner’s own ‘thoughts’ expressed to Kitchener – to send delegates of prominent Boers to persuade the others to come in from the cold. Kitchener had taken up the idea, but with disappointing results. Piet De Wet, Christiaan’s brother, who had surrendered in July, was sent down to Cape Town as a prize exhibit of a tame guerrilla. But these ex-heroes were cold-shouldered by the Afrikaner Bond Party and the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape.25 When these surrendered Boers tried to explain to their brothers in the field that the game was up, they found, on the contrary, that it was their own lives which were forfeit. With uncharacteristic ruthlessness – as we have seen, Smuts was one of the men who carried on this policy – the Boers court-martialled and sentenced as traitors men who had collaborated with the British. Morgendal, an emissary to De Wet’s laager, was first flogged and then shot by General Froneman in a paroxysm of rage. Meyer de Kock, the Secretary of the ‘Burgher Peace Committee’ (formed soon after Christmas), was sentenced and executed.26 So the Burgher Peace Committee did not long survive the season of goodwill.
How, then, Kitchener asked himself, to approach Botha with the news that, on very reasonable terms, peace was there for the asking? There were some intermediaries old enough or frail enough to be in no danger of being shot. In November, Mrs Joubert, the general’s widow, had been persuaded to take an appeal to Louis Botha, urging him to accept the inevitable; the appeal, reflecting the views of twenty-four leading citizens of Pretoria, was written by Sammy Marks, Kruger’s famous protegé, the Jewish millionaire who had built up his business empire in the Transvaal, after acquiring the lucrative whisky concession. Marks begged Botha to tell Reitz and Steyn of his intervention quite openly (‘I should not like anybody to say or think old Marks is going to make a lot of money out of the British Government and that is why he is writing to the General’). He estimated that there were only ten thousand burghers still under arms in the field. How could this pygmy army hope to prevail against the mighty British Empire? ‘Ours is not the first country that has fought and lost, nor will it be the last. Bigger and greater nations than ours have had to acknowledge themselves beaten ‘ He reminded Botha of h
is resolution on the previous 5 June – this was the day when there had been a great council of war in Marks’s office at Hatherley, near Pretoria – a resolution, apparently, to continue with regular war but not to fight as guerrillas. And he warned Botha that the price of the war would be paid by the women and children: the widows and orphans, and the families who would lose everything as the country was progressively destroyed. ‘Do you not think that, as a man, a general, a husband and a father, you should determine to make the best of things and prevail upon others to do the same?’ Another appeal to Botha was written by a prominent Boer called Junius, who had opposed Kruger’s hard-line policy before the war: ‘Our cause is hopeless; if we were not convinced of this we would, with thousands of others, still be with you this day. However, Paul Kruger has brought us so far, and now left us in our misery…. You and other Progressive Raad members did try your best to avoid this unfortunate war, but Kruger could not and would otherwise…. The Afrikander looks upon you as the only strong man who could make an end to the war.’27
The replies to these appeals were somewhat puzzling. Botha accused the intermediaries of being traitors. So did A. H. Malan, one of Botha’s aides, writing to Sammy Marks. The twenty-four leading burghers of Pretoria who were pressing for peace talks included many who had been most active in instigating the war: ‘Those who brought it about or gave cause to our real enemies to jump upon us have long ago left the field, and in a great many instances never did anything. It would be a blessing to the country were they all expelled from it and sent to Ceylon….’ Malan stressed the paradox that ‘most of my brother officers still in the field and most of the burghers still defending their rights belong to the party that opposed the war most strenuously and also everything that could lead to it’. However, what was promising about Malan’s reply was that he said that if the British wanted peace it was they who must make the first move. ‘If we are to lose our independence, which is still a matter of doubt, yet we are not prepared to sacrifice our honour as well by coming as dogs to sue for peace… let him [Roberts] then as the stronger offer such to the weaker direct.”28
The Boer War Page 77
