He was not unduly worried now. The secret of Milner’s recent triumph over Kitchener was the care he had taken to prepare the ground at ‘Headquarters’, where his old Balliol chum, St John Brodrick, was War Minister, with a seat in the Cabinet. He had packed off Hanbury Williams, his own Military Secretary, to serve as St John’s Private Secretary. It was a wrench to lose Hanbury, but Milner was taking no chances. There must be no ‘wobbles’ at home – either in the Cabinet, or among his own allies in the Opposition. Hence the need to ‘cut sticks’, and go back for a spell at Headquarters himself, to prepare for the first moves of the new game: reconstruction under arms.78
In the last two months, Milner had begun some of the groundwork in the Transvaal. He had acquired a splendid, red-tiled villa on the hills north of Johannesburg; Milner laughingly compared it to the ‘residence of a prosperous tradesman at Hendon or Chislehurst’; it had its back to the mine shafts of the Rand, and commanded ‘magnificent rolling country’ up to the Magaliesberg. In fact, it was ‘Sunnyside’ – the suburban HQ belonging to Wernher-Beit, next to Hohenheim where the Raiders had dreamed and plotted. Milner said he liked it because it faced north – towards home.79 But did it not have somewhat unfortunate associations, this new imperial HQ? If there were protests, Milner allowed himself to ignore them. The economic future of South Africa depended largely on the late owners of Sunnyside. Now the origins of the war were forgotten, and the war itself was fading away, their alliance with the imperial government would become eminently respectable. In fact, Milner had chosen a mine manager, Wybergh, as one of a four-man team running the new Transvaal administration.80
Already, behind Sunnyside, the mine chimneys were beginning to smoke and the mine wheels beginning to turn once more. Protesting about the extra transport it cost him, Kitchener had allowed a trickle of both black and white miners back to the Rand. Three hundred and fifty mine stamps were now in operation, and a trickle of gold had begun to flow into the vaults of Wernher-Beit.’81 It might be only a drop in the ocean, compared to what was needed to reshape South Africa. It was a beginning.
On board the Saxon, Milner felt ‘mentally torpid’. No doubt it was a reaction to the struggle with Kitchener. He played a little whist some days; he chatted to some congenial lady passengers; and, of course, he counted the hours till he would be back at ‘Headquarters’, back with his friends at Duke Street, St James’s.
One of the lady passengers on the Saxon whom he did not find so congenial was a dumpy, middle-aged English spinster called Emily Hobhouse. Milner had given her lunch in February (she had letters from influential Liberals), and helped arrange for her to tour the burgher refugee camps. He now regretted his generosity. There had been numerous protests about her trouble-making, especially protests from loyalist ladies. A ‘pro-Boer’, he realized, and a ‘screamer’, too. Milner lay in his deck-chair, and dismissed Miss Hobhouse from his mind. At Madeira, he received a ridiculous cable that the Cabinet was going to make him a peer. The cable must be a hoax.
On 24 May, the Saxon docked at Southampton. The voyage had been as uneventful as that dreary voyage home on the Scot two and a half years before. And there the similarity ended. In 1898, he had slipped into England, almost unknown, a man of the shadows, a death duties expert, sustained by a private dream of‘big things’. Now he belonged to the public; he was the Empire made flesh.
Milner found that most of the government had come to celebrate his apotheosis on the platform at Waterloo: Salisbury, Balfour, Chamberlain, Lansdowne, as well as Lord Roberts. To prove their impatience to honour him, Salisbury and Chamberlain whisked him off immediately in an open landau, and then drove through cheering crowds to be received by the King at Marlborough House. Milner arrived back at his lodgings under the heady name of Baron Milner of St James’s (after these lodgings) and Cape Town.
How Milner was later to regret his own fatal blunder at this moment of triumph. He still dismissed Emily Hobhouse as a ‘pro-Boer’ and a ‘screamer’. In fact, the story she told was only too true. Over sixty thousand men, women and children were now stuffed in those ‘refugee’ camps set up by Kitchener. Their population was rising like the waters in a dam. But where were the doctors, the matrons, the orderlies; the clothes and blankets; the medicines and comforts? It was the twin spirit of neglect and red tape – the Exham spirit – that had haunted the white tents at Bloemfontein a year earlier. And this year the rows of tents were not intended for soldiers used to the ways of the barrack room. They were for women and children, used to the free life of the veld, and (for the richer farmers) ubiquitous African servants. Now they were themselves treated like Africans, herded in, exhausted, destitute, starving, to Kitchener’s camps of ‘refuge’.82
As the telegrams of congratulation flooded into Milner’s lodgings in Duke Street, Emily Hobhouse set off on her own self-appointed mission to waken the conscience of England. Epidemics had broken out in the camps and were spreading with terrifying rapidity.
CHAPTER 39
‘When is a war not a war?’
London and South Africa, 1901
‘Ons mans, kinders, vaders, broers, susters, huis, alles ja alles moet ons agterlaat, en ons – wat sal van ons word?’ (‘We must leave our menfolk, children, fathers, brothers, sisters, house, everything, yes everything, and us – what shall become of us?’)
Maria Fischer’s diary for 29 May 1901, the day she was taken off to a British concentration camp
Emily Hobhouse lost no time in telling her story to any politicians who would listen.
She was an odd choice for the leader of a great moral crusade, this dumpy, forty-one-year-old spinster from Cornwall. Passionate in public, yet inwardly reserved and lonely, a refugee from the claustrophobia of Victorian family life, she had spent years in a remote village near Liskeard as companion to her father, an invalid archdeacon. Her first taste of freedom came at thirty-five, when she vanished into the wilds of Minnesota, where she laboured to convert Cornish miners to temperance. Then she went back to England (after being jilted by a fiancé in Mexico), just as the war-clouds gathered.1 Her political patron was her uncle, Lord Hobhouse, a distinguished Liberal of the old school and a friend of the ‘pro-Boers’, Harcourt and Courtney.2 So it was natural she should fling herself, head and heart, into the work of the ‘pro-Boers’’ relief fund, the South African Women and Children Distress Fund. Humour, tact, organizational power, common prudence: they were not her gifts. (Lord Hobhouse: ‘Oh well, we’ve tried prudence, and we’ve tried caution. Perhaps a little imprudence may do better.’)3 Emily Hobhouse was no Florence Nightingale. But she was aglow with moral indignation. And she, she alone, had seen the camps.
In the first week of June, St John Brodrick gave her a long hearing at the War Office. He listened to her recommendations politely. In fact, they were reasonable enough – indeed, too reasonable, it would turn out. Brodrick did not commit himself.4 A week later, she saw Campbell-Bannerman. His reaction was more than polite. He listened aghast. As she poured out her story – ‘the wholesale burning of farms … the deportations … a burnt-out population brought in by hundreds of convoys … deprived of clothes … the semi-starvation in the camps … the fever-stricken children lying … upon the bare earth… the appalling mortality’ – CB began to murmur something to himself: ‘Methods of barbarism … methods of barbarism.’ It was a phrase that would soon echo round the world.5
The story she told was, indeed, shocking to anyone not committed to believe in the inevitability of the war, and of harsh methods to end it. To CB it threatened to precipitate a political, as well as a moral, crisis. Despite his solid, reassuring figure (‘well suited to a position of … a sleeping partner in an inherited business’, said Beatrice Webb, the Fabian and imperialist), CB was often depressed these days. ‘I agree with all you say,’ he told Lord Ripon in January, ‘as to the black outlook and the Slough of Despond in which we are wallowing at the Cape.’6 The slough seemed, if anything, deeper in May. Paradoxically, CB’s position as
official leader of the Opposition had not been improved by the reaction against the government after the Khaki election, when the public discovered how hollow were those claims that the war was ‘practically’ over. For the war in South Africa continued to breed war within the Liberal Party: ‘pro-Boers’ shooting it out with the Liberal imperialists (‘Limps’); CB trapped in no-man’s-land between them; and all three fair game for Joe and the government. Where was CB to find a common target for his own party? Certainly not in the increasingly bitter debate about the way that the war was being conducted.
Apart from the way it maddened the ‘Limps’ to criticize the handling of the war they believed was a just war, there was the question of the electorate. ‘We must be very careful’ wrote CB, ‘not to take any line which might seem to be anti-British, for our countrymen, though sick at heart, are all the more touchy and obstinate….’7 Hence CB stayed, heavily upright, on the greasy pole between the two Liberal extremes, motionless, apart from occasionally waving his arms to keep his balance.
Since the first South African debate of this year – the debate on the Address in February – this arm-waving had attracted little attention. He concentrated on the two main points on which he believed he could be critical without seeming unpatriotic: on the government’s insistence on ‘unconditional’ surrender, and the policy of farm burning and deliberate devastation. But the first point had become partly academic since the publication of the terms offered to Botha at Middelburg. CB could only criticize the refusal to give the amnesty to colonial rebels. On the second point, the relevant facts were frustratingly obscure. For the government claimed (optimistically, it turned out) that Kitchener had reversed Roberts’s policy, and only resorted to farm-burning in exceptional cases. And, as CB himself soon ‘cordially’ seconded the proposal to grant Roberts £100,000 for his services, his strictures were not calculated to be too wounding.8
By contrast, Loyd George, in full cry at the head of the ‘pro-Boer’ pack, infuriated both the government and the ‘Limps’. He exulted in attacking not merely the system, a great deal more vigorously than CB, but (unlike CB) attacked the army itself. He quoted a notice posted up by General Bruce Hamilton, who had burnt the town of Ventersburg and then told the women and children to go and apply to the commandos for food. ‘This man is a brute,’ said Lloyd George, ‘and a disgrace to the uniform he wears.’ He quoted a Reuters report, describing (correctly) how there were two scales of rations for the ‘refugees’ in the burgher camps, the lower scale being for those whose husbands and fathers were on commando. ‘It means that unless the fathers come in their children would be half-starved. It means that the remnant of the Boer army who are sacrificing everything for their idea of independence are to be tortured by the spectacle of their starving children into betraying their cause.9
The attack on the camp system had been taken up by two other radical MPs, C. P. Scott and John Ellis. It was these two who first used in March an ominous phrase, ‘concentration camps’, taking it from the notorious reconcentrado camps, set up by the Spanish to deal with Cuban guerrillas.10
It was Ellis who sent out his relative, Joshua Rowntree, to report on the camps. When Rowntree was refused entry into the two new colonies by Kitchener, Ellis’s instincts were aroused.11 Brodrick continued to insist that the camps were ‘voluntary camps’; the inmates went there, of their own free will, as refugees. Ellis charged – correctly, of course – that most were effectively prisoners. How many lived in them, asked Ellis in March, and, indeed, how many had already died in them?12 Although he and Lloyd George had little enough information of their own (despite their links with Afrikaners at the Cape), they succeeded in exposing St John Brodrick as apparently having still less.13 It was not till April that the House was given the first statistics of the numbers in the Transvaal camps (21,105); not till May, those of the ORC —Orange River Colony – and Natal (19,680 and 2,524 respectively).14 Even then, the facts remained extremely obscure. For example, Brodrick claimed – erroneously – that many of these ‘refugees’ were coloured people. As for the death-rate in the camps, all he could say was that there had been several hundred deaths in the early months of the year: that is, 284 in the Transvaal and 382 in the ORC.15 These were high, but not outrageously high death-rates for a period of several months. Less reassuring were the reports of Joshua Rowntree, and of a mission of Cape Afrikaners who arrived in England to lobby the Liberals. But they, of course, had not visited the camps. It was in this that lay the overwhelming importance of Emily Hobhouse and her story.
She did not claim to know the latest statistics. What she said– and she repeated it not only to politicians, like CB, but at public meetings all over the country — was that she had seen the conditions in the camps. They were bad, and they were deteriorating.
In brushing off criticism of the camps, Brodrick’s original claim was that they were well-run refugee camps, designed to encourage the Boers to come in and surrender. After Lloyd George and Ellis had exposed this as largely humbug, Brodrick developed a new double line of defence. Speaking to the brief supplied by Kitchener, he claimed that the camps were both a military and moral necessity. The country had to be cleared of food, and how could the women and children be left to starve? He also claimed that there had originally been certain discomforts in camp life, but that everything possible was now being done to alleviate these. The fullest exposition of this reassuring line was given by Leo Amery, The Times correspondent, in a long cable sent from Bloemfontein on 18 June. Amery stressed that the death-rate was ‘rapidly decreasing’, and that nothing augured better for the new administration than the ‘progress’ in the ‘refugee camps’ like the camp at Bloemfontein.16
Now came an eye-witness account from Emily Hobhouse of what progress looked like at Bloemfontein. She first visited Bloemfontein, the largest of the ORC camps (and one where thousands were to die of disease) on 24 January 1901. There were eighteen hundred people then in the camp: a village of white bell-tents, dumped down on the southern slope of a kopje rising from the brown veld.17 She found the city’s military governor, Major-General Pretyman, hospitable and co-operative – indeed, anxious to know what she thought of the place. She was not long in telling him. She had imagined that her mission was to distribute her twelve tons of ‘little extras’ paid for by the relief fund —comforts, clothes and so on – and she found that the bare necessities were lacking.
The shelter was totally insufficient. When the 8, 10, or 12 persons who occupied a bell-tent were all packed into it, either to escape from the fierceness of the sun or dust or rain storms, there was no room to move, and the atmosphere was indescribable, even with duly lifted flaps. There was no soap provided. The water supplied would not go round. No kartels [bedsteads] or mattresses were to be had. Those, and they were the majority, who could not buy these things must go without. Fuel was scanty The ration [the punitive double scale was still in force] was sufficiently small, but when… the actual amount did not come up to the scale, it became a starvation rate.18’
She applied to a friendly superintendent to supply the most vital deficiencies: soap, forage, more tents, brick boilers for drinking water, a tap water supply. He duly requisitioned for them. After three weeks, back came the official reply: agreed to supply soap (at an ounce a week per head) and to build brick boilers; but forage ‘too precious’ and tap water impossible as ‘the price was prohibitive’. Still more ominous, the camp latrines were quite inadequate, and the authorities negligent in dealing with them. Hour after hour, the unemptied pails stood in the sun, making the tents, downwind of them, unbearable to live in.19
In dealing with soldiers – the masters of this man’s world – Emily did her best to keep a civil tongue and a stiff upper lip. Her own feelings, feminine and feminist, poured out in letters home: ‘The authorities are at their wits’ end – and have no more idea how to cope with the … difficulty of providing clothes for the people than the man in the moon. Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and mu
ddling. I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can, because it is good for them; but I can’t help melting a little when they are very humble and confess that the whole thing is a grievous mistake and gigantic blunder and presents an almost insoluble problem and they don’t know how to face it.’20
After Bloemfontein, Emily set off by train, with her wagon-load of comforts, to inspect as many of the other camps as Kitchener – and De Wet – would permit. She was able to see half of those administered by the ORC – Norvals Pont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. She also saw one – Mafeking – administered from the Transvaal.21 Her conclusion was that all the camps, in varying degrees, shared the defects of the Bloemfontein camp. Precisely how bad conditions were depended on circumstance: how energetic the superintendent, how near the supply of water and fuel, how distant the base, how helpful the public nearby, and how early the camp was started (for the earliest camps got first pick of supplies).22
Meanwhile, as Emily travelled round the hopelessly congested railway likes, Kitchener’s columns began a new series of ‘drives’. Everywhere along the railway she saw the resulting ‘bag’: open trucks full of women and children, exposed to the icy rain of the high veld, sometimes left in railway sidings for days at a time, without food or shelter. The sight shocked her even more than the sight of the camps. For the camps bore at least the appearance of order: neat villages of white tents, numbered in military style, so that you could find your way round. In the railway sidings what you could see was war unvarnished: truck-loads of homeless mixed up with the animals of the veld, ‘frightened animals bellowing and baaing for food and drink, tangled up with wagons … and a dense crowd of human beings’. Here was ‘war in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness’.23
The Boer War Page 80
