On her return in April, for a second look at Bloemfontein camp, she found all the improvements, inadequate as they were, had been swamped by the weight of new arrivals. ‘If only the camps had remained the size they were even six weeks ago,’ she reported, ‘I saw some chance of getting them well in hand, organizing and dealing with the distress. But this sudden influx of hundreds and thousands has upset everything, and reduced us all to a state bordering on despair.’24 In fact, the numbers at the camp had doubled since her last visit, and more were expected.
More and more are coming in. A new sweeping movement has begun resulting in hundreds and thousands of these unfortunate people either crowding into already crowded camps or else being dumped down to form a new one, where nothing is at hand to shelter them. Colonel [Goold-Adams] says, what can he do? The General wires: ‘Expect 500 or 1,000 at such a place.’ And he has nothing to send there to provide for them No wonder sickness abounds. Since I left here six weeks ago there have been 62 deaths in camp, and the doctor himself is down with enteric [typhoid]. Two of the Boer girls we had trained as nurses and who were doing good work are dead, too….25
At first, Emily Hobhouse herself hardly realized what was the most striking single fact about the camps: not the discomforts, nor hardships of life, but the appalling rate at which people were dying. ‘I began to compare a parish I had known at home of 2,000 people where a funeral was an event — and usually of an old person. Here some twenty to twenty-five were carried away daily The full realization of the position dawned upon me – it was a death-rate such as had never been known except in the times of the Great Plagues… the whole talk was of death – who died yesterday, who lay dying today, who would be dead tomorrow.’26
By April, she had seen enough. Those soldiers had been right. The whole system was a gigantic, lethal blunder. She must return to England as fast as possible to state the ‘plain facts’ to the British public.27
Her fifteen-page report to the Committee of the Distress Fund was first circulated to MPs and published in late June. It consisted of some letters home, carefully edited (no mention of ‘crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling’) and a summary of the camps’ chief defects: lack of fuel, bedding, soap, clothes; inadequate diet and water supply; overcrowding; bad sanitation. Her basic conclusion was that the whole system was cruel and should be abolished. All those who had friends or relations able to take them should be allowed to leave the camps. No further people should be brought into them. ‘May they stay the order to bring in more and yet more. Since Old Testament days was ever a whole nation carried captive?’ (She added to her recommendations one further one, showing how closely she identified herself with the Boer vrouw: ‘That considering the growing impertinence of the Kaffirs, seeing the white women thus humiliated, every care shall be taken not to put them in places of authority.’)28
This was the report that, coupled with Emily’s personal testimony, sent a shock-wave through the ‘pro-Boers’. Lloyd George and Ellis intensified their attack on the government in an adjournment debate on 18 June. Still more important, the shock at last dislodged CB from his place on the tight-rope between the two Liberal factions. Great emotion underlay the bantering tone. He told a Liberal dinner party at the Holborn Restaurant on 14 June that he was sickened by the policy of sweeping the women and children into camps, as the Spaniards had done in Cuba: ‘A phrase often used is that “war is war”. But when one comes to ask about it, one is told that no war is going on – that it is not war.’ (Laughter.) ‘When is a war not a war?’ (Laughter.) ‘When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.’ (Cheers.)29
Three days after CB’s outburst at the Holborn Restaurant, Lloyd George pinned down the government to a short adjournment debate on the subject in the Commons. The House, he said, must discuss as a matter of urgency the condition of the concentration camps, and ‘the alarming rate of mortality amongst the women and children detained there’. During Question Time earlier that day, Brodrick made two crucial admissions: there were now 63,127 people, white and black, in the camps (a much higher figure than ever previously admitted, though in fact much lower than the real figure); and deaths in the Transvaal camps in May totalled 336—39 men, 47 women, 250 children. Mortality figures for the other three colonies were still not available.30 It was enough for Lloyd George. ‘The answer given today proves that, so far from this being the result of temporary conditions, it is growing worse.’
These new figures, extrapolated over a year, gave a death-rate of twelve per cent, compared with the British army’s death-rate of five per cent at the height of the Bloemfontein epidemic. He accused the government of pursuing ‘a policy of extermination’ against the women and children. Not a direct policy of extermination, but a policy that would have that effect ‘I say that this is the result of a deliberate and settled policy. It is not a thing which has been done in twenty-four hours, for it has taken months and months to do it. The military authorities knew perfectly well it was to be done, and they had ample time to provide for it. They started clearing the country about six months ago, and it is disgraceful that 5 or 6 months after that children should be dying at the rate of hundreds per month.’
Why pursue this disgraceful policy, he asked; why make war against women and children? It was the men that were their enemies. ‘By every rule of civilized war we were bound to treat the women and children as non-combatants.’ The novel method of warfare adopted was all the more disgraceful because it would prolong, not shorten, the war. ‘We want to make loyal British subjects of these people. Is this the way to do it? Brave men will forget injuries to themselves much more readily than they will insults, indignities, and wrongs to their women and children.’ He concluded, after quoting Emily Hobhouse’s report: ‘When children are being treated in this way and dying, we are simply ranging the deepest passions of the human heart against British rule in Africa It will always be remembered that this is the way British rule started there, and this is the method by which it was brought about.’31
Half a dozen other radicals and one Irish nationalist echoed Lloyd George’s denunciation; and CB himself reasserted his own new radicalism. ‘It is the whole system which they [the Army] have to carry out that I consider, to use a word which I have already applied to it, barbarous.’ Why not (as proposed by Emily Hobhouse) release the internees who could fend for themselves? Above all, why not send out from England teams of properly qualified doctors and nurses to deal with the epidemics?32
To all such suggestions, well intentioned or not, Brodrick turned a bland face and a deaf ear. He repeated, for the twentieth time, that the policy of sweeping the country had been forced on them by the guerrillas. Some of the women had been assisting the enemy; others had been abandoned by them; none of them could be simply left on the veld to starve. As for the ‘alarming mortality figures’, he shrugged them off, secure in the knowledge that no one, least of all himself, knew the latest figures and the actual trend: ‘It is urged that we have not done sufficient to make these camps sanitary, and to preserve human life. I deny it altogether. It is said that they are going from bad to worse. Those who have been out there… assured me that things, so far from going from bad to worse, have been steadily ameliorating.’33
The concentration camp debate fizzled out, predictably, in cries of ‘Divide!’ and a downpour of heavy voting for the government: 252 against Lloyd George and his motion, compared with 149 in favour; the ‘Limps’ abstained.34 And there the matter rested for the moment, as far as the imperial Parliament was concerned. To make out their case against the government, the radicals needed to know more mortality figures. Kitchener kept the figures discreetly dark. It was not until 17 July that more or less complete returns were at last published, not until 16 August that the published returns confirmed the trend, and proved that Emily Hobhouse’s worst fears were true.
There were now 93,940 whites, 24,457 blacks in the so-called ‘camps of refuge’, and all the improvements had been swam
ped by the increase of numbers. Every month the deaths rose, relatively as well as absolutely: May, 550; June, 782; July, 1,675. Crisis was becoming catastrophe.35
But 16 August was almost the final day of the session for 1901; the next day, the House dispersed for its five-month holiday. No one bothered Brodrick with further questions about the camps. Both political parties were preoccupied, it must be said. Despite tactical losses and gains here and there, the strategic stalemate was unbroken in the war of attrition on the main battle-fronts: the double war of Kitchener against the Boers, and Kitchener against Milner; and, of course, the Liberals against each other.
Among the Liberals, CB’s ‘methods-of-barbarism’ speech in the Holborn Restaurant had set the cups and saucers rattling up and down the country. The jingo newspapers bellowed abuse. The Manchester Guardian and The Westminster Gazette offered their congratulations. The delight of the pro-Boers was matched by the indignation of the ‘Limps’. Rosebery regarded CB’s speech as evidence of a deliberate plan to widen the split in the party. The banquet was a ‘sinister event’ – in effect, a declaration of war by the centre and left on the right of the party. The party crisis that followed was labelled by Henry Lucy as ‘war to the knife and fork’. The ‘Limps’ counter-attacked in a series of furious engagements at dinner.36
After suffering for so long the indignities of guerrilla war from the ‘Limps’, CB found the open war stimulating. It gave him a chance of calling the ‘Limps’ bluff: did they want him to continue as leader? ‘You know me; you know my faults, and my good points if I have any It is for you to say whether I enjoy that confidence which my position necessarily requires.’ The result was, predictably, that the centre rallied around CB, and the ‘Limps’ had to put away their cutlery. They were divided from the Liberal Unionists on most domestic issues; they had nowhere to go except to slink back under the shade of CB’s umbrella. By early July, the nine days’ wonder was over. The ‘Limps’ over-reaction had confirmed CB’s position as leader of the party, for what that was worth. But, as Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, CB was still stalemated by them, paralysed by the loyalty that Asquith, Grey, and Haldane retained for Milner.
Milner had descended on London at the end of May, in time to stop any ‘wobbles’ by the ‘Limps’ in the direction of misplaced leniency. He had a similar job to do with regard to the government: to stop their wobbles in the direction of severity.
By persisting so unexpectedly, the war was certainly kind to the Conservatives and Unionists; it kept the inner strains of the alliance more or less under control (despite the squabbling between Hicks Beach and Lansdowne); it united the government as effectively as it divided the Opposition. But it did not give the Cabinet a clear-cut policy to agree on. They remained uncertain whose policy to pursue, as they had remained for months: Milner’s or Kitchener’s; the ‘policy of protection’ (of gently phasing out the war), or the policy of devastation (of trying to end it by some sudden, violent stroke). So far, the result of this uncertainty, not to say feebleness, was that the Cabinet had pursued a kind of blocking strategy against Kitchener. It was natural that, after meeting Milner in the flesh, the Cabinet should screw up their courage to try his policy.
The detailed course of negotiations between Milner and the cabinet is obscure. What is certain is that the new ‘protection policy’ (alias ‘localizing’ the war) hammered out in the Cabinet in late June, was basically the policy proposed all along by Milner.
There were many reasons for the Cabinet’s decision. In their hearts, most of them, doubtless, were queasy about Kitchener’s rough-and-ready methods of war, which culminated in the concentration camps. This was the irony behind the hullabaloo in the Commons caused by Emily Hobhouse’s report. Chamberlain, who remained a personal friend of pro-Boers like Harcourt, had never believed in Kitchener’s sweeping-and-scouring system, and no doubt shared Milner’s view, expressed the previous autumn, that to make war on women and children was ‘barbarous’.37
However, politically, the most telling argument against this policy was not a moral one. It was that Kitchener’s policy was not working: in short (as Milner could press on the Cabinet), worse than a crime, a blunder.
It says much for the subtlety of Milner’s diplomacy that at the time when he was moving heaven and earth to reverse Kitchener’s policy, he should be writing affably to the man himself, posing as a kind of honest broker between him and the Cabinet:
I have seen all sorts of people [he wrote to Kitchener in early June], statesmen, journalists, the man in the street. I have been doing nothing else since I came but sucking in opinions. In the clubs and drawing-rooms there is the usual Babel of nonsense. The country is as sound as a bell. The pro-Boer ravings produce astonishingly little effect. I don’t believe we have ever had a big war in which the Opposition has had less weight Any Ministry is much more likely to fall for not conducting the war with sufficient vigour, than for persisting in it with the greatest energy at any cost. On the other hand there is a very natural impatience, not at the war not being over – people are prepared to see it drag – but at the want of clearly visible progress. What is wanted, if people are to be kept in good humour with us – not in a rage with the Boers, which they will be anyway —is definite evidence that we are nearer the end by the end of the winter. With the end of winter they will want to see:
More [mine] stamps at work. Some considerable district clear of the enemy. Some reduction of the force in South Africa within sight. If these symptoms that we are progressing, even slowly, are forthcoming, they will stand a lot more. If not, they will not relent towards the enemy, but they will want some of our heads on a charger, possibly yours, more likely mine, still more likely the Ministry’s….38
Clearly visible progress. In other words, let the reconstruction begin. That was what Milner, in early June, said the public wanted. As for heads on the charger, he had his own preferences, and it was not either for his own or for St John Brodrick’s. He went to see Roberts in private and begged him: any hope of Kitchener’s going straight away to India?
Milner’s most telling arguments against Kitchener’s policy were financial. The British public might be ‘sound as a bell’, but how would their pockets feel when the latest bill for the war was presented? Apart from the Napoleonic Wars, it was the most ruinously expensive war in British history. The current bill was too high to pay out of direct taxation, even by raising income tax from [8d] to I/—, as Hicks Beach had been forced to raise it in 1901. The balance had to be borrowed from home and abroad.
On 2 July, the Cabinet made its wishes clear to Kitchener in a long cable sent through the mouth-piece of Roberts (who, incidentally, disapproved). The cable amounted to an ultimatum, or, at any rate, to a time-table: either Kitchener must end the war by September and the end of the South African winter, or he must adopt Milner’s policy:
We must now face the possibility that your winter campaign, however successful, will not conclude the war. Indeed its very success in reducing the larger commandos to small unorganized guerrilla bands may render some change of method necessary by the end of August … the winter once over, the Government do not think it either possible or desirable to continue indefinitely to spend £1,250,000 a week, and keep in South Africa 250,000 soldiers to deal with an enemy who cannot be crushed simply because they are too few and too scattered… estimated not to exceed 18,000 men. The Government also think that the first necessity of the new Colonies is to make a beginning in them of civil and industrial life….
The cable spelt out the ‘protection policy’: protecting the Rand and the other parts of the country that were potentially revenue-producing or populous or otherwise important; and then gradually pushing the lines outwards from these protected areas. This new policy, Kitchener was told, should enable him to reduce his army by 110,000, from 250,000 to 140,000 men on the pay-roll of the imperial government.39
First round, victory for Milner.
The reply received from Kitchener was predi
ctably masterful. He neither resigned nor turned the Cabinet’s scheme down flat. He stalled. For weeks, he argued about the phased reduction of the army, but gave no signs of being ready to carry it out. And here, it must be said, British successes and British reverses both came conveniently to hand as arguments on Kitchener’s side.
The column war – roughly sixty thousand British soldiers in mobile columns pursuing less than a third that number of Boers – was formless by nature. It seemed even more formless when relayed to London in Kitchener’s brusque cables. Who was winning? On the credit side, from the British point of view, was the ‘bag’: the monthly grand total of Boers killed, captured, or voluntarily surrendered. The total continued to be disappointingly small – 2,585 in May, 2,277 in June, 1,820 in July.40 This was progress, but only if the Boers received no reinforcements from among the Afrikaners of the Cape. Even then, the war could drag on for months, unless there was a sudden collapse of the guerrillas’ morale, speeding the rate of surrender and perhaps causing the Boer leaders to throw in the sponge.
This prospect seemed, certainly as regards the Free State, farther off than ever. It was a peculiar irony of this phase of the war that, by a double intelligence coup, the British now learnt just how firm was the Free State’s will to fight on.
The first opportunity was presented by a peace overture of Botha’s, whose gloomy result was known by the end of June: indeed, it helped precipitate the Cabinet’s desire to try a new policy.
The Boer War Page 81
