He shut himself up in his bedroom and refused to see anyone – or eat anything – for two days. Then the Brat managed to coax him out of his hole, and sternly told him that if ‘we’ felt rotten, as Kitchener himself admitted (‘My nerves have gone all to pieces,’ were K’s own words), then this was quite the most natural thing in the world, as ‘we’ hadn’t eaten a thing for two days. K meekly agreed, and ate a hearty breakfast.60
However, it turned out that the Boers, as usual, were unable to turn a tactical victory to any strategic account. De la Rey was driven back onto the defensive. A fortnight later, Kitchener heard that a six-man delegation of Boers, led by Schalk Burgher (acting President of the Transvaal since Kruger had sailed for Europe), were taking the train to Pretoria to talk about ending the war.61
CHAPTER 42
Peace ‘Betrayed’
Pretoria,
11 April-June 1902
Not by lust of praise or show,
Not by Peace herself betrayed –
Peace herself must they forgo
Till that peace be fitly made …
Rudyard Kipling, The Pro-Consuls
There was only one satisfactory way to end the war, Milner told his crèche, and that was ‘by winning it’.1 He now waited, heart in mouth, as the special train carrying Botha, Smuts, De Wet, Steyn, and the other leaders, clanked into Pretoria on the evening of 11 April.2 Was this victory, the clear-cut military victory that Milner had yearned for ever since 1897, the victory that would give him a free hand to ‘break the mould’ and recast South Africa, as Cromer had recast Egypt (and, indeed, Milner’s hero, Bismarck, had recast Germany)? In other words, had the Boers come to discuss the military details of surrender? Or had they, by contrast, come to bargain about peace?
The idea of peace, on political terms negotiated between governments, filled Milner with a kind of disgust. Peace terms meant compromise – and, as he had admitted to his intimates, ‘there is no room for compromise in South Africa’.3 His loathing for British parliamentary democracy (‘that mob at Westminster’)4 was all the keener because of his own sense of helplessness at this supreme moment:
I see things as they are, and recognize that it is a fool’s trick to waste the energy and devotion of a 1,000 men in trying to do the impossible, and to keep an Empire for people who are dead set on chucking it away. I could wrestle with Boers for ever. But British infatuation is too much for me. What with our sentimentality, our party system, our Government by Committee, our ‘Mandarins’, our ‘Society’ and our Generals The game is just hopeless. It’s rather hard on the nation, a sound nation as ever was, but that’s not enough…. Our political organization is thoroughly rotten, almost non-existent… Never was there such an absurd waste of power, such ridiculous inconsequence of policy – not for want of men, but for want of any effective central authority, or dominant idea, to make them work together. Joe is a strong man. Under other stars he might be as big as Cavour or Bismarck. But all he can do is maintain himself. K is a strong man, but all he is doing is to paralyse me. Rosebery is not a strong man…. Yet his influence has, in the main, been exceedingly mischievous. He has ruined the Liberal Imperialist movement by putting himself at the head of it, I can’t say leading it, for he is incapable of leading anything After all, the only people who know their own minds, and constantly, if with a pathetic feebleness, strive in the same direction, are our poor old South African loyalists ‘’5
No wonder Milner styled himself ‘Sisyphus’, and was often talking of abandoning his political dreams, and returning to the pleasant obscurity of private life. Yet now, if this was in fact to be the beginning of peace negotiations, everything depended on him. Could he save South Africa – British South Africa – from a disastrous peace? Above all, could he stop Kitchener from throwing away their own trump card, that they had no need to end the war?6
Milner was not kept long in suspense. The Boers had, in fact, come to bargain for peace, and he himself was not invited to the first meeting. Yet even Kitchener had to admit that the Boers’ proposals were somewhat unreal. On 11 April, the Boer delegates produced a plan for a ‘perpetual treaty of friendship and peace’ which would settle all the points of difference between governments, including the franchise. The proposal explicitly stated that the Boers did not recognize the annexation of the republics. After desultory argument, the terms of the offer were cabled to Brodrick, and were, of course, rejected out of hand.7
It was not until 14 April that Milner, now permitted to negotiate jointly alongside Kitchener, first met his adversaries. He shook hands with them all: the ten leaders of the two republics. He found them surprisingly fit (no doubt to his irritation), all except for Steyn. The proceedings he found ‘farcical’. Kitchener, to his disgust, was ‘extremely adroit in his management of negotiations, but he does not care what he gives away’.8 Milner cabled his protests to Chamberlain: they must at all costs try to nail down the Boers – and Kitchener – to the terms of the abortive Middelburg peace conference held the previous year. He asked for ‘definite instructions’ on the most important points. Above all, they must not go beyond what Kitchener had proposed at Middelburg as regards the length of time the ex-republics would be governed directly as Crown Colonies; they must avoid fixing a date for the restoration of self-government.9
Two days later, Milner and Kitchener received the Cabinet’s instructions, cabled from London. The cable was almost exactly what Milner had asked for: Middelburg was to be the guiding principle of the conference, and only on the subject of amnesty was there to be any substantial concession. This news was given to the Boers on 17 April. They asked for a general armistice and a safe conduct for the deputies in Europe. Kitchener refused both requests, but agreed to give them facilities – a sort of local armistice – to consult their own burghers.10 For the Boer negotiators had earlier pointed out that they had no right to discuss the surrender of independence without first consulting the volk, meaning the minority of the burghers still out on commando. (Milner had objected that the prisoners of war should be consulted too. He was out-manoeuvred by Steyn, who asked what would happen if the prisoners decided that the war should be continued, and the fighting burghers that it should not. Laughter.11) Then the meeting broke up, without commitment on either side – the Boers to ride back into the veld, Milner to take a train for Cape Town. He had long planned – and postponed – discussions about the constitutional crisis in the Cape.12
That night, Milner wrote up his diary, usually a bleak, unemotional record of events. Considering how the Cabinet had shown no sign of supporting Kitchener in preference to himself, his mood was now remarkable for its bitterness. The irony, the supreme irony, was this: the blundering British army had at last found out how to beat the Boers – and win the great game for South Africa. So he believed. Yet here was Kitchener, ‘dead set on chucking it away’.
April 17. Got up early. Telegrams coming in from home about the negotiations. K. came to see me at 9. We met the Boers at 10, but adjourned immediately in order to consider the last message of H.M’s G…. The delegates met again at 3 pm and asked for an armistice wh. Lord K. conceded in substance if not in name I think it a very bad arrangement. Returned to my house, sent telegrams to S. of S. [Secretary of State] & worked till dinner time Very tired & not a little disgusted to bed.13
Was Milner in fact correct in claiming that Britain held the trump card? Was the war ‘dying’ of itself? Given a few more weeks of Kitchener’s new aperient medicine – barbed wire, blockhouses, and elite columns – would the guerrillas be flushed down the drain? The Boers, as we shall see in due course, had their own conflicting answers to these questions. But it must be said that, despite Methuen’s disaster at Tweebosch, the civilian side of the see-saw had come down with a bump on the side of the British, since those dark days of the previous November.
Reconstruction, at first a ‘farce’, was becoming a fact. It was one of the few redeeming features, so Milner thought, of having allowed the Boer leaders to co
me to Pretoria: they could see for themselves how well their capital was faring without them, ‘The Dutch in the town are hot for peace,’ Milner told Chamberlain, ‘and the spectacle of an established government working on quietly as if the war did not exist, must impress them with the hopelessness of their cause.’14 Milner’s own elite corps had already got their noses to the grindstone. Patrick Duncan, Geoffrey Robinson (later Dawson), John Buchan – these were his ‘crèche’ (or ‘Kindergarten’, as Merriman rechristened them, to poke fun at Milner’s Germanic earnestness), South Africa’s new guardians, intellectual blues recruited by Milner from Balliol, New College, and other parts of ‘Headquarters’.15
True, little of the crèche’s time was spent on building the future, on building dams and railways to develop this ‘magnificent estate’, as Milner called the new colonies, which had been so ‘woefully mismanaged’.16 One day he would out-Cromer Cromer. At present, his hands were full enough with the task of clearing up the mess left by Kitchener. John Buchan, Milner’s personal assistant since November, struggled to deconcentrate the camps, though transport was still critically short.17 Schools were set up in the camps themselves; in the Orange River Colony, 12,123 children were being educated in November 1901, compared with a peak of 8,910 before the war.18 Under proper civilian management, which included two experts brought over from India, the flood-tide of deaths in the camps subsided as rapidly as it had come surging in, propelled by Kitchener’s heavy hand. The statistics for the twin annual death-rates, white and black, in both colonies combined, astonished everyone: October, the appalling peak, thirty-four per cent death-rate for Europeans in the camps, twenty per cent for Africans; November, thirty-one per cent, twenty-five per cent; December, twenty-six per cent, twenty-six per cent; January, sixteen per cent, twenty-eight per cent; February, seven per cent, sixteen per cent; March, four per cent, nine per cent; April, three per cent, six per cent.19
Of course, this astonishing achievement was not so much to the credit of Milner and his young men, as an indictment of Lord K of Chaos. There was a less dramatic contrast between Milner’s achievements in other fields – especially in making the gold-mines hum – and those of his other dominant predecessor, Kruger.
On the credit side, Milner claimed that he had abolished the corrupt administrative practices long denounced by the mine owners. According to Milner’s new Mining Commissioner, Wybergh (ex-leader of the Uitlanders), one of the main problems was that Kruger’s administrators had been underpaid; this was the reason for the system of bribery and jobbery.20 The British diagnosis of the black labour problem was rather different. New ‘pass laws’, better enforced, had tightened up things. And Milner’s new Native Commissioner, Sir Godfrey Lagden, argued unblushingly the case for cutting African wages, and his arguments were published: ‘The native races of South Africa are not now taxed in proportion to the benefits conferred upon them. They should in my opinion contribute adequately towards the expense… [of] their protection and welfare. At present they are deriving much advantage from labour at disproportionately high rates which I trust may in the public interest soon be reduced.’21
Of course, there was nothing unusual about these sentiments; indeed, the view that the Kaffir was underworked and overpaid had long been one of the few things, perhaps the only thing, that united all white South Africa. Hence, Milner’s reassuring hints that Downing Street was sound enough on the native question: a message that, as we shall see, was to be confirmed at the forthcoming peace talks.
For the moment, however, competition from the army had pushed up African wages alarmingly: fifty shillings a month for underground workers, compared to thirty shillings before the war. Yet demand still far outstripped supply. To appease their appetite for black labour, the mine owners had, before the war, recruited eighty per cent of such labour from abroad. Now the first train-loads from Mozambique had begun to steam southwards again. Already in November, the black labour force on the Rand had reached sixteen thousand. At the same time, the white miners had flooded back up the railways from Natal and the Cape, despite Kitchener’s grudging allocation of railway space, so that, by April, thirty-nine thousand Uitlanders were safely home again.22
Hence the encouraging figures for gold output, the counterpart of Kitchener’s ‘bag’:23
No. of mine stamps working (out of 6,000) Ounces of gold x 1,000 (pre-war monthly peak 300)
May 1901 150 7.4
Nov. 1901 600 32
Dec 1901 953 53
Jan. 1902 1,075 70
Feb. 1902 1,540 81
Mar. 1902 1,760 104
Apr. 1902 2,095 120
Everything depended on the Rand. This was the rock on which Milner would build the new British South Africa. So it was these gold figures that were, for better or worse, the measure of Milner’s achievement in putting the Transvaal back on to its feet. By April, production had still only reached a third of its pre-war level. Yet reverse the golden medal: with only a third of existing mines back in production, the two new colonies were actually self-sufficient in current revenue.24 Only get Kitchener off the country’s back, restore the railways to civilian use, and introduce a flood of African labour (paid at suitably low rates), and this new ‘estate’ would be magnificent indeed.
Meanwhile, more blue ticker-tape, carrying news from the veld, had been decoded in Kitchener’s HQ at Pretoria. There was the whiff of success, if not of the clear-cut military victory everyone longed for; enough success, at any rate, to clean the slate from the humiliation of Methuen’s disaster at Tweebosch; enough, perhaps, to tip the balance towards peace.
On 11 April – the very day that De la Rey himself, with Botha and the others, had steamed into Pretoria, looking so sleek and well – Lieutenant-General Ian Hamilton’s columns had dealt a stinging blow to De la Rey’s veteran commandos at Rooiwal, two hundred miles to the west.
The success was not so much to the credit of Hamilton, the newcomer, as to the officers and men of the thirteen columns who had at long last, by the right mixture of perspiration, inspiration, and sheer luck, forced the enemy to stand and fight. And a fight it was: a real ‘soldiers’’ battle, fought out on the kind of terms that British generals had despaired of ever seeing again in their lifetime – a final, reassuring echo from the nineteenth century. This was the astonishing news from Rooiwal.25
The frustrations of fighting in the Western Transvaal, on the British side, were exceptional, even by the standards of the period. It was partly the terrain. They are half-wilderness, these plains in the huge, diamond-shaped box, enclosed by the lines Lichtenburg-Klerksdorp-Vryburg and the Vaal – two hundred miles of rolling, sandy plains intersected by shallow river valleys, dry (except in the rainy season) and almost as desolate as the Karoo.26 De la Rey’s commandos had dominated this barren ocean like a pirate fleet – or a shoal of sharks. The Boers had always understood the principle that best ensures survival: invisibility. De la Rey had perfected the shark’s tactic: to remain submerged until it was the moment to strike.
How were the British to force to the surface this large and well-fed marauder? Three times, De la Rey had emerged recently, only to gorge himself on his pursuers: at Moedwil, on 30 September of the previous year, when he had mauled part of Kekewich’s column; at Yzer Spruit, on 24 February of this year, when he had devoured most of Von Donop’s wagon convoy, seven hundred men strong, 150 wagons brimming with food and ammunition;27 and at Tweebosch, when he had swallowed Methuen whole. The last two attacks confirmed De la Rey’s position as commander of the largest and fittest concentration of Boer commandos left in the war; out of the twenty thousand ‘bitter-enders’, about three thousand were De la Rey’s. As well as looting British bully beef and 303 ammunition, he had looted six field-guns, Methuen’s 15-pounders taken at Tweebosch.28 Of course, Kitchener still had overwhelming superiority in manpower and fire-power. Yet De la Rey’s men were veterans. Many of the British were callow, half-trained yeomanry, like Methuen’s men, who had fled at the first shot.
<
br /> To crush De la Rey, Kitchener had predictably decided to let loose his ponderous steam-roller again, the same war machine that had flattened the Orange River Colony – and some of its inhabitants – in the new-style drives of February and March. He ordered up Rawlinson, his most successful column commander; he also roped in Woolls-Sampson as Intelligence Officer. Klerksdorp, the western railhead on the Vaal, was now made the base of operations. On this small tin-roofed town converged sixteen thousand mounted troops – that is, thirteen columns arranged in four super-columns, and commanded by Rawlinson, Kekewich, Colonel A. N. Rochfort, and Walter Kitchener. The steam-roller lumbered off for the first drive on 23 March, only a fortnight after the end of the last, disappointing drive in the ORC. The result was equally disappointing here: only 8 Boers killed and 165 captured. However, the bag did include three of Methuen’s six field-guns and two of his pom-poms, discarded by De la Rey as obstacles to mobility.29
On 26 March, the GOC’s armoured train sailed into Klerksdorp. (These armoured trains were treated like ships. They carried guns and searchlights; Kitchener’s staff travelled in one called Her Majesty’s Train Cobra, commanded by an ‘admiral’.)30 Kitchener had come to Klerksdorp to see for himself what had gone wrong. The situation was admittedly intractable. Intelligence, the key to success, was virtually a blank sheet. Even Colonel Woolls-Sampson, whose network of African agents had changed the whole war in the Eastern Transvaal, confessed himself beaten here in the west (De la Rey, it appears, had ruthlessly cleared the whole region of African families to protect himself).31 Perhaps a more subtle tactician than Kitchener would have used some ruse de guerre to flush out the enemy: disguising some of his men, as Colonel Plumer had disguised them the previous year, in the poke bonnets of Boer refugees.32Kitchener relied instead on sheer weight and mass, weight of concrete, mass of horseflesh. Predictably, De la Rey again slipped through the net, after mauling part of Walter Kitchener’s force at Boschbult on 31 March. It was Colonel G. A. Cookson’s column, Canadians and others, making a reconnaissance, unsupported. Although they fought bravely, and killed some Boers (at a loss to themselves of 178 men killed and wounded), this achieved little else except to confirm a blatant defect in Kitchener’s anti-guerrilla system.33
The Boer War Page 88
