In Pretoria, too, everyone was preparing to leave—for the front. Reitz and Smuts agreed with Kruger. There was no way to avoid a war, certainly not after the Cabinet meeting of 8 September 1899, when the British decided to send out an expeditionary force. It would take a month for the troops to reach South Africa. They had to put the time to good use. Smuts hastily worked out a plan. He was in favour of a surprise attack. The Boers were by far in the majority. If they invaded Natal without delay, they could easily push through to Durban and seize the artillery and munitions they found there, thus depriving the British of their nearest supply port. In all likelihood the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony would join in and fight with them. With a third Boer republic against them, the British would have a hard time of it. And France, Russia and Germany wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the situation.160
The plan didn’t sound unreasonable, but Smuts never had the opportunity to see it in action. The Orange Free State, President Steyn to be exact, wasn’t ready to take the step. He still believed in a peaceful solution and kept offering suggestions. Kruger dutifully considered them. He thought it a waste of time, but he was unwilling to antagonise his ally by launching an attack on his own. As a result, he spent weeks waiting for Bloemfontein.
Smuts was too fired up to wait. To occupy himself usefully in the meantime, he started writing a historical pamphlet, with the help of Jacob de Villiers Roos. A Century of Wrong was an impassioned protest against ‘our oppression and persecution during the past hundred years’. It was meant to rally Afrikaners throughout the country, in the two British colonies as well as the two Boer republics, to resist ‘an unjust and hated Government 7000 miles away’. The Boers were the heroes, the British the villains. The piece was rhetorical and demagogic, even by nineteenth-century standards.
It portrayed the British as hypocrites motivated by ‘a spirit of annexation and plunder which has at all times characterised its dealings with our people’. They had a ‘morbid love of the natives’, which wasn’t that so much as ‘hatred and contempt of the Boer’. After the discovery of the republic’s mineral wealth, they had harnessed their old insidious policies to the new forces of capitalism and drawn a ‘cordon of beasts of plunder and birds of prey... around this poor doomed people’.
In spite of their ‘great sacrifices... and the many vicissitudes’ they had endured, the Boers possessed ‘a dignity which reminds the world of a greater and more painful example of suffering’. They had pursued their ‘pilgrimage of martyrdom throughout South Africa, until every portion of that unhappy country has been painted red with the blood, not so much of men capable of resistance as with that of our murdered and defenceless women and children’. Through it all they had clung to ‘the Righteousness which... proceeds according to eternal laws, unmoved by human pride and ambition’.
The last chapter sounded like a reply to the Helot Dispatch. Milner was from Oxford, Smuts from Cambridge and at least as well versed in the classics. He likened Britain, which was conveying ‘troops from every corner of the globe in order to smash this little handful of people’, to the Persian king Xerxes ‘with his millions against little Greece’. And the Boers, of course, were the Spartans, Leonidas ‘with his 300 men when they advanced unflinchingly at Thermopylae against Xerxes and his myriads’. And ‘whether the result be Victory or Death, Liberty will assuredly rise in South Africa like the sun from out of the mists of the morning, just as Freedom dawned over the United States of America a little more than a century ago. Then from the Zambezi to Simon’s Bay it will be “Africa for the Africander”.’161
By 28 September 1899 Kruger had grown tired of waiting. A few days earlier he had heard that the British expeditionary force would be followed by a complete army corps. The Transvaal mobilised. On 2 October the Orange Free State did the same. Even Steyn saw no way out.
Willem Leyds felt uncomfortable. He was doing the best he could for the Boer cause, but he was miles away. His business was diplomacy and public relations; he was no longer involved with policy. He travelled back and forth between Brussels, The Hague, Paris and Amsterdam, and occasionally Berlin. It was useful, he got things done, but still. ‘I wish I were in Pretoria,’ he wrote to two of his confidants in the Transvaal in mid-August 1899. ‘I believe in all modesty that I could be of some use.’ The government consulted him frequently, his telegraph bills were high, but ‘one can say far more in person than by cable from a distance’.162
Not only by way of encouragement. Leyds was also critical of his successors in Pretoria. They kept vacillating, he felt. They were either too assertive or too submissive. The best example was their reply to Chamberlain’s suzerainty letter. All his hard work had been ruined by the rash sentence they had added to it, and Chamberlain was quick to exploit his advantage. Leyds was also critical of the tone of the voting rights proposals. The wording was extremely important, he said. It sounded as if the concessions had been extracted with a knife at someone’s throat. The British didn’t like that kind of thing. What’s more, Pretoria’s indecisiveness made his job as an envoy more difficult. He wasn’t informed promptly about new developments, and his instructions were often unclear.
But so be it. It was questionable whether his presence in Pretoria would really have made any difference, as it was now obvious that Milner and Chamberlain were intent on war. Beit, too, for that matter—because Leyds kept a sharp eye on things from his observation post in Europe. ‘Everyone with a financial interest in South Africa dances to the tune of Wernher, Beit & Co.,’ he said. They were so powerful that ‘no one can stand up to them, and to avoid being boycotted they do whatever Beit wants (Wernher is less overbearing) and Beit in turn takes his orders from Chamberlain’.163
From reports like this, it seems Leyds was probably more useful in Europe than he would have been in the Transvaal—on the one hand, by keeping Pretoria up to date about the mood in the European capitals, in centres of government and financial circles and among the general public, on the other hand, by supporting the Transvaal and improving its image. He picked up the thread of the pro-Boer campaign he had launched in 1898. It was vitally important. After a visit to Paris in late April 1899, he noted that ‘the press have launched another campaign against the Republic’. He had to be vigilant and make sure he exposed all their half-truths and slurs. They targeted him personally as well. The Financial Times, for example, reported that he had made money from illicit dealings in gold during his term as state secretary. It was a shot in the dark, but it was hard to disprove. You could deny false allegations, but you couldn’t erase them from people’s minds.164
Some of Leyds’s duties were in the public eye, but most of his work took place behind closed doors. His diplomatic activities ranged from finding suitable state investors and organising the Transvaal’s entry to the Paris World Fair in 1900, to mediating (this was a sensitive matter) to secure the release of a munitions transport under embargo in Lourenço Marques.
It was a consignment of Mausers and more than three and a half million cartridges, en route from German Weapons and Munitions to Pretoria. In the past few years several arms transports had been sent via Mozambique, but for no apparent reason the Portuguese authorities suddenly started to raise objections—under pressure from Britain, the Transvaal government believed. In mid-August Leyds was instructed to go to Lisbon post-haste to put pressure on the Portuguese from his side as well. He was also advised to inform the German government. After all, the goods came from Germany and were being transported on a German vessel, the Reichstag. Leyds followed this advice, although not quite to the letter. He didn’t actually go to Lisbon, but handed the Portuguese envoy in Brussels a memorandum of protest and then concentrated on applying pressure indirectly. This he did with help not only from Berlin, but also Paris, because France would soon be shipping arms—two large Creusot guns—along the same route. They would be labelled ‘machinery’ but, even so, it was better for the French to know about these developments—and use their influence with Portuga
l. At the end of August the port authorities in Lourenço Marques released the consignment of rifles and munitions.165
Thanks to Germany and France. But Pretoria shouldn’t be under any illusions, Leyds warned more than once. This time it had been purely in their own interests. If pressed, neither would side against Britain. His telegrams were absolutely explicit. On 3 August 1899 he said, ‘if it comes to a war, Germany and France will be cordial towards us and might express that openly, but they won’t give us any real support’. His message of 25 September read, ‘Germany will do nothing. France would gladly make things difficult for Britain, but one can’t depend on them. They’re unpredictable. However, the general consensus is that Russia might intervene in Asia.’166
Russia might well see a war between Great Britain and the Transvaal as an opportunity to pursue its own interests. Whatever the case, no one expected Tsar Nicholas II to do anything out of conviction. Under pressure from Britain he hadn’t invited the Transvaal or the Orange Free State to the Peace Conference held in The Hague from mid-May to the end of July 1899. Leyds had avoided The Hague throughout that period. ‘I’m in a rather tight spot,’ he had said.167
But he was gratified to see that the exclusion of the two Boer republics had unleashed a storm of protest in the Netherlands, in the press and in parliament. That was reassuring in itself, although the criticism was targeted, unfairly, at the foreign minister, Willem de Beaufort. Abraham Kuyper, the leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, went so far as to hold the minister personally responsible for the snub against ‘the two Dutch commonwealths’ and accused him of ‘unforgivable weakness’. Leyds knew better. It had all been arranged beforehand. De Beaufort had only two options: conference or no conference, in The Hague or anywhere else.
Leyds also knew that all the fuss in the Netherlands had no impact on the rest of the world, least of all in Britain. In the spring, the Dutch Women’s Association had presented a petition with 200,000 signatures to Tsar Nicholas II, endorsing his peace initiative. In August the Dutch South African Association had collected 140,000 signatures in support of an impassioned appeal on behalf of the Boers, addressed ‘To the People of Great Britain’. The petitions were received politely, but at this stage they carried no weight at all. They were well-meant but irrelevant.168
Leyds had reached this conclusion a few months earlier, after a similar campaign in the Transvaal that actually could have made a difference. A petition to Queen Victoria from 21,000 Uitlanders in late March 1899 was followed two months later by a second petition from 23,000—dissenting—Uitlanders. The text read, ‘We disagree with the sentiments and opinions expressed in the memorial [the first petition to Queen Victoria] because we know that life and property are as safe and secure in the S.A. Republic as in any part of the civilized world.’ The signatories, unlike the South African League, stood firmly behind the government of the Transvaal. It was clear that the immigrant community on the Rand was sharply divided over the Kruger regime.
Pretoria made sure the British government was aware of the second petition, and sent copies to Berlin, Paris, The Hague and Washington as well. But after that—perhaps even more surprising than the petition itself—nothing at all happened. There was no response whatsoever, although the earlier appeal to Queen Victoria resounded in the British press for a long time afterwards. Leyds had got the message. The time for public petitions had passed. It all came down to power politics.169
This point of view was reflected in an extraordinary correspondence that Leyds conducted from mid-July to the end of September 1899. It started with a letter from his old mentor and friend Moltzer, who was a member of the Dutch Council of State and still deeply concerned with the fate of the Boers. Was there anything the Dutch government could do to prevent a war with England? If so, he would take it up at once with Prime Minister Nicolaas Pierson, whom Leyds knew well.
Leyds thought there was. He made a suggestion but it fell flat with his other teacher. The idea was an urgent appeal from the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina—‘a young girl on the threshold of her career’—to Queen Victoria—‘an older woman nearing the end of her life’—but Pierson thought it too much of a gamble. He wasn’t prepared to risk ‘compromising the Queen’. He also made it clear—on behalf of the foreign minister De Beaufort, as well—that nothing could be expected from ‘the Dutch Government as such’. Like everyone else, the Netherlands was too dependent on mighty Britain, not least because of the vulnerable Dutch East Indies.170
The correspondence might have ended there had Pierson not offered to take action in a personal capacity. He was close friends with George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty and thus a member of the Salisbury government. He suggested that a personal letter might help to change the British Cabinet’s standpoint, from the inside. The Dutch prime minister respected the British and believed they were open to reason. In fact he was known to be ‘an anglophile and admitted it himself’. He made no secret of his conviction that the Transvaal ‘should have pursued a liberal policy’ far earlier and should have moved towards ‘admitting the British on the same terms as the Dutch’. If Leyds approved, Pierson was prepared to have a word with Goschen.
Leyds was not in favour but thanked him politely for the offer. What followed was a rather schizophrenic exchange of letters between the two men. On the one side Pierson, who reported to Leyds about his increasingly hopeful contacts with Goschen. From this Pierson had concluded that ‘there is a strong pacifist trend in the British Cabinet’. On the other side Leyds, who observed academic decorum by addressing Pierson as ‘Learned Professor’, only to tell him, with indecorous bluntness, what he thought of his optimism. On 22 August 1899 he wrote, ‘You still believe in the possibility of winning Goschen over. I don’t.’ Pierson kept on writing, nevertheless, to Goschen as well as Leyds. On 26 September he wrote again about ‘a pacifist movement in the British Cabinet’. The Transvaal shouldn’t allow its understandable mistrust of Britain to stand in the way of concessions, he argued. Bilingualism could actually work. Take the Belgian parliament, for example.171
His words fell on deaf ears. Fifteen years earlier Pierson had managed to persuade an ambivalent young lawyer to seek his fortune in South Africa, dwelling on the excellent prospects that awaited him as state attorney. Now he was trying to convince a sceptical statesman that concessions were the answer, elaborating on the opportunities for peace that were still open in London. His efforts were to no avail. Leyds no longer believed in it. Nor did he have any confidence left in the British Cabinet. It was time to get things over and done with.
That’s what he told Pretoria. He wrote to Reitz on 6 October, ‘The whole of Europe is wondering why the Boers don’t start the war, after telling or rather asking the British to withdraw their troops. Everyone thinks it’s suicide to wait for a large British force to arrive in Natal.’ On 9 October he mentioned Europe’s bewilderment again. A day later, on Kruger’s 74th birthday, Leyds received the telegram he had long been expecting. The Boers had issued their ultimatum. The war would begin the following day.172
PART II
Like a boys’ adventure story
October 1899—June 1900
Rule, Britannia!
Southampton, 14 October 1899
Many people, especially in the upper echelons of the army, thought Winston Churchill was nothing but a publicity-seeker and medal-chaser, with his lisp, his wisecracks, his pretentious newspaper articles and his extravagant American mother, whose high-society friends had helped him from one prestigious job to the next. Churchill saw things differently. He knew in his heart that he was destined for something more exalted, or at least more exciting, and there was no time to lose. His father, Lord Randolph, had died young, and he wouldn’t live long either, so he believed. To accomplish what fate had in store for him he would have to make his mark soon, distinguish himself, gain a reputation and excel in a political career that in his father’s case had been so tragically cut short.
That was why, not yet 25, he
had travelled half the world looking for action, the more dangerous the better. He had come under fire from Cuban guerrillas, narrowly escaped the swords of the Pathans on the north-west frontier of British India, and in the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan had experienced the thrill of a cavalry charge against a superior force of Mahdi fighters. All without even a scratch. What he did gain, however, was a reputation as a writer. He had combined his military duties—as second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars—with freelance assignments as a war correspondent for newspapers like the Daily Graphic, the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post. He had also written a successful book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, recounting his war-time experiences in British India. Two more books, The River War about the campaign in Sudan and the novel Savrola, were about to be published.
In May 1899 Churchill decided it was time to leave the army and turn his skills to a career in politics. In the mill town of Oldham, near Manchester, he was one of two Conservative candidates who stood for election to the House of Commons. However, they lost to their Liberal opponents and Churchill’s thoughts turned to an alternative that would consolidate his reputation and bring in a bit of cash.
An opportunity came his way before long. War was looming over South Africa, that was obvious by September, and every self-respecting British newspaper wanted its own reporter on the spot. Churchill could take his pick. The Morning Post was offering £250 a month—a generous sum for a war correspondent—with a contract for at least four months, plus expenses. He could also keep the copyrights, which would come in useful if he ever wanted to use the material for a book. There was someone special in his life, but lacking his mother’s amorous temperament, he didn’t take long to choose between Pamela Plowden and a new adventure in South Africa. On Saturday 14 October 1899 Churchill stood on the quay at Southampton, ready to embark on the Dunottar Castle.1
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