The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  His other conversations with the enemy, in the persons of De Souza and Grobler, were more sophisticated. But the unscrupulous Transvaal press was getting him down. De Volksstem, for instance, had published a stream of depressing reports about fictitious Boer victories and British cowardice. All lies and propaganda, no question about that, but he didn’t have access to reliable information and it preyed on his mind. There was the story of General Koos de la Rey, who had captured another armoured train on the western front and discovered a cache of dum-dums; the one about the ‘surrender’ of the besieged garrison at Mafeking followed by a bayonet attack that night; the endless griping about the cavalry charge at Elandslaagte; more dum-dum bullets found after the battle at Rietfontein; General Kock wounded and left behind on the battlefield at Elandslaagte, stripped of everything he owned, even his clothes. It was all nonsense, of course, or grossly exaggerated, but it left Churchill feeling uneasy.

  The most controversial reports in the Transvaal papers were allegations about the deployment of African and coloured auxiliary troops. The British commanders in Mafeking and Kimberley were said to be forcing Africans to engage in combat, contrary to the unwritten agreement between the opposing parties that this was to be a white man’s war. Most shocking of all was the incident in the village of Derdepoort in the western Transvaal, near the Bechuanaland border. On 25 November a Boer laager in the area had been raided by a group of Kgatla led by Segale, the half-brother of their chief, Lentshwe, who was apparently armed and supported by British troops. They had massacred half the population and then fled to Bechuanaland, taking several Boer women and children with them. What was Churchill to think of it all?26

  Willem Leyds knew exactly what to think about Derdepoort, about Elandslaagte, the dum-dum bullets and that unspeakable incident with the white flag. He had no doubt that it was all true. Right from the start, the British military censors had prevented him from telegraphing Pretoria directly, but through various channels and of course by mail he had received quite a few reliable reports of atrocities committed by British troops. On 26 October 1899 he had issued a press release from his office in Brussels, saying, ‘the British are arming local coloured people and deploying them in active combat against the Boers.’ As the South African Republic’s official representative, he had protested in the strongest terms—he didn’t need any special authorisation from his government to do so—against ‘this criminal and despicable act... which places the lives of the entire white population of South Africa in jeopardy’.

  Nor did he stop there. British soldiers were behaving ‘like true barbarians’ on the battlefield, he wrote to the Russian envoy in Brussels, N. de Giers, in early December. The evidence was pouring in. They were slaughtering disarmed adversaries as if they were on a boar hunt, robbing the dead and wounded of wedding rings and other possessions, carrying out military operations under the ruse of a white flag, and using dum-dum bullets and grenades containing lyddite. All were violations of the rules of warfare laid down in the Geneva Convention of 1864 and reaffirmed at the International Peace Conference in The Hague just a few months earlier. The British were flouting international agreements off the battlefield as well. They were buying huge numbers of horses and mules for their troops in South Africa wherever they could lay their hands on them, including officially neutral countries like Italy and Spain.

  Leyds had an ulterior motive for conveying this urgent message to his Russian counterpart in Brussels. Tsar Nicholas II had personally instructed De Giers to keep him informed of developments in the war. Leyds knew this, and through the envoy addressed himself almost directly to the head of state who was the most likely to do something in response. Unlike his wife, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Nicholas II was firmly on the side of the Boers. He seemed open to the idea of an anti-British initiative and would act alone if it came to that, with the support of the Russian military authorities and public opinion. But the foreign minister, Count N.V. Muraviev, and the rest of the Cabinet had reservations. They weren’t against collaborating in a Franco-German initiative, but felt that unilateral action, like massing troops on the Afghanistan border, would be too great a risk for the Russian government.27

  Staking his bets on the whims of an autocratic emperor was a long shot, as Leyds knew. He had tried it before with Kaiser Wilhelm II after the Jameson Raid. But he didn’t have much choice. After the Anglo-German accord of August 1898, which divided up bankrupt Portugal’s colonial territories, nothing much could be expected of Berlin, and even less after the Kaiser and his wife paid a family visit to Windsor Castle in late November 1899, accompanied by their foreign minister, Bernhard von Bülow. If it had been up to Chamberlain, the visit would have paved the way for closer ties between the two countries and ideally with the United States as well. But that was a step too far for the Germans. After the war broke out anti-British sentiment, stoked by the pro-expansionist Pan-German League, had flared up in the German press and infected public opinion. Wilhelm II and Von Bülow would commit to nothing more than strict neutrality as far as the war in South Africa was concerned. In exchange, Germany would receive concessions from Britain in other parts of the world to further its own imperialistic ambitions, which included, with growing urgency, the acquisition of a fleet of its own.

  Paris was equally reluctant to take measures of any consequence. The French public were as keenly interested in the war as the Germans and Russians. They rejoiced at the Boers’ successes and jeered at the British defeats, but Fashoda had tied their hands. If the French government did anything at all, it was in the realm of quiet diplomacy. The best example of this was handed to Leyds personally on 4 November 1899 by a senior official of the French ministry of foreign affairs. It was a document drawn up in consultation with, perhaps even by, the minister, Delcassé, in person. Delcassé had high expectations of this Appeal to the Nations Represented at the Hague Conference, an urgent petition to the British government on behalf of ‘the conscience of the world’ to stop annihilating a civilised nation. Delcassé thought it best to remain on the sidelines. He wanted Leyds to disseminate the document and rally support in as many countries as possible, with a view to stepping up international pressure on London.28

  Initially, Leyds approved of the idea. The petition addressed ‘British philanthropists’, not ‘the British financial world’, and called on them to endorse ‘the principles of arbitration’. This tied in with his work as an envoy, and it had also been explicitly incorporated in the Boers’ ultimatum of 9 October. He instructed his consular staff to arrange for the document to be translated and disseminated with as many signatures as possible.

  This was easier said than done. Getting the wording right in the various translations was a nightmare. The more signatories there were, the more difficult it was to edit the texts. The thorniest problems, surprisingly, arose in the Netherlands. Since 29 October 1899 a press office in Dordrecht had been assisting Leyds with his propaganda campaigns. In charge of it was H.J. Kiewiet de Jonge, a teacher at the local high school and secretary of the Algemeen Nederlandsch Verbond, or General Dutch Alliance, which had been founded after the Jameson Raid, in the summer of 1896. Unlike the Dutch South African Association, the Alliance targeted the Dutchspeaking community, which included Flanders. After the outbreak of the war it had also become more active and more vocal than the Association. Its offer to provide ‘a well-equipped press office’ serves to illustrate this point. Leyds already had a press office in Paris but he welcomed this extra opportunity to have ‘information in the Dutch-African spirit translated and published in sympathetic newspapers’.29

  Kiewiet de Jonge went to work straight away. He published a Dutch edition of Jan Smuts’s diatribe, A Century of Wrong, which had been sent to Leyds from Pretoria, and had it translated into French and German. With the same enthusiasm, he arranged for the Appeal to be circulated. Kiewiet de Jonge had translated it into Dutch himself and presented the result to prominent members of the General Dutch Alliance, at which point things s
tarted going wrong. Everyone had something to say. Some were critical of the legal terminology, but most importantly they objected to the way the message came across, and especially to its emphasis on arbitration. To Leyds’s surprise, the mood in the Netherlands was ‘more militant’ than anywhere else. ‘In fact, no one wants to hear about ending the war, whether by arbitration or otherwise... After all, it’s going so well, why not keep going and drive the British into the sea? That’s the general attitude in Holland.’

  It was a fair observation. The whole of Europe sympathised with the Boers—‘the whole Continent is on our side,’ Leyds had observed with satisfaction when hostilities broke out—but the Dutch were the most supportive of all. Rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, across the whole political spectrum, academics, journalists and shopkeepers, everyone was passionately involved in the fate of their blood brothers in Africa.

  After the Dutch colonial army’s recent display of strength in the East Indies—in Lombok in 1894 and Atjeh in 1898—the country was caught up in a frenzy of militant nationalism. The Boers’ successes seemed like a sequel, like something they had accomplished themselves. The Dutch were organising public petitions, solidarity projects, fundraising campaigns and ambulances. Many were volunteering to go out and fight. Even Leyds was fired up. As soon as the war started he had written to Pretoria, saying, ‘I wish to assure His Excellency [President Kruger] that I am entirely at his service. I hate being here in Europe and am willing to come and give my life at a moment’s notice.’

  It never actually came to this, any more than all the emotional drumbeating in Europe led to political action. The Dutch government, especially the foreign minister, De Beaufort, kept a cool head and, in the interest of peaceful enjoyment of their possessions in the Dutch East Indies, remained strictly neutral. Leyds also recovered his composure and continued to look for a solution in some form of mediation. Rejecting that option now, he explained to his mentor and confidant Moltzer, would be doing the same as Britain had done before the war, ‘when it refused arbitration or mediation, because it believed it was the stronger of the two parties’. But, he lamented in the same letter, given that so many of their respected fellow countrymen favoured that course, he was thinking of ‘abandoning’ the ‘Petition’ altogether.30

  That left diplomacy as the only way forward. Leyds had to admit there was little to choose from when it came to candidates for mediation. In fact, there were only two, apart from the Russian tsar. One was near at hand. He knew that the young Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, was fervently committed to the Boer cause. Earlier, in July 1899, he had intimated to Prime Minister Pierson and De Beaufort that she might get somewhere with the elderly British queen. They had dismissed the idea, but Wilhelmina had nevertheless taken it upon herself to write a letter to Victoria, appealing to her ‘well-known feeling of humanity and magnanimity... to stop this war’. It hadn’t achieved anything. Queen Victoria had thrown the ball back: if Kruger had been reasonable, there wouldn’t have been a war in the first place. Leyds didn’t know about Wilhelmina’s single-handed intercession. But in December she indicated that she would be willing ‘to mediate between the two, alone or with others, now or at any convenient time in the future’. A personal appeal to the German emperor? The answer depended on her constitutional powers. Leyds would have to wait and see.31

  The second candidate for mediation was far away, across the Atlantic Ocean. To be honest, Leyds had little faith in the American president, William McKinley. Britain had sided with the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898, in fact if not on paper, and Leyds thought that Washington might be willing to reciprocate. And though most Americans seemed to support the Boers, they weren’t as keyed up about the war as the Europeans. As a result, the American government had considerably more room to manoeuvre. This applied in particular to the secretary of state, John Hay, to whom McKinley had delegated much of the decision-making about the conflict. The situation didn’t bode well. Hay was a self-professed anglophile, who believed in the superiority of the Anglo-American way of life. But because ‘Pretoria was still hoping the United States would mediate’, Leyds did what was expected of him. He arranged for the Transvaal’s consul-general in London, Montagu White, to be transferred to Washington, and proposed that the Orange Free State’s consul-general in The Hague, Hendrik Muller, should go there as well. But, like many of his compatriots, he felt the time wasn’t ripe for mediation. ‘In view of our favourable prospects at the moment, I would be disinclined towards any form of intervention.’32 So White went to the United States alone.

  That left only the anti-war movement in the British Empire itself. In this respect the dominions could be written off. Canada, Australia and New Zealand had sided with the motherland and were in the process of sending their own contingents to reinforce the British troops in South Africa. Ireland was trickier. There were Irish troops fighting on both sides—the Dublin Fusiliers and the Royal Irish Fusiliers with the British, the Irish Brigade with the Boers—which exacerbated the already troubled relationship between the two parts of the United Kingdom. Riots broke out in Dublin, but they were contained: the Irish had no links to the antiwar movement in England.

  And that movement was substantial. Its adherents included church and social-democratic organisations, independent Liberal politicians, academics, journalists and business people, represented by groups like the South African Conciliation Committee. The secretary of the committee’s women’s division, Emily Hobhouse, was later to play a significant role in the war. At this stage, however, the most prominent anti-war protester was the controversial journalist William Stead. He was as deeply committed to British imperialism as to world peace, and believed that the two went hand in hand. In late September 1899, after returning from the International Peace Conference in The Hague, he had published a manifesto called Shall I Slay My Brother Boer? An Appeal to the Conscience of Britain. It was an indictment of the impending war, ‘this great crime’, which would cost thousands of lives and produce nothing but ‘another and more distant Dutch Ireland’. Stead continued to protest. He founded his own Stop the War Committee and published a weekly journal, War Against War in South Africa.

  Leyds found in him a welcome ally in his pro-Boer campaign. Stead wrote the preface to the English edition of A Century of Wrong and voiced his support for the ‘Petition’. Their collaboration, however, entailed risks for both parties. Leyds’s association with the peace activist would close doors he would rather keep open, while Stead’s contact with the Transvaal envoy put his own reputation for independence at risk. So anxious was he to safeguard his credibility that he wouldn’t allow Leyds to reimburse him for a postage stamp. This was just the kind of thing the ‘Jingo papers’ would pounce on and regurgitate as ‘distributing thousands of pounds for the corruption of the Press’.33

  As far as mud-slinging was concerned, nothing had changed since the outbreak of war. In the British press Leyds was still a liar and slanderer. But the balance of power had shifted. Leyds now held the winning hand in the propaganda war on the European continent, like the Boers on the battlefield itself. Even so, ‘Jingo journalism’ in Britain had become more strident than ever. Protests by Stead and his followers were no more than a whisper in a raging storm of nationalism, one that was growing even more militant now that there was something to fight for. Challenging the South African Conciliation Committee were numerous pro-war groups, like the Imperial South African Association (formerly the South African Association), the Primrose League and the Empire League. The war against the Boers was the talk of Britain, in boardrooms and drawing rooms, in public houses and music halls. There was actually something at stake. Victories inspired popular songs, defeats were lamented in poems, dramatic events thrilled audiences who saw them enacted on film. As in Pretoria, accusations and recriminations were dished out left, right and centre. Whatever De Volksstem flung at the British, The Times flung back at the Boers. Fraudulent use of the white flag, theft from the dead and wounded, the pl
undering of occupied villages, the deployment of black auxiliary forces. Here, the Boers were the transgressors. The British were fighting a horde of unscrupulous barbarians. The Boers were no good.

  Fortunately, ‘our Boys’ were showing them what true heroism was all about—like Winston Churchill, whose name had been on everyone’s lips since that farce—for that’s all it really was—with the armoured train near Chieveley. The wounded soldiers who had made their way back to Estcourt in the damaged locomotive had nothing but praise for his gallantry and presence of mind. And to think he was only there as a war correspondent. The story had done the rounds in no time, in Britain as well as South Africa, helped along by Churchill’s colleagues Leo Amery and John Atkins and his old retainer, Thomas Walden. Walden had sent Lady Randolph a letter, which was subsequently published in the Morning Post. Churchill had regrettably been captured, Walden wrote to say, but he was fairly certain that he hadn’t been wounded. ‘Every officer in Estcourt thinks Mr C. and the engine-driver will get the V.C.,’ he announced proudly, adding that ‘the driver says he was as cool as anything and worked like a nigger, and how he escaped he doesn’t know, as about fifty shells hit the engine. Everyone in Maritzburg is talking about Mr Churchill.’34