by John Wilcox
Putting down her pencil, Alice leant forward. ‘Miss Hobhouse, you asked earlier if I shared your opinions about … what was it you called this war … ridiculous?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, let me tell you that I do, although my husband is a serving soldier out here and I don’t approve so much of the Boers’ attitude towards the Kaffirs and their idea of governance. Nevertheless, the farm clearances are, I believe, a barbaric act and I can see that this camp, at least, which I understand is the biggest, is a disgrace to a civilised nation. May I come with you and write in my newspaper about your activities and what you discover?’
Miss Hobhouse’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Travel with me? Well, my dear, let me warn you that I travel very light – although I have these comforts I intend to distribute – and also as quickly as I can.’
Alice smiled at the plump, overdressed figure before her. It would be hard to imagine any traveller looking less likely to move fast and untrammelled. ‘Miss Hobhouse,’ she said, ‘in my work and with my husband, I have travelled in many rough and distant parts of the Empire over the last twenty years and I am very used to hardship. I shall not encumber you, I promise.’
The woman looked at her quizzically. ‘Your newspaper is the Morning Post, I believe?’
‘Yes.’
She tilted her head to one side as though in gentle disbelief. ‘That seems to me to be an organ which often unthinkingly supports this Tory government. I fear, my dear, that, if the conditions here are typical, what you may have to report may be rather unacceptable fare to your employers and your readers.’
Alice nodded her head. ‘Yes, I take your point. But my editor has already given me permission to write about you and your work, for, it seems, there is already some discontent back home about the camps and, indeed, the progress of the war. It is true that the Post supports the war, but it is not jingoistic and I am used to treading carefully around the difficulty of reporting events that sometimes stick in the craw of our readers.’ She sighed. ‘The point is, however, that truth is sacred and …’ she looked around her at the rows of tents ‘… I shall report not only what you say, but what I see. And being with you will allow me to see for myself.’
Emily Hobhouse gave a soft, gentle smile that lit up her homely countenance, replacing for a moment the frown that seemed to be her set expression. ‘Well, you shall come with me, if you wish. You must pay your own way and I shall welcome whatever light you can shed back home on the circumstances of these poor people. But you must call me Emily and I shall call you … what was it?’
‘Alice.’
‘Of course. Alice.’
‘Thank you, Emily. Now tell me. What are your immediate plans, for I must think of cabling arrangements?’
‘After seeing what I can do here, I intend to entrain to see about half of the camps here in the Free State – at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. I have, of course, these basic comforts that I must distribute. Then I go to Mafeking in the Transvaal. That, I hope, will give me a fair sample of these places. Maybe I shall have time to revisit some of them before I return home in April.’
‘To whom will you report?’
‘To the committee of the Distress Fund, but I intend to see that my report is also circulated to all members of parliament. If, as I expect, these conditions are widespread, then I hope to be able to put forward sensible suggestions for improving the system, if, that is, it cannot be removed completely.’
Alice nodded. ‘I hope you will allow me to help you, Emily, as well as my journalistic duties will allow.’
‘I shall be grateful. Let us start now, then, by seeing all the tents in this awful place that I have not been able to visit yet.’
‘What? All of them?’
‘Oh yes. We must be thorough.’
At the end of the day, the two women repaired to the simple hotel in the centre of the town where Alice was able to find herself a room next to that of Emily. In the morning, the two of them saw General Pretyman and submitted to him a list of essential requirements for the camp.
He accepted them without demur, although with a frown, and Emily explained that she would not be leaving Bloemfontein until she had visited the general again, in two days’ time, to check on how well her suggestions had been met. Sitting silently at the meeting and watching how her companion handled the general, Alice realised that Emily Hobhouse was not only a determined woman but also a skilled and sensitive negotiator. There was no trace of bluster or the shrill insistence of the harridan. The case of the internees was put with reason and balance. Her admiration for the little woman grew. The next few months, she realised, could be very interesting.
The next two days were taken up with distributing round the camp some of the clothing and other comforts from the Distress Fund that had travelled with Emily and, in Alice’s case, with carefully drafting and cabling back her first story. She was careful to write it in an unemotional, low-key style, keeping to the facts and stressing General Pretyman’s seeming anxiety to help. She was anxious to avoid any editorial ‘toning down’. She also wrote to Simon, stressing her thoughts of him and urging him to take care of his wound. Then she picked up her pen to tell James Fulton where she was, but thought better of it. He must be left to ponder her departure and her whereabouts. It would be good for him.
On the third day, Emily and Alice visited the general to enquire of the changes that had been made at the camp. As before, General Pretyman – what a strange name for one so stolidly, ordinary-looking! – was courteous and frank. It was agreed that soap could be provided, but only at one ounce per head per week, and also brick boilers. But fuel was ‘too precious’ to be spared and tap water impossible to provide because ‘the price was prohibitive’. Emily warned that disease and deaths would follow but met with no bending of the official knee.
Alice spoke little but made copious notes. Nor did Miss Hobhouse continue to argue or make further demands. For the moment she would keep her powder dry. There were other camps to visit and, no doubt, other battles to be fought.
The two women now took to the crowded rail network. Their travels around the Free State and then, later, back into the Transvaal, coincided with a series of Kitchener’s great ‘drives’ across the veldt, and everywhere the two women saw open trucks standing at sidings, full of women and children and the occasional man, exposed to the icy rains and hot sun of the high veldt. These sights, observed Emily, typified war ‘in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness’ and Alice could not remember seeing, in all her varied experiences of warfare, anything quite so heart-wrenching. The scenes, in fact, shook the two more than the sight of the camps, which at least presented a superficial picture of order and protection from the elements, with their rows of white bell tents, like medical dressings, thought Alice, covering suppurating sores.
The conditions in these camps varied, depending on various elements: the dedication and care of the superintendent in charge, the nearness of the supplies of water and fuel, the consciences of the local inhabitants and the care they showed and the dates when the camps were opened – for the earliest camps took first pick of the supplies.
Everywhere the two visited, Emily made pages of notes and then presented her recommendations for improvements, which were received with reactions ranging from wearied agreement and vague promises of remedial action to virtual indifference.
As they travelled, Alice continued to send her reports back to the Post. She struggled to keep indignation out of her stories, confining herself to factual accounts, leavened by descriptive quotes from Emily Hobhouse. She realised that not all of her cables were published – ‘too repetitively critical’ was one editorial reaction. But she also knew that many were used, with, as far as she could tell, little subediting. She also gathered that opinion was hardening in Britain against the war and its effect on Afrikaner civilians and she was glad to be playing some part in creating this, although she realised that without
having the determined Miss Hobhouse as a topical peg on which to hang her stories, she would have obtained far less space.
After six weeks of juddering, wearying rail travel, Emily and Alice returned to Bloemfontein to check to see what changes, if any, had been made since Emily’s first visit there. They found that all the improvements that had been made – few as they were – had been swamped by new arrivals following the new anti-commando sweeps.
The camp itself, which remained the largest in South Africa, had doubled in size and more were expected. Since they had left six weeks before, there had been sixty-two deaths in the camp and the solitary doctor supplied for the settlement was himself laid low with enteric fever. Two of the Boer girls that Emily had trained as nurses had also died.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ declared Emily one evening as the two sat together in their little hotel in the city. Emily, temperate to the end, was sipping cocoa but, as the conditions in the camps had worsened the further they had travelled, Alice had taken to taking two nips of whisky before they retired every evening. It was, she said, ‘the solace of despair’. She put down her glass now.
‘Will you leave now?’ she enquired.
‘Yes. I will sail for England as soon as I can get a ship. This whole system has been a gigantic blunder. It is piling disaster upon disaster.’ She leant forward. ‘Do you know, Alice, I was thinking today of a parish I had known at home of two thousand people, where a funeral was an event – and usually of an old person. Here some twenty-five are being carried away every day. The full realisation of the position has dawned on me. It is a death rate not known except in the times of the Great Plagues. The whole talk is of death: who died yesterday, who lies dying today, who will be dead tomorrow.
‘I do not have accurate figures, but I understand that there are now more than ninety thousand whites and more than twenty-four thousand blacks in these camps.’
She shook her head. ‘I must return home as quickly as possible and present the facts to the British people. You have done wonders, my dear, but not everyone reads the Morning Post, you know.’
Alice took another sip of whisky, as though to anaesthetise herself against the scenes of death they had witnessed that day. ‘What will you recommend in your report?’
‘Well, of course, the huge deficiencies should be remedied immediately, with fuel, bedding, soap, clothing, diet and water supplies improved and the overcrowding and bad sanitation removed. Fundamentally, however, the whole system should be abolished. All those who have friends or relations who can take them should be allowed to leave the camps. No further refugees should be brought in. What’s more, seeing the growing impertinences of the Kaffirs, seeing the white women thus humiliated, every care should be taken to put them in places of authority.’
Alice hid a half smile. She had realised, of course, that Emily was a woman of her time with contemporary views about not mixing the races. But she was also a person of huge energy, great courage and simmering indignation with a moral backbone as rigid as the corset she habitually wore. ‘Good luck, Emily,’ she said, raising her glass. ‘It has been a pleasure and an honour to be with you.’
The next morning, Emily Hobhouse was on her way home, pecking Alice lightly on the cheek and then bustling aboard a train for Cape Town, to where she had cabled to make a reservation on board a steamer leaving for Southampton in a week’s time. As she watched her go, Alice felt a delicious shimmer of synthetic sympathy for those stiff-backed members of the Tory government – and of the right-wing members of the Liberal Party who supported them – who were not aware of what was awaiting them.
Back in the hotel, Alice completed her latest story on the camps: a summation of what she and Emily had seen over the previous six weeks and of what the doughty Miss Hobhouse intended to do on her return. She ploddingly then transposed this into cablese and took it to the cable office. Then, deep in thought, she returned to her room to write to Simon.
She had done so studiously once a week while on trek with Emily and, in return, had received two letters from him. This was as much as she expected, because she knew that he was somewhere in the south, far away from post offices. In both letters, his tone was cheery, unsentimental, of course, but still lacking that warmth that she was accustomed to receiving from him on the rare moments when they had been separated in the past. He was clearly still uncomfortable with her and she sighed. The events of the last six weeks had taken her mind off both her husband and James Fulton to some extent. Fulton had written to her once, having somehow found where she was staying for three nights on her peregrinations, for she had not written to him.
Alice re-read his letter now, before attempting to write to her husband. It was full of the warmth that was absent from Simon’s missive; cheerful, bouncing in style even, but saying how much he was missing her and that things were not the same without her by his side, with her smile, her soft skin … She threw down the letter and put her head in her hand. How she missed him, too, dammit! She realised that her self-imposed absence, her immersion in the doings of Emily Hobhouse had not removed him from her mind or her heart. Oh, what to do about it!
She closed her eyes for a while and then picked up her pen and wrote, ‘My dear, dear Simon …’
CHAPTER NINE
On descending from the train, Fonthill found that General Knox’s camp had moved on and that his own column was said to be well in advance of the main force and was now ‘somewhere across the Orange’. That meant that de Wet had, indeed, found a way of crossing into the Cape Colony and that Simon’s reinforced column must be hot on his tail. God, things had moved fast in the few days that he had been away!
A sense of frustration descended upon him as he stamped around the remnants of Knox’s army, demanding a sound horse and provisions so that he could ride on and catch up with his men. Not only was he out of the action but, it seemed, his much loved wife had somehow lost her senses and was obviously in some sort of relationship with a much younger man. Such a thing had never happened in their sixteen years of marriage and it shook the very foundations of his life. Oh, had it been a mistake to jettison all his principles and to rejoin the army as a regular soldier? It all seemed to stem from that. Well, there was nothing he could do about it, for he was too far away to fight this ridiculous affair at first hand. He must just rely on Alice, dear Alice, to realise how much he loved her and to understand where her duties lay – while he chased this slippery, wily, ruthless Boer …
A reluctant quartermaster captain eventually issued him with a horse and, even more reluctantly, a standard issue Lee Enfield and Webley revolver. ‘If you’re cavalry, you should have a carbine, sir,’ he argued.
‘But I’m not bloody cavalry, Captain. I’m mounted infantry. And I would like a bandolier with cartridges. Thank you.’
He set out following a compass bearing to where he had been told Knox could be found. And he found some relief in riding alone in the magnificent, rolling grassland and kopje-strewn country that swept down to the Orange River and the border with the Cape Province. His shoulder remained sore but he was able to extract much more movement from it now, even though he would be unable to use the heavy rifle he had demanded. Better not meet a Boer patrol, he reflected.
He soon came up with Knox’s new camp and was relieved to find that the general was away. His ADC confirmed that Fonthill’s Horse – now made up to some two hundred men and under the temporary command of Major Hammond – had ridden out two days before and had sent a message back to say that they had found traces of a Boer commando that had crossed the Orange at a place called Zanddrift. It seemed, however, that Knox had also received a strong report that de Wet was heading instead for the little town of Odendaalstroom, which he intended to take and to cross the river near there. As a result, the general had led a large force to head him off and had left that very morning.
Which way to go? It did not take Fonthill long to decide. His place was with his own column, so he hired a Kaffir to take him directly to Zanddrif
t. It was a risk, because he knew that two other Boer commandos, under General Kritzinger and Judge Hertzog, had previously penetrated the Colony and were now ranging deeply into the mountains that fringed the border. The trail that Hammond had followed at the crossing, therefore, could well be that of the two other commandos. Or would it? Mzingeli – if Hammond was trusting him to lead, that is – would never follow old spoors. The thought decided him. He would cross at Zanddrift.
There, he found the recent marks of many riders going down to the fast-flowing Orange but the water level was low and, dismissing his guide, he crossed with comparative ease, despite some initial apprehension about guiding his horse with only one hand in the swift-flowing water. On the other side, he realised that the terrain was now much more inhospitable, with barren hills rising to the south in a jumbled mass. How was he to track the column? He looked about him. What would Mzingeli do? Look for softer ground, of course.
He turned to the left and, sure enough, as the ground close to the river turned marshy, there he picked up again the traces of many horsemen. In addition, however, he noted the marks of several wagons and what could only be heavy guns. The Boers, of course!
His own column included no wagon or artillery piece, but there was no way of knowing if the hundreds of hoof marks included those of his own men. He frowned. Better to follow the tracks of the commando, anyway. If Hammond was doing his job, then wherever were the Boers, Fonthill’s Horse should be close in attendance.
He followed the clearly distinguishable signs of a commando on the march for a couple of hours until it began to rain again, so he resolved to camp for the night. He did not wish to blunder into de Wet’s rearguard again – and this time on his own. Fonthill therefore tethered his horse, unpacked an oilskin, some cold biltong and dry biscuits – better not attempt to light a fire – and curled up miserably under a low tree. He eventually drifted off to sleep, lulled by rain dripping from the leaves and dreamt that Alice was walking hand in hand with Fulton and looking over her shoulder, laughing at him.
