Such were my fortunes in this celebrated episode. It is very rarely that cavalry and infantry, while still both unshaken, are intermingled as the result of an actual collision. Either the infantry keep their heads and shoot the cavalry down, or they break into confusion and are cut down or speared as they run. But the two or three thousand Dervishes who faced the 21st Lancers in the watercourse at Omdurman were not in the least shaken by the stress of battle or afraid of cavalry. Their fire was not good enough to stop the charge, but they had no doubt faced horsemen many a time in the wars with Abyssinia. They were familiar with the ordeal of the charge. It was the kind of fighting they thoroughly understood. Moreover, the fight was with equal weapons, for the British too fought with sword and lance as in the days of old.
* * * * * * *
A white gunboat seeing our first advance had hurried up the river in the hopes of being of assistance. From the crow’s nest, its commander, Beatty, watched the whole event with breathless interest. Many years passed before I met this officer or knew that he had witnessed our gallop. When we met, I was First Lord of the Admiralty and he the youngest Admiral in the Royal Navy. ‘What did it look like?’ I asked him. ‘What was your prevailing impression?’ ‘It looked,’ said Admiral Beatty, ‘like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet.’ With this striking, if somewhat homely, description my account of this adventure may fittingly close.
Chapter XVI
I Leave the Army
THE defeat and destruction of the Dervish army was so complete that the frugal Kitchener was able to dispense immediately with the costly services of a British cavalry regiment. Three days after the battle the 21st Lancers started northwards on their march home. I was allowed to float down the Nile in the big sailing-boats which contained the Grenadier Guards. In Cairo I found Dick Molyneux, a subaltern in the Blues, who like myself had been attached to the 21st. He had been seriously wounded by a sword cut above his right wrist. This had severed all the muscles and forced him to drop his revolver. At the same time his horse had been shot at close quarters. Molyneux had been rescued from certain slaughter by the heroism of one of his troopers. He was now proceeding to England in charge of a hospital nurse. I decided to keep him company. While we were talking, the doctor came in to dress his wound. It was a horrible gash, and the doctor was anxious that it should be skinned over as soon as possible. He said something in a low tone to the nurse, who bared her arm. They retired into a corner, where he began to cut a piece of skin off her to transfer to Molyneux’s wound. The poor nurse blanched, and the doctor turned upon me. He was a great rawboned Irishman. ‘Oi’ll have to take it off you,’ he said. There was no escape, and as I rolled up my sleeve he added genially, ‘Ye’ve heeard of a man being flayed aloive? Well, this is what it feels loike.’ He then proceeded to cut a piece of skin and some flesh about the size of a shilling from the inside of my forearm. My sensations as he sawed the razor slowly to and fro fully justified his description of the ordeal. However, I managed to hold out until he had cut a beautiful piece of skin with a thin layer of flesh attached to it. This precious fragment was then grafted on to my friend’s wound. It remains there to this day and did him lasting good in many ways. I for my part keep the scar as a souvenir.
* * * * * * *
My father and mother had always been able to live near the centre and summit of the London world, and on a modest scale to have the best of everything. But they had never been at all rich, still less had they been able to save. On the contrary, debts and encumbrances had accumulated steadily during their intensively active public and private life. My father’s expedition to South Africa in 1891 had, however, enabled him to obtain a share in very valuable gold-mining properties. He had acquired among other holdings 5,000 Rand Mines shares at their original par value. During the last year of his life these shares rose almost daily in the market, and at his death they were nearly twenty times the price he had paid for them. Soon afterwards they rose to fifty or sixty times this price; and had he lived another year he would have been possessed of a substantial fortune. In those days, when there was no taxation worth mentioning, and when the purchasing power of money was at least half as great again as it is now, even a quarter of a million sterling was real wealth. However, he died at the moment when his new fortune almost exactly equalled his debts. The shares of course were sold, and when everything was settled satisfactorily my mother was left with only the entailed property secured by her marriage settlements. This, however, was quite enough for comfort, ease and pleasure.
I was most anxious not to be a burden upon her in any way; and amid the movements and excitements of the campaigns and polo tournaments I reflected seriously upon the financial aspects of my military life. My allowance of £500 a year was not sufficient to meet the expenses of polo and the Hussars. I watched the remorseless piling up year by year of deficits which, although not large – as deficits go– were deficits none the less. I now saw that the only profession I had been taught would never yield me even enough money to avoid getting into debt, let alone to dispense with my allowance and become completely independent as I desired. To have given the most valuable years of one’s education to reach a position of earning about 14s. a day out of which to keep up two horses and most costly uniforms seemed hardly in retrospect to have been a very judicious proceeding. To go on soldiering even for a few more years would plainly land me and all connected with me in increasing difficulties. On the other hand the two books I had already written and my war correspondence with the Daily Telegraph had already brought in about five times as much as the Queen had paid me for three years of assiduous and sometimes dangerous work. Her Majesty was so stinted by Parliament that she was not able to pay me even a living wage. I therefore resolved with many regrets to quit her service betimes. The series of letters I had written for the Morning Post about the battle of Omdurman, although unsigned, had produced above £300. Living at home with my mother my expenses would be small, and I hoped to make from my new book about the Soudan Campaign, which I had decided to call The River War, enough to keep me in pocket money for at least two years. Besides this I had in contemplation a contract with the Pioneer to write them weekly letters from London at a payment of £3 apiece. I have improved upon this figure in later life; but at this time I reflected that it nearly equalled the pay I was receiving as a subaltern officer.
I therefore planned the sequence of the year 1899 as follows: To return to India and win the Polo Tournament: to send in my papers and leave the army: to relieve my mother from paying my allowance: to write my new book and the letters to the Pioneer: and to look out for a chance of entering Parliament. These plans as will be seen were in the main carried out. In fact from this year until the year 1919, when I inherited unexpectedly a valuable property under the will of my long dead great-grandmother Frances Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry, I was entirely dependent upon my own exertions. During all these twenty years I maintained myself, and later on my family, without ever lacking anything necessary to health or enjoyment. I am proud of this, and I commend my example to my son, indeed to all my children.
* * * * * * *
I decided to return to India at the end of November in order to prepare for the Polo Tournament in February. In the interval I found myself extremely well treated at home. My letters to the Morning Post had been read with wide attention. Everyone wanted to hear about the campaign and Omdurman, and above all about the cavalry charge. I therefore often found myself at the dinner table, in the clubs or at Newmarket, which in those days I frequented, the centre of appreciative circles of listeners and enquirers much older than myself. There were also young ladies who took some interest in my prattle and affairs. The weeks therefore passed agreeably.
It was at this time that I met the group of new Conservative MPs with whom I was afterwards to be much associated. Mr Ian Malcolm invited me to a luncheon at which the other guests were Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Percy (the elder brother of the late Duke of Northumber
land) and Lord Balcarres (now Lord Crawford). These were the rising politicians of the Conservative Party; and many Parliaments have met without receiving such an accession to the strength and distinction of the assembly. They were all interested to see me, having heard of my activities, and also on account of my father’s posthumous prestige. Naturally I was on my mettle, and not without envy in the presence of these young men only two or three years older than myself, all born with silver spoons in their mouths, all highly distinguished at Oxford or Cambridge, and all ensconced in safe Tory constituencies. I felt indeed I was the earthen pot among the brass.
Lord Hugh Cecil’s intellectual gifts were never brighter than in the morning of life. Brought up for nearly twenty years in the house of a Prime Minister and Party Leader, he had heard from childhood the great questions of State discussed from the point of view of the responsible master of our affairs. The frankness and freedom with which the members of the Cecil family, male and female, talked and argued with each other were remarkable. Differences of opinion were encouraged; and repartee and rejoinder flashed to and fro between father and children, brother and sister, uncle and nephew, old and young, as if they were all on equal terms. Lord Hugh had already held the House of Commons riveted in pin-drop silence for more than an hour while he discoursed on the government of an established church and the differences between Erastians and High Churchmen. He was an adept in every form of rhetoric or dialectic; and so quick, witty and unexpected in conversation that it was a delight to hear him.
Lord Percy, a thoughtful and romantic youth, an Irvingite by religion, of great personal charm and the highest academic achievement, had gained two years before the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for the best poem of the year. He had travelled widely in the highlands of Asia Minor and the Caucasus, feasting with princely barbarians and fasting with priestly fanatics. Over him the East exercised the spell it cast over Disraeli. He might, indeed, have stepped out of the pages of Tancred or Coningsby.
The conversation drifted to the issue of whether peoples have a right to self government or only to good government; what are the inherent rights of human beings and on what are they founded? From this we pushed on to Slavery as an institution. I was much surprised to find that my companions had not the slightest hesitation in championing the unpopular side on all these issues; but what surprised me still more, and even vexed me, was the difficulty I had in making plain my righteous and indeed obvious point of view against their fallacious but most ingenious arguments. They knew so much more about the controversy and its possibilities than I did, that my bold broad generalities about liberty, equality and fraternity got seriously knocked about. I entrenched myself around the slogan ‘No slavery under the Union Jack’. Slavery they suggested might be right or wrong: the Union Jack was no doubt a respectable piece of bunting: but what was the moral connection between the two? I had the same difficulty in discovering a foundation for the assertions I so confidently made, as I have found in arguing with the people who contend that the sun is only a figment of our imagination. Indeed although I seemed to start with all the advantages, I soon felt like going out into St James’s Street or Piccadilly and setting up without more ado a barricade and rousing a mob to defend freedom, justice and democracy. However, at the end Lord Hugh said to me that I must not take such discussions too seriously; that sentiments however worthy required to be probed, and that he and his friends were not really so much in favour of Slavery as an institution as I might have thought. So it seemed that after all they were only teasing me and making me gallop over ground which they knew well was full of traps and pitfalls.
After this encounter I had the idea that I must go to Oxford when I came back from India after the tournament. I was I expect at this time capable of deriving both profit and enjoyment from Oxford life and thought, and I began to make enquiries about how to get there. It seemed that there were, even for persons of riper years like myself, examinations, and that such formalities were indispensable. I could not see why I should not have gone and paid my fees and listened to the lectures and argued with the professors and read the books that they recommended. However, it appeared that this was impossible. I must pass examinations not only in Latin, but even in Greek. I could not contemplate toiling at Greek irregular verbs after having commanded British regular troops; so after much pondering I had to my keen regret to put the plan aside.
Early in November I paid a visit to the Central Offices of the Conservative Party at St Stephen’s Chambers, to enquire about finding a constituency. One of my more remote connections, Fitz Roy Stewart, had long worked there in an honorary capacity. He introduced me to the Party Manager, then Mr Middleton, ‘The Skipper’ as he was called. Mr Middleton was held in great repute because the Party had won the General Election of 1895. When parties lose elections through bad leadership or foolish policy or because of mere slackness and the swing of the pendulum, they always sack the party manager. So it is only fair that these functionaries should receive all the honours of success. ‘The Skipper’ was very cordial and complimentary. The Party would certainly find me a seat, and he hoped to see me in Parliament at an early date. He then touched delicately upon money matters. Could I pay my expenses, and how much a year could I afford to give to the constituency? I said I would gladly fight the battle, but I could not pay anything except my own personal expenses. He seemed rather damped by this, and observed that the best and safest constituencies always liked to have the largest contributions from their members. He instanced cases where as much as a thousand pounds a year or more was paid by the member in subscriptions and charities in return for the honour of holding the seat. Risky seats could not afford to be so particular, and ‘forlorn hopes’ were very cheap. However, he said he would do all he could, and that no doubt mine was an exceptional case on account of my father, and also he added on account of my experience at the wars, which would be popular with the Tory working-men.
On the way out I had another talk with Fitz Roy Stewart. My eye lighted upon a large book on his table on the cover of which was a label bearing the inscription ‘SPEAKERS WANTED’. I gazed upon this with wonder. Fancy that! Speakers were wanted and there was a bulky book of applications! Now I had always wanted to make a speech; but I had never on any occasion great or small been invited or indeed allowed to do so. There were no speeches in the 4th Hussars nor at Sandhurst either – if I might exclude one incident on which I was not concerned to dwell. So I said to Fitz Roy Stewart, ‘Tell me about this. Do you mean to say there are a lot of meetings which want speakers?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied; ‘the Skipper told me I was not to let you go without getting something out of you. Can’t I book you for one?’ I was deeply agitated. On the one hand I felt immense eagerness; on the other the keenest apprehension. However, in life’s steeplechase one must always jump the fences when they come. Regaining such composure as I could and assuming an indifference contrary to my feelings, I replied that perhaps if all the conditions were suitable and there was a real desire to hear me, I might be willing to accede to his request. He opened the book.
It appeared there were hundreds of indoor meetings and outdoor fêtes, of bazaars and rallies – all of which were clamant for speakers. I surveyed this prospect with the eye of an urchin looking through a pastry-cook’s window. Finally we selected Bath as the scene of my (official) maiden effort. It was settled that in ten days’ time I should address a gathering of the Primrose League in a park, the property of a Mr H. D. Skrine, situated on one of the hills overlooking that ancient city. I quitted the Central Office in suppressed excitement.
I was for some days in fear lest the plan should miscarry. Perhaps Mr Skrine or the other local magnates would not want to have me, or had already found someone they liked better. However, all went well. I duly received a formal invitation, and an announcement of the meeting appeared in the Morning Post. Oliver Borthwick now wrote that the Morning Post would send a special reporter to Bath to take down every word I said, and that the Morning Post would g
ive it prominence. This heightened both my ardour and my nervousness. I spent many hours preparing my discourse and learning it so thoroughly by heart that I could almost have said it backwards in my sleep. I determined in defence of Her Majesty’s Government to adopt an aggressive and even a truculent mode. I was particularly pleased with one sentence which I coined, to the effect that ‘England would gain far more from the rising tide of Tory Democracy than from the dried-up drainpipe of Radicalism’. I licked my chops over this and a good many others like it. These happy ideas, once they had begun to flow, seemed to come quite naturally. Indeed I very soon had enough to make several speeches. However, I had asked how long I ought to speak, and being told that about a quarter of an hour would do, I confined myself rigorously to twenty-five minutes. I found by repeated experiments with a stopwatch that I could certainly canter over the course in twenty minutes. This would leave time for interruptions. Above all one must not be hurried or flurried. One must not yield too easily to the weakness of audiences. There they were; what could they do? They had asked for it, and they must have it.
My Early Life Page 20
