* * * * * * *
This considerable digression will, I hope, be pardoned by the reader, and I make haste to return to the true path of chronology. As I sat drenched and miserable on the ground with the prisoners and some mortally wounded men, I cursed, not only my luck, but my own decision. I could quite decently have gone off upon the engine. Indeed, I think, from what was said about the affair by the survivors, I might even have been extremely well received. I had needlessly and by many exertions involved myself in a useless and hopeless disaster. I had not helped anybody by attempting to return to the company. I had only cut myself out of the whole of this exciting war with all its boundless possibilities of adventure and advancement. I meditated blankly upon the sour rewards of virtue. Yet this misfortune, could I have foreseen the future, was to lay the foundations of my later life. I was not to be done out of the campaign. I was not to languish as a prisoner. I was to escape, and by escaping was to gain a public reputation or notoriety which made me well-known henceforward among my countrymen, and made me acceptable as a candidate in a great many constituencies. I was also put in the position to earn the money which for many years assured my independence and the means of entering Parliament. Whereas if I had gone back on the engine, though I should perhaps have been praised and petted, I might well have been knocked on the head at Colenso a month later, as were several of my associates on Sir Redvers Buller’s Staff.
But these events and possibilities were hidden from me, and it was in dudgeon that I ranged myself in the line of prisoners before the swiftly erected tent of the Boer headquarters. My gloomy reflections took a sharper and a darker turn when I found myself picked out from the other captive officers and ordered to stand by myself apart. I had enough military law to know that a civilian in a half uniform who has taken an active and prominent part in a fight, even if he has not fired a shot himself, is liable to be shot at once by drumhead court-martial. None of the armies in the Great War would have wasted ten minutes upon the business. I therefore stood solitary in the downpour, a prey to gnawing anxiety. I occupied myself in thinking out what answers I should make to the various short, sharp questions which might soon be addressed to me, and what sort of appearance I could keep up if I were soon and suddenly told that my hour had come. After about a quarter of an hour of this I was much relieved when, as a result of deliberations which were taking place inside the tent, I was curtly told to rejoin the others. Indeed I felt quite joyful when a few minutes later a Boer field cornet came out of the tent and said, ‘We are not going to let you go, old chappie, although you are a correspondent. We don’t catch the son of a lord every day.’ I need really never have been alarmed. The Boers were the most humane people where white men were concerned. Kaffirs were a different story, but to the Boer mind the destruction of a white man’s life, even in war, was a lamentable and shocking event. They were the most good-hearted enemy I have ever fought against in the four continents in which it has been my fortune to see active service.
So it was settled that we were all to march off under escort sixty miles to the Boer railhead at Elandslaagte and to be sent to Pretoria as prisoners of war.
10 For this and following chapters, see map of South Africa, pages 246–7.
11 Commander-in-Chief, and Chief of Staff respectively in 1917–18.
12 See diagram on page 223.
13 It was more than ten years before I was able to make good my promise. Nothing was done for this man by the military authorities; but when in 1910 I was Home Secretary, it was my duty to advise the King upon the awards of the Albert Medal. I therefore revived the old records, communicated with the Governor of Natal and the railway company, and ultimately both the driver and his fireman received the highest reward for gallantry open to civilians.
Chapter XX
In Durance Vile
PRISONER of War! That is the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be, but it is nevertheless a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile the war is going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away. Also the days are very long. Hours crawl like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you. Reading is difficult; writing impossible. Life is one long boredom from dawn till slumber.
Moreover, the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other’s society. If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life. Luckily it was very short. Less than a month passed from the time when I yielded myself prisoner in Natal till I was at large again, hunted but free, in the vast subcontinent of South Africa. Looking back on those days, I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives. What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead. Therefore in after years, when I was Home Secretary and had all the prisons of England in my charge, I did my utmost consistent with public policy to introduce some sort of variety and indulgence into the life of their inmates, to give to educated minds books to feed on, to give to all periodical entertainments of some sort to look forward to and to look back upon, and to mitigate as far as is reasonable the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure. Although I loathed the business of one human being inflicting frightful and even capital punishment upon others, I comforted myself on some occasions of responsibility by the reflection that a death sentence was far more merciful than a life sentence.
Dark moods come easily across the mind of a prisoner. Of course if he is kept on very low diet, chained in a dungeon, deprived of light and plunged into solitude, his moods only matter to himself. But when you are young, well fed, high-spirited, loosely guarded, able to conspire with others, these moods carry thought nearer to resolve, and resolve ever nearer to action.
It took us three days’ journey by march and train to reach our place of confinement at Pretoria from the front. We tramped round the Boer lines besieging Ladysmith in sound of the cannon, friendly and hostile, until we reached Elandslaagte station. Here our little party – Captain Haldane, a very young lieutenant of the Dublins named Frankland,14 and myself – with about fifty men, were put into the train, and we rumbled our way slowly for hundreds of miles into the heart of the enemy’s country. We were joined at an early station by a trooper of the Imperial Light Horse who had been captured that day when on patrol. This man, whose name was Brockie, was a South African colonist. He passed himself off to the Boers as an officer, and as he spoke Dutch and Kaffir fluently and knew the country, we did not gainsay him. We thought he was the very man for us. We all arrived at Pretoria on November 18, 1899. The men were taken off to their cage on the racecourse, and we four officers were confined in the State Model Schools. Throughout our journey we had repeatedly discussed in undertones, and as occasion offered, plans for escape, and had resolved to try our utmost to regain our freedom. Curiously enough three out of our four at different times and in different circumstances made their escape from the State Model Schools; and with one exception we were the only prisoners who ever succeeded in getting away from them.
In the State Model Schools we found all the officers who had been taken prisoner in the early fighting of the war, and principally at Nicholson’s Nek. We new arrivals were all lodged in the same dormitory, and explored ou
r abode with the utmost care. We thought of nothing else but freedom, and from morn till night we racked our brains to discover a way of escape. We soon discovered the many defects in the system by which we were held in custody. We had so much liberty within our bounds, and were so free from observation during the greater part of the day and night, that we could pursue our aim unceasingly. We had not been there a week before our original impulse to escape became merged in a far more ambitious design.15*
Gradually we evolved in deep consultation a scheme of desperate and magnificent audacity. It arose naturally from the facts of the case. We were ourselves in the State Model Schools about sixty officer prisoners of war, and we had about ten or eleven British soldier servants. Our guard consisted of about forty ‘Zarps’ (South African Republic Police). Of this guard ten were permanently on sentry-go on the four sides of the enclosure in the centre of which the school building stood. By day another ten were usually off duty and out in the town; while the rest remained cleaning their equipment, smoking, playing cards and resting in their guard tent. This guard tent was pitched in one corner of the quadrangular enclosure; and in it by night the whole thirty ‘Zarps’ not on duty slept the sleep of the just.
If this guard could be overpowered and disarmed, a very important step would have been taken. It became extremely necessary at the outset to learn how they disposed themselves for the night, what they did with their rifles and revolvers, what proportion of them lay down in their accoutrements, fully armed or armed at least with their revolvers. Careful investigations were made both by day and by night. In the result it was ascertained that practically all the guard not required for duty rolled themselves up in their blankets and slept in two rows on either side of the marquee. Those who were not wanted for sentry-go that night took off their boots and most of their clothes. Even those who were expecting to relieve their comrades in an hour or two took off their tunics, their boots, and above all their belts. Their rifles and bandoliers were stacked and hung around the two tent-poles in improvised racks. There were therefore periods in the night, midway between the changes of the guard, when these thirty men, sleeping without any protection other than the tent wall, within fifty yards of sixty determined and athletic officers, were by no means so safe as they supposed.
The entrance of the guard tent was watched by a sentry. Who shall say what is possible or impossible? In these spheres of action one cannot tell without a trial. It did not seem impossible that this sentry might be engaged in conversation by a couple of officers on some story or other, either about something alarming that had happened or of someone who was suddenly ill, while at the same time two or three determined prisoners could enter the back of the guard tent by a slit in the canvas, possess themselves of pistols or rifles from the rack, and hold up the whole guard as they awoke from their slumbers. The armed sentry at the entrance would have to be seized in the moment of surprise. To master the guard without a shot being fired or an alarm given was a problem of extreme difficulty and hazard. All one could say about such an enterprise was that the history of war – and I must add, crime – contains many equally unexpected and audacious strokes. If this were achieved, it would only be the first step.
The ten armed sentries on duty were the second step. This phase was complicated by the fact that three of these men were posted outside the spiked railing of the enclosure. They were only a yard away from it, and would often stand leaning against it by day, chatting. But at night no such occasion would arise, and they were therefore ungetatable and outside the lions’ den. All the rest were inside. Each of these ten men (three outside and seven in) was a proposition requiring a special study.
It did not follow that the enterprise would be wrecked if one or two of them got off and gave the alarm. Once the guard were overpowered and their rifles and pistols distributed, we should have become an armed force superior in numbers – and we believed superior also in discipline and intelligence – to any organised body of Boers who could or would be brought against us for at least half an hour. Much may happen in half an hour! It seemed obvious that about two o’clock in the morning, halfway through the middle watch, was the most favourable moment. If every British officer did exactly what he ought to do at the right moment, and if nothing miscarried, it seemed fair to hope that, making reasonable allowance for slips in minor matters, we might be masters of the State Model Schools.
The whole enclosure was brightly and even brilliantly lighted by electric lights on tall standards. But the wires on which these lights depended were discovered by us to pass through the dormitories we occupied in the State Model Schools building. One of our number versed in such matters declared his ability to disconnect them at any moment and plunge the whole place in pitch darkness; and this in fact was momentarily done one night as an experiment. If this could be effected say a minute after the hold-up in the guard tent was signalled, the seizure of the sentries on duty, utterly bewildered at what was taking place, might not be so difficult as it seemed. Lastly, the gymnasium of the State Model Schools contained a good supply of dumb-bells. Who shall say that three men in the dark, armed with dumb-bells, desperate and knowing what they meant to do, are not a match for one man who, even though he is armed, is unsuspecting and ignorant of what is taking place? If once we could surprise the guard and overcome and disarm the majority of the sentries, if once we could have thirty officers armed with revolvers and thirty more armed with rifles in the heart of Pretoria, the enemy’s capital, the first and by far the hardest phase in a great and romantic enterprise would have been achieved. What next?
A mile and a half away from the State Model Schools was the Pretoria racecourse, and in this barbed-wire enclosure upwards of two thousand British prisoners – soldiers and non-commissioned officers – were confined. We were in touch with these men and would be able to concert plans with them. Our channel of communication was a simple one. Some of the ten or eleven servants assigned to the officers in the State Model Schools from time to time gave cause for dissatisfaction, and were sent back to the racecourse and replaced by others. Thus we knew regularly the feelings of these two thousand British soldiers and the conditions under which they were confined. We learned that they were extremely discontented. Their life was monotonous, their rations short, their accommodation poor. They were hungry and resentful. On one occasion they had surged up towards the guard at the entrance, and although no bloodshed had taken place, we knew that the Boers had been much exercised by the problem of keeping so many men in check. Our information told us that there were only about one hundred and twenty ‘Zarps’ with two machine-guns in charge of this large prisoners’ cage. Such a force, if fully prepared, could no doubt have quenched any mutiny in blood. But suppose at the moment when the prisoners rose, the racecourse guard was attacked from behind by sixty armed officers! Suppose the machine-guns were rushed from the rear! Suppose the whole two thousand, acting on a definite plan, attacked from the front! Who shall say that in the confusion and the night numbers and design would not have prevailed? If this were so, the second phase of the enterprise would in its turn have attained success. What then?
In the whole of Pretoria there were not five hundred men capable of bearing arms; and these for the most part were well-to-do burghers who had obtained exemption from the front, men unfit to go on commando, officials of the Government, clerks in the Government offices, etc. These were nominally formed into a town guard and had had rifles served out to them. Beyond this, organisation did not run. If the first step could have been taken, the second would have been far easier, and the third easier still. In imagination we saw ourselves masters of the enemy’s capital. The forts were held only by caretakers. Everyone else was at the front. The guns of the forts all faced outwards. They were not defended in any effectual way from an attack from the rear. Had we been successful in obtaining control of the town, the occupation of the forts would have been easy, would have followed in fact as a natural consequence. The nearest British army was three hundred mil
es away. But if all had gone well, we should by a wave of the wand have been in possession of the enemy’s fortified capital, with an adequate force and plenty of food and ammunition for a defence at least as long as that of Mafeking.
The whole of this would have taken place between dusk and dawn. How long should we have had before we were attacked? We thought that several days might certainly be secured. We should hold the central railway junction of the South African Republic. Here the railways north, east, and south were joined together. We could send a train down each of these lines as far as was prudent – perhaps forty or fifty miles, perhaps more – and then come back blowing up every bridge and culvert behind us. In the time thus gained the defence of the town could be effectually organised. Suppose this thing happened! Suppose the Boer armies woke up to find their capital was in the hands of the masses of prisoners of war whom they had so incautiously accumulated there without an adequate garrison! How many men would they have to detach to besiege it? The kind of fighting in which the Boers excelled required the open country. They never succeeded during the whole war in reducing any strong places. Kimberley, Mafeking, Ladysmith are examples. Wherever they came up against trenches and fixed positions, they had recoiled. The theatre in which they were so formidable was the illimitable veldt. If we got Pretoria we could hold it for months. And what a feat of arms! President Kruger and his Government would be prisoners in our hands. He had talked of ‘staggering humanity’. But here indeed was something to stagger him.
Perhaps with these cards in our hands we could negotiate an honourable peace, and end the struggle by a friendly and fair arrangement which would save the armies marching and fighting. It was a great dream. It occupied our thoughts for many days. Some ardent spirits went so far as to stitch together a Union Jack for use ‘on the day’. But all remained a dream. The two or three senior officers who were prisoners with us, on being apprised of our plans, pronounced decidedly against them; and I shall certainly not claim that they were wrong. One is reminded of the comic opera. The villain impressively announces: ‘Twelve thousand armed muleteers are ready to sack the town.’ ‘Why don’t they do it?’ he is asked. ‘The Police won’t let them.’ Yes, there was the rub. Ten men awake and armed may be a small obstacle to a great scheme, but in this case, as in so many others, they were decisive. We abandoned our collective designs and concentrated upon individual plans of escape.
My Early Life Page 26
