21. What to do in these instances was complicated by the conflicting instructions that Gordon possessed.
22. Quoted in Waller, Gordon of Khartoum, p. 232.
23. Earlier in the year an Egyptian officer mutiny had taken place over demotions and pay cuts, which they blamed on European control. A short-term loan from the Rothschild Bank had saved the day, but as a result, the Egyptian Prime Minister, Nubar Pasha, had resigned on 18 February.
24. Quoted in Waller, Gordon of Khartoum, p. 235.
25. The Times, 22 January 1880.
26. Waller, Gordon of Khartoum, p. 245.
27. George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Colonel Gordon in Central Africa 1874-1879 from Original Letters and Documents (London: Thomas de La Rue, 1884, 4th edn, facsimile reprint by Kraus Reprints, 1969), p. 426.
28. The Times, 9 January 1883, p. 3.
29. Some claimed that the offer was encouraged by their mutual friend, Florence Nightingale, while others attributed it to Ripon’s hope that Gordon’s earlier Danubian experience would help resolve the vexatious border issues between Britain and Russia. Still others claimed that Gordon’s reputation for maintaining good relations with native populations would assist Ripon achieve his reform agenda.
30. Waller, Gordon of Khartoum, p. 261.
31. China eventually decided against war and China and Russia signed a treaty in 1881.
32. After numerous quarrels with Gordon’s successor in the Sudan, Gessi had resigned as Governor of Bahr al-Ghazil. In September, while travelling on the steam ship Saphia with some 600 other passengers, it ran aground. For two months they struggled against starvation and disease, and some engaged in cannibalism to survive. Emaciated and mentally tortured by what he had witnessed, Gessi was brought to Khartoum, where the government continued to make life difficult for him. Resolved to return home, he embarked from Berber, but died at Suez. Gordon paid to have his body returned to Ravenna.
33. H Shaked, The Life of the Sudanese Mahdi: A Historical Study of Kitáb sa’adat al-mustahdi bi-sírát al-imám al Mahdi by ismá-íl bin ‘Abd-al-Gádir (New Jersey: Transaction Press, 1978), pp. 75–76.
34. On 16 February 1882, Ra’úf Pasha had been replaced in that post by ‘Abd-al-Qádir Hilmi, but he had not yet arrived to take up his duties and Geigler, a German telegraph engineer, who had been Ra’úf’s deputy, took the post temporarily.
35. Ansár was the name connoting supporters of the Mahdi. It had been the name given to Muhammed’s followers at Medina. The British preferred to call them ‘dervishes’, an Arab word that literally means ‘the poor’ and was widely used to encompass a range of Muslim holy men.
36. Earlier in the century, the BaSotho had fought a thirty-year sporadic battle against the Boers, culminating in 1868 in the retention of their mountain territory and their capital at Thaba Bosiu. In 1869, caught between the Boer Orange Free State, Natal, the Zulus and the British, the BaSotho Paramount Chief, Mosheshwe, accepted a British offer to annex Basutoland. He welcomed the British administrators, but in 1871, for the sake of administrative convenience, the British turned it over to Cape Colony. When the king died in 1879, a rivalry emerged among his sons and the unrest caused the Cape government to impose direct rule through a system of Magistrates. The next year, the government passed the Peace Preservation Act, which included a formal demand for native disarmament. Of the four BaSotho chiefs, three (including the new Paramount Chief, Lestie) reluctantly accepted the demand, but the fourth, Masupha, rejected it. The Cape’s new Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, proposed maintaining disarmament in principle, but permitting guns to be held through licensing agreements. In August 1881, Robinson sent an Agent for the Basutos, Joseph Orpen, to present this to the chiefs. Orpen returned reporting that Masupha was still not convinced. In 1882, the new Cape Prime Minister, Thomas Scanlen, ignoring, to his political peril, the ‘forward demands’ of the businessmen, asked Robinson to ask the Colonial Office to seek Gordon’s services.
37. BL Add MS 51296. Sauer was convicted in the court of public opinion of placing Gordon’s life in danger.
38. Laurence Oliphant, Haifa (London: Blackwood, 1887), pp. 347–50.
39. Charles George Gordon, Reflections in Palestine 1883 (London: Macmillan, 1884).
40. Dominic Green, Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869–1899 (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 142.
41. Colonel John Donald Hamill Stewart, ‘Report on the Soudan’, The Parliamentary Papers, Egypt, No. 11, 1883, C-3670, p. 25.
42. Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 193.
43. Ibid., p. 194.
44. Ibid., p. 195.
45. Granville to Baring, 13 December 1883 (Public Records Office, London 30/29/199).
46. Ibid.
47. Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1908), vol. I, pp. 382, 429.
48. Lord Godfrey Elton, Gordon of Khartoum (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 281.
49. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1903), Vol. III, p. 149.
50. The National Archives (hereafter TNA), FO 78/3665, Baring to Granville, No. 44, 16 January 1884.
51. BL, Add Mss 51298, Gordon to Barnes, 22 January 1884, cited with a slightly different wording in R H Barnes and C E Brown, C G Gordon, A Sketch with Facsimile Letters (London: Macmillan, 1885), pp. 102–3.
52. Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. I, p. 429.
53. TNA, FO 78/3696, Granville to Baring, 18 January 1884.
54. Green, Three Empires on the Nile, p. 160.
55. Sudan Archive, University of Durham, Wingate Mss, 245/6; BL, Add Mss. 56451, Baring to Gordon, 22 January 1884.
56. Wingate found the file but not the incriminating letter. Some weeks later, a letter in Arabic, purporting to be the ‘smoking gun’ was provided to the Foreign Office by Gordon’s brother and his biographer Egmont Hake. Wingate thought it a forgery.
57. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. I, pp. 390, 444–46.
58. Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 213
59. Blue Book, London, Public Records Office, No. 2, p. 6; TNA, PRO 30/29/162, Baring to Granville, 28 January 1884.
60. Gordon to Baring, 18 February 1884, quoted in Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 230.
61. Granville to Baring, 23 February 1884, quoted in Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 230.
62. Gordon to Granville, 26 February 1884, quoted in Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 231.
63. Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 232.
64. Ibid., p. 234. After carefully considering all of the obstacles to evacuation, Trench, pp. 227–29, calculated that ‘purely as an administrative exercise, provided there were no shipwrecks, or engine failures, the operation [of evacuating the 15–20,000 people from the city] could just be completed in about eleven lifts between March and the end of September’.
65. Father Joseph Ohrwalder, Ten Years Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp, from the Original Manuscript of Father Joseph Ohrwalder, Late Priest of the Austrian Mission Station at Delen in Kordofan, ed. and tr. Major R C Wingate (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1892), p. 98.
66. Green, Three Empires on the Nile, p.176.
67. Ibid.
68. Waller, Gordon of Khartoum, p. 372.
69. Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 259.
70. Ibid., p. 257.
71. Rudolf C Slatin, With Fire and Sword in the Sudan, tr. Major F R Wingate (London: Edward Arnold, 1896), p. 17. The Mahdi used Slatin and Joseph Cuzzi, an Egyptian official captured at Berber, to communicate with Gordon. Appalled by their conversion to Islam (which saved their lives), Gordon refused to receive them.
72. A Egmont Hake, The Journals of Major-General C G Gordon, CB, at Khartoum (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), pp. 105–6.
73. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. I, p. 582.
74. Ohrwalder, Captivity, pp. 145–46.
75. Hake, Journals, p. 365.
76. Trench, The Road to Khartoum, p. 282.
77. Ibid., p. 288.
Chapter 7 Frederick Roberts
&n
bsp; 1. David James, Lord Roberts (London: Hollis & Carter, 1954), p. 176; Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (New York and London: W W Norton, 1985), pp. 178–79.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, the biographical sketch on this and the following pages is based, inter alia, on James, Roberts; the article on Roberts by Brian Robson in H C G Matthews and Brian Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, vol. 47 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (hereafter DNB), pp. 156–61; George Forrest, The Life of Lord Roberts, KG, VC (London: Cassell, 1914), as well as the other biographies mentioned in the bibliography.
3. The brief review of the war, and Roberts’s role, is based on, inter alia, L S Amery, ed., The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, vols 3–4 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1905–6); Frederick Maurice, compiler, History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, vols 1–3 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1906–8); J H Breytenbach, Die Geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog in Suid-Afrika, 1899–1902, vols 1–6 (Pretoria: Die Staatsdrukker, 1969–96); The War in South Africa (also known as the German Official Account of the War in South Africa (vol. 1 translated by W H H Waters, vol. 2 translated by Herbert du Cane; London: John Murray, 1904 and 1906); Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979); Bill Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902 (London: Arnold, 1999) and Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002).
4. British Library (hereafter BL), Lansdowne Mss, L(5)48, Roberts to Lansdowne, 7 June 1900 – published in André Wessels, ed., Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa 1899–1902 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing for Army Records Society, 2000), pp. 97–100.
5. For more on the Curragh incident and Roberts’s role see, for example, Ian F W Beckett, ed., The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (London: The Bodley Head for Army Records Society, 1986).
6. Imperial War Museum, L A E Rice-Davies Mss, 77/78/3, programme of Lord Roberts’s funeral.
7. James, Roberts, pp. 6, 53, 163–64; Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, pp. 148–49; Lord Roberts, Forty-one Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1897), I, p. 411 and II, p. 373.
8. Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, pp. 156–57, 179.
9. Ibid., pp. 159, 182.
10. DNB, 47, p. 157; Ian F W Beckett, ‘Women and Patronage in the Late Victorian Army’, History 85, 279 (2000), 478–79.
11. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)44, Bigge to Roberts, 18 August 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 123–24.
12. Royal Archives, VIC/P12/58, Roberts to the Queen, 21 August 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 124–26.
13. Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, p. 182.
14. DNB, 47, p. 158.
15. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)47, Roberts to Lansdowne, 22 October 1899 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 13–14.
16. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)47, Roberts to Lansdowne, 8 December 1899 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 14–16.
17. Brian Robson, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War 1878–1881 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1986), pp. 169–72.
18. Roberts, Forty-one Years in India, II, p. 377.
19. André Wessels, ‘The British View of a War in South Africa (1899)’ and ‘The British Army in 1899: Problems that Hampered Preparations for War in South Africa’, (South African) Journal for Contemporary History, 28, 2 (2003), 153–67 and 168–89.
20. Leopold Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het (Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 1999), pp. 58, 62.
21. Breytenbach, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, IV, pp. 89–100, 127–42; V, pp. 319–26, 337–49.
22. Ibid., IV, pp. 232–39; Amery, ed., Times History, III, pp. 397–400.
23. C R de Wet, Three Years War (October 1899 – June 1902) (London: Archibald Constable, 1902), pp. 101–9.
24. Jay Stone and Erwin A Schmidl, The Boer War and Military Reforms (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1988), p. 56.
25. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)47, Roberts to Lansdowne, 27 December 1899 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 21–24.
26. Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het, pp. 87–90.
27. Ibid., p. 120.
28. According to Pakenham, Boer War, p. 428, it was the most serious strategic mistake of the war.
29. A E Breytenbach, ‘Die slag by Donkerhoek, 11–12 Junie 1900’, unpub. MA dissertation (University of South Africa, 1980), passim; History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1908), III, pp. 204–25.
30. History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, III, p. 519.
31. Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het, p. 85; Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 237.
32. Amery, ed., Times History, III, p. 342; James, Roberts, p. 279; G F R Henderson, Stonewell Jackson and the American Civil War (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), I, pp. 306–7.
33. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)4, Roberts to Lansdowne, 17 May 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 80–83. See also Roberts’s foreword in G F R Henderson, The Science of War: A Collection of Essays and Lectures 1891–1903, ed. Neill Malcolm (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
34. The Times, 21 September 1900, p. 4.
35. See Proclamation 17 of 1900, 14 September 1900, as published in Army. Proclamations issued by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts in South Africa (London: HMSO, 1900) (hereafter Cd. 426), p. 17.
36. National Army Museum (hereafter NAM), Roberts Mss, 1971-01-23-126-3, Speech by Roberts, Cape Town, 10 December 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 144–48.
37. Cd. 426, pp. 1–2, 7; Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het, p. 110.
38. Albert Grundlingh, The Dynamics of Treason: Boer Collaboration in the South African War of 1899–1902 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2006), pp. 38–40; Idem, ‘Collaboration in Boer Society’, in Peter Warwick, ed., The South African War: The Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Harlow: Longman, 1980), p. 58.
39. Cd. 426, p. 8.
40. Cd. 426, pp. 10–11. As early as the second week of January 1900, when a British force briefly invaded the OFS, a number of Boer farms were burnt and cattle looted. See Breytenbach, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, IV, p. 85.
41. Instructions to Major General R A P Clements, as quoted in S B Spies, Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics January 1900–May 1902 (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1977), p. 122.
42. Amery, ed., Times History, V, p. 8.
43. Fransjohan Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2001), pp. 36–59, 242–63.
44. Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het, p. 114; Breytenbach, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, VI, pp. 168–69.
45. Roberts to Milner, 18 August 1900, as quoted by Scholtz, Waarom die Boere die Oorlog Verloor het, p. 131.
46. NAM, Roberts Mss, 1971-01-23-101-1, Afghanistan Series. Correspondence with India and England while Commanding Troops in Afghanistan, by General Sir Frederick Roberts, vol. 13, 1878–80 (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1891), pp. 523–24, Document CCCCXXII, Roberts to A C Lyall, 6 August 1880 – also published in Brian Robson, ed., Roberts in India: The Military Papers of Field Marshal Lord Roberts 1876–1893 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing for Army Records Society, 1993), p. 208.
47. Keith Surridge, ‘Lansdowne at the War Office’, in John Gooch, ed., The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 32, 34–39. See also NAM, Roberts Mss, 1971-01-23-34-373, Lansdowne to Roberts, 19 May 1900.
48. Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, p. 166.
49. Stephen Badsey, ‘War Correspondents in the Boer War’, in Gooch, ed., The Boer War, p. 196; Robson, Road to Kabul, pp. 93–94, 273.
50. NAM, Roberts Mss, 1971-01-23-126-3, Speech by Roberts, Bloemfontein, 28 March 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts,
pp. 65–67.
51. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885–1918 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 200–2.
52. For general histories of the war see, for example, Roberts, Forty-one Years in India, vol. 2 and Robson, Road to Kabul, as well as the other Anglo-Afghan War books referred to in the bibliography. For Roberts’s diaries, 1878–79 (the 1880 diary could not be traced), see NAM, Roberts Mss, 1971-01-23-92-18 and -19. Unless otherwise indicated, these sources were, inter alia, used in writing this case study of the war.
53. For the background to the war see, for example, Causes of the Afghan War being a Selection of Papers laid before Parliament with a Connecting Narrative and Comment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1879), passim, and Michael Edwardes, Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War (London: Harmish Hamilton, 1975), pp. 1–99.
54. Robson, ed., Roberts, p. 111.
55. NAM, Roberts Papers, 1971-01-23-37-21, Lytton to Roberts, 9 September 1879 – published in Robson, Road to Kabul, p. 140 and in Robson, ed., Roberts, pp. 119–22. The letter is marked ‘Very Confidential’.
56. James, Roberts, pp. 151–59; Roberts, Forty-one Years in India, II, pp. 341–61; E F Chapman. ‘The March from Kabul to Kandahar and the Battle of the 1st September, 1880’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 25 (1882), 282–302, 307–15.
57. Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, p. 174.
58. For general reviews of the battle see, for example, Breytenbach, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, IV, pp. 232–430; Amery, ed., Times History, III, pp. 401–58, 473–87; Maurice, compiler, History of the War, II, pp. 73–179; J L Basson, ‘Die Slag van Paardeberg’, unpub. MA thesis, Pretoria University, 1972, passim; The German Official Account of the War in South Africa, I, pp. 154–230. The case study that follows is primarily based on these sources.
59. BL, Lansdowne Mss, L(5)48, Roberts to Lansdowne, 22 February 1900 – published in Wessels, ed., Roberts, pp. 54–57.
60. Charles Sydney Goldmann, With General French and the Cavalry in South Africa (London: MacMillan, 1902), pp. 74–86; J G Maydon, French’s Cavalry Campaign (London: C Arthur Pearson, 1902), pp. 140–49.
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