CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
BRITAIN ENTERED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE GRIP
OF WAR. She placed nearly half a million men in the field, the
biggest force she had hitherto sent overseas throughout her
history. The conflict in South Africa, which began as a small
colonial campaign, soon called for a large-scale national effort.
Its course was followed in Britain with intense interest and lively
emotion. Scarcely a generation had gone by since the Franchise Acts
had granted a say in the affairs of State to every adult male. The
power to follow events and to pass judgment upon them had recently
come within the reach of all through free education. Popular
journals had started to circulate among the masses, swiftly
bringing news, good, bad, and sometimes misleading, into millions
of homes. Yet the result of this rapid diffusion of knowledge and
responsibility was not, as some had prophesied, social unrest and
revolutionary agitation. On the contrary, the years of the Boer War
saw a surge of patriotism among the vast majority of the British
people, and a widespread enthusiasm for the cause of Empire.
Of course there were vehement critics and
dissentients, the pro-Boers, as they were derisively called. They
included some influential Liberal leaders, and in their train a
rising young Welsh lawyer named Lloyd George, who now first made
himself known to the nation by the vigour of his attacks upon the
war and the Government. Nevertheless the general feeling in the
country was staunchly Imperialist. There was pride in the broad
crimson stretches on the map of the globe which marked the span of
the British Empire, and confidence in the Royal Navy’s command of
the Seven Seas. Europe was envious. Most of the Powers made plain
their sympathy for the Boers, and there were hints of an allied
combination against the Island kingdom. She might not have been
allowed to escape from her colonial war with an easy victory, but
her dominion of the seas caused second thoughts. On the outbreak of
war a flying squadron of the Royal Navy was mobilised at
Portsmouth, and this upon consideration from many angles proved
effective in overawing Europe. The lesson was not lost upon the
German Kaiser. The spectacle of British sea-power exercising
unchallengeable authority made him redouble his efforts to create a
mighty ocean-going German battle fleet. Dire consequences were to
flow from his spirit of emulation.
The South African War had its roots deep in the
past. Two land-locked Boer Republics, owing a vague suzerainty to
Britain, were surrounded on all sides, except for a short frontier
with Portuguese Mozambique, by British colonies, protectorates, and
territories. Yet conflict was not at first inevitable. The large
Dutch population in Cape Colony appeared reconciled to British rule
and supported Cecil Rhodes as their Premier. The Orange Free State
was friendly, and even in the Transvaal, home of the dourest
frontier farmers, a considerable Boer party favoured co-operation
with Britain. Hopes of an Anglo-Boer federation in South Africa
were by no means dead. But all this abruptly changed during the
last five years of the nineteenth century.
When Joseph Chamberlain became Colonial Secretary
in 1895 he was confronted by a situation of great complexity. The
Transvaal had been transformed by the exploitation of the extremely
rich goldfields on the Witwatersrand. This was the work of foreign
capital and labour, most of it British. Within a few years
Johannesburg had developed into a great city. The Uitlanders—or
Outlanders, as foreigners were called—equalled the native Boers in
number, but the Transvaal Government refused to grant them
political rights, even though they contributed all but
one-twentieth of the country’s taxation. Paul Kruger, the President
of the Republic, who had taken part in the Great Trek and was now
past his seventieth year, determined to preserve the character and
independence of his country. He headed the recalcitrant Dutch,
unwilling to make common cause with the British, and opposed to the
advance of industry, though ready to feed on its profits. The
threat of a cosmopolitan goldfield to a close community of
Bible-reading farmers was obvious to him. But his fears were
intensified by the encircling motions of Rhodes’ British South
Africa Company, which already controlled the territories to the
north that were to become the Rhodesias, and was now trying to
acquire Bechuanaland to the west. Rhodes, who had large financial
interests on the Rand, dreamt of a United South Africa and a
Cape-to-Cairo railway running through British territory all the
way.
The political and economic grievances of the
Uitlanders made an explosion inevitable, and Chamberlain by the end
of 1895 was ready to meet it. Unknown to him however Rhodes had
worked out a scheme for an uprising of the British in Johannesburg
to be reinforced by the invasion of the Transvaal by a Company
force. This was to be led by the Administrator of Rhodesia, Dr
Leander Starr Jameson. At the last moment the rising in
Johannesburg failed to take place, but Jameson, not having
counter-instructions from Rhodes, invaded the Transvaal with five
hundred men on December 29. It was, in Chamberlain’s words, “a
disgraceful exhibition of filibustering,” and it ended in the
failure which it deserved. On January 2 Jameson and his force
surrendered to the Boers at Doornkop. The raid was a turning-point;
the entire course of South African history was henceforth violently
diverted from peaceful channels. The atmosphere of the country was
poisoned by national and racial prejudice; the Dutch at the Cape,
in natural sympathy with the Transvaal Boers, began to growl at the
British. Rhodes was forced to resign his Premiership; but his great
popularity in England served only to sharpen Boer suspicion of a
deep-laid plot against the life of their republics. The Orange Free
State threw in its lot with Kruger. In the Transvaal his purpose
was strengthened; the party of reaction gained the upper hand and
armaments were purchased on a large scale for the conflict that
loomed ahead.
The next three years were occupied by
long-drawn-out and arduous negotiations, Chamberlain’s
determination being more than matched by Kruger’s tortuous
obstinacy. In March 1897 Sir Alfred Milner, an outstanding public
servant, became High Commissioner in South Africa. He was an
administrator of great talents, but he lacked the gift of
diplomacy. Within a few months he had made up his mind; he wrote to
Chamberlain, “There is no ultimate way out of the political
troubles of South Africa except reform in the Transvaal or war. And
at present the chances of reform in the Transvaal are worse than
ever.” But Chamberlain was anxious to avoid war, except as a last
resort, and even then he hoped that the responsibility for its
outbreak could be fixed on the Boers. He believed, as did Rhodes,
that Kruger, under pressure, would yield. They underestimated the
pioneers of the veldt.
The climax was reached in April 1899, when a
petition, signed by more than 20,000 Uitlanders, arrived in Downing
Street. It was followed in May by a dispatch from Milner which
stated that “The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept
permanently in the position of helots . . . does steadily undermine
the influence and reputation of Great Britain and the respect for
the British Government within the Queen’s Dominions.” A period of
negotiation followed, with the British Government demanding a vote
for every citizen after five years’ residence in the Transvaal and
putting forward the old claim to “suzerainty.” A conference at
Bloemfontein in June between Kruger and Milner settled nothing.
Milner was convinced that the Boers, now armed to the teeth, were
aiming at the establishment of a Dutch United States of South
Africa. Kruger was equally convinced that the British intended to
rob the Boers of their freedom and independence. “It is our country
you want,” he said, as tears ran down his face. Chamberlain made
several more attempts to come to an agreement, but by this time
both sides were pressing ahead with military preparations. On
October 9 the Boers delivered an ultimatum while the British forces
in South Africa were still weak. Three days later their troops
moved over the border.
At the outbreak of the war the Boers put 35,000
men, or twice the British number, in the field, and a much superior
artillery derived from German sources. They crossed the frontiers
in several directions. Their army was almost entirely mounted. They
were armed with Männlicher and Mauser rifles, with which they were
expert shots. Within a few weeks they had invested Ladysmith to the
east, and Mafeking and Kimberley to the west. At Ladysmith, on the
Natal border, 10,000 men, under Sir George White, were surrounded
and besieged after two British battalions had been trapped and
forced to surrender with their guns at Nicholson’s Nek. At Mafeking
a small force commanded by Colonel Baden-Powell was encircled by
many times its number under Pete Cronje. At Kimberley Cecil Rhodes
himself and a large civilian population were beset. After the
seasonal rains there was fresh grazing on the veldt, which had been
deliberately stimulated by Boer burnings at the end of the summer.
The countryside was friendly to the Boer cause. World opinion was
uniformly hostile to the British. Meanwhile a British army corps of
three divisions was on the way as reinforcement, under the command
of Sir Redvers Buller, and volunteer contingents from the Dominions
were offered or forthcoming. The phrase “unmounted men preferred”
used in official correspondence was typical of the want of
knowledge prevailing at the War Office. The troops were good, but
the enemy weapons and conditions were entirely misunderstood.
Kruger had long wanted a salt-water port under his
independent control. Beyond the mountain passes of Natal lay Durban
harbour, which could be captured if only he could reach it. Durban
was linked with the Transvaal by a railway which, by comparison
with the long line to Cape Town, was short, manageable, and on his
doorstep. Here would be the end of many disputes about customs
dues, freight charges, and much else besides, and it was in this
region that the main effort of both sides was at first
concentrated.
The British army corps, as it arrived, was
distributed by Buller in order to show a front everywhere. One
division was sent to defend Natal, another to the relief of
Kimberley, and a third to the north-eastern district of Cape
Colony. Within a single December week each of them advanced against
the rifle and artillery fire of the Boers, and was decisively
defeated with, for those days, severe losses in men and guns. At
Colenso, in Natal, where Buller himself commanded, at the Modder
River on the road to Kimberley, and at Stormberg in the east of
Cape Colony the Boers held their front and invaded the country
before them. Although the losses of under a thousand men in each
case may seem small nowadays, they came as a startling and heavy
shock to the public in Britain and throughout the Empire, and
indeed to the troops on the spot. But Queen Victoria braced the
nation in words which have become justly famous. “Please
understand,” she replied to Balfour when he tried to discuss “Black
Week,” as it was called, “that there is no one depressed in
this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of
defeat. They do not exist.” Lord Roberts of Kandahar, who had won
fame in the Afghan Wars, was made the new Commander-in-Chief, Lord
Kitchener of Khartoum was appointed his Chief of Staff, and in a
few months the two already illustrious generals with an
ever-increasing army transformed the scene. Buller meanwhile
persevered in Natal.
The new British command saw clearly that forces
must be used on a large scale and in combination, and the Boer
capitals, Bloemfontein and then Pretoria, became their sure
objective. Cronje at Mafeking was deceived into thinking that the
main blow would fall on Kimberley, and he shifted the larger
portion of his troops to Magersfontein, a few miles south of the
diamond centre. Here he entrenched himself and awaited the attack.
Kimberley indeed was one of Roberts’ objectives, but he gained it
by sending General French on a long encirclement, and French’s
cavalry relieved it on February 15. The threat from the rear now
compelled Cronje to quit his earthworks and fall back to the
north-east. Twelve days later, after fierce frontal assaults by
Kitchener, he surrendered with four thousand men. Thereafter all
went with a rush. On the following day Buller relieved Ladysmith;
on March 13 Roberts reached Bloemfontein, on May 31 Johannesburg,
and on June 5 Pretoria fell. Mafeking was liberated after a siege
which had lasted for two hundred and seventeen days, and its relief
provoked unseemly celebrations in London. Kruger fled. The Orange
Free State and the Transvaal were annexed, and in the autumn of
1900 Roberts went home to England. After almost exactly a year of
lively fighting, and with both the rebel capitals occupied, it
seemed to the British people that the Boer War was finished, and
won. At this Lord Salisbury, on Chamberlain’s advice, fought a
General Election and gained another spell of power with a large
majority.
On January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died. She lay
at Osborne, the country home in the Isle of Wight which she and
Prince Albert had designed and furnished fifty-five years before.
Nothing in its household arrangements had been changed during the
Queen’s long widowhood. She had determined to conduct her life
according to the pattern set by the Prince; nor did she waver from
her resolution. Nevertheless a great change had gradually overtaken
the monarchy. The Sovereign had become the symbol of Empire. At the
Queen’s Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 India and the colonies had been
vividly represented in the State celebrations. The Crown was
providing the link between the growing family of nations and races
which the former Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had with foresight
christened the Commonwealth. Disraeli’s vision and Chamberlain’s
enthusiasm had both contributed to this broadening Imperial theme.
The Queen herself was seized with the greatness of her rôle. She
sent her sons and grandsons on official tours of her
ever-increasing dominions, where they were heartily welcomed.
Homage from a stream of colonial dignitaries was received by her in
England. She appointed Indian servants to her household, and from
them learnt Hindustani. Thus she sought by every means within her
power to bind her diverse peoples together in loyalty to the
British Crown, and her endeavours chimed with the Imperial spirit
of the age. One of her last public acts, when she was over eighty
years of age, was to visit Ireland. She had never believed in Irish
Home Rule, which seemed to her a danger to the unity of the Empire.
Prompted by a desire to recognise the gallantry of her Irish
soldiers in South Africa, she travelled to Dublin in April 1900,
wearing the shamrock on her bonnet and jacket. Her Irish subjects,
even the Nationalists among them, gave her a rousing reception. In
Ireland a fund of goodwill still flowed for the Throne, on which
English Governments sadly failed to draw.
In England during the Queen’s years of withdrawal
from the outward shows of public life there had once been
restiveness against the Crown, and professed republicans had raised
their voices. By the end of the century all this had died away.
High devotion to her royal task, domestic virtues, evident
sincerity of nature, a piercing and sometimes disconcerting
truthfulness—all these qualities of the Queen’s had long impressed
themselves upon the minds of her subjects. In the mass they could
have no knowledge of how shrewd she was in political matters, nor
of the wisdom she had accumulated in the course of her dealings
with many Ministers and innumerable crises. But they justly caught
a sense of a great presiding personage. Even Ministers who in
private often found her views impulsive and partisan came to
respect the watchful sense of duty that always moved her. She
represented staunchness and continuity in British traditions, and
as she grew in years veneration clustered round her. When she died
she had reigned for nearly sixty-four years. Few of her subjects
could remember a time when she had not been their Sovereign. But
all reflecting men and women could appreciate the advance of
British power and the progress of the British peoples that had
taken place during the age to which she gave her name. The
Victorian Age closed in 1901, but the sense of purpose and
confidence which had inspired it lived on through the ordeals to
come.
The war in South Africa meanwhile continued. In
the past the Boers had never shown themselves docile or obedient to
political authority, even when exercised by their own leaders, and
British occupation of their principal townships and British seizure
of the railways seemed an insufficient reason for abandoning the
struggle. The veldt was wide, and from its scattered farmhouses a
man could get news, food, shelter, forage, a fresh horse, and even
ammunition. Roberts and Buller had hardly left the shores of South
Africa when the war flamed into swift-moving, hard-hitting
guerrilla. Botha, Kritzinger, Hertzog, De Wet, De la Rey, to name
only five of the more famous commando leaders, soon faced Kitchener
with innumerable local battles and reverses which were not to end
for another seventeen months. The Boers were only to be subdued by
extraordinary British exertions. In February 1901 Botha struck at
Natal, and was thrown back by General French after laying waste
large areas of the country. The other leaders invaded Cape Colony,
hoping to rally its Dutch inhabitants. Very few responded, but they
were enough to destroy all hopes of a speedy peace. After the
raiders were expelled Kitchener and Botha met at the end of the
month to arrange terms. Each of these leaders wanted an amnesty for
the Cape rebels; but Milner, the High Commissioner, was adverse,
and the Cabinet in London supported him. Thus frustrated, and much
against his judgment and personal inclination, Kitchener was driven
to what would nowadays be called a “scorched earth” policy.
Blockhouses were built along the railway lines; fences were driven
across the countryside; then more blockhouses were built along the
fences. Movement within the enclosures thus created became
impossible for even the most heroic commandos. Then, area by area,
every man, woman, and child was swept into concentration camps.
Such methods could only be justified by the fact that most of the
commandos fought in plain clothes, and could only be subdued by
wholesale imprisonment, together with the families who gave them
succour. Nothing, not even the incapacity of the military
authorities when charged with the novel and distasteful task of
herding large bodies of civilians into captivity, could justify the
conditions in the camps themselves. By February 1902 more than
twenty thousand of the prisoners, or nearly one in every six, had
died, mostly of disease. At first the authorities denied that
anything was wrong, or that any alleviation was possible, but at
length an Englishwoman, Miss Emily Hobhouse, exposed and proclaimed
the terrible facts. Campbell-Bannerman, soon to be Prime Minister,
but at this time in Opposition, denounced the camps as “methods of
barbarism.” Chamberlain removed them from military control;
conditions thereupon speedily improved, and at last, on March 23,
1902, the Boers sued for peace.
Three days later Cecil Rhodes died of heart
disease. In one of his final speeches he thus addressed the
Loyalists of Cape Town: “You think you have beaten the Dutch. It is
not so. The Dutch are not beaten. What is beaten is Krugerism, a
corrupt and evil Government, no more Dutch in essence than English.
No! The Dutch are as vigorous and unconquered today as they have
ever been; the country is still as much theirs as yours, and you
will have to live and work with them hereafter as in the past.”
Certainly the peace which was signed at Vereeniging on May 31 tried
to embody this spirit, and its provisions may be judged magnanimous
in the extreme. Thirty-two commandos remained unbeaten in the
field. Two delegates from each met the British envoys, and after
much discussion they agreed to lay down their arms and ammunition.
None should be punished except for certain specified breaches of
the usages of war; self-government would be accorded as soon as
possible, and Britain would pay three million pounds in
compensation. Such, in brief, were the principal terms, of which
the last may be reckoned as generous, and was at any rate
unprecedented in the history of modern war. Upon the conclusion of
peace Lord Salisbury resigned. The last Prime Minister to sit in
the House of Lords, he had presided over an unparalleled expansion
of the British Empire. He died in the following year, and with him
a certain aloofness of spirit, now considered old-fashioned, passed
from British politics. All the peace terms were kept, and Milner
did much to reconstruct South Africa. Nearly half a million British
and Dominion troops had been employed, of whom one in ten became
casualties. The total cost in money to the United Kingdom has been
reckoned at over two hundred and twenty million pounds.
We have now reached in this account the end of the
nineteenth century, and the modern world might reasonably have
looked forward to a long period of peace and prosperity. The
prospects seemed bright, and no one dreamed that we had entered a
period of strife in which command and ascendancy by a single
world-Power would be the supreme incentive. Two fearful wars, each
of about five years’ duration, were to illustrate the magnitude
which developments had reached during the climax of the Victorian
era. The rise of Germany to world-Power had long been accompanied
by national assertiveness and the continuous building up of
armaments. No one could attempt to measure the character and
consequences of the impending struggles. To fight on till victory
was won became the sole objective, and in this the power of the
nations engaged was to prove astounding. It seemed so easy in the
course of the closing years of the passing century to take as a
matter of course the almost universal system of national armies
created by general conscription and fed by the measureless
resources of industrial progress. Order and organisation were the
salient features of modern life, and when Germany threw all her
qualities into the task the steps became obvious, and even
inevitable. Nay, it could be argued, and perhaps even proved, that
the wise and normal method of modern progress, which all the
Continent of Europe adopted in one form or another, was the
principle of rearmament on the highest scale. Such was the vitality
of the human race that it nevertheless flourished undeterred.
Alone of the Great Powers of Europe, which ordained
that every man should be trained as a soldier and serve for two or
even three years, Great Britain availed herself of her island
position and naval mastery to stand outside the universal habit—for
such it had become. And yet this abstention was by no means to
allay the growth of the danger. On the contrary, in South Africa
Britain took, unconsciously no doubt, a leading part in bringing
about the crisis. She exhibited herself to all the nations as
supreme. For three long years the process of conquering the Boers
continued, leaving the rest of Europe and America the facts of
Empire and much else to meditate upon. All the Powers began to
think of navies in a different mood. Germany saw that her world
preponderance would not be achieved without warships of the
greatest strength and quality, and France and other nations
followed her example. It was indeed a new outlet for national pride
and energy, of which Japan, at the opposite side of the globe, took
eager advantage. To the vast military staffs were added naval
formations which pointed out the logic and importance of all their
doings. The conquest of the air was also on the way. Britain would
have been content to rule alone in moderation.
Nearly a hundred years of peace and progress had
carried Britain to the leadership of the world. She had striven
repeatedly for the maintenance of peace, at any rate for herself,
and progress and prosperity had been continuous in all classes. The
franchise had been extended almost to the actuarial limit, and yet
quiet and order reigned. Conservative forces had shown that they
could ride the storm, and indeed that there was no great storm
between the domestic parties. The great mass of the country could
get on with their daily tasks and leave politics to those who were
interested as partisans without fear. The national horse had shown
that the reins could be thrown on his neck without leading to a
furious gallop in this direction or that. No one felt himself left
out of the Constitution. An excess of self-assertion would be
injurious. Certainly the dawn of the twentieth century seemed
bright and calm for those who lived within the unequalled bounds of
the British Empire, or sought shelter within its folds. There was
endless work to be done. It did not matter which party ruled: they
found fault with one another, as they had a perfect right to do.
None of the ancient inhibitions obstructed the adventurous. If
mistakes were made they had been made before, and Britons could
repair them without serious consequences. Active and vigorous
politics should be sustained. To go forward gradually but boldly
seemed to be fully justified.
The United States remained, save in naval matters,
largely aloof from these manifestations. Her thoughts were turned
inwards on her unlimited natural resources, as yet barely explored
and still less exploited. Her population still owed much of its
amazing increase to immigrants from Europe, and these, out of
temper with the continent of their origins and perhaps misfortunes,
had no wish to see their new home entangled in the struggles of the
old. The vast potentialities of America lay as a portent across the
globe, as yet dimly recognised, save by the imaginative. But in the
contracting world of better communications to remain detached from
the preoccupations of others was rapidly becoming impossible. The
status of world-Power is inseparable from its responsibilities. The
convulsive climax of the first Great War was finally and
inseparably to link America with the fortunes of the Old World and
of Britain.
Here is set out a long story of the
English-speaking peoples. They are now to become Allies in terrible
but victorious wars. And that is not the end. Another phase looms
before us, in which alliance will once more be tested and in which
its formidable virtues may be to preserve Peace and Freedom. The
future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope. Nor should
we now seek to define precisely the exact terms of ultimate
union.