Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (6 page)

Nothing could be much more gorgeous, much more ridiculous, much more deceptive or much more effective than this enormous fantasy. A city of tents was erected on the plain north of Delhi, and there a kind of gigantic morality play was enacted. The setting was symbolic in itself, for while the durbar ground was very old, and dusty, and Indian, the durbar camp was all new, progressive and British. It was laid out to a practical grid, it had well-paved roads and excellent water-supplies, and everywhere among its white marquees ran the drooping telegraph wires that were the threads of Empire, the electric cables which illuminated it as brightly as London itself, and the winding rails of the tramcars.

To this exhibition of progress, ablaze upon the brown plain, all
the feudatories were summoned: the bewhiskered Maharajahs of Punjab, the bold soldier-princes of Rajasthan, royalty of Nepal in peculiar hats, sleek Bengalis and beautiful Tamils, Sikhs with gilded scimitars, gaunt Baluchis with ceremonial camels, Burmese and Sikkimese and Madrasis and wondering rustic potentates from Gujarat or Kerala. All were called to the tented city beyond the Lahore Gate, and there they paraded dutifully in the great Durbar Square to swear fealty to the Crown of England.

This was Empire! Here illusion mastered reality, and theatre became life. Trumpets sounded, guns fired, soldiers presented arms, plumes waved, elephants snorted, jewels glittered, cameras clicked (‘nearly everyone had a kodak,’ wrote one participant, ‘even many of the natives themselves’). Here were aged veterans of the Indian Mutiny, led by a blind centenarian who, we are told, ‘turned his sightless orbs towards the cheering and feebly saluted.’ Here were standard-bearers and heralds, scrolled and tabarded, and High Court judges in their wigs. Here were the twelve State trumpeters, and the twelve military bands, and the 40,000 parading soldiers. And here upon his slender-pillared dais stood the Viceroy of India, the Crown’s embodiment, George Nathaniel Curzon of Eton and Balliol, forty-three years old, half-crippled with pain in his back, an accomplished inventor of comic verse, a well-known eastern traveller, dressed in the flamboyant accoutrements of his office and accompanied by his wife, the former Miss Leiter of Washington, in a pale blue dress embroidered with gold.

The trumpets sound. The drums roll. The regiments present arms. As the vast polychromatic crowd rises thunderously to its feet‚ slowly, rather muffled there fall upon that dry air the first solemn notes of the British National Anthem—so dignified, so old, so far from home, so simple in that exotic setting, so touching, so profound, that the very soul of India seems to be stirred.
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Chamberlain never visited India, and he might have found all this preposterously irrelevant to the times. Our proud paterfamilias would have adored it, and his son’s schoolmasters probably pinned pictures of it on the notice-board in the corridor. Curzon himself was highly satisfied with the arrangements,
1
and that blind old hero of the Mutiny was so excited by it all that the very next day he took to his camp-bed and died. But before the end of the century, anyway, the behaviourist fallacies of Empire were to be exposed, and its high style irrevocably chastened, by a catastrophe of the imperial story, the second war against the Boers.

I
N the immensity of the South Atlantic, blazing hot and slowly heaving, one Victorian steamship slowly overtakes another. On the liner
Dunnotar
Castle
is General Sir Redvers
1
Buller, VC, one of the boldest generals of the British Army, who is on his way to assume command of the imperial forces fighting the Boers in South Africa. On the old transport
Nineveh
are Australian volunteers on their way to join his armies. Slowly the two ships close, until they are almost within hailing distance, the decks and riggings are crowded with waving men, and the general, tearing himself away from his maps and campaign plans, emerges portly and beaming from the converted ladies’ dressing-room he is using as an office.

From the rigging of the
Nineveh
somebody is signalling with a flag, and word by word the message is interpreted on the liner:
Is
—
Sir
—
Redvers
—
Buller
—
On
—
Board?
Yes, goes back the answer, and robustly across the gap between the ships, above the swish of the waves and the pounding of the engines, come three lusty Australian cheers, to a waving of wide-brimmed hats and a ribald whistle or two. The general is much gratified, the
Dunnotar
Castle
responds with a hoot of its siren, but as the ships draw apart again, and Sir Redvers returns to his calculations, a second signal is flagged from the
Nineveh
. It is harder to read this time, for the gap is widening fast, but a hundred pairs of binoculars are raised upon the liner, poop to bridge, as the letters are spelled out. Is it a message of loyalty or good luck? Is it a patriotic slogan? No, it is another inquiry, hardly less topical than the first:
What—Won—The—Cesarewitch?

In such a spirit did the soldiers of the Empire go to war against the Boers in the autumn of 1899—cocky after a century of easy
victories, secure in their tribal jokes and customs, confident in their leaders, anxious only about the racing results: but though the Empire had a population of 370 million, and there were not much more than 100,000 Boers altogether—though General Buller had 85,000 men at his disposal, and the Boers only 35,000—though the Army believed it could end the war by Christmas, and it was the ambition of every British officer to get to the front before then—still the campaign to which they were so boisterously sailing marked the beginning of the end of their Empire, and the first faltering of their pride.

Sir Redvers sailed on, chuckling and drinking champagne: but nothing would be quite the same after the Boer War, and even Queen Victoria, as if recognizing it to be the end of her era, died when it was half-way through.

The British and the Boers were old enemies. They first confronted each other after the Napoleonic wars, when the British acquired the Cape of Good Hope, and they had been skirmishing on and off ever since. Before the arrival of the British the Cape had been colonized, under the Dutch flag, by a community of mixed Dutch, Flemish, German and French Huguenot stock, known then as Boers (‘farmers’) and later as Afrikaners (‘Africans’). These varied settlers had long ago coalesced into an all too recognizable unity, an African tribe in fact. Tight-knit, traditionalist, racialist, individualist, devout in a severe Calvinist style, the ‘Volk’ were fundamentalists in life as in faith. They were suspicious of all change, determined to live by their own ideals, and convinced of their unalterable rights under a God of absolutes.

From the start the British found them a terrible nuisance, for South Africa played an important part in the imperial thinking. It stood pivotally upon the Empire’s eastern trade routes, and it contained a large population of black pagans, towards whom the best of the British felt themselves to stand in the condition of Godparents. The Boers, though, were irreconcilable. Some did settle into the British pattern of things, but many more wanted nothing of the
Empire and its liberal humbug, being perfectly convinced that the white man would be forever superior to the black, and that the Negro was divinely ordained to be a permanent hewer of wood and drawer of water. Throughout the Victorian century the most resolute of them had been withdrawing stage by stage from the British presence. By 1890 some 100,000 had out-distanced the imperial expansion, and were established in two more or less independent Boer republics, far in the South African interior—the Orange Free State, with its capital at Bloemfontein, and the Transvaal with its capital at Pretoria. Spiritually they had retreated farther still, and were living up there in
laager
, as they would say, ramparted by the wagons and earthworks of their dogma.

The British could not tolerate such anachronisms within their South African paramountcy. By 1898 they were settled themselves in three colonies down there, Cape Colony, Natal, and Rhodesia, founded eponymously by Cecil Rhodes and his Chartered South African Company; and just as they had annexed the territories of the Zulus and the Matabeles, the Ashanti and the Baganda, so inevitably they would one day subdue this most refractory tribe of all. Twenty years before they had briefly seized control of the Transvaal, only to be humiliated in the hilltop battle of Majuba, but since then they had established their own settlements so far to the north that the Boers were now surrounded on three sides. Since then, too, the Transvaal had been discovered to contain, in the highlands around Johannesburg, the world’s largest deposits of gold.

In those days gold played more than a practical, almost a mystic part in the affairs of the nations: that this vast new supply should fall within a British sphere of authority seemed to the imperialists, not to speak of the City speculators, almost a divine dispensation. So by the last years of the century strategy, morality, economics, instinct and plain greed made it inevitable that the Boer Republics must be tidied up beneath the Crown—‘sooner or later’, as Winston Churchill wrote, ‘in a righteous cause or a picked quarrel… for the sake of our Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of the race, we must fight the Boers.’

The ostensible
casus
belli
was the presence within the Transvaal of a large foreign population, much of it British. These were the men
who worked the gold-mines, and they actually formed a majority in the Republic. They paid 80 per cent of the taxes, they mined the gold, but they were allowed no rights of citizenship, being treated by President Kruger of the Transvaal with a disagreeable mixture of contempt and suspicion. In 1895, just before the Jubilee, Cecil Rhodes had connived in a conspiracy to overthrow Kruger by a
coup
d’éta
t
, with a rising in Johannesburg and a filibustering invasion from British territory: Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary turned a blind eye, but the Jameson Raid ended anyway in fiasco and ignominy.
1
By 1899, with British ambitions all over Africa reaching a peak of energy and fulfilment, the issue had gone beyond plot or maverick, and war came about scarcely by intention at all, but in the
natural course of events. It had to happen. The Boers were in their last encampment, the British at the apogee of their imperial advance.
1

The Boers actually started the war, by a preventive invasion of British territory. On October 11, 1899, after presenting an impossible ultimatum, they crossed the frontiers of Natal and Cape Province to invest the railway towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley. Within the week Sir Redvers was on the high seas with the three divisions of his Army Corps, twice the size of Wellington’s army at Waterloo, in eager expectancy of greater fame and further glory.

On the face of it the odds against the Boers were farcical, which is why they pinned their hopes upon a sudden attack. If they could overwhelm the weak British garrisons in South Africa, they might force the Empire to agree to their own independence before reinforcements could arrive. In fact the disparities were more of scale than of effectiveness. Two very different forces clashed in the Boer War, and they might have come from different centuries, the one looking back to Omdurman, the Indian Mutiny and even Waterloo, the other looking forward to Ypres, El Alamein and even Sinai.

The British Army in 1899 was essentially an imperial force, accustomed to colonial wars against primitive opponents, fought at great distances from home along complicated supply routes. Within its specialized limits it had been very successful, but since the Crimean War the only European enemies it had faced had been the Boers themselves, who had effortlessly trounced it at Majuba Hill, and its famous victories had mainly been over Asian and African primitives. It had no general staff, and only two intelligence officers to keep in touch with military affairs throughout the Empire. Its rigid conceptions of class made for discipline and unshakeable camaraderie, but reduced the private soldier to a willing cipher. His was just to do or die. It was an army instinctively drawn to the battle-square
and the close-order advance, those glorious specialities of British arms since the days of the great Marlborough. It accepted change with great reluctance, and though it was now armed with machine-guns and repeater rifles, it tended to use them like cannon and muskets. It went into action with bands and pipers, had only recently abandoned the red-coat as standard battledress, and put great store upon its magnificent roll of battle-honours, fought for through many generations in every clime and country.

The Boer Army, on the other hand, was hardly an army at all, and its chief battle-honour was Majuba—Majuba Day, February 27, was one of the great secular festivals of the Boer year. It was simply the Boer manhood
in
toto
‚ mustered in local mounted units called commandos, owning its own horses, electing its own officers, wearing its own casual interpretations of uniform, and relying heavily upon the inbred fieldcraft, horsemanship and enterprise of its individual soldiers. Its discipline, like its morale, was variable: often its soldiers drifted away from the battlefield home to the farm, or decided to try their fortunes on another front, or demanded new officers. The Boers had armed themselves, though, with the most modern equipment from European arsenals, they kept open minds on military matters if on no others, and above all they were born to the terrain. They were a nation of horsemen, hunters, trekkers, pastoralists of the open veld. Since every Boer male went to war, among their officers were men of striking intellect, too, who were quicker by far than their professional British opponents. All in all they were born irregulars, perhaps the best guerilla soldiers in the world.

These were opponents, then, different in kind. They had much in common nevertheless, and in particular they shared an emotional sense of brotherhood and purpose. Each army was secure in its convictions, and each was bound by a tribal trust and integrity. When, at the start of the war, the Transvaal commandos assembled in Pretoria to collect their arms and orders, the occasion was likened to the gathering of a huge family. From every part of the republic they came, schoolboys to grandfathers, riding their tough and shaggy ponies with a shambling ease, their saddlebags bulging with biltong, their slouch hats hard over their heads, greeting friends
and relatives everywhere as they rode into the little capital, and saluting President Kruger himself, as they passed his modest frame house on Church Street, as they might greet a family patriarch on the farm.

On the other side the fellowship was just as strong, if less egalitarian. ‘We’ll do it, sir! We’ll do it!’ cried the soldiers when, early in the war, Colonel Ian Hamilton told them they would send the newsboys crying victory through the streets of London. And here is the coded message by which an approaching British column declared itself to the besieged British garrison at Mafeking:
Our
numbers
are
the
Naval
and
Military
Club
multiplied
by
ten;
our
guns,
the
number
of
sons
in
the
Ward
family;
our
supplies,
the
O/C
9th
Lancers.
No Boer alive could crack this impenetrable cipher, but almost any British officer in Mafeking could interpret it. Everyone knew the Naval and Military, the ‘In and Out’, was No 94, Piccadilly; most people knew the Earl of Dudley, Bill Ward, had five brothers; and anybody in a decent regiment was aware that the colonel commanding the 9th was that very nice fellow Malcolm Little.
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As Buller sailed out to Africa,
Punch
published a cartoon of two London urchins discussing the war. ‘The Boers will cop it now’, one was saying to the other. ‘Farfer’s gone to South Africa,
an’ tooken ’is  strap!’
The British saw the war at first as a punitive campaign like so many others, in which a recalcitrant tribe of the frontiers was to be summarily brought to heel. In the event the fighting lasted three years, and required a great deal more than farfer’s strap.