Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (8 page)

Two British failures: for a famous British success, let us inspect the besieged railway town of Mafeking, away to the north. It was really hardly more than a village, and the Boers did not invest it very resolutely, but it was defended so jauntily by its dapper commanding officer, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, and projected its own self-image so successfully across the world, that its very name became synonymous with British pride and spirit. Some 1,200 Britons were shut up there, with about as many black Africans, and though they did not really suffer very greatly (except the Africans, who nearly starved), and made no real effort to get out, still they did defend the place with true panache.

It was a tiny place, a square, a church, a station, a couple of hotels, a grid of half a dozen streets, clustered in greenery around a muddy river in the heart of the high veld, and throughout the siege it retained some of the English village spirit. Baden-Powell was the undoubted squire of Mafeking, the life, soul and character of it all, around whose cheerful conceited figure everything revolved. The centre of activity was Dixon’s Hotel in Market Square, with the horses at its hitching-posts and the loungers on its verandah, and from there every kind of enterprise was mounted. It might be a foray into the enemy lines. It might be a jolly ruse to deceive the Boer sentries. It might be a fancy-dress ball for Sunday evening, or a comic couplet for the
Mafeking
Mail
. Numerous swells were invested in Mafeking. Baden-Powell’s Chief of Staff was Lord Edward Cecil, lately of Fashoda, and ensconced in a beflagged and cushioned dug-out was Lady Sarah Wilson, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and Winston Churchill’s aunt (‘Breakfast today horse sausage’, she wired home in April, 1900. ‘Lunch minced mule and curried locusts. All well’).
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‘B-P’ dominated them all, though, from his headquarters next door to Dixon’s, and he gave to the defence a perky humour that caught the fancy of the world.

He disseminated it carefully, in a flow of vivacious and not
always strictly accurate messages home. If he made things in Mafeking seem more desperate than they were, that did not detract from the tonic effect it all had upon the spirits of the people at home, or its propaganda value elsewhere; at a time when Black Week had profoundly depressed the nation, and sadly damaged British prestige in the world, Mafeking was like a breath of the old allure. ‘B-P’ ’s cocky despatches recalled the heroic eccentricity of Gordon at Khartoum. His hard-pressed garrison, hemmed in by Mausers, showed just the same grit as the heroes of Rorke’s Drift, jabbed about by assegais in the Zulu War of ’79. The presence of women and children recalled the tear-jerkers of the Indian Mutiny, and the attendance of patricians too, Lord Edward, Lady Sarah, Charles Fitzclarence of Munster, the Hon. Algernon Tracy and several members of the In and Out, was an assurance that British imperialism still had
class.

So through the days of ignominy Mafeking, far away on the Bechuanaland border, brilliantly kept the legend of Empire alive. It is true that Ladysmith was besieged more fiercely, suffered more terribly and resisted just as bravely, besides being a far more important objective. Mafeking, though, did it all with style, and style at that moment the Empire badly needed. The whole world came to know the confident figure of Baden-Powell, whistling with his telescope on his precarious lookout tower beside Dixon’s: and it was wonderfully true to the Mafeking myth that when, after eight months, the first men of the relieving force clattered into the outskirts of the town, they got a distinctly laconic greeting from the first citizen they met. ‘Ah yes’ was all he said, ‘we heard you were knocking about.’

For the saddest Boer humiliation of the war we must make our way along dusty veld tracks, through low hills prickly with thorn, to the infinitesimal hamlet of Paardeberg, on the Modder River in the Orange Free State. There, at the climax of Lord Roberts’s campaign, the main Boer army, with all its wagons, animals, women and children, was surrounded in its
laager
in the river-bed. It was February, 1900, the height of the South African summer. The
weather was hot and heavy, with thunderstorms now and then, and black clouds piled often over the southern horizon. As usual, the Boers lay there very low. To the British, drawn up north and south of the river, nothing showed in the open veld but the snaking course of the river itself, tangled with shrubbery, and the smoke of the Boer encampment buried in its green ravine. Within the
laager,
though, General Piet Cronje’s army was tensely concentrated. It was the very epitome of the last-ditch stand, down there in the airless river-bed. It was an allegory of Boerness.

On the crest of the river-banks the commando marksmen were entrenched, with clear fields of fire up the gently rising scrubland to the open veld. Behind them in the shaly gorge all the paraphernalia of the army was jammed this way and that—wagons tilted on the shingle, piles of ammunition boxes in the muddy lee of the banks, gun-litters and field kitchens, hospital tents, horses tethered restless among the trees, twitching their tails against the flies. Rough shelters had been scooped out in the bluffs, and there the women in their poke bonnets, the children in their grubby prints and frayed trousers, sheltered behind awnings of old canvas. The men lived and slept in their wagons, or in bivouacs at the river’s edge, or at their guns. Their
laager
was two miles long, like a trench-grave in the veld.

For ten days the Royal Artillery tried to blast the Boers out of this place. The river-bed was thick with cordite fumes, rubble, wrecked wagons, the smoke of burning wood, the stink of dead horseflesh, and sometimes the Boers could see, in the patch of sky between the trees, the round red shape of an observation balloon, like death’s scrutiny. Several times the British attacked frontally across the veld, to be beaten back with fearful losses, and the women crouching in their dug-outs could hear the rifle-fire almost above their heads. All hope of relief was lost, but Cronje, a huge, tragic, shambling figure of a man, declined offers of safe conduct for his non-combatants and refused all calls to surrender—‘During my life-time I will never surrender.
Dixi
.’ Instead day by day the Boers fought back sullenly and despairingly, weaker each hour, shorter of food, shorter of sleep, disillusioned in their river-bed.

Paardeberg was the greatest single reverse in the history of Boer
arms. When the spirit broke at last, and on February 27 Cronje, in his wide hat and shabby green frock-coat, climbed out of the ravine to surrender to Lord Roberts, he did not reply to the victor’s courteous greeting—‘You have made a gallant defence, sir’: and when his 4,000 ragged and half-starved burghers filed into captivity with their wives and children, carrying blankets and bundles of possessions, some with umbrellas, they looked less like an army than a band of dispossessed peasants, and the British soldiers watched them go with mingled pity and amusement. It was Majuba Day, the proudest day in the Boer calendar; when Cronje himself rode away to prison camp, he travelled stormy-faced and erect in a Cape cart, Mrs Cronje implacable at his side.
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‘Say, colonel,’ inquired an American observer, watching a British battalion prepare yet another frontal assault upon yet another impregnable hill, ‘isn’t there a way
round?
’ The story of the Boer War is full of such sudden pungencies. It was not war on the gargantuan twentieth-century scale, huge conscript armies pursuing inconceivable objectives. It was war recognizably between
people,
fighting for targets all could see, commanded by generals everyone knew, animated by public emotions. ‘It is our country you want!’ Kruger once cried to a visiting Englishman, tears falling down his
cheeks. ‘I thank God,’ General Sir George White told his soldiers, when Ladysmith was relieved at last, ‘I thank God we have kept the flag flying.’

It was war in the open, self-explanatory. Here, for instance, in the miserable last stages of the conflict, we see through the eyes of a young Boer soldier a scene somewhere in the northern Cape, where a ragged and emaciated commando is desperately trying to evade the British net. In terrible weather the Boers are riding deeper and deeper into Cape Colony, in the hope of getting help from the Cape Dutch, but by now they are almost beaten, hungry, wearing rags and home-made sandals, driving their bony horses in endless night marches across enemy territory. On a stormy night in September they reach a railway line, and as they do so a train approaches. Shivering with cold and wet, the Boers throw themselves on the ground as it thunders by: and out of the blustery darkness, through the rain, they catch a glimpse in lighted windows of clean and well-dressed British officers, laughing over their dinners in the restaurant car. In a moment it is past, leaving only the smell of its steam and the rattle of its wheels on the lines: and so the Boers, rousing their horses, wrap their rags around them and cross the railway track into the night.

Or here a British medical officer waits at night for the ambulance wagons to reach his hospital, No 4 Stationary Field Hospital, out of the Tugela battlefields. Two white lanterns have been hung from a flagstaff outside the hospital tents, to guide the drivers, and one by one the ungainly hooded wagons, each drawn by four horses, lurch and sway out of the darkness with their loads of maimed and dying. Usually they come silently out of the veld, but once the doctor hears, as a wagon waits outside the lines for the stretcher-bearers to unload it, a repeated half-conscious cry from a man inside. ‘Can you see the two white lights yet, Bill? Where’s the two white lights? Can you see them yet, Bill? Can you see them white lights? …’

And here, almost at the end of the war, the Boer General Jan Smuts, with his harum-scarum escort of guerillas, meets his chief opponent, General Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, after months of hit-and-run warfare across the immensities of the veld. Smuts and his companions have been brought for negotiations by train from
the south, in a journey that has lasted a week—by day cautiously across the veld, for the guerilla war is still being waged, at night with the train’s searchlight constantly sweeping the landscape. At last they reach the little station of Kroonstad, in the Orange Free State, where Kitchener is to meet them. The train draws into the station, and stands hissing at the platform in a sudden silence. The heat is intense. The Boers, thin, tired and sun-blistered, watch expectantly out of their compartment windows.

Presently the British general arrives, just as he arrived in his gunboats off the Fashoda fort. Reddish-brown from sun and long campaigning, expressionless as always, his blue eyes cold above his famous moustache, he rides into the station yard on a black charger. Around him ride, in the stiff English manner, three or four staff officers. Behind are a couple of willowy aides. And as they clatter up the yard the Boers see with astonishment—with admiration too, perhaps, even with a touch of awe—that behind the officers rides a bodyguard of turbanned Pathans from the north-west frontiers of India, crimson-jacketed, with jackboots polished like glass and gold-mounted scimitars at their sides. The grand illusion has arrived once more, at the Kroonstad station yard.

It was a war of striking personalities, and in power of character the two armies were well matched. It is the British, however, that we are concerned with, and it may be said that in the Boer War, as in most of their imperial conflicts, they got the leaders they deserved. Grandiose there upon the pinnacle of their power, they were represented in South Africa by an extraordinary gallery of originals, good or bad.

Several of the great stars of Empire were there, of course, all behaving characteristically. Roberts, ‘Our Bobs’, brought with him from England a Union Jack sewn by his dear wife to be hoisted over Pretoria. Kitchener, ‘Old K’, put on weight during the campaign. Rhodes, ‘The Colossus’, nearly came to blows with the British military commander of Kimberley, but was gratified to get a telegram from the Kaiser congratulating him on its defence.
Buller, ‘Sir Reverse’, remained through all his misfortunes the most beloved of the generals—though his soldiers often laughed at him, and nicknamed him the Tugela Ferryman because he led them back and forth across that river so often, still they never let him down. He could, so one of his colonels wrote, ‘by a short unintelligible address send his defeated and diminished army merry and confident back to camp’, and when he was relieved of his command they apostrophized him with a song of consolation:

There were many soldiers less famous but no less singular. General Sir Charles Warren, for instance, had once been Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, in which post he became famous for failing to catch Jack the Ripper and for issuing his orders in rhyming couplets.
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Colonel ‘Sam’ Steele of Strathcona’s Horse had spent thirty years as an officer of the Canadian Mounted Police, and liked to reminisce in his veld bivouac about Big Bear and the Frog Lake Massacre. General the Earl of Dundonald had been entrusted by his grandfather, Admiral Lord Dundonald, with a Secret Plan for the salvation of the nation in case of extreme emergency, and was constantly troubled by the thought that the moment for its disclosure might have arrived.
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General Sir Henry
Colvile was the author of
A
Ride
in
Petticoats
and
Slippers
. Colonel Ian Hamilton kept his notes in a French shorthand of his own invention. General Wauchope, who died at Magersfontein, was one of the richest men in Scotland and had been Gladstone’s opponent at Midlothian in the general election of 1892. Lord Rosslyn of the Blues was the original of
The
Man
Who
Broke
the
Bank
at
Monte
Carlo.