Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (9 page)

Lords Dunraven, Paget, Lathom, Lovat and Donoughmore all raised private regiments, whose troopers paid their own passage to South Africa, and donated their pay to the Widows and Orphans’ Fund. The ubiquitous Winston Churchill covered the war for the
Daily
Telegraph
, now and then fighting a spirited skirmish on the side, and once escaping with great publicity from a Boer prison camp (‘He’s a fine fellow’, wrote Buller to Lady Londonderry. ‘I wish he were leading regular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper.’) The young Mahatma Gandhi, then living in Natal, was one of the stretcher-bearers who toiled up Spion Kop. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, ran a field hospital. Rudyard Kipling worked on an army newspaper. Edgar Wallace the novelist scooped the world for the
Daily
Mail
with the news of the final peace agreement. Mary Kingsley the great West African explorer died of fever nursing wounded Boers. Even Queen Victoria herself, though she did not visit the battlefields physically, was
certainly
there in the
spirit,
and she sent to each of her soldiers, on New Year’s Day, 1900, a tin of chocolate as a souvenir, with her crowned head on the lid, and the message ‘I wish you a Happy New Year.’

It was a bitter war, ending more bitterly than it began, but like most wars it was bitterest away from the fighting. There were bigotries on both sides. Passions were crude, abuse was often elementary. Kipling did not hesitate to attack Kruger personally in his famous anathema
The
Old
Issue
—

The Boers and their supporters, in return, loved to represent Queen
Victoria as a bloated, bug-eyed and probably dissolute old harridan, while both sides were assiduous in spreading atrocity stories about each other, generally untrue and often wildly unconvincing.

It was the first of the propaganda wars. Every incident in the field, flashed across the world by the electric telegraph, was magnified or distorted to prove a point or support an ideology. The whole world joined in this new excitement: the Boer War was the Algeria or Vietnam of its time. When, in Black Week, the British armies were so disastrously defeated three battles in a row, half the world laughed or cheered at their discomfiture: six months later, when Mafeking was relieved, the other half responded with such hysterical celebrations that the name of the little town went briefly into English usage—‘Mafficking, indulging in extravagant demonstrations of exultation.’

But they Mafficked far more boisterously in Piccadilly than in Mafeking itself, and the Boers celebrated their victories only with thanksgiving to God. In the field a sad and incoherent comradeship often linked the fighting men. British doctors regularly attended the Boer wounded, and British prisoners were generally treated with courtesy. When the Boer General Kroos de la Rey went to war from his home town of Lichtenburg, in the Transvaal, he left instructions that a plot in the town cemetery should be reserved for the honourable burial of British soldiers killed in the war: his orders were obeyed, and when the time came the British dead were reverently laid among their enemies.
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For though the propagandists might argue otherwise, the behaviour of these opponents was often much alike. The Boers were fighting for independence, which they believed to be their sacred right: the British were fighting for an Empire which they thought to represent all that was best in human progress, headed by a Queen who was virtually divine herself. On the Boer side was the sense of ‘Volk’, a sense of earth, livelihood and immediacy. On the
British there was a noble brotherhood between officers and men, an uncomplaining acceptance of misery, a touching devotion even to the most incompetent generals—‘if he’s not worth following,’ another British private wrote of the Tugela Ferryman, ‘I don’t know who is.’ Both sides drew a kind of magic from the past. ‘They have taken away our Majuba Day!’ cried President Kruger in anguish when he heard the news of Paardeberg. ‘Now quietly, lads,’ said Colonel ‘Bobby’ Gunning of the King’s Royal Rifles, addressing his NCOs on the eve of battle, ‘remember Majuba, God and our country.’ Time and again we read of chivalries in the field—a wounded enemy given free passage, a parched patrol allowed to water its horses, the exchange of wounded, cheerful repartee by heliograph across the lines. Sober in victory as in defeat, the Boer soldiers never crowed over their enemies, and were frank in their admiration of British qualities. As for the British regulars, they came deeply to respect the best of the Boers, and cherished the very name ‘commando’ to use one day for themselves.

These were Christian armies, fighting each other at the end of the Christian era; Boer and Briton shared a trust in many old truths, and a homely familiarity with the prophets and patriarchs of their creed. In one of the Natal battles a middle-aged British officer, Major Charles Childe-Pemberton of the South African Light Horse, was ordered to lead an assault upon a hill. He was portly and greying, having retired from the Royal Horse Guards some years before, and was a popular racing man, known always by his racecourse nickname, Monsieur L’Enfant, or The Child. Before the battle he confided in his brother-officers that he had a premonition of death, and asked them to see that on his grave was inscribed verse 26, Chapter 4 of the Second Book of Kings. The attack was made; the hill was taken; Major Childe-Pemberton, laughing at his own presentiment, was hit in the head by a scrap of shrapnel, and died on the spot.

They buried him nearby, ‘affectionately and reverently, in his own clothes, just as he was’, and above him they wrote his chosen epitaph: ‘Is it well with the child? It is well.’
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The Queen died with her century, the heroic spirit faltered, squalid images of burnt farms and diseased internment camps replaced the splendours of bugle and night march. The struggle degenerated into a messy and generally inglorious manhunt, soured by recriminations and reprisals, executions in the field, arson and broken oaths. Mile after mile the countryside was left scorched and desolate: in the internment camps the unforgiving Boer women, far from the camaraderie of the front line, nursed their dying babies. The Boers thought the British were resorting to genocide, and reproached them for betraying the white man’s code by arming African scouts and sentries. The British accused the Boers of treachery, fighting as they did in civilian clothes, and disregarding many conventional laws of war.

Squat and ugly blockhouses now disfigured the landscape, 8,000 of them, one every 1½ miles through the old Boer republics. Their protruding armoured balconies gave them an ominous mediaeval appearance, and between them thousands of fortified posts divided the country into enormous stockades, into which the commandos were laboriously penned. In one of Kitchener’s drives 9,000 soldiers, 12 yards apart, formed a beaters’ line 54 miles long, moving 20 miles a day, while seven armoured trains patrolled the railway tracks, and another 8,000 men manned the blockhouses all around. Across this hideous chequer-board the fugitive commandos clawed their way. They were like wild animals, Kitchener said, forever running away—‘not like the Sudanese, who stood up to a fair fight’. By the end of 1901 more than sixty British columns were in the field, but more than 20,000 guerillas still eluded them, and away in the east an exiled Government of the Transvaal, setting up its nomadic capital 
in farms, woods and high valleys, survived to the bitter end. Deep within the Cape Colony, where he got within sixty miles of Cape Town itself, Smuts prayed a favourite prayer of the Griqua tribespeople: ‘Lord come to our help yourself, and not your son for this is no time for children.’

The British won, of course, and the Peace of Vereeniging was concluded at their dictate in May, 1902: but the protracted guerilla campaign, the sordid anticlimax of it all, the thousands of deaths by disease or neglect, robbed the victory of any grandeur. In London the treaty was greeted far less boisterously than the relief of Mafeking two years before. The Queen had died, Rhodes had died, ‘Bobs’ had come home long before, Salisbury retired as soon as the war ended, Kitchener’s bludgeon methods had taken the fun out of following the flags. Never again did the British go to war with the old imperial éclat, or greet their victories with their frank Victorian gusto.

The peace settlement was widely greeted as generous, especially by the British. It handsomely compensated the Boers for the devastation of their country, and it eventually gave them full equality, of law as of language, within a self-governing African union of all four European colonies. It seemed a peace of reconciliation. In this as in much else, though, the Boer War was deceptive. The treaty
was
magnanimous, but by its terms the British hoped to establish a secure, British-dominated South Africa, to establish a lasting hold over the gold of the Rand, and to ensure some measure of fair play for the black peoples of the land. The Boers were no less calculating, even in defeat. They reasoned that within a constitutional union they might one day achieve mastery not only of their own former republics, but of all South Africa, with complete control of its wealth, and with the freedom to treat their Kaffir subjects just as the Old Testament suggested.

They were right. Some Afrikaners became enthusiastic supporters of the imperial cause, and the Boer generals were greeted as prodigal sons when they visited London after the war—‘Welcome to the dear old flag!’ said a souvenir postcard, with portraits of three fierce commando leaders nestling incongruously beneath the Union Jack. But the Boer conviction proved, in the long run, more obdurate than
the British: Jehovah survived the Queen-Empress, and the Boers were to win the Boer War in the end.
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