Churchill

by Celia Sandys

  Pausing in his journey only to dine in Pietermaritzburg, Churchill arrived in Durban just in time to embark on a coaster, the Guelp, for East London. Twenty-four hours at sea and a further forty-eight by rail brought him to Cape Town. The Morning Post’s readers were soon made aware that he found little to like in what he described as ‘imported social Capetown’. In the Mount Nelson Hotel, he wrote, he found luxury but no comfort. The dining room was spacious but overcrowded. The waiters were clean but too few. Thus the good dinner was cold before it had reached the table.

  The world and his wife seemed to be staying at the hotel – ‘particularly the wife’. In Cape Town there were ‘more colonels to the acre than in any place outside the United States’. Intrigue, scandal, falsehood and rumour were rife. Overrun with amateur strategists, the city gave a completely misleading impression of South Africa: ‘There is too much shoddy worn there at present.’ Only in Government House did Churchill find an understanding of the situation – and a chance to ride and hunt in congenial company under Table Mountain.

  As the days passed it became apparent that an obstacle had arisen to prevent him joining Roberts’s army. In his dispatches he had always sought to present events in the best possible light, in order that the military leadership would retain the confidence of those at home. Surely, he felt, the problem could not lie in that direction. But in fact his writing had raised hackles. Through two good friends in Lord Roberts’s headquarters, Generals Ian Hamilton and William Nicholson, Churchill discovered that the obstacle was none other than the Commander-in-Chief himself. He had two principal objections to Churchill. The first was that his Chief of Staff, General Lord Kitchener, who had taken such exception to parts of The River War, would resent Churchill’s attachment to the main army. The second was Roberts’s personal anger at the dispatch in which Churchill had criticised the sermon at the military church service in the aftermath of Spion Kop.

  Behind these specific irritations was no doubt the more general one of a junior officer doubling as a war correspondent – a situation which was supposed to have been forbidden – buzzing around the battlefield and even, as at Spion Kop, haranguing generals. A pen-picture in a regimental magazine was sent to Pamela Plowden, who, thinking it ‘rather funny’, passed it on to Lady Randolph:

  On the stricken field

  See:- With wallets

  stuffed with ointments

  Balm’d 1st field dressings

  ever accompanied by his

  faithful Vulture = gently

  chiding erring generals,

  heartening disheartened

  Brigade Majors – the

  prematurely bent figure

  of the late Candidate for

  Oldham, the one lodestone

  of hope to the weary

  soldier.

  Churchill did not allow Lord Roberts’s antipathy towards him to colour what he wrote. In a letter of 7 April to the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, after commenting on some unfortunate minor setbacks in Roberts’s campaign, he expressed the hope ‘that the resolve of the country will not weaken’, and declared, ‘We all have entire confidence in Lord Roberts.’ No doubt he delighted in also reporting that the Commander-in-Chief had ‘put Lord Kitchener in his place several times’.

  Hamilton and Nicholson were favoured members of the Roberts ‘Indian Ring’, and eventually persuaded their chief to allow Churchill to accompany the forthcoming campaign. A terse note from the Military Secretary, written on 11 April, informed him that ‘Lord Roberts desires me to say that he is willing to permit you to accompany this force as a correspondent – for your father’s sake.’ This grudging permission was all that Churchill needed, and he immediately set off for Bloemfontein. It was not until 1 May that he bothered to comment, writing to his mother, ‘You will form your own opinion as to the justice of making me accept as a favour what was already mine as a right.’

  The train stopped at Bethany, where Churchill stayed the night rather than arrive in Bloemfontein at midnight. There he called on Lieutenant-General Gatacre, whom he had met during the Sudan campaign. Gatacre was no longer the dashing and energetic man he remembered; months of campaigning with insufficient resources had worn him down. Nevertheless, Buller had supported him after the débâcle at Stormberg. In conversation with Churchill, Gatacre brightened up when he spoke of the immediate future, which held the prospect of action on favourable ground with his whole division available to him. ‘So I left him. Early next morning he was dismissed from his command and ordered to England, broken, ruined, and disgraced.’ Roberts’s new broom had summarily swept Gatacre away.

  Churchill did not mince his words in telling his readers that this dismissal carried quite the wrong message to the army. Initiative would die as commanders asked for detailed instructions so that they might be covered in all eventualities. He wondered who else might be arbitrarily dismissed, dressing up the thought as a remark by ‘an irreverent subaltern’ – a ploy he had used when criticising the army chaplain. He ended his dispatch by saying he dare not pursue the subject further. But he had already gone too far for his own good. The ‘lodestone of hope to the weary soldier’ was in danger of becoming a lodestone to weary generals. His forthright views on the shameful way Gatacre had been treated infuriated Roberts, coming so soon after he had allowed the young correspondent to join his army. Whenever they passed, Churchill’s salute would be curtly acknowledged only as that of a stranger.

  When Churchill arrived in Bloemfontein, the Morning Post already had Lord Cecil Manners accredited as a correspondent with Lord Roberts’s column. Manners’s diary records that he received a long telegram from Churchill ‘informing me he has been authorised by Morning Post to replace me here’. Churchill softened the blow with a personal letter: ‘I am exceedingly sorry to be the cause of disturbing you here . . . If you think of going to Natal, I may be of some assistance to you by giving you letters to some of the Powers on that side.’ Manners did not take the hint that he should go to Natal, and was later taken prisoner on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

  Having thus installed himself as the senior correspondent, Churchill’s first dispatch from Bloemfontein, dated 16 April, describes a town whose original population of four thousand had swollen tenfold in the previous month:

  The Market Square is crowded with officers and soldiers listening to the band of the Buffs. Every regiment in the service, every Colony in the Empire is represented . . . The inhabitants – bearded burghers who have made their peace, townsfolk who never desired to make a quarrel – stand around and watch complacently . . . Trade has followed hard on the flag . . . the market is buoyant.

  The victorious army was showing a friendly face to the Boer population. There were banquets to which Boers were invited. Fraternising was part of Lord Roberts’s policy, and with pretty girls and women on hand, the army needed no encouragement. The Commander-in-Chief wrote in an optimistic vein to Queen Victoria. He considered the Orange Free State as good as conquered, and forecast that the Transvaal would follow as soon as Johannesburg and Pretoria were occupied. With the centres of government in British hands, the war would soon be over. Meanwhile, in response to his offer of amnesty, many Boers had returned to their homes and, taking an oath of neutrality, accepted defeat.

  But resuming the offensive would take longer than Lord Roberts had estimated. The troops needed new clothing and boots. Their rations had to be brought up to the proper level. A Boer ambush during the advance on Bloemfontein had resulted in the loss of a large number of wagons and their contents, all of which needed to be replaced. Hard-ridden and poorly-fed horses had succumbed; the cavalry division alone had lost 1,500 during the relief of Kimberley. To this number of re-mounts had to be added the animals required for the thousands of mounted infantry which it was planned to raise. And if the new horses were to fare any better than their predecessors, their rations had to be increased. All these requirements had to come up a single line of narrow-gauge railway.

  But
the biggest logistic difficulty was one of Lord Roberts’s own making. He and his Chief of Staff, Lord Kitchener, had centralised the army’s logistical system, thinking to make it more efficient. Replacing well-tried arrangements had achieved the very opposite effect, as a result of which Kitchener became known in the army as ‘K for Chaos’.

  In his dispatch of 16 April Churchill describes the problems of re-equipping the troops for the next phase of operations. Criticising the rickety logistics system would not have brought improvements, as his earlier dispatch had done in the case of the army chaplains, but would only have increased Roberts’s irritation with him, to his own disadvantage and that of those who had petitioned on his behalf. So, while providing a detailed explanation of the logistical problems, Churchill omitted to mention the difficulties which had given rise to Kitchener’s nickname among the troops. And, suppressing whatever feelings may have arisen as a result of his own graceless treatment, he described the Commander-in-Chief as ‘the Queen’s greatest subject’. There is no doubt that he viewed Roberts with considerable respect.

  Another large omission in his dispatch is any criticism of the army medical services, which in Bloemfontein were truly appalling. A serious typhoid epidemic which lasted from April to June was the inevitable result of the overcrowding, poor hygiene and an inadequate water ration, which had led men to drink from contaminated sources. The Surgeon General was generally thought to be out of his depth, while the sanitation officer was none other than the Colonel whom Buller had sacked for his incompetence in countering an outbreak of typhoid in Ladysmith. The epidemic in Bloemfontein brought a death rate worse than Ladysmith’s had ever been, and killed many more men than did Boer bullets. Roberts’s lack of interest in such matters was largely to blame. He tolerated terrible inefficiency and complacency in his senior medical officers yet often sacked his generals with little justification. Churchill must have been aware of the dreadful state of Roberts’s medical services, yet nowhere in any of his accounts of the Boer War are they even mentioned.

  Any frustration which may have arisen from Churchill’s need to mute his criticism was short-lived. The Boers in the Orange Free State were by no means as beaten as Roberts had thought. Churchill once more moved towards the sound of gunfire, away from Bloemfontein and the irritation of being ignored by the Commander-in-Chief, the friend of his father and a household name at home. The excitement in prospect gave him ‘little time to worry unduly about the displeasure even of so great a personage and so honoured a friend’.

  FIFTEEN

  Return to Pretoria

  ‘I had thrown double sixes again.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  dispatch to the Morning Past, 22 April 1900

  CHURCHILL’S DISPATCH of 16 April 1900 includes a passing mention of an audacious move by the Boers at the end of March: ‘But while the army waited, as it was absolutely forced to wait . . . the Boers recovered from their panic, pulled themselves together, and, for the moment boldly seized the offensive. Great, though perhaps temporary, were the advantages they gained.’

  This was the advance by General Christiaan de Wet, the Commandant General of the Free State, who swooped into the southeast of the Orange Free State with a mere fifteen hundred men. Churchill was uncharacteristically brief in his account of events: ‘I do not intend to be drawn into a detailed description . . . For many reasons it deserves a separate and detailed consideration, chiefly because it shows the Boer at his very best: crafty in war and, above all, deadly cool.’

  De Wet recognised that a guerrilla campaign was the only sensible means of engaging a British army which had overwhelming numerical superiority. His first target, the waterworks at Sannah’s Post, only twenty miles east of Roberts’s headquarters, brought him a haul of seven guns, over a hundred wagons and more than four hundred prisoners. Three days later he overwhelmed a British garrison at Reddersburg, fifty miles south of Bloemfontein. Churchill inclined his readers towards a tolerant view – ‘Let us judge no one harshly or in ignorance’ – before revealing some telling figures: ‘With a loss of eight killed and thirty-one wounded, the retreating troops surrendered when relief was scarcely five miles away.’ He does not mention the numbers who surrendered: 546. That would have been too damning. After Reddersburg, de Wet moved seventy-five miles to the east and laid siege to the town of Wepener. By now the British cavalry and infantry in large numbers were catching up with him, so he withdrew to safety north of Bloemfontein.

  De Wet’s sixteen-day rampage was a foretaste of the guerrilla war of which Churchill had warned when he advocated reconciliation at the end of the campaign in Natal. Political factors were also helping to stiffen the morale of many Boers who might otherwise have accepted Roberts’s offer of amnesty. The British government’s insistence that it was not prepared to acknowledge the independence of the Transvaal or the Orange Free State played directly into the hands of Kruger, who portrayed it as a threat to all that the Afrikaner held dear. ‘The lately penitent rebels are stirring,’ wrote Churchill as he set off to join the fighting in the south-east of the Free State, no doubt well pleased to distance himself from the headquarters of an unfriendly Commander-in-Chief.

  Anticipating the need to move rapidly around the new theatre of operations, Churchill equipped himself comprehensively, with a four-horse wagon from which to live and horses on which to ride with the cavalry. This gave him the ability to move ‘sometimes quite alone across wide stretches of doubtful country . . . then dart back across a landscape charged with silent menace, to keep up a continuous stream of letters and telegrams to my newspaper’. No doubt the editor of the Morning Post thought it money well spent

  Accompanied by his wagon and horses, Churchill took the train to Edenburg, fifty miles south of Bloemfontein. He then trekked for two days through the pouring rain until he caught up with the 8th Division, commanded by Major General Sir Leslie Rundle – known as Sir Leisurely Trundle – whom he had known during the Omdurman campaign.

  Having enjoyed Rundle’s hospitality, he hurried on next day to join Brigadier-General John Brabazon’s brigade, which was scouting ahead. As always, Churchill wanted to be part of the action, but in this case there was an added incentive: Brabazon was ‘a man of striking character and presence’, the sort of soldier he admired. A friend of Lord and Lady Randolph, he had played an influential part in Churchill’s early military career, for it was the regiment which Brabazon commanded, the 4th Hussars, to which Churchill had gravitated when he was commissioned. Thereafter the two men became lifelong friends.

  An impoverished Irish landlord, Brabazon had earlier, because of straitened finances, resigned his commission in the Grenadier Guards to become a gentleman volunteer in the Ashanti campaign of 1874. Here he so distinguished himself that his commission was restored, a virtually unprecedented occurrence. The portrait of him in My Early Life illustrates aspects of his character which attracted Churchill. Brabazon had ‘an inability real or affected to pronounce the letter “R” . . . His military career had been long and varied . . . To the question, “What do you belong to now, Brab?” he replied, “I never can wemember, but they have gween facings [their uniform lapels] and you get at ’em from Waterloo.” Of the stationmaster at Aldershot he inquired . . . “Where is the London twain?” “It has gone Colonel.” “Gone! Bwing another.”’

  The Boer War had not been kind to Brabazon. He had arrived in South Africa at the head of a regular cavalry brigade but had fallen out with General Sir John French, his divisional commander, a younger man who was more able to adapt to the changing nature of war. Twenty years before, French had been a subaltern in Afghanistan and junior to Brabazon, whose amusing stories about those days were often at French’s expense, as were his jaunty comments on current tactics. As a result, Brabazon, said to be ‘to be too old for real work’ and ‘too fond of comfort’, found himself commanding the Imperial Yeomanry, a hastily raised force organised by a committee of fox-hunting gentlemen at home. This setback notwithstanding, h
e was still a debonair commander pursuing the war more vigorously than most. With Brabazon, Churchill was once more in his element.

  As Sir Leslie Rundle’s force approached the Boer stronghold of Dewetsdorp, ‘Brabazon was all for battle.’ The pace was being set by more cautious commanders, but to appease him the cavalry were allowed to probe the enemy defences. Churchill was with Brabazon when Angus McNeill, commanding the locally-raised Montmorency’s Scouts since Montmorency himself had been killed, rode up and asked permission to cut off a party of two hundred mounted Boers by taking possession of a small hill. Permission granted, McNeill ordered his fifty scouts to mount, and, turning to Churchill, shouted, ‘Come with us, we’ll give you a show now – first class.’

  Writing his dispatch that same evening, Churchill recorded: ‘So, in the interests of the Morning Post, I got on my horse and we all started . . . as fast as we could.’ It was a race. The Boers were ahead, but for them the going was uphill, and they were probably worse mounted. However, a few, with better horses than their comrades, began to forge ahead. Then the Scouts were forced to dismount, some hundred yards from the hilltop, to cut a wire fence barring their way.

  The delay was fatal to their venture, and very nearly fatal for the Morning Post’s correspondent. The heads of a dozen Boers appeared above the rocks, ‘grim, hairy and terrible’. There were obviously many more behind them. ‘Too late,’ McNeill called, ‘back to the other kopje [hill]. Gallop!’