In general, the regular doctors and nurses of the Royal Army Medical Corps, with eyes on their future prospects in the service, were reluctant to admit that anything was or had been wrong, or that anyone had erred. The long-service nursing sisters all spoke ambiguously of how wonderfully uncomplaining the men were. But the civilians in khaki—doctors and patients, officers and men—did not hesitate to speak up.
The medical, surgical, and administrative practices were probably no worse than they had always been in the British army, but not since the Crimean War more than fifty years earlier had they been exposed to public view. All soldiers able to do so were expected to stand at attention when officers entered their wards, thermometers passed from mouth to mouth without even being wiped; Dr. John Temple Leon (a civil surgeon) reported that the principal medical officer of his hospital did not visit his marquees for six weeks; Dr. Frank Fitchett said he never saw the PMO inspecting the medical tents, and he complained of the “apathy or indifference displayed by the senior officers.” James Dunlop, professor of surgery at Anderson’s Medical School, criticised the RAMC officers for being “not up to date”: some of the heads of the Medical Department were unfamiliar with the advances of modern surgery, and were not “gifted with the experience and forethought and judgment necessary for men occupying such important positions.”26 Professor Dunlop once found that the bedpans had been removed from a ward because the men had been found using them as spitoons.
The major complaint heard by the commission was of the shortage of medical supplies and hospital equipment. Sir William Wilson said that although plenty of supplies were stocked on the coast he had difficulty getting them transported into the interior. This was undoubtedly true. The chief lack was of bedpans and chamberpots. Dr. Richard Whittington testified that at one time in No. 8 General Hospital there was only one night commode for forty bell tents. Dr. Fitchett said, “The night-stools were very small and soon filled, and on going round at night I frequently would hear piteous cries for the orderly, and found a man unable to relieve himself because the vessel was filled.”27 Dr. Albert A. B. Kirkman, also of No. 8 General Hospital, said he had had no bedpans and “the patients with enteric were walking down between the marquees evacuating down there.... all the patients had to get out of bed—men who were dying, as a matter of fact.” Mr. Anthony Bowlby, the senior surgeon at Portland Hospital, said “there was an immense number of men suffering from diarrhoea.... The whole hillside for the circuit of a mile round Bloemfontein was contaminated.” Dr. Little at No. 9 General Hospital testified that “we considered many patients lost their lives from the want of bed pans.”
There were also insufficient beds, blankets, mattresses, cooking utensils, fuel, urinals, feeding cups, hospital clothing, and fresh milk. A private in the 3rd Grenadier Guards, who asked not to be identified when he appeared before the royal commission, testified that he had been put in a bell tent where for ten days he lay without a waterproof sheet. When he was finally moved to a marquee and given a bed and sheets, the mattress was infested with lice. He saw one orderly “take a delirious patient by the throat and throw him back upon the bed.” Like many others, he complained of the food: “I had no fresh milk whatever in the hospital. The condensed milk was mixed with cold and dirty water. The beef-tea was cold and nasty, so that I could not drink it.”
Kipling testified that on two occasions he had been told by RAMC officers that nothing was needed, but when he asked the nurses they begged for pyjamas, warning him to deliver them not to the Stores Issue Department but to the back entrance of the hospital. On one occasion he delivered medicines as well.
In striking contrast to the evidence of the civil surgeons and patients was the testimony of the senior RAMC officers. Lieutenant Colonel F. Edward Barrow, principal medical officer at No. 9 General Hospital, a hospital described by Burdett-Coutts as “a tented city of pestilence,” admitted that he needed 60,000 gallons of water a day and could only get 6,000, but he admitted little else. “We were told to boil that water from the wells, but as we had no firewood or coals, we could not boil it.” He does not appear to have regarded this as a serious matter, but he was concerned about the milk. He spoke of “the dirty habits of the Kaffir boys” and said he had deliberately stopped the supply of fresh milk because he thought it might be contaminated “with Kaffir boys doing all the work.” He said his hospital had so much food that he had to bury fresh mutton and beef. He denied that his hospital had ever been overcrowded and said, “Lots of patients arrived with absolutely nothing the matter with them.” When asked, “Did you fall short of necessities?” he apparently forgot his statements about the shortage of water and fuel or he did not regard these as necessities, for he replied: “I had more than enough of everything.... I never ran short of anything.” Asked for figures, he said flatly that he never bothered with statistics and that he did not require his medical officers to give him reports: “There was no necessity to report to me. I knew everything what was going on.” Given some statements made by wounded men regarding their handling, he shrugged and replied that “the wounded can be eccentric.”
Colonel Barrow had some peculiar notions about the causes of illness. Although at one point he declared that he had never seen water in the hospital tents during heavy rains, he credited much sickness to rainstorms: “Men were washed out of their tents and were puddling about in mud four inches thick, the alluvial mud. By that means all those poisons were let loose.” Another factor, he said, was that after the troops reached Bloemfontein they did not have enough work to do; idleness, he maintained, even more than rainstorms, was responsible for the epidemic. “If there had been war in the locality, and they had been at it again, there would not have been so much sickness.”
Lieutenant Colonel R. T. Beamish, principal medical officer at No. 8 General Hospital, also affirmed that all had been well in his hospital. “It was never overcrowded,” he said. Never at any time was the hospital undermanned; he had all the nurses and orderlies he needed. “The patients never suffered.” In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, he swore that there were never more than five men housed in a bell tent. As to the great bedpan shortage, Beamish said: “I think there was no actual dearth of bed pans,” and again, “I never knew there was any dearth of bed pans. On the contrary, I believe there was not.” Except perhaps a shortage of feeding cups, Beamish thought there had been an ample supply of everything. As for the complaining civil surgeons, several were “very rowdy and not quite teetotal—they were more or less intemperate and very rowdy.”
Sir Robert Romer, president of the royal commission, said he was very impressed with Colonel Beamish’s testimony, as indeed he was with that of the other senior RAMC officers. When the commissioners’ report was finally issued the following January it blandly stated:
We desire to say that in our judgement, reviewing the campaign as a whole, it has not been one where it can properly be said that the medical and hospital arrangements have broken down.... no general or wide-spread neglect of patients, or indifference to their suffering. And all witnesses of experience in other wars are practically unanimous in the view that, taking it all in all, in no campaign have the sick and wounded been so well looked after as they have been in this.
The war attracted an extraordinary number of visitors, people who just came out to see what it was like. While the war was still being fought Cooks organised tours of the battlefields. Admiral F. I. Maxse travelled to Bloemfontein to visit his son. Sir Claude and Lady de Crespigny went out to see their three sons and to take a look around. Lady de Crespigny did a bit of nursing in Bloemfontein, where their eldest son was in hospital, and Sir Claude, who wanted to see some action, attached himself to a colonial unit for a few weeks. A number of officers whose regiments were still in England obtained leave and went out to volunteer their services.
With all those fine young men in South Africa the seat of war became an attraction for a considerable number of women who (as Milner put it) “seem to have no par
ticular call of duty or business.” On 3 April 1900 Chamberlain wrote to Milner: “The Queen regrets to observe the large number of ladies now visiting and remaining in South Africa,” and she deplored “the hysterical spirit which seems to have influenced some of them to go where they are not wanted.” This observation was, of course, passed on to Lord Roberts, whose wife and daughter were then on their way to join him at Bloemfontein. He decided he had better write to the Queen and tell her this, which he did, adding: “I understand that Your Majesty does not approve of ladies coming out to South Africa from mere curiosity. I am forbidding any to enter the Orange Free State, except those who have a son or husband in hospital, or whose husband is likely to be quartered in Bloemfontein for some time.”28
Soon after, John Maxwell wrote to his wife: “Lady Roberts has arrived here and, as Kitchener says, she has represented nearly 500 tons of supplies, for her ladyship came up in a special train and upset all arrangements. However, the old Chief must be looked after, and I’m sure we grudge him nothing.”29 As for his own wife, Maxwell told her not to come out, not even if she stayed in Cape Town, where, he said, “every hole and corner is crammed with ladies who alternate squabbling among themselves with the washing of officers’ faces.”
Young Lady Edward Cecil, herself in Cape Town, remarked that “there was a good bit of cackle” about the ban on women. In her memoirs she wrote: “Nobody in those free and spacious days objected to women who came out to see their husbands or brothers, but there were plenty of others, some of whom were even mischievous.” Being the prime minister’s daughter-in-law, she did not feel constrained to abide by the ban and, with Lady Charles Bentinck, went up to Bloemfontein. As she told her mother, they enjoyed themselves hugely:
Every man you ever heard of is in Bloemfontein and they nearly all came to see us that afternoon [the day of their arrival].... We saw the Grenadiers on parade and as we rode—at some distance away—across their front, the eyes of every man in that Battalion followed us from right to left and until we had ridden away. It was an extraordinary feeling, being so looked at.30
Among the early visitors to conquered Bloemfontein was Rudyard Kipling, who, like many others, wanted to do his bit and see some action. Before the war Bloemfontein had produced an English-language newspaper called The Friend of the Sovereignty and Bloemfontein Gazette. Lord Stanley, the chief press censor, asked a group of newspaper correspondents to take it over and edit it as an official organ of the army for the amusement and instruction of both the troops and the inhabitants. And thus was founded the first army newspaper. The first addition of the new Friend, published on 16 March 1900, proclaimed: “The simple policy adhered to in these columns will be the maintenance of British supremacy in South Africa, equal rights for all white men, without respect for race or creed, which principles in our opinion embody the establishment of sound government, the prosperity of the country and the happiness of the people.”
A number of the most distinguished correspondents in South Africa contributed to the paper during its thirty-day existence: Lionel James, Bennett Burleigh, A. B. “Banjo” Patterson (who wrote “Waltzing Matilda”), and, only a few days after its first appearance, Kipling, who contributed verses, epigrams, and articles, including “Kopje-boolk Maxims” such as:
Two horses will shift a camp if they be dead enough.
Abandoned women and abandoned kopjes are best left alone.
Half a loaf is better than no bread, but a pound and a half of trek ox is an insult.
It was in The Friend that Kipling first published his remarkable poem on Joubert, after his death on 27 March 1900. Joubert, the moderate, the chivalrous, had always been admired by the British. When news of his death reached Roberts, he sent a note of condolence to President Kruger. Joubert had been in ill health for some time, and his condition was not improved by a fall from his horse. After the retreat from Ladysmith he had called together his commandants and sorrowfully told them that he was too ill to continue as their leader; he asked them to accept Louis Botha as his replacement. Although Botha had shown himself to be an able general and he was known to be a favourite of Joubert’s, the request came as a surprise, for the Boers had a great respect for age and Botha at thirty-seven was considered very young for the chief command. It was also contrary to Boer custom for a commandant-general, or any general at this stage of the war, to be appointed rather than elected. Had an election been held, it is probable that De la Rey rather than Botha would have been the burghers’ choice; however, in deference to Joubert’s wishes, Botha was accepted and his appointment was eventually confirmed by the last session of the volksraad. Joubert retired to his farm, where he died, his faithful Hendrina by his side.
With the capture of Cronjé, the death of Joubert, and the passing of the military leadership of the Boer forces into the younger, more vigorous, and more able hands of Botha, De la Rey, and De Wet, the nature of the war began to change.
27
DECISIONS AT KROONSTAD
Bloemfontein was one of the enemies’ capitals, but it did not impress the British. “Dust and flies and sunsets are the three outstanding things I remember about Bloemfontein,” wrote General J. F. C. Fuller of his days as a subaltern. Lieutenant David Miller told his mother in a letter home: “Bloemfontein is very disappointing—just a little English townlet of some 6,000 inhabitants. Our camps are all around it. The hospitals are full, and a scarcity of nurses. Eighty soldiers were buried the day I arrived, nearly all enteric fever.”1
There were few problems with the inhabitants, a number were helpful, and some of the women nursed the sick and wounded; it is said that one of President Steyn’s brothers signed a contract to supply wood for fuel to the British army. People were not turned out of their homes, and the soldiers were given strict orders to be on their best behaviour. In the words of Corporal Murray Cosby of the 7th Mounted Infantry, Roberts warned them that “if any of us blackards were caught looting so much as a hen’s egg from any private person, Dutch, English or Kaffir, we would be tried by drumhead court-martial and instantly shot.”2
The staunchest republicans among the Boers, men and women, had fled Bloemfontein. Tibbie Steyn, the president’s wife, although ill, had gathered up her son and two of her daughters and preceded her husband to Kroonstad. The flight of the refugees and wounded across the Orange Free State and the Transvaal before the advancing British increased the despair of the Boers; wild rumours spread; no one knew what to do or what to expect next. The world as they had known it was crumbling about them. Men and women scattered on farms across the veld travelled miles to the nearest railway station to glean news from refugees, wounded, and deserters.
Christian de Wet, seeing that it was a hopeless task to try holding his men together, gave them all leave to return to their homes and stay until he sent for them:
How can I describe my feelings when I saw Bloemfontein in the hands of the English? It was enough to break the heart of the bravest man amongst us. Even worse than the fall of our capital was the fact that, as was only to be expected, the burghers had become entirely disheartened; and it seemed as if they were incapable of offering any further resistance. The commandos were completely demoralized.3
President M. T. Steyn proclaimed Kroonstad to be the new capital of the Orange Free State. A three-man delegation had just been dispatched to Europe to plead for intervention on the part of the great powers. In the meantime it was necessary to fight on as best they could. On 17 March 1900 Steyn called all the principal Boer leaders to a krygsraad:
Notwithstanding the despondency of the burghers at the capture of Bloemfontein, there were no serious words spoken of making peace at the largest war council, over which I presided, at Kroonstad.... The matter of the most efficient manner of carrying on the war was discussed and in the Volksraad it was unanimously decided to carry on the war.4
Steyn the moderate, the man who more than any other on either side had sought to prevent the war, was now to emerge as the living, breathing spiri
t of the Boers’ resistance. This man of peace was to be the only politician of iron and blood, the man with the firmest determination, the strongest will. It is curious that his name was, and is, so little known outside South Africa, for although Kruger had played his part in starting the war, Steyn was the major political figure to fight it. Kruger remained the living symbol of Afrikanerdom for the British, even long after he had faded from the scene, and they underestimated the vital role played by this stocky, long-bearded Free State president.
Some important decisions were made at the Kroonstad krygsraad. The need for greater discipline in the Boer forces was evident, and it was resolved that efforts would be made to make the independent-minded burghers conform to military necessities. Sick leaves were to be strictly regulated, and men who left their commandos without authorisation were to be punished. As Cronjé had demonstrated, the practice of carrying along wagons loaded with women and children and moveables could be disasterous; the krygsraad decreed that in future the numbers of wagons would be strictly controlled.
It was also decided to give more recognition to the foreign volunteers, of whom there were perhaps as many as 2,000, and to form them into a separate corps. They had been given a less than generous welcome in the early days of the war; Kruger had bluntly told one group: “Thank you for coming. Don’t imagine that we have need of you. Transvaal wants no foreign help. But as you wish to fight for us, you are welcome. I take your coming as a gratifying sign that Europe is gradually beginning to recognize the right of the Afrikaner nation.”5
Great Boer War Page 37