The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the Europeans had it all their own way, or even that in all their imperial wars they had all the technological superiority. Menelik’s forces at Adowa in 1896 had overwhelmed 30,000 Italians, and were armed with more than 14,000 muzzle-loaders and similar rifles. The arms trade which made Armstrong and others into millionaires knew little of territorial restraint. By 1899 Paul Kruger’s Boer Republic had an arsenal of 31 machine guns, 62,950 rifles, 6,000 revolvers and sufficient ammunition for a protracted campaign.

  They would also be helped by another factor: the sheer incompetence of quartermasters, suppliers and others, the human capacity to make mistakes. Belloc was a master of the witty epigram – ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun and they have not.’ The truer picture of Imperial warfare is probably given by Sir Henry Newbolt with his ‘The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead’ – see here.

  Much of this bad luck and incompetence was on display in the opening months of the Boer War. So too was the resourcefulness of the Boers and the skill and courage with which they used their vast arsenal. So, ultimately, was that sheer ruthlessness which Kitchener had displayed at Omdurman.

  In 1897, Chamberlain had appointed Sir Alfred Milner (1854–1925) as high commissioner for South Africa. He was a journalist – he had been a deputy editor to Stead and Morley on the Pall Mall Gazette – a barrister, a Liberal and a Balliol man. It would have been hard to find anyone with a mindset more different from Kruger’s, who in an election of 1898 was returned as president of the Boer Republic with an overwhelming majority.

  In the negotiations about the position of the Uitlanders which took place between Kruger and Milner, the Boer position hardened and the commissioner became increasingly exasperated. Every time Milner (on the Cabinet’s instructions) made a minor concession to Kruger, the old man in his top hat upped the ante – for example by wishing to ban the immigration of Indians to Johannesburg. The dispute played out between the smooth, intelligent Milner and the stubborn, serious old Voortrekker was nominally concerned with the voting rights or residency permits of ‘foreigners’ in Johannesburg. It was really seen by everyone as something much bigger.

  When Kruger had repelled the Jameson Raid, no less a person than the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had cabled the Transvaal president on 3 January 1896: ‘I sincerely congratulate you that, without appealing for the help of friendly Powers, you, with your people, by your energy against the armed hordes which as disturbers of the peace broke into your country, have succeeded in re-establishing peace and maintaining the independence of your country against attacks from without.’28 When war eventually came, about 1,600 volunteers formed the ‘foreign brigade’ to help Kruger: Irish, Americans, Germans, Scandinavians, French, Dutch and Russians. (Among the European aristocrats were Count Sternberg and Prince Bagration of Tiflis, who was accompanied by two Cossack servants.)29 The British, equally symbolically, drew on their Empire to supply them with troops – a Canadian regiment raised by Lord Strathcona, Australians, New Zealanders and Indians.30 For this was to be a war which enabled other nations to deliver a verdict on the power of the British Empire.

  That was why Milner believed that ‘Krugerism’ had to be checked. It was why he could stigmatize the prime minister of Natal (an English South African) as ‘disloyal’ for so much as sending a message of congratulation to Kruger on his re-election. It was why in a celebrated memo to the Westminster government, Milner flamboyantly said:

  The case for intervention is overwhelming … The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain and the respect for the British Government within its own dominions.31

  By September 1899 the garrison in South Africa was reinforced from 12,000 to 20,000 troops and war became inevitable. The Orange Free State publicly allied itself with the Transvaal and war was declared on 11 October.

  The Boers wore no uniform. An American newspaper correspondent, Howard Hillegas, commented:

  To call the Boer forces an army was to add unwarranted elasticity to the word, for it has but one quality in common with such armed forces as Americans or Europeans are accustomed to call by that name. The Boer army fought with guns and gunpowder, but it had no discipline, no drills, no forms, no standards, and not even a roll-call.

  When one field cornet of the Kroonstad commando insisted on holding a morning roll-call and a rifle inspection, the men complained to a higher authority, and he was told to stop harassing them.32

  In the initial stages of the war, though, the Boers had all the advantages. They were familiar with the country, which was certainly not true of the 20,000 British troops lately arrived in the Cape, or the 10,000 Indians drafted in.33 They also, in the opening stages of the war, heavily outnumbered the British. They had 50,000 mounted infantry, and enough ammunition for 80,000. Their marksmen were extremely skilled and the Krupp guns they used were superior to British weapons.34

  Initially, when they invaded Northern Natal, the Boers had great success. By the end of October, Joubert had outmanoeuvred Sir George White at the battle of Ladysmith, which was to be besieged until 28 February 1900. Kimberley, on the northernmost border of Cape Colony, the western border of the Free State, was also besieged, and so was Mafeking. Three important British forces were thereby immobilized and the Boers had the opportunity to press on through the Cape Colony and take Cape Town. Had they done so, they would have forced Britain to make terms. Instead, with their desire to capture Durban and give themselves a seaport, they made a tactical error which allowed the British time to land a formidable army at Cape Town at the end of October under Sir Redvers Buller as commander-in-chief.

  Buller was a stupid man, and his initial actions led to heavy casualties. In December there was the ‘Black Week’ in which Lieutenant General Sir W.F. Gatacre was defeated at Stormberg; a day later on the 3rd Lord Methuen was disastrously repulsed by Cronje at Magersfontein; and four days later Buller, advancing to relieve Ladysmith, was defeated by Louis Botha at Colenso. The only son of Lord Roberts was killed in the action. Buller then lost his nerve. He signalled to White that Ladysmith should surrender and cabled the same to the Cabinet in London.

  The Cabinet’s response was to sack Buller and make Roberts commander-in-chief and Kitchener his chief of staff. Roberts was sixty-seven years old. Three years before he had retired from the Indian command. He and Kitchener landed at Cape Town on 10 January 1900.

  Roberts gave categorical orders to Buller that he was to do nothing until they had arrived, but the ambitious Buller attempted one last chance of a victory which was his and his only. The disastrous battle of Spion Kop was fought on 24 January – witnessed by a twenty-four-year-old war correspondent called Winston S. Churchill. 1,200 men were killed or wounded, both sides fought with outstanding valour; it was one of the worst defeats inflicted on British troops since the Crimea. The next morning the Boers photographed the British dead on the battlefield and published the pictures all over the world. They caused uproar in England.

  When Arthur Balfour referred to the disastrous setbacks, the Queen upbraided him with: ‘Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.’35

  Under Roberts’s command, the British army turned round the disastrous position into which Buller had led it. 1900 saw the relief of Ladysmith and Mafeking, the capture of Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria and – by October 1900 – the formal annexation of the Transvaal. Roberts returned to England and Kitchener succeeded him as commander-in-chief on 29 November.

  It might have been supposed that the war was all but over. Rather, it had eighteen terrible months to run, with the Boers fighting a resourceful guerrilla campaign and Kitchener responding with a dreadful ruthlessness. The first part of his strategy was to set
up a line of prefabricated blockhouses – constructed out of stone, with corrugated iron roofs – from Kapmurden to Komatipoort, as lookout posts to defend the railway from commando attack. His second move was to clear the land. Women and children were to be separated from their menfolk and herded into concentration camps. Their farms were to be burned or blown up. Crops were to be burnt, livestock killed. Several million horses, cattle and sheep were shot. Barbed-wire fences totalling 3,000 miles were set up to corral the Boers into the camps, with a blockhouse to observe them every few hundred yards.

  From then onwards in the war the function of the British army had become the collection of non-combatants and livestock. Lieutenant Colonel Allenby commanded 1,500 men at the beginning of 1901, one of eight columns ‘driving’ the Transvaal. At the end of three months, his ‘bag’ was 32 Boers killed, 36 captured, 154 surrendered; 5 guns; 118 wagons; 55 carts; 28,911 rounds of ammunition; 273 rifles; 904 horses; 87 mules; 485 trek oxen; 3,260 other cattle; and 12,380 sheep. He also imprisoned some 400 women and children.

  The plight of those in the camps was brought to the public eye by Emily Hobhouse, who went to South Africa on behalf of the Women and Children’s Distress Fund. While the military ran the camps (until November 1901) the death rate was 344 per 1,000, falling to 20 per 1,000 in May 1902. The families were deprived of clothes, bedding, cooking utensils, clean water and adequate medicine.36 Children often had to lie on the bare earth exposed to unbearable heat. By October 1901, 80,000 Boers were living in these camps – a number which swelled to 117,871 in the eleventh month. 20,177 inmates died, most of them children.37

  Kitchener appears to have been indifferent to the suffering he caused in South Africa. Like many who enjoy inflicting pain on their fellow men, or from whose natures compassion has been mysteriously excluded, he was a keen animal-lover. He had a pet bear in Cyprus. He instantaneously ‘bonded’ with horses and camels on campaign. His true mania, however, was for dogs. When he had finished tormenting the South Africans this cruel bugger – there is enough evidence, surely, to justify both the noun and the epithet – doted on four cocker spaniels named Shot, Bang, Miss and Damn. When he was in India he bought a house, something he had never done before: ‘I need somewhere for my dogs to live.’38

  No such shelter was offered by the field marshal to the Afrikaner women and children whom he had starved, or allowed to die of dysentery and typhoid, in the midday sun of the High Veld. The photographs of the children in those camps, skeletal as the inmates of Belsen,39 are the silent footnote to the South African war. Six days after the peace was signed at Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 Kitchener was awarded £50,000 by Parliament. He was given the Order of Merit and created a viscount.

  The Victorian age, haunted by the dire warnings of Malthus, had begun with the erection of workhouses on home territory. It ended with a war which was no more than a scramble for gold and diamonds. The war cost Great Britain £222 million. 5,774 British troops were killed, 22,829 wounded, and some 4,000 Boers died in battle. The war was hugely popular. The reliefs of Mafeking and Ladysmith were the occasions of wild public rejoicing. The songs of the war had an infectious. music-hall brio. And Britain may be said to have won handsome returns on her expenditure. For her £222 million she had won control of the richest spot on Earth. Yet as in a morality tale, she had gained diamonds and gold and lost something in return. A people who built workhouses at the beginning of an era and concentration camps at the end might have gained the whole world, but they had lost honour, and soul.

  43

  Vale

  LIFE AT THE court of Queen Victoria can never have been exciting, but as she entered the deeper, mistier recesses of old age, the tedium for her attendants was scarcely tolerable. At Osborne in the winters, there was so little to do that the equerries tried playing golf in the snow with red billiard balls: ‘but the greens are of course useless. We share a great deal … We have had some good hockey.’1

  There were moments of light relief, as when Hubert Parry came to be knighted. ‘What a ripper he is,’ observed Frederick Ponsonby.

  He told me that he had had a private rehearsal & had split his breeches in trying to kneel down in his velvet pants. Some of the others who came to be decorated were chattering with fear & one of them kept on repeating his name to me he was so frightened. H.P. however didn’t care a d–n & roaring with laughter and telling stories before going in to the room where the Queen was … I was sorry that he wasn’t going to stay & dine as I am sure that H.M. would be delighted with him.2

  The numbers dining with the Queen were small: usually just Princess Beatrice, sometimes Princess Louise (‘the petticoats’ as the equerries dubbed them) and one or two courtiers. The old lady liked to eat off gold – even her eggcup at breakfast for the royal boiled egg was gold plate – and she maintained a Hanoverian level of greed. ‘If she would follow a diet and live on Benger’s [proprietary baby] Food and chicken all would be well,’ opined her maid of honour Marie Mallet, ‘but she clings to roast beef and ices! And what can you then expect? Sir James [Reid – the doctor] has at last persuaded her to try Bengers and she likes it and now to his horror, instead of substituting it for other foods she adds it to her already copious meals … And of course when she devours a huge chocolate ice followed by a couple of apricots, washed down with iced water as she did last night [25 July 1900] she ought to expect a dig from the indigestion fiend.’3

  In this last phase of decrepitude her eyesight grew dim, and she became querulous about the darkened rooms (as they appeared to her) at Osborne, and the faintness of modern ink. She continued to be punctilious about overseeing the affairs of state and reading the boxes of state papers sent down by ministers. When she entered the very final stage, and was too ill to read them for just one week, Arthur Balfour ‘was astounded at the accumulation of official boxes that had taken place during the last week and said it showed what a mass of routine work the Queen had to do’.4

  She took a keen interest in the progress of the Boer War, and kept an album of photographs of all the officers killed: an agonizing task for the equerries who had to write to all the widows asking for these pictures. Having compiled it for a year she tired of it, saying it was too sad to look at.

  Young Fritz Ponsonby was longing to go to South Africa and confided the fact to Princess Victoria (daughter of the Prince of Wales), who immediately told her mother, who told the Queen. ‘HM was speechless and sent Mrs Grant flying to find out all about it. HM says you could have knocked her down with a feather and she says she will be jiggered if she’ll allow it for a moment.’5

  In fact, the last official engagement she performed was on Monday, 14 January 1901, when she received Lord Roberts on his return from South Africa. She was wheelchair-bound and very frail. She conferred on him an earldom, and since his only son had been killed in the war she allowed him the privilege of the title passing to his daughter. (The Queen herself had lost a beloved grandson in the fighting: Prince Christian Victor, Helena’s boy, who died of enteric fever in Pretoria.) She also made ‘Our Bobs’ a Knight of the Garter.

  Not long after this audience, she began to sink. On Wednesday 16th, for the first time in twenty years as her personal physician, Reid saw the Queen in bed: she remained there all day, only rising to dress at 6 p.m.6 Over the next few days, Reid and the courtiers began to warn those most intimately connected with her that the Queen’s life was coming to an end. The government needed to be told: no one could remember the procedures for summoning an Accession Council or for swearing in a new monarch. The bishop of Winchester, Randall Davidson, was summoned to the Queen’s bedside. The Prince of Wales was telephoned at Marlborough House,7 and set off for the Isle of Wight.

  Much against the advice and wishes of ‘the petticoats’, the Kaiser in Berlin had been informed and had set off at once to see his grandmother. When he arrived at Osborne House, he said to the petticoats, ‘My first wish is not to be in the light, and I will return to London if you wish. I should like to see
Grandmama before she dies, but if it is impossible, I should quite understand.’8 Everyone was impressed by how well he behaved. She spent the last two and a half hours of her life leaning on the Kaiser’s immobile arm, with Reid supporting her other side. She finally died at half-past six in the evening on 22 January 1901.

  She died clutching a crucifix, but like so much else about Queen Victoria, her religion was sui generis. The ‘Instructions’, written out on 9 December 1897 and carried out by Reid to the letter,9 insisted that she should be placed in her coffin with an array of trinkets worthy of an Egyptian pharaoh. Rings, bracelets, lockets, shawls, handkerchiefs and plaster casts of her favourites’ hands were all placed in the casket. When all the royalties had come to pay their last respects to the body (‘no smell’)10 and to look at that face – ‘like a lovely marble statue, no sign of illness or age, and she looked. “the Queen”’11 – it was time for the doctor to cram more souvenirs into the casket – Prince Albert’s dressing-gown: and in her left hand a photo of John Brown and a lock of his hair in tissue paper which the doctor tactfully covered with Queen Alexandra’s floral tribute.12 The new king kindly allowed the Munshi to come and look his last on the Empress of India, and finally two men came in and screwed down the coffin lid.13