In the black months later that year, people were to blame Lansdowne, understandably, for the blunders of the War Office. But there were two things that paralysed Lansdowne’s war preparations, apart from his own character.
First, his own Cabinet colleagues regarded the War Office with a kind of amused contempt, as though war was not a serious subject – or could safely be left to the generals to quarrel over. In 1896 Lansdowne had nervously agreed to propose to the Cabinet that they might raise soldiers’ pay a few pence in order to get a better class of recruit.9 (After deductions, Tommy Atkins then received less than the famous shilling-a-day fixed after the Mutiny of the Nore in 1797.)10 The same year, and again in 1898, Lansdowne agreed to ask the Cabinet for a small increase in the size of the regular army. Grudgingly they accepted these proposals. But their lack of confidence in the War Office was made abundantly clear. Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the Chancellor, publicly denounced the idea of increased army spending. Chamberlain scoffed at the ‘rickety and useless’ War Office system. Salisbury, the Prime Minister, hinted that he might not be able to support Lansdowne in the Army Debates in the Lords. He relented, but warned Lansdowne: ‘I need not say that in respect to these military arrangements … I shall assent to anything which commends itself to you. But my advice will be, not to pay much attention to your military advisers.’ Lansdowne felt he had been ‘outrageously’ treated – especially by Hicks Beach – and he threatened to resign.11
Then in 1898 came Kitchener’s twin victories: by moral force at Fashoda, by brute force at Omdurman. Lansdowne’s stock with his colleagues rose accordingly. But he was still kept on a tight rein financially: there was only £20.6 million for the army budget. The British army remained frail by international standards: a nominal total of 340,000 (actually 316,000) regulars and reservists, compared with three million in Germany, ten million in Russia, and four million in France.12 (The navy was, of course, the bulwark of home defence, and traditionally got most of the defence budget.) Unlike its foreign counterparts, the British army had to be ready to fight in every corner of the globe. And after deducting men for permanent garrisons at home, in India, in Egypt and in the colonies, there were only two army corps and a cavalry division – about seventy thousand men – available to send on overseas ‘demonstrations’.13 In short, the British army was an army supposed only to be ready for small wars. But was this small-war army in a fit state for war of any kind? It was seriously below strength, especially in artillery and cavalry and short of essential supplies of every type, according to its Commander-in-Chief, Lord Wolseley.14
The second reason for Lansdowne’s inertia that year was his distaste for Wolseley and his Ring. What victories they would have won, Lansdowne’s generals, if they could have fought an enemy with the vigour they showed in fighting each other! But the senior generals were split into two ‘Rings’ – Field-Marshal Lord Wolseley’s ‘Africans’, Field-Marshal Lord Roberts’s ‘Indians’ – and the issue was still unresolved. The struggle left Lansdowne alienated from Wolseley and most of the War Office.15 He himself favoured Roberts and his ‘Indians’. Their diplomatic collaboration in India – Roberts as Indian C-in-C, Lansdowne as Viceroy – had made the two men mutual admirers. Unfortunately for both, when Roberts returned to England after forty-one years’ service in India, Lansdowne had failed to make him British C-in-C at the Horse Guards. The Cabinet had selected Roberts’s rival, Wolseley. Roberts was fobbed off with the job of C-in-C in Ireland.16 But the battle of the Rings went on. It was no Wagnerian struggle; there was a pettiness about both men as well as a touch of greatness. In 1900 Wolseley was due to retire. Already sixty-seven, Roberts was a year older than Wolseley, yet he was still burning to snatch back the Horse Guards from the ‘Africans’. Their second-in-command, and heir-apparent, blocked his way: Sir Redvers Buller, now commander of the 1st Army Corps at Aldershot17 So Roberts and the ‘Indians’ waited their chance, and the closer they drew to Lansdowne the worse for Wolseley, Buller and the efficiency of the Horse Guards.
Lansdowne’s reply to Wolseley’s belligerent minute of mid-June was characteristically negative. He evaded Milner’s three questions. Instead he agreed that they should send a ‘hint’ to General Butler about the need to be ‘on the look-out’. But it was too soon for ‘open preparations for a row’.18 He turned down flat the expensive proposal of Wolseley’s to mobilize an army corps of thirty-five thousand men. Lansdowne was unperturbed by the fact that the total of British troops in South Africa was only ten thousand, compared to the Boers’ estimated potential forces of 53,700. Why should the Boers invade? What was needed was to make sure the ten thousand men of the British garrison were in a ‘thoroughly efficient state’. They would need some ammunition and new boots – a hundred rounds and one pair of boots per man – and extra transport and ten good British officers to put some stuffing into them.19 That was the Secretary of State’s decision of 21 June, conveyed by cable to General Butler. Butler was also reminded that he had never answered an important War Office question of the previous December: what was his plan for defending the colonies in the unlikely event of Boer invasion? Finally, after receiving Butler’s cabled reply, Lansdowne sent him a courtly rebuke: ‘You cannot understand too clearly that it is your duty to be guided on all questions of policy by the H C [Milner]… whom you will of course loyally support.’20
In fact, Butler’s cabled replies were astonishing. He offered no plan of defence. No suggestions about how many reinforcements were needed. Nor where they were to be positioned. The only question that, by implication, he answered was this. He confirmed the wisdom of Milner’s suggestion that Butler himself should be replaced. What Butler had written touched at the very heart of Milner’s war-mongering with the capitalists of the Rand (though Butler remained oblivious that it was Wernher and Beit, not Rhodes, who were Milner’s partners). He cabled: ‘Situation is not understood in England. In the event of crisis arising situation will be more of a civil war than regular military operations…. Persistent efforts of a party to produce war form … gravest element in situation here. Believe war between white races coming as sequel to the Jameson Raid … would be greatest calamity that ever occurred.’21
It was now early July, and the turn of Wolseley and his ‘Africans’ to attempt a counter-attack.
If Lansdowne found Wolseley rather trying, Wolseley’s own feelings for Lansdowne were a good deal more passionate. ‘Little Lansdowne … is an obstinate little fellow, very conceited, and his obstinacy is born of ignorance’ – ‘I spend my day struggling with my little gentleman…. Such a small mind it would be difficult to imagine. I am sure some little Jew must have “overtaken” his mother before he was conceived.22 So Wolseley poured out his feelings to his wife. In truth, Lansdowne was more than a personal enemy for him, and his Ring. He seemed to epitomize the worst defects of the British military system, defects persisting despite the reforms he and his Ring had helped create: defects like the reckless cost-cutting in the army budget; the pettifogging regulations and red tape; the muddle and confusion in the War Office; above all, the encroachment of a civilian War Minister and his officials in a field that should, by rights, have been the preserve of himself and his Ring.23
Wolseley was not, of course, a mere theorist, an armchair army reformer. He had been a famous fighting general. An early struggle against great handicaps (his father was an impoverished Anglo-Irish major who had died when he was seven); outstanding gallantry in the face of the enemy (he had been severely wounded in the thigh in Burma, and permanently lost the use of his right eye after being struck by a bursting shell in the Crimea); the enfant terrible of his profession (he was awarded a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy before he was twenty-seven): this was the stuff that military heroes were made of. Add to that certain qualities of mind that would have been exceptional in any profession: an ice-clear brain, combined with a demonic fund of energy, what he called a ‘mad and manly’ fury to succeed. Add to that, in turn, an unbroken run of successes as a military c
ommander in the Ashanti, Zulu and Egyptian campaigns. No wonder Wolseley’s name had become a by-word for military efficiency – ‘all Sir Garnet’, as the cockneys put it. By the 1880s, he was ‘our only general’. (Roberts was ‘our only other general’.)24
However, Wolseley was now sixty-six. There was little trace of the rakish young Wolseley, the original of W. S. Gilbert’s ‘Modern Major-General’. His hair was milk-white. He had had some sort of illness two years earlier (Roberts claimed it was a stroke) and his memory was now painfully erratic. He was an ‘extinct volcano’, he confessed to his wife. It was to her that he poured out his heart in these bitter and hollow years as Commander-in-Chief. ‘Dearest Snipe,’ he began these letters, almost gaily, and then the venom would flow. The British army was doomed in its present form. The C-in-C was a mere figurehead. The army was controlled by an ignorant and conceited civilian, who had not the courage to admit to his fellow-ministers the army’s deficiencies. ‘I believe that war would be the best thing at the moment for us,’ he had noted recently. ‘We should get rid of an impossible army system….’25
Meanwhile, Wolseley was tormented by the idea that he ought to resign. Two thoughts held him back. First, his successor would be Roberts – ‘little Roberts’, the head of the ‘Indians’. Roberts might know a great deal about India. He knew nothing about England. And if he took over the army at home, everything would ‘go to the devil’.26 At the same time, Wolseley had himself to confess to a hopeless longing to serve as Commander-in-Chief of an army in the field. It would make a fine, Tennysonian ending. One big command, and perhaps death in harness, rather than in his bed ‘like an old woman’.27 But what chance was there of leading the Ring into battle now? If an expedition were sent to South Africa, its leader would be not Wolseley but his ex-protegé, Sir Redvers Buller. Buller was six years his junior, and Buller’s years as Adjutant-General had given him a reputation for reform as brilliant as Wolseley’s own. No wonder Wolseley was jealous. In fact, the magic had gone from the Ring. Wolseley could not forgive Buller for having accepted the reversion of the C-in-C’s post in 1895, offered by the Liberals before the Tories came to power and appointed Wolseley instead.28
Wolseley’s July counter-attack on Lansdowne took the form of a triple salvo of minutes proposing a ‘forward’ policy. He repeated his earlier plan: call out Buller’s 1st Army Corps on Salisbury Plain – say, thirty-five thousand men – and terrify Kruger; buy their transport for South Africa (eleven thousand mules, costing nearly £500,000), in case he refused to be terrified. Wolseley added a second proposal: send out to South Africa a first instalment often thousand men, as Milner had suggested.
This brought Lansdowne squarely back to the first of the three crucial questions: how many troops would make the two colonies safe from invasion? Ten thousand, according to Wolseley. Lansdowne scoffed at this extravagant idea.29 And he mobilized the other generals, especially one of the ‘Indians’, against Wolseley and Buller.
In July, he had appointed Major-General Sir Penn Symons, a brigadier from India, to be GOC in Natal, the more vulnerable of the two colonies. Symons could hardly have been a more unsuitable choice for the job. He knew next to nothing about South Africa, and he was a fire-eater. Only a few days after his arrival Lansdowne cabled to ask his views about the first crucial question. His reply: a mere two thousand extra troops would make Natal safe right up to its northern apex (hemmed in though it was by the two republics).30
In the absence of any support from Butler – and Butler recommended no reinforcements at all – Wolseley turned to his old ‘African’ colleague, Major-General Sir John Ardagh, Director of the Intelligence Department at the War Office. It was Ardagh’s responsibility to forecast the enemy’s capacity for war. But Ardagh was a shy, cautious man, known for his alarming silences. Moreover, Ardagh had been given only a shoestring budget for the Intelligence Department – £20,000 to cover the whole world.31 He had no professional intelligence agents in either the Free State or the Transvaal. So his forecasts were hesitant and conflicting. Where they were to prove accurate – and to favour Wolseley – it was easy for Lansdowne to brush them aside.32
The underlying strategic question was simple. On paper, the two republics could commandeer citizen armies totalling fifty-four thousand men. Britain had as yet a garrison totalling ten thousand men in South Africa. Would the republican armies be powerful and efficient enough to drive deep into the two colonies in strength? Or could they only adopt a raiding strategy – that is, only push a few thousand men beyond the border areas?
Ardagh was inclined to believe that the Boers would only adopt a raiding strategy. His department’s latest intelligence forecast was printed in an eighty-nine page booklet, Military Notes on the Dutch Republics, marked ‘secret’, and largely unpublished even today. He predicted – correctly – that the Free State would throw in its lot with the Transvaal. Together, they would have a potential invasion force of 34,000 men, (including 4,000 Afrikaners from the colonies), leaving the balance of 20,000 to keep an eye on Kaffirs and Uitlanders at home. They would be armed with the latest guns and rifles.33 (Though the Intelligence Department had underestimated the Transvaal’s Mausers by ten thousand and inflated the number of Creusot ‘Long Toms’ from four to sixteen, these errors more or less cancelled out.)34 There was a footnote about the possibility of a plan to attack Ladysmith, well inside Natal, from the Free State.35 But the general impression given in Military Notes, and in other ID forecasts, was that the problem of defending the colonies was of checking ‘raids’ by two thousand to three thousand Boers.36
How did Ardagh and his department come to this conclusion, that would seem so astounding in the light of events? Military Notes gives the answer: the Boers were not regarded as a serious military adversary. As fighting men, they were expected to be inferior to the Boers who had beaten Colley’s small force at Majuba. Boer generals, used to fighting Kaffirs, knew nothing of handling large bodies of men; not even Joubert had commanded more than three thousand. Nor would the officers be able to cope with the problems of transport and supply. Indiscipline would compound the difficulties. When it came to a ‘row’, they would find their own new artillery – the Krupp and Creusot field-guns bought after the Raid – inferior to the British Armstrongs. And the guns would hamper them if they tried to adopt their old guerrilla tactics. Moreover, they had always had a ‘dread’ of English cavalry; and they had yet to taste the effect of modern artillery shrapnel. In short, far from the Boers being able to invade successfully, an ‘adequate’ force of British infantry, supported by cavalry and artillery, would have no difficulty in invading the republics. They would easily beat the Boers in the open plains of the Free State or the Transvaal (though they might have trouble in the broken country of the Natal frontier). Military Notes concluded majestically: ‘It appears certain that, after [one] serious defeat, they would be too deficient in discipline and organization to make any further real stand.’37
Apart from Ardagh, the most important remaining member of Wolseley’s Ring was Sir Redvers Buller. Till now Lansdowne had only allowed Buller one interview. But on 18 July Buller was summoned from Aldershot to the War Office, and it turned out that he was even more alarmed than Wolseley about the defenceless state of both colonies.38 As the designated leader of the main expeditionary force, Buller was the man who would have to pay for those blunders with his own reputation – perhaps even with his life.
In mid July, however, Lansdowne still dithered, waiting for a lead from Chamberlain and his Cabinet colleagues. He still evaded Milner’s three questions. Then, suddenly and dramatically, the confused political situation seemed to clear.
On 19 July Wolseley read in the papers that Kruger had made substantial political concessions, including a seven-year franchise, to be fully retrospective. The Times announced that the crisis was over.39 Wolseley wrote gloomily to his wife: ‘The papers look like peace.’ Still, the crisis had already achieved something for the army – £100,000 or so already agree
d to be spent on boots, mules, and so on. And Wolseley was convinced that Kruger was irredeemable. So war would come in due course.40
That afternoon Wolseley left London and took a train to Amesbury, to review the army manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain. It was a job he could take pride in. The manoeuvres were his personal creation. Two years before he had persuaded Lansdowne to buy the land for the army, and the practice of full-scale battle training had thus been revived after a lapse of a quarter of a century. Wolseley revelled in it all; he could still sit a gallop on a fresh horse, despite his age and infirmities. And what a relief to be out of London, that ‘horrid Babylon of noise and dirt’, as he called it. He hated the crowds, almost as much as he hated the loneliness. Dining alone at his club, the Athenaeum, and reading the St James’s Gazette over his meal, he felt utterly abandoned. Still, even the Athenaeum was better than that hateful War Office.41
As for its chief, Wolseley declared that he was ‘worn out by the flabbiness’ of the ‘obstinate little fellow’.42 But he was sorry that war had been postponed. A war would be the making of the British army. It would also be the making of the English upper class, that ‘vulgar, snobbish’ and ignorant class which still infused the army with the redcoat spirit a decade after it had changed its uniform to khaki. Best of all, a big war would ‘be the end’ of little Lansdowne.43
Three weeks before Kruger’s ‘climb-down’ was reported to the Colonial Office, Chamberlain had delivered his first major speech on South Africa. It was at his party’s annual meeting – in Birmingham Town Hall on 26 June. The speech (‘we have put our hands to the plough’) was hailed by The Times as a triumph of firmness and moderation. About Milner, Chamberlain was more complimentary than ever before. ‘Who is Sir Alfred Milner?’ he asked himself rhetorically in that vast gathering, as though Milner was his own personal invention. Then, letting his eye-glass fall, and looking the crowd full in the face, with that all-steel, made-in-Birmingham look that never failed, Chamberlain answered his own question. ‘Sir Alfred Milner was chosen because of his great ability, his cool judgement, his unfailing tact, his impartial mind.’44
The Boer War Page 13