It was true. The atmosphere at the War Office, and his own moral isolation, prevented Buller from even discussing the situation with White.
After his return to Aldershot, Buller sent Lansdowne a private letter of the highest importance, which has never been published. It shows that Buller – unlike Wolseley or any other general – had come near to grasping the scale of the danger in which Chamberlain’s policy of ‘bluff’ had put them. Buller knew the Boers better than any other English general. He had himself raised Boers for his Light Horse in the Kaffir War, and he had personal friends among them.94 (This was probably the reason, as well as Buller’s links with the Liberals, for Lansdowne’s sneer that Buller ‘talked Boer’.) Now he begged Lansdowne to send ‘a further force at once’ to Natal – in addition to the ten thousand. ‘We have let things drift until we are in a very uncomfortable military position – if the Boers are bold … they have now the chance of inflicting a serious reverse upon us in Natal – should they do that every day saved in the sending of reinforcements would be worth its weight in gold….’95 Buller moreover made it clear (though not in this letter) that it was essential that White should not push his force too far forward when he arrived in Natal. He must stay on the defensive behind the strong line of the Tugela River. To go nearer the Biggarsberg and garrison Ladysmith – as planned at present – would be to invite disaster.96
Lansdowne brushed aside Buller’s appeals. They must wait to see if Kruger was bluffing. Anyway, had not Wolseley said that he ‘staked his reputation’ that they would be ‘safe as to everything south of Biggarsberg’ when the eight thousand men arrived?97 Buller remained grimly at Aldershot. When Wolseley had first taken him into his office and shown him the rough list of the regiments in the Army Corps, the flower of the British army and fifty thousand strong, Buller had exclaimed, ‘Well, if I can’t win with these, I ought to be kicked.’98 Now his mind was filled with forebodings. He wished to God that Wolseley had himself been chosen to lead the expedition.99
While Buller’s troops were making dummy night attacks at Aldershot,100 the Tantallon Castle, bearing Sir George White and his staff, was cutting a phosphorescent wake through the waters of the South Atlantic. White was glad to be out of the War Office. He found the battle between ‘Africans’ and ‘Indians’ ‘disagreeable’. The soldiers were not sufficiently in control and were not either ‘united or strong’.101
After a few days at sea, White’s spirits lightened. He felt younger and brisker already, despite his gammy leg, though it was no fun climbing down the companion-way from his state cabin on the upper deck to queue up for a bath. White was a tall, lean, Anglo-Indian general, whose skin burnt easily in the sun, a country gentleman from the north of Ireland who had worked his way laboriously up the Indian military ladder. He was conscientious rather than clever. His distinction was that he had won the VC as a young man in Upper Burma. His handicap, apart from his leg, was that he had served only in India and knew nothing about war in South Africa – or, indeed, about any war against white opponents. He spent most of the voyage in a deck-chair, mugging up the subject as best he could. He took a look at Butler’s Life of Colley (Colley was the British Commander killed at Majuba. Butler was the General Butler, the one sacked in August and sent back from the Cape). The voyage was tedious enough. Then, at long last, on 3 October the Tantallon Castle steamed into Cape Town harbour, just before dawn lit up the smooth grey flanks of Table Mountain.102
White found Milner ‘nervous and … overdone’, and he was disturbed by Milner’s news.103 For three weeks he himself had been effectively cut off from the world; there had been no cables waiting at Madeira. When he left Lansdowne, Lansdowne was full of talk of Kruger’s ‘bluffing’. White himself told a friend the day before sailing, ‘Personally, I don’t believe there will be fighting of a serious kind. The great financiers who keep their fingers close to the pulse of such affairs are not disturbed.’104 On board ship he had met the young Dutch-born secretary of the Transvaal State Secretary, Sandberg, who assured him Kruger would not fight. He was inclined to agree. He told his staff, including Ian Hamilton (who had distinguished himself at Majuba, before joining Roberts’s ‘Indians’), that it was not their task to avenge Majuba and invade the Transvaal. They must defend Natal until the arrival of the Army Corps. He was merely ‘St John the Baptist preparing the way … Redvers Buller is the Messiah.’ His plan was to put the bulk of his forces ‘just in front of Ladysmith’, on the slopes of the Biggarsberg range. He rejected the appeals of some fire-eaters to push up to Laing’s Nek – that is, as Colley had done, pushing up into the northern apex of Natal, dominated by Majuba itself.106
On the other hand, he had dismissed Buller’s warning to avoid the northern triangle altogether and dig in behind the Tugela. He considered Buller was an alarmist.
Now Milner told White that the Boer armies had turned out in very large numbers on the frontiers of both Cape Colony and Natal. An ultimatum was expected. The first shot might be fired ‘that day or the next’. The Afrikaners in the Cape were ‘ripe for revolt’. At the same time, White learnt that on 25 September General Symons, the fire-eater, had decided on his own authority to push a brigade to Dundee, seventy miles north of Ladysmith, thus dangerously dividing the British forces.107
In these alarming circumstances White decided that afternoon that he must short-cut his journey to Natal, by taking the train cross-country to East London and then catching a boat direct to Durban. His baggage was rushed to the station and with hardly a minute to spare he and his staff caught the evening mail by the single-track line to East London.108 The three-day journey across the Great Karoo was a revelation to White. Despite those instructive books he had read on board ship, he had had no idea of the desert-like character of the South African veld. It reminded him of one of the poorest parts of India, like Baluchistan. He was also surprised (and disturbed) at the sight of the Afrikaners who gathered at the wayside stations – men with slouch hats, beards and rifles, who represented the great majority of the population. They seemed at ‘daggers drawn’ with the local British, and only too keen to help their countrymen across the borders. From time to time the train halted to allow special trains, crowded with Uitlanders, to pass in the opposite direction. They were refugees from Johannesburg and White was told that they had been beaten up by the Boers. Many were women and children.
At East London, White’s party were hurried on board the Union Line’s steamer Scot – the same ship that had carried Milner to England a year before. He was surprised to find one of the passengers was Colonel Frank Rhodes, Cecil’s brother and one of the leaders of the old Reform Movement. Rhodes was now engaged on some mysterious mission in Natal, accompanied by young Lord Ava, eldest son of the ex-Viceroy of India. (Rhodes was also ‘playing the old, old game’, White noted disapprovingly, with a girl on the boat.)109
An hour later the Scot sailed for Durban and suddenly White’s mind was seized with the same sense of foreboding that Buller had felt for months. What he had seen and heard in the Karoo had shaken him badly. Even when the reinforcements of eight thousand men had all arrived, the Boers would remain superior both in ‘strength and position’.
Belatedly, White had begun to grasp the answers to Milner’s crucial three questions: he was the wrong choice as commander; Symons had pushed the troops too far forward; the reinforcements were wholly inadequate.
He wrote to his wife despondently, ‘Goodbye dear old lady … we should have 20,000 more troops in South Africa than we have … the Cabinet have only themselves to thank if they have to reconquer South Africa from the sea.’110
CHAPTER 9
The Ultimatum
Pretoria and the Transvaal,
1–12 October 1899
‘South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood-bath out of which our volk shall come … either as … hewers of wood and drawers of water for a hated race, or as victors, founders of a United South Africa, of one of the great empires [rijken] of the world … an
Afrikaner republic in South Africa stretching from Table Bay to the Zambezi.’
Jan Smuts’s secret memorandum for the Transvaal Executive, 4 September 1899
By the first week of October, Pretoria was already half deserted. Most of the burghers had gone to the Natal front. Even the station, awash with cheering crowds (and stray groups of British refugees) only a week before, was now empty except for a few stragglers.1 On the stoep (veranda) of his small, whitewashed house in Church Street, the old President waited in silence, as he had waited on the night of the Raid, sitting there in the twilight, puffing at his pipe, while his wife milked the cow in the yard, as though they were a couple of Boers from the backveld. Outwardly, the old President seemed as immovable as ever. That week The Times’s reporter, Leo Amery, had interviewed Kruger at his office before he himself went down to the Natal frontier, and asked if there was any prospect for peace. ‘Nee,’ roared the old man, ‘unless Camberlen changes his tune.2 Yet, till the final month of the crisis, Kruger had in fact struggled for a settlement. It was his own tragedy that Kruger understood ‘Camberlen’ as little as ‘Camberlen’ understood Kruger.
The gap which remained to be bridged at the end of August was actually small enough. Chamberlain’s terms dating from Bloemfontein were still on the table. If Kruger gave an unconditional five-year franchise to the Uitlanders, Chamberlain had promised to call it a day. Or Chamberlain was prepared to accept a seven-year franchise, coupled with a joint enquiry to guarantee its good faith. By the end of August, the pressures on Kruger to make one or other of these concessions had reached a climax. Smuts’s patron in the Cape, Jan Hofmeyr, strongly criticized the conditional five-year offer they had finally made: ‘You gave too much and you asked too much.’ To have offered concessions in ‘bits and pieces’, and to have given the impression they were ‘extorted’ had ruined their effect on British public opinion.3 From the government of the Free State came similar appeals. Fischer, the State Secretary and the right-hand man of President Steyn, went on a last-ditch mission to Pretoria on I September to try to get Kruger to change his mind.4
Such was the advice of Kruger’s political allies. Their judgement, it seems today, was absolutely correct. If Kruger had accepted it, a settlement would surely have followed. Lord Salisbury, Hicks Beach and Balfour would have seized on the compromise. Chamberlain would have agreed (as Selborne ruefully admitted to Milner).5 No one – not even Milner – could have prevented it.
Here lay the underlying tragedy of the war; the narrowness of the margin by which the peace was lost.
But on the following day, 2 September, Kruger, like Chamberlain at the same time, had reached breaking-point. Despite his brother Afrikaners in the Cape, and brother Boers in the Free State, he had decided to make no further concessions. For three weeks more he and Chamberlain were still to exchange messages, but these were only manoeuvres to gain the good opinion of their friends and allies. The real negotiations had ended that day.6
Why did Kruger, who had, as it seems to us today, so much more than Chamberlain to lose by war, reject the last chance of peace? Certainly not because he was driven to it by the force of Boer public opinion. True, a spasm of war fever – the Boer counterpart of jingoism – had begun to grip the country by the end of August. The Boer Press was virulently anti-British; a noisy war party had emerged in the Raad; many of the younger Boers were spoiling for a fight; it was time, as Ben Viljoen, the member for Johannesburg, declared, to put trust in ‘God and the Mauser’.7
Yet Kruger, with all his defects, was a statesman. If he had chosen, he could have stood up to his war party, as he had stood up to the burghers whom he had found at the time of the Raid preparing to hang Jameson from the beam brought from Slachter’s Nek. Was it, then, that Kruger believed he had a good chance of winning a war against Britain and her Empire? It is true that many Boers honestly believed they could sweep the British into the sea, and create an Afrikaner republic from Table Bay to the Zambezi.8 Even Smuts, usually so level-headed, thought he smelt military victory.9 Kruger put his trust in God; that goes without saying. He put less trust in the Mauser. He viewed the prospect of war with the deepest foreboding. If Britain won, then ‘the price would stagger humanity’ – that was what he told the Press at this time.10 It was hardly the voice of a man who saw much hope of victory; more like the death-cry of Samson before he pulled down the pillars of the Temple.
The simple fact is that Kruger rejected the chance of compromise because he did not realize it existed. He refused to make further concessions because he thought they would have been futile. Chamberlain, he thought, had set a trap – a trap to humiliate the volk, before he destroyed them. ‘We have honestly done our best and can do no more,’ Fischer had cabled back to Hofmeyr, after Kruger had convinced him that negotiations were hopeless; ‘if we are to lose our independence … leave us at least the consolation that we did not sacrifice it dishonourably.’11 Kruger himself cabled, ‘With God before our eyes we feel that we cannot go further without endangering our independence.’12
This belief that nothing would satisfy Chamberlain except total surrender went back in turn to the cycle of mutual suspicion dating from the Raid. It was this that was the most disastrous result of the Raid. Since then, each man had groped for a settlement in a fog of mistrust: Kruger convinced that Chamber-lain, twice frustrated, would try for a third time to steal the Transvaal’s independence; Chamberlain believing that any concessions from Kruger would be illusory. Each saw the other’s proffered hand as a trap.
The one man who could have enlightened them had set his heart on war.
Ironically, it was Kruger’s and Smuts’s correct reading of Milner that had led, above all, to their misreading of Chamberlain, and the collapse of negotiations. When Smuts looked into Milner’s eyes at Bloemfontein – those ‘very intelligent’, dangerous, grey eyes – he had perceived only too clearly the threat Milner represented: ‘more dangerous than Rhodes … a second Bartle Frere’.13 Where Kruger and Smuts were misled was in confusing Milner’s aims with Chamberlain’s. Had they realized Chamberlain’s capacity for compromise – and, still more, the British government’s – they would have heeded the advice of their Afrikaner and Boer allies. But all they saw was the Joe of the cartoonists, ‘Pushful Joe’, and the only voice they heard was Joe’s public voice, the voice that made short, clanging speeches about sands-in-the-glass and compared Kruger to a squeezed sponge; and that hardly seemed the voice of compromise. They knew only the political masks of the opponent. They had never once met face to face.
By 2 September, Kruger, like Chamberlain, had decided war was inevitable. Smuts said, ‘Humanly speaking a war between the Republics and England is certain.’14 He then launched into a feverish plan for a military offensive. Its keynote was a blitzkrieg against Natal before any reinforcements could arrive. The numerical advantage would then lie in their favour by nearly three to one – that is, forty thousand Boers against fifteen thousand British troops. By throwing all their troops against Natal, they could capture Durban before the first ships brought British reinforcements. In this way they would capture artillery and stores ‘in enormous quantities’. They would also encourage the Cape Afrikaners in the interior to ‘form themselves into a third great republic’. The international repercussions, Smuts continued, would be dramatic. It would cause ‘an immediate shaking of the British Empire in a very important part of it’. Britain’s enemies – France, Russia and Germany – would hasten to exploit Britain’s collapse.15
The chief obstacle to Smuts’s offensive plan, however, had proved to be President Steyn. On 9 September the crucial news had reached South Africa: the British Cabinet had pressed the first war-button and decided to send out eight thousand troops to Natal.16 This gave the combined armies of the Transvaal and the Free State barely a month to launch their offensive before they lost the advantage of their four-to-one numerical superiority. Yet President Steyn was still not convinced war was inevitable. On 22 September, the British Cabinet
pressed their second war-button, and a newspaper report was cabled to South Africa: they had decided to send the Army Corps.17 On 25 September a spy at Ladysmith cabled to Pretoria that the British were moving north to Dundee.18 Still Steyn hung back. As the British troop-ships steamed ever nearer Durban, Kruger cabled desperately, ‘You still seem to think of peace but that seems to be impossible…. You think Chamberlain is leading us into a trap, but if we wait longer the position may become hopeless and that would be our trap.’19
Without waiting for their allies, the Transvaal at last mobilized on 28 September. The plan was accepted with acclamation in the Raad, though six of the members, political associates of Commandant-General Joubert’s, were reported opposed. The next step was to send Britain an ultimatum. Steyn was still the stumbling-block. He insisted that the ultimatum should accuse Britain of breaking the London Convention, and the ultimatum had to be redrafted accordingly. By the end of September it was ready to be delivered to the British Agent (all ready ‘to tip Greene the black spot’, as Frank Reitz, a keen admirer of Treasure Island, revealed to Leo Amery). Then, at long last, Steyn’s doubts were resolved: Chamberlain was bent on war, and the two republics must strike first.20
What decided him is not clear: probably it was a threatened revolt among his own burghers, led by a certain Christiaan de Wet, which tipped the balance.21 At any rate, the Free State mobilized its forces on 2 October.22 A further week was lost while the burghers moved up to the frontiers. Finally, at 5 p.m. on 9 October, Reitz called round to Greene and delivered the ultimatum.23 By the same day the majority of the British troop-ships had docked at Durban. Steyn’s search for peace had cost the two republics the whole of their crucial four weeks’ advantage.24
The Boer War Page 17