The text of the ultimatum had been received in London on Tuesday 10 October with derision, delight, dismay – and indifference.
Derision was the keynote of the editorials in Wednesday’s newspapers. ‘Preposterous’, ‘Mountebank’, ‘Extravagant farce’, ‘One is in doubt whether to laugh or to weep,’ proclaimed The Daily Telegraph. The Times called the ultimatum an ‘infatuated step’ by this ‘petty republic’. The Globe denounced this ‘trumpery little State’ and its ‘impudent burghers’. Most editorials followed the same line as The Telegraph: ‘Of course there can only be one answer to this grotesque challenge … Mr Kruger has asked for war, and war he must have.’ (Privately, Moberly Bell, Manager of The Times, was slapping his sides with laughter. ‘The ultimatum was excellent in every way. An official document is seldom both eminently amusing and useful but this was both.’)64
The first rumours of the ultimatum had reached the public in London late on Tuesday afternoon. By and large, the British public displayed little emotion – or even tension – at the news. Wednesday’s Times said that Britain would be at war with the republics ‘at tea-time’. People took up the phrase: this was to be the tea-time war. It was Newmarket week, and the Cesarewitch happened to coincide with the moment – 3.10 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time – when the ultimatum expired on Thursday. No one could have guessed this from the behaviour of the crowds, including the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of Cambridge and Devonshire; they saw Scintillant win by a short lead from Ercildoune. The weather was still perfect. October had brought an Indian summer. On Saturday, working people flocked out to see Aston Villa play Tottenham Hotspur in the first round of the FA cup. In the streets of London – both in Mayfair and Whitehall – crowds were conspicuously absent. Fashionable London was in the country, Parliament still on holiday. The smooth surface of late Victorian life was not to be ruffled by war – not, at any rate, by a war at tea-time, a war in a tea-cup.65
It was inside the twisting corridors of Pall Mall that the ultimatum caused the keenest stir on Tuesday, and the sensations it excited were of astonishment – and delight. ‘Accept my felicitations,’ scribbled Lansdowne to Chamberlain. ‘I don’t think Kruger could have played your cards better than he has.’66
In September the overwhelming fear in the War Office had been that the Boers might try to rush Natal before the Indian contingent was in position to defend it. By early October most of the ‘Indians’ had arrived. Immediately the anxieties of the War Office had reversed themselves. What if Kruger now tried to cheat them of military victory by further diplomatic manoeuvres? And what if the Free State preserved its neutrality? It was on the ability of Buller’s invasion force to choose the easy line of advance – by way of the plains of the Free State rather than through the mountains of Natal – that the strategy of invasion depended. Yet there was no way of forcing the Free State (as opposed to the Transvaal) into war against England. Balfour had admitted privately in early October that he was afraid the neutrality of the Free State would prove the ‘Achilles heel’ of the whole expedition.67
But now the Transvaal ultimatum, amounting to a joint declaration of war from both republics, resolved this problem at a stroke. No wonder that Lansdowne told Chamberlain that morning, ‘My soldiers are in ecstasies.”68
In Wolseley’s case, the ecstasy was somewhat muted. He was still licking his wounds after the three months’ struggle to persuade little Lansdowne to send the Natal reinforcements and the Army Corps. He bitterly regretted the extra month’s delay in ordering the transport. The price of decades of penny-pinching was also stamped on all their military preparations. They were short of vital armaments – especially heavy guns – and short of mounted troops of all kinds. But Wolseley had to admit that the actual mobilization was going like clockwork.69
It was a triumph for the system for which Wolseley had worked all his life. How people like Roberts had scoffed at the short service army, the linked territorial battalions and the army reserve! Yet when the call had come, the twenty-five thousand reservists of the 1st Army Corps had responded manfully. In some battalions ninety-seven per cent. had reported at the depots – ship-workers from Tyneside, screw-makers from Birmingham, farm-workers from Essex. On Saturday the advance guard of this Army Corps were to set sail: Sir Redvers Buller was going out in the Dunottar Castle. The main body of the forty-seven thousand men would follow in a fleet of civilian liners chartered by the Admiralty.70 Wolseley expected only a small war. Yet the army Britain was already committed to sending was the biggest expeditionary force for nearly a century – bigger than Roberts’s Afghan expedition of 1878 (the last occasion when the reserves had been mobilized) or Wolseley’s Egyptian expedition of 1882, bigger even than Raglan’s expedition to the Crimea in 1854.
At Princes Gardens, Chamberlain’s comfortable London house, the Master had been the first to receive the news. He was usually late to bed and late to rise. That Tuesday morning he had been woken at a quarter past six by a messenger from the CO. He read the long code cable and then sat up amazed, so his biographer records. ‘They have done it!’ he exclaimed. Not only had Kruger’s impertinent ultimatum resolved the strategic problems. All the interlocking political problems seemed to fall into place.71
Kruger’s ultimatum pulled the carpet from under the feet of the anti-imperialist Liberals, led by Sir William Harcourt. The terms of the ultimatum were in effect a declaration of independence, and an abrogation of the Conventions by which Gladstone had tried to arrange a settlement after Majuba. In public, Harcourt, Leonard Courtney and their radical friends continued to accuse Chamberlain of provoking the war. Privately, they were aghast at the news. ‘What a moment to make a speech,’ wrote Courtney’s wife after a wretched journey to his constituency at Liskeard. His plea for the Boers was greeted by a ‘howl of indignation at Boer insolence’.72
Chamberlain had never worried himself too much about Courtney and those other ghosts from his Gladstonian past. It was the centre Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who were crucial to his chance of keeping the consensus: that is, by avoiding an actual division in the House. The previous week Campbell-Bannerman had told some Liberals at Maidstone that no one could answer the question, ‘What is it that we are going to war about?’73 It was ‘a mean speech by a mean man’, Chamberlain commented, adding that the Liberals were much divided, but ‘the country is clearly on our side’.74 Yet up to the last moment, Chamberlain had doubted his capacity to carry the country united into the battle.
Chamberlain’s main political difficulty before Kruger delivered his ultimatum had been this: to send out the Army Corps, the Cabinet had to ask Parliament for an extra £10 million. So Parliament had been summoned for 17 October. Chamberlain had to be ready then with a politically convincing answer to Campbell-Bannerman’s overwhelming question: why was Britain going to war?
Was it to re-establish British supremacy by confirming Britain’s status as the paramount power in South Africa? Unfortunately, to many Liberals, including centre Liberals, talking of British supremacy was too easy a cloak for what they regarded as aggressive imperialism –75 and, from his own side, Balfour had reminded Chamberlain of the danger of appearing to pick a quarrel with the Boers.76 Was it then to re-establish equal rights for all white men in the Transvaal (and even win a few basic rights for some black men)? Unfortunately, the Uitlanders were far from popular in Britain – despite all that Fitzpatrick, Wernher and Beit had done to improve their image. As Chamberlain himself admitted, there was ‘too much of “money-bags” about the whole business’.77 Lord Salisbury had reminded him that very week that the only chink in their political armour was that they were ‘doing work for the capitalists’.78 Hence Salisbury himself had hoped to play down the franchise issue and ‘make the break’ with the Transvaal over their refusal to accept a modified Convention.79 Each casus belli had serious political drawbacks, and yet they would have had to incorporate them in any British ultimatum, and debate them in Parliament.
It was th
e thought of the odium that would be attached to his own ultimatum that had haunted Chamberlain throughout that week.80 The date had actually been fixed for the following day, 11 October, and the terms – very stiff terms – finally agreed by the Cabinet. Chamberlain assumed that the Boers would reject it. Its intended result was merely to justify the war to the British and to the world. Britain’s basic demand remained: concede full equality to the Uitlanders. But now they were to have a one-year franchise and proportionate representation in the Raad. It would be ‘full equality’ with a vengeance. For if the British Uitlander voters were in the majority, as everyone assumed, they would swiftly take political control of the Transvaal. There was also to be a new ‘Great Deal’ for the capitalists. And Britain demanded a new agreement to secure her own status as paramount power, and insisted that the Transvaal reduce its armaments. Finally, there was to be ‘most favoured nation treatment’ – an end to police persecution, at any rate – for the Cape Coloureds, Indians, Africans from the colonies, and other coloured British subjects.
Granted these concessions, the British government was generously prepared to guarantee the republic’s independence and security from attack ‘from within any part of the British Dominions or from the territory of any other state’.81
Having drafted this trenchant ultimatum, Chamberlain had still racked his brains to find a way to avoid sending it. Why not provoke the Boers to strike the first blow by pushing General Symons’ force up to the Natal border at Majuba and Laing’s Nek? Chamberlain put up this scheme to the War Office in September and early October.82 It was opposed not only by Wolseley and Buller but (surprisingly) by Milner.83
It seemed strange to Chamberlain that Milner should plead caution in view of his earlier impetuosity, and of his conviction, expressed throughout that summer, that Kruger would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth’. In fact, Milner had reversed his line of argument the moment he had seen the British Cabinet committed to sending out the army. Chamberlain remained true to Milner’s earlier opinion that the Boers were no real threat to the British army. ‘I am afraid he [Milner] has got scared,’ he told Hicks Beach. All this talk of the Boers’ military strength was the alarmism of Milner, Wolseley and Buller.84
‘They have done it!’ Chamberlain had exclaimed that Tuesday morning. Kruger had sent his reckless ultimatum, and all these anxieties were forgotten. His own ultimatum would remain locked away in the files of the CO. How the Lord had delivered the Boers into his hands! For the British government would be free, when peace came, to impose even stiffer terms, if they wished. Above all, Kruger had given him the thing he most desired, the perfect motive for war: to repel an enemy’s invasion.85
On Saturday 14 October, a huge, cheerful, patriotic crowd gathered at Southampton Docks to bid General Sir Redvers Buller Godspeed on his passage to South Africa. People had perched on the roofs of railway carriages, others had settled, like a flock of birds, in the lattice-work of a dockside crane; the scene was recorded by the cinema-camera of the Biograph Company. All day, impressive-looking passengers and their equally impressive luggage accumulated on board: brass-hats and war correspondents (like young Winston Churchill, son of the unfortunate Lord Randolph); black tin trunks and leather sword scabbards; the General’s two war-horses (Ironmonger and Biffin); polo sticks; even a bicycle. Then, punctually at 4 p.m., the General’s special train steamed up to the quayside. A moment later the General himself, wearing a long dark overcoat and a felt hat, strode briskly up the gang-plank of the Dunottar Castle.
Buller was not a folk-hero like Wolseley or Roberts – not yet, at any rate. Earlier that day, the crowd at Waterloo Station had not even recognized the tall, burly figure in mufti, the red face with the bulldog jowl, and the sprig of Devonshire violets in his button-hole. Here at Southampton people greeted him as though they had known him all his life. It was, as one of the papers reported, like the home-coming of a victorious General. Buller made a gruff speech of thanks at the head of the gang-plank. He hoped he would ‘not be away long’. That was all he had to say. The crowd began to sing ‘Rule, Britannia’ and then struck up ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.86
How many of them could have guessed Buller’s feelings at that moment? It was not, as Lord Lansdowne had claimed, that he was a second Sir William Butler – a Boer sympathizer. He had now come to accept the war as inevitable. He blamed the war-mongering of the Hollander (recent Dutch immigrant) clique.87
That morning, when Buller had been seen off by the War Office staff at Waterloo Station, towering head and shoulders over both Lansdowne and Wolseley, he was overwhelmed, it seems, by his forebodings. He knew what it felt like to be a Cassandra. All through July and August he had warned the War Office, ‘Do not go north of the Tugela, do not go north of the Tugela.’88 As usual, Lansdowne had ignored his advice. Now he had seen the latest War Office cables from South Africa. The cables left him aghast. White reported that he was allowing Symons to keep the garrison at Dundee. Once again, Lansdowne had upheld White and Symons in the teeth of the protests of Buller – the man who was going to pay the price if the expedition ran into disaster.89
In public, Buller gave no hint of these bitter feelings, as he stood leaning lightly on the rail of the bridge of the Dunottar Castle. He was fifty-nine, yet he looked fit enough to be fifty, bronzed, heavily moustached, the very archetype of the British warrior. The ship’s fog-horn sounded. It was echoed by a hurricane of cheers from the quayside. Somebody (Lady Audrey, Buller’s wife, according to The Times) began to sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Part of the crowd took up the solemn anthem. Others shouted cheerful slogans like ‘Give it to the Boers!’, ‘Bring back a piece of Kruger’s whiskers!’, ‘Remember Majuba!’
Sir Redvers stood on the navigation bridge, waving his felt hat as the Dunottar Castle steamed slowly out into the fog. One thing gave him an air of supreme self-confidence. He did not try to hide his own emotion.90
The following Tuesday, the House of Commons, recalled prematurely from the grouse moors, voted to pay the £10 million needed for Buller’s Army Corps. Chamberlain defended his South African policy from A to Z – or rather, from the Raid to the Ultimatum. He spoke for three hours. His basic theme was this: aggressive republicanism had made war inevitable. Apart from the men of the Irish Party, only a handful of members voted against the government. South Africa would be the political graveyard for Chamberlain – so it had once appeared. Now it seemed to have given him the greatest triumph of his career.91
CHAPTER 10
Bursting the Mould
Cape Town and Ladysmith,
14–20 October 1899
‘I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not a very agreeable, and in many eyes, not very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a big war.’
Sir Alfred Milner to Lord Roberts, 6 June 1900
In Cape Town, there were colonial cheers for imperial troops. On Saturday 14 October, the day that Buller and the vanguard of his armada set sail from Southampton, the rear-guard of the Indian reinforcements steamed into Table Bay. As the small body of khaki-helmeted troops tramped through Adderley Street to the barracks – they were four hundred men of the Yorkshire Light Infantry, rushed from Mauritius in HMS Powerful – people gave them a heroes’ welcome. The same war-cries were heard as in England: ‘Pull old Kroojer’s whiskers!’, ‘Remember Majuba!’1
The ultimatum itself had caused little public excitement, but this was not for the same reason as in England. On the contrary, for weeks now the war had seemed a foregone conclusion to most people in the colony, on whichever side of the fence they took their stand, British or Boer. Already war cast a long shadow southwards across the Cape. Ever since August British refugees had been flooding out of the Rand, as though there had been a breach in one of the immense, muddy dams built to supply the gold-fields. The first wave brought the managers and the professional men: men in Homburg hats, wearing gold watches, with Africa
n servants to help with the children and wives who could afford to dress in the latest Paris fashion; financiers like Friedrich Eckstein (the South African director of Wernher-Beit’s subsidiary) and others of the Hohenheim set. The second wave brought the shopkeepers and the better-off working men: people like Tom Edgar’s mates, from Floirie’s Chambers and Tarry’s ironworks; Cornish miners and Lancashire boiler-men – the ‘white Kaffirs’, as they sometimes called themselves. These were the British Uitlanders who had stood straw-hatted in Market Square, nine months before, as Dodd read out the text of the Edgar Petition, the solemn appeal to Caesar. Now Caesar was on the march, and they were refugees till Caesar restored them: pouring down the railway line, dragging away all they possessed in bundles and boxes in a Great Trek to freedom, British-style.2
The exodus from the Rand reached its climax on the Monday before the ultimatum. By now the Uitlander Council had arranged to pay the fares of the poorest class of Uitlander; and there was a rumour (accurate enough) that the Boers planned to expel British subjects. Lights began to go out all over the Rand. The Ferreira, the Jumper, the Bonanza, the Robinson Deep: at all the great mines, the boilers were let out and the huge steel crushing stamps hung up – at all except for a few mines commandeered by the Boers for the duration. The golden streams flowing to the cyanide vats had now been succeeded by a stream of panic-stricken refugees heading for Johannesburg Station. There they were, packed – seventy, even a hundred at a time – into ‘Kaffir-trucks’ (or coal trucks or cattle trucks, it was all the same).
Three days later they would arrive at Cape Town; and then they really did look like Kaffirs, after those days and nights in the open trucks, exposed to the spring rains, and covered in mud and coal dust. Thirty thousand people, it was said, travelled like this to the Cape and Natal in the space of those few weeks. After the great Johannesburg dam had finally emptied itself, the total number of refugees was thought to be at least sixty thousand.3 When the spokes of the mine-wheels ceased to turn, when the sky was finally blue above the mine-chimneys, the Boers had become once again the majority in their own country.
The Boer War Page 19