B-P resisted the temptation personally to supervise the rounding-up; it was his job to co-ordinate things at the centre of his web of telephones. But he did yield to one impulse that was later to cause raised eyebrows. He sent a reassuring note, under flag of truce, to ‘The Boy’ McLaren, a prisoner in Snyman’s camp: ‘Dear Boy, I hope you were not too disturbed by heavy firing in the night, but the Boers made an attack on us and we have scuppered the lot. Let me know if you want any clean pyjamas….‘ This note, according to his official biographer, was part of a plan to bluff the Boers; for Eloff was by no means ‘scuppered’ at this moment.101
Meanwhile, Major Godley, his two squadrons, and his natives, had all risen to the occasion. In fact, it was the Africans, most of all, who bore the brunt of the fighting and saved the day. When Eloff’s fire-raisers stormed through the Stadt, scattering the women and children, the 109 armed Baralongs did not try to bar their progress. They stood aside, as if a pride of lions was rampaging through a cattle kraal. Then, once the lions were in the kraal, the Baralongs re-formed, waving their blunderbusses and shouting war cries. It was the turning-point, the time when the burning Stadt beckoned to Snyman. Now was the moment to pour in a stream of reinforcements. But the Baralongs barred the way – and cut off Eloff’s line of retreat.102
When FitzClarence rode up with D Squadron, the worst was already over. Godley could be seen galloping along the south side of the Stadt, a tall, thin figure on his pony, rallying his two squadrons, after strengthening the men in the outposts. Eloff’s men were taken piecemeal: a party huddled behind the stone kraal six hundred yards beyond the police barracks; another on a kopje covered with that Stonehenge of limestone boulders; the third with Eloff in the barracks itself. The stone kraal was dealt with first. After a wave of bullets from two squadrons broke over the stone walls, a white flag was seen fluttering about the place. Then the Baralongs rushed forward, eager to pay off old scores. If Captain Marsh, of B Squadron, had not raced them to the kraal, there would not have been many Boers left to surrender. Later, the second group of Boers – holed up in the Stonehenge – were driven off by the same squadrons, assisted by B-P’s ancient muzzle-loader. B-P himself directed the attack by telephone, and, for some reason, let most of this party make their escape.103
In the old police barracks Eloff’s fiery dream was now fast turning to ashes. The Times correspondent, Angus Hamilton, witnessed the scene, and got the scoop of his career. Hamilton had been captured when he wandered along to the barracks, not realizing it was at the centre of the battle. (‘That is the worst of being educated under black powder,’ said Major Baillie of The Morning Post, who narrowly missed the same fate, and the scoop.) As Eloff’s prisoner, Hamilton spent the day with Colonel Hore and the rest of his men. Eloff treated them chivalrously; one of the officers was allowed to go out in a lull and bring in a young orderly called Hazelrigg, bleeding to death from a wound in the groin; the Boers made no attempt to stop Hore’s troopers looting (with scant regard for their Colonel’s orders) their own regimental stores, still surprisingly abundant; crates of whisky, Beaune, and so on had been kept in reserve in the barracks, along with a huge box of tinned fruit, peas, and parsnips. But there were unpleasant moments. Trooper Hay, the deserter who had led the Boers into the town, swaggered around with Hore’s sword and his gold watch tied to his belt. Hay suggested that the prisoners should either be put out on the veranda as a way of keeping down the garrison’s fire, or else be asked to join in defending the barracks. Hamilton explained he was a war correspondent. ‘You be damned!’ said one of the Boers pleasantly in English. ‘We’ll put you on the roof.’ Eloff then put the thirty-two prisoners, for their own safety, in the store-house, where the whisky had been kept; it was a fetid little place, made worse by the fact that one of the prisoners was suffering acutely from dysentery; but it protected them from the Boers and from British bullets.104
From time to time, Eloff visited his prisoners to chat about the battle. ‘He sat within the door upon a case of Burgundy, his legs dangling, his accoutrements jingling,’ said Hamilton later, ‘and the rowels of his spurs echoing the tick-tacking of the Mauser rifles.’ No young British officer, surrounded by Dervishes, could have kept a stiffer upper lip. ‘He seemed to possess the complete mastery of the situation, his buoyant face was impressed with the confidence of youth, reflecting the happiness he felt… that his ambition seemed about to be realized.’ As the shadows lengthened, so did the odds against him, and even Eloff began to recognize it. ‘At times he lost control of himself and complained querulously in Dutch about the non-appearance of his reinforcements; at other moments he regaled the prisoners with scraps of information [actually quite untrue] … that Limestone Fort had fallen, and that the [British] trench beneath the railway bridge had surrendered.’ After dark, Hamilton and the other prisoners became extremely demoralized. Outside, there were deafening sounds; British bullets smashed through the wall, the roof, and the door of their prison; through the grating of the window they caught glimpses of the Boers, huddled at their posts. The darkness inside the room was lit up by rifle flashes. The door flew open, and three wounded men fell forward into the room. The strain became almost unendurable. Hamilton, no coward, was convinced that they were about to be led out to execution.
Just then Eloff reappeared in the doorway. To the prisoners’ amazement, Eloff offered to surrender, if Hore could arrange a cease-fire. By this time, the telephone had ceased working; and waving the white flag in the dark had had no effect on the town guard. So Hore bellowed out, ‘Cease-fire, cease-fire!’ His voice was recognized and the captors surrendered to their prisoners.105
Next morning, Eloff, accompanied by a French and a German officer, was sitting down to the delayed breakfast at Dixon’s Hotel. B-P played host, and Lady Sarah Wilson sat on his right.
Despite these mutual acts of gallantry, the battle had been costly enough for both sides. Eloff had lost about 60 killed and wounded, as well as 108 prisoners. B-P had lost 12 dead and 8 wounded; most of them were Africans.106
The relief itself, accomplished the following Wednesday (with three weeks’ breadstuffs for the white garrison still in stock),107 seemed almost an anticlimax after the melodrama of Saturday’s battle.
Early on Wednesday, the feeling pervaded the town that at long last, after 217 days, rescue was at hand. The two relief columns – Plumer’s from the north, Mahon’s from the south – had already joined forces. People climbed on to the roofs to look for signs. There were trails of dust; Boers’, it turned out. Then an hour’s distant rumble of artillery about seven miles away to the north-west, then silence. Interest in the relief ebbed away again. People returned to a more pressing pursuit – the final of the siege billiards tournament, in progress at the club. Others carried on with the prosaic job of food-gathering; somebody was shooting sparrows for the pots; natives were cutting up a horse for the soup kitchens.108
At seven o’clock, in bright moonlight, a major and eight troopers, with ostrich plumes in their hats, clattered into the market square. The major said they were the advance guard of the relief. ‘Oh yes, I heard you were knocking about,’ was all he got from a passer-by, who then went off to draw his rations, or do some other task, as though the relief was no business of his.
At first, the fact that Mafeking was relieved was too big for many to grasp. But the news spread, gathering momentum. The nine mysterious horsemen were helped from their horses, clapped on the back, hands pumped, friends recognized by friends. It turned out the major was ‘Karri’ Davies, the Johannesburg Reformer, and second-in-command of the Uitlanders’ regiment, the Imperial Light Horse. He seemed as surprised as anyone to be there in Mafeking, and, of course, delighted. For him, as for many of the Reformers, the war had the quality of a personal vendetta with the Boers. He and his men had been first to ride into Ladysmith, along with Major Gough. Now they had pulled off a double. There were ragged cheers, and the crowd took up ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Red, White and Blue’, befor
e the exhausted troopers flung themselves on the ground, and slept by their horses. The moon had set before the main column, including a convoy of food wagons and horse artillery, rumbled after them into Mafeking, unseen by the men they had come to rescue.109
Mahon’s flying column had, by contemporary standards, certainly flown. They had left Barkly West, on the Vaal, 240 miles to the south, only twelve days earlier, and marched as fast as a stony desert road and near-empty water-holes would allow. Drought and dust and sickness, not Boers, had proved their most dangerous enemies, though the advance of this weak, western column would have been impossible if Roberts’s main army had not also begun, at long last, its great advance at the same time. For most of the time Mahon’s column nimbly side-stepped any Boers who shadowed it.110 On 11 May, Mahon sent a cryptic message by runner to warn Plumer and B-P of his own relative weakness. The code was a special old-school-tie code invented for the occasion: ‘Our numbers are Naval and Military Club multiplied by ten [94 Piccadilly x 10 = 940]; our guns the number of sons in the Ward family [The Earl of Dudley and 5 brothers = a battery of six]; our supplies the O.C. 9th Lancers [Lt-Col Little = few].’111
In fact, the column totalled 1,149, and largely consisted not of British troops, but of rough-and-ready South African mounted irregulars. The great majority were Uitlanders, the men of the ‘Imperial’ (i.e., ex-Johannesburg) Light Horse – both the squadrons who had, with Woolls-Sampson, been locked up in Ladysmith, and the one that had, with Karri Davies, triumphantly unlocked them; they amounted to 814 officers and men. There were also 122 colonials from Rhodes’ diamond city, the Kimberley Mounted Corps. The truly imperial troops were the hundred men of the Royal Horse Artillery. In addition, it had been decided, after consultation with Milner, to send exactly a hundred British infantry: twenty-five from each of the four regions, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland.112 This was, of course, a mere token, a flutter of the Union Jack, but there was no missing the political message: that the Imperial factor in South Africa had come to stay. Otherwise, there would have been an extraordinary sense of déja vu about Mahon’s relief column. Apart from Mahon himself, the column was dominated by those would-be revolutionaries of the Rand, the Reformers. There was not only Karri Davies. Colonel Frank Rhodes, Cecil’s brother – sentenced to death in 1896 by Kruger and released from gaol in Pretoria, only to be locked up for those 120 days with White at Ladysmith – Rhodes was Mahon’s Intelligence Officer, and the man who had, in effect, planned the expedition. The Raiders, too, had somehow pushed their way to the front of the stage. Colonel Sir John Willoughby, Jameson’s Number Two during the Raid, sentenced at Bow Street to ten months’ imprisonment and dismissed from the British army, had re-emerged as (acting) Major Sir John Willoughby, Mahon’s DAAG. Lieutenant-Colonel Bobby White, Jameson’s Number Three, was attached to Plumer’s relief column.113 It was as though the main actors of that tragi-comedy (apart from Jameson) had decided on a repeat performance, but flying the imperial flag: the play to be acted in reverse. For in 1895 the Raiders had ridden from Mafeking to Johannesburg; and now Johannesburg had ridden to Mafeking. And it was in this sense – an inverted victory, rather than the conventional kind – that the news of the relief of Mafeking was received with hysterical acclaim all over the British world.
The hysteria may look ludicrous in retrospect. ‘They are behaving as though they had beaten Napoleon,’ said Wilfred Blunt.114 Yet the instinct of the public was also correct, for there was much, in the short term, to celebrate. The relief of Mafeking proved to be only the first of a new run of victories for the British. In the fortnight since Mahon’s column had clattered across the Vaal, a great change had come over the war map of South Africa. Roberts’s grand army had made its second, and by far its most successful, ‘tiger-spring’. Already the golden mine dumps of the Rand glittered on the horizon. By early June, that small, silk Union Jack, worked by Nora Roberts, would be floating over Pretoria, and the seat of Kruger’s government would be a Netherlands Railway coach, fleeing northwards.115
And Mafeking was not only a new English word (OED: ‘maffick’). It was taken as a symbol of the new imperial unity forged by the war. B-P’s garrison had been raised in the Cape; Plumer’s column in Rhodesia (and Plumer could not have succeeded without his Canadian guns and Australian infantry); and where would the garrison have been if the Rand had not come riding to the rescue?
In Britain, Mafeking meant, in every sense, relief: hysterical, euphoric relief. Relief from that ‘nightmare’ (as Balfour, the deputy Prime Minister, had called it)116 of national humiliation. A clear-cut, happy ending, so it seemed, to the series of confused disasters that had characterized the first part of the war. The strange kind of victory – the avoidance of defeat – in which people could take unqualified pride. Not a blood-bath like Waterloo, or a massacre like Omdurman, but something reassuringly closer to a game of cricket. It was a story that the sporting British public could take immediately to their hearts (where it was to remain for two generations). How one man and some loafers, with little help from the War Office, had fought against fearful odds and had, by English pluck and ingenuity, turned a forlorn hope into a triumph.
In short, Colonel B-P had given back the other BP, the British Public, its faith in itself. ‘It is good to be an Englishman,’ said Major Baillie, the war correspondent, and he would have been echoed by English people of every social class. ‘These foreigners start too quick and finish quicker. They are good men but we are better, and have proved so for several hundred years.’117
Was it in fact a triumph? Of course, in direct military terms it was no such thing, once the ‘Cronje phase’ of the siege was over. But wars, except wars of extermination, are not about troops and guns and positions on the map (a lesson that was to prove a bitter one for the British all through the following year). Wars are ultimately about morale. And B-P had not only given back Britain its self-confidence, but dealt the Boers a crushing psychological blow by denying them Mafeking, the symbolic birth-place of the Raid. No other British commander in the war had done so much with so little.
By contrast, the celebrations, and the mood, of the garrison in Mafeking were modest enough. There was a ceremonial march-past of the relief column, just as there had been in Ladysmith. B-P took the salute. It happened to be the Queen’s birthday, and bunting decorated the shattered buildings. The Queen’s Christmas chocolate was distributed, five months late, but no less appropriate. People sent the chocolate home as a curio, and with it the other valuable trophies of the siege: ‘Lord Nelson’ depicted on the bank-notes, B-P’s head on the stamps, already £19 for each set. There were fireworks that evening, just as there were in half the towns in the Empire, but people decorously sang ‘God Save the Queen’ before retiring early to bed under the stars.118
At the march-past, B-P had been, uncharacteristically, unable to control his emotions. Perhaps it was the natural reaction to the end of that ordeal, or the moral burden he had carried for so long in his lonely vigil on his watch-tower. Perhaps the sight of his friend, ‘The Boy’ McLaren, back at his side was too much for him to bear. Or perhaps it was just the grousing he could not take; bitter things were already being said about him by the men of Plumer’s column, cheated of the glory of the relief by Mahon.119 B-P a hero? ‘To me the whole affair of the siege… was an enigma,’ wrote one of Plumer’s captains. ‘What in the world was the use of defending this wretched railway-siding and these tin-shanties? To burrow underground on the very first shot being fired … seemed to me the strangest role ever played by a cavalry leader…’120
Already myth and counter-myth were beginning to overlay the history of the siege, as the sand from the Kalahari began to drift over the graves of the 354 Africans officially recorded as having died of shell and shot, and of countless others who died of hunger or disease.121
In one respect, B-P did behave entirely in character. Apart from a brisk mention of some of the Baralongs in despatches, no thanks were given to the majority of the garrison �
�� the Africans. A relief fund – £29,000 – was generously raised in England to put Mafeking back on its feet. None of this went to the thousands of Africans whose farms had been looted, towns burnt, and families expelled or died of starvation. The Stadt, the other Mafeking, represented the plight of all black South Africa in microcosm. This was ‘white man’s country’. The Africans were there to be useful to white men. When no longer useful, they must go back to where they belonged, wherever that might be. So, in the ‘white man’s war’, they had to pay, like the animals, a terrible price.
After B-P had left Mafeking to found the Boy Scout movement and become one of the most famous Englishmen alive, and after ‘Lord Nelson’ was put, appropriately, in a museum, people erected an official war memorial to the Mafeking dead. A small plaque was, strange to say, added; recording the services of the ‘Black Watch’.122
Better still would have been to quote that lapidary phrase of Milner’s: ‘You have only to sacrifice “the nigger” absolutely, and the game is easy.’123
The Boer War Page 66