My life and loves Vol. 4
Page 12
I did my very best in this sense. A good many people applauded me, but after the dinner, when Harold Frederic and I strolled together to the Liberal Club and I congratulated him on one of the best speeches I had ever heard, he said:
"My dear Harris, I never made a good speech before in my life, and you usually talk well, but tonight I thought you were at your worst; you showed such distrust of Milner. I assure you, he's a Radical and a good fellow."
"I don't believe he's a Radical; he's a German and he'll fail ruinously in South Africa. He'll bring war. You've only to look at him; he frightens me."
Lord Desborough came to me afterwards and said that he agreed with a good many of my ideas, but he wished that I could really meet Milner because Milner was a prince of good fellows and absolutely fair-minded. Finally he invited me to lunch with him at Willis' rooms; and I lunched there a week later with Milner and Lord Desborough.
It was at this time the fashionable rendezvous for lunch in London, and I noticed that three or four people, whom I had known socially, treated me with marked coldness. I was put down as a lover of the Boers, and a good many of the governing class disliked my attitude intensely. Man after man came out and bowed to Milner and Desborough in the pleasantest way, while contenting themselves with the merest nod to me. After lunch Milner went away and Desborough remarked to me that he had never known Milner so cautious: "He didn't speak his mind or give us even an inkling of what he thought." But I still believed that it was absolutely impossible for any English governor to be mad enough to make war with the Boers. "After all," I said to Lord Desborough, "they are the real colonists in South Africa; except the gold hunters in Johannesburg and the diamond diggers in Kimberley, there are no Englishmen outside of Natal and the Cape. Will Milner go in for colonization and make for himself a deathless reputation, or will he proceed to quarrel with the Boers?" I knew at the bottom of my heart that Krueger would quarrel with any one: was indeed as combative as a bull-terrier.
Desborough could tell me nothing, except that he hoped for the best; still, he felt pretty sure that Milner would do what Chamberlain wished and always act in the best interests of England. We had to leave it at that.
In due time Milner went out to South Africa, and in my mind's eye I saw a meeting between him and President Krueger.
Milner tall, thin, with shaven, stony face, calm, direct regard and immaculate attire, the type of clean, intelligent efficiency; and Oom Paul, huddled in his armchair, looking like a sick gorilla with a fringe of thick, dirty hair under his heavy animal face, and small hot eyes glinting out under the bushy brows: the one man ignorant to the point of believing the world to be flat, the other intelligent and equipped with all the learning of the schools; and yet Krueger a great heart and great man, and Milner small and thin, proud of easily holding his emotions in leash to his reason. I dreaded the clash, for behind Milner was all the power of Britain, and yet Krueger was right: "We Boers hold South Africa; you can't get rid of us; it is foolish to bully your bedfellow."
Milner's first speech at Graaf Reinet taught me all that I wished to know about him, and more. The gist of his speech, I shall never forget, and I don't care to look out the words. "The Boers," he began, "talk about their loyalty: I see no merit in this; I should think they would be loyal; they live in perfect peace, protected by the might of England, by her armies and navies; loyalty is a cheap price to pay for such complete security." And so he went on, as if love were a thing to be bought and affection had a price. He had no conception whatever that the ordinary Boer never dreamed of any attack from the outside and would have laughed at the idea. The whole speech was a British challenge; still, at first nothing seemed to come of it, and I gradually settled down into the hope that no decisive issue would arise in my time.
I then went into one of the bad speculations of my life. I had got to know the two managers of the Savoy Hotel, Ellis and Cesari, very well indeed. They had made a success of the Savoy Hotel, and as soon as Cesari knew that I came to the French Riviera nearly every winter, he told me that he could make a marvelous success of a hotel at Monte Carlo. Next winter I came down and saw some hotels which were for sale. I didn't care for any of them, but when I spoke to the Princess of Monaco about it, she said she would be delighted to make any hotel I took a success so far as it lay in her power; and so I told Cesari that if he could find a good hotel as an investment I might take a hand in it, for I had already bought a good deal of property on the Cap d'Estel between Monte Carlo and Eze, and would be glad to develop a hotel or reserve on it.
The next winter, Cesari came out and soon told me that he had discovered a wonderful hotel. I went to Monte Carlo and saw it, didn't think much of it, but allowed myself to be persuaded. Cesari played me false, spent some thousands of pounds on the furnishings of the hotel, and some thousands of pounds more on wine, and the first season was fairly successful. Unluckily for me, about this time one of De Lara's brothers took an interest in a hotel in Monte Carlo, and Princess Alice went continually to that hotel and left me in the lurch, saying that her husband didn't wish her to come to my place. This only made me the more obstinate, and I determined to build a reserve; I got estimates for ten thousand pounds, set the men to work under Cesari's supervision, but as my bad luck would have it, the managership of a great hotel in Paris was offered to Cesari, and he left me practically without notice.
At the crucial moment I suddenly found myself called away to South Africa again. Milner was pushing matters to an extremity. I went out and saw to my horror that he had brought it almost to war. I returned to London, determined to see Chamberlain in order to try to save England from what I regarded as a catastrophe.
I wrote to Chamberlain and asked him to give me an hour of his time; and he was good enough to consent. He had altered in many ways since we parted over the policy of the Fortnightly Review. He had given up his belief in Free Trade and had come to see that a closer union of England and her colonies was only to be achieved by "Fair Trade," but as soon as I spoke of South Africa I found that he disagreed with me. The English Empire, he thought, must be founded on justice, strict justice; and Krueger and his Boers were unjust to the English settlers in Johannesburg, who had made the Transvaal the richest state in South Africa and yet were denied any rights of citizenship. I learned from him that he meant to force the Boers and Krueger to act justly. I tried to argue with him as I have argued in these pages, but nothing I could say had any effect. It all seemed sun-clear to him, whereas I knew that the use of force must lead to a South African war, which could have nothing but evil results. I did my very best; I went so far as to plead with bun that he might assure Krueger that England would guarantee the independence of the Transvaal on condition that he gave rights of citizenship to the Johannesburgers; but the more I pleaded, the more I felt that it was all in vain; Chamberlain's mind was made up. He had the best of the verbal argument, and power to boot; and Krueger would have to give in. I was perfectly certain that Krueger would never give in.
A little while later Lord Hardwicke came to me and wanted to know whether I would sell the Saturday Review. I said that I had no objection.
There were only about ten or twelve thousand shares which hadn't been taken up, besides the reserved shares-the few hundreds reserved for me. I asked him did he wish to get control in order to change the editorship, or was he willing to keep me on as editor. He said that he didn't think there was any wish to change me; so the end of it was that I sold him the ten or twelve thousand shares, which gave him, or rather Beit and Rhodes, the control of the Saturday Review.
Some months later, Hardwicke told me that "they wanted to treat me fairly, but the policy of the Review in regard to South Africa must be modified to suit Chamberlain and Rhodes; would I do it, or would I re-sign?"
"It's a perfect impasse," I said. "You have got the voting power on everything except the vote for the editor and his assistants, and that is controlled by the five hundred shares which I possess and will not part with."
I went away immediately to the South of France and began to work seriously at the "Shakespeare." It was nearly twenty years since I had discovered him in his works; in all these years I had read him again and again for various qualities to make sure that my version of him was the correct one. The work was entrancing to me, but difficult. I had continually to be on my guard not to ascribe any of my own failings to him; fortunately for me, the differences in character and development were so marked it was not impossible to picture him in almost every trait.
In this summer of '99 I got the first rough sketch of the book down on paper. In reading it through, I was delighted with the portrait, when suddenly the papers told me that Milner had met President Krueger in South Africa and had failed utterly to come to any understanding with him, and thereupon Milner had sent a telegram to Chamberlain, which filled me with fear: it was the special pleading of an advocate, an advocate, too, who cared nothing for the Boers or South African opinion. I saw at once that Milner had adopted Chamberlain's position from one end to the other.
Now for the first time I felt how wrong I had been to give up the Saturday Review; and, it began to dawn upon me, it was because Rhodes and Chamberlain were determined to push the matter to war that Beit and Hardwicke had bought control of the Saturday. Chamberlain began to send troops to South Africa, and then another voice, and a great one, made itself heard distinctly.
At this very time, the greatest living woman writer, Olive Schreiner, wrote an impassioned article (afterwards published under the title Words in Season), pleading for fair play to the Dutch and for a policy of conciliation, just as I had pleaded.
It didn't seem possible that England would attempt to use force against the Transvaal, but I was frightened as Olive Schreiner was, and month by month the fear grew. One thing was certain: Chamberlain and Milner could make war if they wished, and it grew plainer and plainer that they meant to; they pushed Krueger to concession after concession, then declared them all worthless; and in the meantime English troops kept pouring into Natal and Cape Town. The old gorilla had to fight. War! The shame and horror of it ate into my very heart.
Almost the last thing I wrote in the Saturday Review was a prediction that if the English made war in South Africa, it would last for years and cost them two hundred millions of money and would alter none of the essential conditions. In fact, it would be at best labor and lives lost, the most brainless adventure that England ever engaged in. Years afterwards some London paper reproduced this prediction of mine as extraordinarily correct, and I remember Winston Churchill asking me one day how I had come to be so right.
"I wasn't right," I replied, "the war cost England more than a thousand millions."
"What do you mean?" he asked in astonishment.
"When you speak of what it cost," I said, "you reckon up the money paid out, but you don't count the financial consequences. Consols before the war were 114; after the war they were 94 or 5: there was a loss of twenty points of some eight hundred millions of money; but if you lost one hundred and fifty millions on Consols, you lost two hundred millions on your railroads, and a proportionate sum on all the other industries. That ineffably stupid, brainless war cost over a thousand millions of English money, and nothing, less than nothing, was gamed by it. You won contempt and hatred in South Africa and gained nothing, not even fighting fame. Campbell-Bannerman was quite right in giving back their independence to the Boers: it was the only thing to do; but even that didn't atone for the atrocious bloodshed and wanton loss."
The mere attempt to coerce Krueger showed such manifest stupidity that it forced me to doubt the English race, doubt whether they had political wisdom enough to carry out a great policy and be worthy of their astounding birthright.
Instead of beginning to settle up the great plateau of Africa from the north of the Transvaal to the Zambesi, they spent a thousand millions in ruining their prestige in Africa and bringing mourning into thousands of homes for no reason. But even Olive Schreiner could not stop Chamberlain from sending British soldiers into Natal to bring pressure on Krueger, and Milner went on talking and telegraphing rabid nonsense to excite the combative English feeling; and at length came the war.
By this time I had finished the first draft of my book on Shakespeare and was back in England; before even the war was declared, I went to see Lord Wolseley, who had been a friend of mine for a great many years. It was at the end of the summer before the war was declared that I asked him in his room in the War Office whether there was going to be war. He told me it was practically decided. I said, "How terrible! What a dreadful calamity!"
He sprang up from the table. "We are making no mistake this tune," he said.
"I'll send out an army corps and bring it to a quick ending."
"You don't really think," I said, "that an army corps will be sufficient?"
"There are not more than forty or fifty thousand Boers," he said. "I reckon that forty or fifty thousand British soldiers should be enough for them, and more than enough."
"You don't know the country," I said, "nor the Boers: two army corps, four, five army corps will not be enough."
He lifted his hands in amused deprecation. "You don't know our English soldiers," he said; "at any rate, Buller is going out; he knows the Boers."
"Buller!" I cried, and as soon as possible I went away. The next day I went and called on Buller and had a talk with him. I had known him, too, for many years, and had always looked upon him as a big foolish person, only to be tolerated because of his charming wife, Lady Audrey; but in this conversation, Buller surpassed himself.
"What are your tactics?" I asked. "Where are you going to land?"
"Oh, I suppose it will be Durban," he said; "the nearest way to the Transvaal is through Natal."
"But all Cape Colony will be seething," I said, "on the other side of you. The young Boers there will be able to go up through the Free State to the aid of their cousins in the Transvaal. What is your policy?"
"There is only one policy in war," replied Buller. "Get alongside the other fellow and give him hell."
"But suppose he won't let you get alongside of him," I said.
"There if, never any difficulty," he said, "if you want to fight."
A few months later I read of a scene that came vividly before me as pictured in the London papers-Buller with an army of thirty thousand men brought to a standstill by the shooting of two or three thousand Boers hidden on the other side of a river. He sent out artillery and soon the sharp-shooting Boers had killed every one of the gunners and then sent a force across the river to take the British guns and dump them in the river; it was done without loss:
Buller with a force outnumbering the Boers ten to one beaten to a standstill by sharp-shooters who could use cover!
It was in late December or early January, after the war had begun, that Lord Desborough asked me to lunch at the Bath Club, and at the beginning of the lunch he said: "I have asked Harris to come here because he was the only person to predict that the British forces would have many defeats. When Chamberlain asked for a credit of ten millions and everyone said that the war wouldn't last three weeks, no one except Harris saw that after three months we should need a credit of a hundred millions and should feel dreadfully disappointed at the outcome." 'Twas just after Spion Kop, I remember, when Buller had tried to occupy the little mo
untain and a couple of thousand men he sent up were beaten by a few hundred Boers so that they had to be withdrawn the same day. The Times had just published a dispatch of Buller, in which he said that he had retreated from Spion Kop without losing a gun or an ammunition wagon. An army general at Grenfell's lunch started the talk by declaring that that was a splendid message of Buller-that he retreated from Spion Kop without losing a gun or ammunition wagon.
"Or," I added interrupting, "a moment's time."
Everyone laughed; but the general got very red. When Grenfell pressed me for my opinion, I said, "I am sorry to say that I think the English will win; the Boers have made as bad blunders as the English: they have been led away by the memory of '80–81 and by Buller's attack, and have gone to fight in Natal; they should have left only a small force on the frontier and gone down into Cape Colony to get recruits, where they could have got a hundred thousand men of their own race to help them. Because they have not done this, they will be beaten. The next English general will land in Cape Town and go up through Cape Colony, and in a month or so the whole aspect of the war will have changed.
"But nothing alters the fact that the war is the worst one that the English have ever been engaged in, except, indeed, their terrible defeat in the Argentine, which no one seems to remember. But this is even worse, for South Africa was already practically Anglicized, made English in sentiment from one end of the country to the other.
"I remember spending an evening with General Cronje, who was a typical Boer, but his daughters would talk of nothing except of the dramas on the London stage and how they longed to go for a night to Covent Garden to hear Grand Opera."