one-sidedly. Possibly that is so; but I am putting the side that wants
putting. I am constantly seeing it stated that any measures are
justifiable so long as they are likely to end the war. "Well, but we
must end it somehow," is a common phrase. That is all rubbish. We must
fight fairly, that's the first rule of all. I daresay there may have
been individual acts of cruelty or treachery on the part of the Boers,
but I am sure that any just and unprejudiced officer will tell you that
on the whole they have behaved surprisingly well, and in a way that is
really very striking when we consider how undisciplined and individually
independent they are. Let us then, on our side, play the game fairly. No
doubt it is very exasperating to have the thing dragging on in the way
it is doing, and the present intangible, elusive warfare is desperately
irritating, but there is after all nothing unfair about these tactics of
the Boers, nothing illegitimate in any way; they are merely the turning
to account of natural advantages; and this being the case, we have no
right to lose our tempers and get vicious just because we have taken on
a tougher job than we thought for. Unluckily there seems to be a big
party who are prepared to do anything and fight anyhow to get the thing
finished. You will gain nothing by those means. You will not hasten the
end of the war, and you will make its after effects more lasting and
hard to deal with.[2]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Here is a telegram copied from the _Evening Standard_ of
October 16, 1901. "Addressing the volunteers who have returned from the
front, the Governor of Natal this morning said that he could not now
refer to the Boers as dogs of war, but rather as yelping, snarling
curs." As against that take the opinion of Lord Cranborne who has just
come back from the front: "They had fought and they were fighting with
some of the bravest, some of the most tenacious, and some of the most
admirable troops that the nation had ever had to encounter;" and he ends
his speech: "Personally he had, as one who had served as a soldier in
South Africa, a great admiration for the Boers themselves." What I
submit is, that it makes the whole difference to your chances of a
settlement whether you speak of and regard your enemy as brave and
admirable, or as a yelping cur. We shall have to settle down with these
people sooner or later, and every paltry insult uttered and countenanced
against them only makes the process much more difficult. The odd thing
is that even in England they seem to excite no surprise or dissent. They
are printed as a natural comment on the situation. What I always feel
is, now as when I was out there, that the chances of a future agreement
would be very much improved if the English people were to treat the
Boers in the way that brave enemies ought to be treated, with a certain
amount of courtesy and respect.]
LETTER XXVI
PLAIN MISTER!
Cape Town.
I am trying to din the fact into my head that I am a civilian again and
not a soldier any more. It is difficult. I find myself looking
questioningly at my suit of grey flannel. It feels like a disguise. No
soldiers' hands as I pass them rise in salute now, though my own
involuntarily half rises in answer They look at me and take no notice. A
recruiting sergeant tried to induce me this morning to join an irregular
corps. He told me I should get five shillings a day, and that it was a
fine life and a beautiful country.
And yet I know that, in a few days even, the civilian life that seems so
unreal now will be the real, and the old soldier life the unreal. I
shall not in my walks find my eyes wandering "with a vague surmise" over
the nearest hilltops in search of Boers, nor measuring unconsciously the
range from the top of Table Mountain, which I find myself doing even as
I write this, looking up at it through the window. The trekking, the
fighting, the croak of the invisible rifle, the glare of the sun, the
row of swarthy determined faces, the roar of horse hoofs, all this, and
the lounging days by river banks (shooting guinea-fowl and springbuck),
will drop back and be shut off from one's life to rise now and then, I
suppose, with the creeping of an old excitement in one's memory.
There was a heavy gloom on the last days of my soldiering. It was at
Naauwpoort that I first joined the Guides. We stopped there coming down.
There was the waiting-room, the very table I had slept on; the sun-baked
flat where first I met the Major; the slopes where our tents were
pitched--Lord! how the sight of the place brings it all back, and how
different everything has turned out from what we expected; it was there
that I joined, and it was there, travelling down with our time-expired
men, that we first heard the news of the Queen's death. You at home will
feel this deeply--of course every one must--but I can't help thinking
that out here, far away from home and fighting, one feels it even more.
I am almost surprised at minding so much. There is an irksome sense at
the back of one's mind, even when one is thinking of other things--of
loss, of something wanting. England seems less England to me than it did
and I less of an Englishman. It gives a faint satisfaction to have been
one of her soldiers at the end.
I will spare you my raptures on reaching Cape Town and seeing the woods
and clear streams and sea again. The change from a comparatively barren
country to the richly-wooded slopes under Table Mountain, and the burst
of sparkling sea beyond is quite sudden. At one step, in the twinkling
of an eye, you pass from monotony and desolation and the old life of the
veldt into everything that is most lovely and suggestive of freedom and
variety. Huge Table Mountain rises high over the town, its steep slopes
wooded with forests of pine and oak. Gorge-like narrow passages wind
into the upright precipices of rock and separate them into great
pinnacles of grey stone. I clambered up there a few days ago, through
hot-smelling pine woods, heaths of all sorts, evergreens and flowers,
clear water like Scotch burns coming down among the rocks with its toss
of white froth and amber pools, and such a view, when one got to the
top, down over the whispering woods and out over the flat sea!
The sea was the thing that beat all--"the great sea perfect as a
flower,"--the sight of it was a stab. There are great four-masted
barques and full-rigged ships lying at the wharfs and outside--double
t'gallant yarders, my boy; I yelled at them by way of greeting down
across the tree-tops.
Nearer in lies a long black steamer, a transport. She is an ugly looking
old tub, but in my eyes perfect. Handsome is as handsome does. She takes
us home to-morrow, my pony and me.