CHAPTER 2. THE CAUSE OF QUARREL.
CHAPTER 3. THE NEGOTIATIONS.
CHAPTER 4. THE EVE OF WAR.
CHAPTER 5. TALANA HILL.
CHAPTER 6. ELANDSLAAGTE AND RIETFONTEIN.
CHAPTER 7. THE BATTLE OF LADYSMITH.
CHAPTER 8. LORD METHUEN'S ADVANCE.
CHAPTER 9. BATTLE OF MAGERSFONTEIN.
CHAPTER 10. THE BATTLE OF STORMBERG.
CHAPTER 11. BATTLE OF COLENSO.
CHAPTER 12. THE DARK HOUR.
CHAPTER 13. THE SIEGE OF LADYSMITH.
CHAPTER 14. THE COLESBERG OPERATIONS.
CHAPTER 15. SPION KOP.
CHAPTER 16. VAALKRANZ.
CHAPTER 17. BULLER'S FINAL ADVANCE.
CHAPTER 18. THE SIEGE AND RELIEF OF KIMBERLEY.
CHAPTER 19. PAARDEBERG.
CHAPTER 20. ROBERTS'S ADVANCE ON BLOEMFONTEIN.
CHAPTER 21. STRATEGIC EFFECTS OF LORD ROBERTS'S MARCH.
CHAPTER 22. THE HALT AT BLOEMFONTEIN.
CHAPTER 23. THE CLEARING OF THE SOUTH-EAST.
CHAPTER 24. THE SIEGE OF MAFEKING.
CHAPTER 25. THE MARCH ON PRETORIA.
CHAPTER 26. DIAMOND HILL--RUNDLE'S OPERATIONS.
CHAPTER 27. THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION.
CHAPTER 28. THE HALT AT PRETORIA.
CHAPTER 29. THE ADVANCE TO KOMATIPOORT.
CHAPTER 30. THE CAMPAIGN OF DE WET.
CHAPTER 31. THE GUERILLA WARFARE IN THE TRANSVAAL: NOOITGEDACHT.
CHAPTER 32. THE SECOND INVASION OF CAPE COLONY.
CHAPTER 33. THE NORTHERN OPERATIONS FROM JANUARY TO APRIL, 1901.
CHAPTER 34. THE WINTER CAMPAIGN (APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1901).
CHAPTER 35. THE GUERILLA OPERATIONS IN CAPE COLONY.
CHAPTER 36. THE SPRING CAMPAIGN (SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1901).
CHAPTER 37. THE CAMPAIGN OF JANUARY TO APRIL, 1902.
CHAPTER 38. DE LA REY'S CAMPAIGN OF 1902.
CHAPTER 39. THE END.
PREFACE TO THE FINAL EDITION.
During the course of the war some sixteen Editions of this work have
appeared, each of which was, I hope, a little more full and accurate
than that which preceded it. I may fairly claim, however, that the
absolute mistakes made have been few in number, and that I have never
had occasion to reverse, and seldom to modify, the judgments which I
have formed. In this final edition the early text has been carefully
revised and all fresh available knowledge has been added within the
limits of a single volume narrative. Of the various episodes in the
latter half of the war it is impossible to say that the material is
available for a complete and final chronicle. By the aid, however, of
the official dispatches, of the newspapers, and of many private letters,
I have done my best to give an intelligible and accurate account of
the matter. The treatment may occasionally seem too brief but some
proportion must be observed between the battles of 1899-1900 and the
skirmishes of 1901-1902.
My private informants are so numerous that it would be hardly possible,
even if it were desirable, that I should quote their names. Of the
correspondents upon whose work I have drawn for my materials, I would
acknowledge my obligations to Messrs. Burleigh, Nevinson, Battersby,
Stuart, Amery, Atkins, Baillie, Kinneir, Churchill, James, Ralph,
Barnes, Maxwell, Pearce, Hamilton, and others. Especially I would
mention the gentleman who represented the 'Standard' in the last year
of the war, whose accounts of Vlakfontein, Von Donop's Convoy, and
Tweebosch were the only reliable ones which reached the public.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Undershaw, Hindhead: September 1902.
CHAPTER 1. THE BOER NATIONS.
Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended
themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when
Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain
of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and
left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile,
unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this formidable people
and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage
men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could
survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons
and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to
the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally,
put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic
Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine
all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you
have the modern Boer--the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed
the path of Imperial Britain. Our military history has largely consisted
in our conflicts with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have
never treated us so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their
ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.
Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the
British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch
of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came
they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into
Africa? It is a twice-told tale, and yet it must be told once again if
this story is to have even the most superficial of introductions. No one
can know or appreciate the Boer who does not know his past, for he is
what his past has made him.
It was about the time when Oliver Cromwell was at his zenith--in 1652,
to be pedantically accurate--that the Dutch made their first lodgment at
the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese had been there before them, but,
repelled by the evil weather, and lured forwards by rumours of gold,
they had passed the true seat of empire and had voyaged further to
settle along the eastern coast. Some gold there was, but not much, and
the Portuguese settlements have never been sources of wealth to the
mother country, and never will be until the day when Great Britain
signs her huge cheque for Delagoa Bay. The coast upon which they settled
reeked with malaria. A hundred miles of poisonous marsh separated it
from the healthy inland plateau. For centuries these pioneers of South
African colonisation strove to obtain some further footing, but save
along the courses of the rivers they made little progress. Fierce
natives and an enervating climate barred their way.
But it was different with the Dutch. That very rudeness of climate
which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of their
success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the qualities
which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and barren lands who
master the children of the light and the heat. And so the Dutchmen at
the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust climate. They did
not penetrate far inland, for they were few in number and all they
wanted was to be found close at hand. But they built themselves houses,
and they supplied the Dutch East India Company with food and water,
gradually budding off little townlets, Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and
pushing their settlements up the long slopes which lead to that great
central plateau which extends for fifteen hundred miles from the edge
of the Karoo to the Valley of the Zambesi. Then came the additional
Huguenot emigrants--the best blood of France three hundred of them, a
handful of the choicest seed thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul
to the solid Teutonic strain. Again and again in the course of history,
with the Normans, the Huguenots, the Emigres, one can see the great hand
dipping into that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the same
splendid seed. France has not founded other countries, like her great
rival, but she has made every other country the richer by the mixture
with her choicest and best. The Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du Plessis,
Villiers, and a score of other French names are among the most familiar
in South Africa.
For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the
gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld which
lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an industry, but in
a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms are
necessary for even small herds. Six thousand acres was the usual size,
and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government. The diseases
which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and Australia,
been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox cleared the
country for the newcomers. Further and further north they pushed,
founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and
Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale
of the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered
dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of
control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most
prominent characteristic. Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an older
but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt.
The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm
which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years, during which
the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between England and France
in the final counting up of the game and paying of the stakes, the Cape
Colony was added in 1814 to the British Empire.
In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We had it
by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase. In 1806
our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took possession of
Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to the
Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American land.
It was a bargain which was probably made rapidly and carelessly in that
general redistribution which was going on. As a house of call upon the
way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself
was looked upon as unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or
Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which we were
buying for our six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed
one of good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest
diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and
humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we fought
with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace and
prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men. The future
should hold something very good for us in that land, for if we merely
count the past we should be compelled to say that we should have been
stronger, richer, and higher in the world's esteem had our possessions
there never passed beyond the range of the guns of our men-of-war. But
surely the most arduous is the most honourable, and, looking back from
the end of their journey, our descendants may see that our long record
of struggle, with its mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring
of blood and of treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring
goal.
The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there
is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has
marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. There is
no word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had
then been thought of. Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which
extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch at
liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of the
Anglo-Celtic colonists? In that question lay the germ of all the trouble
to come. An American would realise the point at issue if he could
conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch
inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the westward and
established fresh communities under a new flag. Then, when the American
population overtook these western States, they would be face to face
with the problem which this country has had to solve. If they found
these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely unprogressive,
they would experience that aggravation of their difficulties with which
our statesmen have had to deal.
At the time of their transference to the British flag the
colonists--Dutch, French, and German--numbered some thirty thousand.
They were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as
themselves. The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British
and the original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since
they were of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be
distinguished by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance. Five
thousand British emigrants were landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern
borders of the colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but
steady influx of English speaking colonists. The Government had the
historical faults and the historical virtues of British rule. It was
mild, clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might
have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found
them. But to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic
races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series
of complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa. The
Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic
view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the
protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that British justice, if not
blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable in
theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating
when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men
whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black
is the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality
for themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who live under
entirely different conditions. They feel--and with some reason--that
it is a cheap form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered
household in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the
relation shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,
half-childish retainers. Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race have
grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.
The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular
part of the friend and protector of the native servants. It was upon
this very point that the first friction appeared between the old
settlers and the new administration. A rising with bloodshed followed
the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave. It was
suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged. This punishment
was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. A brave race can forget
the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold. The
making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship. It
is true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the
prisoners were Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on the
side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to
make racial capital out of the incident. It is typical of the enduring
resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid, it
seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged,
the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to
Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in
1816. Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the British
Government and the Afrikaners.
And the separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious
tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a
substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious
generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the Kaffir
tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then, finally, in
this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the
British Empire, which fanned all smouldering discontents into an active
flame.
It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist
was willing to pay for what he thought was right. It was a noble
national action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its
time, that the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of twenty
million pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders, and so to remove
an evil with which the mother country had no immediate connection. It
was as well that the thing should have been done when it was, for had we
waited till the colonies affected had governments of their own it could
never have been done by constitutional methods. With many a grumble the
good British householder drew his purse from his fob, and he paid for
what he thought to be right. If any special grace attends the virtuous
action which brings nothing but tribulation in this world, then we may
hope for it over this emancipation. We spent our money, we ruined our
West Indian colonies, and we started a disaffection in South Africa, the
end of which we have not seen. Yet if it were to be done again we should
doubtless do it. The highest morality may prove also to be the highest
wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.
But the details of the measure were less honourable than the principle.
It was carried out suddenly, so that the country had no time to adjust
itself to the new conditions. Three million pounds were ear-marked for
South Africa, which gives a price per slave of from sixty to seventy
pounds, a sum considerably below the current local rates. Finally, the
compensation was made payable in London, so that the farmers sold their
claims at reduced prices to middlemen. Indignation meetings were held in
every little townlet and cattle camp on the Karoo. The old Dutch spirit
was up--the spirit of the men who cut the dykes. Rebellion was useless.
But a vast untenanted land stretched to the north of them. The nomad
life was congenial to them, and in their huge ox-drawn wagons--like
those bullock-carts in which some of their old kinsmen came to
Gaul--they had vehicles and homes and forts all in one. One by one they
were loaded up, the huge teams were inspanned, the women were seated
inside, the men, with their long-barrelled guns, walked alongside,
and the great exodus was begun. Their herds and flocks accompanied the
migration, and the children helped to round them in and drive them. One
tattered little boy of ten cracked his sjambok whip behind the bullocks.
He was a small item in that singular crowd, but he was of interest to
us, for his name was Paul Stephanus Kruger.
It was a strange exodus, only comparable in modern times to the sallying
forth of the Mormons from Nauvoo upon their search for the promised land
of Utah. The country was known and sparsely settled as far north as the
Orange River, but beyond there was a great region which had never
been penetrated save by some daring hunter or adventurous pioneer. It
chanced--if there be indeed such an element as chance in the graver
affairs of man--that a Zulu conqueror had swept over this land and left
it untenanted, save by the dwarf bushmen, the hideous aborigines,
lowest of the human race. There were fine grazing and good soil for
the emigrants. They traveled in small detached parties, but their total
numbers were considerable, from six to ten thousand according to their
historian, or nearly a quarter of the whole population of the colony.
Some of the early bands perished miserably. A large number made a
trysting-place at a high peak to the east of Bloemfontein in what was
lately the Orange Free State. One party of the emigrants was cut off
by the formidable Matabeli, a branch of the great Zulu nation. The
survivors declared war upon them, and showed in this, their first
campaign, the extraordinary ingenuity in adapting their tactics to their
adversary which has been their greatest military characteristic. The
commando which rode out to do battle with the Matabeli numbered, it is
said, a hundred and thirty-five farmers. Their adversaries were twelve
thousand spearmen. They met at the Marico River, near Mafeking. The
Boers combined the use of their horses and of their rifles so cleverly
that they slaughtered a third of their antagonists without any loss to
themselves. Their tactics were to gallop up within range of the enemy,
to fire a volley, and then to ride away again before the spearmen could
reach them. When the savages pursued the Boers fled. When the pursuit
halted the Boers halted and the rifle fire began anew. The strategy was
simple but most effective. When one remembers how often since then our
own horsemen have been pitted against savages in all parts of the world,
one deplores that ignorance of all military traditions save our own
which is characteristic of our service.
This victory of the 'voortrekkers' cleared all the country between the
Orange River and the Limpopo, the sites of what has been known as the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In the meantime another body of
the emigrants had descended into what is now known as Natal, and had
defeated Dingaan, the great Chief of the Zulus. Being unable, owing to
the presence of their families, to employ the cavalry tactics which had
been so effective against the Matabeli, they again used their ingenuity
to meet this new situation, and received the Zulu warriors in a square
of laagered wagons, the men firing while the women loaded. Six burghers
were killed and three thousand Zulus. Had such a formation been used
forty years afterwards against these very Zulus, we should not have had
to mourn the disaster of Isandhlwana.
And now at the end of their great journey, after overcoming the
difficulties of distance, of nature, and of savage enemies, the Boers
saw at the end of their travels the very thing which they desired
least--that which they had come so far to avoid--the flag of Great
Britain. The Boers had occupied Natal from within, but England had
previously done the same by sea, and a small colony of Englishmen
had settled at Port Natal, now known as Durban. The home Government,
however, had acted in a vacillating way, and it was only the conquest of
Natal by the Boers which caused them to claim it as a British colony.
At the same time they asserted the unwelcome doctrine that a British
subject could not at will throw off his allegiance, and that, go where
they might, the wandering farmers were still only the pioneers of
British colonies. To emphasise the fact three companies of soldiers
were sent in 1842 to what is now Durban--the usual Corporal's guard with
which Great Britain starts a new empire. This handful of men was waylaid
by the Boers and cut up, as their successors have been so often since.
The survivors, however, fortified themselves, and held a defensive
position--as also their successors have done so many times since--until
reinforcements arrived and the farmers dispersed. It is singular how in
history the same factors will always give the same result. Here in this
first skirmish is an epitome of all our military relations with these
people. The blundering headstrong attack, the defeat, the powerlessness
of the farmer against the weakest fortifications--it is the same tale
over and over again in different scales of importance. Natal from this
time onward became a British colony, and the majority of the Boers
trekked north and east with bitter hearts to tell their wrongs to their
brethren of the Orange Free State and of the Transvaal.
Had they any wrongs to tell? It is difficult to reach that height of
philosophic detachment which enables the historian to deal absolutely
impartially where his own country is a party to the quarrel. But
at least we may allow that there is a case for our adversary. Our
annexation of Natal had been by no means definite, and it was they and
not we who first broke that bloodthirsty Zulu power which threw its
shadow across the country. It was hard after such trials and such
exploits to turn their back upon the fertile land which they had
conquered, and to return to the bare pastures of the upland veld. They
carried out of Natal a heavy sense of injury, which has helped to
poison our relations with them ever since. It was, in a way, a momentous
episode, this little skirmish of soldiers and emigrants, for it was the
heading off of the Boer from the sea and the confinement of his ambition
to the land. Had it gone the other way, a new and possibly formidable
flag would have been added to the maritime nations.
The emigrants who had settled in the huge tract of country between
the Orange River in the south and the Limpopo in the north had been
recruited by newcomers from the Cape Colony until they numbered some
fifteen thousand souls. This population was scattered over a space
as large as Germany, and larger than Pennsylvania, New York, and New
England. Their form of government was individualistic and democratic to
the last degree compatible with any sort of cohesion. Their wars with
the Kaffirs and their fear and dislike of the British Government appear
to have been the only ties which held them together. They divided
and subdivided within their own borders, like a germinating egg.
The Transvaal was full of lusty little high-mettled communities,
who quarreled among themselves as fiercely as they had done with the
authorities at the Cape. Lydenburg, Zoutpansberg, and Potchefstroom were
on the point of turning their rifles against each other. In the south,
between the Orange River and the Vaal, there was no form of government
at all, but a welter of Dutch farmers, Basutos, Hottentots, and
halfbreeds living in a chronic state of turbulence, recognising neither
the British authority to the south of them nor the Transvaal republics
to the north. The chaos became at last unendurable, and in 1848 a
garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district incorporated in the
British Empire. The emigrants made a futile resistance at Boomplaats,
and after a single defeat allowed themselves to be drawn into the
settled order of civilised rule.
At this period the Transvaal, where most of the Boers had settled,
desired a formal acknowledgment of their independence, which the British
authorities determined once and for all to give them. The great barren
country, which produced little save marksmen, had no attractions for a
Colonial Office which was bent upon the limitation of its liabilities.
A Convention was concluded between the two parties, known as the Sand
River Convention, which is one of the fixed points in South African
history. By it the British Government guaranteed to the Boer farmers the
right to manage their own affairs, and to govern themselves by their
own laws without any interference upon the part of the British. It
stipulated that there should be no slavery, and with that single
reservation washed its hands finally, as it imagined, of the whole
question. So the South African Republic came formally into existence.
In the very year after the Sand River Convention a second republic, the
Orange Free State, was created by the deliberate withdrawal of Great
Britain from the territory which she had for eight years occupied. The
Eastern Question was already becoming acute, and the cloud of a great
war was drifting up, visible to all men. British statesmen felt that
their commitments were very heavy in every part of the world, and
the South African annexations had always been a doubtful value and an
undoubted trouble. Against the will of a large part of the inhabitants,
whether a majority or not it is impossible to say, we withdrew our
troops as amicably as the Romans withdrew from Britain, and the new
republic was left with absolute and unfettered independence. On a
petition being presented against the withdrawal, the Home Government
actually voted forty-eight thousand pounds to compensate those who had
suffered from the change. Whatever historical grievance the Transvaal
may have against Great Britain, we can at least, save perhaps in one
matter, claim to have a very clear conscience concerning our dealings
with the Orange Free State. Thus in 1852 and in 1854 were born those
sturdy States who were able for a time to hold at bay the united forces
of the empire.
In the meantime Cape Colony, in spite of these secessions, had prospered
exceedingly, and her population--English, German, and Dutch--had grown
by 1870 to over two hundred thousand souls, the Dutch still slightly
predominating. According to the Liberal colonial policy of Great
Britain, the time had come to cut the cord and let the young nation
conduct its own affairs. In 1872 complete self-government was given
to it, the Governor, as the representative of the Queen, retaining a
nominal unexercised veto upon legislation. According to this system
the Dutch majority of the colony could, and did, put their own
representatives into power and run the government upon Dutch lines.
Already Dutch law had been restored, and Dutch put on the same footing
as English as the official language of the country. The extreme
liberality of such measures, and the uncompromising way in which they
have been carried out, however distasteful the legislation might seem
to English ideas, are among the chief reasons which made the illiberal
treatment of British settlers in the Transvaal so keenly resented at the
Cape. A Dutch Government was ruling the British in a British colony,
at a moment when the Boers would not give an Englishman a vote upon a
municipal council in a city which he had built himself. Unfortunately,
however, 'the evil that men do lives after them,' and the ignorant Boer
farmer continued to imagine that his southern relatives were in bondage,
just as the descendant of the Irish emigrant still pictures an Ireland
of penal laws and an alien Church.
For twenty-five years after the Sand River Convention the burghers
of the South African Republic had pursued a strenuous and violent
existence, fighting incessantly with the natives and sometimes with
each other, with an occasional fling at the little Dutch republic to the
south. The semi-tropical sun was waking strange ferments in the placid
Friesland blood, and producing a race who added the turbulence and
restlessness of the south to the formidable tenacity of the north.
Strong vitality and violent ambitions produced feuds and rivalries
worthy of medieval Italy, and the story of the factious little
communities is like a chapter out of Guicciardini. Disorganisation
ensued. The burghers would not pay taxes and the treasury was empty. One
fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from the north, and the Zulus on
the east. It is an exaggeration of English partisans to pretend that our
intervention saved the Boers, for no one can read their military history
without seeing that they were a match for Zulus and Sekukuni combined.
But certainly a formidable invasion was pending, and the scattered
farmhouses were as open to the Kaffirs as our farmers' homesteads were
in the American colonies when the Indians were on the warpath. Sir
Theophilus Shepstone, the British Commissioner, after an inquiry of
three months, solved all questions by the formal annexation of the
country. The fact that he took possession of it with a force of
some twenty-five men showed the honesty of his belief that no armed
resistance was to be feared. This, then, in 1877 was a complete reversal
of the Sand River Convention and the opening of a new chapter in the
history of South Africa.
There did not appear to be any strong feeling at the time against the
annexation. The people were depressed with their troubles and weary of
contention. Burgers, the President, put in a formal protest, and took
up his abode in Cape Colony, where he had a pension from the British
Government. A memorial against the measure received the signatures of a
majority of the Boer inhabitants, but there was a fair minority who took
the other view. Kruger himself accepted a paid office under Government.
There was every sign that the people, if judiciously handled, would
settle down under the British flag. It is even asserted that they would
themselves have petitioned for annexation had it been longer withheld.
With immediate constitutional government it is possible that even
the most recalcitrant of them might have been induced to lodge their
protests in the ballot boxes rather than in the bodies of our soldiers.
But the empire has always had poor luck in South Africa, and never
worse than on that occasion. Through no bad faith, but simply through
preoccupation and delay, the promises made were not instantly fulfilled.
Simple primitive men do not understand the ways of our circumlocution
offices, and they ascribe to duplicity what is really red tape and
stupidity. If the Transvaalers had waited they would have had their
Volksraad and all that they wanted. But the British Government had some
other local matters to set right, the rooting out of Sekukuni and the
breaking of the Zulus, before they would fulfill their pledges. The
delay was keenly resented. And we were unfortunate in our choice of
Governor. The burghers are a homely folk, and they like an occasional
cup of coffee with the anxious man who tries to rule them. The three
hundred pounds a year of coffee money allowed by the Transvaal to its
President is by no means a mere form. A wise administrator would fall
into the sociable and democratic habits of the people. Sir Theophilus
Shepstone did so. Sir Owen Lanyon did not. There was no Volksraad and
no coffee, and the popular discontent grew rapidly. In three years the
British had broken up the two savage hordes which had been threatening
the land. The finances, too, had been restored. The reasons which had
made so many favour the annexation were weakened by the very power which
had every interest in preserving them.
It cannot be too often pointed out that in this annexation, the
starting-point of our troubles, Great Britain, however mistaken she may
have been, had no obvious selfish interest in view. There were no Rand
mines in those days, nor was there anything in the country to tempt the
most covetous. An empty treasury and two native wars were the reversion
which we took over. It was honestly considered that the country was
in too distracted a state to govern itself, and had, by its weakness,
become a scandal and a danger to its neighbours. There was nothing
sordid in our action, though it may have been both injudicious and
high-handed.
In December 1880 the Boers rose. Every farmhouse sent out its riflemen,
and the trysting-place was the outside of the nearest British fort. All
through the country small detachments were surrounded and besieged
by the farmers. Standerton, Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Lydenburg,
Wakkerstroom, Rustenberg, and Marabastad were all invested and all
held out until the end of the war. In the open country we were less
fortunate. At Bronkhorst Spruit a small British force was taken by
surprise and shot down without harm to their antagonists. The surgeon
who treated them has left it on record that the average number of
wounds was five per man. At Laing's Nek an inferior force of British
endeavoured to rush a hill which was held by Boer riflemen. Half of our
men were killed and wounded. Ingogo may be called a drawn battle, though
our loss was more heavy than that of the enemy. Finally came the
defeat of Majuba Hill, where four hundred infantry upon a mountain were
defeated and driven off by a swarm of sharpshooters who advanced under
the cover of boulders. Of all these actions there was not one which
was more than a skirmish, and had they been followed by a final British
victory they would now be hardly remembered. It is the fact that they
were skirmishes which succeeded in their object which has given them
an importance which is exaggerated. At the same time they may mark the
beginning of a new military era, for they drove home the fact--only too
badly learned by us--that it is the rifle and not the drill which makes
the soldier. It is bewildering that after such an experience the
British military authorities continued to serve out only three hundred
cartridges a year for rifle practice, and that they still encouraged
that mechanical volley firing which destroys all individual aim. With
the experience of the first Boer war behind them, little was done,
either in tactics or in musketry, to prepare the soldier for the second.
The value of the mounted rifleman, the shooting with accuracy at unknown
ranges, the art of taking cover--all were equally neglected.
The defeat at Majuba Hill was followed by the complete surrender of the
Gladstonian Government, an act which was either the most pusillanimous
or the most magnanimous in recent history. It is hard for the big man
to draw away from the small before blows are struck but when the big man
has been knocked down three times it is harder still. An overwhelming
British force was in the field, and the General declared that he held
the enemy in the hollow of his hand. Our military calculations have been
falsified before now by these farmers, and it may be that the task
of Wood and Roberts would have been harder than they imagined; but on
paper, at least, it looked as if the enemy could be crushed without
difficulty. So the public thought, and yet they consented to the
upraised sword being stayed. With them, as apart from the politicians,
the motive was undoubtedly a moral and Christian one. They considered
that the annexation of the Transvaal had evidently been an injustice,
that the farmers had a right to the freedom for which they fought, and
that it was an unworthy thing for a great nation to continue an unjust
war for the sake of a military revenge. It was the height of idealism,
and the result has not been such as to encourage its repetition.
An armistice was concluded on March 5th, 1881, which led up to a peace
on the 23rd of the same month. The Government, after yielding to force
what it had repeatedly refused to friendly representations, made
a clumsy compromise in their settlement. A policy of idealism and
Christian morality should have been thorough if it were to be tried
at all. It was obvious that if the annexation were unjust, then the
Transvaal should have reverted to the condition in which it was before
the annexation, as defined by the Sand River Convention. But the
Government for some reason would not go so far as this. They niggled
and quibbled and bargained until the State was left as a curious hybrid
thing such as the world has never seen. It was a republic which was
part of the system of a monarchy, dealt with by the Colonial Office,
and included under the heading of 'Colonies' in the news columns of the
'Times.' It was autonomous, and yet subject to some vague suzerainty,
the limits of which no one has ever been able to define. Altogether, in
its provisions and in its omissions, the Convention of Pretoria appears
to prove that our political affairs were as badly conducted as our
military in this unfortunate year of 1881.
It was evident from the first that so illogical and contentious an
agreement could not possibly prove to be a final settlement, and indeed
the ink of the signatures was hardly dry before an agitation was on foot
for its revision. The Boers considered, and with justice, that if they
were to be left as undisputed victors in the war then they should have
the full fruits of victory. On the other hand, the English-speaking
colonies had their allegiance tested to the uttermost. The proud
Anglo-Celtic stock is not accustomed to be humbled, and yet they found
themselves through the action of the home Government converted into
members of a beaten race. It was very well for the citizen of London to
console his wounded pride by the thought that he had done a magnanimous
action, but it was different with the British colonist of Durban or Cape
Town, who by no act of his own, and without any voice in the settlement,
found himself humiliated before his Dutch neighbour. An ugly feeling of
resentment was left behind, which might perhaps have passed away had the
Transvaal accepted the settlement in the spirit in which it was meant,
but which grew more and more dangerous as during eighteen years our
people saw, or thought that they saw, that one concession led always
to a fresh demand, and that the Dutch republics aimed not merely at
equality, but at dominance in South Africa. Professor Bryce, a friendly
critic, after a personal examination of the country and the question,
has left it upon record that the Boers saw neither generosity nor
humanity in our conduct, but only fear. An outspoken race, they conveyed
their feelings to their neighbours. Can it be wondered at that South
Africa has been in a ferment ever since, and that the British Africander
has yearned with an intensity of feeling unknown in England for the hour
of revenge?
The Government of the Transvaal after the war was left in the hands of a
triumvirate, but after one year Kruger became President, an office which
he continued to hold for eighteen years. His career as ruler vindicates
the wisdom of that wise but unwritten provision of the American
Constitution by which there is a limit to the tenure of this office.
Continued rule for half a generation must turn a man into an autocrat.
The old President has said himself, in his homely but shrewd way, that
when one gets a good ox to lead the team it is a pity to change him.
If a good ox, however, is left to choose his own direction without
guidance, he may draw his wagon into trouble.
During three years the little State showed signs of a tumultuous
activity. Considering that it was as large as France and that the
population could not have been more than 50,000, one would have thought
that they might have found room without any inconvenient crowding.
But the burghers passed beyond their borders in every direction. The
President cried aloud that he had been shut up in a kraal, and he
proceeded to find ways out of it. A great trek was projected for the
north, but fortunately it miscarried. To the east they raided Zululand,
and succeeded, in defiance of the British settlement of that country,
in tearing away one third of it and adding it to the Transvaal. To
the west, with no regard to the three-year-old treaty, they invaded
Bechuanaland, and set up the two new republics of Goshen and Stellaland.
So outrageous were these proceedings that Great Britain was forced
to fit out in 1884 a new expedition under Sir Charles Warren for the
purpose of turning these freebooters out of the country. It may be
asked, why should these men be called freebooters if the founders of
Rhodesia were pioneers? The answer is that the Transvaal was limited
by treaty to certain boundaries which these men transgressed, while no
pledges were broken when the British power expanded to the north. The
upshot of these trespasses was the scene upon which every drama of South
Africa rings down. Once more the purse was drawn from the pocket of
the unhappy taxpayer, and a million or so was paid out to defray the
expenses of the police force necessary to keep these treaty-breakers in
order. Let this be borne in mind when we assess the moral and material
damage done to the Transvaal by that ill-conceived and foolish
enterprise, the Jameson Raid.
In 1884 a deputation from the Transvaal visited England, and at their
solicitation the clumsy Treaty of Pretoria was altered into the still
more clumsy Convention of London. The changes in the provisions were all
in favour of the Boers, and a second successful war could hardly have
given them more than Lord Derby handed them in time of peace. Their
style was altered from the Transvaal to the South African Republic, a
change which was ominously suggestive of expansion in the future. The
control of Great Britain over their foreign policy was also relaxed,
though a power of veto was retained. But the most important thing of
all, and the fruitful cause of future trouble, lay in an omission. A
suzerainty is a vague term, but in politics, as in theology, the more
nebulous a thing is the more does it excite the imagination and the
passions of men. This suzerainty was declared in the preamble of the
first treaty, and no mention of it was made in the second. Was it
thereby abrogated or was it not? The British contention was that only
the articles were changed, and that the preamble continued to hold good
for both treaties. They pointed out that not only the suzerainty, but
also the independence, of the Transvaal was proclaimed in that preamble,
and that if one lapsed the other must do so also. On the other hand,
the Boers pointed to the fact that there was actually a preamble to the
second Convention, which would seem, therefore, to have taken the place
of the first. The point is so technical that it appears to be eminently
one of those questions which might with propriety have been submitted to
the decision of a board of foreign jurists--or possibly to the Supreme
Court of the United States. If the decision had been given against Great
Britain, we might have accepted it in a chastened spirit as a fitting
punishment for the carelessness of the representative who failed to
make our meaning intelligible. Carlyle has said that a political mistake
always ends in a broken head for somebody. Unfortunately the somebody is
usually somebody else. We have read the story of the political mistakes.
Only too soon we shall come to the broken heads.
This, then, is a synopsis of what had occurred up to the signing of
the Convention, which finally established, or failed to establish, the
position of the South African Republic. We must now leave the larger
questions, and descend to the internal affairs of that small State, and
especially to that train of events which has stirred the mind of our
people more than anything since the Indian Mutiny.