Churchill the Young Warrior, page 14
Although he gave her a firm opinion that “the Boer Republics are wearing thin,” the difficulty of any such affair was to separate wishful thinking from reality—it might go either way. The Boers were absolutely determined to hold on to what they considered to be their land, after all their pioneering hardships and hazards for generations, and after successfully tearing down forests to till the land, then create and establish a culture, from being farmers to building towns and cities—just as the Americans had done when they had trekked west and built their own homesteads. The Boers had trekked to the Transvaal in their own ox-wagons, circled them under attack, and fired with their rifles to protect themselves and their families from the peoples who surrounded them and outnumbered them. The attacking enemies were well-organized and brave warriors, the Zulu and the Xhosa. They and the Voortrekkers suffered heavy losses of life. The Matabele had moved south at more or less the same time that the Dutch settlers had travelled up north from the Cape Province, and met somewhere in the middle. Both parties had managed to survive. Their problems now came from the British.
The Voortrekkers
There was no doubting that the Boers were determined to resist the incursions onto their land. Winston wrote in the Morning Post of one man he had seen who had touched his heart. “I have often seen men killed in war,” he wrote, “thousands at Omdurman, scores elsewhere, black and white, but the Boer dead aroused the most painful emotions.”
These Afrikaans, Dutch, French, and German Protestants had fled from violent religious and military upheavals, and from wars of persecution by the Roman Catholic Church and its armies in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands in the 1830s and 1840s—at the same time as other emigrants escaped slaughter in the revolutionary turmoil in the Spring of Nations in Europe, some finding a safe haven in the Cape Colony of South Africa. It had been founded by the Dutch and taken over by the British when Holland’s economy foundered and collapsed. They surged into the interior in their covered ox-wagons to found their own homeland in the Great Trek.
It was little different from the pioneering days in the “Wild West” of America, with comparatively small groups of families with their horses, cattle herds, sheep, and hens. They moved together for protection like nomads against the well-regimented forces of native warriors, all riding and surging towards the Promised Land of the Book. Most were poor farmers from the East Cape, but some, like Piet Retief, came from the West Cape, leaving the insecurity of frontier life in the Cape Province. The land and weather had been too harsh for farming, and they were squeezed for survival between an inflow of thousands of British immigrants and British administration that favored the others, including the indigenous Xhosa tribes.
News reached them of a “Promised Land” which was more fertile, in what would become the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. There was also serious conflict between the hardworking farmers who needed labor and the British Empire’s insistence on freeing all slaves, as was also being done in North America. Those families were hard-bitten and accustomed to shortages and mere subsistence farming. But they were also shrewd hunters who shared a religious fervor for the land and the Old Testament, with their ancestors’ names of each generation painfully written into the flyleaves of the family Bible. It was the only book they knew—usually read to them by the father of the household, if he could read—otherwise in the Dutch Reformed Church.
When the Voortrekkers migrated to Natal in 1837—which was Zululand—they sent a delegation of a hundred representatives to King Dingane the following year, to negotiate a treaty. After the king signed it with their leader Piet Retief, Dingane changed his mind and had the entire hundred guests murdered in their huts when they slept at night. The treaty had given the Voortrekkers land by the Tugela River. Dingane then sent a regiment of well-trained and disciplined warriors against the rest of the families, and slaughtered 500 of the Voortrekkers, then stole all their cattle.
Andries Pretorius took leadership of the remaining families and was determined to retrieve their cattle and sheep and take revenge on Dingane. In response, Dingane sent some 15,000 to 20,000 Zulu warriors to wipe out the Voortrekkers. The families defended themselves courageously in the customary way of frontier pioneers, by encircling their ox-wagons into a protective laager and firing at the enemy from in between and underneath them. Although overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Voortrekkers made a vow to God that they would honor the date of December 16, 1838 by commemorating it, if they were delivered from the Zulus. Their victory over the Zulu attack became known as the “Battle of Blood River,” because the waters of the Ncome River turned red from the slaughter. It was their turning point.
They established the Republic of Natal in 1839 between the Tugela River and Port St. Johns, in accordance with their original treaty with King Dingane. Britain annexed it in 1843. And many of the Boers packed up their belongings and their families and livestock and trekked even further north to get away from them, joining up with other pioneering families there and establishing homesteads, ranches, and farms. These illiterate and semi-literate poor farmers who only read one book, the Bible, believed they had entered the Nile Valley in Egypt and were “God’s Chosen People.”
But there were other people there before them, and inevitable conflicts also with the Ndebele tribe, ruled by Chief Mzilikazi in the Transvaal. The Boers overcame all the odds against them by their hardiness and persistence, their shrewd hunting tactics, their sharpshooting skills with their muzzle-loaders, and their horsemanship. Their small pioneering settlements merged into several small Boer Republics, and then the Orange Free State and the Republic of South Africa. But when valuable mineral resources were discovered in Bloemfontein and on the Reef, the British annexed the land in the Boer War in 1900.
“If I were a Boer”
The particular man Winston referred to as having touched his heart was in his sixties, “with firm aquiline features, and a short beard.” He had refused to surrender to the British. “Even when his left leg was smashed by a bullet, [he] continued to load his rifle until he bled to death.” Next to him he saw the body of a teenage boy, shot through the heart. Further away were two British riflemen with their heads smashed in. Winston was so deeply moved at what he saw in battle at Spioenkop that he turned down an invitation from the Conservatives to stand at the next General Election in Southport, in order to continue under fire at the battlefront.
In the meantime, the indomitable Jennie had helped to organize and equip a hospital ship named Maine, and arrived, in charge of it, in Durban on January 28. Winston met her and his brother Jack there, and took Jack back with him to the front at the Tugela River. Jack was now an officer in the Territorials. Addressing the despondency in England in one of his newspaper articles, Winston wrote that some British citizens have a duty to shoot straight, “but all of us remain cheerfully determined.”
Jack was wounded and sent back to Jennie’s hospital ship. As for Winston, he wrote to Pamela on February 25, “I was very nearly killed two hours ago by shrapnel.” His attitude was quite simply that they must be more determined than the enemy. But few could be as determined as the Boers, who felt their land and their identity slipping away from them. Three days later, two cavalry squadrons commanded by Lord Dundonald were about to enter Ladysmith. With him was Winston’s friend Ronald Brooke. He invited Winston to join them.
It was a cool evening and Winston’s horse was fresh. They passed first over stony ground. The British cavalry pushed on with the sound of artillery. An armed picket approached before they could put their horses into a gallop. They paused to identify themselves as the Ladysmith relief column. Then, Winston wrote, “from out of trenches and rifle pits artfully concealed in the scrub a score of tattered men came running, cheering feebly, and some crying. In the half-light they looked ghastly pale and thin. A poor white-faced officer waved his helmet to and fro, and laughed foolishly, and the tall, strong colonial horsemen, standing up in their stirrups, raised a loud resounding cheer. Then we knew the siege of Ladysmith was over.”
After dining with the town’s defenders, he never lost sight of the predicament of the Boers. “I would treat the Boers with all generosity, and tolerance, even providing for those crippled in the war, and for the destitute women and children … To last, a peace must be honorable.” He wrote later that the British should “devote themselves to stimulating and sustaining the spirit of the people by measures of social improvement and reform.”
Joseph Chamberlain praised his reports from South Africa. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies, and although he never became Prime Minister, he was viewed as the most important politician at this time. Meanwhile, Winston’s novel, which he called Savrola, had finally been published, and he read the reviews. He was relieved to see it highly praised, particularly for its deep insights. And some phrases had made their impression on the book critics’ minds, such as his description of “a degenerate imperialism.”
Winston laid out a rule for the final phase of the action in South Africa in his newspaper articles, which he hoped would stand as a model for the government and the military to follow: “Beware of driving men to desperation—even a cornered rat is dangerous…. Those who demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, should ask themselves whether such barren spoils are worth five years of bloody partisan warfare and the consequent impoverishment of South Africa.”
But as it would turn out, not everyone was as wise or compassionate as he was. He became disillusioned with the Conservative Party and turned away from it, partly because of its attitudes to the Boer War. “If I were a Boer,” he said later on, “I should be fighting in the field.”
His sympathies wavered, because he did not distinguish one group of people from another by its color or race, nationality or religion. And he knew from Darwin’s hundreds—even thousands of scientific studies—that all human beings were related to each other from the same stock. He was in revolt against “jingoism” that resulted in mindless and brutal attitudes towards different people, like the Kaiser with his Hunnish mindset.
He was horrified at the poverty of the Boers. It was an insight of the other half of the world with its completely different societies that no one in England ever saw. Even so, he knew that if he pushed the points he wanted to make in his newspaper articles too far, there would be a backlash from the generals and politicians alike and they would close ranks against him to prevent him from telling the truth. He was aware from his reading of the classics that the result of bad news is that the messenger gets killed to prevent it from leaking out.
From Winston Churchill’s vantage point and his philosophical way of seeing events unroll, he would have seen the war in South Africa as the beginning of the fall of the British Empire, partly as a result of favoritism and cover-ups and personal squabbles in the army culture, that would affect not only events in the South African war but also in the First World War, with Sir Ian Hamilton, Haldane (who didn’t like him), and Kitchener, who felt insecure against him.
“Inquiries after the war showed that British commanders had been incompetent, that forces had been sent into combat without clear orders, proper maps or sufficient intelligence, and that equipment had been completely inadequate. Leo Amory, who was a reporter in the field for The Times, wrote, for example, of the disaster of Spion Kop: no effort was made beforehand to ascertain the shape of the position to be occupied, or to furnish the officers entrusted with its capture with such information.”5
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BELOW THE POVERTY LINE
WINSTON’S SHIP BROUGHT HIM BACK TO England from South Africa before the Boer War was over. It was not an honorable end that he had repeatedly called for in his newspaper articles, and he felt well out of it. He could do no more, although it was in the hands of casual and scheming administrators and an incompetent British army with a bespattered reputation. But even Winston could never have imagined what would besmirch it next. Meanwhile, Kitchener achieved fame and was ennobled as “Lord Kitchener of Khartoum” for winning the Battle of Omdurman, which secured British control of the Sudan.
Winston found a copy of Vanity Fair magazine on the ship, with a cartoon of him by the popular artist who called himself “Spy.” There was an article with it that said, “He is a clever fellow who has the courage of his convictions. He can write and he can fight…. And it is probable that his every effort, military or literary, has been made with political bent.” Winston must have grinned at the writer’s prescience. He landed at Southampton on July 20 and went to Oldham five days later, where he was adopted as their prospective candidate for the General Election.
Over ten thousand people turned out in the streets with flags and drums beating and shouted themselves hoarse for two hours, he told his brother afterwards. Next day, in Oldham’s Theatre Royal, he described to a mesmerized audience how he had escaped from the Boers and holed up at the Witbank colliery. As soon as he mentioned the name of one of the men who had helped him, Mr. Dewsnap, the Oldham engineer, someone in the audience shouted, “His wife’s in the gallery.” It was followed by cheers.
Concentration Camps
Back in South Africa, there was nothing for either side in the battle to cheer about. Winston had been right about the Boers refusing to put down their guns. The guerrilla battles of their commandos continued, despite the overwhelming size of the trained British forces. Regimented British soldiers would advance in the open with not a single enemy in sight, and suddenly be confronted by a squadron of Boers rising from trenches concealed at their feet and shooting them down in an instant. On other occasions—as Kitchener complained plaintively—“The Boers are not like the Dervishes who stood up to a fair fight. They are always running away on their little ponies.” The Boer hit-and-run tactics continued to be effective against an outmoded British Army.
It was a war of attrition to see which side would be worn down first. The sturdy Dutch farmers were hardier than the British soldiers and accustomed to privations. But each side was determined to win. The popular opinion in Britain was that none of the British generals was any good. And since the war had drifted off course and lacked deliberate focus, General Buller was replaced by Lord Roberts. The British government now sent its biggest military force ever overseas, hoping to crush the Boers with overwhelming force. But the guerilla commandos were led by excellent generals and a last-ditch dedication to fighting on. It was mass against minimalism, and the minimal guerilla forces continued to win for a while; then not so much.
Roberts took back several cities in the traditional manner of previous wars and annexed the Republic of South Africa, declaring the war was over. But it continued with small commando raids, as Winston had warned it would if there was no compromise. There was considerable sympathy for the Boers in Europe. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands sent a Dutch warship for President Kruger and his family and the Boer government, ignoring a British naval blockade. Meanwhile the Boer Republics were incorporated in the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Boer prisoners of war were shipped out of the country. But although Roberts had assumed the commandos would down arms when their leaders did, the Boer forces stubbornly continued their guerilla tactics—they simply could not be stopped. The British government was forced to think again and change its traditional tactics that didn’t work. Now, blockhouses that contained small groups of half a dozen soldiers were built across the two republics—eight thousand of them to restrict the movement of Boer commandos. And there was a scorched earth policy to destroy any homes that gave, or might give, concealment or support to the guerilla forces, in order to cut off their supplies. British troops made constant sweeps of the countryside and destroyed crops to starve them out. They even poisoned the wells—a move unheard of in civilized western societies. Then they rounded up Boer women and children into tented camps, even with their African women servants. Some Boer auxiliaries were persuaded to change sides, but not many.
Concentration camps to confine dissidents had already been used by the Spanish, and the Americans in the Philippine-American war. Now Roberts began to set them up to house refugees whose homes were burnt down. When Lord Kitchener replaced Lord Roberts, he extended the camps for women and children, locating them close to train stations so that they could be supplied. 25,630 men were sent overseas when captured, leaving about 2,000 women and children in the camps. Food was sparse and the conditions were poor. Bad personal hygiene led to the spread of measles, typhoid and dysentery. Insufficient medical care resulted in deaths whose numbers increased sharply. 4,177 women, 22,074 children under the age of sixteen, and 1,676 men died from starvation, exposure and disease.1
The British public were shocked when they found out. A report caused a government inquiry.2
Emily Hobhouse, the Leader of the Liberal Opposition in Parliament, visited the camp with £200 worth of groceries and bales of clothing. Sir Alfred Milner contributed a truck. She sent her report to a committee with recommendations for reforming the camps. She described that part of the country as silent and lifeless and prone to dust storms. She saw a few burnt farms.
The Bloemfontein camp was a good two miles from the town, “dumped down on the southern slope of a kopje, right out on the bare brown veld, not a vestige of a tree in any direction, nor shade of any description. There are nearly 2,000 people in this one camp, of which some few are men—they call them ‘hands-up’ men—and over 900 children”:
Imagine the heat outside the tents and the suffocation inside! We sat on their khaki blankets, rolled up, inside Mrs. B.’s tent; and the sun blazed through the single canvas, and the flies lay thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. In this tiny tent live Mrs. B.’s five children (three quite grown up) and a little Kaffir servant girl. Many tents have more occupants. Mrs. P. came in, and Mrs. R, and others. And they told me their stories, and we cried together, and even laughed together, and chatted bad Dutch and bad English all afternoon. On wet nights the water streams down the canvas and comes flowing in, as it knows how to do in this country, under the flap of the tent, and wets their blankets as they lie on the ground.
