| The Grand Old Man—Soldiering at seventy—Interview in his Night-shirt—Earl Derby as a censor—Typical John Bull—First meeting with Kipling—Kitchener and the Picadilly generals—Hair and guts in African armies—Douglas Haig opens door of fame |
February 1900—Outside Cronje’s laager. Saw Lord Roberts for the first time. He came to our hospital to inspect some new style of tents we had brought over, and which are supposed to be better than the regulation tents. A very small, grizzled old man—they say he is seventy—but he sits his horse like a youngster. Though he is studiously polite to everybody, he has broken several generals already, so the brass hats and the red-collared popinjays of staff officers are wondering, when they go to bed at night, whether their jobs will be gone in the morning.
Kipling says of “Bobs” that he does not advertise. Well, he met another non-advertiser to-day. Colonel Fiaschi, in charge of our hospital, is a long, gaunt Italian, a celebrated surgeon, and a regular fanatic for hard work. When Roberts came, Fiaschi was operating. Ninety-nine hospital commanders out of a hundred would have handed over the job to a subordinate, and would have gone round with the great man. Not so Fiaschi. He came to the door of the tent with his hands all over blood and said:
“You must excuse me, my lord. I am very busy.”
“You are quite right, sir,” said Roberts. “Go on with your work. I will come round another time, if you will let me know when it will suit you.”
Later on, Fiaschi, with a couple of orderlies, was out looking for wounded in a fog, and blundered right on to an outlying Boer trench.
“Come on, you men,” said Fiaschi, “you have no chance. Give me your rifles.”
The Boers, thinking he had the whole British Army behind him, handed over their rifles, and Fiaschi brought them in. This was reported to Roberts. A staff officer who handed in the report told me that the old man said at once:
“Was not that the officer who refused to come round because he was operating? Give him a D.S.O.”
And a D.S.O. it was.
May 14th—Kroonstadt. Rode in with Lord Roberts’s staff. The niggers think that this war is a free-forall, now that the Boers are on the run. They started to loot the Boer hospital, carrying out bedding, food, etc, on their heads. They picked the wrong time. Just as they came streaming out of the hospital, Lord Roberts and his staff rode past. Without raising his voice the old man just crooked his finger to a staff officer and said:
“Put the Lancers on to them.” The Lancers escort jumped their horses in over the low wall, prodded our coloured brothers in the stern with the lances, and the hospital gear went back in quick time.
May 30th—Outside Johannesburg. Went with a dispatch rider from French’s force on the west of Johannesburg to Lord Roberts’s force on the east. Arrived about 3 a.m., and handed dispatches to a staff officer. Lord Roberts was sleeping on a little stretcher in a back room and came out in his night-shirt to look at them. He doesn’t spare himself, seventy years and all as he is. He marked each dispatch for the proper staff officer in the same unhurried, methodical way in which he gave the Lancers the orders to stab the niggers. Like Goethe’s hero, he works without haste and without rest. The dispatch officer introduced me as an Australian correspondent; and the old man, standing there in his night-shirt, with the weight of the campaign on his shoulders, found time to ask me how the Australians with French were getting on.
“When I first saw the Australians,” he said, “I thought they were too untrained to be of much use. But the work I have given them to do is the best proof of what I think of them now.”
I told him that the only thing the Australians wanted was more horses. He said:
“That’s what everybody wants—more horses.” Then, to the staff officer, “Make a note of that. Stir up the remount people and let me know what they are doing.” He then said: “Did you see many Boers retreating north as you came across to-night? Were they moving wagons and guns?”
We replied we had seen plenty, hundreds and hundreds of them, travelling in the dark, or camped by the roadside. Told him that Colonel Pilcher had captured a Boer gun after the dispatches were written. (As a matter of fact, we had left Pilcher sitting on the gun lest, as he said, some damned senior officer would come up and claim the credit of having captured it. “I’m not going to have any mistake about who captured this gun,” said Pilcher.)
The old man rubbed his chin, thoughtfully, and said, “One gun! Well that’s something.” It was well known in the army that the old man had been giving French a very rough time for not getting round ahead of the Boers and capturing their wagons and guns, at half a dozen different places.
Winston Churchill came through the same night with dispatches for his paper; he had the daring to ride right through Johannesburg on his bicycle. The town was full of Boers drowning the sorrows of their retreat in drink. If they had recognized him, they would most likely have shot him, as they were a bit out of hand, and he had written some things that they bitterly resented. One must hand it to this Churchill that he has pluck.
March 25th 1900—Bloemfontein. Met Kipling. He has come up here on a hurried visit, partly to see what a war is really like after writing so much about soldiers, and partly in search of health after his late severe illness.
He is a little, square-built, sturdy man of about forty. His face is well enough known to everybody from his numerous portraits; but no portrait gives any hint of the quick, nervous energy of the man. His talk is a gabble, a chatter, a constant jumping from one point to another. In manner, he is more like a business man than a literary celebrity. There is nothing of the dreamer about him. The last thing anyone could believe is that the little, square-figured man with the thick black eyebrows and the round glasses, is the creator of Mowgli, the Jungle Boy; of The Drums of the Fore and Aft; of The Man who would be King; to say nothing of Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd, and other celebrities. He talked of little but the war and its results, present and prospective. His residence in America has Americanized his language, and he says “yep” instead of “yes”.
After talking a little while about Australian books and Australian papers, he launched out on what is evidently his ruling idea at present—the future of South Africa.
“I’m off to London,” he says. “Booked to sail on the eleventh. I’m not going to wait for the fighting here. I can trust the army to do all the fighting. I knew this war was coming and I came over here some time ago, and I went to Johannesburg and Pretoria. I’ve got everything good and ready. There’s going to be the greatest demand for skilled labour here the world has ever known. Railways, irrigation, mines, mills, everything would have started here long ago only for this government. The world can’t afford to let the Boers have this country to sleep in any longer.”
I said that our men did not think the country worth fighting over; that it would not pay to farm unless one were sure of water.
“Water. You can get water at forty feet anywhere. What more do they want?”
I said that there was a vast difference between artesian water which rises to the surface and well water which has to be lifted forty feet. When it comes to watering 100,000 sheep, one finds the difference.
“Well,” he said, “that may be so in this Karroo desert. But you haven’t seen the best of the country yet. Wait till you get to the Transvaal.”
“If you take the country,” I said, “what will you do with the Boers?”
“Give’em back their farms. But we’ll show them how to run the country as it should be run. They don’t know what a grand country they have got.”
There spoke the idealist and the theorist. That was over thirty years ago and the great rush of skilled labour has not happened yet.
I was amazed at his cock-sureness; for I felt certain that I knew more about land settlement than did Kipling, and I would have hesitated about telling the Boers how to run their country. Then I remembered that he had been for years on the editorial staff of a big Indian newspaper. Once a man has been privileged to use the editorial “we” he feels that the world is out of joint, and that he is born to set it right. Remember Dickens’s editor who said: “Let us remind the Emperor of Turkey that we have got our eye on him.”
Kipling is two men—a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and he put off the toga of the politician and put on the mantle of the author. It was most fascinating. He yarned away about shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings; interested in everything; asking questions about everything; jumping from one subject to another, from his residence in New York to border battles on the Indian frontier; from the necessity of getting your local colour right, to the difficulty of getting a good illustrator. As he spoke, his face lit up and you began to notice the breadth of his head and the development of the bump of perception over his eyes. His training as a journalist may have made him a bit of an adviser-general to the world at large, but it taught him to talk to anybody and to listen to anybody, for the sake of whatever story they might have to tell. You could have dumped Kipling down in a splitter’s camp in the back-blocks of Australia and he would have been quite at home; and would have gone away, leaving the impression that he, was a decent sort of bloke that asked a lot of questions.
I asked him how he got all his material, and he said:
“Some of it I saw; some of it I was. As for the rest—I asked questions.” Later on, I was to stay with Kipling in England and to see more of this many-sided character.
March 29th—Outside Bloemfontein. Met Hector Macdonald, the fighting Scotch “Tommy” who rose to he a general and afterwards passed into limbo. One of the world’s great soldiers gone wrong. I had expected to see a dour, hard-faced Presbyterian sort of general, with the brand of the sergeant-major all over him. Instead of this, I saw quite a young-looking, pleasant-faced man with quick eyes, mobile mouth, and a general expression of light-heartedness; a man with a devil-may-care look in his eye, as if he would fight a policeman on the least provocation and think nothing of it. He yarned away about the Australians at a great rate, and obviously thinks our troops are as good as any for the work here. He looked young enough to be Lord Roberts’s son. He must be a wonder to have risen from the ranks to the position he holds, while still so young a man. Macdonald is as little of the “Muckle Sandie” —the typical Scot—as any man I have ever seen. A genius in his own line, he shared the fate of that other great genius, Oscar Wilde.
At the same time met Kitchener. As far as mobility of expression goes, you could put Kitchener’s face on the body of the Sphinx, and nobody would know the difference. He has the aloof air and the fixed expression of a golf champion. His staff say that he is all right when you know him, but you’ve got to know him first. They say that he has some humour concealed about him, and that he is a collector and is fond of literature. Perhaps he is like Thomas Bracken’s hero, “not understood”. He is taking over from Lord Roberts and will have a thankless job, as the English are sick of the war. There is a lot of jealousy in the army—in any army. The Piccadilly generals say that Kitchener is only a nigger-fighter, well enough when the enemy will rush at him and try to stab him with a spear, but not exactly the man that they—the Piccadilly generals—would have selected for the job of catching De Wet.
As a matter of fact, De Wet nearly caught him. K. of K. was with a force that was guarding lines of communication, so far from the fighting-line that the men were laying out a football ground; putting whitewashed stones round their tents, and thinking of marrying and settling down. Kitchener was occupying a house at some distance from the main body. The next thing was that De Wet’s men raided this outfit, galloping up to the lines in the darkness and shooting off their horses into the camp. If they had known that Kitchener was in that house, they must have got him. As it was the great K. of K. came running at full speed into the main camp, shouting, “Buller, Buller”, every ten yards. “Buller” was the countersign for the night, and Kitchener thought it as well to let the pickets know that he was not a Boer coming along in such a hurry.
SOME BOER GENERALS
March 18th 1900—At Wessell’s farm, outside Bloemfontein. We are moved out here probably to keep our troops from getting into mischief in the town. This is the best bit of country we have seen in Africa. We are camped on a high ridge, which is (like nearly all the rest of Africa that we have seen) perfectly bare of trees. The grass is knee-deep, almost exactly like our kangaroo-grass. Below is a flat of about six hundred acres covered with maize, growing very well, and about eight feet high. All among the maize there are thousands of melons—water-melons, rock-melons, pie-melons—and pumpkins; the fruit is so thick that a horse can hardly avoid smashing it as we ride through the rows of corn. From this ridge, at least six houses are in sight, each with its dam of water, its mass of willows and poplars, and its fruit garden. The soil is a rich red loam; and the grass is so good that horses, when turned loose to graze, hardly move ten yards from the same spot. The owners of these farms, and their farmhands, are the Boers of whose uncivilized ignorance we have heard so much. They have the latest air-meter windmills, they use the springs of water to the best advantage in irrigation, and in the town we can get anything that could be got in an Australian town of similar size.
If one goes to these outlying farms, the man of the house is always away on commando, but the Afrikander woman is as a rule the exact counterpart of the girl of any Australian country town. They are great on tennis—nearly every farm has its tennis-court. They have their little assembly balls; and one clique does not mix with the other clique, just as in Australia. In peace time they go to Johannesburg for balls and races and so forth. Now they go to the hospitals and act as nurses. When they were besieging Ladysmith, the wives and daughters and sweethearts of the burghers used to go down from Heidelberg by excursion train every Saturday and hold a kind of picnic. Old Piet Joubert found them such a nuisance that he forbade any women coming down, except nurses. Then they all put red crosses on their arms and went as nurses—more nurses than patients—till even the nurses were not allowed to go down. When we cleared the Boers out of Heidelberg, all these women rolled up to our hospital and started nursing the sick Tommies with just as much interest as their own men. The Boers have been fighting all through their history and they take war as they find it.
Outside Thabanchu—Went with two celebrated civil surgeons, Drs MacCormick and Scot Skirving, with an ambulance to pick up a wounded man. Rode round a kopje and found ourselves right in the middle of a Boer commando. Great chance to see how they campaigned.
We saw a lot of rough, dirty, bearded men, just like a crowd of shearers or farm-hands, as no doubt most of them were. Each man was leading a pony and carrying a rifle. The rifle was the only thing neat and workmanlike about them. Their clothes were poor, ready-made slops; their hats every kind of battered old felt; their saddles were wretched things, worn out of shape. No two men were dressed alike; they were all ages, all sizes and all classes; all were dirty, with rough, unshaven faces. But we did not take much notice of that, as campaigning is not clean work, and we ourselves had not had our clothes off for a week. They had no Cape carts, as they were too near our forces and might have to clear out at a moment’s notice. They didn’t send quartermasters to draw their rations or their forage or anything like that. Each man led his horse up to the barn and came out with a bundle of horse forage under his arm. Then they drew off to camp in little groups. Each had a blanket on his saddle. Some had a white blanket, some blue, some red, and some had gaudy-coloured rugs. Each man was his own ordnance, supply, and remount department.
A boy of fifteen years of age, who could speak English, was sent with us to find the wounded man. A talkative youngster, chattering away volubly. He took himself very seriously, as boys of that age are apt to do. We asked him how long the Boers would go on fighting. He struck an attitude and said:
“Till the last Afrikander is killed. If there is only he and I left,” he went on, touching the man next him, “we will fight till we are both killed and then you will have the land. Till then, no.”
He was evidently a youngster of some position in life, and the two men with him were his followers in some way, his farm-hands, probably. They seemed to be half amused at, and half proud of his tall talk. I asked him his name, and he said something that sounded like “Verry,” but it may have been “Fourie.”
“I am a wonderful fellow,” he said. “I cannot miss a man up to eight hundred yards. The English are brave enough, but they cannot shoot. Ah, this man-shooting is difficult. Buck-shooting is easy, but the buck does not fire back.”
“In the first part of this war,” he said, “we suffered too much from hair and guts.”
Asked to explain this cryptic statement, he said:
“All our generals were old men, fat men with big beards. They had fought Zulus, and we thought they could fight a war, but they could not handle big numbers of men. A hunting-party, yes; but a war, no. Now we have trained men, like Botha, and we will do better. Cronje was one of the old generals, and we have better fighting generals than Cronje. We are with General Olivier and he is very good.”
When one comes to think of it, a lot of Boer generals had French-sounding names, such as Olivier, Cellier, Du Toit, Du Plessis, etc.—probably descendants of French Huguenots.
This boy let us look into the General’s headquarters. About a dozen large, hairy Boers were sitting round the room, smoking silently. A little girl was nursing a baby in a corner. A teapot and cups were on the table. It reminded one of the pictures of the “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” in Burns’s poems.
We picked up the wounded man, and the boy saw us out of their lines. On parting, he said: “I hope to meet you again, but I do not want to be a prisoner and have to go to Capetown and catch fish. If I do go there, and they give me a line, I will catch all the fish.”
This fish-catching business is the one Boer joke. When Lord Roberts accepted the surrender of a big number of men, he remarked on the absence of wounded, and the Boers said, “We sent them away, because they don’t like fish.” Then they all laughed.
Lord Roberts, who is a serious-minded man and was not in the joke, looked at them in a puzzled sort of way. He wondered what fish had to do with it, until his staff explained that every Boer expected (if made a prisoner) to be sent to an island to catch fish till the war was over.
During all this fighting French and Haig did all the cavalry work and were among the few generals that ever really got in touch with the enemy. Other generals only saw the tails of their horses retreating round a hill. French was like the cat who walked by himself—preferably on the tiles—he had little to say to anybody. In temperament he was like a fox-terrier, always ready to attack the nearest enemy. It was lucky for him that he had the cool, clear-headed Haig at his elbow. Otherwise, he might have walked into a disaster or two that would have left some other general to command the British army in France in the Great War.
As the Tommies put it: “Haig carried French’s brains.”
French would take one look at a position and say:
“I think we’ll go up here, Douglas.”
But Haig would say: “I think that’s the centre of their position, sir. Suppose we send a patrol up these hills on the right, and get the beggars to shoot a bit. Then we’ll know where they are.”
Like Carlyle’s genius, Haig had the capacity to take infinite pains. His instructions were always clear and distinct, and he meant them to be obeyed. As to his appearance, everybody has seen thousands of photos of Haig. Probably no man in the world ever got so much publicity. A very square-chinned man, with a broad forehead, he might have made a great public-school teacher, or a great judge. He gave the impression of being a very earnest man, who took things seriously. In this he differed from French, whose face had not a wrinkle on it, and who took all things as they came, especially women. Both had clear eyes and clear complexions, thus conforming to the dictum of General Dan Tucker, who said that a man needed good guts to get anywhere in the army.
Luckily for me, Haig had been in Australia, where I had seen him play polo. After examining my credentials, he said:
“Now, look here. I ought to send you round to army headquarters and let them decide whether you are to stay or not, but I’ll let you stop here on this understanding. Everything you write has to be censored by me. If you try to send anything away that isn’t censored, then you’ll be sent away. You’ve got to play the game. You mustn’t go anywhere, or do anything, without getting the proper permission. Sometimes the wires are crowded; then each correspondent is allowed to send so many words and no more. One man sent a message in the morning and another message in the afternoon; but we found it out and he has been sent away. Don’t try to be too clever, and you’ll get along all right.”
Haig explained the duties and powers of a war correspondent by saying: “You can come out with the staff and see anything that’s going on. If you want any information, come to me and I’ll tell you—if I have time. Don’t worry the General. He’s not at his best with correspondents any time, and he might say something you didn’t like. Let him alone and he’ll let you alone. We’re going out in the morning and you can come along if you like.”
When the staff moved out next morning it consisted of the General and his brigade major; a young officer with red tabs, to gallop about with messages and orders; a signalling officer; the staff representatives of the medical and artillery services; half a dozen foreign attachés, who were allowed to accompany the war to see how Britain’s army stood comparison with their own; several wealthy Jews, who had been hunted out of Johannesburg by the war and somehow got on to French’s staff as intelligence officers; and a few dispirited war correspondents, who reckoned that nothing was going to happen. Sometimes things happened; more often they didn’t.
Army officers are like cricketers in that they are given their innings. If they make one bad stroke and get caught, they are out—and they very seldom get a second innings. Scores of men are ready to step into their places, and the army has no mercy for failures. If French and Haig had fallen down on their job in South Africa, the history of the world might have been different. As it was, they managed to carry their bats out, against tricky bowling, and were due to go in first for the British Army when the Great War came on.