Read Online Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat by Jan Morris - Free Book Online
Authors: Jan Morris
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in their admiration of British qualities. As for the British regulars, they came deeply to respect the best of the Boers, and cherished the very name ‘commando’ to use one day for themselves.
These were Christian armies, fighting each other at the end of the Christian era; Boer and Briton shared a trust in many old truths, and a homely familiarity with the prophets and patriarchs of their creed. In one of the Natal battles a middle-aged British officer, Major Charles Childe-Pemberton of the South African Light Horse, was ordered to lead an assault upon a hill. He was portly and greying, having retired from the Royal Horse Guards some years before, and was a popular racing man, known always by his racecourse nickname, Monsieur L’Enfant, or The Child. Before the battle he confided in his brother-officers that he had a premonition of death, and asked them to see that on his grave was inscribed verse 26, Chapter 4 of the Second Book of Kings. The attack was made; the hill was taken; Major Childe-Pemberton, laughing at his own presentiment, was hit in the head by a scrap of shrapnel, and died on the spot.
They buried him nearby, ‘affectionately and reverently, in his own clothes, just as he was’, and above him they wrote his chosen epitaph: ‘Is it well with the child? It is well.’ 1
12
The Queen died with her century, the heroic spirit faltered, squalid images of burnt farms and diseased internment camps replaced the splendours of bugle and night march. The struggle degenerated into a messy and generally inglorious manhunt, soured by recriminations and reprisals, executions in the field, arson and broken oaths. Mile after mile the countryside was left scorched and desolate: in the internment camps the unforgiving Boer women, far from the camaraderie of the front line, nursed their dying babies. The Boers thought the British were resorting to genocide, and reproached them for betraying the white man’s code by arming African scouts and sentries. The British accused the Boers of treachery, fighting as they did in civilian clothes, and disregarding many conventional laws of war.
Squat and ugly blockhouses now disfigured the landscape, 8,000 of them, one every 1½ miles through the old Boer republics. Their protruding armoured balconies gave them an ominous mediaeval appearance, and between them thousands of fortified posts divided the country into enormous stockades, into which the commandos were laboriously penned. In one of Kitchener’s drives 9,000 soldiers, 12 yards apart, formed a beaters’ line 54 miles long, moving 20 miles a day, while seven armoured trains patrolled the railway tracks, and another 8,000 men manned the blockhouses all around. Across this hideous chequer-board the fugitive commandos clawed their way. They were like wild animals, Kitchener said, forever running away—‘not like the Sudanese, who stood up to a fair fight’. By the end of 1901 more than sixty British columns were in the field, but more than 20,000 guerillas still eluded them, and away in the east an exiled Government of the Transvaal, setting up its nomadic capital in farms, woods and high valleys, survived to the bitter end. Deep within the Cape Colony, where he got within sixty miles of Cape Town itself, Smuts prayed a favourite prayer of the Griqua tribespeople: ‘Lord come to our help yourself, and not your son for this is no time for children.’
The British won, of course, and the Peace of Vereeniging was concluded at their dictate in May, 1902: but the protracted guerilla campaign, the sordid anticlimax of it all, the thousands of deaths by disease or neglect, robbed the victory of any grandeur. In London the treaty was greeted far less boisterously than the relief of Mafeking two years before. The Queen had died, Rhodes had died, ‘Bobs’ had come home long before, Salisbury retired as soon as the war ended, Kitchener’s bludgeon methods had taken the fun out of following the flags. Never again did the
These were Christian armies, fighting each other at the end of the Christian era; Boer and Briton shared a trust in many old truths, and a homely familiarity with the prophets and patriarchs of their creed. In one of the Natal battles a middle-aged British officer, Major Charles Childe-Pemberton of the South African Light Horse, was ordered to lead an assault upon a hill. He was portly and greying, having retired from the Royal Horse Guards some years before, and was a popular racing man, known always by his racecourse nickname, Monsieur L’Enfant, or The Child. Before the battle he confided in his brother-officers that he had a premonition of death, and asked them to see that on his grave was inscribed verse 26, Chapter 4 of the Second Book of Kings. The attack was made; the hill was taken; Major Childe-Pemberton, laughing at his own presentiment, was hit in the head by a scrap of shrapnel, and died on the spot.
They buried him nearby, ‘affectionately and reverently, in his own clothes, just as he was’, and above him they wrote his chosen epitaph: ‘Is it well with the child? It is well.’ 1
12
The Queen died with her century, the heroic spirit faltered, squalid images of burnt farms and diseased internment camps replaced the splendours of bugle and night march. The struggle degenerated into a messy and generally inglorious manhunt, soured by recriminations and reprisals, executions in the field, arson and broken oaths. Mile after mile the countryside was left scorched and desolate: in the internment camps the unforgiving Boer women, far from the camaraderie of the front line, nursed their dying babies. The Boers thought the British were resorting to genocide, and reproached them for betraying the white man’s code by arming African scouts and sentries. The British accused the Boers of treachery, fighting as they did in civilian clothes, and disregarding many conventional laws of war.
Squat and ugly blockhouses now disfigured the landscape, 8,000 of them, one every 1½ miles through the old Boer republics. Their protruding armoured balconies gave them an ominous mediaeval appearance, and between them thousands of fortified posts divided the country into enormous stockades, into which the commandos were laboriously penned. In one of Kitchener’s drives 9,000 soldiers, 12 yards apart, formed a beaters’ line 54 miles long, moving 20 miles a day, while seven armoured trains patrolled the railway tracks, and another 8,000 men manned the blockhouses all around. Across this hideous chequer-board the fugitive commandos clawed their way. They were like wild animals, Kitchener said, forever running away—‘not like the Sudanese, who stood up to a fair fight’. By the end of 1901 more than sixty British columns were in the field, but more than 20,000 guerillas still eluded them, and away in the east an exiled Government of the Transvaal, setting up its nomadic capital in farms, woods and high valleys, survived to the bitter end. Deep within the Cape Colony, where he got within sixty miles of Cape Town itself, Smuts prayed a favourite prayer of the Griqua tribespeople: ‘Lord come to our help yourself, and not your son for this is no time for children.’
The British won, of course, and the Peace of Vereeniging was concluded at their dictate in May, 1902: but the protracted guerilla campaign, the sordid anticlimax of it all, the thousands of deaths by disease or neglect, robbed the victory of any grandeur. In London the treaty was greeted far less boisterously than the relief of Mafeking two years before. The Queen had died, Rhodes had died, ‘Bobs’ had come home long before, Salisbury retired as soon as the war ended, Kitchener’s bludgeon methods had taken the fun out of following the flags. Never again did the
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