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Authors: Jan Morris
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most memorable of them. Though it too is crowned by a clump of memorials, and though the line of the British trench is marked by whitewashed stones, it is a marvellously peaceful and gentle place, and of all the battlefields I have visited, seems the most truly regretful.
1 Though presently retired on half-pay, under the shadow of his failures in South Africa, Buller remained a popular national figure until his death in 1908—hot-tempered, bibulous and jolly to the last.
2 For example: The Commissioner has observed there are signs of wear / On the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square. / Unauthorized persons are not to climb / On the Landseer Lions at any time.
3 It turned out to be, when he did reveal it fourteen years later, a system of smoke-screens much used in the First World War. Dundonald was an ingenious inventor himself, once having himself pulled across the Thames in a watertight bag of his own design, while his grandfather was better remembered as Lord Cochrane, Father of the Chilean Navy and honoured eponymously by Chilean warships ever since.
1 They are overlooked now by a bust of de la Rey himself, who is buried close by, and by a monument to his eldest son, who died of wounds at the Modder River in 1899. When I was there in 1975 I thanked the gardener for tending the British graves with such care. ‘So long as you’re satisfied’, he gently replied.
1 He came from Kinlet in Shropshire, and the Childes own land there still, so unfailingly rooted in Englishness that when I recently inquired after them a villager actually referred to the present head of the family as ‘the young squire’. The Major’s grave has since been moved, and is now in a small military cemetery among the outbuildings of an Afrikaner farm, near the hamlet called Acton Homes: but the epitaph remains, and the old soldier still lies within sight of his one victory (for it is thought to have been the only time Major Childe-Pemberton went into action).
1 The bitterness of the Boer War was never quite expunged, and was fostered by the more extreme of the Afrikaner nationalists. When I first went to South Africa, sixty years later, people still told me of the ground glass allegedly put in the porridge of the internment camps, and showed me horrific pictures of black men armed by the British, while the Women’s Monument at Bloemfontein, commemorating those who died in Kitchener’s internment camps, was a national shrine outranked only by the memorial to the Voortrekkers at Pretoria. I must add, though, as an old admirer of the Boers, that when I explored the battlefields of the war in 1975 I heard not a word of reproach, triumph or resentment from the many kind Afrikaners who showed me around, even in my Jingo moments.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Wearying Titan
T HE world watched thoughtfully. ‘My dear, you know I am not proud,’ wrote the Tsar Nicholas II to his sister during the Boer War, ‘but I do like knowing that it lies solely with me in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa. The means is very simple—telegraph an order for the whole Turkestan army to mobilize and march to the Indian frontier. That’s all.’
He was exaggerating in fact, for until his central Asian railway system was complete he had no way of getting the Turkestan army to the Indian frontier, but he was only expressing the instinct of the nations. The Boer War had cracked the British mirror; the Jubilee was over; the Empire had grown too big for itself. It had seemed to most of its citizens invulnerable because of its very size, but now, it seemed, it was size that made it vulnerable. Empire gave the British a finger on every pulse, a say in every conference; but at the same time it made them subject to all the world’s anxieties, innately responsive not merely to the Mauser of a Boer, but to the whim of any foreign despot.
The Boer War showed that it was getting too much for them. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold had portrayed Great Britain as a
1 Though presently retired on half-pay, under the shadow of his failures in South Africa, Buller remained a popular national figure until his death in 1908—hot-tempered, bibulous and jolly to the last.
2 For example: The Commissioner has observed there are signs of wear / On the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square. / Unauthorized persons are not to climb / On the Landseer Lions at any time.
3 It turned out to be, when he did reveal it fourteen years later, a system of smoke-screens much used in the First World War. Dundonald was an ingenious inventor himself, once having himself pulled across the Thames in a watertight bag of his own design, while his grandfather was better remembered as Lord Cochrane, Father of the Chilean Navy and honoured eponymously by Chilean warships ever since.
1 They are overlooked now by a bust of de la Rey himself, who is buried close by, and by a monument to his eldest son, who died of wounds at the Modder River in 1899. When I was there in 1975 I thanked the gardener for tending the British graves with such care. ‘So long as you’re satisfied’, he gently replied.
1 He came from Kinlet in Shropshire, and the Childes own land there still, so unfailingly rooted in Englishness that when I recently inquired after them a villager actually referred to the present head of the family as ‘the young squire’. The Major’s grave has since been moved, and is now in a small military cemetery among the outbuildings of an Afrikaner farm, near the hamlet called Acton Homes: but the epitaph remains, and the old soldier still lies within sight of his one victory (for it is thought to have been the only time Major Childe-Pemberton went into action).
1 The bitterness of the Boer War was never quite expunged, and was fostered by the more extreme of the Afrikaner nationalists. When I first went to South Africa, sixty years later, people still told me of the ground glass allegedly put in the porridge of the internment camps, and showed me horrific pictures of black men armed by the British, while the Women’s Monument at Bloemfontein, commemorating those who died in Kitchener’s internment camps, was a national shrine outranked only by the memorial to the Voortrekkers at Pretoria. I must add, though, as an old admirer of the Boers, that when I explored the battlefields of the war in 1975 I heard not a word of reproach, triumph or resentment from the many kind Afrikaners who showed me around, even in my Jingo moments.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Wearying Titan
T HE world watched thoughtfully. ‘My dear, you know I am not proud,’ wrote the Tsar Nicholas II to his sister during the Boer War, ‘but I do like knowing that it lies solely with me in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa. The means is very simple—telegraph an order for the whole Turkestan army to mobilize and march to the Indian frontier. That’s all.’
He was exaggerating in fact, for until his central Asian railway system was complete he had no way of getting the Turkestan army to the Indian frontier, but he was only expressing the instinct of the nations. The Boer War had cracked the British mirror; the Jubilee was over; the Empire had grown too big for itself. It had seemed to most of its citizens invulnerable because of its very size, but now, it seemed, it was size that made it vulnerable. Empire gave the British a finger on every pulse, a say in every conference; but at the same time it made them subject to all the world’s anxieties, innately responsive not merely to the Mauser of a Boer, but to the whim of any foreign despot.
The Boer War showed that it was getting too much for them. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold had portrayed Great Britain as a
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