His aspiration was strengthened with a petition of 21,000 British subjects, the Uitlanders, asking their home country to intervene in the tortuous affairs of Southern Africa. Milner and Kruger met at Bloemfontein to attempt to settle their differences. Milner’s military secretary wrote: ‘the conference goes on its rather weary way … meanwhile our Uitlanders will lose patience and upset the game’. Kruger, as rugged as an African hippo, remained obdurate; Milner believed that he would have to put more effort into ‘screwing’ Kruger. This was Chamberlain’s word. He might draw inspiration from events elsewhere. The English military had recently enjoyed some success. At the beginning of September 1898, Kitchener destroyed the Mahdist army at Omdurman; two days later the British and Egyptian flags were flying over the palace at Khartoum, which for Kitchener at least was some revenge for the death of Gordon. The victory was followed by a successful confrontation with the French in Fashoda, where the French sailed away to avoid a fight. All this put some spirit into the military authorities, and they were growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations between Kruger and Milner. It was said that Kruger would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth’, a phrase of Cecil Rhodes; at the same time the typewriters of the English press were growing hotter in their calls for action.
The death of Gladstone, in 1898, intervened. He had returned to Hawarden Castle to entertain the colonial premiers who had come to England for the Diamond Jubilee. In his old age his major preoccupation had changed from Irish Home Rule to the prevalence of jingoism which swept the press and the music halls and filtered into streets with the orange peel and the bunting. He had never really been interested in imperial attitudes. He was suffering from facial neuralgia which soon metamorphosed into cancer. He died on 19 May 1898, at the age of eighty-eight, and in the spirit of the new age was taken on a London Underground train before his funeral at Westminster Abbey. For some he represented one of the last obstacles to the steady progress of the state, and for others one of the last memorials to a once resplendent nation.
The time had come to call Kruger’s bluff. He had organized a ‘foreign brigade’, among them troops from Ireland, Africa, Germany and Prussia. In retaliation the British brought on the forces of the empire: Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and Indians. Milner wrote in a memo that ‘the case for intervention is overwhelming’. The British had become the white helots, ‘Uitlanders’ who had no rights. British regiments were despatched from Bombay and Calcutta, and Smuts sent a secret memorandum in which he stated: ‘South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood-bath.’ They would either be a defeated and hated race, the pariahs of Africa, or the sturdy founders of a United South Africa. Salisbury wrote in a memorandum: ‘I feel convinced that the Dutch leaders in Transvaal, Orange State, and Cape Colony, have got an understanding together and have agreed to make a long pull and a strong pull to restore Dutch supremacy in South Africa. If that is their view, war must come; and we had better take it at a time when we are not quarrelling with anyone else.’ He had written two months before: ‘I see before us the necessity for considerable military efforts – and all for people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and no power to England.’ For Salisbury it was largely a question of prestige rather than power. It was to determine the identity of what was known as ‘Boss’ in southern Africa.
The Boers delivered an ultimatum, but on the same day the British troopships made landfall at Durban before they moved inwards into Africa. War was declared on 11 October. The Boers, without uniforms and with precious little leadership, had the initial advantage. They knew the country; they knew the places for ambush and retreat which were denied to the 20,000 British and the 10,000 Indians who followed them. The Boers were also very good shots, accustomed as they were to hunting the springbok and the wildebeest. The same readiness and proficiency were not evident on the British side. The physical condition of the volunteers was appalling: when 12,000 came forward in Manchester, 8,000 were rejected as unfit. The most significant failure of the British in South Africa was the poor quality of the troops, at a time when army standards had been deliberately lowered. It was considered shameful and revived the ‘Condition of England’ question in the more direct terms. A correspondent in London wrote to Milner: ‘People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering, while ever echoed round the shrill and awful cry of “Terrible Reverse of British Troops”.’
As garrison commander Robert Baden-Powell, aware of the large number of Boer forces, set up his headquarters at Mafeking to facilitate the arrival of British ships and to deter the population from aiding the Boers. At the beginning of October 1899 it was surrounded and shelled. No one then believed that ‘the Siege of Mafeking’ would endure 217 days. There was bad news elsewhere. ‘Mournful Monday’ was followed by ‘Black Week’ at the beginning of December which claimed 3,000 lives. An epidemic of enteric fever was meanwhile killing fifty soldiers a day who occupied Bloemfontein. Nowhere was safe. ‘What’s them ’ere blokes on that bloomin’ hill?’ The English tents were on the slopes of Mount Impati, in the British colony of Natal, and now the Boers had crept out of cover to remove them. The English repulsed them, but at the cost of fifty-one dead and more than two hundred wounded. It was the beginning of a war played out to the accompaniment of drums, mountain guns, the Boers’ ‘Long Toms’, rumbling carts, 94-pounders, the snorts and whinnies of the horses and pack mules.
When the English retreated into Ladysmith from the mountain it was reported that ‘they came back slowly, tired and disheartened and sick with useless losses’. The siege of Ladysmith then began. It was not a little war. Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley were for that period the arsenals of empire in an otherwise hostile terrain. It was a great war fought from an impossibly long distance. It riveted the attention of the world, much of which was wishing and hoping for the demise of the British empire. In the ensuing battle of Ladysmith the British were driven back into the town, with many dead or injured, where they endured a siege of 118 days.
The bad news of Ladysmith, and subsequent defeats, shook the nation as it had never been shaken before. Victoria had said: ‘we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat’, but even her confidence was modified. ‘No news today,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘only lists of casualties.’ The public reaction was more severe. Something had gone terribly wrong. The prime minister, Salisbury, seemed sanguine and almost listless, feeling that from the start he had been outwitted by ‘Milner and his Jingo supporters’. Yet he saw the point. Any defeat would cast a shadow over the country’s imperial supremacy, to which, of all recent prime ministers, he most fervently subscribed.
As for the public, it was a calamitous awakening. The editor of The Times commented at a later date that ‘our national life and thought never were the same again’. The veil of British mastery had been torn, revealing blunder after blunder. To the rest of the world it revealed that the British were as bad they had always believed them to be – blustering and hypocritical and essentially incompetent. One commentator, Karl Pearson, noted: ‘the spirits of one and all, whatever their political party or their opinions might be, were depressed in a manner probably never experienced by those of our countrymen now living’. A diplomat, Cecil Spring-Rice, remarked in December 1899: ‘One lies alone with a living and growing fear staring one in the face.’