Mounted Boer guerrillas raided British outposts and railway lines, ambushed British troops, and then disappeared into South Africa's endless plains. A proper cavalry charge, like that at Kimberley, was no use if you couldn't even find the enemy. In response, the British decided to cut the roaming bands of Boer raiders off from their food and supplies. This meant that wherever the guerrillas attacked, British soldiers ruthlessly destroyed Boer farm buildings, crops in the field, and food stocks for dozens of miles in all directions. From some 30,000 farms, black pillars of smoke rose into the sky and flocks of vultures swooped down to feast on more than three million slaughtered sheep. French, Haig, and other commanders ordered troops to cut down fruit trees and poison wells, to use their bayonets to slash open bags of grain, and to torch families' furniture and possessions along with their homes. No one imagined that 15 years later this would be the face of war in Europe as well, or that armies would sow vastly wider swaths of deliberate devastation, or that it would be not only farms but centuries-old cities reduced to smoking rubble.
As British troops continued their ruthless farm-burning, what was to be done with the more than 100,000 civilians—almost all of them Boer women, children, or elderly, plus African farmhands—now left homeless? Here, too, came an eerie glimpse into the not-so-distant future, as the British opened a network of guarded concentration camps, row after row of white tents, often surrounded by barbed wire. The largest of these held more than 7,000 Boers, brought in by soldiers in high-wheeled covered wagons or railway flatcars, the grim-faced women clothed in long dresses and bonnets with neckcloths against the sun. Milner ordered all news of these camps censored from press telegrams leaving Cape Town, fearing that it would supply "the mad men at home with their most valuable material."
One day, however, at the beginning of 1901, a visitor arrived to see him bearing a letter of introduction from a member of her family in England whom he knew. He invited her to lunch at Government House, where Emily Hobhouse found herself the only woman among eight male guests, her surroundings indelibly stamped by the image of the British crown—on lamps, writing paper, and even the servants' livery. When Milner asked what brought her to South Africa, she said that she would rather discuss it with him in private. He politely promised her 15 minutes after lunch. She took more than an hour.
In that private session, Milner quickly realized that despite her impeccable dress and prominent family, his visitor was just the sort of person he referred to in confidential correspondence as a "screamer." Hobhouse was the founder of a group called the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund, and she had already joined Lloyd George and others in speaking against the war at public meetings in Britain. But that was not enough for her, and so she had come in person to distribute clothes, food, and blankets to war victims, including the very Boer women and children—as she had discovered to her horror on arriving in Cape Town—whom British troops were now herding into Milner's concentration camps.
Sharing a sofa in the Government House drawing room with his most unwelcome guest, Milner did not want to appear to have something to hide, and reluctantly he agreed to her request to visit the camps and distribute her relief supplies, which filled two railway freight cars. "He struck me as ... clear-headed and narrow," Hobhouse wrote to her aunt in England. "Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one."
Blue-eyed and fair-haired, Emily Hobhouse was 40 years old. In most of the photographs we have of her, she looks at the camera with unusual directness for a woman of her time, as she must have looked at Milner that day. We can only guess at what opened her mind to the injustices of a world far wider than the one she had been raised in. Possibly it was the way her father, an Anglican minister, angrily broke up a romance she had with a local farmer's son whom he considered beneath her—a relative of his had worked as a maid in their house. Or possibly it was the time she spent, some years later, studying child labor conditions with the encouragement of a liberal-minded aunt and uncle, well-known reformers. It was only after the death of her widowed father, whom she cared for through many years of illness in his rural parish, that she felt free to go her own way in life. She traveled to Cape Town on a cheap steamboat, second class, and apparently expected to do no more than put her organization's relief supplies in the right hands. That was before she found out about the concentration camps and went toe-to-toe with Milner.
On a bright moonlit night, Hobhouse boarded a train in Cape Town for a 600-mile journey into the interior. At the first camp she visited, the heat was overwhelming, flies covered everything, and in the tents where destitute, traumatized families were living, the nearest thing to a chair was often a rolled-up blanket. In the chaos of being rounded up by British troops, she discovered, some of the Boer women had gotten separated from their children. The food was terrible, drinking water came from a polluted river, and up to a dozen people were crowded, sick and well together, into each tent. When it rained the tents flooded. While she was interviewing one woman, a puff adder slithered into the tent. As everyone else fled, Hobhouse, no more intimidated by a poisonous snake than by a viceroy, tried to kill it with her parasol. Elsewhere, she saw corpses being carried to mass graves. "My heart wept within me when I saw the misery." (When a final tally was made after the war, it would show that 27,927 Boers—almost all of them women and children—had died in the camps, more than twice the number of Boer soldiers killed in combat.)
As the days went by and she continued touring the archipelago of camps, the scenes of horror only multiplied: "a little six months' baby gasping its life out on its mother's knee," she wrote to her aunt. "...Next, a girl of 24 lay dying on a stretcher." Furious, she issued demands to startled British officers: for milk, for a boiler for the drinking water, for nurses, clothing, medicines, soap. None of the camp commandants were quite sure who this well-dressed, well-connected woman was, but they knew she was angry and they were not about to say no to her. "I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can," she wrote, blaming the outrages she saw on "crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling." It was not only to her aunt that she sent letters. Thanks in part to a stream of them Hobhouse sent to English newspapers, the existence of the camps rapidly burgeoned into an international scandal. Antiwar members of Parliament denounced them in the House of Commons, leaving an alarmed Milner seeing this as the war's main public relations problem: "If we can get over the Concentration Camps," he told the colonial secretary, "none of the other attacks upon us alarm me."
To read the many letters Emily Hobhouse sent from South Africa is not only to see a war's hidden toll on civilians; it is to see, in this age that was so restrictive for women, one finding herself. Quickly Hobhouse discovered how to make her way around a country at war, learning from soldiers, for example, which valve you could open on the side of a stopped steam locomotive if you wanted hot water for tea. She slept in a missionary's home, railway cars, a stationmaster's quarters, and in a tent in one of the concentration camps. Once she even spotted a troop of Boer guerrillas galloping across the veldt. To be among so many who were homeless, dying, or at war matched nothing in her upbringing, but beneath the outrage and compassion in what she wrote home is a current of restrained exuberance as this country clergyman's daughter fully encounters the world for the first time.
After some five months, Hobhouse decided she could accomplish more by returning to England, and she booked a shared cabin on the mail ship Saxon from Cape Town in May 1901. Once on board, she discovered, in grander accommodations, none other than her archenemy. Sir Alfred Milner kept to himself, but Hobhouse, with typical determination, managed to corner him as he sat alone on the upper deck and immediately launched into a tirade about the camps. He heard her out, polite as always, then jarred her by indicating that he had received some 60 reports on her activities. "What an army of informers to pay!" she wrote later.
Milner was returning to London to dampen what he called the "pro-Boer
ravings" against the war that Hobhouse had helped stoke, and to have a series of secret rendezvous with his mistress, Cécile Duval. He would also meet with Violet Cecil many times, in public and in private; as the prime minister's daughter-in-law, she had become his eyes and ears inside the British government. On arriving at London's Waterloo station, he was driven off in an open carriage to receive a peerage from King Edward VII, whose mother, Queen Victoria, had died earlier in the year.
Hobhouse had her own agenda in England. She went to see the secretary of state for war and lectured him, too, about the camps—for nearly two hours. She produced a three-penny pamphlet on the subject and had it distributed to members of Parliament, then embarked on a lecture tour, speaking at 26 public meetings and moving audiences to tears. At Southport, hecklers shouted "Traitor!" In Plymouth, they threw summer squash, and in Bristol, chairs, sticks, and stones. Hobhouse kept some of the missiles as souvenirs. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain called her a "hysterical spinster."
After nearly half a year of political agitation in England, Hobhouse quietly set sail on a return mission to the camps. Despite her efforts to get her name removed from her ship's passenger list, Milner, himself now back in Cape Town, found out and had soldiers meet the ship when it dropped anchor, to bar her from coming ashore. The following day the local military commander appeared and demanded that she return to England. She refused. A few days later, she was ordered onto a troopship bound for home. She refused again. This time, soldiers picked her up and carried her. She struggled so vigorously, however, that the colonel in charge had to order her arms tied, "like a lunatic," he said. "Sir," Hobhouse replied, "the lunacy is on your side and with those whose commands you obey." Later, the colonel was asked, in this most unusual arrest of a lady, had there not been a danger that her petticoats might have become visible? "I had thought of that," the colonel replied, "and when she was picked up I threw a shawl over her feet." From the troopship, Hobhouse managed to send a last letter to Milner. "Your brutal orders have been carried out," it began, "and thus I hope you will be satisfied." Two officers' wives on board refused to speak to her for the entire voyage.
In putting the camps on the world's front pages, Emily Hobhouse had shown that she had the courage to defy public opinion in wartime, and in a far more destructive war, much closer to home—in which she would again encounter Alfred Milner—she would not hesitate to do so once more.
The guerrilla war in South Africa dragged on, to end only in mid-1902, when an uncompromising Lord Milner accepted the surrender of the last Boer fighters. Now established in a majestic, sprawling red-brick and half-timber mansion in the city of the gold mines, Johannesburg, he saw the next phase of his task as nothing less than "restarting the new colonies [the two conquered Boer republics] on a higher plane of civilization," and molding them and the two existing British colonies into one entity, which would soon take its honored place as part of the British Empire. It was taken for granted—on this alone the British and Boers had always agreed—that in the new South Africa the black majority would be powerless. "The white man must rule," Milner declared, "because he is elevated by many, many steps above the black man; steps which it will take the latter centuries to climb." More than anyone else, he was the architect of twentieth-century South Africa as a unitary state under white control.
If the new country taking shape was to be a shining example of British rule, it would need the best of rulers. And so Milner recruited from England a dozen or so bright, eager aides to help him run the unified territory. All his life, Milner's dynamism and air of high, noble purpose made him a magnet for ambitious and talented young men. Most of those he chose now were graduates, like him, of Oxford, and in their youthfulness they became known collectively as Milner's Kindergarten. His new personal secretary, for instance, was a profoundly upbeat Scot named John Buchan. Buchan found it thrilling to meet in a railway compartment a wounded hussar who had won Britain's highest military honor, the Victoria Cross, or to be sent on a mission to deliver some dispatches to his fellow Scot Douglas Haig. That occasion, incidentally, may be the only time that the laconic Haig is on record as making a joke. Buchan had taken a night train, overslept, and managed to get off just in time, throwing an army greatcoat over his pajamas. Taking in his dishabille, Haig told him not to worry: Brasenose—the Oxford college both had attended—had never been a dressy place.
Buchan had taken up his post before the final surrender, and referred to the Boer guerrilla commanders still on the loose as sporting adversaries. Echoing Newbolt's famous poem, he wrote that they "play the game like gentlemen, and must be treated as such." Once the game ended, he helped Milner with what he called the "fascinating and most hopeful work" of resettling Boer survivors on their ravaged farms. For this ever-cheerful man just three years out of college it was a heady experience to draft laws ("I must say I am rather proud of my Land Act"), supervise a hundred officials, and be responsible for shepherding around a visiting British cabinet minister ("not so big a man as Lord M"). Buchan shared a house with three other members of the Kindergarten. Dressed in black tie for dinner every night, they told Oxford jokes and the others teased the good-natured Buchan for almost buying himself a farm on the veldt that turned out to have no water supply. It was all excellent experience for a talented young person eager to rise in the world, and having Lord Milner as one's patron could ensure a faster climb. To be not yet 30 and helping run an entire country—could any other job better destine a man for still greater things ahead?
Milner and his Kindergarten got the gold mines working again at full tilt, directed the building of some 800 miles of new railway lines, established insane asylums and leper colonies, and drew up regulations covering everything from taxation to the "light corporal punishment" that could be applied to unruly workers. After eight years of war and peace, Milner finally returned to England in 1905.
Douglas Haig and Sir John French had already gone home, where they were amply rewarded for their military triumphs: Haig soon became the youngest major general in the British army, and French was promoted to lieutenant general. He presented Haig—to whom he still owed £2,000—with a gold flask inscribed, "A very small memento, my dear Douglas, of our long and tried friendship." The high-spirited French was delighted to collect honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, but was most pleased by his next job: commanding Britain's 1st Army Corps at Aldershot, Hampshire. Aldershot was considered the home of the British army, and its commander traditionally had influence in military circles well beyond his rank. "I daresay that he is not the cleverest man," one official wrote of him, "but he is the most successful soldier we could find."
"This is certainly a great piece of luck for me," French wrote to a friend. "I think it ensures my participating in the next war."
4. HOLY WARRIORS
NO ONE KNEW when Britain's next war would come, but everyone knew with whom it would be. The mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II was both expansion-minded and resentful that Germany had gotten into the race for African and Asian colonies so much later than Britain. All his life he looked back fondly at his youth as an officer in an elite regiment, and he loved all things military, seldom wearing civilian clothes except when hunting. His keen, anxious ambition echoed that of many other Germans, whose country had the largest population in Western Europe, but not yet, it seemed, proportional prestige in the world. Since the end of the 1890s, Germany had been engaged in a polite but determined naval arms race with Britain, while the British worked to maintain their strong advantage in the heavily armored battleships and faster battle cruisers that had allowed the Royal Navy to so long dominate the world's oceans. The contest between the two nations to mobilize shipyards, foundries, and machine tools to build these fearsome vessels gave a hint of something new in the military trade: warfare that might be decided not by bravery, dash, and generalship, but by industrial might.
Not everyone saw it that way, however. Moving up the career ladder in 1907 to the influential army post of insp
ector general, Sir John French had no doubt what one of his top priorities was: the cavalry. He found much sympathy from King Edward VII, whom he met frequently at dinners, receptions, and military ceremonies, and with whom he corresponded about cavalry matters. Disturbing anti-cavalry voices, he soon discovered, were to be heard all around him, such as that of a British military observer at the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, who reported that the only thing cavalrymen could do when faced with entrenched machine guns was to cook for the infantry. French fought back against such heretics, who ignored the example of his glorious charge at Kimberley. The most outrageous move of the naysayers was to persuade the army high command to abandon the lance as a cavalry weapon. If the lance went, could the next casualty, heaven forbid, be the sword? For several years French fought a fierce bureaucratic battle, through memos, whispers in the King's ear, articles in the press, and the recruitment of Boer War heroes as behind-the-scenes lobbyists. Finally, in 1909, he won, and the lance was officially restored to the cavalry's arsenal.
In his leisure time, the diminutive general could be seen furtively squiring around London various elegant women married to other men. He frequently crossed the English Channel on military business; when sent to observe German army maneuvers, he got on well with the Kaiser, who awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle. To French, however, peacetime felt like waiting. "In the campaigns I've been in during my life," he once wrote, "I've never felt satisfied at the end of any and have looked forward to the next."