I had pleaded.
It didn't seem possible that England would attempt to use force against the Transvaal, but I was frightened as Olive Schreiner was, and month by month the fear grew. One thing was certain: Chamberlain and Milner could make war if they wished, and it grew plainer and plainer that they meant to; they pushed Krueger to concession after concession, then declared them all worthless; and in the meantime English troops kept pouring into Natal and Cape Town. The old gorilla had to fight. War! The shame and horror of it ate into my very heart.
Almost the last thing I wrote in the Saturday Review was a prediction that if the English made war in South Africa, it would last for years and cost them two hundred millions of money and would alter none of the essential conditions. In fact, it would be at best labor and lives lost, the most brainless adventure that England ever engaged in. Years afterwards some London paper reproduced this prediction of mine as extraordinarily correct, and I remember Winston Churchill asking me one day how I had come to be so right.
'I wasn't right,' I replied, 'the war cost England more than a thousand millions.'
'What do you mean?' he asked in astonishment.
'When you speak of what it cost,' I said, 'you reckon up the money paid out, but you don't count the financial consequences. Consols before the war were 114; after the war they were 94 or 5: there was a loss of twenty points of some eight hundred millions of money; but if you lost one hundred and fifty millions on Consols, you lost two hundred millions on your railroads, and a proportionate sum on all the other industries. That ineffably stupid, brainless war cost over a thousand millions of English money, and nothing, less than nothing, was gamed by it. You won contempt and hatred in South Africa and gained nothing, not even fighting fame. Campbell-Bannerman was quite right in giving back their independence to the Boers: it was the only thing to do; but even that didn't atone for the atrocious bloodshed and wanton loss.'
The mere attempt to coerce Krueger showed such manifest stupidity that it forced me to doubt the English race, doubt whether they had political wisdom enough to carry out a great policy and be worthy of their astounding birthright.
Instead of beginning to settle up the great plateau of Africa from the north of the Transvaal to the Zambesi, they spent a thousand millions in ruining their prestige in Africa and bringing mourning into thousands of homes for no reason. But even Olive Schreiner could not stop Chamberlain from sending British soldiers into Natal to bring pressure on Krueger, and Milner went on talking and telegraphing rabid nonsense to excite the combative English feeling; and at length came the war.
By this time I had finished the first draft of my book on Shakespeare and was back in England; before even the war was declared, I went to see Lord Wolseley, who had been a friend of mine for a great many years. It was at the end of the summer before the war was declared that I asked him in his room in the War Office whether there was going to be war. He told me it was practically decided. I said, 'How terrible! What a dreadful calamity!'
He sprang up from the table. 'We are making no mistake this tune,' he said.
'I'll send out an army corps and bring it to a quick ending.'
'You don't really think,' I said, 'that an army corps will be sufficient?'
'There are not more than forty or fifty thousand Boers,' he said. 'I reckon that forty or fifty thousand British soldiers should be enough for them, and more than enough.'
'You don't know the country,' I said, 'nor the Boers: two army corps, four, five army corps will not be enough.'
He lifted his hands in amused deprecation. 'You don't know our English soldiers,' he said; 'at any rate, Buller is going out; he knows the Boers.'
'Buller!' I cried, and as soon as possible I went away. The next day I went and called on Buller and had a talk with him. I had known him, too, for many years, and had always looked upon him as a big foolish person, only to be tolerated because of his charming wife, Lady Audrey; but in this conversation, Buller surpassed himself.
'What are your tactics?' I asked. 'Where are you going to land?'
'Oh, I suppose it will be Durban,' he said; 'the nearest way to the Transvaal is through Natal.'
'But all Cape Colony will be seething,' I said, 'on the other side of you. The young Boers there will be able to go up through the Free State to the aid of their cousins in the Transvaal. What is your policy?'
'There is only one policy in war,' replied Buller. 'Get alongside the other fellow and give him hell.'
'But suppose he won't let you get alongside of him,' I said.
'There if, never any difficulty,' he said, 'if you want to fight.'
A few months later I read of a scene that came vividly before me as pictured in the London papers-Buller with an army of thirty thousand men brought to a standstill by the shooting of two or three thousand Boers hidden on the other side of a river. He sent out artillery and soon the sharp-shooting Boers had killed every one of the gunners and then sent a force across the river to take the British guns and dump them in the river; it was done without loss:
Buller with a force outnumbering the Boers ten to one beaten to a standstill by sharp-shooters who could use cover!
It was in late December or early January, after the war had begun, that Lord Desborough asked me to lunch at the Bath Club, and at the beginning of the lunch he said: 'I have asked Harris to come here because he was the only person to predict that the British forces would have many defeats. When Chamberlain asked for a credit of ten millions and everyone said that the war wouldn't last three weeks, no one except Harris saw that after three months we should need a credit of a hundred millions and should feel dreadfully disappointed at the outcome.' 'Twas just after Spion Kop, I remember, when Buller had tried to occupy the little mountain and a couple of thousand men he sent up were beaten by a few hundred Boers so that they had to be withdrawn the same day. The Times had just published a dispatch of Buller, in which he said that he had retreated from Spion Kop without losing a gun or an ammunition wagon. An army general at Grenfell's lunch started the talk by declaring that that was a splendid message of Buller-that he retreated from Spion Kop without losing a gun or ammunition wagon.
'Or,' I added interrupting, 'a moment's time.'
Everyone laughed; but the general got very red. When Grenfell pressed me for my opinion, I said, 'I am sorry to say that I think the English will win; the Boers have made as bad blunders as the English: they have been led away by the memory of '80–81 and by Buller's attack, and have gone to fight in Natal; they should have left only a small force on the frontier and gone down into Cape Colony to get recruits, where they could have got a hundred thousand men of their own race to help them. Because they have not done this, they will be beaten. The next English general will land in Cape Town and go up through Cape Colony, and in a month or so the whole aspect of the war will have changed.
'But nothing alters the fact that the war is the worst one that the English have ever been engaged in, except, indeed, their terrible defeat in the Argentine, which no one seems to remember. But this is even worse, for South Africa was already practically Anglicized, made English in sentiment from one end of the country to the other.
'I remember spending an evening with General Cronje, who was a typical Boer, but his daughters would talk of nothing except of the dramas on the London stage and how they longed to go for a night to Covent Garden to hear Grand Opera.'
I must have spoken with intense bitterness because at the end of the lunch Lord Desborough, in saying 'Good-bye' to me, said: 'I am afraid, Harris, we must part; when you speak against England as you do, it is like speaking against my mother; I cannot bear it. I am sorry, but we mustn't meet again.'
I realized then that I was completely out of touch with the English, and as the gloomy days went on, I came to be more and more isolated.
I don't know how to express what I felt about that inexcusable war and my detestation of the men who brought it about. I think everyone who reads what I have written about Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner must admit that I have treated them more than fairly, with sympathy, indeed, and a desire, above all, to omit no good feature of character, no gift of intellect.
But they worked together to bring about the South African war, and afterwards I always said and felt that they were viler than any criminal, two of those whom Dante meant when he said they were hated of God and of His enemies.
After the war, Chamberlain invited me to dinner and I replied, regretting that I couldn't accept. He met me a day or two afterwards in the lobby of the House of Commons and came up to me, smiling.
'Your letter rather surprised me,' he said. 'I thought we were friends and that you would tell me when you would be free, in case you had an engagement.'
