I replied, 'I am very sorry, Mr. Chamberlain, but I can only see you as the maker of the war in South Africa and I cannot meet you with any decent, friendly feeling. I think it a horrible thing to have done. I mustn't speak about it or I should be insulting, and I have no wish to insult you.'
'I am sorry,' he replied, 'but I did what I regarded as my duty.'
I said, 'I know, but the word 'duty' is worse than prostituted,' and I hurried away.
Milner, too, I saw afterwards, met in fact at a certain house, but when he spoke to me I went past him as if I hadn't seen or heard him. I was told afterwards that both Chamberlain and Milner spoke of me as a 'savage without manners,' but there are higher laws than those of manners.
Swinburne wrote a shameful sonnet in August, 1899, which was printed in The Times in defense of the war. He speaks of the Boers as 'dogs, agape with jaws afoam,' and ends with Strike, England, and strike home.
Meanwhile, Lord Roberts had taken over the commander-in-chief-ship and the whole war had altered. I did not know Roberts at all well. Years before, he had invited Sir Charles Dilke to pay him a visit on the northwest frontier of India and see what he had done with the British forces in Afghanistan.
Dilke asked me to go with him and at first I consented eagerly, but when I talked it over with Wolseley, he persuaded me that I was wrong: he told me that Roberts had nothing in him at all-was a little fighting Irishman under the thumb of his wife, Lady Roberts; he was sure I should only be losing my time. I could see no reason for Wolseley's condemnation, for I had always found him fair minded: I took his advice in this instance and told Dilke I couldn't go with him; and so I missed Roberts. Towards the end of the year 1899 a story was told me which led me to think that I would have to alter my opinion about him.
When it became plain that Buller could do nothing except make a fool of himself in South Africa, and lead his troops to defeat and disaster, the Defense Committee under Lord Hartington got together to consider matters, and for some unknown reason they all agreed that Roberts ought to be sent out; but the Secretary of State for War objected. 'We passed Roberts over,' he said, 'who was the senior, and sent out Buller. How can we go back to Roberts now? How can one confess such a blunder?'
'Quite easily,' said Lord Hartington; 'tell Roberts that we made fools of ourselves and we are sorry for it and beg him to come to our help; say that England wants him.'
The moment the War Secretary broached the matter to Roberts, he exclaimed, 'At last, at last!'
The Secretary of War asked him what he meant. He replied, 'You know they sent me out in '80, but when I got to Cape Town I found that Gladstone had just made peace after the bitter defeat of Majuba. The news sent me down to my cabin crying with rage-to make peace after such a defeat!
But when I thought it over I felt certain that if I lived long enough my time would come, so I resolved to give up drinking and smoking and live as long as I could for the chance of redeeming our name; that's why I said, 'At last.''
'I wanted to apologize,' said the Secretary, 'for passing you over and sending Buller out.'
'No apology needed,' said Roberts, 'I have my chance at last. I will do the work; you can tell them so.'
One day I read in the paper that Roberts when to church on Sunday at Cape Town, and I must confess this gave me a shock, till a friend told me the story that I have just told here. At any rate, Roberts went forward through Cape Colony and through the Free State to the Transvaal and led his troops against the chief force of the Boers under General Cronje and won a complete victory-almost without loss. One word in the account made the victory clear to me: the correspondent said that Roberts, holding the Boers in front, made a flank attack.
When he returned to England a couple of years later, I got to know him, and asked him, had I been right in my thought about his tactics.
He said, 'Quite right. The Boers had come from all parts of a country three times as big as England: the Boers from the north of the Transvaal couldn't possibly know anything about the Boers from the south, so when they were on the battlefield I knew that there could be no cohesion among them; and at the same time, I realized perfectly that they were far better shots than the troops of my army, so I protected my front with a cross fire of artillery while attacking their flanks, and at once saw I was justified; the Boers began to retreat; successive flank attacks broke up the whole organization, and my artillery turned the retreat into a rout.'
The bringing of two or three hundred thousand English soldiers up through Cape Colony and the Free State held Cape Colony to quietude, and the brains of Lord Roberts did the rest. The defeat and retreat of Cronje was the turning point of the war.
People still talk of Kitchener as if he had been the equal of Roberts, and I have heard the victory in South Africa attributed to his generalship, so I must tell what I think of Kitchener. I had met him first when I was in Cairo fifteenodd years before. I had gone out partly to cure bronchitis and partly to get an understanding of Egypt. I met Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, in Cairo; and he introduced me to his assistant, who was a far abler man, Gerald Portal, afterwards Sir Gerald Portal, who died all too soon for England.
Gerald Portal came and lunched and dined with me at Shepheard's Hotel, and took me to the English Club; and at the English Club one day he asked me whether I knew Kitchener; I shook my head. 'The Chief,' he said, 'Sir Evelyn Baring, thinks a great deal of him, but I couldn't form such a high opinion about him: he was so silent.'
'I remember,' I said, 'my father telling me that the only way for a man of no family and no wealth to get on in the English army or navy was either by servility or silence. He added that I was incapable of both. Perhaps Kitchener's trying silence!'
'I will go to Suakim,' I added, 'if you will give me a letter to him. I will see Kitchener and let you know what I think of him.'
I had already engaged in Cairo a Levantine Jew intepreter; he spoke English nearly as well as I did, and boasted that he spoke perfect Arabic; it seemed to me he knew nearly every known tongue, for his modern Greek was better than mine, and his Italian perfect.
In due time I went to Suakim and called on Kitchener and was invited by him to dinner. There were a couple of sheiks at the table, and from time to time Kitchener spoke to them in Arabic. His French was not good, though I had understood that he had passed some years as a young man in France. This surprised me so much that I asked him whether he knew Arabic.
'I am pretty useful at it,' he said.
When I got home I told my secretary what Kitchener had said. He burst out:
'I know Kitchener; I met him in Cyprus, worked for him: he knows no Arabic, not he! He knows nothing: he's a mere ignorant bluff. I tell you what to do. I'll teach you two or three Arabic proverbs; you shoot them off at dinner: the sheiks will understand, but Kitchener won't.'
He insisted so vehemently and so contemptuously about Kitchener's ignorance that I resolved to put it to the test, for his manner at the dinner had not impressed me; he had gotten his reputation through silence and not through wisdom, in my opinion. So I spent an hour learning two or three Arabic sentences till my secretary told me that I pronounced them perfectly.
The next night, dining again with Kitchener, I took the opportunity and shot off the wittiest of them. The sheiks burst out laughing and answered me in Arabic, and I grinned as if I understood what was said. Kitchener turned to me and said, 'You know Arabic?'
'Oh, I am not useful at it,' I replied. But I noticed that after that he used no more Arabic.
I came away from Suakim with the one word for Portal which I gave him the first day at lunch. 'No one,' I said, 'ever was so great a soldier as Kitchener looks.'
Some months later I found that Portal shared my contemptuous opinion of Kitchener's ability. And the South African war only confirmed my opinion.
As soon as Roberts left South Africa, the war under Kitchener dragged on. He founded a system of blockhouses, hoping to surround the Boers. I said his blockhouses were made for blockheads and predicted that he would achieve nothing with them; and he did achieve nothing, except waste of a huge sum.
When I got to know Lord Roberts after the war and came to a high appreciation of his soldier's insight, I wanted to get his opinion of Kitchener, and he gave it to me without circumlocution.
'You know,' he said, 'after beating Cronje by flank attacks, I sent Kitchener after him to round the Boers up and bring them to surrender. He had seen how I conducted the fight: I didn't dream of telling him anything about it; he must have understood, I supposed. The next news I got was that he pursued Cronje and his beaten force of four or five thousand men and attacked them at Paardeberg. He attacked them in front and lost twelve hundred men in an hour and had to draw off beaten. I almost cried when I heard it. When I came up I found the Boers by the river and immediately began a cross fire of artillery. The cross fire was deadly; the Boers took shelter in the river bed and
