As Our Forces Were
Still In A Great Minority, It Was Impossible To Stop The
Reinforcements, So The Correspondence Led To Nothing.
On October
7th the army reserves for the First Army Corps were called out in
Great Britain and other signs shown that it had been determined to
send a considerable force to South Africa.
Parliament was also
summoned that the formal national assent might be gained for those
grave measures which were evidently pending.
It was on October 9th that the somewhat leisurely proceedings of
the British Colonial Office were brought to a head by the arrival
of an unexpected and audacious ultimatum from the Boer Government.
In contests of wit, as of arms, it must be confessed that the laugh
has been usually upon the side of our simple and pastoral South
African neighbours. The present instance was no exception to the
rule. While our Government was cautiously and patiently leading up
to an ultimatum, our opponent suddenly played the very card which
we were preparing to lay upon the table. The document was very firm
and explicit, but the terms in which it was drawn were so
impossible that it was evidently framed with the deliberate purpose
of forcing an immediate war. It demanded that the troops upon the
borders of the republic should be instantly withdrawn, that all
reinforcements which had arrived within the last year should leave
South Africa, and that those who were now upon the sea should be
sent back without being landed. Failing a satisfactory answer
within forty-eight hours, 'the Transvaal Government will with great
regret be compelled to regard the action of her Majesty's
Government as a formal declaration of war, for the consequences of
which it will not hold itself responsible.' The audacious message
was received throughout the empire with a mixture of derision and
anger. The answer was dispatched next day through Sir Alfred
Milner.
'10th October. - Her Majesty's Government have received with great
regret the peremptory demands of the Government of the South
African Republic, conveyed in your telegram of the 9th October. You
will inform the Government of the South African Republic in reply
that the conditions demanded by the Government of the South African
Republic are such as her Majesty's Government deem it impossible to
discuss.'
And so we have come to the end of the long road, past the battle of
the pens and the wrangling of tongues, to the arbitration of the
Lee-Metford and the Mauser. It was pitiable that it should come to
this. These people were as near akin to us as any race which is not
our own. They were of the same Frisian stock which peopled our own
shores. In habit of mind, in religion, in respect for law, they
were as ourselves. Brave, too, they were, and hospitable, with
those sporting instincts which are dear to the Anglo-Celtic race.
There was no people in the world who had more qualities which we
might admire, and not the least of them was that love of
independence which it is our proudest boast that we have encouraged
in others as well as exercised ourselves. And yet we had come to
this pass, that there was no room in all vast South Africa for both
of us. We cannot hold ourselves blameless in the matter. 'The evil
that men do lives after them,' and it has been told in this small
superficial sketch where we have erred in the past in South Africa.
On our hands, too, is the Jameson raid, carried out by Englishmen
and led by officers who held the Queen's Commission; to us, also,
the blame of the shuffling, half-hearted inquiry into that most
unjustifiable business. These are matches which helped to set the
great blaze alight, and it is we who held them. But the fagots
which proved to be so inflammable, they were not of our setting.
They were the wrongs done to half the community, the settled
resolution of the minority to tax and vex the majority, the
determination of a people who had lived two generations in a
country to claim that country entirely for themselves. Behind them
all there may have been the Dutch ambition to dominate South
Africa. It was no petty object for which Britain fought. When a
nation struggles uncomplainingly through months of disaster she may
claim to have proved her conviction of the justice and necessity of
the struggle. Should Dutch ideas or English ideas of government
prevail throughout that huge country? The one means freedom for a
single race, the other means equal rights to all white men beneath
one common law. What each means to the coloured races let history
declare. This was the main issue to be determined from the instant
that the clock struck five upon the afternoon of Wednesday, October
the eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine. That moment marked
the opening of a war destined to determine the fate of South
Africa, to work great changes in the British Empire, to seriously
affect the future history of the world, and incidentally to alter
many of our views as to the art of war. It is the story of this war
which, with limited material but with much aspiration to care and
candour, I shall now endeavour to tell.
CHAPTER 5.
TALANA HILL.
It was on the morning of October 12th, amid cold and mist, that the
Boer camps at Sandspruit and Volksrust broke up, and the burghers
rode to the war. Some twelve thousand of them, all mounted, with
two batteries of eight Krupp guns each, were the invading force
from the north, which hoped later to be joined by the Freestaters
and by a contingent of Germans and Transvaalers who were to cross
the Free State border. It was an hour before dawn that the guns
started, and the riflemen followed close behind the last limber, so
that the first light of day fell upon the black sinuous line
winding down between the hills.
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