At his side as chief of staff, fresh from Omdurman, was his old friend from India days, Major Douglas Haig. The two had left England for South Africa on the same ship, and when French saw that Haig had not been allocated a cabin, he invited Haig to share his own on the top deck. As usual, French was in financial trouble, this time having speculated unwisely on South African gold stocks. Although it was almost unheard of for a commanding officer to be in debt to a subordinate, French borrowed a hefty £2,000 from Haig, the equivalent of more than $260,000 today, to stave off angry creditors.
On February 15, 1900, French's scouts finished reconnoitering the last enemy stronghold between his troops and the besieged Kimberley, fortified positions held by some 900 Boer soldiers on two ridges about three-quarters of a mile apart. Then, surrounded by snorting horses, the jangle and creak of boots and spurs, and the smell of saddle leather, the impetuous general gave the order that all cavalrymen dreamed of: Charge!
Successive waves of shouting British troopers in tall sun helmets galloped up the gently rising valley between the two ridges: first the lancers with pennants flying, their khaki-clad chests crisscrossed by diagonal straps, proud swordsmen next, horse-drawn artillery in the rear. French himself led the second wave of troops. It was a bold move, and it worked. Some 3,000 cavalrymen suffered fewer than two dozen casualties. "The feeling was wonderfully exciting, just as in a good run to hounds," said a British officer. "An epoch in the history of cavalry," enthused the London Times history of the war; the Boer foot soldiers "availed nothing against the rushing speed and sustained impetus of the wave of horsemen.... This was the secret French had divined."
There was, however, less to this rushing speed and sustained impetus than met the eye. To begin with, the Boer defenders on these ridges had no machine guns. Also, in the scorching Southern Hemisphere summer the British horses charging across the bone-dry veldt raised such masses of dust that Boer marksmen couldn't see a thing, and most of them fired too high. Only after the great dust cloud slowly dissipated did the bewildered Boers realize that the cavalry had thundered past them almost entirely unscathed. Most important, the Boers had neglected to use something that was quite plentiful in South Africa and which, a decade and a half later, would prove the simplest and most effective defensive weapon of all time.
Between their two ridges they had not strung any barbed wire.
Press descriptions of the cavalry charge were so exhilarating that millions of Britons ignored the fact that it wasn't exactly a classic dash that overran terrified enemy soldiers; rather, the charge was between two groups of dust-blinded Boer troops who were unharmed by it. Not a single cavalryman's sword or lance was bloodied. But no matter: when word reached the London stock exchange, applause burst out and the price of South African gold mine shares shot up; at a murder trial in Liverpool, when the judge broke into the proceedings to announce that Kimberley had been relieved, jury and spectators erupted in cheers.
"The Cavalry—the despised Cavalry I should say—has saved the Empire," the petulant Haig wrote to a friend. "You must rub this fact into the wretched individuals who pretend to rule the Empire!" For both French and Haig, the relief of Kimberley made their reputations and immeasurably advanced their careers. Particularly impressed were Germany's military observers on the scene, who were watching the combat closely, suspecting that someday soon they might be fighting these very commanders. "The charge of French's cavalry division was one of the most remarkable phenomena of the war," a German general staff report said, adding that "its staggering success shows that, in future wars, the charge of great masses of cavalry will be by no means a hopeless undertaking even against troops armed with modern rifles."
Germans and British alike were thinking of this war on the African plains as a rehearsal for a larger conflict. But it was not just about cavalry where they missed the mark, for they failed to pay attention to the machine gun. This was still thought of as a weapon mainly useful against large frontal attacks by Africans, Arabs, or other "natives." Both Boers and British had a small number of Maxim guns but, mounted on 400-pound carriages with steel-rimmed wheels nearly five feet high, they proved difficult to maneuver and were seldom used.
Although the war was not yet over, everyone on the British side was glad to have a victory to celebrate, no one more so than the bellicose Rudyard Kipling. He was the figure every nation waging a war of aggression sorely needs: the civilian celebrity who honors the warriors. Everywhere he went in South Africa he was wildly cheered by soldiers who knew his stories that celebrated their derring-do and his poetry that made music of their slang. At one banquet honoring his friend Milner, he made an ironic toast to the Boer leader Kruger, "who has taught the British Empire its responsibilities, and the rest of the world its power, who has filled the seas with transports, and the earth with the tramp of armed men." For several years now, Kipling had been sprinkling his prose and poetry with anti-German barbs. He believed this war would do "untold good" for his beloved British tommies, preparing them for the inevitable clash with Germany. The Boer War, said a character in a story he wrote at the time, was "a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon."
3. A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER
IN BRITAIN'S WEALTHY, aristocratic families, the first son would inherit the title and usually the land, while a younger brother often went into the army. One of those now fighting the Boers, for example, was Major Lord Edward Cecil, who had grown up in the palatial Hatfield House, on a historic estate where Queen Elizabeth I had spent part of her childhood. Along paved paths, Cecil's eccentric father exercised on a large tricycle, a young coachman trotting beside him, pushing him up hills and then jumping on behind for the downhill slopes. For the 21st birthday of an older brother, a special train had brought London visitors to a banquet at which they consumed 240 quarts of soup, 60 partridges, and 50 pheasants, served by white-gloved footmen in blue-and-silver uniforms. After private tutoring and Eton, Edward was commissioned as an officer in one of Britain's most fashionable regiments, the Grenadier Guards. In 1898, befitting someone of social prominence, he had been on hand to watch the Maxim guns in action at Omdurman.
As with many British officers, when he was ordered to South Africa the next year, Cecil's attractive young wife, Lady Violet, accompanied him. After he had joined his army unit far in the interior, she stayed on in Cape Town, the command center of the war effort. As loyal to the empire as someone like Charlotte Despard was rebellious, Violet busied herself working with the Red Cross, while frowning on the British women who arrived in Cape Town "without evening dress of any kind." A drawing of her from this time shows a stunning woman who could turn many a man's head: slender, full-lipped, with dark curly hair and doe eyes set wide apart. And turn one head she did, for here in the seaside city, beneath the spectacular flat-topped Table Mountain with its "tablecloth" of fog rolling off the top, she and Sir Alfred Milner were falling in love.
Decades later, after the world war that would upend both their lives, she combed through Milner's papers and her own, making sure that no intimate details were left to history. But we do know that their passion was mutual, intense, and, for many years, furtive. In Victorian high society, there was no question of Violet and Edward divorcing. And for Violet, who had left their four-year-old son in the care of nannies and her in-laws in England, to be known to have a romance on the side while Edward was under Boer fire would have meant betraying not just her husband but the British Empire itself. Nor could Milner afford the appearance of the slightest impropriety, since as high commissioner to South Africa, in a mansion with portraits of Queen Victoria on the walls, he was the moral embodiment of that same empire.
And there was yet a further reason why public scandal was unthinkable: Edward Cecil's father was prime minister of Britain.
In fact, it was he—Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury, to give him his full name—who had suggested that Violet accompany his son to South Africa. Edward's father's position was known to everyone
, including the Boers. When Edward's mother died of cancer, they allowed a courier under a white flag to pass through their battle lines surrounding Mafeking, a town where Edward and his contingent of British troops had become trapped under siege, with the news.
Violet was a woman of style, wit, and elegance. Her father was an admiral, and a brother would become a well-known general. As a teenager she had lived two years in Paris, studying music and art, meeting the impressionist painter Edgar Degas, taking in the opera and the Comédie Française, and often seeing a family friend—the French politician, journalist, and future wartime prime minister Georges Clemenceau. It would be good for Edward, his mother wrote to a family member, "to have a clever wife." Violet and Edward had known each other less than six months before they married, but to both it must have seemed the perfect match: to him, Violet appeared suitably wellborn, cultured, and dazzlingly beautiful; as for her, she was marrying someone whose social position promised a glamorous life near the pinnacle of imperial power.
It took little time, however, for the first problems to appear. Violet was the life of any party; Edward had a melancholy streak. She cared passionately about the arts; the Cecils had little use for them. Attending three Anglican services each Sunday, the Cecil family was devoutly religious; Violet was an atheist. At her first Christmas at the intimidatingly gloomy Hatfield House, she recorded dryly that four clergymen had come to dinner, "one, so to speak, to each daughter-in-law." Above all, the recessive Edward never fully emerged from the shadow of his famous father.
Alfred Milner, on the other hand, was a commanding public figure, confident of his destiny. "I wish Milner had a less heroic fight to make," Violet wrote to one of her brothers from Cape Town, adding that the high commissioner "telegrams all day, up at seven and generally not to bed until 2.... He is well, alert and cheerful, absolutely fearless."
Violet's privileged position gave her opportunities denied to other officers' wives, such as being invited to the front to inspect a contingent of guardsmen, and being asked by Rhodes to stay at his spacious Cape Town estate, Groote Schuur. She accepted both invitations, sometimes caring for wounded soldiers recuperating under Rhodes's roof—officers only, of course. Rudyard Kipling and his wife, Carrie, were frequent guests at the mansion's polished mahogany dining table, and became fond of Violet. An eight-person band of Rhodes's servants played on the steps for half an hour every night after dinner, while, from the long, columned porch facing Table Mountain, a herd of zebras could often be seen roaming an adjoining forest. A pet lion cub lived on the grounds. "One day I know he will break his chain and I shall find him in my bedroom," Violet wrote. "What shall I do?"
The imperial lion of Cape Town, Milner, lived a short carriage ride away. Like him, she rejoiced in how the war had made visible "the solidarity of the British people, wherever they were, and of the native races who lived under our flag. From Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and other parts of the Empire, offers came of help in men, money and material. The Empire had found itself." A continent away at Hatfield House, her little son, George, was given a miniature cannon that could shoot peas at toy Boer soldiers.
Avidly interested in politics, Violet watched debates in the Cape Colony's all-white parliament from Milner's private box in the visitors' gallery. The two of them also found time to stroll in the gardens of Groote Schuur and go riding together several times a week on the beach or up the slopes of Lion's Head, a hill with one of Africa's most breathtaking views. She joined him at a New Year's Eve party on the last day of the old century and at many official dinners. A sparkling, high-spirited conversationalist, she could be counted on to charm whichever visiting general or cabinet minister she might be seated next to. For Milner, it was a coup to have the prime minister's daughter-in-law as his unofficial hostess at Government House, where dinner dress for his aides-de-camp was black tuxedos with lapels of scarlet silk.
She was even included in a carefully posed photograph of Milner and his staff. He is seated, with watch chain, vest, morning coat, striped trousers, and the frown of a leader with no patience for trifles. Violet, in a long skirt, her curls tucked under a hat, stands behind him, her hand resting comfortably on the back of his chair.
Her effect on him was noticeable to others. "Sir Alfred is very happy and full of jokes, and chaffs everyone. One sometimes can hardly believe he is the same man as [before her arrival] last July," a friend wrote after Violet had been in Cape Town for a year. Some assume that the couple became lovers in South Africa, but in their book about this love triangle, Hugh and Mirabel Cecil—he is a collateral descendant of Edward's—are convinced that this did not happen until later. All we know is that on the evening of June 18, 1900, Violet Cecil and Alfred Milner dined alone at Government House and something happened that made her forever after fondly mark this anniversary in her diary. "Was it a declaration of love?" the authors ask. "A more than usually tender expression of affection? We shall never know."
For all the Britons engaged in the fight against the persistent Boers, whether civilians like Milner or officers like John French and Douglas Haig, something made this war disturbingly different from the other colonial conflicts they had known. Many people in Britain thought their country shouldn't be fighting at all.
One, naturally, was French's own sister. When Charlotte Despard first addressed a peace rally at the town hall of Battersea, angry hecklers tried to shout her down. But this left-leaning community already felt at war with Britain's upper classes and appreciated underdogs, and antiwar sentiment was not long in growing. Soon there was even a street renamed after Piet Joubert, a Boer commander whose soldiers fought several battles with the troops of Charlotte's brother. (Joubert Street still exists, not far from Charlotte Despard Avenue.)
Despard's denunciations of the war did not dampen her affection for the man she still called Jack. She seemed to think of him mainly as the little boy she had helped raise, not as anyone responsible for "the wicked war of this Capitalistic government" which she fulminated against from lecture platforms. Sister and brother dismissed the other's political opinions as forgivable quirks.
Many of the war's opponents in England were on the political left and saw the Boers as innocent victims. Such dissidents were frequently attacked by angry mobs; one group of antiwar socialists escaped harm only by fleeing to the upper deck of a horse-drawn London omnibus, where they could stamp on the hands of their pursuers, who had to climb a steep ladder to reach them. The youthful David Lloyd George, a Welsh member of Parliament and skilled orator, was one of the war's boldest critics. When he tried to speak in Birmingham, a brass band played patriotic tunes outside the hall and a street vendor sold half-bricks, "three a penny, to throw at Lloyd George." In the uproar, one man was killed by a baton-wielding policeman, and 26 people were injured. Lloyd George escaped the mob by slipping out a side exit disguised in a badly fitting policeman's uniform. At an antiwar meeting in Bangor, Wales, less lucky, he was clubbed on the head and momentarily stunned. Citizens of his own parliamentary constituency burned him in effigy.
Milner often came in for special attack as the man who had almost single-handedly started the conflict in order to seize the Transvaal's gold. Many of the "pro-Boers," as they were called, linked the war to injustice at home, foreshadowing later peace movements: every shell fired at the Boers, Lloyd George thundered, carried away with it an old-age pension. Though they did not prevail against the war fever, the Boer War protests proved an embarrassing—and enduring—crack in the imperial façade. They raised a question that would resound even more contentiously in the next decade, in a war whose costs, human and financial, were astronomically higher: was loyalty to one's country in wartime the ultimate civic duty, or were there ideals that had a higher claim?
Nowhere was opposition to the war stronger than in Ireland, where the spectacle of English troops occupying Boer land evoked the island's own history. Many Irish saw the Boers as Davids ground down by the English Goliath and reaching for their slingsh
ots. Irish sports teams took on the names of Boer generals. Much of the world also viewed the Boers as noble underdogs, and several thousand foreign volunteers made the long journey to South Africa to fight beside them. To British outrage, one of the largest contingents came from Germany.
Given Britain's overwhelming military might, defeating the Boers was only a matter of time, and more battle victories soon came, French and Haig getting credit for several of them. After the grand prize—the gold mines—fell under British control in mid-1900, various honors were handed out, with French awarded a knighthood for his relief of Kimberley. Another siege, the seven-month one at Mafeking that Edward Cecil had endured, was also broken at last. At Hatfield House, four-year-old George Cecil planted a tree, the Mafeking Oak, and lit an enormous bonfire to celebrate the liberation of his father at the other end of the world. When news of the relief of Mafeking reached Cape Town, however, Violet Cecil took to bed with a headache.
Several months later, after she had been reunited with Edward, she returned to England, having been away from young George for fourteen months. Her departure left Milner feeling "very low indeed," he wrote in his diary. "Still feeling profoundly depressed," he added the next day. Violet suggested to Edward that they return to South Africa, where the family could help build the new, British-dominated country envisioned by Milner, and she urged the same on her two brothers. But Edward, by now aware of his wife's feelings for Milner, refused. Instead, he remained in the army and applied, successfully, for service in Egypt.
Like the Cecils, other Britons naturally assumed the war was essentially over. After all, the Union Jack now fluttered over South Africa's towns and cities, garrisoned by hundreds of thousands of tall-helmeted troops who outnumbered the remaining Boer fighters more than ten to one. But, exasperatingly, Sir John French and Douglas Haig, like the rest of the British army, found themselves pursuing elusive, bearded warriors in civilian dress who refused to acknowledge that they had been beaten.