It is impossible to speak or write about the South
African War without mentioning the Concentration Camps. A great deal of fuss
was made about them, not only abroad, where all the enemies of England took
a particular and most vicious pleasure in magnifying the so-called cruelties
which were supposed to take place, but also in the English Press, where long
and heartrending accounts appeared concerning the iniquities and injustices
practised by the military authorities on the unfortunate Boer families
assembled in the Camps.
In recurring to this long-forgotten theme, I must first
of all say that I do not hold a brief for the English Government or for the
administration which had charge of British interests in South Africa. But
pure and simple justice compels me to protest, first against the use which
was made for party purposes of certain regrettable incidents, and, more
strongly still, against the totally malicious and ruthless way in which the
incidents were interpreted.
It is necessary before passing a judgment on the
Concentration Camps to explain how it came about that these were organised.
At the time of which I am writing people imagined that by Lord Kitchener's
orders Boer women, children and old people were forcibly taken away from
their homes and confined, without any reason for such an arbitrary
proceeding, in unhealthy places where they were subjected to an existence of
privation as well as of humiliation and suffering. Nothing of the kind had
taken place.
The idea of the Camps originated at first from the
Boers themselves in an indirect way. When the English troops marched into
the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, most of the farmers who composed
the bulk of the population of the two Republics having taken to arms, there
was no one left in the homes they had abandoned save women, children and old
men no longer able to fight. These fled hurriedly as soon as English
detachments and patrols were in sight, but most of the time they did not
know where they could fly to, and generally assembled in camps somewhere on
the veldt, where they hoped that the British troops would not discover them.
There, however, they soon found their position intolerable owing to the want
of food and to the lack of hygienic precautions.
The British authorities became aware of this state of
things and could not but try to remedy it. Unfortunately, this was easier
said than done. To come to the help of several thousands of people in a
country where absolutely no resources were to be found was a quite
stupendous task, of a nature which might well have caused the gravest
anxieties to the men responsible for the solution. It was then that the
decision was reached to organise upon a reasonable scale camps after the
style of those which already had been inaugurated by the Boers themselves.
The idea, which was not a bad one, was carried out in
an unfortunate manner, which gave to the world at large the idea that the
burgher families who were confined in these camps were simply put into a
prison which they had done nothing to deserve. The Bond Press, always on the
alert to reproach England, seized hold of the establishment of the Camps to
transform into martyrs the persons who had been transferred to them, and
soon a wave of indignation swept over not only South Africa, but also over
Britain. This necessary act of human civilisation was twisted to appear as
an abuse of power on the part of Lord Roberts and especially of Lord
Kitchener, who, in this affair, became the scapegoat for many sins he had
never committed. The question of the Concentration Camps was made the
subject of interpellations in the House of Commons, and indignation meetings
were held in many parts of England. The Nonconformist Conscience was deeply
stirred at what was thought to be conduct which not even the necessities of
war could excuse. Torrents of ink were spilt to prove that at the end of the
nineteenth century measures and methods worthy of the Inquisition were
resorted to by British Government officials, who—so the ready writers and
ready-tongued averred—with a barbarity such as the Middle Ages had not
witnessed, wanted to be revenged on innocent women and children for the
resistance their husbands and fathers were making against an aggression
which in itself nothing could justify.
So far as the Boers themselves were concerned, I think
that a good many among them viewed the subject with far more equanimity than
the English public. For one thing, the fact of their women and children
being put in places where at least they would not die of hunger must have
come to them rather in the light of a relief than anything else. Then, too,
one must not lose sight of the conditions under which the Boer burghers and
farmers used to exist in normal times. Cleanliness did not rank among their
virtues; and, as a rule, hygiene was an unknown science. They were mostly
dirty and neglected in their personal appearance, and their houses were
certainly neither built nor kept in accordance with those laws of sanitation
which in the civilised world have become a matter of course. Water was
scarce, and the long and torrid summers, during which every bit of
vegetation was dried up on the veldt, had inured the population to certain
privations which would have been intolerable to Europeans. These things, and
the unfortunate habits of the Boers, made it extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to realise in the Camps any approach to the degree of
cleanliness which was desirable.
To say that the people in the Concentration Camps were
happy would be a gross exaggeration, but to say that they were martyrs would
convey an equally false idea. When judging of facts one ought always to
remember the local conditions under which these facts have developed. A
Russian moujik sent to Siberia does not find that his life there is very
much different from what it was at home, but a highly civilised,
well-educated man, condemned to banishment in those frozen solitudes,
suffers acutely, being deprived of all that had made existence sweet and
tolerable to him. I feel certain that an Englishman, confined in one of the
Concentration Camps of South Africa, would have wished himself dead ten
times a day, whilst the wife of a Boer farmer would not have suffered
because of missing soap and water and clean towels and nicely served food,
though she might have felt the place hot and unpleasant, and might have
lamented over the loss of the home in which she had lived for years.
The Concentration Camps were a necessity, because
without them thousands of people, the whole white population of a country
indeed, amounting to something over sixty thousand people, would have died
of hunger and cold.
The only means of existence the country Boers had was
the produce of their farms. This taken away from them, they were left in the
presence of starvation, and starvation only. This population, deprived of
every means of subsistence, would have invaded Cape Colony, which already
was overrun with white refugees from Johannesburg and the Rand, who had
proved a prolific source of the greatest annoyance to the British
Government. To allow this mass of miserable humanity to wander all over the
Colony would have been inhuman, and I would like to know what those who, in
England and upon the Continent, were so indignant over the Concentration
Camps would have said had it turned out that some sixty thousand human
creatures had been allowed to starve.
The British Government, owing to the local conditions
under which the South African War came to be fought, found itself in a
dilemma, out of which the only escape was to try to relieve wholesale misery
in the most practical manner possible. There was no time to plan out with
deliberation what ought to be done; some means had to be devised to keep a
whole population alive whom an administration would have been accused of
murdering had there been delay in feeding it.
There was also another danger to be faced had the veldt
been allowed to become the scene of a long-continued migration of
nations—that of allowing the movements of the British troops to become
known, thereby lengthening a war of already intolerable length, to say
nothing of exposing uselessly the lives of English detachments, which, in
this guerrilla kind of warfare, would inevitably have occurred had the Boer
leaders remained in constant communication with their wandering compatriots.
Altogether the institution of the Concentration Camps
was not such a bad one originally. Unfortunately, they were not organised
with the seriousness which ought to have been brought to bear on such a
delicate matter, and their care was entrusted to people who succeeded,
unwittingly perhaps, in making life there less tolerable than it need have
been.
I visited some of the Concentration Camps, and looked
into their interior arrangements with great attention. The result of my
personal observations was invariably the same—that where English officials
were in charge of these Camps everything possible was done to lighten the
lot of their inmates. But where others were entrusted with surveillance,
every kind of annoyance, indignity and insult was offered to poor people
obliged to submit to their authority.
In this question, as in many others connected with the
Boer War, it was the local Jingoes who harmed the British Government more
than anything else, and the Johannesburg Uitlanders, together with the
various Volunteer Corps and Scouts, brought into the conduct of the
enterprises with which they were entrusted an intolerance and a smallness of
spirit which destroyed British prestige far more than would have done a
dozen unfortunate wars. The very fact that one heard these unwise people
openly say that every Boer ought to be killed, and that even women and
children ought to be suppressed if one wanted to win the war, gave abroad
the idea that England was a nation thirsting for the blood of the
unfortunate Afrikanders. This mistaken licence furnished the Bond with the
pretext to persuade the Dutch Colonists to rebel, and the Boer leaders with
that of going on with their resistance until their last penny had been
exhausted and their last gun had been captured.
Without these detestable Jingoes, who would have done
so much harm not only to South Africa, but also to their Mother Country,
England, it is certain that an arrangement, which would have brought about
an honourable peace for everybody, could have come much sooner than it did.
A significant fact worth remembering—that the Boers did not attempt to
destroy the mines on the Rand—goes far to prove that they were not at all so
determined to hurt British property, or to ruin British residents, or to
destroy the large shareholder concerns to which the Transvaal owed its
celebrity, as was credited to them.
When the first rumours that terrible things were going
on in the Concentration Camps reached England there were found at once
amateurs willing to start for South Africa to investigate the truth of the
accusations. A great fuss was made over an appeal by Lady Maxwell, the wife
of the Military Governor of Pretoria, in which she entreated America to
assist her in raising a fund to provide warm clothing for the Boer women and
children. Conclusions were immediately drawn, saddling the military
authorities with responsibility for the destitution in which these women and
children found themselves. But in the name of common sense, how could one
expect that people who had run away before what they believed to be an
invasion of barbarians determined to burn down and destroy all their
belongings—how could one expect that these people in their flight would have
thought about taking with them their winter clothes, which, in the hurry of
a departure in a torrid summer, would only have proved a source of
embarrassment to them? More recently we have seen in Belgium, France, Poland
and the Balkans what occurred to the refugees who fled before foreign
invasion. The very fact of Lady Maxwell's appeal proved the solicitude of
the official English classes for the unfortunate Boers and their desire to
do something to provide them with the necessaries of life.
Everybody knows the amount of money which is required
in cases of this kind, and—in addition to America's unstinting
response—public and private charity in Britain flowed as generously as it
always does upon every occasion when an appeal is made to it in cases of
real misfortune. But when it comes to relieve the wants of about sixty-three
thousand people, of all ages and conditions, this is not so easy to do as
persons fond of criticising things which they do not understand are apt
sweepingly to declare. Very soon the question of the Concentration Camps
became a Party matter, and was made capital of for Party purposes without
discrimination or restraint. Sham philanthropists filled the newspapers with
their indignation, and a report was published in the form of a pamphlet by
Miss Hobhouse, which, it is to be feared, contained some percentage of tales
poured into her ears by people who were nurtured in the general contempt for
truth which at that time existed in South Africa.
If the question of Concentration Camps had been
examined seriously, it would have been at once perceived what a tremendous
burden the responsibility of having to find food and shelter for thousands
of enemy people imposed on English officials. No one in Government circles
attempted or wished to deny, sorrowful as it was to have to recognise it,
that the condition of the Camps was not, and indeed could not be, nearly
what one would have wished or desired. On the other hand, the British
authorities were unremitting in their efforts to do everything which was
compatible with prudence to improve the condition of these Camps.
Notwithstanding, people were so excited in regard to the question, and it
was so entirely a case of "Give a dog a bad name," that even the appointment
of an Imperial Commission to report on the matter failed to bring them to
anything approaching an impartial survey. Miss Hobhouse's report had excited
an emotion only comparable to the publication of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's famous
novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Miss Hobhouse came to South Africa inspired by the most
generous motives, but her lack of knowledge of the conditions of existence
common to everyone in that country prevented her from forming a true opinion
as to the real hardship of what she was called upon to witness. Her own
interpretations of the difficulties and discomforts which she found herself
obliged to face proved that she had not realised what South Africa really
was. Her horror at the sight of a snake in one of the tents she visited
could only evoke a smile from those who had lived for some time in that
country, as a visitor of that particular kind was possible even in the
suburbs of Cape Town, and certainly offered nothing wonderful in a tent on
the high veldt. The same remark can be applied to the hotels, which Miss
Hobhouse described as something quite ghastly. Everyone who knew what South
Africa really was could only agree with her that the miserable places there
were anything but pleasant residences, but the fuss which she made as to
these trivial details could only make one sceptical as to the genuineness of
the other scenes which she described at such length. No one who had had
occasion to watch the development of the war or the circumstances which had
preceded it could bring himself to believe with her that the British
Government was guilty of premeditated cruelty.
Of course, it was quite dreadful for those who had been
taken to the Concentration Camps to find themselves detained there against
their will, but at the same time, as I have already remarked, the question
remains as to what these people would have done had they been left
absolutely unprotected and unprovided for among the remnants of what had
once been their homes. It was certain that Miss Hobhouse's pamphlet revealed
a parlous state of things, but did she realise that wood, blankets, linen
and food were not things which could be transported with the quickness that
those responsible heartily desired? Did she remember that the British troops
also had to do without the most elementary comforts, in spite of all the
things which were constantly being sent from home for the benefit of the
field forces? Both had in South Africa two enemies in common that could not
be subdued—distance and difficulty of communication. With but a single line
of railway, which half the time was cut in one place or another, it was but
natural that the Concentration Camps were deprived of a good many things
which those who were compelled to live within their limits would, under
different circumstances or conditions, have had as a matter of course.
Miss Hobhouse had to own that she met with the utmost
courtesy from the authorities with whom she had to deal, a fact alone which
proved that the Government was only too glad to allow people to see what was
being done for the Boer women and children, and gratefully appreciated every
useful suggestion likely to lighten the sad lot of those in the Camps.
It is no use denying, and indeed no one, Sir Alfred
Milner least of all, would have denied that some of the scenes witnessed by
Miss Hobhouse, which were afterwards described with such tremulous
indignation, were of a nature to shock public opinion both at home and
abroad. But, at the same time, it was not fair to circumstances or to people
to have a false sentimentality woven into what was written. Things ought to
have been looked upon through the eyes of common sense and not through the
refracting glasses of the indignation of the moment. It was a libel to
suggest that the British authorities rendered themselves guilty of
deliberate cruelty, because, on the contrary, they always and upon every
occasion did everything they could to lighten the lot of the enemy peoples
who had fallen into their hands.
