Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies: Chapter III.

Richard Harding Davis
WITH BOTH ARMIES

The Executive Council
(Seated L-R: Joubert. Kruger, Cronje)

CHAPTER V
Pretoria in Wartime

IF Pretoria is awaiting her doom, she is awaiting it calmly. If the republic is at war, she does not allow that fact to disturb the peaceful repose of her capital. She gives so few signs here that her burghers are holding back the troops of the greatest empire on the globe that a stranger might dwell in Pretoria for a month and see nothing in her streets to make him suspect that he was in the capital of a government at war for its independence.

It has always been the aim of President Kruger and his counsellors to preserve in Pretoria the patriarchal idea upon which the republic is founded. Johannesburg was abjured by them as a modern city, the Uitlanders' city, the city where the streets were lined with gold, the city of vast, intricate machinery, of vaster and more intricate speculations; where men in one night lost the value of twenty thousand head of oxen on a hand at poker, where one American mining engineer received a salary four times as great as that of the President of the United States, where in five years a former circus clown made one hundred million dollars. In their eyes it was a wanton city, and to offset its modern, foreign air, the life and customs of Pretoria were ordered in keeping with the simplicity, conservatism, and outdoor life of the Boer.

The President of the republic lives in what we could call a whitewashed cottage. The church in which he preaches to his people faces him from across the street. His official residence might be that of its pastor. On the porch of this cottage, with a cup of coffee at his elbow and a long pipe between his lips, he discusses and transacts the affairs of state. The children from the school-house on the corner come to visit him at recess and hang over his fence, and, unawed by the two helmeted policemen and the two marble lions, they talk to the President and he talks to them.

In the public square of the capital, where the Palace of Justice and the Government Building face each other, there is also, side by side with office buildings, banks, and hotels that would be the pride of any of our smaller cities, a thatched cottage. And in the square itself, under the windows of the new building which cost three millions of dollars, the Boer farmers and cattle-dealers cook their meals over an open fire, their oxen “outspanned” beside the cabs, their women and children seated on the feather-beds inside the great canvas-covered carts. It is the idea of the President that every burgher, no matter from how far he may have driven his oxen, may feel that when he reaches this capital he, as a part of the State, is at home and welcome.

Pretoria reposes drowsily at the bottom of a basin, a great bowl made of hills. There is a crack in the bowl, and it is through this crack that the British Army, when it comes, will enter the capital. In the meantime Pretoria, shut in from the outside world not only by her circle of hills but by censors, armies, and a blockade of warships, waits tranquilly. For none of these, even while it increases her isolation, can disturb her calm. A session of the Volksraad, when it meets here may arouse her, because that is of interest to every man over sixteen years of age in the republic; but the fact that one hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers are advancing upon her, limping, it is true, but still advancing, is a circumstance too foreign to her experience to ruffle her composure.

From any elevation Pretoria is a beautiful place, a great park of tall, dark-green poplars, with red roofs shining through, and the towers of the public buildings and the gilded figure of Liberty rising over all. From a distance Pretoria has almost the look of Florence. The hills about her are so high that the white, sunlit clouds are near enough when they pass to write their names upon them; and they continue for so great a distance that they turn, as they draw away, from a light green to a purple, and then to a misty, turquoise blue.

Pretoria down in the basin itself is not so beautiful. It is throughout half suburb and half city, with corrugated-zinc cottages next to a bank building, and a State museum adjoining the meat-market, but with trees and flowers and running water everywhere. The houses are of one story, each of them set in gardens of rose bushes and many of the older ones roofed with thatch; but the government buildings, the shops, the banks, and business houses are metropolitan. They suggest a new city of our West, and some of them, the banking houses around the city square, are of the best style of architecture as it is adapted to homes of business. But the red dust, the chief characteristic of South Africa, and the ox-cart, the moving home of the Boer, destroy the illusion of a city.

The trek-wagons are as incongruous as are the costers' donkey-carts in Piccadilly. They are the most picturesque relics which remain to us from the days of the emigrant and of the pioneer. The caravan of camels still obtains, but it belongs to a people who have never left anything behind them, who have never progressed one stride in advance of the camel, and to whom the caravan with its rolled up tents and bales of merchandise is still part of their daily life. But the trek-wagon exists in a land of railroads and telegraphs, and rubs wheels with victorias and tram-cars. It is much like the great hooded carts which the empire makers of our West drove across the prairie, the real “ships of the desert,” that carried civilization with them, and that blazoned forth on their canvas as the supreme effort of the pioneer, “Pike's Peak or Bust.” The ox-cart is the most typical possession of the Boer, and it and the lion, and the man with the rifle in his hand, are the three emblems of the national coat-of-arms.

The cart is drawn by from five to ten pair of oxen led by a small Kaffir, the “voortrekker,” and belabored from behind by another Kaffir, with a whip as far reaching as a salmon line. In the front seat sits the head of the family and behind him are his women folk in a mysterious zenana, from which they emerge clad in white starched linen, showing that the cart must contain, besides its bunks and mattresses, as many ingenious wardrobe-boxes and cubbyholes as the cabin of a ship. At the back of the long wagon sit the Kaffir women and their naked, beaded children. The rifle hangs ready at hand beside the box-seat; water-kegs, pots, and pans swing between the wheels, and tools and fodder-boxes hang from either side.

The calm of the Pretoria streets is the calm of the people. In travelling from Ladysmith to Pretoria I have found nothing to be in greater contrast than the composed acceptance of the war by the Boer and the Englishman's complete absorption in it. In London, Cape Town, in Durban, in Ladysmith, on the steamers, in the field, the Englishman reads, talks, thinks of nothing else. Here the chief men of the Government find time to meet at a club twice a day to smoke and talk on almost any other subject. Yet each of them has been to the front for a month at a time, or for three months together, and each of them is going back again, but he speaks of his having been there without boasting or excitement, much as though he were a neutral who had run down to the battle-field to take photographs and collect exploded shells as souvenirs. I have heard one of them secure the entire attention of every man in the club by recounting his adventures on a hunting-trip which he had taken during his leave of absence from his commando, and his friends were much more keen to know how his pointers and setters had behaved than what his men had done in the firing-line. I commented on this, and one of them told me that during a reconnaissance which the British made from Ladysmith and when the burghers were firing upon them, a couple of deer ran from the hills back of the Boer position. Instantly almost every burgher whirled about, and turning his back to the enemy, opened a fusillade on the deer.

To a great power such as is Great Britain, this war should be only an incident. But, strangely enough, it is the Boer who appears to consider it an incident, an unfortunate occurrence requiring severity upon his part and entailing the punishment of a wayward and mistaken enemy. He discusses the war tolerantly and patiently. He expresses a great pity that such fine fellows as the English soldiers should have come out so far to be killed. He can grow excited, but that is only momentary; his accustomed attitude toward the war is one of subdued interest.

What makes the remarkable resistance which the Boer has shown to the British forces the more remarkable, is this fact of his leisurely indifference to it all. He goes from the farm to the firing-line and back again to the farm almost at will, and what is even more surprising is the fact that when he is in the field he apparently only takes part in an engagement when he feels inclined to do so. It is a usual thing for a hundred of them to lie in a trench protecting the position, and opposed sometimes to a thousand men, while the remaining three or four hundred of their comrades, who do not wish to fight, will be seated a hundred yards down the kopje smoking and eating. At Sand River, within three hundred yards of the artillery which was firing desperately on Lord Roberts's advancing column, I saw a thousand Boers, and not one of them was apparently conscious that a battle was going forward or that his services were badly needed. They sat among the rocks and talked together, or slept in the shade of a mesquite bush, or mounted their ponies and rode away. It is almost impossible to believe how few men are needed to hold one of these defensive positions, and I am convinced that throughout the war one man to ten has been the average proportion of Boer to Briton, and that frequently the British have been repulsed when their force outnumbered that of the Boers twenty to one. What terrible losses the burghers would have caused had they occupied the trenches in force is something the nations which next meditate going to war with modern magazine rifles should weigh deeply. The Boers tell you casually when leading up to some other point, that at such and such a fight they placed ten men on one kopje and on another twenty. At Spion Kop the attack on the hill was made by forty men, so few indeed, so they claim, that one of the English colonels surrendered, and then on seeing, when the Boers left cover, to what a small force he was opposed, threw down the white flag and cried, “No, we'll not surrender,” and fired on the Boers who were coming up to receive his rifles. One can imagine what an outcry such an incident as this would have called forth from the English papers had it been the Boer who first raised the white flag and then thought better of it. But the comment the Boer made on this “treachery” was, “It was probably a mistake. Perhaps someone without authority raised the white flag and the colonel did not know that. He wounded seventeen of our men, but I believe it was a mistake.”

A number of Pretorians were at Nicholson's Nek, and they tell me that at that place their men were so few in proportion to the eleven hundred British soldiers who surrendered, that when the burghers sent a detachment from the trenches to take the Englishmen's arms, their own men were entirely swallowed up in the crowd, and they lost sight of them altogether. Every burgher, which means every man over sixteen years of age who can carry a rifle, is allowed twelve days' leave of absence out of each three months. If he overstays his leave, which the women, who are even more keen than the men, seldom permit him to do, he is brought back to his regiment or “commando “under arrest. But for this there appears to be very little punishment. What there is consists of fines, which the burghers cannot pay and which are remitted indefinitely until “after the war,” and of enforcing pack drill, and police work around the camp. It is almost always the same men who force the fighting; that is, the same forty men out of a commando of three hundred will always volunteer to fight in the trenches, while the remainder help them from time to time exactly as they see fit. Knowing this, the wonder grows as to what would have happened to the British forces if the Boer had been a relentless foe with a taste for blood-letting and slaughter, instead of one quite satisfied to hold his position with the least possible exertion, and with the least danger to himself. The accounts of his successful marksmanship are undoubtedly correct. It is owing to this and to his ability to judge distances in this peculiarly deceptive atmosphere that his fire, coming though it does from so few rifles, is so fatally effective. Eighty per cent. of the men in each commando are what we should consider sharp-shooters; and as opposed to them the Boers tell me that after a charge they have often picked up the English rifles where the soldiers have fallen a hundred yards from the Boer trench, and found that the sights on the Lee-Metfords were adjusted for eight hundred to eleven hundred yards. Of course, with sights at that range, no sharp-shooter, certainly no Tommy, could hit a Boer at a hundred yards, even if the burgher stood up and made a target of himself.

But it is the conduct of the Boer in Pretoria rather than his bearing in the field which is of the greater and more curious interest. For, as I have written, in Pretoria he gives us no sign that war exists.

His shop-windows are filled with something better than relics from battle-fields, portraits of his generals, or caricatures of his enemy, and he advertises nothing as being “absolutely essential to all officers going to the front.” I know of only two shop-windows in Pretoria where anything is exhibited which would suggest that the country is at war. One of them is a row of bullets and spent shells, and the other is a collection of camp mattresses. They are not marked as being essential to anyone going to the front, or elsewhere. You can take them or leave them. Compare this modest recognition of the fact that a war is going forward, with what you find in Cape Town, Durban, and even in London. There at once you come upon hysterical patriotism and an unpleasant idea that everybody is trying to make money out of the patriotism of everyone else.

There is hardly a shop-window in any of these cities that is not dressed to catch the eye of the man “going south.” In three different shops in Piccadilly he is offered three different kinds of hats as the “only authorized hat issued to the Yeomanry.” And yet they cannot all be the authorized hat. Somebody must be trying to make an honest penny. If he does not want an authorized hat he is allured by thousands of styles of watch-charms, ribbons, and sleeve-links decorated with the Union Jack, the Lion and the Unicorn, a portrait of the Queen, of Chamberlain, of Milner, of Rhodes. He is tempted by khaki overcoats, khaki underclothes, khaki blankets, khaki neckties, khaki night-shirts, although almost all colors loop the same at night; patent stoves, patent medicines, patent picket-pins, patent gaiters, waterproofs, water-bottles, water-filters, compressed beef tablets, stomach-bands, compasses, cakes of chocolate, campaign pocketknives, campaign folding beds, folding tables, folding camp-stools, folding maps, portraits of Buller, of Baden-Powell, of Roberts, of Kitchener, plaster statuettes of “the gentleman in khaki,” the same gentleman reproduced on letter-paper, on fans, on pocket-handkerchiefs, postal-cards with Caton Woodville's war-pictures in one corner, boxes of cigarettes bristling with photographs of the war-heroes, hat-bands and banners bearing the name of Ladysmith, Kimberley, Mafeking.

Every war is the shopman's opportunity, and he can be excused. But the calmness and fairness with which the Boer regards the war and his enemy, in comparison with the hysteria of the Englishman on the same subject, are novel and unexpected developments. Englishmen are generally calm, sane, and cool-headed, and to the Englishman war is no new thing.

“Oh, we always have some little war on somewhere,” Englishmen say. You have only to pass Sanford's shop in Cockspur Street to prove how true this is. In the window there is never less than one map displayed, with little flags stuck over it, showing the position of the English forces at war in India, in the Soudan, or along the west coast of Africa.

And this also is only a little war. The South African Republic is about the littlest nation on the map. One would think that if Great Britain meant to wipe it off the slate she would have done so quickly, or when she found that this was difficult, she would not call the attention of the world to the fact that she was in trouble, but would cover it up, make light of it, and would try to throw us off the scent by starting a world's fair, or manoeuvring her squadron; that she would do anything before she would allow the Powers to see that her entire empire is upset by thirty thousand farmers, and that for six months they have held her and her colonies at bay.

Even if the people of England have lost control of themselves and of their sense of perspective, her statesmen might be expected to keep their heads, and to remember that South Africa is only a part of the British Empire, and that this is only one of England's little wars. But apparently no one has any other thought than of South Africa. They have sent out the regular army, the reserves, the militia, the volunteers, three dukes, the Honorable Artillery company, the post-office clerks, the barristers from the Temple, the cashiers from the bank, the yeomen from the farms, the “special corps” of “gentlemen,” the crofters and gillies from Scotland, the caddies from the golf links, the Canadian rough riders, the Australian mounted police, the New Zealand Light Horse, the Bengal lancers, the Indian coolies.

And to emphasize the fact that they have been forced to do this, they are going to give the loyal colonials, the same colonials that theysnubbed so quickly when they first offered their services before the war began, a triumphal march through the streets of London, instead of sending them home quickly and secretly so that no one would know that they had had to call upon them for help.

They have sent the good Queen to Ireland for the first time in half a century, electioneering, and have bribed the Irish with the privilege, which they should always have enjoyed, of standing guard at St. James's Palace. They have robbed the ships-of-war of men and of guns, they have coquetted with poverty-stricken Portugal, they have sent all the way to Klondike to get an American to act as their chief of scouts, and they have finally sent their two great generals to the front, only to find that they have but one great general, and that the other, upon whom they had lavishly bestowed a fortune and a title, is not a tactician nor a fighting man, but an intelligent train despatcher and chief of commissariat.

One would think that some sane man in the nominal opposition party would point out to the Government that this war is a good subject to drop, to lay on the table, that it is not one to discuss to crowded galleries, that it is only showing to the amused Powers of Europe weakness after weakness. We have all for so long believed England to be a great military Power that at first we excused defeat after defeat. We even cabled them home as “reverses.”

But to-day no real friend of England would try to hide the fact that she is in a precarious and ridiculous predicament, and that she is going about saving the remnants of her lost prestige in the wrong way. A friend of England, which I certainly claim to be, would beg her to call upon her sense of humor, to get back her sense of proportion, to act as though this war was not so very serious-as though it were an incident. Let us advise her to stop her Absent-Minded Beggar funds and all the other undignified appeals to private purses for that which should come out of the national exchequer. It is not becoming that every actress who wants an advertisement and every colonial millionnaire who wants a knighthood should be permitted to pass the hat for the British Tommy. The rattle of the tambourine is being heard much too distinctly. It is lacking in dignity, it is “not done.” It is not what we have learned in the past to expect from our English cousins.

We have a small war of our own on our hands at present. We have an army of 60,000 men locked up in the Philippines, having taken all of its chief cities, from none of which it dares move at night for fear of being captured. In our newspapers we give our war a short quarter of a column of space a day, partly because we are rightly ashamed of it and partly because we are too busy over other things to treat it except as an incident.

The Boer treats his war as an incident. He is not hysterical. He does not repeat every old woman's tale of poisoned wells and poisoned bullets, of treacherous white flags, or talk of hanging rebels, nor accuse the enemy of cruelty, brutality, and firing on Red Cross flags. When a man is in the wrong he invariably blusters and makes wild accusations to cover up the fact that he is ashamed of himself and of what he is doing.

If a man has your watch you merely go to the nearest policeman and say: “That man has my watch.” But if you are planning to take his watch you first blacken his character and rake up all his past history to prove that he is a despicable ruffian. You say: “He is a foul, unkempt person, and I mean to take his gold watch.” “He does not wash, and I mean to take his gold watch.” “He sings hymns on the battle-field and quotes the Bible correctly, which proves he is a hypocrite, so I mean to take his gold watch.” “He refuses to allow me full burgher rights and to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at the same time, and so I mean to take his gold mines.”

It must be because the English are so conscious of the injustice of this war that they rail as they do at the Boer. The Boer, with his independence threatened, might be excused if he railed at the men who are trying to rob him, but he does not. lie is only somewhat hurt and a good deal dazed at the charges they make against him, but he is still good-humored, calm, and determined.

For the last four months I have sat in tents, on steamer-decks, and on the terrace of the Mount Nelson Hotel and listened to old friends from London talk on this war with a spirit of intolerance, unfairness, and credulity which made me doubt if they could possibly be the same sportsmanlike, healthy-minded, well-balanced men that I had formerly known. Never in its most unlicensed moments did the yellow press of America concoct such absurd stories, as clean-limbed, clean-minded English officers will believe and retell against the Boer, their enemy, whom few of them, except those who have surrendered, have ever seen.

Compare their attitude of mind toward the Boer with the attitude of the Boer toward them-the Boer who has had to suffer many things, who has every excuse to censure, who has much to forgive.

The wife of one of the chief men in the republic told me of a call she made on Mrs. Kruger three days after the battle of Spion Kop. I will report what happened exactly in her words. She found the wife of the President red-eyed with weeping and in a state of complete dejection. “The President,” explained Mrs. Kruger, “ has just received a telegram from General Botha. He says the English have not buried their dead yet at Spion Kop. It is three days now and they are still lying there. I cannot understand why it is so.

Even the birds respect a dead body so much that they will not touch it for three days; then tell me why is it that these English have no respect for their own dead. I cry when I think of the mothers and children of these poor men. You will excuse me, but I have been so miserable I have not changed my dress. I cannot sleep to-night if I think those men are lying there yet.”

You remember the Queen's message, beginning, “My heart bleeds,” and so on, “for my soldiers.” Mrs. Kruger's heart bled, too, for the Queen's soldiers, the men who had been sent to rob her of her home and country. Compare the two, the good Queen sent to Ireland, after neglecting it for fifty years, to encourage enlistment, and the wife of the Boer President, weeping over the soldiers who had tried to kill her countrymen. Which shows the greater unselfishness, the more Christian spirit, the nobler charity ?

The sequel I hardly care to write. But in as brief words as possible be it told that General Botha wrote to Buller requesting permission to bury the English dead and asking for a guarantee that his men would not be fired on while thus engaged. Buller replied that he would guarantee protection to the Boers while they were burying the English, and requested that they should “send him in a bill for their trouble.”

This reply of Buller's and the charge of the Fifth Lancers at Elandslaagte are the only two incidents of the war which a Boer cannot discuss with tolerance. Save for these two incidents I cannot find that they have any hard feelings toward the English except those, of course, which are aroused by the fact of his trying to rob the Boer of his liberty. But these two incidents have hurt deeply.

The charge of the Fifth Lancers was described by an officer of the regiment in a letter home as “good pig-sticking,” and consisted, so the Boers say, of the lancers stabbing the wounded Germans and Dutch volunteers as they lay on the ground waiting for the ambulances, and as they raised their hands for mercy. One Swiss hotel-waiter was brought in here from Elandslaagte with a bullet wound in the knee which had brought him to the ground and seventeen lance wounds in his body which he had received from apparently each Tommy who rode over him. But so far as I can learn, what hurt the Boers more than the stabbing of the wounded men on the ground is that one unfortunate line of the English officer who described the charge as good “pig-sticking.”

It is the ill-breeding and useless callousness and brutality of that remark which the Boer cannot understand. The officer, let us hope, has been crowded out of the regiment, but his phrase was, with rare lack of taste, copied widely into all of the English newspapers. The fact that this was done shows in itself how since the war the taste and judgment of so many people in England have fallen below the old standard and have become hardened and distorted.

We see it also in the fact that in one of his letters Mr. Kipling speaks jauntily of “a good killing,” and Winston Churchill even, than whom there is no one among English correspondents for whom I entertain a higher regard, writes, “we had a good ‘bag’ today—ten killed, seventeen wounded.” It is not becoming that a great genius like Rudyard Kipling should not see something more in the killing of a few poor farmers than a day's pig-killing in the Chicago stockyards, and that the death of ten of his enemies should weigh no more heavily on Mr. Churchill's buoyant and clever mind than would a bag of grouse on his shoulder. War is all sad, and it is all wrong. It is a hideous relic of the age of stone. It is outrageous and indecent. But as it must obtain we should lend to it every semblance of dignity. If we must kill our fellow-man, let us at least, as we pass, cover his staring eyes with his helmet and as men respect a brave man. But in this campaign everything seems to have been done to degrade war, to make it even more brutal than it is; to callous the mind toward it; to rob it of all of its possible heroism and terrible magnificence. We have the incident of the British officer who protested loudly against General Cronje receiving a cigar when he asked for one; of another who distributed Mrs. Cronje's wisp of false hair as a souvenir to his brother officers; of Captain C. of the Scots Greys, who photographed the Boers while the Tommies bayoneted them. These incidents make warfare worse than brutal. It becomes vulgar.

I prefer to remember that Admiral Cervera sent an officer to the American Admiral to assure him of the safety of Hobson and his crew after they had attempted to bottle up the Spanish fleet, and to congratulate him on their courage, and that Captain Phillips called to his men when they had sunk the Spanish battleship, “Don't cheer! those men are drowning!”

It was actually a relief to reach Pretoria, where one hears the war discussed without violence, abuse, or exaggeration, where the death of one or of many of the enemy is spoken of, not with rejoicing, but with regret; where his reckless bravery is admired and condoned as a fault of youth, and where men whose bullets I dodged at Pieter's Hill from the English lines listen to my side of the story of the same fight without prejudice or suspicion or ill-will.

If the English must abuse someone they might begin on all of their own generals, with the exception of Lord Roberts, Sir George White, General French, and Baden-Powell, and might court-martial three or four of the others. Then the prestige of their arms would rise again. For no one can blame a man who employs incapable servants, until they have proved themselves so.

The English generals have been tried and found wanting. On this occasion it was the fault of the generals; should Great Britain make use of them again it will be her fault. It was her misfortune that hers should be the first of the great armies of the Old World to wage war under modern conditions, and this war which England forced upon the Boer is helping to educate Europe. The Powers are learning through Great Britain's mistakes and expenditure of life and money what not to do. They are strengthening themselves at her expense. But Great Britain is not learning. Instead of recalling the men who have blundered, and proclaiming by so doing that the standard of her army is still what we all used to believe it to be, she shields them, once more sends them forward and begs them not to do it again. The British War Office is not adaptable, it cannot change in midstream, it cannot pick out the natural leader and throw over the general made at Aldershot and at the Guards Club.

England, instead of admitting that she has been mistaken, that the man whom she supposed to be the great leader of men, is, after all, only a dull butcher who continually butts his head against a stone wall and who has lost her more men by his lack of wit than the Boers have killed with their rifles, sends him on again to Van Reenan's Pass to butcher more Tommies, to butt his head against more stone walls. Wellington held back Napoleon and defeated the greatest army of veterans of this century at Waterloo, with a loss of 7,000 men. It cost Buller 5,000 men to relieve Ladysmith.

With the exception of the capture of Cronje by Lord Roberts, which, after all, was the capture of 3,000 men by 20,000, with 20,000 more hurrying up in reserve, there has not been in six months a single British victory except of a negative character. If you think over it you will find that the men who so far have made reputations out of this war have done so by holding their own, not by advancing on the enemy or entering his territory. I do not consider Lord Roberts, as his reputation was made many years ago.

But the men who have won distinction in this war are Sir George White, who held his own at Ladysmith; Baden-Powell, who held his own at Mafeking; French, who relieved Ladysmith; Winston Churchill, who escaped from prison; and Bugler Dunn, to whom the Queen gave her portrait and a silver bugle. That is rather a light showing after six months' continuous fighting, especially if against that list of heroes you should place in parallel column a list of men who have failed- Kitchener, who lost 1000 men at Paadersburg, and was in consequence sent to do police work among the rebels; Buller, Methuen, Gatacre, Warren, Broadwood, Coleman, and Long. It is like reading the tombstones in a graveyard.

Compare that list with the list of men who came out of the Spanish-American War with a record of something attempted and something done. I do not make this comparison as an American, but because it illustrates that in war, which is the most difficult of all professions, intelligence is the only thing which should count. It is not years of service; if it were, the man who has been night watchman at a bank for thirty years might lay claim to the position of cashier. It is intelligence, and again intelligence.

Buller has a dozen ribbons; all the other English generals have seen service in at least a half-dozen campaigns. But bravery we take for granted, and experience counts for nothing, service counts for nothing, training counts for nothing, without an intelligent mind to make use of them and to direct them. Theodore Roosevelt, who never saw a battle until he went to Cuba, but who is abnormally intelligent, would make a better general to-day than any of these gentlemen who have conducted army corps along the Modder River and the Tugela.

In three months there came out of the crucible of our little war Dewey, Sampson, Schley, Roosevelt, Hobson, and Leonard Wood, who in six weeks was promoted from the rank of captain to that of brigadier-general, and in three months was a major-general and Governor of Santiago, and who is now Governor-General of the whole island of Cuba. All these men did something; they sank a fleet or took a fort: they showed intelligent executive ability. They did not merely “hold their own,” nor conduct a masterly retreat. Dewey was not an accident. He was not sent to Manila on account of his place in the line of promotion, but he was selected from among others because he was known to be of exceptional intelligence; Sampson was also pushed over the heads of the commodores who ranked him, for the same reason.

We sought out intelligence and we rewarded intelligence. Miley when he went to Cuba was only a first lieutenant, and he came out of the war a lieutenant-colonel, and no one deserved promotion more and no one while he lived, through the increased influence which his promotion gave him, was of greater service to the army. But it would have been impossible for Leonard Wood to rise in the British Army in three months from the rank of captain to that of brigadier-general. Napoleon could not have done it. It would have been against the precedent and traditions of the British War Office.

I am not sure that they have any Napoleons or Mileys or Funstons or Woods in the regimental ranks of the British Army, but if they are there, they will remain concealed until this war is over. Twenty years from now they may obtain command, but the British War Office cannot in six months adapt itself to new conditions, nor face new facts, nor turn upon its history and recognize new men.

We all were with Great Britain as soon as her difficulties began. We had not forgotten how she came to our aid when, without her' help, a coalition of the Powers might have put us to sore humiliation. But she must see now that her difficulties ran on for too long a time. The under dog at which “the lion and her cubs” had been snarling and snapping made too strong, too manly, too intelligent a fight for his liberty for one to sympathize any longer with the lion's blunders and hysteria and rampant, impotent patriotism.

During this crisis the Englishman did not, unfortunately, see himself as others saw him. He acted and talked and wrote as extravagantly about this little war as he would had the combined fleets and armies of the whole world attacked his island home. He stamped his foot and sang “Britons never, never shall be slaves,” when nobody wanted to make him a slave, and he recited the “Absent-Minded Beggar” on all public occasions, and wore a necktie of the national colors as though the foeman's foot were already on his shore, instead of seeing, as everyone else saw, that after forcing a war most insolently and barefacedly on one of the smallest governments on the globe, that smallest government was giving him for six months a severe and humiliating thrashing.

It is well not to know when you are being beaten, but it is also admirable to be able to see when you are making yourself ridiculous. It is the Englishman's failure to see this latter which leads him still to sing “Let 'em all come” in the music-halls, when so far he has not been able to whip, not all, but even one of 'em, and that one the smallest of the lot.

South African War Links


		Richard Harding Davis, *With Both Armies in South Africa*, 1900 Chapter VI: President Kruger
		Richard Harding Davis, *With Both Armies in South Africa*, 1900 Table of Contents
		Biography of Richard Harding Davis. "U.S. author of romantic novels and short stories and the best known reporter of his generation."

		Perspectives on the South African War. A collection of links to materials on the South African War.
		The South African War Virtual Library contains a wide selection of research data related to the South African War. This site presents an archive of easily accessible and concise material concerning the War. It is not intended to be a new historical 'front', but instead an organised amalgamation of a wide variety of available material.

The Pine Tree Web Home Page: A Collection of the Author's Links

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Please write to: Lewis P. Orans