From Capetown to Ladysmith: An Unfinished Record of the South African War

by G. W. Steevens

The personality of George Steevens was one which might have been complex and obscure to the ordinary acquaintance, were it not for one shining, one golden key which fitted every ward of his temperament, his conduct, his policy, his work. He was the soul of honour. I use the words in no vague sense, in no mere spirit of phrase-making. How could that be possible at this hour? They are words which explain him, which are the commentary of his life, which summarise and enlighten every act of every day, his momentary impulses and his acquired habits. "In Spain," a great and noble writer has said, "was the point put upon honour." The point of honour was with George Steevens his helmet, his shield, his armour, his flag. That it was which made his lightest word a law, his vaguest promise a necessity in act, his most facile acceptance an engagement as fixed as the laws of motion. In old, old days I well remember how it came to be a complacent certainty with everybody associated with Steevens that if he promised an article, an occasional note, a review—whatever it might be—at two, three, four, five in the morning, at that hour the work would be ready. He never flinched; he never made excuses, for the obvious reason that there was never any necessity for excuse. Truthful, clean-minded, nobly unselfish as he was, all these things played but the parts of planets revolving around the sun of his life—the sun of honour. To that point I always return: but a man can be conceived who shall be splendidly honourable, yet not lovable—a man who might repel friendship. Steevens was not of that race. Not a friend of his but loved him with a great and serious affection for those qualities which are too often separable from the austerity of a fine character, the honour of an upright man. His sweetness was exquisite, and this partly because it was so unexpected. A somewhat shy and quiet manner did not prepare men for the urbanity, the tolerance, the magnanimity that lay at the back of his heart. Generosity in thought—the rarest form of generosity that is reared among the flowers of this sorrowful earth—was with him habitual. He could, and did, resent at every point the qualities in men that ran counter to his principles of honour, and he did not spare his keen irony when such things crossed his path; but, on the other side, he loved his friends with a whole and simple heart. I think that very few men who came under his influence refused him their love, none their admiration.

Into all that he wrote—and I shall deal later with that point in detail—his true and candid spirit was infused. Just as in his life, in his daily actions, you were continually surprised by his tenderness turning round the corner of his austere reserve, so in his work his sentiment came with a curious appeal, with tender surprises, with an emotion that was all the keener on account of the contrast that it made with the courage, the hope, and the fine manliness of all his thought and all his word. Children, helplessness of all kinds, touched always that merciful heart. I can scarcely think of him as a man of the world, although he had had in his few and glorious days experience enough to harden the spirit of any man. He could never, as I think of him, have grown into your swaggering, money-making, bargaining man of Universal Trade. Keen and significant his policy, his ordering of his affairs must ever have been; but the keenness and significance were the outcome, not of any cool eye to the main chance, but of a gay sense of the pure need of logic, not only in letters but also in living.

There, again, I touch another characteristic—his feeling for logic, for dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would be possible to meet in argument. He used, in his admirably assumed air of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect dignity—to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had ever mastered the philosophical systems of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, from Hegel to Schopenhauer. Though he said it with an airy sense of fun, and almost of disparagement, I am strongly inclined to believe that it was true. He was never satisfied with his knowledge: invariably curious, he was guided by his joy in pure reasoning to the philosophies of the world, and in his silent, quiet, unobtrusive way he became a master of many subjects which life was too brief in his case to permit him to show to his friends, much less to the world.

This, it will be readily understood, is, as I have said, the merest summary of a character, as one person has understood it. Others will reach him from other points of view. Meanwhile Ladysmith has him—what is that phrase of his?—"You squirm between iron fingers." Fortunate he, so far that he is at rest, squirming no longer; and with the wail on his lips, the catch in the throat, he went down in the embrace of a deadlier enemy than the Bulwan horror, to which he made reference in one of the last lines he was destined to write in this world. He fell ill in that pestilent town, as all the world knows. His constitution was strong enough; he had not lived a life of unpropitious preparation for a serious illness; but his heart was a danger. Typhoid is fatal to any heart-weakness, particularly in convalescence; and he was caught suddenly as he was growing towards perfect health.

I have been privileged to see certain letters written to his wife by the friend with whom he shared his Ladysmith house during the course of his illness. "How he contracted enteric fever," says Mr Maud, "I cannot tell. It is unfortunately very prevalent in the camp just now. He began to be ill on the 13th of December, but on that day the doctor was not quite sure about its being enteric, although he at once commenced with the treatment for that disease. The following day there was no doubt about it, and we moved him from our noisy and uncomfortable quarters in the Imperial Light Horse Camp to our present abode, which is quite the best house in Ladysmith. Major Henderson of the Intelligence Department very kindly offered his own room, a fine, airy, and well-furnished apartment, although he was barely recovered of his wound. At first I could only procure the services of a trained orderly of the 5th Dragoon Guards lent to us by the colonel, but a few days later we were lucky enough to find a lady nurse, who has turned out most excellently, and she takes charge at night.... I am happy to tell you that everything has gone on splendidly".... After describing how the fever gradually approached a crisis, Mr Maud continues: "When he was at his worst he was often delirious, but never violent; the only trouble was to prevent him getting out of bed. He was continually asking us to go and fetch you, and always thought he was journeying homewards. It never does to halloa before one gets out of the wood, but I do really think that he is well on the road to recovery." Alas!

Not so much as a continued record of Steevens's illness, as in the nature of a pathetic side-issue to the tragedy of his death, I subjoin one or two passages from a letter sent subsequently from Ladysmith by the same faithful friend before the end: "He has withstood the storm wonderfully well, and he is not very much pulled down. The doctor thinks that he should be about again in a fortnight"—the letter was written on the 4th of January—"by which time I trust General Buller will have arrived and reopened the railway. Directly it is possible to move, I shall take him down to Nottingham Road.... There has been little or nothing to do for the last month beyond listening to the bursting of the Long Tom shells." That touch about General Buller's arrival is surely one of the most strangely appealing incidents in the recent history of human confidence and human expectation! Another friend, Mr George Lynch, whose name occurred in one of his letters in a passage curiously characteristic of Steevens's drily incisive humour, writes about the days that must immediately have preceded his illness: "He was as fit and well as possible when I left Ladysmith last month." (The letter is dated from Durban, January 11.) "We were drawing rations like the soldiers, but had some '74 port and a plum-pudding which we were keeping for Christmas Day.... Shells fell in our vicinity more or less like angels' visits, and I had a bet with him of a dinner. I backed our house to be hit against another which he selected; and he won. I am to pay the dinner at the Savoy when we return."

There is little more to record of the actual facts at this moment. The following cable, which has till now remained unpublished, tells its own tale too sadly:—

"Steevens, a few days before death, had recovered so far as to be able to attend to some of his journalistic duties, though still confined to bed. Relapse followed; he died at five in the afternoon. Funeral same night, leaving Carter's house (where Steevens was lying during illness) at 11.30. Interred in Ladysmith Cemetery at midnight. Night dismal, rain falling, while the moon attempted to pierce the black clouds. Boer searchlight from Umbala flashed over the funeral party, showing the way in the darkness. Large attendance of mourners, several officers, garrison, most correspondents. Chaplain M'Varish officiated."

When I read that short and simple cablegram, the thought came to my mind that if only the greater number of modern rioters in language were compelled to hoard their words out of sheer necessity for the cable, we should have better results from the attempts at word-painting that now cumber the ground. And this brings me directly to a consideration of Steevens's work. In many respects, of course, it was never, even in separate papers, completed. Journalist and scholar he was, both. But the world was allowed to see too much of the journalist, too little of the scholar, in what he accomplished. 'The Monologues of the Dead' was a brilliant beginning. It proved the splendid work of the past, it presaged more splendid work for the future. And then, if you please, he became a man of action; and a man of action, if he is to write, must perforce be a journalist. The preparations had made it impossible that he should ever be anything else but an extraordinary journalist; and accordingly it fell out that the combination of a wonderful equipment of scholarship with a vigorous sense of vitality brought about a unique thing in modern journalism. Unique, I say: the thing may be done again, it is true; but he was the pioneer, he was the inventor, of the particular method which he practised.