THE BOER WAR
From Lady Silchester to her cousin, Captain Roger Brentham.
Stellenbosch,
Cape Colony,
March 25, 1900.
DEAR ROGER—
Your letter from Magara of last December reached me in London just as I was leaving with Landolphia Birchall (she kept her former name when she married the Booky ... and quite right, too—you never know how a second or third marriage is going to turn out, and at any moment may want your old name back). We came out here to see something of the war at close quarters and to set up a hospital and a convalescent home for the sick and wounded officers and men.
I cannot tell you how proud and pleased I was you had done the right thing. People—especially that horror, Willowby Patterne ... my dear, he is going bald as an egg, with a terribly pink neck, all due to some mistake in a hair-restorer, he says, but I say it is a vicious life—people were saying odious things about you the last year or two for developing German East Africa instead of one of our own colonies. But I knew—and always said—your heart was in the right place and that once you saw old England was in a tight place you would come to her assistance. There is nothing like one's own country, after all, is there?—"My country, right or wrong!"—one of the few ex-cabinet ministers who is running straight said last December at a meeting I got up at Reading. Some rude man in the audience called out, "But why don't you set it right? Then we should know where we are." But you must expect such retorts from people who know nothing of foreign policy.
I wonder how you got away? Lucy and Maud, I suppose, you have left behind. The Kaiser seems rather friendly to us, they all say, and is going to be pacified with Samoa and more pieces of West Africa. So I suppose your concession will be all right, whilst you are away, and the Germans won't do anything unkind to poor Lucy and Maud. Or have they returned to England? It is France who is showing her teeth, not Germany! Chocho has very rightly told her "to mend her manners." She is a pig ... she can't forgive our taking Egypt and turning back Marchand at Fashoda.
Even Spain has seized the opportunity to get her own back. It seems Lord Wiltshire called her a decaying nation during the war with the United States, and she has been saying through her press after each British defeat: "Who's the decaying nation now?" I must say she had some cause! Never were we more bitterly disappointed in our Generals—before Lord Roberts came out: They started off—some of the dear old trots, with Crimean whiskers, if you'll believe me—as pleased as Punch; and their silly young A.D.C.'s got the porters at Waterloo station to stick labels on their luggage "To Pretoria," "To Bloomfontain" (Is that how it's spelt?). And, of course, the only result of this boastfulness was that as soon as the old footlers got out there they fell into ambushes and lost their way and their men, and were deceived by guides, and the soldiers quite lost heart and got taken prisoners.