While all these apparent trifles were accumulating, there was silently growing up a spirit of flunkeyism, which seems innate in English people. The Transvaal is essentially republican, and such a spirit was utterly unsuited to the ideas of the inhabitants. One correspondent in the Transvaal wrote to me at the time—“sycophancy and subserviency are in the ascendant, good independent men are shunted to make way for those who know how to truckle to the powers that be.”[[105]]
Sir Bartle Frere at once acceded to Sir Owen Lanyon’s request. Arriving in Pretoria from Natal on the 10th of April, 1879, after several conferences with the Boers, he almost reconciled them to annexation by telling them that they should have as free a constitution as their brethren in the Cape. Sir Garnet Wolseley, however, came out, superseded Sir Bartle Frere in the High Commissionership for South East Africa, and arriving just too late for Ulundi, and the overthrow of Cetywayo, came to the Transvaal, and was sworn in as Governor on September 29, 1879. Sir Garnet spoke just as strongly as Mr. Gladstone (whom I will quote anon) had written, concerning the impossibility of our retiring from the Transvaal, and both at Wakkerstroom, Standerton and Pretoria assured his hearers that the Transvaal would remain British “as long as the sun shone.”
To add insult to injury a constitution of merely government and nominee members was formed, which was laughed and jeered at by nearly the entire country, both Dutch and English.[[106]]
At this time the Volkstem, the organ of the Boers in Pretoria, urged the farmers not to give any excuse to Sir Garnet Wolseley to attack them, but simply to protest, passively resist, and follow out President Burgers’ advice in March, 1877, when he told them “Have patience, your plan is to protest, keep on protesting, and ‘alles zal recht kommen.’” The Dutch followed this advice for a time, as they did not forget the success which attended these tactics in Holland 300 years before, when under Counts Egmont and Horn, in 1566, they managed by a series of protests, to Madrid, to rid themselves of the Spaniards and Spanish rule.
Sir Garnet Wolseley then went home, and Sir Pomeroy Colley in March, 1880, succeeded him as High Commissioner for South Eastern Africa. Events rapidly culminated. On December 13th, the Triumvirate of Kruger, Joubert, and Pretorius being formed (Lanyon in Pretoria still being nominal administrator of the country), three commanders were organized, one of which went and met the 94th Regiment at Bronkhorst Spruit, another to Potchefstroom, where it besieged the Court-House and Fort, while the third made Heidelberg its headquarters.
So the war commenced.
The three months’ siege or investment of Pretoria by the Boers was a very tame affair indeed, the state of alarm the place was in being nothing but the direct consequence of the Boer success at Bronkhorst Spruit, which I shall presently describe. As soon as conductor Egerton brought into Pretoria the account of the disaster at this place, a grand meeting of the townspeople took place, and Sir W. Owen Lanyon at once placed Pretoria under martial law, all Dutch sympathizers being allowed but half an hour’s grace to clear out, bag and baggage; the Convent, the gaol close by with its yard, and the military camp were fortified, and to these places all the inhabitants of the town, about 3,000, were compelled to remove, and leave their homes to the mercy of any intruder.
Dr. Dyer, the District Surgeon of Pretoria under the Lanyon administration, in former years a practitioner at the Diamond Fields, and who when I saw him in Pretoria held the same appointment under the Boer government, very kindly spent the whole of Sunday morning in driving me around and pointing out the principal places of interest, at the same time giving me most interesting personal reminiscences of the siege, during which he was principal Civil Medical Officer. We drove first to the old military camp, and saw the long parallel rows of barrack buildings, built during the British occupation, but which then were all empty and forsaken. “It is impossible,” the Doctor said, “to picture what we went through, or to realize the contrast between the thronged busy place this was during the siege and the silence of to-day.”
Indeed it would be difficult to find a valid excuse for the action of the authorities at all in dragging the inhabitants away from their houses and homes, and penning them up like sheep together, were it not that a species of panic had come over all.
