You will think, I daresay, that I have been putting the case one-sidedly. Possibly that is so; but I am putting the side that wants putting. I am constantly seeing it stated that any measures are justifiable so long as they are likely to end the war. "Well, but we must end it somehow," is a common phrase. That is all rubbish. We must fight fairly, that's the first rule of all. I daresay there may have been individual acts of cruelty or treachery on the part of the Boers, but I am sure that any just and unprejudiced officer will tell you that on the whole they have behaved surprisingly well, and in a way that is really very striking when we consider how undisciplined and individually independent they are. Let us then, on our side, play the game fairly. No doubt it is very exasperating to have the thing dragging on in the way it is doing, and the present intangible, elusive warfare is desperately irritating, but there is after all nothing unfair about these tactics of the Boers, nothing illegitimate in any way; they are merely the turning to account of natural advantages; and this being the case, we have no right to lose our tempers and get vicious just because we have taken on a tougher job than we thought for. Unluckily there seems to be a big party who are prepared to do anything and fight anyhow to get the thing finished. You will gain nothing by those means. You will not hasten the end of the war, and you will make its after effects more lasting and hard to deal with.[2]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Here is a telegram copied from the Evening Standard of October 16, 1901. "Addressing the volunteers who have returned from the front, the Governor of Natal this morning said that he could not now refer to the Boers as dogs of war, but rather as yelping, snarling curs." As against that take the opinion of Lord Cranborne who has just come back from the front: "They had fought and they were fighting with some of the bravest, some of the most tenacious, and some of the most admirable troops that the nation had ever had to encounter;" and he ends his speech: "Personally he had, as one who had served as a soldier in South Africa, a great admiration for the Boers themselves." What I submit is, that it makes the whole difference to your chances of a settlement whether you speak of and regard your enemy as brave and admirable, or as a yelping cur. We shall have to settle down with these people sooner or later, and every paltry insult uttered and countenanced against them only makes the process much more difficult. The odd thing is that even in England they seem to excite no surprise or dissent. They are printed as a natural comment on the situation. What I always feel is, now as when I was out there, that the chances of a future agreement would be very much improved if the English people were to treat the Boers in the way that brave enemies ought to be treated, with a certain amount of courtesy and respect.
LETTER XXVI
PLAIN MISTER!
Cape Town.
I am trying to din the fact into my head that I am a civilian again and not a soldier any more. It is difficult. I find myself looking questioningly at my suit of grey flannel. It feels like a disguise. No soldiers' hands as I pass them rise in salute now, though my own involuntarily half rises in answer They look at me and take no notice. A recruiting sergeant tried to induce me this morning to join an irregular corps. He told me I should get five shillings a day, and that it was a fine life and a beautiful country.
And yet I know that, in a few days even, the civilian life that seems so unreal now will be the real, and the old soldier life the unreal. I shall not in my walks find my eyes wandering "with a vague surmise" over the nearest hilltops in search of Boers, nor measuring unconsciously the range from the top of Table Mountain, which I find myself doing even as I write this, looking up at it through the window. The trekking, the fighting, the croak of the invisible rifle, the glare of the sun, the row of swarthy determined faces, the roar of horse hoofs, all this, and the lounging days by river banks (shooting guinea-fowl and springbuck), will drop back and be shut off from one's life to rise now and then, I suppose, with the creeping of an old excitement in one's memory.
There was a heavy gloom on the last days of my soldiering. It was at Naauwpoort that I first joined the Guides. We stopped there coming down. There was the waiting-room, the very table I had slept on; the sun-baked flat where first I met the Major; the slopes where our tents were pitched—Lord! how the sight of the place brings it all back, and how different everything has turned out from what we expected; it was there that I joined, and it was there, travelling down with our time-expired men, that we first heard the news of the Queen's death. You at home will feel this deeply—of course every one must—but I can't help thinking that out here, far away from home and fighting, one feels it even more. I am almost surprised at minding so much. There is an irksome sense at the back of one's mind, even when one is thinking of other things—of loss, of something wanting. England seems less England to me than it did and I less of an Englishman. It gives a faint satisfaction to have been one of her soldiers at the end.