Roberts & Kitchener in South Africa, 1900–1902

By Rodney Atwood

The British Army was shocked by three military defeats in a week in South Africa in late 1899. The commanding General Sir Redvers Buller lost his nerve. Something must be done was the cry across the Empire. Britain sent forth not one, but two military heroes. Field Marshal Lord Roberts and Major General Lord Kitchener spent their first five weeks in South Africa restoring morale, reorganising their forces and deceiving the enemy as to their intentions. In the next four weeks their offensive transformed the war: Kimberley and Ladysmith were relieved from Boer sieges and an enemy force of 4000 under General Cronje was captured on the Modder River. A long and bitter guerrilla war ensured in a terrain ideally suited to fast-moving Boer commandoes. On the dark side, deeds were committed of which no civilised empire priding itself on justice and fair play could be proud. The comradeship-in-arms of Roberts and Kitchener, their differing yet complementary personalities, their strategic and tactical decisions are described and assessed using a wide variety of sources including, personal papers and official correspondence. By these mens resourcefulness the British Army, despite its unpreparedness and poor leadership at many levels, won a remarkable victory in the first of the twentieth century Peoples Wars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781844685646

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

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Copyright © Rodney Atwood 2011

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Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps

Acknowledgements

Outline of Roberts’s and Kitchener’s careers

Introduction: A Morning at Cape Town

Notes

Select Bibliography

Roberts and Kitchener arrive at Cape Town, January 1900, in an emotional moment for the waiting crowds. The Empire’s hopes rested on the new commanders. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

The Cameron Highlanders storm the Dervish zariba at the Atbara in a dramatic illustration by Stanley Berkeley: ‘a line of khaki and dark tartan blending to purple, of flashing bayonets at the slope, two-month bearded faces’. (National Army Museum)

The defiant Mahmud, who was a prisoner of the Anglo-Egyptian army. Despite the virtual annihilation of his force, he warned his captors, ‘you will pay for this at Omdurman’. (National Army Museum)

The 12th Sudanese Battalion awaiting the Dervish onslaught at Omdurman. In the words of an admiring British captain: ‘These magnificent black regiments [were] the finest fighting troops in the world.’ (National Army Museum)

Raising British and Egyptian flags on Gordon’s Palace at Khartoum. This was Kitchener’s long awaited moment of triumph – his hero was avenged and the Mahdist movement smashed. (National Army Museum)

Boer artillery was very professional. Their guns were ‘manned A1’ in the words of Colonel Ian Hamilton and outranged the British.

Men of De Wet’s Commando. Although posed, the picture captures the fighting qualities of the Boers sporting captured British rifles and bandoliers.

A British troop train supporting Roberts’s offensive. A cavalry officer wrote that: ‘The line is choked with troop trains…and endless truckloads of stores and provisions.’ (National Army Museum)

Men of Roberts’s army on the march to Bloemfontein. This photograph illustrates how the British adapted their tactics in the face of Boer shooting, but not the extraordinary weather they endured.

Cronje surrenders to Roberts at Paardeberg. ‘The little man’ reaps the benefits of strategic planning, Kitchener’s hustling and Sir John French’s quickness of thought and action.

British sentries guard their prisoners. A British officer described the Boers taken at Paardeberg with their umbrellas and galoshes as like ‘a crowd of Kentish hop-pickers’.

De Wet harangues his commando after success against British lines of communication. His two blows against the British at Sannah’s Post and here at Dewetsdorp rallied the Boers.

Women and children at a Concentration Camp. Due to British maladministration, over 20,000 died in epidemics.

A horseman of the Imperial Yeomanry. As the war continued, the British finally discovered mobility to match the commandos.

Australians march through Sydney en route to South Africa. The crowd’s enthusiasm for the Empire’s war could be seen in any of a score of cities.

[Roberts] looked the very picture of a General, firm, alert and determined, while there was that about him that would command implicit trust and obedience under any circumstances. Beside him sat Lord Kitchener, stern and fixed, as immovable as marble. He appeared to be looking right through us and it was gratifying to know afterwards that he was well satisfied with our appearance and with the work done. Of the remainder of the staff I can say nothing. These two men took all my attention and I certainly was impressed with the two distinct types – the little and the big Lords, as we call them, the one to be loved, the other feared.

(Pte Arthur Haddock, City Imperial Volunteers)

I think I may say that in military fundamentals Bobs and K. saw eye to eye.

(General Sir Ian Hamilton)

Anyhow, most Gentlemen in the House would agree that while there was more sensational military work under Lord Roberts, the more difficult task in connection with the war had fallen to Lord Kitchener.

(Henry Labouchere MP in the H. of Commons, 5 June, 1902)

List of Illustrations and Maps

List of Illustrations

Roberts and Kitchener arrive at Cape Town, January 1900, in an emotional moment for the waiting crowds.

The Cameron Highlanders storm the Dervish zariba at the Atbara in a dramatic illustration by Stanley Berkeley.

The defiant Mahmud, who was a prisoner of the Anglo-Egyptian army.

The 12th Sudanese Battalion awaiting the Dervish onslaught at Omdurman.

Raising British and Egyptian flags on Gordon’s Palace at Khartoum.

Boer artillery was very professional.

Men of De Wet’s Commando.

A British troop train supporting Roberts’s offensive.

Men of Roberts’s army on the march to Bloemfontein.

Cronje surrenders to Roberts at Paardeberg.

British sentries guard their prisoners.

De Wet harangues his commando after success against British lines of communication.

Women and children at a Concentration Camp.

A horseman of the Imperial Yeomanry.

Australians march through Sydney en route to South Africa.

Maps

Acknowledgements

This book takes forward the story of Field Marshal Lord Roberts which I began in The March to Kandahar. In South Africa his service in war was shared with Kitchener of Khartoum, whose background I sketch in detail. Their commands are my theme, with Kitchener steadily assuming greater importance. This is no comprehensive history of the South African War; nor do I compare it to the Mfecane, the bloodiest episode in South African history. Scholars in the field will recognise my many debts of gratitude. The writing of Andre Wessels, Bill Nasson, Fransjohan Pretorius and Leopold Scholtz and an article by John Benyon give a South African perspective. Unfortunately Professor Nasson’s new edition appeared too late for me to use. Professor Wessels’ two volumes published by the Army Records Society have been invaluable. So has Keith Surridge’s Managing the South African War. The Dorset and Hampshire library services kindly supplied innumerable volumes; the Aldershot special military collection lent me the Times History of the South African War. Writing on the war is now so extensive that it fills an entire book: Fred R. van Hartesveld, The Boer War: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Ct & London, 2000). Sadly, my acquaintance with John Darwin’s The Empire Project came too late to affect my writing, but I am glad his view of the war supports mine:

In the longer view, the outcome of the struggle, the unification of South Africa as a self-governing, British dominion rather than its secession, or balkanisation into competing states, created a vital adjunct of British world power in the century of global wars.

I am indebted to the kind and efficient staff of numerous archive collections: the Royal Greenjackets’ Museum; the Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Wiltshire and Swindon, West Sussex and Bedfordshire Record Offices; the archives at my old college, Churchill College Cambridge; the Bodleian at Oxford; the Imperial War Museum; the Royal Artillery Institute Woolwich; the Wellcome Trust Library for the work of the RAMC; the Liddell Hart Archives. Although the Royal Logistic Corps Museum holdings proved not to be useful, I am grateful for their kindness and also that of Colonel Ian Bennett, RCT (ret’d), part-author of Wait for the Wagon.

I am grateful to the Royal Artillery Historical Trust for allowing me to quote from the papers of Sir Laurence Parsons and Sir John Headlam; Mr A.J. Maxse for the use of his ancestor Sir Ivor Maxse’s correspondence; the Bedfordshire and Luton Archives for citing the Orlebar Papers; Sir Anthony Carew-Pole for his ancestor’s letters held at Antony House and the assistance of Tamsin Mallett at the Cornwall Record Office; Dr Jeremy Hogg for permission to cite the H.A. Gwynne papers; to Captain Richard Purser for those of his great-grandfather Major General Sir John Headlam at the Imperial War Museum; the Hon. Sara Morrison for a quote from a letter to her grandfather Walter Long; the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives for use of the De Lisle, Ian Hamilton, Lyttelton and Maurice papers; Mr James Methuen Campbell of Corsham Court for use of his ancestor Field Marshal Lord Methuen’s letters; Mr Andrew Rawlinson for those of Lord Rawlinson of Trent, a great Dorset soldier sadly now virtually unknown in this county; to Lord Birdwood for permission to use the papers of Field Marshal Lord Birdwood; the Bedfordshire Record Office for the Orlebar letters; the British Library for the Balfour, Lansdowne, White and Dunlop-Smith papers; the Archives of Churchill College, Cambridge for the Amery and Esher papers; the Gloucestershire Record Office for use of items in the Hicks-Beach collection; the Brenthurst Library in South Africa for use of the microfilm held at the Imperial War Museum of Ms 069 the diaries of Sir John French; the Isle of Wight Record Office for an item from the Aspinall-Oglander papers. Dr Alastair Massie of the National Army Museum followed up the copyright of a number of their collections which I used, including the Rawlinson papers mentioned above.

Andy Smith of the Victorian Military History Society and the National Army Museum’s Emma Lefley kindly provided most of the illustrations. Those on the dust jacket come from the Mary Evans Picture Library and the National Army Museum. John Radcliffe and John Walker of the Kipling Society gave advice on ‘The Pro-Consuls’. Gregory O’Connor and Ciara McDonnell of the National Library of Ireland helped in what eventually proved to be a fruitless search for Congreve and Kelly-Kenny papers.

The National Archives, the British Library and the National Army Museum were the main centres for my research. At the last of these Simon Moody, Alastair Massie and the staff of the Templer Centre unfailingly provided a great variety of documents; Dr Moody recommended the journal of Lieutenant Trench of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment.

I am particularly grateful to Mr Adam Williams of Tonbridge, Kent who generously sent me typescript of the letters of his grandfather, Private Arthur Haddock, who served in South Africa with the CIV. Private Haddock gave me my lead quote.

Innumerable correspondents kindly answered letters: John Pollock; the late Professor Richard Holmes; the late Brian Robson whose view of Roberts influenced mine; Professor Keith Jeffery for clarifying Henry Wilson’s relations with the Robertses, among other things; Professor Edward Spiers; Tony Heathcote; Jacqueline Beaumont for her encyclopaedic knowledge of the contemporary press; Professor Stephen Miller who recommended Field Marshal Lord Methuen’s papers; Peter Trew who introduced me to the diary of burgher Jack Lane; Professor Andre Wessels who encouraged my enthusiasm, and among answers to many questions found one to a riddle about Bloemfontein floorboards that began with Professor Niall Ferguson and continued with Dr Elvira Wessels. Professor Ian Beckett gave much help, and was kind enough to invite me to a conference he was hosting; at this Stephen Badsey’s and John Laband’s knowledge gave me many pointers. Dr Badsey’s work on the British Cavalry, Professor Piers Brendon’s on the British Empire and Roland Oliver’s review of Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War in the Times Literary Supplement supplied insights. Michael Redley of the John Buchan Society clarified Buchan’s admiration for Lord Milner. Charles Aikenhead sent me wonderfully clear battlefield photographs and his account of Ladysmith VCs including Freddie Roberts’s. He and Ken Gilligan answered questions about topography. Michael Parker of Downes at Crediton and Michael Pentreath welcomed me to Redvers Buller’s old home; I am sorry that my view of Mr Parker’s ancestor differs from theirs.

I owe a particular thanks to the three who kindly read my draft, although in a different form to which it finally appeared: Peter Boyden and Keith Surridge, who also answered many questions, gave encouragement and made wise suggestions; and to John Schofield. Nicholas Griffin not only read the original, but also my revised draft, a true kindness. These four saved me from many errors of fact and judgement and numerous faults of style and language. Those that remain are entirely my own.

My special thanks go to Brigadier Henry Wilson, the publishers Pen & Sword, to the book’s editor Pamela Covey, to Jon Wilkinson who produced another fine cover, and to my daughter Susannah who drew the maps.

My warmest thanks must go once again to my wife who for the better part of seven years has endured the presence of two long-dead Victorian heroes at our Dorset home.

Map 1. South Africa 1900

Outline of Roberts’s and Kitchener’s careers

Introduction

A Morning at Cape Town

At the close of the nineteenth century the British Empire stood at its apogee. Nearly a quarter of the world’s landmass and population lay under British rule, and its seaways were guarded by the ships of the Royal Navy. In 1897, Britain celebrated the Queen-Empress’s Diamond Jubilee. On Jubilee Day, 22 June, 50,000 soldiers from the Empire paraded through London, the largest force ever seen in the capital; a testimony as the Daily Mail told its readers in the boldest print to ‘THE GREATNESS OF THE BRITISH RACE’. In their rejoicing at British power and achievement, the holiday crowds saluted ‘The mightiest and most beneficial Empire ever known in the annals of Mankind,’ as The Times declared.¹ Unheard in this great display was the Empire’s most famous voice. Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie had celebrated quietly that evening after an overcast day in Sussex by walking out to hear the church bells chiming and watch the chain of bonfires rise and sink on dune and headland along the south coast. Not until 17 July did the poem which had been taking form in Kipling’s mind appear in The Times under the title ‘Recessional’: a prayer for the pervading presence of God in British consciousness. The Empire’s citizens should never lose a sense of duty and of obligation to His Law which alone justifies the will to power:

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart;

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, All our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!²

The call to humility and the warning that the proudest empire is as ephemeral as a day’s pageant did not meet with everyone’s approval, nor was it evident as a guide to British conduct of affairs in the next few years. The awakening, however, was to come quickly. In late 1899 the war which had threatened in South Africa for some years broke. Transvaal President Kruger presented an ultimatum to Britain. The Empire defied him, and he sent his forces south. Well-armed Boer commandos on rugged ponies rode swiftly into Natal and Cape Colony. The British Army believed it was ready. A former Indian Army commander-in-chief Sir George White commanded a large garrison at Ladysmith, and a famous veteran of African war, Sir Redvers Buller, was dispatched from Aldershot with the First Army Corps. The next few weeks knocked the gilt off late-Victorian confidence, the military equivalent of Kipling’s prophetic warning. After a costly victory at Talana and a better one at Elandslaagte, White’s forces were driven back into Ladysmith. An attempt to sortie and rout the Boers was defeated; a clear demonstration of enemy superiority.

Arriving at the end of October Buller took the field, dividing his forces. Columns advanced from Natal while other units defended Cape Colony. To the astonishment of a confident public, Britain’s famous regiments were defeated by what many took to be a collection of ill-disciplined farmers. In the course of less than a week – the infamous ‘Black Week’ – three British attacks were beaten. General Gatacre’s column lost its way and was cut up at Stormberg. General Lord Methuen’s force, attempting a night march and dawn attack, was routed at Magersfontein and the famous Highland Brigade decimated by Boer musketry. Most serious, at Colenso on the Tugela River, Buller himself with 18,000 men was repulsed and suffered the ignominious loss of ten guns.

The shock waves passed back, almost immediately via telegraph wires, to London. What made the effect worse was the false report the previous Friday that Ladysmith had been saved and 10,000 Boers taken prisoner. Share prices had shot up, and gentlemen in their clubs said: ‘There, didn’t I tell you so? Always said Buller would put things right.’³ The truth arrived the next morning, Saturday. Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government, which had recently triumphed over Muslim fanatics and French rivals in the Sudan, was confronted with defeat and humiliation. The Queen-Empress might declare that she was not discouraged, but the patriotic English were shocked. Moreover, Ministers were dismayed to learn what the public did not know, that Buller’s telegrams to the government at home and to George White at Ladysmith were eloquent of his loss of confidence and defeatism. New measures were put in hand. Buller was superseded, and two of Victorian England’s most famous military heroes were dispatched on board the steamer Dunottar Castle. The Empire mustered all additional forces it could find.

Ten days into the New Year – not regarded then by most people as the new century, which mathematically would not begin until 1901 – these heroes, having rendezvoused at Gibraltar en route, arrived at the Cape. There was a little fog when Cape Town was neared – the usual white cloth upon Table Mountain. Then the sun shone through the cloud, and as the Dunottar Castle was sighted, there was a rush for the docks. Jetties and temporary stagings were covered with sightseers, well-dressed ladies filled the balconies, and on the transport ships Tommies in khaki lined the rails to see the new arrivals. The waiting dockside was cleared save for lines of troops and an open carriage drawn by a fine pair of greys. Among the huge and expectant crowd on the harbour front at Cape Town was Lady Violet Cecil, the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law. Her husband Major Lord Edward Cecil of the Grenadier Guards was among the British garrison shut up by the Boers in Mafeking with Colonel Baden-Powell. In common with fellow spectators, she strained to see the two heroes as the ship came nearer. They were hidden beneath an awning, which concealed them until close to shore. Most of the crowd saw only a short, erect figure in the full-dress uniform of a British Field Marshal, a black armband just visible against his dark blue sleeve. But Lady Violet spotted a taller figure in khaki uniform, who seeing in her someone he knew, raised his hand. A rustle of excitement passed through the crowd, which was some way off, kept back by police and soldiers. Then the shorter figure, very white-haired, stepped forward where all could see him. Greatly moved, as Lady Violet later recalled, she felt she wanted to cry, knowing that this small but upright man had lost his son in Buller’s defeat at Colenso, a young officer of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps mortally wounded in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the British guns.

The shorter figure was Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford, victor of the Second Afghan War, commander-in-chief of the Indian Army for the last seven and a half of his forty-one years in India, and then in Ireland until his recent appointment to succeed Buller. ‘Bobs Bahadur’, ‘Bobs the hero’ of the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar stood to attention to take the salute from the guard of honour, only 5 feet 4 inches, but every inch a soldier.

Even with cocked hat and plume he was small beside the bronzed Hercules behind him. The khaki figure, his prominent trademark moustaches known to everyone present following his devastating victory at Omdurman sixteen months before, was eighteen years younger than Roberts and a good deal taller. Major-General Sir Herbert Kitchener had joined the ranks of Victorian heroes by organising the march of the Anglo-Egyptian Army up the Nile to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon and bring civilisation to the Sudan. His victory in battle had been capped by clever diplomacy, preventing a confrontation with the gallant French explorer Colonel Marchand from exploding into a war between France and Britain. The hopes of the world’s greatest empire rested on these two. Surely Roberts and Kitchener, at the head of Guardsmen, Highlanders, regiments of the line, cavalry and colonial contingents, could not fail to bring down the resourceful Boer enemy and restore victory to British arms?

Such was the emotion surrounding the landing of the two that Lady Violet’s recollections were vague. The next thing remembered was Kitchener holding her hand tight and asking again and again after her husband at Mafeking. But those who landed seemed more interested in Ladysmith than Mafeking, in the garrison of 12,000 men under Sir George White, hemmed in by General Piet Joubert and his commandos. The band played, but as Lady Violet recalled later, she never heard it, so moved was she.

There were further cheers as Roberts drove to Government House with Sir Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner for South Africa. The enthusiastic greetings given to the Commander-in-Chief were eloquent of the anxiety of Cape Town’s loyal inhabitants. The first news was good – a Boer assault on Caesar’s Camp, an outlying strongpoint at Ladysmith, had been repulsed.⁴

There was much to do. In a letter from Gibraltar, Kitchener had typified the campaign as ‘a big business badly begun’, and in mid-January he was more explicit: ‘Things don’t look very bright out here. I fear the W[ar].O[ffice]. does not yet realise the importance of the war.’ Heavy guns, transport, mounted troops, marksmanship, fieldcraft, scouting – all needed rapid improvement to defeat a mobile and resourceful enemy. ‘If we had worked the Sudan campaign like this,’ wrote Kitchener, ‘we should never have reached Dongola – most of us would be in prison at Omdurman or dead by now! Lord Roberts is splendid.’⁵

For although both were confident, neither man underestimated the task ahead. They were to find it harder than anyone expected, and under the pressures of a new kind of conflict committed deeds of which no empire priding itself on justice and fair play could be proud. At the end of two and a half years of Victorian England’s costliest war, the British had had, in Kipling’s words, ‘No end of a lesson’. Victory in South Africa, won through a mixture of arms and negotiation, was the hardest-fought for Britain since the Crimea.

Kitchener’s moustache and the most successful recruiting poster of the First World War, perhaps of any war, made him what the modern press call ‘an icon’, but after his death at sea in 1916 his reputation was eclipsed by controversy over the bloody losses of the Western Front and then by that of a later warlord, Winston Churchill. Roberts’s nickname and diminutive stature made him equally a symbol of the Army of Empire in his lifetime, but his career too was largely forgotten after 1914–18. At the time of his death his admirers acclaimed him the greatest British general since Wellington.⁶ Thirty years ago in a widely-researched book on the Boer War, Thomas Pakenham showed how Roberts benefited from press and political contacts. Pakenham drew vivid pen-pictures to throw sand in the faces of Britain’s imperial paladins, beginning by placing Sir Alfred Milner on a late-Victorian ‘naughty nineties’ bicycle with an attractive girlfriend taking time away from his schemes of empire. His book was a tour de force narrative, bringing together politics and the fighting in a lively fashion, brushing away many cobwebs around Boer War writing. However, as one reviewer wrote, he was not above creating details when they were unavailable.⁷ Since then historians have emphasised the key role played by the press in the careers of both Roberts and Kitchener. If Roberts was not the first media general, he was certainly astute at using the press. Unfortunately the last full-length biography failed to investigate possibly the most interesting aspect of his career, the role of his bossy wife at a time when men ruled the world – or at least the British Empire – and by destroying their private letters the author tried to prevent anyone else doing so.⁸

To many of their contemporaries, especially other soldiers, the marvel was that these two apparently contrasting figures should work so well together.

Kitchener was a controversial character, regarded by admirers as a world-beater, but resented by establishment figures as he rose by his own efforts and did not hide his sometimes ruthless ambition. Sir Philip Magnus, his biographer of the 1950s,⁹ presented a one-dimensional portrait laying emphasis on the unfeeling image originating in the journalism of G.W. Steevens. Steevens’ account of Kitchener as Sirdar or commander of the Egyptian Army is unforgettable:

He stands several inches over 6 feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men’s heads … Steady passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick-red rather full cheeks, a long moustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affections nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant too: neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential [Kitchener] … You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it. His precision is so unhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire Exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the Sudan Machine.¹⁰

Unforgettable but incomplete; Kitchener was a highly-strung, complicated figure. More recent biographers provide a more rounded image, emphasising his unconventional early career, personal friendships and achievements in the First World War.¹¹

The careers of these two men spanned the apogee of the British Empire. When Roberts as a young subaltern travelled to India in 1852, it alone occupied a special place in British imperial consciousness. Elsewhere Britain pursued trade and limited civilising goals, the fight against the slave trade and the spread of Christianity. Britain looked forward to a time when her colonies would develop their own institutions of self-government. The report of the Earl of Durham outlining the political future for Canada was to be a blueprint for colonial self-government.¹² The Great Exhibition in 1851, a marvel of organisation, showed the British ahead of other nations in industry, but its theme was international, not imperial. Queen Victoria called it a ‘peace festival’. Other nations could become as prosperous if they followed Britain’s example. Britain had no need of a mighty army or a vast empire. Her colonies were pre-eminently those places, sisters across the sea, where people of British race had settled and where British institutions, elected parliaments, the rule of law, a free press, would spring up. Like ripe fruit dropping from the tree, or children who grew to maturity, colonies would become self-governing nations on the British model.

India was different. Here Britain ruled over millions of people of different race and culture. To Victorian statesmen, India and the British Isles were the twin centres of their wealth and strength in the world. India was Britain’s most dazzling imperial possession, seen as a land of romance, dense jungles, fierce tigers, tea plantations, and gilded palaces. India was vital for trade, absorbed British goods, and provided a training ground for an army of 250,000.¹³ The Indian Mutiny, in which Roberts fought as a young officer, threatened British rule. It was crushed with great brutality. The British were shocked that the rebels appeared to reject the benefits of Western progress, but British trusteeship over India could therefore be extended into a distant future. Holding India remained essential to British power.

The British were vastly outnumbered by their subject peoples. In Egypt there was a garrison of 5,000, a population of 13 million. In India there were over 4,000 Indians for every British soldier. British rule depended upon the active collaboration of native people in administration and the army; upon bluff and prestige, medals, uniforms, parades and conspicuous display; upon a mask of moral superiority which included frowning on intimate relations between races which had characterised an earlier time; upon fair justice, light taxes, a rule better than any possible local alternative; and a reputation for military invincibility. Any defeat must be promptly reversed.¹⁴ To this last, Roberts owed his reputation.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, British supremacy was threatened by French, Russian, American and especially German rivalry; and by the rise of Islamic nationalism, as shown by the career of the Sudan’s Mahdi, ‘the appointed one of God’. The passing of the mid-Victorian heyday saw a change in attitude, to strengthen imperial ties. In the 1880s the focus of British foreign affairs shifted from Europe to Asia and Africa, from the Concert of Europe to the cultivation of empire. The first maps appeared with the colour red marking British possessions. J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, in his lectures on The Expansion of England in 1881 asked:

Will the English race, which is divided by so many oceans … devise some organization like that of the United States, under which full liberty and solid union may be reconciled with unbounded territorial extension? And secondly shall we succeed in solving a still harder problem? Shall we discover some satisfactory way of governing India…?

Seeley believed Britain’s survival possible only as a World State, harder for a sea power than continental rivals with great landmass.¹⁵

In the 1890s the debate about empire intensified. Britain’s apparently declining position could only be restored by acquiring colonies in Africa with its great natural wealth and by safeguarding the lifeline of empire, the routes to India via Suez and the Cape. In South Africa Britain claimed paramount authority and trusteeship; she came into conflict against a white race with a Biblical sense of their identity and superiority. The Boers or Afrikaners of Calvinist Dutch descent rejected British claims. British policy towards South Africa vacillated; it reflected the clash between a liberal, multi-racial imperialism and a racialist republicanism. The British laid aside Dutch law, promoted humanitarian ideals, introduced missionaries and in 1833 freed the slaves. The Boers regarded native peoples as ‘kaffirs’ (the Arab name for infidels). Hungry for land and avid to uphold white supremacy, they streamed out of Cape Colony north and east across the Orange and Vaal Rivers in the Great Trek of 1837–45. It was difficult to achieve a modus vivendi with the Transvaal and Orange Free State; their outlook incompatible with the rulers of a world empire. Imperial policy, restricted at first to guarding Simonstown naval base, was drawn in the Voortrekkers’ path. When the tiny Boer republic on the coast at Natal seemed to threaten the route to India, it was taken over. The imperial government denied Boer claims to Basutoland and Griqualand West and annexed them. A costly and bloody war waged by the British against the Zulus brought widespread condemnation in Britain. Disraeli’s government fell; Gladstone dithered uncertainly.¹⁶ South Africa’s strategic importance, the Boer spirit of independence, the discovery of diamonds, then gold – all these pointed to possible future war. Africa, both south and north, took a growing place in imperial policy. The Earl of Salisbury, three times Prime Minister at the end of the century, presided over African expansion.¹⁷ Salisbury and his family became Kitchener’s patrons. Roberts and Kitchener claimed to be bipartisan, to owe loyalty to neither Party, but at the end of the century the Conservatives gave them their chances for fame and that most elusive of goals, military glory.

Chapter 1

‘Emphatically a Period of Small Wars’

Little Bobs, the hero of the British private and the fearless leader of men whom every native soldier in India would follow to the death.

(The Times, 4 January, 1897)

The idea of making Sir F. Roberts Viceroy (which would never do …) was to put Arthur [Duke of Connaught] under him, which the Queen indignantly repudiates.

(Queen Victoria, 5 February, 1892)

The man whom I have always placed my hopes upon, Major Kitchener, RE, one of the few very superior British officers, with a cool and good head and a hard constitution, combined with untiring energy.

(Colonel Charles Gordon)

The Victorian era is destined to go down to history as emphatically a period of small wars.

(The Daily Mail, Diamond Jubilee edition)

When General Sir Frederick, Baron Roberts of Kandahar returned to England from India in spring 1893, after forty-one years of service, he found himself fêted as a famous servant of empire, but unemployed. The Times, saluting him upon his laying down supreme command of the Indian Army, declared:

He leaves behind him a sense of security which never in India before rested on so solid a foundation of military strength … His life of hard fighting has been spent on the farthest frontiers of the Empire, and he returns to England as a great Roman commander who had held the Danube might have returned to the Capitol, adored by his legions, but almost a stranger to his fellow citizens.

Roberts’s fighting had begun in the Indian Mutiny, winning the Victoria Cross in hand-to-hand combat, continued on the North-West Frontier and in Abyssinia where he was Quartermaster-General of Lord Napier’s 1867 expedition to rescue hostages held by King Tewodros (‘mad Theodore’ to the British), and reached a climax in the Second Afghan War of 1878–80. In a difficult and mountainous country against a resourceful enemy, he had won a series of striking victories, culminating in his famous 300-mile march from Kabul to Kandahar to rescue a besieged British and Indian garrison and defeat Ayub Khan’s army. It was easy to forget that he had not commanded much more than a strong division. His victory outside Kandahar not only restored the reputation of British invincibility, but installed on the Afghan throne Abdur Rahman, former client of the Russians but now friend and ally of British India. Roberts’s success enabled the Liberal viceroy, Lord Ripon, to withdraw over-stretched Indian and British forces from Afghanistan while bringing the country under British influence. At the meeting of Abdur and Ripon’s successor Dufferin at Rawalpindi in March 1885, onlookers were reminded that Afghan foreign policy was conducted under British suzerainty. The bearded Afghan, ‘a true fighter for Islam’, was escorted by his British hosts to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan:

For he might have been Roosian,

A French or Turk or Proosian,

Or perhaps Ital-ian!

But in spite of all temptations,

To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman!¹

Roberts was no stranger to the English public despite The Times description. His wiry, terrier-like, 5-foot 4-inch frame, his piercing blue eyes – few knew that one was blind – set in a face reddened from exposure to Indian sun, his fine crop of white whiskers, his nickname ‘Bobs’, made him an obvious candidate for media attention. He was not slow in exploiting these contacts to advance his claims for promotion and his views on imperial defence. As a spotter of future talent, he had surrounded himself with able young officers and befriended a precocious genius, Rudyard Kipling, future poet of empire, with whom he shared an interest in the welfare of British soldiers.

In the years after the triumph of 1880 Roberts had advanced, first to command the Madras Army in southern India, then to the Indian Army commander-in-chief’s post from 1885 to 1893. Almost his first task in that role was in Burma. The British had deposed King Thibaw, who had been rash enough to sign an agreement with France and to defy the Raj. The occupation of Mandalay proceeded smoothly enough, but the Indian and British garrison was soon in a prolonged war against ‘dacoits’, bandits in British parlance, mainly unemployed ex-soldiers of the disbanded Burmese Army. Roberts did not lead columns in pursuit, but provided a directing hand at the centre of operations. In Burma he continued the collaboration begun in Afghanistan with Colonel George White. White had been at the front in Roberts’s battles in Afghanistan, winning the Victoria Cross. His active leadership, good organisation, and his frankness when he told the Viceroy Dufferin that British rule in Burma extended no further than the range of sentries’ rifles, impressed Roberts.²

The Times article had praised Roberts for carrying to completion ‘great schemes of [Indian] defence’ planned by his friend and predecessor as commander-in-chief, Sir Donald Stewart; for increasing the numbers of Indian and British troops; for stationing young soldiers newly-arrived in India in the cooler hills for a period of acclimatisation; and for re-arming batteries of artillery with the new 12-pounder gun. His influence had been far-reaching. He enjoyed excellent relations with successive Viceroys and with their soldier advisors, Military Members of their council. He continued to develop links with newspapermen prepared to support his views on strategy. As spokesman of the ‘Forward School’, Roberts advocated building railways and North-West Frontier forts against Russian invasion.³

He enjoyed the wholehearted support of his wife, more than just a model Victorian spouse. He and Nora Henrietta Bews, youngest daughter of a Black Watch officer, had married at Waterford when he returned to Ireland on sick leave from service in the Indian Mutiny. Nora gave up an extended honeymoon to return to India with him so he should not lose an opportunity on the Quartermaster-General’s staff. In nineteenth-century India she suffered the same fate as many of those now much-despised memsahibs, the bloom of youth fading in the climate, three of her children dying in infancy. She raised the surviving two girls and a boy, the latter destined for an army career, in a happy family. In July 1888 George White saw the Robertses together at Simla and thought them ‘the nicest family party possible. The children are on the nicest terms with their father and mother.’⁴ As wife of the Indian commander-in-chief, Lady Roberts’s main achievement was to begin Indian Army Nursing and establish ‘Homes in the Hills’, rest homes for nurses at hill stations, doubling as nursing establishments for officers. The work of her nurses, replacing ill-trained orderlies, was effective. In an epidemic of cholera, the chief medical officer praised ‘the valuable services rendered to the cholera patients by the nursing sisters … Nothing could exceed their attention and care of these patients …’ Her work paralleled that of Lady Dufferin, the Vicereine, whose Fund supplied lady doctors and midwives for women’s hospitals in India. Not all Lady Roberts’s actions won accolades. There was muttering about ‘petticoat government’ because of her alleged influence. ‘One thing is very certain,’ wrote George White from Simla, ‘that she takes too much part in Sir Fred’s business and that it is generally known.’⁵

Now the Robertses were back in England, he without an appointment. His influence continued in India, for his successor as commander-in-chief was that very George White whom he had advanced. White’s work in Burma established his reputation, the government of India reporting that success was due in large part to his ‘skill, judgement and ability’. Roberts had next appointed him to command a division at Quetta in Baluchistan. He successfully led the Zhob expedition against tribesmen who had long made their almost inaccessible mountain home a base for raids into British territory. In the following years, with the political officer Sir Robert Sandeman, he showed skill in the pacification of Baluchistan. White’s conversion to the ‘Forward School’ was partly Roberts’s doing, partly Sandeman’s.⁶ In summer 1892, knowing Roberts supported him as his successor, White wrote:

You open such brilliant possibilities to me that I should like to be as fit as possible in case the highest post falls to me & I will spend my leave with a view to being ready for any eventuality.

Roberts successfully pressed his appointment.⁷

His reforms continued Roberts’s policies: encouraging accurate shooting and temperance among the men. His command saw the greatest development of the ‘Forward School’. Indian and British columns with their pack guns, mule trains and loose, open formations repeatedly advanced into the mountainous country lying on the Afghan border to avenge tribal raids and repel warlike sorties. There was a small expedition against the Waziris in 1894. In