On the outside wall of Great St. Mary’s Church in Cambridge is a bronze memorial plaque dedicated to the men of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk who died in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902. Two soldier figurines, one in a pith helmet, the other in a bush hat, stand guard on each side. The 1905 plaque is a forgotten relic barely noticed by the crowds in the marketplace below. There are no remembrance ceremonies here. The excellent War Memorials Trust website (1) looks at the dead men in some detail: deeds of great courage are recorded but most of the hundreds of soldiers are simply noted as ‘killed’ or, perhaps worse, as ‘died of disease’.
For the British, the Boer War seemed ill-fated from the start. The rivalry of British and Dutch settlers in South Africa became acute when a Dutch group, the Boers (farmers) trekked north and set up their own republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Britain tried to annex Transvaal in 1880 in the First Boer War, but an inadequate British force was defeated. Tensions rose again after the discovery of the large Witwatersrand gold deposit in the Transvaal in 1886. The Boers refused to give up their republics and boldly declared war on Britain on 11 October 1899./
The Boers, fit, highly motivated, skilled with horse and gun, well supplied with the latest German rifles and artillery, and agile in their fast-moving ‘commando’ groups, attacked first and laid siege to British garrisons at Ladysmith and Mafeking and to the diamond town, Kimberley. The British force was too small and clumsily led. It suffered defeat after defeat. Stormberg, Magersfontein, Spion Kop and Colenso were costly battle disasters in the dark autumn of 1899. The Boers were adept at cutting supply routes and at placing their trenches and artillery in a landscape that they knew well.
1900 went better for the British with a greatly enlarged force, filled out by troops from the British Empire and led by the astute Lords Roberts and Kitchener. The Boers were defeated at Paardeberg and the besieged towns were relieved. Roberts’s men, although tormented by enteric (typhoid) fever, marched north and took control of the Boer republics. The Boer forces now resorted to guerrilla tactics. Lord Kitchener, the next Commander, responded ruthlessly: blockhouses were built to defend supply routes; barbed wire was stretched across the veld to curtail Boer movement; and Boer farms were burned and women and children sent to tented ‘concentration camps’ where all too many died. Captured Boers fighters were exiled, even executed. Long drawn-out negotiations finally ended the war on 31 May 1902.
It was a dismal war that cost some £19 billion (in present day money). 20,092 British soldiers died and 6,189 Boers. In his poem ‘The Boer War’, written later in the century, the Transvaal-born poet William Plomer (1903-1973) saw it as ‘bungled, unwise’, and claimed it created only ‘an alp of unforgiveness’ (2).
However, the war left an impressive legacy of poetry. Anyone who discusses Boer War poems must be grateful to Malvern van Wyk Smith, whose magnificent study appeared in 1978 (3). In it, he traced hundreds of British, Dutch, German, French, Afrikaans and American poets. There are giants among them like Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy or A. E. Housman, whose poems on the conflict have enduring vitality while interest in the Boer War itself has faded away (4). Then there are the many lesser poets who wrote with real force. Herbert Cadett (1869-1907) was typical. A journalist, with a novel, some detective stories, The Boys’ Book of Battles and a handful of poems to his credit, Cadett imagined the South African fighting with intensity of detail.
From THE SONG OF MODERN MARS
Three miles of trench and a mile of men
In a rough-hewn, slop-shop grave;
Spades and a volley for one in ten-
Here’s a hip! hurrah! for the brave.
A flash from the front that shames the sun,
The crash of a bursting shell,
And the rat-tat-tat of the Maxim gun-
A machine-made funeral knell….
Infantry dodging from rock to rock,
And gunners from peak to peak,
Rifle-shots playing at postman’s knock
And soldiers at hide and seek.
Crimson flecks on a sand-coloured mound,
Like rays of the rosy morn,
And splashes of red on a khaki ground,
Like poppies in fields of corn. (5)
The ‘poppies’ reference seems poignant for today’s readers, but it is unintentional prophesy by Cadett.
Smith includes several women poets in his survey. The great Victorian female novelists and poets had created a special place in the publishing world for women writers. The hundreds of papers and magazines that flourished in this last great age of the printed word considered war poems by women readily acceptable.
The departure of British troops was the first theme for the Boer War poets. In October 1899, Thomas Hardy cycled down to Southampton to watch the troops bound for South Africa boarding ship. ‘Embarcation’(sic), ‘Departure’,’ The colonel’s soliloquy’ and ‘The going of the battery’ (6) contrast the ‘tragical To-be’ with those ‘saner, softer polities’ that would avoid the madness of war. Hardy tried to enter the minds of the soldiers and civilian onlookers to share their fears and feelings during this great Victorian event.
Ella Fuller-Maitland (1857-1939) had married a wealthy man and divided her time between her London house in Chelsea and a summer home in Sidmouth, Devon. She had some literary ambitions, published poems in the St. James’s Gazette and wrote a prose account of her observations of London street-life in From my window in Chelsea (7). In November 1899, she went into the City to watch the ceremonial departure of the elite volunteer force, the Imperial Yeomanry. The power of the occasion inspired her best poem (8):
THROUGH THE STREETS
Through the dim London morning
The soldiers rode away;
The crowd, in sable, round them;
The sky above them grey.
Two strains of music played them,-
One mournful and one glad.
It was the mournful music
That sounded the least sad.
This atmospheric mood study has something of the concise intensity of Oscar Wilde’s London sketch, ‘Symphony in Yellow’(9). The pathetic fallacy of the black clothes and grey sky expresses the bleak feelings of the onlookers while the gentle paradox of the sad and glad music anticipates the emotions of that first foggy Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in 1919.
W. T. Stead (1849-1912) was called ‘the most famous journalist in the British Empire’. His Pall Mall Gazette investigations into Victorian prostitution and urban poverty were sensational. A devoted pacifist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he took great interest in the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. His passion cost him his life: he was drowned in the Titanic disaster of April 1912 while on the way to a peace conference in the U. S. A.
He took the side of the Boers in 1899 and created his own tabloid, War against war in South Africa, to oppose the government. A title cartoon of John Bull greedily reaching out towards the gold fields set the tone. There were regular casualty lists (‘The British butcher’s bill) and ugly quotations from soldiers’ letters home:
‘They threw up their arms and fell on their knees for mercy; but we were told not to give them any…We went along sticking our lances through them; it was a terrible thing but you have to do it’ (10).
Forceful poems accompanied the anti-war stories. ‘Somebody’s Darling’ was one such, an anonymous piece that treads the fine line between sentiment and real sorrow. It was probably written by a nurse (11).
From SOMEBODY’S DARLING
Into a ward of unwhitewashed walls,
Where the dead and the dying lay,
Wounded by bayonets, shots and balls,
Somebody’s Darling was borne one day.
Somebody’s Darling, so young and so fair,
Wearing still on his pale young face,
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave,
The lingering lights of his boyhood’s grace.
Matted and damp are the curls of gold
Kissing the snow of that fair young brow:
Pale are the lips of delicate mould –
Somebody’s Darling is dying now….
Somebody’s watching and waiting for him,
Yearning to clasp him again to her heart:
There he lies with his blue eyes dim,
And smiling, child-like lips apart.
Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear,
Carve on the wooden slab at his head:
‘Somebody’s Darling lies buried here’.
The volunteer nurses shared the sieges and outbreaks of disease with the men they tried to help. Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘Dirge of Dead Sisters’ as a magnificent elegy for those who died (12).
The tragic fate of war widows inspired two of the most enduring artistic and poetic reflections on the war. John Byam Shaw’s painting Boer War 1900 (13)shows a lonely woman inblack clothes standing by a lake, pondering her sadly changed life amid the fading flowers of early autumn. Thomas Hardy’s ‘A Wife in London’, written in December 1899, describes a woman on a cold, dark day receiving the telegram from South Africa announcing her husband’s death. Ironically a letter from the soldier arrives next day, full of life and plans for their summer trips together in 1900 (14).
Jane Barlow’s ‘Ghost-Bereft’ (15) has a similar focus on a distressed war widow. Barlow (1857-1917) was once considered ‘one of the most notable of Irish writers’ and her novels, sketches and poems of Irish life were very popular. Her attempts at drama were not successful but ‘Ghost-Bereft’, a playlet in blank verse, has some enduring force. The young Lady Kathleen MacNeill, living on a large Irish private estate, has lost her husband in the South African War. Once ‘gay as a goldfinch’, she now sits all day in a black gown and widow’s cap in the ‘musty old library’:
They are very long days in the empty house,
When nobody is ever coming home,
And nothing more can happen.
A beautiful May evening brings her out to walk in the park. Before he went to war, the husband planted a long line of rhododendron bushes on the banks of a little valley above a stream. Local superstition claims that you may meet the dead in this spot. Lady Kathleen cannot resist testing the idea.
From GHOST-BEREFT
Last time I came here frost lay on the grass
Along the borders, and the air was cold,
So cold, I thought how it would be warm and bright
Where Gerald was; and then I seemed to hear
The bullets shrieking in it. And now all day
It is warm and bright. I only hear the birds
That wake me singing. It will be a long, long time
Before the days are quiet and dark again….
Half glad he was, I know,
Half glad to go, even when he said goodbye,
And said: ‘Don’t let those rhododendrons blossom
Till I came back to see them.’ There they are,
The white ones glimmering low upon the edge,
Too steady to be foam. They are early…
And has he come to see them now?
The supernatural element of the play (a ‘shadowy figure’ does indeed appear in the valley at the conclusion) means less to us now than the impressive rhododendron metaphor: those ominous, white, unmoving petals seem to be a powerful reflection of Lady Kathleen’s grief.
The mystery and danger of the vast South African landscape was another theme. There were strange new names: the Karoo (scrubland), the Veld (or Veldt) (grassland) or Kopjes (hills). Thomas Hardy makes these odd names part of the puzzlement of Drummer Hodge:
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew-
Fresh from his Wessex home-
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam. (16)
Harriet Childe-Pemberton (1852-1921) also uses the landscape in her poetry. Well connected, she was presented at Court to Queen Victoria and might have been a distant relative of William Shakespeare. She knew the Brownings and edited some of their work. ‘No Luck’ is part of ‘Men, Women and a War’ in her 1905 collection (17). The poem owes something to Kipling’s soldier soliloquys but more to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. The poet gives us the thoughts of a soldier, brought back to England wounded. He finds that his wife has deserted him. His bitterness finds expression in his memories of the veldt, a huge ‘changeless desert’. In ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karoo’, (18) Kipling had already described the sheer terror of the vast open spaces in South Africa: the lonely railway sentinels watch the rare trains leave:
And the darkness enters our faces
And the darkness re-enters our souls.
Childe-Pemberton’s veldt is even bleaker: she presents a spiritual waste land before the ‘The Waste Land’ of 1922.
From NO LUCK
….maybe that shot
Was the one stroke which Fortune did allot
To me of luck! – That, and to die just here
Begirt by this sweet English atmosphere,-
The scent of hayfields carried by the breeze,
The level green that tints the summer trees
And brings one wave of cool athwart the hot
Thus shutting out the veldt, until forgot,
Thank God! It almost be…Oh, Friend! That veldt
Stretching eternally, is fit to melt
The very heart out of a soldier’s hope!
Sometimes, when fever gives my fancy scope,
I dream that hell is like the veldt, – a waste, –
A changeless desert, wherein who be placed
Against invading madness must keep guard, –
Arid, monotonous, despairing, hard! –
There were women war poets within South Africa itself. Betty Molteno (1852-1927) was the brilliant daughter of the first Prime Minister of Cape Colony. She was brought up to share her father’s deep interest in politics and current affairs. She became the Head of the Collegiate School for Girls in Port Elizabeth but was forced to resign when she took a pro-Boer stance in 1899. Inspired in their thinking by the great South African novelist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), Molteno and her friends, Alice Greene and Anna Purcell, expressed their anti-war stance in poems first published in the progressive British journal, The New Age, and collected in the booklet Songs of the Veld (19). They were some of the first women poets to bring real, urgent politics into poetry.
Molteno became close to Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926), who was sent to South Africa to investigate the sufferings of women and children in the War, and who discovered the ‘concentration camps’ where Boer and African women and children were herded to suffer and die (in their thousands) in dreadful conditions. Hobhouse’s stunning Report (20) of 1901 inspired widespread outrage and a change in military policy. A Liverpool Baptist Minister concluded ‘This cowardly war has been conducted by methods of barbarism…The Concentration Camps have been Murder Camps’ (21).
Betty Molteno’s poem ‘Ahab’ reflects this international anger. In 1901, she addressed the new English King, Edward VII, seeing him as the murderous Biblical Old Testament tyrant, who stole the vineyard belonging to his neighbour Naboth (22):
From AHAB
Lift up, O King, thy garment’s snowy hem
A little higher. Turn thy head away –
‘Tis not a pleasant sight to gaze on wounds.
Thy garment’s edge is getting red with blood –
Step higher, King, still higher, – look not down –
Step, over that red pool and that still form…(23)
Nor did the 1902 Peace bring an end to Molteno’s bitterness and anger. She imagined the excitement of London crowds as the war ended. She told her editor: ‘I wrote the lines two or three weeks ago, in a sort of horror, on learning of some of the details connected with the peace.’
From LONDON, JUNE 26 1902
Sing, sing, O people, clap your hands for joy,
Ye now can enter on the lands ye’ve won.
Naboth is dead, his vineyard is your own.
The fair rich goldfields of the sunny south
Are yours by right, the dazzling spoils of war.
Fair is that gold, and blinding in its glitter,
Savage and fierce the joy of its possession. (24)
The maltreatment of Boer women and children aroused poetic anger in Britain, too. Alice Mary Buckton (1867-1944) looked like an unlikely protest poet. As a child, she had lived near the mighty Alfred Tennyson and helped him by sharpening his quill pens. Years later, she still wore the cloak he had given her. A private income allowed her to enjoy her creative interests: kindergarten education; writing plays about King Arthur; establishing Glastonbury as a place of pilgrimage. They were all rather vague and are mostly now forgotten.
Her Boer War protest sequence, ‘The Burden of Engela’ (1904) (25) was quite different. Its fifty-two poems were supposedly founded on true events, but also probably borrowed something from Emily Hobhouse. They describe the lives, in peace and war, of Engela and Piet on their farm in north Transvaal. It is ‘a self-made pastoral world built from nothing in harsh conditions’, vividly imagined by Buckton who had never visited South Africa. Bold, incisive, clear and memorable, each poem describes a mood or an incident from the first departure of the men into their ‘commando’ groups to the sad return of Engela to their ruined farm. Piet departs; Engela’s daughter’s sweetheart Geert is brought home dead; Engela nurses a wounded British Army officer. To avoid her farm horses being commandeered by the British, she shoots the precious animals.
From AT WELBEDACHT
Two troopers came at dawn, with a sergeant at their head.
‘Yield us the stallions, woman! The brown one and the red!’
She gazed as one that wanders: ‘Take them,’ was all she said.
Engela is then told that she and her little son Jaapie must leave the farm which will be burned and the livestock seized.
From FIRE-FAMINE-SWORD
Jaapie’s face was fierce and still;
He held me by the hand;
The bleating of two thousand sheep
Went with us through the sand;
And all along the darkened sky
A smoke lay on the land.
They are taken far away by train to a ‘concentration camp’. Two short, blunt lyrics define the horror of this resettlement for women and children:
BY RAIL
Make way in the crowded trucks – a babe has died!
Born but an hour since – an hour it cried! –
All that is left of a mother’s secret pride!
Scrape in the burning sand a shallow grave:
The hours creep on, and lives are hard to save;
Carry us out of the parching heat, we crave!
The mother’s head lay gasping on my knee…
At set of sun, beneath a wild thorn tree
Another grave was covered silently!
In the merciless heat of the tented camp, which is full of disease, Engela loses her son.
UNDER THE WILD MOON
Under the wild moon
A rough stone stands,
Raised too soon,
Marked by alien hands,
Glimmering white afar
In the dead lambs’ fold –
‘Jaapie – prisoner of war –
Ten years old’!
In the concluding poem, ‘The Return’, Engela and her mother come back to the ‘empty fields’ and ‘heaped and broken stones’ of their farm. But the giant aloe tree is in flower and the bees are busy in their untouched hives: there is hope.
Alice Buckton’s ‘The Burden of Engela’ is still in print in the U.S.A. Here, it deserves more recognition as an important document in Edwardian Imperialist literature.
NOTES
(1) www.roll-of-honour.com>Cambridgeshire>Boer War
(2) William Plomer: Collected Poems: Jonathan Cape 1960 p83
(3) Drummer Hodge. The poetry of the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902): Oxford University Press 1978.
(4) See the use of Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ in Alan Bennett’s play The history Boys (2004).}
(5) Herbert Cadett: ‘The song of modern Mars’: Success: February 1900
(6) See the ‘War poems’ section of Poems of the past and the present: Macmillan (1901).
(7) From my Window in Chelsea: Smith, Elder and Co. (1903). Her observations include the effects of the war on London life.
(8) ‘Through the Streets’: The Spectator 2 December 1899
(9) Oscar Wilde: Centennial Magazine: 5 February 1889
(10) War against war in South Africa: 15 December 1899 p137
(11) Anonymous: War against war in South Africa: 15 December 1899 p137
(12) Rudyard Kipling: The Five Nations: Methuen (1903)
(13) City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham
(14) Published in revised form in Poems of the past and the present: Macmillan (1901)
(15) Ghost-bereft with other stories and studies in verse: Smith, Elder and Co. (1901)
(16) The Dead Drummer: Thomas Hardy:Literature: 25 November 1899
(17) Men, women and a war inLove knows – and waits and other poems: John Long (1905)
(18) The Times: 5 June 1901
(19) Songs of the Veld and other poems: The New Age Press (1902)
(20) Report of a visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies: London (1901)
(21) White Concentration Camps: South African History Online: www.sahistory.org.za
(22) The Bible: Old Testament: 1 Kings 21
(23) Songs of the Veld and other poems: The New Age Press (1902) p 33
(24) Songs of the Veld and other poems: The New Age Press (1902) p 34
(25) The Burden of Engela: a Ballad Epic: Methuen (1904)