THREE BOOKS ON THE LAST MATABELELAND CAMPAIGN.*
IN this age of journalism few interesting experiences are withheld from print. Mr. Selma has already told the story of last year's outbreak in Rhodesia, and here are three more narratives of the same events which supplement one another admirably. Colonel Baden-Powell was Chief of Sir Frederick Carrington's Staff, and, therefore, in addition to relating his personal adventures, can treat of military operations which extended over a country about as large as France and Germany together, as they were seen from the Staff Head- quarters in Bulawayo, whence the General directed the movements of different bodies over that enormous extent. Colonel Plumer had the task of organising at Mafeking, the northern limit of railway communication from Cape Town, the first force which came to the help of Bulawayo and enabled the white men to assume the offensive. This corps he commanded through the campaign, and he narrates in detail, first the process of levying and equipping it (a task which was performed with extraordinary despatch), and then its operations in the field. Major Watts adds a chapter describing the actions of a detachment of it sent under his command into Mashonaland. Lastly, Mr. Sykes relates with great candour and clearness the circumstances of the out- break, the panic in Bulawayo, and the events of the cam- paign as seen by himself when serving in the ranks under Colonel Plumer.
Of the three books, Colonel Baden-Powell's is by far the most interesting ; the most valuable is, probably, Colonel Plumer's succinct and very professional account. The first outrages occurred on March 25th, 1896. Colonel Plumer, then in Cape Town, received orders on April 2nd to enrol a relief force. The first detachment started from Mafeking for the march of six hundred miles on April 12th, and the last on May 1st. Their first engagement with the Matabele took place on May 23rd, and by June 2nd the whole mounted force was complete outside Bulawayo. It must be remembered, in addition, that the rinderpest had entirely disorganised transport, and made difficulties about forage, so that it was no small achievement to have raised, equipped, and mounted a force of seven hundred and fifty men, and brought them to their destination, one thousand five hundred miles from the Cape, including a march of six hundred miles, all within two months. Mr. Sykes may well speak with admiration of the organising ability shown by his commanding officer. The force was disbanded in October, after an existence of eight months, having seen a great deal of hard marching and a good deal of very disagree- able fighting in storming Matabele entrenched in kopjes. Of course it consisted in large proportion—about two-thirds—of men who had served before in South Africa or elsewhere ; but in any case its record is remarkable. Colonel Plumer speaks • (1.) The Matabeleland Campaign, 1896: being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. By Colonel R. S. B. Baden-Powell, 13th Hussars, F.R.G.S. London : Methuen and Co. — (2.) An Irregular Corps in Matabeletatul. By Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Planner, Commanding Matabeleland Relief Force. London : Began Paul, Trench, and Co.—(3.) With Plumer in Matabeleland : an Account of the Operations of the Matabeleland Relief Force during the Rebellion of 1896. By Frank W. By/see. Assisted by 0.0. Lavinger, 0.B., and others, London ; Constable luid Co. highly not only of the courage of his men but of their dis- cipline in the field. He is entitled to take very high credit to himself for it, as Mr. Sykes's account makes it plain that the force included some very undesirable people. In camp thefts of articles of equipment, blankets and so forth, appear to have been incessant. On the road up to Bulawayo, where many waggons were left stranded owing to the deaths of oxen from rinderpest, the successive detachments broke into and pillaged these waggons. A commanding officer's eye cannot be everywhere along six hundred miles of route, and then troops were sent off almost as soon as the men were enlisted; but it was not a promising commencement, and it does not inspire one with a high opinion of South African morality. No wonder that the merchants of Bulawayo prayed to be delivered from such deliverers. It is, however, clear that when Colonel Plumer got his force together he very soon had them' in hand, and Mr. Sykes's occasional protests against the vexatious pedantry of military regulations illustrate the process. Colonel Baden-Powell, like Mr. Sykes, has tales to tell about the somewhat informal proceedings of these warriors. Colonel Plumer's force was of course commanded by an Imperial officer ; but some of the Bulawayo levies must have been considerably more irregular. 4‘ It is daily a wonder to me," Colonel Baden-Powell writes, "how the General manages to handle some of the local officers and men." And, indeed, it is impossible not to sympathise with Smith, the sentry, when he finds himself confronted with his best customer, who has forgotten the countersign, but declares that if he is not allowed to pass he will get his meat in future from Brown.
Colonel Baden-Powell's book is rather a piece of journalism than a technical record. He is obviously a high-spirited and adventurous man, with a knack of putting his high spirits on paper. In addition to his duties of organisation as a Staff Officer—and bitterly he complains of those duties which kept him indoors labouring all day in an office while happier people were out shooting and getting shot—he was at the head of the Intelligence Depart- ment, and used to make nightly excursions into the Matoppo Hills to mark down the enemy's positions. He is full of zeal for this art, and deplores that nowadays the value of solitary scouting is not recognised. How far there may still be a place in scientific warfare for people like the cele- brated Grant of Peninsular days is a matter for experts to discuss ; but there is no doubt of a scout's value against Eulus and negroes generally, who for the most part are too _nuch afraid of the cold and the dark to move at all by night, and can therefore be approached almost with safety ; the difficulty is the escape by the morning light. Colonel Plumer testifies to the value of Colonel Baden-Powell's services, and Mr. Sykes records the high esteem in which he was held by the famous native scout, Jan Grootboom, who seems to be a picturesque and amusing personage. The accounts of these expeditions into the enemy's quarters make excellent reading, and Colonel Baden-Powell is enough of a writer to render very keenly his own sensations. Elsewhere he describes admirably that passion for the open, the delight in the free life between veldt and sky, which sends the adventurer wandering. He Las, too, a remarkable criticism of some utterances by Mr. Stephen Crane on the psychology of combatants. Roughly speaking, Mr. Crane says that they are dazed and in a kind of mist. The soldier replies that, on the contrary, the faculties are keener, more braced up, in short, that a man is more completely himself when he is fighting—just as he is when playing some game that requires quick decisions—but liable to sudden and uncontrollable bursts of blind fury.
Naturally, however, one goes to books about South Africa just now for certain specific information, not for the pleasures of literature. Has the campaign rehabilitated the British soldier in South African opinion? Colonel Baden-Powell, who saw a good deal of the Mashonaland fighting in which they were chiefly concerned, says "Yes," emphatically. Not only was their conduct excellent in every way—they were obviously much pleasanter to lead than the irregulars, and their pluck in that most unattractive business of running into caves with men waiting to shoot was admirable— but also their marksmanship with the Lee-Metford im- pressed the beholders as one would desire. The value of the local troops, moreover, as against bavages, was thoroughly established; it is worth noting that the most conspicuous
gallantry appears to have been shown by the half-bred Cape "boys." But above all one wishes to get at the light thrown by these records upon the state of affairs between black and white in Rhodesia. Colonel Plumer abstains from any ex- pression of opinion, and confines himself to a record of facts. In stating the causes of the rising, he omits all mention of the Jameson Raid, which destroyed the English prestige and denuded the country of its recognised defenders. Both Colonel Baden-Powell and Mr. Sykes are under the fascina- tion of Mr. Rhodes. And it must freely be admitted that Mr. Rhodes's good luck went so far as to give him that rarest of all good fortunes, the opportunity to repair in some measure mischief of his own making. Mr. Sykes quotes the very picturesque account written by a journalist, who was one of the few whites present at Mr. Rhodes's first indaba with the chiefs on August 21st. When Grootboom had advanced among the crowds of armed natives. Mr. Rhodes and his party waited, uncertain of the result. Mr. Rhodes said, "This is very exciting. This is one of the incidents in life that make it worth living." It was the utterance of a gambler, and a gambler Mr. Rhodes has been throughout, on the largest scale, showing a gambler's cruelty in his disregard of consequences. If the Chartered Company and its system of government be, as we are continually told, the work of Mr. Rhodes, then there is no doubt upon whom rests the blame for the Matabele rising. That is an irre- fragable deduction from Mr. Sykes's own statements, yet Mr. Sykes, like the rest of Rhodesia, as it seems, never thinks of blaming Mr. Rhodes. The conquest in 1893 was not a com- plete subjugation ; the white men held their position in the country rather by an understanding than as de facto supreme. Under such circumstances the first duty of the Govern- ment was to settle the country and to strengthen their hold on it; but they concerned themselves rather with schemes of finances and with company promoting in Europe than with administration. The tribute of cattle, claimed as a war indemnity in the first instance, was injudiciously exacted When a definite understanding had been come to with the natives as to the amount claimed by the Company, the ruder- pest appeared, and measures were taken to check it by a general slaughter, which, though perfectly ineffectual, are not on that account to be condemned. What is entirely to be condemned is the reckless ignorance of native feeling which made those responsible for the government of a half-subdued country and for the safety of those who, trusting the Company had settled there, conceive such a project as the Jameson Raid at a moment when the allegiance of the natives was strained to breaking-point. The Matabele rising was organised directly after that disgrace to the British arms. Moreover, Colonel Baden-Powell asserts that the plan of the rebels was at a given date to attack, not outlying farms, but Bulawayo itself. The impatience of savages interfered with the execution of this project, and Bulawayo received its bloodstained warning. But it is none the less evident, both from Colonel Baden-Powell's expressed opinion, and from the picture which Mr. Sykes draws of the town's unpreparedness and panic confusion, that the plan. if carried out, might have meant destruction of every white. It happened otherwise, but the war came, to embitter for a generation the relations between black and white. The Matabele meant it to be a war of extermination, and if the white settlers had had their own way they would have done as much by the rebels. Colonel Baden-Powell says, and truly, that it is natural for men to "see red" after they have been coming upon the bodies of white women and children with skulls battered in. Yet it is only too clear that the civilised race set to the uncivilised terrible examples of cruelty. Mr. Sykes quotes, as an example, one shocking instance of barbarity. The proclamation of clemency was regarded on the spot as a gross and fatuous error. More than that, the ordinary laws of warfare were disregarded. The Mangw6 Pass on the road from Bulawayo to Mafeking had not been stopped; but a priest of the M'limo in that part of the Matoppo Hills was said to be inciting the people to rise, in which event communications would be endangered. It was thought desirable to prevent this, and a Native Commissioner named Armstrong, with the American scout Burnham, rode out to see the priest in his cave, and having ascertained his identity, shot him, and rode away. Mr. Sykes adds that he proved afterwards to have been one of the people belonging to Faku, a friendly chief. But in any case, the situation is one which occurs con-
tittually on the Indian frontier, where fanatic priests are a standing danger. Would the Indian Government desire to be served by its scouts in this manner? Or is it by such means that the Zulu race will be brought to acquiesce in the white rule ? Yet neither Colonel Baden-Powell nor Mr. Sykes expresses any disapprobation of the act. The truth is that Rhodesia has from the outset been governed by a ring of stock-jobbers ; stock-jobbers on the largest scale, but still stock-jobbers, whose morality, to put it mildly, is not that of honourable statesmen. And the curse of specula- tion is on the people. "White labour," says Colonel Baden- " if it were content to labour and not to strive at once for fortune would in that climate thrive and do well ; but it is a dream which at present does not work in practice. Were this otherwise, South Africa would form a richer agricultural garden than Canada." South Africa is full of people basting to be rich ; and whatever services to their country the success- ful among them may have rendered, whatever proportion of their accumulated millions they may have expended in paying troopers to shoot down Matabele or be shot down by them, the guilt of the murder of all the unhappy men, women, and children who were butchered on the farms where they accounted themselves in safety, rests in the last resort, not upon the bloodthirsty savages whom the settlers shot and hung with such alacrity, but upon the gentlemen who were too much concerned with the advancement of their own interests or ambitions to trouble themselves with a thought of the lives they had in charge.
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