CHAPTER 3
Champagne for the Volk

Pretoria,
23-29 December 1898

Geologist to Kruger in 1886:  ‘Mr President, the conglomerate gold-beds and enclosing sandstones and quartzites were sea-shore deposits formed during the subsidence of a coast line in...’
Kruger to his wife:  ‘Mama, meet the gentleman who was there when God made the earth.’

A fortnight after Milner had attended the great ‘hooroosh’ for George Curzon in London, another kind of celebration took place in Pretoria, six thousand miles away:  a victory banquet for burghers and government.  The conquering hero was the Transvaal Commander-in-Chief, Commandant-General Piet Joubert, and they were not giving him a send-off, like Curzon’s;  they were celebrating his safe return.  Joubert and his commandos had just marched back to Pretoria after subduing, with the help of their Creusot artillery, a troublesome African chief called Mpefu.(1)

For the battle-hardened commandos, it was the triumphant end to half a dozen native wars in nearly as many years.  No wonder that in the Grand Hotel, Pretoria, that evening the candlelight playing on the blue-and-gold uniforms of the state artillery and the green sash of the President reflected a certain swagger — a kind of imperial glow, Afrikaner-style — that would not have been out of place in the Hotel Cecil, London.  The champagne, too, was excellent in Pretoria.  Since they had grown rich on the profits of the Rand, the Boers had come to recognize how imported French wine, like imported French artillery, could add to the success of most occasions.(2)

Oom Paul (‘Uncle Paul’, as the burghers affectionately called Kruger) spoke briefly at the banquet.  For the last few years he had been visibly failing in health, plagued by eye trouble and other infirmities.  Still, he remained a prodigy.  At seventy-three he was a national monument in his own lifetime, a heroic survival from the Great Trek.(3)  It was those days he recalled in his speech.  He told the story, as he loved to tell it on every possible occasion, of his own part in crushing Dingaan and the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.

‘I do not say what I have heard,’ he said, speaking the taal (Afrikaans) in his gruff, jerky voice, ‘but what I have seen with my own eyes.’  He went on to describe the battle in his homely way:  the circle of covered wagons chained together in the laager;  the gaps between the wagons closed by bundles of mimosa thorn;  the attack of the Zulus, the air thick with assegais;  the children melting down lead for bullets;  the women hacking off the arms of the Zulus who tried to break through the thorn bushes.  And the Lord, praise the Lord;  He had given His people a great victory.

Kruger’s extraordinary life had spanned the whole life of the State from the Battle of Blood River to Jameson’s defeat at the Battle of Doornkop.  It was now nearly the third anniversary of that victory.  Kruger, under doctor’s orders, retired early from the banquet, after receiving an ovation, to his small, whitewashed house in Church Street.(4)

It was in this same modest house that the news of the Raid had reached Kruger three years before, when Jameson was riding to Johannesburg.  It was ten o’clock;  his friends had found him asleep;  a single sentry on duty at the gate;  the house in darkness, apart from one electric bulb.  On hearing the news, Kruger reluctantly agreed to have a horse saddled ready in case he had to leave Pretoria in a hurry.  But had he already guessed what was afoot?  He showed no sign of excitement.  After agreeing to call out the commandos, he went back to sleep as if nothing had happened.(5)

To mark the anniversary of the Raid, people had now suggested that the government set up a monument.  There was even talk of celebrating Jameson Day, equivalent to the Englishman’s Guy Fawkes.(6)  Kruger let it be known that he frowned on the latter idea.  They had already one day of national rejoicing, Dingaan’s Day (16 December) to celebrate the destruction of the Zulus.  Perhaps Kruger added with characteristically heavy humour that it was not the moment — not yet, at any rate — to celebrate the destruction of the British.

The chief speech at that night’s banquet was given by General Joubert.  He rose to his feet, his Majuba medal agleam on his scarlet uniform, tall, bearded, suave, the leading Boer of his generation after President Kruger, and the runner-up in three presidential contests.  Although he, too, had witnessed the Great Trek, as a child, Joubert presented a striking contrast to Kruger.  If Kruger was the archetypal Boer of the backveld, Joubert typified the Boer of the towns.  Not for him the baggy black suits of the old President, the clouds of smoke puffed from an enormous pipe, and the habit of underlining his words by spitting on the ground.(7)  Joubert dressed like a gentleman, and was known for his progressive ideas.  He had taught himself to read and write English as well as Dutch.  His business acumen had earned him the name of ‘Slim (Clever) Piet’ as well as investments in land and gold shares that totalled, after his death, £230,000 — a tidy sum even by the standards of the Rand.

If Joubert had a weakness it was, the Boers said, his lack of moral courage.  As a general, he hated imposing unpopular duties on the burghers;  as a politician, he shrank from standing up to Kruger in the Raad (the Volksraad, alias the Transvaal Parliament).  Not that he could be accused of being soft towards Africans, any more than any other ‘Progressive’ politicians.  On the contrary, in both the Raad and on the battlefield he had proved himself a firm advocate of keeping the Kaffirs in their place.(8)

Tonight Joubert was almost apologetic as he explained why there had been so little fighting in the campaign against Mpefu.  There was no need to kill many Kaffirs.  They fled into their caves.  Mpefu fled across the Limpopo.  Yet the war was just and necessary.  Mpefu, the so-called ‘Lion of the North’, had the impertinence to call himself the King of Zoutpansberg, and claim some white settlers as his subjects.  So the government sent the burghers and stopped the Lion’s roar for ever.

There was cheering in the hall as Joubert reached his peroration:  the usual patriotic appeal for unity.  They must stand shoulder to shoulder against all opposition in the struggle for the ‘land’.  They must shed the last drop of blood for the ‘yolk’.  Before midnight, the banquet concluded with the customary cheers, three times three, for the guest of honour and his wife.  The Boer national anthem, the ‘Volkslied’, was played by the hotel band, the state artillerymen presented arms, and the guests trooped out into the city, where a picturesque contrast presented itself the backveld Boers, in Pretoria for their Christmas pilgrimage, camped there in their covered wagons;(9)  while high above the wooded valleys, throwing monstrous shadows in the moonlight, were three enormous forts, the pride of the Transvaal army, equipped with searchlights and the latest European artillery.(10)

It had been a triumphant evening for Joubert, the conquering hero, and Oom Paul, the father of the republic.

Of course, political realities are never so simple, least of all in a country like the Transvaal, which had leapt two centuries in the space of a decade.  Kruger was neither so unyielding nor so secure as he appeared.  Joubert, the picture of the loyal general, deeply resented Kruger’s idiosyncratic methods of government and opposed much of his policy.  Behind Joubert there had gathered the ‘Progressives’ (the young Turks) mustering about a third of the Raad.  They were determined to modernize the ramshackle republic before it was too late.

Hence it was not true to say, as Milner had told Chamberlain, that there was no sign of the Transvaal reforming itself.  Change was in the air, radical change, and supported (if reluctantly) by Kruger himself.

Chamberlain had called Kruger an ‘ignorant, dirty, cunning’ old man (borrowing the words, incidentally, from a private letter of that unusual Foreign Office official, Roger Casement).(11)  Foreigners consistently underrated Kruger.  It was partly a matter of style.  The massive frame, the puffy features, halfcovered by a mat of grey hair, had their counterpart in the gruff voice and the strange syntax.(12)  Here was the epitome of the peasant;  one of Brueghel’s rustics escaped from the sixteenth century;  an ‘ugly customer’ indeed (as Disraeli once called him in private) at the helm of government.(13)

It is true that in some ways Kruger appeared extremely crude.  Joubert, who was also self-educated, adopted the European conventions of public speaking;  he had mastered the art of saying nothing in a great many words.  Kruger often said too much before he had spoken a sentence.  And not only that, he actually seemed to believe much of what he said:  that the earth was as flat as the Bible said,(14) that the Boers were the people of the Book, chosen by the Lord, and (as a kind of corollary) that the rooineks (English) deserved to be damned.  Yet to people who knew Kruger well, it was clear that the old man’s mind, like the Rand gold-mines, had its deep levels;  that he was complex as well as crude.

He had been born in 1825 somewhere inside the borders of Cape Colony, the third child of an obscure trekboer (a migrant farmer) whose ancestors had come from Germany a century before.  When he was ten, the family joined a pioneer column led by Andries Potgieter and set out on the Great Trek.  His education was left to the Good Book and the rifle:  the Bible read aloud by his father at the supper table, the rifle used to such effect that before long he had shot half a dozen lions.  At seventeen he was deputy field cornet, and he did not disappoint his admirers.  To his tally of lion, he added a list of African chiefs whom he subdued:  Secheli, the Bechuana chieftain, Mapela of Waterberg and Monsioia.  And at twenty-six he served on the Boer council of war which negotiated with Britain the Sand River Convention, recognizing Transvaal independence.  At thirty-six he was Commandant-General.(15)

After 1877, when Britain had annexed the Transvaal and Sir Bartle Frere controlled it, Kruger emerged as the national champion.  Twice he was sent to London to try to persuade the British to cancel the annexation.  He failed, of course.  But the First Boer War that followed (regarded by the Boers as the First War of Independence) brought him a double triumph:  in the battles that culminated in Majuba, and in the diplomatic victories that followed.  It was Kruger who helped persuade Gladstone to settle for peace, subject to the Convention.  He was then elected for the first of four terms as President.(16)

The veld had bred in him the unusual qualities that made a man a successfull leader in hunting lions or black men:  the mixture of animal strength and human cunning, of self-reliance and faith in the Lord, and the steely will, strong but flexible, equally serviceable in advance and retreat.

But the veld had also bred in Kruger serious defects which emerged in time of peace.  He was headstrong and autocratic and tactless.(17)  One of his political opponents once described the extraordinary methods he used to woo the opposition:  ‘First he argues with me and, if that is no good, he gets into a rage and jumps round the room roaring at me like a wild beast ... and if I do not give in then he fetches out the Bible and ... he even quotes that to help him out.  And if all that fails he takes me by the hand and cries like a child and begs and prays me to give in.... Say, old friend, who can resist a man like that?’(18)  But many Boers, quite apart from the British, did not find these methods irresistible at all.

Among the Progressives, Kruger’s reputation had suffered in the years of peace after Majuba.  His diplomatic policies were dealt a near-fatal blow by British success in encircling the country during the scramble for Africa.  Many Boers, including Joubert, believed in the 1880s that the Transvaal should expand northwards across the Limpopo;  Rhodes trekked there first.  The Boers also had their eyes on Tongaland as an outlet to the sea;  the British took Tonga-land.  Kruger had to be content with a railway link to Lourengo Marques in Portuguese territory, which took years to build.(19)

By 1893 — two years before this railway was opened — Kruger’s stock in the Transvaal had fallen so low that he almost lost the presidency to Joubert.  Joubert’s supporters in the Progressive Party maintained that he had won a majority of the votes, but the poll had been rigged.  Joubert failed, characteristically, to insist on new elections.(20)

Joubert’s party continued to harry Kruger inside and outside the Raad throughout the next three years.  In their party newspaper Land en Volk they hammered home the message:  ‘Krugerism’ was corrupt, inefficient and a ridiculous anachronism;  high time Kruger was put in a museum.  They baited Kruger for giving his country away to foreigners:  the plum jobs were given to the Hollanders (Dutch immigrants) who acted as the administrators and technicians of the young state;  the railway monopoly given to a foreign company, the Netherlands Railway Company;  and the dynamite monopoly given to foreign speculators, the German and French shareholders of two foreign arms-manufacturing companies.  In a country where the mines had such an insatiable appetite for dynamite, this monopoly was to make nearly £2 million profit, almost a licence to print money.  Even some of Kruger’s staunchest supporters thought this monopoly indefensible.(21)

By 1895 Kruger seemed to be coming to the end of his tether.(22)  And then rescue came — from Dr Jameson.

The first great debt that Kruger owed Dr Jameson was that Jameson united the volk behind the Transvaal government.  At a stroke, the fumbling old President became the hero of the Raid.  The sneers of the Progressives were forgotten for the moment, and when the backveld burghers were cheerfully planning to hang Jameson and the Reformers (on the famous beam from Slachter’s Nek) it was Kruger who showed studied moderation.(23)

The second great debt that Kruger owed Jameson was the that the Raid rallied the volk outside the borders of the Transvaal — especially in the Orange Free State.  The Free State was the sister republic of the Transvaal, the first of the twin homelands founded by the voortrekkers.  And how enviable was its history in comparison with the Transvaal’s.  The British had long regarded it as a model republic:  a show-piece of tolerance and good sense.  For half a century — ever since the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 — they had recognized it as a fully independent nation.  On their part, the Free State Boers welcomed foreign immigrants and treated them well when they came.  The Uitlanders in the Free State had all the political rights denied their counterparts in the Transvaal.  But then how easy it was for everybody to behave impeccably in the Free State.  Not an ounce of gold had been found — in those days — under its rolling veld.  Only a trickle of immigrants came:  no threat to its independence or national character.’(24)

Now, since the Raid, a subtle change had come over the arcadian state.  The President elected in 1896 was Marthinus Steyn, dedicated to closer union with the Transvaal.  In 1897 a military pact had been concluded between the two republics, and Steyn had set the seal on this pact by visiting Pretoria in November 1898.  In diplomacy, President Steyn could be expected to exert a moderating influence.  But, if all failed, blood was thicker than water.(25)  No wonder Kruger fêted President Steyn in Pretoria with a brass band and a State banquet;  and in his official speech, Kruger brought the house down.  It was his favourite kind of clowning:  ‘I’m just an old simpleton,’ compared to those ‘brilliant educated gentlemen from the Free State’.  Kruger had every reason to celebrate.  With the new military pact, he had pulled off a diplomatic coup.  If it came to the crunch, the Free State could add fifteen thousand burghers to the Transvaal army of twenty-five thousand.(26)

These were two of the political effects of the Raid:  uniting the volk inside and outside the Transvaal.  But Dr Jameson’s crowning achievement was to teach Kruger how deplorable was the state of his own burgher army.

True, when the call came, the burghers had answered it in their fashion.  As Joubert reported:  ‘When the telegram was received that Jameson had crossed the border I would not believe it possible, but I sent round the country calling the men to arms.  Each man jumps on his pony and rides off.  He does not wait ... but goes as he is.’  Of course, it was easy for the six thousand burghers who had mobilized to round up Jameson’s six hundred.  But what if a real army had invaded the country?  What if the British government had supported Jameson?  The facts that the Raid brought to light were a scandal.  By law, every burgher had to provide himself with a rifle and ammunition.  Of the 24,238 burghers liable to be commandeered, 9,996 were found to have no rifle;  the rest had old rifles or new rifles of an old pattern.  There was only enough ammunition to make war for a fortnight.  The country, concluded Kruger, was ‘practically defenceless’ at the time of the Raid;  ‘the burghers had neglected their sacred duty to arm themselves’.(27)

Now it was Kruger who proceeded to re-equip the Transvaal army at a cost of over £1 million.  Joubert had stupidly ordered thirty-six thousand British Martini-Henry single shot rifles and six thousand Austrian Guedes rifles.(28)  These had been superseded nearly ten years before by the new small-bore magazine rifles, the Lee Metford in Britain and the Mauser in Germany.  Kruger told Joubert to buy a second rifle for each burgher, and made him import thirty-seven thousand Mausers from Krupp’s factory in Germany.(29)

The best that could be said for Joubert was that he was building up an excellent artillery corps.  He was to order twenty-two of the most modern pieces of artillery from Europe:  from Creusot in France, four of the latest 155-mm heavy guns (later to be known as ‘Long Toms’) and six of the 75-mm field guns;  from Krupp’s, four of their 120-mm howitzers and eight of the 75-mm field guns.  He was also buying from Maxim-Nordenfeld in Britain twenty of the experimental 1-pounders (‘Pom-Poms’) that were not yet in service with the British army.(30)  But the State Artillery Corps was still a midget by European standards.  Joubert was told they needed another eight of the 75-mm Creusots.  He procrastinated till it was too late.  ‘What can I do with more guns?’ he asked when pressed in the Raad, ‘Have we not already more than we can use?’(31)

Kruger on his part had made some equally strange decisions.  He commissioned those four elephantine fortresses, Despoort, Klapperkop, Schanzkop and Wonderboompoort, commanding Pretoria and the Rand.  They cost over £300,000 — £1½ million according to one estimate.(32)  What were they for?  Militarily, it was hard to imagine.  They offended the first principle of Boer tactics:  mobility above all.  Kruger’s object seems to have been political:  to overawe the Uitlanders.  But the fortresses at Johannesburg had become the symbol of ‘Krugerism’, and the lesson the Uitlanders drew was the one Kruger least of all wished them to draw.  They were too weak to beat Kruger alone, they must summon the help of the imperial government.(33)

Despite this blunder, and despite Joubert’s bungling, Kruger had transformed the Transvaal’s army since the Raid — just as Milner had warned Chamberlain.  The burghers could mobilize in a week:  twenty-odd commandos armed with the most modern guns and rifles, an effective force of over twenty-five thousand fighting men — forty thousand including their allies from the Free State.  The combined army was four times the size of the British garrisons in the two colonies and the largest modern army in the entire sub-continent.(34)

These, then, were the main results of the Raid, as it affected Kruger:  to strengthen his grip on the Transvaal, to rally the Free State to his side, to make his country a real military power.  Yet the future was still ominous.  The Raid had given him a breathing space, but the basic dilemmas remained.  He must modernize the republic without alienating his deeply conservative burghers.  He must make concessions to the Uitlanders without risking his country’s independence.  Above all, he needed a new convention with the British government in order to realize the voortrekkers’ dream of fully independent nationhood.

His first task was to try to sweep clean what Milner described (and many Progressive Boers would have echoed him) as the ‘Augean Stables’ of the Transvaal administration.(35)  Jan Smuts was the man on whom Kruger now relied to help with the task.  That year, 1898, Kruger had displaced one of the Hollander immigrants and Smuts was appointed State Attorney, chief legal adviser to the government.  It was a bold appointment;  Smuts was only twenty-seven and totally inexperienced.  But he had a reputation for academic brilliance combined with tact;  though a stranger to both qualities, Kruger held no prejudice against them.(36)  Smuts would now have to work fast if he was to pre-empt the attack of the Progressives, the Uitlanders and the imperial government.  In fact, nothing would have astonished Milner and delighted Chamberlain more, had they known that Kruger, like Chamberlain, believed time fought on the side of the British.

Kruger’s choice of Smuts showed all the old President’s shrewdness.  Yet how incongruous the partnership appeared.  Smuts was an Afrikaner from the Cape;  his first language, for the purpose of writing, was English, his favourite poets were Shelley, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman.  He was tall and slight and absurdly young-looking, with his curly flaxen hair and a complexion that was always ready to flush like a girl’s.  His introduction to Kruger had been chilling.  Smuts had just married his childhood sweetheart, Isie, and brought her to the President’s house to meet him.  ‘Whatever were you doing to marry such an ugly woman?’ asked Kruger.  A moment passed before Smuts realized this was a sample of the old man’s elephantine humour.  It was impossible to imagine Smuts himself playing the fool.  There was a frightening intensity about him;  the grey-blue eyes were strained and hard.(37)

As for his intellectual qualities, he had a record as dazzling as Milner’s.  Like other clever colonials, he had gone to Cambridge;  there he earned a string of prizes, and took a double First in Law.  These were golden years for Cambridge.  It was the Cambridge of the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.  But little of this gold had rubbed off on Smuts, and he had lived for nothing but work.  When he came home at last, he embarked on a legal career, writing political articles in his spare time.  The keystone of his political faith, like that of other Afrikaners at the Cape, had been the idea of South African unity under the British flag.(38)  Here was the ‘great Temple of Peace and Unity’ in which both white races would assemble, ‘joyfully’ accepting their differences, until they finally coalesced into a single great white nation spanning South Africa from the Zambezi to the Cape.  And Rhodes was the man, Smuts had fondly imagined, who would help build the foundations of the temple.(39)

When it turned out that Rhodes was after all what his enemies claimed — a plotter and a traitor — Smuts’s feelings can well be imagined.  ‘The man we had followed, who was to lead us to victory, had not only deserted us;  he had ... betrayed us.’(40)  Overnight Smuts transferred his hero-worship to Kruger.  He shook the dust of the Cape off his feet and headed north to the Transvaal, where he practised at the Johannesburg Bar.(41)

By December 1898 Smuts had been State Attorney for six months.  He flung himself into the work with his usual single-mindedness.  As chief legal adviser to the government, he had to attend all the meetings of the Volksraad and most of those of the Executive Council, as well as to advise all the government departments.  In fact, he had become the general factotum, not merely the legal adviser, to the government.  But his main task, as Smuts saw it, was reform, and the first priority was to try to tackle the shortcomings in the administration — to ‘clean up’ the place, as he put it bluntly in a letter to a friend.(42)

How far and how fast could Smuts go in cleaning up corruption?  The trouble was that, at the root of most of the corruption and inefficiency, was the system of monopolies and concessions.  This system was, in Kruger’s eyes, not a means of feathering his own nest, or his supporters’;  it was, as he said, a ‘cornerstone of his country’s independence’.  There was a purpose in allowing most of the £2 million profits of the dynamite monopoly to pass to German and French dynamite rings.  By this means Kruger had built up one of the largest explosive factories in the world at Johannesburg.  And apart from the military potential of this industry, Kruger could point to the useful political friends he had bought with that £2 million:  German and French Uitlanders, foreign financiers and their governments.  Kruger had in fact played off one set of Uitlanders, and one set of governments, against another.(43)  Smuts decided to try to arrange for the question of monopolies to be settled as part of a great deal with the capitalists of the Rand.(44)

In another field Smuts could act swiftly:  towards the regular Transvaal police, ‘The new State Attorney,’ one government-sponsored newspaper cautiously announced that autumn, ‘is clearly bent on checking the indiscriminate reckless firing by foolish constables.’(45)  In fact, there had been several recent instances when the ‘Zarps’, as the police were called (‘Zuid Afrika Republik’ was written on their shoulder flashes), had shot unarmed men when making arrests, and their victims were not confined to Kaffirs.  Part of the trouble was that the six hundred Zarps were recruited almost exclusively from the poorest of urban poor whites.  Obviously raw Boers of this particular minority — the six thousand-odd landless Boers in Johannesburg — would need tight discipline if they were to serve as police in a city whose other population numbered over forty thousand Uitlanders and fifty thousand black and coloured workers.  In general, as one would expect, the Zarps reserved the worst of their treatment for the latter.  That autumn the Zarps were alleged to have raided and beaten up a number of Cape Coloureds in Johannesburg.  Smuts immediately suspended the official responsible.  In the government enquiry that followed unpleasant facts came to light:  forty coloured people had been dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, accused of breaking the pass law;  some of them had been ill-treated;  a sick girl had died, possibly as a result of the raid.  The enquiry conceded that certain ‘irregularities’ had been committed.  But no action was taken against the official responsible.(46)

Smuts now had a new political problem.  The cause of the coloured people who were British subjects, had been taken up by the acting British Agent in Pretoria, Edmund Fraser.  Smuts decided to go and see Fraser about the matter and try to settle it man to man.  He could hardly have guessed the extraordinary course the interview would take.

The two men met in Pretoria on 23 December 1898, the same day as the great victory banquet given for General Joubert.(47)  Smuts must have been in a friendly mood, as there was a report in the Pretoria newspapers about a most conciliatory speech delivered in Grahamstown by General Sir William Butler, who was holding the fort while Milner was away on leave in London.  Butler was quoted as saying, ‘Unity is strength, but it should be a union of hearts, not a union forced by outside pressure.... To my mind South Africa needs no surgical operations, it needs rest and peace....’(48)  The sentiments would have been unexceptional in most countries.  But it was strange to hear such conciliatory talk from a British High Commissioner — and the not-so-veiled reference to the Raid.  Smuts was all the more unprepared for his interview with Fraser.

After the two men had discussed the affair of the Cape Coloureds amicably enough, Fraser suddenly launched into an extraordinary outburst.  The course of the dialogue, according to Smuts’s notes, went something like this:

Fraser:  ‘We have now sat still for two years because our own officials put us in a false position in the Raid.  The time has now come to take action.’

Smuts:  ‘Action?  Could you explain what you mean?’

Fraser:  ‘Well, you see.  Gladstone made a great mistake in handing you back the Transvaal after Majuba and before [instead of] defeating your army.  It encouraged your idea of a great Afrikaner republic throughout South Africa.  If you ask my opinion the time has come for us to end this nonsense by striking a blow.  We’ve got to show who’s the boss in South Africa....’

Smuts:  ‘But, whatever would give you occasion for this?’

Fraser:  ‘England’s fed up with the maladministration in this country, and especially with the ill-treatment of British subjects.  This is the point on which England will take action.  I know perfectly well that England won’t go to war over abstract subjects like suzerainty — that means nothing to the man in the street.  She’ll go to war about things that everyone can understand.’(49)

Go to war. . . . Smuts was left gasping by the interview.  What was the meaning of these threats?  Had Fraser gone mad, or was this a hint of the opening of a new and extremely dangerous phase in the endless wrangle between the two governments?  Were the British looking for a casus belli?  If so, this could not be the ill-treatment of coloured British subjects, whose plight would hardly wring the heart of everyone in England, let alone of their allies in South Africa.(50)

Smuts had not long to wait to learn the meaning of the puzzle.  Already reports were reaching his desk of a great protest meeting arranged to take place next day in Johannesburg.  The British Uitlanders were in uproar.  A young Englishman called Edgar had been shot by a trigger-happy Zarp.(51)  But that was not all.  The Uitlanders intended to petition the British government to intervene on their behalf.

It was little in itself, but it was the pebble that starts the avalanche.

Head of chapter story told me by Mrs Williams, one of Kruger’s great-granddaughters

1. Standard and Diggers News (weekly edit) 31 Dec 1898.  Volksstem 24 Dec 1898

2. Ibid. Kotzé Memoirs II, 36.  S E Trichard Geskiedenis 57-110

3. P. Kruger Memoirs I & II passim.  Fisher Kruger 141-52, 240.  Meintjes Kruger passim.  DSAB I, 445 foll

4. See note 1

5. Kotzé Memoirs II 216 foll

6. Volksstem 29 Dec 1898

7. Kotze 11, 30-31.  Marais 6-7

8. Mouton Archives Year Book 1-264.  DSAB I, 412-17.  Gordon Growth of Opposition 246-74.  Kotzé loc cit

9. See note 1

10. Oberholster Historical Monuments 305-6 (inc photos)

11. C’s minute 5 Apr 1896 Drus Documents 160-2.  Casement 30 Apr 1896 (Cy) PC

12. Kotzé loc cit.  Marais 9-10.

13. W. Monypenny & G. Buckle Life of Disraeli (London 1920) VI, 416

14. Jorissen Transvaalsche Herinneringen 16-17.  Marais 7.  Fisher 156.  But Kruger had too keen a sense of humour to be a real flat-earther.  See chapter head

15. P. Kruger Memoirs I, 3-103.  DSAB I, 444-7

16. P. Kruger Memoirs I, 143-190.  DSAB I, 448-9

17. Kotzé loc cit

18. Quoted Marais 10

19. DSAB I, 449-451

20. Gordon 207-28

21. Gordon 46-57.  Marais 27-45 (esp 31).  Cd 623.  A quarter of the £2m profit went to the state

22. Marais 13-14

23. P. Kruger II, 269-72.  Scholtz diary Jan 1896, Scho.  Fitzpatrick Transvaal 229-30.  Van der Poel 143-65.  Actually the beam went to the museum

24. Bryce Impressions of South Africa 311-18

25. Ibid.  See Bryce’s footnote 318 added Oct 1899

26. Standard & Diggers News (weekly edit) 30 Sep 1898.  Terms of pact printed in WO Military Notes (cy) PC 90-3

27. Breyt I, 406, 564-7.  Mouton 225

28. Breyt I, 406-11.  Mouton 226

29. Ibid

30. SD II, 192.  Cf Military Notes (cy) PC and Breyt I, 276 Poll

31. Joubert quoted Mouton 227

32. RCSAW I, 193:  M-C 7 Feb 1898 quoting public statement by Kruger.  Cf Breyt I, 274-7, Oberholster loc cit

33. Star passim 1899

34. The combined force was nominally 54,000-57,000 acc Breyt I, 153, but only 32,000-35,000 actually mobilized at outbreak of war.  Cf OH I, 458-9 giving figure of over 48,000 commandeered

35. Gordon 184-203

36. Hancock Smuts I, 67-9. P. Kruger II, 298-9

37. Hancock I, 3-63, 68

38. Ibid I, 33-53

39. SP I, 80-100, 123-6

40. SP I, 103-6

41. Hancock Smuts I, 58-67

42. Smuts-Merriman 18 Jun 1899 SP I, 257-8

43. Cd 623.  Marais 27-33.  Gordon 55-6

44. Hancock Smuts I, 86

45. Standard & Diggers News (weekly edit) 23 Sep 1898

46. C 9345/83, 95-6.  Marais 234-7

47. Hancock Smuts I, 83

48. Cape Times 21 Dec 1898.  Sir W. Butler quotes slightly different text in Autobiograhy 396-8

49. SP I 212-13.  Original Dutch notes in indirect speech

50. Smuts-Hofmeyr 10 May 1899 SP I 233-5

51. Standard & Diggers News (weekly edit) 24 Dec 1899