Part 9 (1/2)
”2. Fuel was very scarce.
”3. Milk was very scarce.
”4. Soap was not to be had.
”5. Insufficient supply of trained nurses.
”6. Insufficient supply of civilian doctors.
”7. No ministers of religion.
”8. No schools for children.
”9. Exorbitant prices were demanded in the shops.
”10. Parents had been separated from their children.
”Within the Report itself, either in footnotes or in the main body of the Report, Miss Hobhouse mentions that active steps had already been taken to remedy these evils. Tanks had been ordered to boil all the water. She left money to buy another, and supplied every family with a pan to hold boiled water. Soap was given out with the rations. 'Moreover, the Dutch are so very full of resources and so clever they can make their own soap with fat and soda.' The milk supply was augmented; during the drought fifty cows only yielded four buckets of milk daily. 'After the rains the milk supply was better.' An additional supply of nurses were on their way. 'The Sister had done splendid work in her domain battling against incessant difficulties ... and to crown the work she has had the task of training Boer girls to nurse under her guidance.'
”Ministers of religion are in residence, and schools under Mr. E.B.
Sargant, the Educational Commissioner, are open for boys and girls.
Children have been reunited to parents, except that some girls, through Miss Hobhouse's kind efforts, have been moved away from the Camps altogether into boarding schools. Even in this Bloemfontein Camp, notwithstanding all that Miss Hobhouse says of the absence of soap and the scarcity of water, she is able to write: 'All the tents I have been in are exquisitely neat and clean, except two, and they are ordinary.' Another important admission about this Camp is to be found in the last sentence of the account of Miss Hobhouse's second visit to Bloemfontein. She describes the iron huts which have been erected there at a cost of 2,500, and says: 'It is so strange to think that every tent contains a family, and every family is in trouble--loss behind, poverty in front, privation and death in the present--but they have agreed to be cheerful and make the best of it all.'
”There can be no doubt that the sweeping together of about 68,000 men, women and children into these Camps must have been attended by great suffering and misery, and if they are courageously borne it is greatly to the credit of the sufferers. The questions the public will ask, and will be justified in asking, are:
”1. Was the creation of these Camps necessary from the military point of view?
”2. Are our officials exerting themselves to make the conditions of the Camps as little oppressive as possible?
”3. Ought the public at home to supplement the efforts of the officials, and supply additional comforts and luxuries?
”The reply to the first question can only be given by the military authorities, and they have answered it in the affirmative. Put briefly, their statement is that the farms on the veldt were being used by small commandoes of the enemy as storehouses for food, arms and ammunition; and, above all, they have been centres for supplying false information to our men about the movements of the enemy, and correct information to the enemy about the movements of the British. No one blames the Boer women on the farms for this; they have taken an active part on behalf of their own people in the war, and they glory in the fact. But no one can take part in war without sharing in its risks, and the formation of the Concentration Camps is part of the fortune of war. In this spirit 'they have agreed,' as Miss Hobhouse says, 'to be cheerful and make the best of it.'
”The second question--'Are our officials exerting themselves to make the Camps as little oppressive as possible?'--can also be answered in the affirmative, judging from the evidence supplied by Miss Hobhouse herself.
This does not imply that at the date of Miss Hobhouse's visit, or at any time, there were not matters capable of improvement. But it is confessed even by hostile witnesses that the Government had a very difficult task, and that its officials were applying themselves to grapple with it with energy, kindness and goodwill. Miss Hobhouse complains again and again of the difficulty of procuring soap. May I quote, as throwing light upon the fact that the Boer women were no worse off than the English themselves, that Miss Brooke-Hunt, who was in Pretoria to organise soldiers'
inst.i.tutes a few months earlier than Miss Hobhouse was at Bloemfontein, says in her interesting book, 'A Woman's Memories of the War': 'Captain ---- presented me with a piece of Sunlight soap, an act of generosity I did not fully appreciate till I found that soap could not be bought for love or money in the town.' A Boer woman of the working-cla.s.s said to Miss Brooke-Hunt: 'You English are different from what I thought. They told us that if your soldiers got inside Pretoria they would rob us of everything, burn our houses, and treat us cruelly; but they have all been kind and respectable. It seems a pity we did not know this before.' Miss Hobhouse supplies some rather similar testimony. In her Report she says: 'The Mafeking Camp folk were very surprised to hear that English women cared a rap about them or their suffering. It has done them a lot of good to hear that real sympathy is felt for them at home, and I am so glad I fought my way here, if only for that reason.'
”In what particular way Miss Hobhouse had to fight her way to the Camps does not appear, for she acknowledges the kindness of Lord Kitchener and Lord Milner in enabling her to visit them; we must therefore suppose that they provided her with a pa.s.s. But the sentence just quoted is enough in itself to furnish the answer to the third question--'Is it right for the public at home to supplement by gifts of additional comforts and luxuries the efforts of our officials to make Camp life as little intolerable as possible?' All kinds of fables have been told to the Boer men and women of the brutality and ferocity of the British. Let them learn by practical experience, as many of them have learnt already, that the British soldier is gentle and generous, and that his women-folk at home are ready to do all in their power to alleviate the sufferings of the innocent victims of the war. I know it will be said, 'Let us attend to the suffering loyalists first.' It is a very proper sentiment, and if British generosity were limited to the gift of a certain definite amount in money or in kind, I would be the first to say, 'Charity begins at home, and our people must come first.' But British generosity is not of this strictly measured kind.
By all means let us help the loyal sufferers by the war; but let us also help the women and children of those who have fought against us, not with any ulterior political motive, but simply because they have suffered and are bound to suffer much, and wounded hearts are soothed and healed by kindness.
”Mr. Rowntree has spoken quite publicly of the deep impression made on the Boer women by the kindness shown them by our men. One said she would be always glad to shake hands with a British soldier; it was because of the kindly devices they had invented to make over their own rations to the women and children during the long journey when all were suffering from severe privations. Another Boer girl, referring to an act of kindness shown her by a British officer, remarked quietly: 'When there is so much to make the heart ache it is well to remember deeds of kindness.' The more we multiply deeds of kindness between Boer and Briton in South Africa, the better for the future of the two races, who, we hope, will one day fuse into a united nation under the British flag.”
I hope the reader will forgive me for having quoted in such abundance from Mrs. Fawcett's letter, but it has seemed to me that this plain, unprejudiced and unsophisticated report, on a subject which could not but have been viewed with deep sorrow by every enlightened person in England, goes far to remove the doubts that might still linger in the minds of certain people ignorant of the real conditions of existence in South Africa.
A point insufficiently realised in regard to South African affairs is the manner in which individuals comparatively devoid of education, and with only a hazy notion of politics, contrived to be taken into serious consideration not only by those who visited South Africa, but by a certain section of English society at home, and also in a more restricted measure by people at the Cape and in the Transvaal who had risen. These people professed to understand local politics better than the British authorities, and expected the officials, as well as public opinion in Great Britain, to adopt their advice, and to recognise their right to bring forward claims which they were always eager to prosecute.
Unfortunately they had friends everywhere, to whom they confided their regrets that the British Government understood so very little the necessities of the moment. As these malcontents were just back from the Rand, there were plenty of people in Cape Town, and especially in Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, and other English cities in Cape Colony, ready to listen to them, and to be influenced by the energetic tone in which they declared that the Boers were being helped all along by Dutch Colonials who were doing their best to betray the British.
In reality, matters were absolutely different, and those who harmed England the most at that time were precisely the people who proclaimed that they, and they alone, were loyal to her, and knew what was necessary and essential to her interests and to her future at the Cape of Good Hope and the Rand. Foremost amongst them were the adherents of Rhodes, and this fact will always cling to his memory--most unfortunately and most unjustly, I hasten to say, because had he been left absolutely free to do what he liked, it is probable he would have been the first to get rid of these enc.u.mbrances, whose interferences could only sow animosity where kindness and good will ought to have been put forward. Cecil Rhodes wanted to have the last and definite word to say in the matter of a settlement of the South African difficulties, and as no one seemed willing to allow him to utter it, he thought that he would contrive to attain his wishes on the subject by seeming to support the exaggerations of his followers. Yet, at the same time, he had the leaders of the Dutch party approached with a view of inducing them to appeal to him to put himself at their head.