| My first celebrity—A soldier in stays—A Royal horse-dealer—Prince Henry’s uncle— Buys a horse and loses it—The old army—Duchesses pull strings—Jobbing in generals —Pressure on the Press—Admiral Chichester uses language |
November 1899—En route for South African War. By all accounts, these Boers are only part human. There is an ambulance outfit on board, and I ask an ambulance orderly—a retired sergeant-major of British infantry—whether the Boers will fire on the ambulances.
He says: “Of course, they’ll fire on the hambulances. The ’ave no respect for the ’elpless. They’ve even been known to fire on the cavalry.”
Colonel Williams, commander of our hospital outfit, fully believes this, and is training his men in rifleshooting at a box towed over the stern, and with revolvers at bottles thrown overside. No one has as yet sunk a bottle, and some of the shooters have even missed the Indian Ocean.
Approaching Africa. Few of the Australians on board have ever been away from Australia; but the English, Irish and Scotch are developing national rivalries. A party of Highlanders (quite distinct from the Scotch) are holding some sort of a celebration. They ask an Australian named Robertson whether his ancestors were Highlanders.
He says: “No; but for ignorance and squalid savagery, I will back my ancestors against any Highlanders in the world.”
Luckily for him, the Highlanders on board all belong to different units and different clans. This Robertson apparently knows something about Highlanders, for he says: “If they started anything against me, they’d be fighting each other before you could say knife.”
First experience of the troubles of active service with green troops on board a ship. The army medical men came aboard a day earlier than anyone else and barricaded themselves in a square of the ship. They closed two doors of access to other parts of the ship, commandeered all the hammocks they could lay their hands on, and sat tight. A squadron of cursing Lancers fought and struggled in the alleyways, and traffic was, to put it mildly, congested. The men who went short of hammocks had a few well-chosen words to say, but the P.M.O. battled nobly for his men and said that, if the doors were opened and a thoroughfare made of his camping-grounds, he would not have enough equipment left to bind up a sore thumb.
The machine-gun section wanted an acre of deck for their drills, and the signallers wanted the same area. All stores were below decks and could only be got at by one of the three great powers—the chief officer, the boatswain and the carpenter. Consequently, everybody followed the chief officer, the boatswain and the carpenter about like lost lambs. Thus we fared across the Indian Ocean, toiling, rejoicing, and borrowing gear and equipment—generally without the knowledge or consent of the lender.
Another diary extract runs:
November 3Oth—At Capetown. Met my first Boer prisoner. He is a doctor, holding an English degree, and can make a fifty break at billiards. Apparently these Boers are at any rate partially civilized. He says that, if the Boers catch our hospital orderlies with rifles in the ambulances, they will be entitled to shoot them. He evidently looks on us as less civilized than his own people—the poor fish. He got hurt in some way during a raid and the British are only keeping him till he is fit to go back.
Met Sir Alfred Milner (afterwards Lord Milner), Governor of the Cape. He is my first world-wide celebrity, for our country is a bit off the beaten track for celebrities. Milner is a long, dark, wiry man, with a somewhat high-strung temperament; but he has been a pressman, so nothing ought to rattle him. He has a lot on his shoulders, as he conducted all the negotiations with Kruger. If any one man is responsible for the war, then Milner is the man. Hitherto, the only English magnates I have met have been State governors—discreet personages, whose official view of life could be summed up in three words: “I’d better not.” But this man has actually used the words “You must”; and has stood to his guns. Being as green as grass in the ways of the world, I had expected to meet a combination of Mussolini and Sherlock Holmes, and I was surprised to find the great English pro-consul, whom the Boers hated just as heartily as we hated Kruger, to be a man that put on less swagger than, say, one of our own government officials. When I told him that I wanted to get to the front as a correspondent with Australian troops, he laughed and said that the military were complaining that there would soon be more correspondents than fighting men at the front; but he would give me a note to the Chief Press Censor to say that the Australians ought to have a man of their own so that each part of Australia would get whatever credit was coming to it.
When writing my name in the visitors’ book, I saw that Schreiner, the Cape Premier, had written his name every day in it. Schreiner, and his ministry—in fact most of the Cape people—were bitterly opposed to the war, and Schreiner was calling every day to show that he, like Jorrocks’s celebrated huntsman, James Pigg, was “always in the way and willing to oblige,” in case Milner wished to change his mind.
He had some job, had Sir Alfred Milner, as the German Emperor was sending messages of congratulation to Kruger, and the American Press were roasting the war for all they were worth. Milner was my first experience of the unhurried Englishman. I met the ‘jumpy’ sort later on. But the jumpy sort never get into those big jobs; or, if they do, they emulate a certain colonel of Scot’s Greys who had a magnificent voice and a stirring word of command. He came to grief on active service. Someone said he roared himself into his job, and roared himself out of it.
At Capetown—Sir Alfred Milner finds time to ask me if I would take two ladies to a jackal hunt with a pack of English hounds. I tell him that my three horses have been sent on with the troops and I have no horse.
“Oh,” he says, “an Australian can always get a horse.”
December 1st.—Japhet in search of a father, or Paterson in search of a horse. Every horse in Capetown is either commandeered by the military or is hardly able to carry a saddle. Out in the bay there are ships full of horses, but the bull-headed old English Admiral in charge of the port won’t let them come ashore. I try about a dozen places and am met with derision. I would hate to be beaten.
This Admiral, by the way, one Chichester, was one of the characters of the war. He ordered transports in and out, cursing freely all the time. The captain of the Kent that brought us over, had only just tied up to the wharf and was in full swing discharging cargo, when he was ordered out again. Being one of the bulldog breed of British skippers, he refused to go, having the natural antipathy of all mercantile skippers for the Admiralty and all its works.
On the way over we had written him a letter of appreciation for the way he had looked after us; and he was fool enough to show this to the Admiral.
“Do you think,” said Chichester, “that because a lot of —— silly Australians write you a —— silly letter, you are going to disobey my —— orders?”
The captain was lucky to escape with his ticket.
Reverting to the horse-hunt: I tried about a dozen places and drew blank every time. Then, on the principle that I would try anything once, I walked into a depot for army horses, though the chance of getting a hunter out of an army depot would only appeal to a super-optimist. One never knows. Hardly had I walked in at the gate, when a groom came forward and said:
“Good day, Mr Paterson.”
I thought, what next? Here was I in a foreign land and a man had arisen up out of the earth that knew me. It turned out that he was an English groom who had been in Australia and had looked after a racehorse that I had ridden in a race. Thus does fate, when at its very blackest, turn a silver lining!
He said: “I brought these ’orses over from the Argentine and there’s some decent sorts in ’em. If you want one to go with the Guv’ment ’Ouse party, I’ll sneak one out to you. These officers ’ere is up at the Mount Nelson all their time, and what they don’t know, won’t ’urt ’em. But you’ll have to put ’im on the train yerself. It wouldn’t do to let Sir Halfred Milner know you ’ad a guv’ment ’orse.”
Next morning at daylight, two men met outside that horse depot. One handed over a good-looking Argentine horse, saddled and bridled. The other handed over a couple of pounds, and the nefarious transaction was complete.
At the train I found men waiting to take my horse, which I handed over with a muttered “Government House”, which was a good password anywhere; and, going to the carriage reserved for the Government House party, I found that my two charges for the day were the Duchess of Westminster and Lady Charles Bentinck, no less. Certainly His Excellency, Sir Alfred Milner, had done me pretty well.
Both were young and attractive women, beautifully turned out, and their features had all the repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere. Both carried whisky and water in hunting-flasks and they both smoked cigarettes—accomplishments which had not, at that time, penetrated to the lower orders. Being handed over to the care of a casual Australian meant nothing in their young lives, in fact I don’t think anything on earth could have rattled them. When you are a duchess, you let other people do the worrying.
I was wearing a pair of English-made buckskin breeches, and when the duchess opened the conversation by saying, “They didn’t make those breeches in Australia, did they?”, I felt at once that there was not going to be any hauteur or class distinctions on the journey. And when Lady Bentinck followed it up by saying, “I suppose you often ride a hundred miles in a day in Australia, Mr Paterson?” I realized that they looked upon me as the Wild Colonial Boy, the bronco buster from the Barcoo, and I determined to act up to it. It seemed a pity to disappoint them.
At that time, I was a solicitor in practice in Sydney, rarely getting on a horse; but I told them that if I had a horse in Australia that wouldn’t carry me a hundred miles in a day, I would give him to a Chinaman to draw a vegetable cart. That appeared to be the stuff to give ’em. Subjects of conversation were rather limited, as they had never been in Australia and I had never been in England. I didn’t know anybody they knew, and they didn’t know anybody I knew. Such a thing was hardly likely. So we talked about horses, that one unfailing topic of conversation which levels all ranks in every part of the world and is a better passport than any letter of introduction. I asked whether the ladies were riding astride in England and the Duchess said: “No, the grooms say that it will give the horses sore backs.” I knew that to be ridiculous, but it didn’t seem quite the right time to say so.
Her Grace was good enough to add that there was only one place in England where you could get a good lady’s saddle, and it also appeared that there was only one place where you could get a properly-cut lady’s habit. I was afterwards to find that, for the English people, there is only one right thing at a time—they are very set in their ways, as the Americans say.
In the Great War there was only one brand of pipe that anyone could smoke without developing an inferiority complex, and the son of the maker of this pipe was appointed subaltern to a crack regiment. His co-subalterns ragged him about the amount of money his father was making out of the army; and being a somewhat simple youth he asked the Colonel whether he ought to resign.
The Colonel said: “I think your father is doing a very silly thing. He is charging only two pounds for these pipes, when these fools would rather give him a fiver than not have one.”
You see, it was the only place where a man could get a pipe.
Returning to our hunt (which, in an indirect way was afterwards to lead me into the Remount Service, otherwise the Horse-hold Hussars) we passed a long railway journey quite cheerfully with biting comments from the ladies on the failures of various members of the British high command.
“They should never have sent him out, my dear. Goodness knows how old he is, and he rouges and wears stays. No wonder he walked his men right straight into a Boer camp, instead of going where he was told. But, of course, he’s a great friend of the Prince of Wales.”
From these and similar remarks one gathered that, in those good old days, military appointments were like the Order of the Garter—there was no damned merit about them. It was hard for an Australian to understand how the machinery worked; but brother correspondents, including Prior and Hands of the Daily Mail, told me that everything in England was run by aristocratic cliques, each clique being headed by some duchess or other.
“They fight like cats over the big jobs,” they said, “and the man whose duchess can put in the best work, gets the job.” This matriarchal system of conducting a war seemed so unlikely that I thought the correspondents were making game of my native ignorance. I asked why the newspapers didn’t expose the business.
“My dear fellow,” was the reply, “if any newspaper proprietor went up against those old Sacred Ibises, they would leave his wife out of everything, and she would soon straighten him up. You haven’t been in England, have you? Well, go to England and you’ll learn something.”
I said that I had already met one duchess, and she seemed to be a very conscientious sort of lady. But the carping democratic spirit would not down.
“Yes,” they said, “her husband’s a terrific swell, and he had to have some job, so they made him director of remounts. He’s a soldier all right, but what does he know about remounts? As much as I know about dancing the Spanish cachucha to a pair of castanets.”
We had our hunt, in which I was hard put to it to maintain my reputation of a wild-west hero, for I was riding an unconditioned remount amongst first-class English hunters. But, by nursing my unfortunate Argentine as much as possible, and by the simple expedient of following the tracks when I got thrown out, I managed to keep the Australian flag flying. As Mr Jorrocks says: “A young man would sooner ’ave a himputation on ’is morality than on ’is ’ossmanship.”
After a good hunt we ran the jackal to earth; and the ladies sat and smoked without blinking an eyelid while a Dutch farmer, under the impression that he was airing his English, used the most frightful language while digging the animal out.
Later on, when I had picked up my own horses at the front, I met the Duke of Teck, director of remounts. I found him to be a carefree sportsman who knew quite a lot about horses, but was a bit casual as to details and organization. Seeing me one day riding a big Australian mare, he said: “Here, you Australian fella, I want that mare for a general. How much do you want for her?”
Seeing that he could have commandeered the mare or fixed the price himself, he gave me a fair deal. When I said that I wanted thirty-five guineas for her, he amused himself by acting the horsecoper.
“I think she’s blind,” he said, walking up to the mare and making a swipe at her with his hat, which caused her nearly to jump from under me. Then he fixed his eyes on a small bump on one of her forelegs.
“I don’t like the fetlock,” he said. “I think she’s just starting to go there. If I buy her for a general and she can’t retreat fast enough and he gets captured what are they going to say about me?”
As the mare, though old, was thoroughbred and perfectly sound, I offered to ride her up a kopje, and retreat down it faster than any general’s horse in the British Army. So after making a sort of prizefighter’s swing at her ribs to test her wind, he handed me a cheque and told me to deliver the mare straight away at the depot. This I did—and luckily for myself got a receipt for her.
Next day, in the Bloemfontein Club, crowded with officers, I was hailed across the room by His Highness, as follows:
“Hey, you Australian horse-thief, what did you do with that mare? I paid you for her and you never delivered her.”
“I did deliver her. I’ve got the receipt in my pocket.”
“Well, you stole her out again, then. She’s not there now.”
This accusation of horse-stealing was, of course, partly due to my having passed myself off as a wild untamed Australian, and partly to the all-round reputation that the Australians had made for themselves from the moment they arrived.
“You’ve got the mare and the money too, I expect. Come now, didn’t you steal her out of the depot again?”
I assured him that I hadn’t taken the mare, as I could get all the Boer ponies I wanted, on the veldt.
“Well,” he said, “some damned general must have seen her in there and got her out before my man had a chance at her. These generals growl all the time about their horses, and when I do get them a good horse, they expect me to sit in the dirt and hold it for them till they like to come for it. Never take a remount job, Paterson. I’ve issued ten thousand horses since I’ve been here, and, if you ask the army, I haven’t issued one good one.”
But if the remounts were the untouchables of the army, at any rate, they gave the world a new word. The big depot for the army was at Stellenbosch; and when any general marched his men east when he should have gone west, or arrived a day too late for a fight, old Lord Roberts would promptly order him to leave his command and go to Stellenbosch and take charge of the remount depot. That, as they used to say in the bush, would learn him; and it gave to the world the expression “Stellenbosched”.
Lord Roberts, who attended to all the Stellenbosching, was not only a Commander-in-Chief, he was a dictator. Such men as French and Kitchener had been subalterns when he was a major, and, like the mother who can never believe that her children have grown up, the old man could never realize that these fellows were really generals. Calm-eyed, unhurried, knowing his job from A to Z, he strafed the big men and sent the lesser men to Stellenbosch. The reader will perhaps have gathered by this time that the old man regarded the command of a remount depot as a punishment.
I was to have the honour of meeting the old man later on and to find that he ran the war as a one-man job, taking no advice from anybody. All unessential details he left to his wife and two daughters; which may have had some bearing on the fact that Roberts’s staff were nearly all titled men (very eligible), while French’s staff, apart from Haig and a few professional soldiers, were more financial than aristocratic. Johannesburg Jews of the richer sort got on to French’s staff as intelligence officers; English ironmasters without any military training were given jobs on the staff as inspectors of things in general. So long as the man at the top was all right, things seemed to go swimmingly. Did not the great Duke of Wellington once complain that he had been sent two staff officers, of whom one was a lunatic and the other a chronic invalid? And still he won the war!