Following the Equator, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Complete


British loss, 226, out of 400 engaged.

Boer loss, 1 killed, 5 wounded.

That ended the war. England listened to reason, and recognized the Boer
Republic--a government which has never been in any really awful danger
since, until Jameson started after it with his 500 "raw young fellows."
To recapitulate:

The Boer farmers and British soldiers fought 4 battles, and the Boers won
them all. Result of the 4, in killed and wounded:

British loss, 700 men.

Boer loss, so far as known, 23 men.

It is interesting, now, to note how loyally Jameson and his several
trained British military officers tried to make their battles conform to
precedent. Mr. Garrett's account of the Raid is much the best one I have
met with, and my impressions of the Raid are drawn from that.

When Jameson learned that near Krugersdorp he would find 800 Boers
waiting to dispute his passage, he was not in the least disturbed. He
was feeling as he had felt two or three days before, when he had opened
his campaign with a historic remark to the same purport as the one with
which the commander of the 94th had opened the Boer-British war of
fourteen years before. That Commander's remark was, that the Boers
"would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum." Jameson's was, that
with his "raw young fellows" he could kick the (persons) of the Boers
"all round the Transvaal." He was keeping close to historic precedent.

Jameson arrived in the presence of the Boers. They--according to
precedent--were not visible. It was a country of ridges, depressions,
rocks, ditches, moraines of mining-tailings--not even as favorable for
cavalry work as Laing's Nek had been in the former disastrous days.
Jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as General
Colley had done at the Nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no Boer
to show himself. Then about a hundred of his men formed up to charge the
ridge-according to the 58th's precedent at the Nek; but as they dashed
forward they opened out in a long line, which was a considerable
improvement on the 58th's tactics; when they had gotten to within 200
yards of the ridge the concealed Boers opened out on them and emptied 20
saddles. The unwounded dismounted and fired at the rocks over the backs
of their horses; but the return-fire was too hot, and they mounted again,
"and galloped back or crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where
they were shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds.
Some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night which followed
the Boers carried away another thirty killed and wounded--the wounded to
Krugersdorp hospital." Sixty per cent. of the assaulted force disposed
of--according to Mr. Garrett's estimate.

It was according to Amajuba precedent, where the British loss was 226 out
of about 400 engaged.

Also, in Jameson's camp, that night, "there lay about 30 wounded or
otherwise disabled" men. Also during the night "some 30 or 40 young
fellows got separated from the command and straggled through into
Johannesburg." Altogether a possible 150 men gone, out of his 530. His
lads had fought valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to a
Boer to kick him around the Transvaal.

At dawn the next morning the column of something short of 400 whites
resumed its march. Jameson's grit was stubbornly good; indeed, it was
always that. He still had hopes. There was a long and tedious
zigzagging march through broken ground, with constant harassment from the
Boers; and at last the column "walked into a sort of trap," and the Boers
"closed in upon it." "Men and horses dropped on all sides. In the
column the feeling grew that unless it could burst through the Boer lines
at this point it was done for. The Maxims were fired until they grew too
hot, and, water failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went
out of action. The 7-pounder was fired until only half an hour's
ammunition was left to fire with. One last rush was made, and failed,
and then the Staats Artillery came up on the left flank, and the game was
up."

Jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered.

There is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant Boer farmer
there who thought that this white flag was the national flag of England.
He had been at Bronkhorst, and Laing's Nek, and Ingogo and Amajuba, and
supposed that the English did not run up their flag excepting at the end
of a fight.

The following is (as I understand it) Mr. Garrett's estimate of Jameson's
total loss in killed and wounded for the two days:

"When they gave in they were minus some 20 per cent. of combatants.
There were 76 casualties. There were 30 men hurt or sick in the wagons.
There were 27 killed on the spot or mortally wounded."

Total, 133, out of the original 530. It is just 25 per cent.--[However,
I judge that the total was really 150; for the number of wounded carried
to Krugersdorp hospital was 53; not 30, as Mr. Garrett reports it. The
lady whose guest I was in Krugerdorp gave me the figures. She was head
nurse from the beginning of hostilities (Jan. 1) until the professional
nurses arrived, Jan. 8th. Of the 53, "Three or four were Boers"; I quote
her words.]--This is a large improvement upon the precedents established
at Bronkhorst, Laing's Nek, Ingogo, and Amajuba, and seems to indicate
that Boer marksmanship is not so good now as it was in those days. But
there is one detail in which the Raid-episode exactly repeats history.
By surrender at Bronkhorst, the whole British force disappeared from the
theater of war; this was the case with Jameson's force.

In the Boer loss, also, historical precedent is followed with sufficient
fidelity. In the 4 battles named above, the Boer loss, so far as known,
was an average of 6 men per battle, to the British average loss of 175.
In Jameson's battles, as per Boer official report, the Boer loss in
killed was 4. Two of these were killed by the Boers themselves, by
accident, the other by Jameson's army--one of them intentionally, the
other by a pathetic mischance. "A young Boer named Jacobz was moving
forward to give a drink to one of the wounded troopers (Jameson's) after
the first charge, when another wounded man, mistaking his intention; shot
him." There were three or four wounded Boers in the Krugersdorp
hospital, and apparently no others have been reported. Mr. Garrett, "on
a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version, and
thanks Heaven the killed was not larger."

As a military man, I wish to point out what seems to me to be military
errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been
considering. I have seen active service in the field, and it was in the
actualities of war that I acquired my training and my right to speak.
I served two weeks in the beginning of our Civil War, and during all that
time commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men. General
Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it him. I also told
him the principle upon which I had conducted it; which was, to tire the
enemy. I tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a
casualty myself nor lost a man. General Grant was not given to paying
compliments, yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole war
much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have
lost through the inspiriting results of collision in the field would have
been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel. Further
endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary.

Let us now examine history, and see what it teaches. In the 4 battles
fought in 1881 and the two fought by Jameson, the British loss in killed,
wounded, and prisoners, was substantially 1,300 men; the Boer loss, as
far as is ascertainable, eras about 30 men. These figures show that
there was a defect somewhere. It was not in the absence of courage. I
think it lay in the absence of discretion. The Briton should have done
one thing or the other: discarded British methods and fought the Boer
with Boer methods, or augmented his own force until--using British
methods--it should be large enough to equalize results with the Boer.

To retain the British method requires certain things, determinable by
arithmetic. If, for argument's sake, we allow that the aggregate of
1,716 British soldiers engaged in the 4 early battles was opposed by the
same aggregate of Boers, we have this result: the British loss of 700 and
the Boer loss of 23 argues that in order to equalize results in future
battles you must make the British force thirty times as strong as the
Boer force. Mr. Garrett shows that the Boer force immediately opposed to
Jameson was 2,000, and that there were 6,000 more on hand by the evening
of the second day. Arithmetic shows that in order to make himself the
equal of the 8,000 Boers, Jameson should have had 240,000 men, whereas he
merely had 530 boys. From a military point of view, backed by the facts
of history, I conceive that Jameson's military judgment was at fault.

Another thing.--Jameson was encumbered by artillery, ammunition, and
rifles. The facts of the battle show that he should have had none of
those things along. They were heavy, they were in his way, they impeded
his march. There was nothing to shoot at but rocks--he knew quite well
that there would be nothing to shoot at but rocks--and he knew that
artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks. He was badly overloaded
with unessentials. He had 8 Maxims--a Maxim is a kind of Gatling, I
believe, and shoots about 500 bullets per minute; he had one
12 1/2-pounder cannon and two 7-pounders; also, 145,000 rounds of
ammunition. He worked the Maxims so hard upon the rocks that five of them
became disabled--five of the Maxims, not the rocks. It is believed that
upwards of 100,000 rounds of ammunition of the various kinds were fired
during the 21 hours that the battles lasted. One man killed. He must
have been much mutilated. It was a pity to bring those futile Maxims
along. Jameson should have furnished himself with a battery of Pudd'nhead
Wilson maxims instead, They are much more deadly than those others, and
they are easily carried, because they have no weight.

Mr. Garrett--not very carefully concealing a smile--excuses the presence
of the Maxims by saying that they were of very substantial use because
their sputtering disordered the aim of the Boers, and in that way saved
lives.

Three cannon, eight Maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded a result
which emphasized a fact which had already been established--that the
British system of standing out in the open to fight Boers who are behind
rocks is not wise, not excusable, and ought to be abandoned for something
more efficacious. For the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste
ammunition.

If I could get the management of one of those campaigns, I would know
what to do, for I have studied the Boer. He values the Bible above every
other thing. The most delicious edible in South Africa is "biltong."
You will have seen it mentioned in Olive Schreiner's books. It is what
our plainsmen call "jerked beef." It is the Boer's main standby. He has
a passion for it, and he is right.

If I had the command of the campaign I would go with rifles only, no
cumbersome Maxims and cannon to spoil good rocks with. I would move
surreptitiously by night to a point about a quarter of a mile from the
Boer camp, and there I would build up a pyramid of biltong and Bibles
fifty feet high, and then conceal my men all about. In the morning the
Boers would send out spies, and then the rest would come with a rush.
I would surround them, and they would have to fight my men on equal
terms, in the open. There wouldn't be any Amajuba results.

--[Just as I am finishing this book an unfortunate dispute has sprung up
between Dr. Jameson and his officers, on the one hand, and Colonel Rhodes
on the other, concerning the wording of a note which Colonel Rhodes sent
from Johannesburg by a cyclist to Jameson just before hostilities began
on the memorable New Year's Day. Some of the fragments of this note were
found on the battlefield after the fight, and these have been pieced
together; the dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments
contained. Jameson says the note promised him a reinforcement of 300 men
from Johannesburg. Colonel Rhodes denies this, and says he merely
promised to send out "some" men "to meet you."]

[It seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so little a
thing. If the 300 had been sent, what good would it have done? In 21
hours of industrious fighting, Jameson's 530 men, with 8 Maxims, 3
cannon, and 145,000 rounds of ammunition, killed an aggregate of 1.
Boer. These statistics show that a reinforcement of 300 Johannesburgers,
armed merely with muskets, would have killed, at the outside, only a
little over a half of another Boer. This would not have saved the day.
It would not even have seriously affected the general result. The
figures show clearly, and with mathematical violence, that the only way
to save Jameson, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy,
was for Johannesburg to send him 240 Maxims, 90 cannon, 600 carloads of
ammunition, and 240,000 men. Johannesburg was not in a position to do
this. Johannesburg has been called very hard names for not reinforcing
Jameson. But in every instance this has been done by two classes of
persons--people who do not read history, and people, like Jameson, who do
not understand what it means, after they have read it.]




CHAPTER LXVIII.

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its
cussedness; but we can try.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The Duke of Fife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes deceived him. That
is also what Mr. Rhodes did with the Reformers. He got them into
trouble, and then stayed out himself. A judicious man. He has always
been that. As to this there was a moment of doubt, once. It was when he
was out on his last pirating expedition in the Matabele country. The
cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed, to visit a party of hostile
chiefs. It was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near fetching
another indiscretion out of the poet laureate. It would have been too
bad, for when the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady
along, too, and she also was unarmed.

In the opinion of many people Mr. Rhodes is South Africa; others think he
is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa
consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg gold
fields, and Cecil Rhodes. The gold fields are wonderful in every way.
In seven or eight years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred
thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the
ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting
material. Nowhere in the world is there such a concentration of rich
mines as at Johannesburg. Mr. Bonamici, my manager there, gave me a
small gold brick with some statistics engraved upon it which record the
output of gold from the early days to July, 1895, and exhibit the strides
which have been made in the development of the industry; in 1888 the
output was $4,162,440; the output of the next five and a half years was
(total: $17,585,894); for the single year ending with June, 1895, it was
$45,553,700.

The capital which has developed the mines came from England, the mining
engineers from America. This is the case with the diamond mines also.
South Africa seems to be the heaven of the American scientific mining
engineer. He gets the choicest places, and keeps them. His salary is
not based upon what he would get in America, but apparently upon what a
whole family of him would get there.

The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is not rich, from
a Californian point of view. Rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a
ton is considered plenty rich enough. It is troubled with base metals to
such a degree that twenty years ago it would have been only about half as
valuable as it is now; for at that time there was no paying way of
getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained "free" gold; but
the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold fields of the
world now deliver up fifty million dollars' worth of gold per year which
would have gone into the tailing-pile under the former conditions.

The cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest; and among the
costly and elaborate mining machinery there were fine things which were
new to me, but I was already familiar with the rest of the details of the
gold-mining industry. I had been a gold miner myself, in my day, and
knew substantially everything that those people knew about it, except how
to make money at it. But I learned a good deal about the Boers there,
and that was a fresh subject. What I heard there was afterwards repeated
to me in other parts of South Africa. Summed up--according to the
information thus gained--this is the Boer:

He is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted,
uncleanly in his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings with the
whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy, a good shot, good
horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of political independence, a
good husband and father, not fond of herding together in towns, but
liking the seclusion and remoteness and solitude and empty vastness and
silence of the veldt; a man of a mighty appetite, and not delicate about
what he appeases it with--well-satisfied with pork and Indian corn and
biltong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be stinted; willing
to ride a long journey to take a hand in a rude all-night dance
interspersed with vigorous feeding and boisterous jollity, but ready to
ride twice as far for a prayer-meeting; proud of his Dutch and Huguenot
origin and its religious and military history; proud of his race's
achievements in South Africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted
deserts in search of free solitudes unvexed by the pestering and detested
English, also its victories over the natives and the British; proudest of
all, of the direct and effusive personal interest which the Deity has
always taken in its affairs. He cannot read, he cannot write; he has one
or two newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it; until latterly
he had no schools, and taught his children nothing, news is a term which
has no meaning to him, and the thing itself he cares nothing about. He
hates to be taxed and resents it. He has stood stock still in South
Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till
the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Uitlander notions of
progress. He is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference
has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and
gold and diamonds. The gold and the diamonds have brought the godless
stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he
wishes that they had never been discovered.

I think that the bulk of those details can be found in Olive Schreiner's
books, and she would not be accused of sketching the Boer's portrait with
an unfair hand.

Now what would you expect from that unpromising material? What ought you
to expect from it? Laws inimical to religious liberty? Yes. Laws
denying, representation and suffrage to the intruder? Yes. Laws
unfriendly to educational institutions? Yes. Laws obstructive of gold
production? Yes. Discouragement of railway expansion? Yes. Laws heavily
taxing the intruder and overlooking the Boer? Yes.

The Uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all
that. I do not know why. Nothing different from it was rationally to be
expected. A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right
away. He must have time to modify his shape. The modification had begun
in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some progress. It
has made further progress since. There are wise men in the Boer
government, and that accounts for the modification; the modification of
the Boer mass has probably not begun yet. If the heads of the Boer
government had not been wise men they would have hanged Jameson, and thus
turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr. But even their
wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr. Rhodes if they ever catch
him. That will round him and complete him and make him a saint. He has
already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur,
and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all. It will be a
dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing, it will land him in
good company and be a pleasant change for him.

Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers' Manifesto have been
conceded since the days of the Raid, and the others will follow in time,
no doubt. It was most fortunate for the miners of Johannesburg that the
taxes which distressed them so much were levied by the Boer government,
instead of by their friend Rhodes and his Chartered Company of
highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims
find, they do not stop at a mere percentage. If the Johannesburg miners
were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poorhouse in twelve
months.

I have been under the impression all along that I had an unpleasant
paragraph about the Boers somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant
one. I have found them now. The unpleasant one is dated at an interior
village, and says--

"Mr. Z. called. He is an English Afrikander; is an old resident, and has
a Boer wife. He speaks the language, and his professional business is
with the Boers exclusively. He told me that the ancient Boer families in
the great region of which this village is the commercial center are
falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the
materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one
into the grip of the usurer--getting hopelessly in debt--and are losing
their high place and retiring to second and lower. The Boer's farm does
not go to another Boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner. Some have
fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks."

Under date of another South African town I find the note which is
creditable to the Boers:

"Dr. X. told me that in the Kafir war 1,500 Kafirs took refuge in a great
cave in the mountains about 90 miles north of Johannesburg, and the Boers
blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death. Dr. X. has been in
there and seen the great array of bleached skeletons--one a woman with
the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast."

The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands,
and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do
his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history
has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it
certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be
adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang
have been following the old ways.--They are chartered to rob and slay,
and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit.
They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories
in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force
a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of
their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country
belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue
"regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the
white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery,
and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to
pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick,
super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself
or starve--his master is under no obligation to support him.

The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit
is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a
discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an
overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an
overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted
Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors
by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these
are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either
of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger
out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of
insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the
victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and
pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.