Botha Smuts And South Africa

BECHUANALAND

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[Frontispiece

BOTHA, SMUTS

and

South Africa

by
BASIL WILLIAMS

Published by

HODDER & STOUGHTON LIMITED

for THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS

AT SAINT PAUL'S HOUSE

IN THE CITY OF LONDON

FIRST PRINTED 1946

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS, LTD.
LONDON, BY HAZELL, WATSON & VINEY, LTD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY

A General Introduction to the
Series

series has been undertaken in the con-
* viction that there can be no subject of study
more important than history. Great as have
been the conquests of natural science in our time
such that many think of ours as a scientific age
par excellence it is even more urgent and necessary
that advances should be made in the social
sciences, if we are to gain control of the forces of
nature loosed upon us. The bed out of which all
the social sciences spring is history; there they
find, in greater or lesser degree, subject-matter
and material, verification or contradiction.

There is no end to what we can learn from
history, if only we will, for it is coterminous with
life. Its special field is the life of man in society,
and at every point we can learn vicariously from
the experience of others before us in history,

To take one point only the understanding of
politics: how can we hope to understand the
world of affairs around us if we do not know how
it came to be what it is? How to understand
Germany, or Soviet Russia, or the United States
or ourselves, without knowing something of
their history?

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

There is no subject that is more useful, or
indeed indispensable.

Some evidence of the growing awareness of
this may be seen in the immense increase in the
interest of the reading public in history, and the
much larger place the subject has come to take in
education in our time.

This series has been planned to meet the needs
and demands of a very wide public and of educa-
tion they are indeed the same. I am convinced
that the most congenial, as well as the most con-
crete and practical, approach to history is the
biographical, through the lives of the great men
whose actions have been so much part of history,
and whose careers in turn have been so moulded
and formed by events.

The key idea of this series, and what dis-
tinguishes it from any other that has appeared,
is the intention by way of a biography of a great
man to open up a significant historical theme;
for example, Cromwell and the Puritan Revo-
lution, or Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

My hope is, in the end, as the series fills out
and completes itself, by a sufficient number of
biographies to cover whole periods and subjects
in that way. To give you the history of the
United States, for example, or the British Empire
or France, via a number of biographies of their
leading historical figures.

That should be something new, as well as
convenient and practical, in education.

vi

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

I need hardly say that I am a strong believer
in people with good academic standards writing
once more for the general reading public, and of
the public being given the best that the univer-
sities can provide. From this point of view this
series is intended to bring the university into the
homes of the people.

A. L. ROWSE.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE,
OXFORD.

Vll

Contents

CHAPTER PACK

A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES V

PREFACE Xi

I. THE SETTING OF THE SCENE . . I

II. THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND

SMUTS 16

m. BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE SOUTH

AFRICAN WAR .... 32

IV FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO

UNION 49

v. UNION versus THE TWO STREAM POLICY 72

VI. BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR . 94

VII. LONDON, PRETORIA AND VERSAILLES .*

DEATH OF BOTHA . . .HI

VIII. SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN . 126

IX. COALITION WITH HERTZOG I HEADING

FOR WAR ..... 142

X. SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA . 158

XI. SMUTS ON (l) NATIVE AND (2) EMPIRE

PROBLEMS ; (3) SMUTS AT HOME . 179

xn. BOTHA AND SMUTS -par nobilefratrum . 203

BIBLIOGRAPHY .... 2IO

INDEX 212

BI* ix

Preface

THIS book has been a labour of love,
prompted by a deep admiration of those
two great men Botha and Smuts, and by a
happy remembrance of four sojourns in South
Africa.

I am specially grateful for talks, especially
about General Smuts, with the late Deneys
Reitz and his English friends Mr. and Mrs.
Gillett.

B.W.

January, 1945

XI

Chapter One

The Setting of the Scene

LOUIS BOTHA was born in 1862 in Natal,
and Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1870 in Gape
Colony. Both therefore started life as British
subjects. Botha's family, however, migrated to
the Orange Free State in 1869 and thereafter
Botha was never a British subject till 1903, where-
as Smuts had renounced his British allegiance
only seven years before that date.

The South Africa of the decade in which these
two great figures of the British Commonwealth of
Nations first saw the light was a very different
South Africa from that which they grew up to
know. It is true the boundaries of the four
modern provinces of the Union Cape Colony,
Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal
had been more or less definitely marked out, but
these separate states were still very far from the
goal of Union which they finally attained nearly
half a century after Botha's birth. So far indeed
were they apart that they all had divergent
interests and policies, both with regard to one

i

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

another and not least in their relations with the
natives within their borders.

The original Dutch settlers at the Cape from
1652 onwards formed an essentially pastoral and
to a less extent agricultural community of Boers
peasants requiring vast farms of some 5000
acres on which to feed their flocks and herds, with
relatively small patches for growing corn and
vegetables for the family needs. An important
accession to the Boer community came after the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 with
French Huguenot refugees, who brought with
them a new industry, vine-growing and wine-
making ; but though their families have always
detained their original French names, such as
De la Rey, Marais, de Villiers, etc., they other-
wise became hardly distinguishable in habits or
language from their Boer neighbours. As the
population increased the restricted settlement in
the Cape Peninsula became too confined for its
needs, with the result that families with all their
possessions began to trek further north and east
in search of new pastures so far scarcely occupied
by wandering native tribes. After the final
British occupation of the Cape in 1803 there was
little increase in immigration until the 1820
settlement of discharged British soldiers with their
families in the new Eastern province with
headquarters at Port Elizabeth.

The Boers had always been difficult to control,
even by their own governors ; indeed, before the

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

first British occupation in 1797 some of them had
hived off and set up an independent government
of their own out of reach of the Cape officials.
With the final British occupation they found
further grievances : English, which they did not
understand, was made the only official language,
and their own officials, field-cornets and magis-
trates were generally replaced by Englishmen.
Another grievance came with English and
Scottish missionaries, chiefly concerned with
proselytizing the natives and with the defence of
native interests against their Boer masters, who
treated them as slaves. Even to-day Slagter's
Nek, where in 1815 five Boers were hanged for
rebellion in support of a man accused of cruelty
to his Hottentot slave, is still remembered against
the British. Finally in 1834 came the emanci-
pation of the slaves within the British Empire,
subject indeed to compensation, which, however,
was not only inadequate originally, but also
whittled away by heavy deductions payable to
the agents entrusted with its distribution.

These and other grievances led to the Great
Trek, or rather Treks, for there were several of
them, beginning in 1835, of Boers dissatisfied with
British rule, taking their families* and possessions
in their great lumbering ox-wagons, and accom-
panied by their flocks and herds, northwards
across the Orange River, so as to be beyond the

* One of these trek-Boer children was Paul Krugcr, then
a boy of ten.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

reach of the alien government. Some settled
between the Orange and Vaal rivers, others hived
off still further north, beyond the Vaal, and others
still eastwards into Natal. In these distant parts
they set up little self-governing republics, which,
however, had very uneasy times with invading
native tribes, Matabeles, Basutos, Zulus, far fiercer
than their native neighbours at the Cape. At first
the British Government, on the principle that once
a British subject always a British subject, refused
to recognize the independent governments set up
by the trekkers ; but, owing to the distances and
the inadequate military forces at the Cape, could
do little to enforce its authority. Natal, however,
was in an exceptionable position : there was a
good port the modern Durban which offered
easy communication with India ; and in fact
a small English settlement had been established
there before the Boers came in. Moreover the
sparsely scattered Boer settlers were in constant
danger from their fierce and well-trained neigh-
bours in Zululand. Accordingly the British
Government had much justification for asserting
its authority and definitely annexing the territory
in 1845. In Trans-Orangia, too, the trek-Boers
had trouble with Basutos on the east and Griquas
on the west and intestine quarrels among them*
selves. So great, indeed, were their difficulties
that they made no serious opposition when, in
1848, the Governor of the Cape, Sir Harry Smith,
extended British rule over this territory under the

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

name of the Orange River Sovereignty. But it
was symptomatic of the British Government's
vacillating policy at this period that in 1854, only
six years later, it abandoned the attempt at control
beyond the Orange River and by the Bloem-
fontein Convention recognized the independence
of the Orange Free State, as it was renamed. As
for those Boers who had trekked further afield
beyond the Vaal river, it was obvious from the
first that they could not be controlled from Cape
Town, nearly 1000 miles away : accordingly in
1852, by the Sand River Convention, the inde-
pendence of the new Transvaal republic had been
recognised. It must not be imagined, however,
that it was simply owing to dissatisfaction with
British rule that these expeditions to pastures new
had been undertaken. Apart from the instance
already quoted of Boers hiving off from their own
government in 1797, as late as 1874 a party of
Transvaal burghers, partly from restlessness,
partly from dissatisfaction with the existing
government, had trekked off to the inhospitable
country in S.W. Africa south of the Portuguese
border, where their few wretched descendants
were discovered by Colonel Reitz in 1924.*

For a long time indeed the South African
Republic of the Transvaal was too poverty-
stricken and too much divided by factions to
settle down satisfactorily. By 1877 the republic
was almost bankrupt after an unsuccessful war

* Sec his Ab Ortspan, 100117.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

with Sekukuni's native tribe in the Magaliesburg
under an unpopular President, Burgers ; and the
intestine disputes had come to such a pass that
a section of the burghers even welcomed the
annexation of the country by the British agent,
Sir Theophilus Shepstone. This annexation was
in furtherance of the Colonial Secretary, Lord
Carnarvon's, scheme of forming a confederation
of the four South African states, Cape Colony and
Natal with the Orange River and the Transvaal
republics, a scheme which entirely failed partly
owing to the tactlessness of Carnarvon's agents,
but chiefly because none of the four states was
then in favour of it. Unfortunately too, Shep-
stone failed to carry out his promise that the
Transvaalers should retain full legislative powers,
and they soon regretted their early acquiescence.
Discontent increased under the rule of Shepstone
and still more under that of his successor Sir Owen
Lanyon : the defeat of the British troops at
Isandhlwana by the neighbouring Zulus in 1879
only added fuel to the flame : and in December
of that year the Boers, at a public meeting at
Paardekraal, proclaimed the South African
Republic once more, under the guidance of
Kruger, Pretorius and Joubert. British troops
not only failed to suppress the revolt but suffered
the crushing defeat of Majuba in 1881. As a result
Gladstone's Government in the following August
formally acknowledged once more the Transvaal
republic, subject, however, to British suzerainty,
6

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

a claim, however, not specifically repeated in the
succeeding convention of 1883. By this time both
Botha, then aged 21, and even Smuts, at 13, were
old enough to recognize the importance of this
set-back to British influence in South Africa.

Further extensions of British or Boer rule were
s^ill to come by the gradual absorption of outlying
native tribes within their borders, and still more
by the march of Rhodes' s pioneer expedition into
the interior of the continent up to the Zambesi in
1890 and later beyond that river. By that time,
however, the South Africans were not left in
undisputed control even of the south. The
Portuguese, who had hitherto neglected their
ancient establishments at Delagoa Bay, began to
awaken to the importance of this territory on
account of its port, the only one accessible to the
Transvaal Boers, and later together with Beira
useful for Rhodesia, and to reassert their almost
dormant authority on the east, as well as their
ancient claims to Angola on the west. But far
more ominous for the security of the Cape was
the gradual infiltration of Germans into South
West Africa. In 1880 the British Government
refused to extend protection to German traders
there or to annex the country, as the Cape desired,
and only agreed three years later to occupy
Walvis Bay, the one good port in the territory.
Accordingly, in 1884, Bismarck proclaimed a
German protectorate over the remaining territory
of South West Africa. In the following year, too,

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

he established a protectorate over East African
territory now known as Tanganyika, interrupting
thereby Rhodes's design of an entirely British
corridor from the Cape to Cairo.

To return to the Cape, still in 1870 and for
many years to come the dominant factor in South
Africa. Though Canada had attained self-
government in 1845, the Cape had not yet reached
beyond the stage of having a legislative assembly,
able indeed to criticize, but not to control, the
governor's nominated officials. This delay in
obtaining responsible government was due not
so much to unwillingness in Downing Street to
grant it as to the Cape politicians' hesitation to
accept it. The fact is that though the territory of
the Cape was already large, its European popu-
lation, according to the census of 1865, was only
181,000, intermingled with some 500,000 natives
who contributed hardly anything to the colonial
exchequer. But the main reason for the Cape's
hesitation was due to the constant troubles on the
frontiers with marauding natives, both within
and without the colony, the suppression of which
called for greater charges than the Cape felt able
to supply from its own resources. For until the
*70's the Cape was a relatively poor colony,
depending almost entirely on its export trade to
the mother-country of wool, hides and wine ;
there was a colonial debt of 1,420,000, then
considered a large amount, two-thirds of which
8

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

was due to Great Britain for advances made to
meet past deficits.

Already, however, in the late sixties the first
discoveries had been made of what soon appeared
to be untold wealth in gold and diamonds. In
1867 gold was found at Tati in the great Bcchuana-
land corridor to the north, west of the Transvaal :
and in 1869 the diamond later known as the Star
of South Africa, which eventually changed hands
for 25,000, was picked up in Griqualand, south-
west of, if not actually within, the Free State
border. One result of this discovery was a rush
of diggers to Griqualand, which soon became an
Alsatia dangerous to both claimants of the
territory, the Cape and the Free State. The
dispute as to ownership was referred to Keate,
then governor of Natal, who, on the evidence
before him, decided in favour of the British claim.
In 1876, however, the evidence on which this
decision was based was found to be questionable ;
but by that time the territory in dispute was
peopled almost entirely by British subjects, and
the Free State, unwilling to take over their govern-
ment, accepted the sum of 90,000 as compen-
sation for the erroneous decision. Four years
later Griqualand West, hitherto governed as a
Crown Colony, was transferred to the Cape.

But the excitement over the diamond fields of
Kimberley and the surrounding district of Griqua-
land West was soon overshadowed by the rich
deposits of gold found mainly in the Transvaal,

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

at Pietersburg in 1870, at Lydenburg in 1872, at
Barberton in 1882 and on the Witwatersrand in
1884. These discoveries, especially the last two,
soon attracted vast crowds of prospectors and
gold-miners to the Transvaal, which before and
during the British occupation from 1877 to 1881
was almost a bankrupt state, and suddenly
became potentially the richest in South Africa.
For Kruger, the new president of the Transvaal,
took good care, by special taxation on the mines
and by a monopoly of the dynamite essential for
their working, to secure a large portion of their
earnings for the benefit of the state.

The new wealth accruing to the Cape, largely
from the increased trade brought about to supply
the needs of the diamond diggers in Griqualand
West, disposed the Cape Colonists to accept the
higher status of responsible government with a
ministry commanding the support of the elector-
ate, which the home government had long been
pressing upon them. From the outset, it should
be noted, though the franchise was restricted
by a fairly high property-tax, there was no
colour bar. Natives attaining the necessary
property qualification and a certain standard of
literacy were allowed the full exercise of the
franchise, though, as might be expected, at first
few passed both tests. At first, too, it is notable,
the English section of the European population
alone took much interest in this new responsibility.

The fact is that in the early seventies the Boer

10

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

farmers paid little attention to politics, being
concerned almost exclusively with their pastoral
and agricultural occupations, with looking after
their native servants and with the daily reading
of the Scriptures to their generally large families.
In fact, they had little contact with the world
outside their own domains, each of which
amounted in extent to some 5000 acres, and it
was the proud boast of most of these Boer
farmers, each to be monarch of all he surveyed
from his own farmhouse. Once a year, however,
the farmers of each wide district did meet one
another at the annual Naehtmaal Holy Com-
munion celebrated at the principal, and some-
times the only village of their district, which was
often many miles distant from most of the farms.
Packing their families in their great ox-wagons,
the farmers would congregate at the appointed
place, camp round the village for the celebration
of the Naehtmaal and for several days thereafter,
making their purchases at the village store and
above all congregating to discuss the affairs of
the neighbourhood and rumours of the great
world beyond. Their political interests, so far
as they had any, were in fact concerned solely
with the district within which they lived and
annually met their neighbours ; and they cared
little for outside affairs as long as they were free
to conduct their households and their farming
operations as they pleased. Returned to their
homes after these annual Sittings, they resumed

XI

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

their patriarchal life, ruling their families and
servants on the whole, with occasional exceptions,
fairly and benevolently, while retaining the right
of castigating those caught thieving or scamping
their duties. In many of these scattered farms the
only literature to be found was the family Bible,
read and expounded by the head of the family, at
the daily prayers. The only interference with the
patriarchal and pastoral state of existence was on
the eastern border, liable to raids from fierce
border tribes, Galekas and Basutos, which ne-
cessitated the despatch of armed forces by the
Cape Government. But even these raids did not
at first stir up the Boer farmers to any consecutive
interest in the central government, especially as
the farmers there affected were mainly of English
stock.

During the later seventies, however, came a
notable awakening of the Cape Boers' interest in
politics, due partly to their sympathy with the
Transvaal Boers' revolt against the English
Government's annexation of their country in
1877, and perhaps eyen more to the proselytizing
work of two men, the Rev. S. J. du Toit, a
Hollander, and Jan H. Hofmeyr, of an old Boer
family. To both is due the recognition of the Taalj
a Dutch patois general among the Boers, instead
of the High Dutch of Holland, as a national
language on equal terms with English. How
successful these two pioneers were in arousing
their Boer fellow-countrymen from their political

12

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

lethargy is illustrated by the remark of Deneys
Reitz, a shrewd observer, when he was travelling
through Namaqualand, one of the most out-of-the
way districts of the Cape, over half a century
later: " Politics is the ruling passion. For our
farmers it takes the place of the theatres, cinemas
and sport. It is the national pastime, like bull-
fighting in Spain."*

But in one important respect the two men had
rather different aims ; du Toit being frankly
anti-British and for the closest co-operation
between the Boers of the Cape and those who had
trekked into the interior to escape from British
rule and established independent governments
north of the Orange and Vaal rivers ; while
Hofineyr, though just as keen as du Toit in en-
couraging the Cape Boers to take an active part in
politics, had no sympathy with du Toit's separatist
aims. In the long run Hofineyr carried his less
provocative policy against du Toit. He even
obtained control of the Afrikander Bond, founded
by du Toit, eliminating therefrom its founder's
more aggressive policy. For Hofineyr, deter-
mined as he was to procure for the Boers the
influence their numbers justified in the govern-
ment, always kept it as his aim to consolidate the
unity in South Africa of Boer and British interests
in fact, to create one South African nation in
the same way as it has always been the aim of
Canadian statesmen to merge the differences

* D. Reitz, Ab Outspati, p. 35.

13

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

between French and English Canadians in the
common interests of Canada as a whole. Hofmeyr
indeed gave the best proof of his sincerity in
advocating Dutch and English co-operation when
in the eighties he was leader of a compact body
of 32 Boer representatives, and, though refusing
Rhodes's invitation to join his newly-formed
ministry, gave it his support. In fact, ever since
then there have always been sections of both Boer
and English communities anxious to form a united
party keen only on the well-being of the whole of
South Africa.

Rhodes himself was entirely in accord with
Hofmeyr in this policy, when he formed his
ministry and for some time thereafter. Supported
as he was by the Afrikander Bond as well as by a
majority of the Cape members of British origin,
he was able to carry out many useful measures,
not the least being the Glen Grey Act, which, for
the first time, gave to the Cape Natives an oppor-
tunity for exercising individual responsibility in
the management of their own affairs.

The main difficulty in securing, if not real
union, at any rate a working agreement between
the Dutch and British elements in South Africa
was undoubtedly the policy of President Kruger
in regard to the gold-mining immigrants into the
Transvaal, mostly of British origin, and contemp-
tuously spoken of by the Boers as Uitlanders.
They had no civic rights, were heavily taxed and
were subject to a venal and bullying police force:

*4

THE SETTING OF THE SCENE

Kruger even tried to kill the Cape railway traffic
in goods to the Transvaal by prohibitive rates on
the Transvaal stretch, and when the traders tried
to circumvent this manoeuvre by derailing their
goods at the Transvaal border and sending them
by ox-wagons across the Vaal he closed the drifts
on that river ; on a protest, however, from the
Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain, Kruger had to
give way on this point. But the Uitlanders'
grievances were still unredressed. Then came the
blow to South African unity prepared by Rhodes
himself, hitherto one of the chief advocates of
such unity. He determined, on his own responsi-
bility, and without informing even his own Cape
cabinet, to solve the difficulty by the coup de main
of Jameson's raid into the Transvaal. The raid,
unbelievably ill-prepared, was a ghastly fiasco :
it only strengthened Kruger's hand and necessi-
tated Rhodes's resignation as Cape Prime
Minister. But its worst consequence was that for
many years it postponed any possibility of
harmonious co-operation between the two sections
of the South African white population.

Chapter Two

The Apprenticeship of Botha
and Smuts

NO greater contrast could well be imagined
than that between the training of Botha and
Smuts in their early days : and he would have
been a bold man who had prophesied that they
were destined to become not only the dearest of
friends but also workers with identical aims in
the same field of national politics.

The Botha family, according to one account,
came to South Africa from Thuringia in the last
quarter of the seventeenth century, though
according to Lord Buxton, who no doubt obtained
his information from Botha himself, they were of
French Huguenot stock from Lorraine. But,
whatever their origin, the Bothas had, like all
these foreign immigrants, completely identified
themselves in language and habits with the Boers
of Dutch stock. Louis, born, as we have seen, in
1862, was the ninth child of the characteristically
large Boer family of thirteen. In 1869 the family
migrated from their farm, Onrust, near Greytown
in Natal, to the Orange Free State, finally
settling down on a farm near Vrede. Here Botha
16

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

and his brothers and sisters had some rudimentary
schooling from neighbouring teachers, but their
main education consisted in learning for the
girls, household chores and simple cooking for the
large family, for the boys, the South African
farmer's craft on a large mixed farm of some
5000 acres, where sheep, cattle and horses were
pastured and a comparatively small patch given
up to raising corn, oats and vegetables for the
family needs. Besides looking after the cattle and
breaking in the horses, the boys were taught to
shoot straight and get an eye for country. Here,
too, Louis learned to understand and sympathize
with the Kaffirs first from the native servants
on his father's farm and to speak familiarly two
of the chief native languages, Zulu and Sesuto ;
and not least to acquire his deep knowledge of his
own Boer people in the rough and tumble of a
large family ruled patriarchally by a notable
father and mother, who became leaders of the
neighbourhood.

As early as 1880, when he was only eighteen, he
played a useful little part in the first Anglo-Boer
War by cutting adrift all the boats and pontoons
on his side of the Vaal, which were being used by
English messengers to communicate with the
troops on the Transvaal side. In the same year
he was sent by his parents on his first independent
adventure. With a bundle of food and clothing
put up by his mother to strap on to his horse, at
the beginning of winter he went off in charge of

17

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA *

the family's sheep and cattle on the long month's
trek across the Drakensberg range into the warm
low-lying pastures on the border of Zululand. It
was an adventure not without its perils, for Zulu-
land in those days, owing to the exile of the
paramount chief Cetewayo and Sir Garnet
Wolseley's division of the country among several
petty chiefs at odds with one another, was in
constant unrest ; and on one occasion at least
Botha needed all his presence of mind to avert
a serious peril* Usibepu, the most formidable of
these petty chiefs, hot, it is said, from the murder
of a missionary, suddenly appeared with his impi
in Botha's camp and truculently demanded some
of his beasts to feed his impi. Young Botha, who
at the time had only a few cartridges left, quietly
lighted his pipe and, after reproving the chief for
his unceremonious approach, offered him one
sheep on condition he and his impi cleared off at
once, which they did forthwith. This was not the
last time Botha had dealings with Usibepu.

These independent journeys with the family's
flocks and herds, which he took off to the winter
pastures over the border for four years in succession
added to his earlier training on the family farm
had already given Botha so much self-assurance
and sense of responsibility that, on his father's
death in 1884, he proposed to his brothers and
sisters that he should be given the sole manage-
ment of his father's estate, the annual proceeds of
which he would, of course, divide fairly among
18

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

them. But they would not hear of this proposal ;
accordingly Louis, determined to find scope for
his special gifts, left the Free State and crossed
over the border to his winter haunts in Zululand.
It so happened that at this juncture there was a
bitter struggle between two Zulu chiefs, Dinizulu,
the son of Cetewayo, and Usibepu, with whom
Botha had already had dealings ; and Dinizulu
had enlisted the help against his rival of Lukas
Meyer, a Boer friend of Botha's, promising, if
Usibepu were beaten, to hand over a Zululand
district, later called Vryheid, to Meyer. Among
other Boers who joined Meyer's small but efficient
band was Botha ; and, though Usibepu was far
the more effective fighter among the Zulus,
Dinizulu's party, reinforced by Meyer and Botha
and their friends, overcame him. Accordingly,
the district of Vryheid became a little Boer repub-
lic, independent for the time being of the
Transvaal republic on its borders, with Botha's
friend Lukas Meyer as its President.

Botha himself was promptly given responsible
work in the organisation of the new republic, his
first tasks being to survey the country, delimit the
boundaries of the farms to be allotted to the Boers
who had been fighting on Dinizulu's side, and lay
out the new township of Vryheid. To Botha
himself was allotted the farm Waterval, of about
* 3500 acres, close to Vryheid. Here was the home
in which he began his married life ; for in 1886 he
took as his bride Annie, daughter of John Cheerc

19

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Emmet, a collateral descendant of the famous
Irish patriot, who had settled at Harrismith in
the Orange Free State, and sister of one of Botha's
co-adventurers in the fight against Usibepu. This
proved an ideally happy marriage, for the two
were in love with one another to the end, and to
his business ability, gift of leadership and business
acumen, she brought qualities somewhat lacking
in him a good education, a love of music and
a sense of humour.

Two years after Botha's marriage the little
republic of Vryheid was taken over by the
Transvaal, and he very soon found thereby greater
scope for his administrative talents. Field cornet
of the district of Vryheid town in 1894, in the
following year he was sent as a native com-
missioner to Swaziland, then under the protec-
torate of the Transvaal, and there did good work
in suppressing some of the illicit liquor traffic
which was doing untold harm to the natives. But
efficient as he was in administration, his main
interest, at this time, at any rate, was in his
farming activities ; and he was only too glad at
the end of the year to return to his own home at
Vryheid where, while resuming his post as field
cornet of the district, he could devote himself to
the improvement of his property. At the outbreak
of the Boer War in 1899 he had increased his
holdings in various parts of the Transvaal, such
as Standerton and the bushveld, to 16000 acres,
and possessed a flock of some 6000 sheep, including
?o

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

a dozen imported pedigree rams, 600 heads of
cattle and 400 fine mares served by specially
selected stallions. Nor was he averse to invest-
ment in other promising undertakings. In 1891
he had bought 1800 acres containing coal
measures which, some twenty years later, he sold
for 9000.

In spite of all these private activities he never
lost sight of public affairs. In 1896, on news of
the Jameson raid, he promptly mobilized the
farmers of his field cornetcy and telegraphed to
President Kruger, expressing the hope that " all
rebels will be punished and made example of
. . . Burghers were never more unanimous
than now, and stand by the government as one
man " ; indeed, he is said to have urged that
Jameson should be shot as a filibuster : Jameson
himself hearing of this advice many yekrs later
remarked, so the story goes, " Yes, Botha was
always right." But, though strongly supporting
Kruger on this occasion, he was never in favour
of Kruger's unenlightened methods of govern-
ment, especially in regard to the Uitlanders ; and
in the presidential election of 1895 had supported
the more liberal Joubert against Kruger. In
1897 he himself stood with his old chief, Lukas
Meyer, for election to the Volksraad ; both were
elected, but Botha himself headed the poll. In
the Volksraad, Botha, with Meyer and Joubert,
was generally opposed to Kruger's repressive
policy against the Uitlanders and even proposed

B2 21

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

to cancel the iniquitous Nobel contract for
dynamite, which bore so hardly on the mine
industry, until he found that Kruger had bound
the country to the contract and felt impelled to
withdraw his opposition. But once the die was
cast by the declaration of war against England
in October, 1899, he was more than ready to do
his duty by his own country.

Jan Christiaan Smuts, eight years Botha's
junior, was the second son of a family of eight by
his father's first marriage, with two more to come
from a second marriage. Smuts's parentage was
more notable than Botha's, his father being a
prosperous farmer of the rich Malmesbury district
in Cape Colony, who was elected to the Cape
Legislative Assembly, and his mother of an old
Huguenot family, a woman of deep religious
feeling and considerable culture. In his early
days Smuts was of feeble health and a shy retiring
lad, of little use on the farm, which his father had
meant him to take over, his elder brother being
destined for the office of predikant. It was not
till he was ten or twelve years old (the authorities
differ), when he was sent to a boarding school at
Riebeek West, that for the first time, according to
one of his biographers, he learned to read. But
when he did start he became a voracious reader
and was given special facilities by the headmaster,
who soon realized his abilities and encouraged
him in his new-found zeal for learning* At the

82

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

age of sixteen he proved ripe for study at the
Victoria College of Stellenbosch, first announcing
his coming and asking for guidance in a touchingly
naive letter to one of the professors. " Dear Sir,"
the letter begins, " Allow me the pleasure of your
reading and answering these few lines* I intend
coming to Stellenbosch in July next, and, having
heard that you take an exceptionally great interest
in the youth, I trust you will favour me by keeping
your eye upon me and helping me with your
kindly advice. Moreover, as I shall be a perfect
stranger there, and, as you know, such a place,
where a large puerile element exists, affords fair
scope for moral, and, what is more important,
religious temptation, which, if yielded to, will
eclipse alike the expectations of my parents and
the intentions of myself, a real friend will prove
a lasting blessing for me. For of what use will
a mind, enlarged and refined in all possible ways,
be to me, if my religion be a deserted pilot, and
morality a wreck ? "*

At Stellenbosch he worked hard, and soon
became so marked a student that when the great
Rhodes came to address the college, he was chosen
to return thanks for the students, and was noted
by Rhodes as a young man of promise. But he
still remained aloof from his fellows with one
exception. Among the women students was a
Sibella Kriege, six months younger than himself,
with whom he soon found interests in common.

* This letter is quoted in Millin, General Smuts, I, 12 14.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Almost daily they would meet on their way to
college ; they studied Greek, German and botany
together, talked of high philosophy, and in fact
discovered one another as kindred spirits. After
five years at Stellenbosch this self-reliant young
man determined to go to Cambridge to study law,
and, though he seems to have had little help from
his parents, scraped together enough money
partly by borrowing from a Stellenbosch professor
to be able to enter as an undergraduate at
Christ's College. Here, too, he was very much of
a solitary ; few, indeed, of his contemporaries
seem to have met him. He himself later spoke of
the debt he owed to Joseph Wolstenholme,. a
mathematical fellow of his college, who gave him
much help in his reading. The only Cambridge
contemporaries I have met who had spoken to
Smuts in those days are Dr. G. P. Gooch and
Archdeacon Lambert ; but at any rate he
attended the lectures of Henry Sidgwickon politics,
and of that great humanist in law, Maitland, and
worked to such purpose that he established a
record by obtaining firsts in both parts of the Law
Tripos in the same year. Then he went to the
Middle Temple and was duly called to the bar.
But law was not the only interest of this shy and
solitary lawyer. In their walks and talks at
Stellenbosch he and Sibella Kriege, besides
reading Goethe, had tackled Walt Whitman, in
whom Smuts discovered the germ of his Holistic
philosophy, and, during his odd moments at the

24

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

Temple, wrote a book entitled Walt Whitman,
A Study in the Evolution of Personality, expounding
Whitman's view of the world, sent it out to Sibella
Kriege, who copied it out fair for him, and
submitted it to a publisher. The publisher's
reader was no less than George Meredith, who,
while impressed by the book, thought it was not
likely to attract enough readers to warrant publi-
cation. Then, in spite of brilliant prospects at the
English bar, he decided to return to his native
land. So far, except for his one confidant and
companion, Sibella Kriege, Smuts had been
a solitary.

Settling at Cape Town Smuts began practising
at the bar, but does not appear to have found many
clients. The Cape lawyers and politicians have
always been a genial crowd, accustomed to meet
at their clubs, exchanging gossip and chaffing one
another good-humouredly while treating one
another to friendly drinks. In such a crowd
Smuts was not much in his element, for he was
still shy and reserved, very abstemious in his
habits and too serious to join in the genial chaff.
So he was not likely to attract many clients and
in fact got little business at the Cape bar. How-
ever he was already an adept with his pen and
to some extent made up for the dearth of briefs
by journalism. Moreover, he found one influential
friend in the leader of the Bond, Jan Hofmeyr,
who was then allied with Rhodes, at that time
premier of the Cape, and, though refusing to

25

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

enter Rhodes's ministry, gave him powerful help
in his endeavour to merge the Dutch and English
communities in a common programme for the
benefit not only of Europeans but also of the
natives. This was a policy which attracted Smuts
from the very first and indeed, except for the
interval of the Anglo Boer War of 1899 to 1903,
was always his main preoccupation in public
affairs. Accordingly Hofmeyr recommended him
to Rhodes as one likely to do good service for their
common policy. Rhodes, indeed, perhaps hardly
needed this advice, for he appears to have
remembered the speech made by the lad in res-
ponse to his own address at Stellenbosch in 1878,
and invited him to make an electioneering speech
on his behalf at Kimberley. No wonder Smuts,
already inspired by the idea of a united South
African nation, was attracted by the great man
who seemed to have gone so far towards allaying,
in the Cape at any rate, the differences between
Boer and Briton, and accepted the invitation ; and
he made a brilliant speech, in face of a by no
means entirely favourable audience, in favour of
Rhodes's policy and attacking Kruger for his
obstinate isolationism. Then came the Raid in
December, 1895, and the revelation of Rhodes's
complicity. To Smuts, no less than to the
Hofmeyrs and Schreiners, Krieges and all the
Dutch in South Africa, this came as a negation of
all Rhodes's talks of and plans for the union of
the races. " He alone," wrote Smuts, " could
26

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

have put the copestone to the arch of South
African unity. He spurned the ethical code.
The man that defies morality defies mankind."
Smuts's action was no less prompt than his words.
Full of fight and fizzing with energy, he gave up
his British allegiance and went north to carve
out a new career in the Transvaal.*

On arriving at Johannesburg, besides giving
law lectures and writing for the papers, he soon
got a good practice at the bar, where there were
then few who could rival his attainments. Thus
he soon found himself well enough off to marry
Sibella Kriege, his one confidant in his shy
retiring days at Stellenbosch, where the wedding
took place on 1st May, 1897 ; and so began a
happy marriage of a pair united in common
interests in literature and above all in public
spirit.

So successful had Smuts been at the Johannes-
burg bar and so eminently had he proved his
staunchness for the Boer cause at this dividing of
the ways between Boer and Briton, that even the
old conservative Kruger had marked his ability ;
and in 1898 when Smuts was only twenty-eight,
he was appointed State Attorney, second only in
the ministry to the Secretary of State, Reitz. One

* In later years Smuts came to recognize, in spite of the Raid,
that in his essential aim, Rhodes's was identical with his own for
a union of both South African nations. For at the South
African National Convention of 1908 Smuts confided to
Fitzpatrick, " Oh, if we only had Rhodes at this Convention,
how he would put all straight."

27

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

of Smuts's first actions as State Attorney was to
clean up the Augean stable of the Johannesburg
' police, which had made itself especially obnoxious
to the Uitlanders, by dismissing its chief, whom
he described as " a specially smart man,
singularly unsuccessful in getting at criminals,"
especially in the illicit liquor traffic and in the
numerous disorderly houses of Johannesburg ;
and a law was passed, in spite even of Kruger,
putting the detective force under the direct
personal control of the State Attorney. It may
have been on this occasion that Smuts, as he
related in later days, was told by Kruger : " Your
whip hits too hard."

But even more serious matters than the dis-
orderly state of Johannesburg soon monopolised
the attention of Kruger and his government. Ever
since the discovery of gold on the Rand an ever-
increasing stream of foreign chiefly British
immigrants, Uitlanders as the Boers called them,
had been pouring into the city and the gold-
diggings on the Rand. From the first the Boers,
and not least Kruger himself, were alarmed at
this foreign invasion, which threatened to swamp
their comparatively small pastoral community,
and to introduce habits of luxury and extrava-
gance alien to their simple habits. But Kruger,
realizing that these Uitlanders had come to stay,
had determined at any rate to make them pay
heavily for their accommodation. They were
heavily taxed, not only directly, but also through
a*

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

concessions given by the government to foreign
firms not without a consideration to the State
for providing at exorbitant prices dynamite, etc.,
essential for working the mines : at the same time
they were refused any say in the government of
the country they were financing. For long their
grievances found no redress, and after the fiasco
of Jameson's raid, they were in even worse state.
But in March, 1897, with the arrival of Milner as
Governor of the Cape and High Commissioner for
South Africa, they found a man prepared to stand
up for what he regarded as British rights. Milner,
backed by the Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain,
was determined not only to remove their grievances,
but also to assert in its most uncompromising
form the suzerainty of the imperial factor through-
out South Africa. After much correspondence
between Milner and Kruger, finally, at the end
of May 1899, a conference was arranged at
Bloemfontein between Milner and the equally
uncompromising old president. Milner on his
side required no promptings from his staff, who
merely acted as his secretaries. Kruger, on the
other hand, had been careful to take as one of
his chief assistants his clever and ingenious young
State Attorney, who, besides being fecund in
devices, realized better than his chief that some
concessions were necessary to avoid a war which
might prove fatal to the Transvaal. Encouraged
by sympathisers at the Cape, Smuts persuaded
Kruger to make important concessions on the
B2* 29

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

franchise for the Uitlanders, but he, no less
than Kruger, was uncompromising about the
suzerainty. However, Milner was not one to be
content with any half-way house, and though a
near approach was made to a satisfactory
franchise, the conference broke down chiefly on
the suzerainty question.

Smuts, however, still hoped that war might be
avoided. He got into touch with Conyngham
Greene, the British agent in the Transvaal,
suggesting a more liberal franchise for the
Uitlanders and admitting a nominal suzerainty
for Great Britain, if it were never exercised. But
this rather hole-and-corner negotiation never
came to anything ; for Kruger was not prepared
to go as far as Smuts on the franchise question.
Accordingly, Smuts, in his final letter to Greene,
whittled away some of his original offer, and
Milner insisted that any new approach from the
Transvaal should come direct to him. Meanwhile,
while Great Britain was still unprepared for war
in South Africa, Kruger had been making his
final preparations, nd was waiting only for the
first October rains, to bring on the grass for his
mounted commandos, before proclaiming war.
On 9th October he sent an ultimatum to England
demanding that all British troops should be
moved from the borders and, reinforcements
coming by sea sent back at once. On llth Oc-
tober, 1899, hostilities began, with an invasion of
Natal by Boer commandos. Thereupon Smuts ,

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF BOTHA AND SMUTS

wrote A Century of Wrong, a pamphlet recounting
all England's so-called iniquities in South Africa,
and ending with a peroration urging the unifi-
cation of all South Africa under the Dutch
Vierkleur flag. The pamphlet was forthwith
issued by W. T. Stead in England ; Smuts is said
later to have regretted its bitter hostility to
England.

Chapter Three

Botha and Smuts
in the South African War

BOTHA, as we have seen, had been at least
doubtful about the declaration of war by the
Transvaal, but, the country once committed, he
threw aside every doubt and was all for vigorous
action. The war indeed soon proved the mettle
of this quiet, wise man, then hardly more recog-
nized, outside his own district of Vryheid, for
what he was, than was Lincoln, " the prairie
lawyer," before he first leaped into fame in his
electioneering campaign against Douglas, the
" pocket giant ". As a simple field cornet Botha
accompanied Lukas Meyer's commando for the
invasion of Natal, -but from the outset showed a
dash and determination for aggressive action
which soon brought him to the front, leading the
first reconnoitring party across the Buffalo river
and distinguishing himself in the battle of Dundee.
Promotion soon came to him, for on 30th October,
when Lukas Meyer fell sick, he was promoted to
the rank of assistant-general, and shortly after-
wards was put in command of the southern force

3*

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

investing Ladysmith. Here he was not content
with the inactive policy of the Commandant-
General Joubert, who proposed simply to sit
round Ladysmith, blocking all communication for
the garrison with the outside world until it was
forced to surrender, but urged him, while leaving
a blockading force round that town, to push on
vigorously and possibly even reach the sea before
the British reinforcements arrived. Yielding to
Botha's pressing instances, Joubert crossed the
Tugela river in November and swept round
Estcourt in two columns. It is noteworthy that
during this advance Botha ambushed an English
armoured train near Chievely, and, meeting
Mr. Winston Churchill unarmed and wandering
about the line, took prisoner the future prime
minister, and sent him up to his temporary prison
at the high school in Pretoria. But British
reinforcements were then beginning to arrive,
and Joubert recrossed the Tugela and, shortly
afterwards falling sick, left Botha as the senior
officer in command round Ladysmith.

Buller, on taking over command of the Natal
forces at the end of November, decided to reach
Ladysmith by a frontal attack on the Boer centre
opposite Colenso. Botha, with that rare instinct
for reading his opponent's mind, one of his most
remarkable characteristics in the field, divined
that Buller would choose this course, and accor-
dingly, weakening his widely extended flanks,
concentrated nearly all his strength on the centre.

33

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Here, on a semi-circle of hills facing the Tugela
opposite Buller, he had dug himself in so securely
and so unperceived by his enemy, that the
advancing British troops were at his mercy. To
make assurance doubly sure he gave orders that
not a shot was to be fired until .the enemy were
actually crossing the Tugela. The Boers, how-
ever, when Long's guns came forward into action
in an exposed position just south of the river,
could no longer restrain themselves and, besides
putting the battery out of action, so clearly
revealed the strength of their position that Buller
gave up his intended frontal attack. But had the
Boer marksmen concealed their position a little
longer, as Botha had instructed them, the victory
would probably have been far more complete
and a large portion of Buller's force put out of
action.

Botha himself, after his defeat of Buller at
Colenso, was all for an immediate advance on
the British forces before Buller had time to
readjust his forces. But, unfortunately for the
Boers, Botha was not then unquestioned master
of their military decisions, since he had not yet
been appointed to the supreme command ; while
the various commandos besieging Ladysmith
were too prone to act independently of one
another. Nevertheless, when it came to actual
fighting, Botha's clear vision and practical
efficiency generally enabled him to impose his
will on his colleagues. Thus at Tabanayama by

34

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

his prompt call for volunteers to save the
threatened right flank of the Boers he averted the
danger. Again, in January, 1900, when a detach-
ment of British troops had attained a commanding
position on Spion Kop and many of the burghers
had begun a panic-stricken retreat, Botha brought
up guns to shell the British troops on the hill,
rallied his burghers and launched a series of
counter-attacks which finally dislodged the
British. " It was," says one historian of this war,
" Botha's persistent will to conquer that decided
the issue." Again, in the last desperate fighting
before Ladysmith in February, when Buller was
working round the eastern flank, Botha forced
him to retire from Vaalkranz, and telegraphed to
Kruger, " With the help of the Lord, I expect
that if only the spirit of the burghers keeps up as
it did to-day, the enemy will suffer a great
reverse." But after this Botha was constantly
hampered by the less venturesome Meyer, who
had returned to the front. After Buller's final
success at Pieter's Hill on 27th February, Botha's
attempt to rally the burghers was frustrated by
Joubert himself, who gave the signal for a final
retreat.

On the same day as Pieter's Hill, Cronje had
surrendered to Roberts at Paardeberg, and a
month later Joubert died. Thereupon Botha
was appointed to succeed him as Commandant
General of the Transvaal. Such an appointment
was in itself an innovation, for Botha was then

35

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

only thirty-eight, one of the youngest even of the
commando leaders, and the Boers had as a rule
an exaggerated respect for age. But Joubert had
already realized his worth, and the still younger
State Attorney, Smuts, is said to have finally
persuaded Kruger to appoint him. At any rate
he soon proved his fitness for the position. He was
not one to tolerate the slack independence of the
commandos, too inclined to dribble away home
after a bout of fighting instead of maintaining the
pressure at the front. One of his first actions was
to send peremptory telegrams to the landrosts of
the eastern districts ordering them to send back
to the front all shirkers from the commandos:
" act on this immediately," he concluded,
" because every minute lost is in itself a wrong
which you are doing to your country and kin-
dred " ; and he saw to it that his orders were
obeyed. He also turned to better use the many
foreign volunteers from Holland, France and
Germany, hitherto looked on askance by the
burghers, by enrolling them in a foreign legion
divided into separate units, according to their
respective nationalities and appointing in com-
mand of the legion the Comte de Villebois
Mareuil, formerly a distinguished officer in the
French army.

After the relief of Ladysmith by Buller on
27th February, 1900, and Robertas victory of
Paardeberg on the following day, there was little
left for Botha to do in Natal, whereas Roberts's

3*

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

march through the Free State towards Johannes-
burg and Pretoria threatened the very existence
of the two Boer republics. So in May Botha
took his newly reorganized commandos from
Natal to the Free State. But with his force of
only 10,000 as opposed to Roberts's 100,000, there
was little he could do beyond delaying actions.
At Doornkop on the outskirts of Johannesburg
he made a gallant stand against odds, but could
not prevent the occupation of the mining city and
of the capital, Pretoria, by Roberts's troops.
Just before the British Army's entry into Johannes-
burg, Judge Kotze, a hater of England and all
English ways, had proposed to blow up the gold
mines and so deprive the British of the TransVaaFs
main industry. Botha, however, lucidly happened
to be at Johannesburg at the time ; he was not
one to sanction such wanton destruction of what
after all was still Boer property, and had Kotze
arrested before he could carry out his plan. It is
interesting, however, to note that-later, when the
British were in full possession of Johannesburg,
Smuts suggested a sudden coup-de-main by a force
of 12,00015,000 Boers to destroy all the mines
with dynamite. Smuts then seems to have
believed that the only object of the British was for
the possession of the wealth of the goldfields, and
expressed the view that " our plans, if carried out,
would have meant a speedy conclusion of war,'*
a view of Great Britain's reasons for going to war
certainly erroneous. At any rate he never

37

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

persuaded Botha to embark on such a hare-
brained scheme.*

One last pitched battle, however, Botha had
with the British shortly after the occupation of
Pretoria. Kruger and most of his ministers,
though abandoning the capital, had determined
to carry on the government from a railway train,
and were on their way eastwards by the line from
Pretoria to Delagoa Bay. So, to prevent a
premature success by the British advancing along
the railway and so rendering the Boer Govern-
ment's escape impossible, Botha decided to make
a stand at Diamond Hill east of Pretoria ; and,
though he won no victory, by his delaying action
facilitated his government's escape to the
Portuguese border.

So far Smuts, barring occasional visits to the
Natal front to visit his friends fighting against
Buller, had been kept at his work in Pretoria. But
when Kruger and the rest of his ministry, mostly
old men, left Pretoria for the railway, Smuts,
only thirty years old and as vigorous as ever,
remained behind, having made up his mind that
the only thing left that he could do for his country
was to fight in a commando. But first he saw to
it that the government should be provided with
funds for carrying on the war. Kruger had gone
off in such a hurry that he had left the state
treasure, consisting of bar gold valued at^500,000,

* Millin, Central Smuts, 1, 153.
38

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

in one of the Pretoria banks. When Smuts went
to demand delivery of the gold, the bank manager
absolutely refused to part with it, but Smuts,
escorted by fifty policemen, soon overcame the
manager's scruples and obtained the gold, which
he forthwith sent down the line to Kruger's train ;
such a windfall was, of course, as nothing com-
pared with the millions expended by Great
Britain in the succeeding two years of war, but
it served to some extent in providing equipment
and food for the commandos that continued the
fight for the next two years and more. Botha
also was able to retrieve the 25,000 lodged in
a bank in the name of the commandant-general
for similar purposes.

Smuts at first sight seemed one of the last men
likely to make a success of guerilla fighting. It is
true that he had, on his return to South Africa
from Cambridge, joined a company of volunteers
at Stellenbosch. But so far he had appeared
mainly as a student and as a clever and ingenious
lawyer. He had never, except in his early days
on his father's farm, seemed interested in anything
but books, and in general company was shy and
reserved. He had, no doubt, as State Attorney
learned much of human nature, both good and
bad, and could hold his own against men like the
rascally police chief of Johannesburg, and even
to some extent against men of Milner's calibre.
But on commando he- would have to be cheek-by-
jowl mainly with men of little education except

39

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

in farming work and uninterested in Smuts's bent
for literary and philosophic speculation. But to
compensate for these drawbacks he had an eager
determination to make a success of anything he
undertook ; and he shared with his fellow-
burghers a passionate belief in his country's cause.
Already, too, he was beginning to be known as
" Slim Jannie," in a complimentary sense, for
his ingenuity in dealing with rascally police
officials, recalcitrant bank managers, and even, to
some extent, with men of Milner's calibre. Such
a man might well prove exceptionally useful in
circumventing or harassing the somewhat lum-
bering British columns roaming about the
countryside. These merits were quickly appre-
ciated by the wise and understanding comman-
dantrgeneral, when Smuts applied to him for work
on commando. Indeed, Botha seems at once to
have recognised that in Smuts he had found an
embryo leader in the hard struggle against over-
whelming odds on which the Transvaal and the
Free State were then embarking. So he accepted
Smuts's offer and sent him to learn the guerilla's
craft under his friend De la Rey, the ablest and
most successful commandant in the Western
Transvaal.

The guerilla war that was started after the final
pitched battle at Diamond Hill lasted for all but
two years. In the end, of course, the Boers with
forces far inferior in numbers, and with supplies
limited to what they could find in their farms,

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

which were being gradually bereft of inhabitants
and produce by the columns of British troops,
while the women and children were brought in
to concentration camps driven too, as they were,
from pillar to post and gradually reduced by
capture or losses in engagements these fighting
Boers were bound in the end to succumb to the
overwhelming forces against them. But, suffering
as they did, they earned the respect of their
opponents and in the end secured a settlement
which still kept the Boers as the predominant
factor in South Africa. Among the Boer leaders
of these guerilla bands, while many inflicted
serious reverses on the British troops, four stand
out as most prominent, the Free Stater de Wet,
and the Transvaalers Botha, De la Rey and
Smuts.

In organising the guerilla fighting Botha as a
rule wisely entrusted the fighting in the various
districts mainly to the commandos raised in those
districts. There the men had their homes which
they naturally wished to defend and also knew
most of the by-ways from which they could make
surprise attacks on the slow, heavily-moving
English columns mostly confined to the well-
marked roads or open country, or else evade them
before they could be trapped by superior forces.
Botha himself chiefly confined his own activities
to the Eastern Transvaal, with which he was most
familiar, but he managed, in spite of difficulties
of communication, almost to the end of the war

41

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

to keep in touch with the members of the two
Boer Governments and the leaders of his scattered
commandos. How wearing this guerilla warfare
was to the British forces may be judged by an
offer of Kitchener to meet Botha at Middleburg
in February, 1901, to discuss terms of peace : the
meeting took place, but without result, since
Botha was not yet prepared to give up the
independence of his people, a sine qua non on the
British side. Kitchener, however, even at this
meeting, was impressed by Botha's attitude, so
much so that he wrote to the Secretary for War :
" Botha is a quiet, capable man, and I have no
doubt carries considerable weight with his
burghers ; he will be, I should think, of valuable
assistance to the future government of the country
in an official capacity."*

Six months later Kitchener, changing his
tactics, tried threats instead of diplomacy to put
an end to the tiresome war of which he was
heartily sick, issuing a proclamation warning the
Boers in the field that, if they had not surrendered
by the 15th September, all their chief officers
would be banished and the rank and file mulcted
for the cost of keeping their wives and children in
the concentration camps. Botha's answer to this
threat was his own most spectacular expedition of
the war. On the day after Kitchener's pro-
clamation he issued orders to his commandos in
the Western Transvaal. His plan was to invade

* Quoted by Engdcnbcrg, General Lows Botha, 66.
4*

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

Natal, unmolested hitherto by the Boers for over
a year since the relief of Ladysmith, and not too
securely guarded. On 17th September General
Gough had a serious reverse at Blood River Poort ;
and though Botha failed in his immediate object
of invading Natal, he attracted to his orbit several
British columns hastily brought from other
districts where they were much needed. These
he evaded successfully, and then by magnificent
marches on one day covering thirty miles
suddenly swooped down on Benson's column,
long the terror of the Eastern Transvaal and
almost annihilated it at Bakenlaagte on 30th Oc-
tober, 1901 : an effective reply to Kitchener's
proclamation of 15th September.

By July, 1901, Smuts had learned enough of
the guerilla art under De la Rey in the Western
Transvaal to be chosen by Botha as commandant
of a little band of 400 men to ride through the
Free State and, after crossing the Orange River,
to arouse the Dutch in Cape Colony itself. Taking
little more in his saddle-bags than Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason and a Greek New Testament, he set
off gaily on the adventure.* During August he
was involved in one of Kitchener's great drives
in the Free State, but, after many hairbreadth
escapes, reached the Orange River at the
beginning of September, only to find almost every
drift across the river guarded by French's forces

* Hertzog, another Boer guerilla leader, told me that he took
a Tacitus in his saddle-bags.

43

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

in Cape Colony. Smuts, however, who always did
his own reconnaissances himself, often alone*
found one unguarded passage by which he led
his men across. Henceforward for the rest of the
war he remained in Cape Colony, eluding the
English even French himself always pursued,
often almost starving for want of food, but also
occasionally surprising an English detachment and
helping himself to English supplies and clothing.
On one occasion he had got so far south as to be*
within sight of Port Elizabeth, and thence
diverged westward to his own Malmesbury dis-
trict, where he was met by a brother-in-law
Kriege, bringing him a large sum of money from
Smuts's father. He gained a few recruits from
the local Dutch, but not so many as he had hoped,
since the English forces had commandeered most
of the horses and the Boer guerilla bands were
comparatively helpless without horses, whereas
the British could bring up their reinforcements by
train. Occasional reinforcements however came
to him from other Boer parties from the Free
State, his most notable recruit being Deneys
Reitz, son of a former President of the Orange
Free State, who became the most lively chronicler
of the adventure.! On one occasion French
himself was within an ace of being captured by
Smuts's little force, which had come to a halt one

* On another of his daring reconnaissances, when he took
three others with him, the party was ambushed by a British
patrol, and Smuts alone survived to return to his commando.

t In his book Commando, for which Smuts wrote a preface.

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

tight by the railway line just as a train was
approaching. They could easily have de-railed
the train, but Smuts forbade it, as it might contain
women and children : in fact, as he subsequently
learned, it contained only French and his staff on
the way to reorganize his forces in the pursuit of
Smuts's little commando. Finally Smuts, rein-
forced by more volunteers mainly from the two
republics until his commando had increased to
over 2000 men, made his way as far north as
Ookiep in Namaqualand, where, after capturing
a British fort, he was called away to discuss the
final peace proposals at Vereeniging.

Smuts's incursion into Cape Colony, in spite of
all his difficulties, had been one of the most
brilliant performances in the Boer War. With
his own small force he had kept 80009000
British troops employed in defending British
territory, and though he had won no great
victories, he had at any rate kept his enemy
guessing and to a considerable extent distracted.
He had no hesitation in risking his own life, and
in fact always ihsisted on doing his own recon-
noitring and by his tact and personal courage
kept his force, barring casualties, intact and
enthusiastic to the end. After his years of active
service in the open air, his very appearance had
changed. When he first came to Johannesburg
in 1896 he was described as " pale-faced, tre-
mendously serious, with a hungry look, and
seemingly taking no notice of what was around

45

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

him "; now his closest relations did not recognise
him with his new alertness and vigour, with " the
breezes of the veld in his smile, its vast spaces in
the sweep of his arm, its strength and unrelenting
spirit in the springiness of his rapid gait."*
As to his military achievements, many years later,
French, his chief adversary, presiding at a dinner
to Smuts in London, said of him : " Smuts
impressed me far more than any opponent I ever
met, with his power as a great commander and
leader of men."

A full account of the meeting of Free State and
Transvaal delegates at Vereeniging is to be found
in de Wet's Three Years' War : and a very moving
account it is. Those most intent on continuing
the war were chiefly from the Free State, notably
President Steyn, ex-President Reitz and de Wet,
though they at first found several from the
Transvaal holding the same view. Against them
was the majority of the Transvaal delegates and
notably Botha and Smuts, who pointed to the
almost complete exhaustion of their resources,
the devastation of the country, the separation
from their wives and children in the concentration
camps and the comparative leniency of the
English terms as almost irrefutable arguments for
submission : the only alternative being the well-
nigh complete annihilation of those who persisted
in fighting against overwhelming odds. " We

* N. Levi, Jan Smuts, 35 sqq.
46

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE S. AFRICAN WAR

must save the nation " was the burden of both
men's speeches to the delegates. " Terms might
be secured now," said Botha, " terms which
would save the language, customs and ideals of
the people. The fatal thing would be to secure
no terms at all and yet be forced to surrender.
We are slipping back. We must save the nation
by a permanent peace under which both Boer
and British would be able to dwell here side by
side."* With the same intent Smuts exposed
with Thucydidean art the weakness of the
national forces, praised their heroism and appealed
to his countrymen to face realities and for the time
being to yield " with the assured hope of attaining
later," as he put it, " the glory of a nobler future,
the light of a brighter day."

In settling details of the treaty both Botha and
Smuts had several conferences with Milner and
Kitchener, of whom the latter conceived a great
admiration and liking for Botha, and by his frank
talks with Smuts, in which he prophesied that
within two years the Liberals would be in power
in England and likely to grant a satisfactory
constitution to the two new colonies of the
Transvaal and the Orange River, greatly facili-
tated the Boers' acceptance of the British terms.
At the final meeting of the Boer delegates on
31st May, 1902, when the British terms were
presented for acceptance or rejection, the pro-

* The last words of this quotation come from E. V. Engelenbcrg,
Central Lends Botha.

47

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

ccedings, as was usual with the Boers on such
solemn occasions, were opened with prayer ; and,
after a few speeches, the treaty of peace as
presented was finally accepted by fifty-four votes
to six. Vice-President Burger of the Transvaal
then spoke : " We are standing here at the grave
of the two Republics. Much yet remains to be
done . . . Let us not draw our hands back
from the work which it is our duty to accomplish.
Let us ask God to guide us, and to show us how we
shall be enabled to keep our nation together. We
must be ready to forgive and to forget whenever
we meet our brethren. That part of the nation
which has proved unfaithful* we must not
reject." " Then this," so the chronicle ends,
" the last meeting of the two Republics, was
closed with prayer."

On the British side, as soon as the treaty of
Vereejiiging was signed on 31st May, 1902, " We
are good friends now," said Kitchener, as he
shook hands with Botha, whom he had learned to
respect as a formidable and straightforward
antagonist, a sentiment entirely reciprocated by
Botha about Kitchener himself, for whom he
conceived a lasting affection.

* I.e., the National Scouts, Boen who had fought on the
British side.

Chapter Four

From Responsible Government
To Union

AS soon as the treaty of Vereeniging had been
formally cornpleted, Botha called together
his staff officers to thank them for their faithful
services, concluding his speech with these pro-
phetic words : " One consolation remains to all
of you : you can now go and rest a little. As for
me, my real work only begins at this hour. The
day when rest will be mine will be the day when
they lower me into the grave. The sacrifices we
had to make were terrific, but we are going to see
a Greater South Africa."* No prophecy could
have been truer.

One of the first duties Botha imposed on himself
was to seek relief for his own scattered people,
most of whose houses had been destroyed, their
livestock commandeered and their wives and
children kept in concentration camps. It is true
that 3,000,000 had been promised in the treaty
by the British Government for restoring the
burghers to their farms, but this was quite in-
sufficient to make good their losses ; so Botha,

* Engelenberg, i.e. 99.

49

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

accompanied by De Wet and De la Rey, went off
to Europe to raise funds from sympathisers in
England and was particularly touched by his
friendly and informal reception by King Edward
and his wife ; but jieither in England nor on the
continent, which he also visited, were the sums
contributed to his fund for widows and orphans at
all commensurate with his hopes.

On his return his immediate need was to find
a new home, for his farm buildings at Waterval
had been destroyed in the war ; and the district
of Vryheid, where they were, had been handed
over to Natal at the peace. Accordingly Botha,
who had made up his mind to remain a Trans-
vaaler, bought a farm in the Standerton district,
which he renamed Rusthof, Haven of Rest,
gradually adding to it out-lying properties. until
by 1912 he owned 11,000 acres. What Botha did
not know about high-veld farming was not worth
knowing, especially in stock-raising of sheep,
horses and cattle. As he himself once remarked
to a friend, " They may call me a soldier or a
statesman in reality I am a farmer and nothing
else."* The story is told that on his visit to
Europe in 1909 he was given a special permit to
visit the French Government's merino sjud farm
and to purchase a few rams. Out of a flock of
150 he finally picked out three, which the manager
declared to be the best on the farm : " Tell your
Minister," he exclaimed, " that when I was

* Engelenberg, I.e. 122.
50

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

notified of the coming of the famous Boer general,
I never dreamt he was such an exceptionally clever
sheep expert ; on such occasions I always have
our very best rams kept out ; " and when Botha
asked to make a selection of the two-year v -olds,
" Never ! " exclaimed the worried manager, " I
shall never be allowed to permit such a capable
expert to take the pick of my two-year-olds. We
have to keep them for our own use."* As a prac-
tical farmer, indeed, Botha was far ahead of the
ordinary Boer farmers, who were quite content
with the roughest unscientific farming which
enabled them merely to provide little more, as a
rule, than was necessary for their own households.
In fact, much as he disliked Milner's methods of
government in most respects, he made an excep-
tion in favour of his agricultural department,
which did magnificent work in improving the
Boers' happy-go-lucky system of farming.

But after his return from the disappointing visit
to Europe he had little leisure at first for farming
activities, for he had made up his mind that his
primary duty was to help his own countrymen in
their distress. Accordingly he took a house in
Pretoria, where he was always accessible to those
who came to him with grievances against the
government and generous to those in special need.
Though he and Smuts, who had resumed his
practice at the bar, were offered places on Milner's
nominated council to advise the government, they

* Engclenberg, I.e. p. 186.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

both refused, as they disagreed with Milner's
policy and felt that as outside critics they would
be for more effective than as a minority in an
unrepresentative assembly.

Smuts, the other outstanding figure among the
Transvaal Boers, had after Vereeniging, during
the last period of Milner's regime, at first given
way to bitterness and despair as to the future of
his country, especially when the employment of
Chinese on the mines added another complication
to the uneasy mixture of races in South Africa.
His chief confidant in England was Miss Hobhouse
who during the war had visited the concentration
camps and done much to arouse indignation at
home against the early defects of that system.
Writing to her on the probable results of Milner's
scheme of increasing the output of the mines by
Chinese labour, he concluded : " I see the day
coming when British South Africa will appeal to
the Dutch to save them from the consequences of
their insane policy of to-day. And I fear I some-
times fear with an agony bitterer than death
that the Dutch will no more be there to save them
or South Africa. For the Dutch too are being
undermined and demoralised by disaster and des-
pair, and God only knows how far this process will
be allowed to go on."*

But this defeatist attitude happily proved only

* Millin, 1, 193 5. One of his bitter effusions was published
without, I believe, his consent, and was answered by a bitter
ode of Owen Seaman's in Punch.

52

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

a passing mood, and Smuts was soon inspired by
Botha to take an active part in his scheme for
reviving the spirit of the Boers by starting a party
to be named Het Volk, " The People," which, as
its name implied, was to include the whole Boer
people. The chief difficulty to be overcome was
the unwillingness of the Bitter-enders, who had
fought to the last, to have any association with
Hands-uppers, Boers who had surrendered in earlier
days and in many cases enlisted in the National
Scouts organised by the British to fight against
their own countrymen. But at the inaugural
meeting of Het Volk in May, 1904, Botha made it
plain at the outset that the composition of Het Volk
must be as universal as its name : " Let us," he
said, " put back the past so far that it nq longer
has any power to keep us apart. Less than a year
ago we were in opposite camps men of the same
home passed each other without a handshake.
To-night we are gathered in order to consider the
fortunes of one and all. So mote it be. Let us do
all we can to heal the breach, then we shall again
become great. Let the names of * Hands-upper '
and c National Scout ' be excised from our vocab-
ulary. The honour of the people is a thing too
great and delicate to be tarnished by such
stains."* From this time forward H& Volk
flourished under Botha's wise and tolerant guid-
ance, aided by Smuts's resourcefulness and

* Engdenberg, 1312.
3 S3

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

diplomatic ability* until in 1910 it became
merged in the more comprehensive South African
party, which by that time included also many of
British stock; and even such obstinate extremists
as Deneys Reitz, son of an ex-President of the
Orange Free State, who had at first refused to
take the oath of allegiance to Great Britain,
" learned to see Botha's great vision of a united
South African people, to whom the memories of
the Boer War would mean no longer bitterness, but
only the richness and inspiration of a spiritual
experience. The loyalty of a Boer boy ripened
into the broader liberty of the South African."f

The general election in England of 1905, which
brought in the Liberals with an overwhelming
majority was nowhere more enthusiastically
acclaimed than in the Transvaal and the Orange
River Colony, as it was then for a brief period
called. The aim of Botha and Smuts was no mere
half-way house of representative institutions, such
as the abortive Lyttelton constitution proposed,
without full responsible government by the
people's chosen parliament : and there seemed to
be a chance of obtaining full responsibility under
the Liberals. So Smuts was sent over by Het Volk
to explore the ground in England. He saw
several of the new ministers, none of whom gave
him much satisfaction until he came to Campbell

* Recognising Smuts's diplomatic ability, the Boen chose him
to expound their grievances to Chamberlain on his visit to
South Africa in 1904.

t D. Reitz, Commando. (Preface by J. Smuts.)

54

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

Bannerman himself. The Prime Minister asked
him many searching questions about the past.
Why had they not accepted Milner's offer of seats
on the legislative council, or Lyttelton's Crown
Colony government with seats in the legislature ;
questions to which Smuts answered that the one
thing that could make the wheels run was self-
government, giving his reasons at length. Smuts
concludes his account of the interview. " I went
on explaining, I could see Campbell Bannerman
was listening sympathetically. Without being
brilliant he was the sort of sane personality large-
hearted and honest on whom people depend.
He reminded me of Botha. He told me there was
to be a cabinet meeting next day, and he added,
' Smuts, you have convinced me.' "* The story
is well known of that cabinet meeting at which
Campbell Bannerman, speaking against the view
of all but two of his colleagues, by his " plain,
kindly, simple utterance," which lasted only ten
minutes, moved at least one member to tears and
converted them all to the acceptance of the
decision he had himself come to, to trust the
enemies of barely four years ago, and grant the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State, as it was
once more to be entitled to call itself, as free and
responsible a government as that of any of our
dominions. " They gave us back," said Smuts,
" in everything but name our country. After
four years ! Has such a miracle of trust and

* Millin, l.c. I, 21314,

55

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

magnanimity ever happened before ? Only people
like the English could do it. They make mistakes,
but they are a big people." Botha, on the news
of Campbell Bannerman's death in 1908, cabled
to London his grief at the loss of " one of the
Empire's wisest statesmen and one of the Trans-
vaal's truest friends. In securing self-government
for the new colonies he not only raised an im-
perishable monument to himself, but through the
policy of trust he inspired the people of South
Africa with a new feeling of hopefulness and
co-operation. In making it possible for the two
races to live and work together harmoniously, he
had laid the foundation of a united South Africa."
At the first elections under the new constitution
Het Volk secured majorities in both the new
colonies. But it was an encouraging feature of the
election, in the Transvaal at any rate, that a
certain number of English-speaking electors voted
for Het Volk candidates and that some even of
those elected on that side were of English origin.
For it was the aim of both Botha and Smuts to
merge these racial distinctions in a common
patriotism for a South African nation. It was the
aim, too, already proclaimed by a much chastened
Rhodes as early as the end of 1900 when the war
was thought to be all but ended : " You think,"
he said, to a meeting in Gape Town, " you have
beaten the Dutch ! But it is not so. The Dutch
are not beaten ; what is beaten is Krugerism, a
corrupt and evil government, no more Dutch in

56

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

essence than English. No ! The Dutch are as
vigorous and unconquered to-day as they have
ever been ; the country is still as much theirs as it
is yours, and you will have to live and work with
them hereafter as 'in the past. Remember that
when you go back to your homes in the towns or
in the up-country farms and villages, make your
Dutch neighbours feel that the bitterness is past
and that the need of co-operation is greater than
ever. Teach your children to remember when
they go to their village school that the little Dutch
boys and girls they find sitting on the same benches
with them are as much part of the South African
nation as they are themselves, and that, as they
learn the same lessons together now, so hereafter
they must work together as comrades for a
common object the good of South Africa."*

With the majority secured at the polls by Het
Volk, it seemed natural that Botha should be
called upon to form a Ministry. At first indeed
there had been an idea that Sir Richard Solomon,
a Cape Colonial who had been Milner's Attorney-
general, but had stood for Pretoria as a Het Volk
candidate, might be chosen ; but being defeated
at the polls, he was out of the question. Smuts
also was thought of by some of Het Volk, but he
wisely stood aside for Botha. Writing to Merri-
man at the Cape he says : "I might have been
Premier, but considered that it would be a mis-

* Quoted in my Cecil Rhodes, 319 20 ; I was fortunate
enough to hear the speech.

57

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

take to take precedence over Botha, who is really
one of the first men South Africa has ever pro-
duced. If he had culture, as he has chivalry and
commonsense, there would not be his equal in
South Africa."t In fact Botha soon proved that
actually there was not his equal in South Africa.

At the outset Botha showed his determination
to make no racial distinctions in the composition
of his small cabinet of six members. Besides being
prime minister himself he also, most appropriately,
took charge of the department of agriculture ;
Smuts, his fidus Achates, doubled the functions of
colonial secretary and minister of education ; of
the four remaining ministers, two were of Dutch
origin, but the two important offices of finance
and public works were assigned to Hull and
Solomon, both of British origin. Smuts indeed
was justified in writing about a proposed testi-
monial to Botha. " The victory of the people's
party at the polls is chiefly due to his never-
flagging endeavours, which began on the day
peace was proclaimed, in the cause of welding the
inhabitants of the Transvaal into a compact,
lasting organization ; to his commonsense and
well-considered counsel ; to his moderate
policy and his work for cordial race co-
operation."*

As might have been expected, when self-
government was established in the two former
Boer states, in both of which, especially in the

t Engclcnbcrg Lc. 147. * Ib. 145.

5*

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

Free State, there was a large Boer majority, there
was much pressure by these majorities to clear
away lock, stock and barrel, most of Milner's
schemes and dismiss his imported officials, inclu-
ding especially the inner ring, the so-called
" kindergarten/' most of them first-rate young
men. In the Free State, where Hertzog was
minister of education, this policy was pursued
with some vigour : but Botha in the Transvaal
resolutely opposed such drastic measures, and in
that was supported by Smuts. A few of the
English officials resigned of their own accord, but
all the best were willing to stay and were main-
tained in office ; while most of Milner's schemes
for developing industry, especially agriculture,
were obviously too good to be scrapped. It is told
of Botha that when a deputation of Boer farmers
came to ask him to send back to England Milner's
director of agriculture, F. B. Smith, later a dis-
tinguished fellow of Downing, he replied : " Wait
till he has got rid of the cattle-plague, then I may
see about it." In the same way he kept on all the
other agricultural experts from overseas, who
had been doing admirable work in encouraging
the new scientific methods in veterinary science,
agrostology, etc. Botha himself, of course, being
one of the most expert farmers in South Africa,
was fully entitled to judge ; but even in this, and
still more in other matters, he was not one to give
his final decision without deep reflection. As one
of his officials said : " When I first put up a

59

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

proposal to him, he generally knew little about
the matter, but would say : c Well, I will think it
over, and give you my decision.' When, a few
days later, the decision came, it was invariably
right."

The two questions which had loomed largest in
the recent elections had been the importation of
Chinese labour for the mines owing to a supposed
dearth of native labour, and the education policy
in the schools. As to the first Botha, with his
extensive knowledge of native tribes and their
habits, was convinced that with judicious and
tactful treatment the native labourers would once
more flock to the mines, and equally convinced
that the introduction of another race with entirely
alien habits into the already heterogeneous
elements in South Africa was a cardinal error.
But, unlike some of his Boer followers, who would
at once have sent all the Chinese labourers
packing, whatever effect that might have on the
mines, he realised the importance to South Africa
of the gold-mining industry, and was determined
not to make too sudden a change which might
disorganise it for an indefinite period. He there-
fore, though determined to get rid of the Chinese
labourers in the long run, only gradually repat-
riated them until the new supplies of native labour
which he was tapping had proved large enough
to take their place entirely. Botha was well
justified in his policy. Between January, 1907,
and December, 1908, the natives on the mines
60

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

had increased from 94,000 to 150,000 and by
March, 1910, the last Chinese labourer had left
South Africa.

Smuts's chief achievement in this first and last
ministry of the Transvaal as a self-governing unit
of the British Empire was to elaborate a new
educational policy. Under Milner's regime the
old school buildings had been taken over as Crown
property and a code passed which greatly im-
proved the curriculum imposed by the former
Boer government, with this serious defect that the
medium of education was to be entirely English ;
with the result that the Boers had formed an
Association of Christian National Education and
started schools of their own to which they sent
their own children wherever possible. Smuts's
Education Act of 1907 wisely did away with this
dual system and established free primary schools
throughout the Transvaal, in which both lan-
guages, English and Dutch, were given equal
rights according to the choice of the parents,
thereby accustoming children of both nationalities,
as Rhodes had foreshadowed, to come together at
an early stage in the same schools. By this
tolerant attitude Smuts antagonized many of the
more bigoted Boer ministers of religion, and it
may account for the charge sometimes brought
against him of irreligion. At any rate in this
reform, which was far more liberal than that
instituted by Hertzog in the Free State, Smuts
was warmly backed up by Botha, who, though no
B3* 61

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

scholar and ignorant of the technical aspects of
education, was all for good and cheap schools and
above all for a system fair to English as well as
Dutch : Botha indeed, used to say that the older
generation could only be saved by tremendous
efforts, and therefore everything should be done
to educate the children at least.* In another
respect Smuts was not so successful ; for it fell to
him to have the first dealings with a man and a
problem that for more than ten years proved
thorns in the flesh to himself and many others in
the British Empire Gandhi and the rights of
Indian settlers in South Africa : but this problem
may be more conveniently dealt with at a later
stage.

So far the grant of responsible government to
the Transvaal had more than justified Campbell
Bannerman's courageous decision to incorporate
the two former Boer states as self-governing
members of the British Empire. One of the first
acts\of the Botha government had been to present
to the King, as a token of gratitude and goodwill,
the great Cullinan diamond, the largest in the
world, as an addition tp the crown jewels. Within
his first year, too, as premier, Botha had gone to
the meeting of the Imperial Conference and there
made his mark even among such experienced
colleagues as Laurier from Canada, Deakin from
Australia, and the former raider Jameson from
Cape Colony ; and he gained the affection of the

Engdenberg, 15&9.
62

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

British public by the many public speeches he was
called upon to make during his brief sojourn in
the country.

How sincere, too, was his determination to be
a loyal member of the British Empire was illus-
trated by his consenting in 1908 to become a vice-
president of the Champlain Tercentenary &
Quebec Battlefields Association, as evidence of his
right to take part in the consecration of the ground
where the foundation of the British Empire
was laid.

From the outset of their careers as responsible
ministers of the crown both Botha and Smuts, as
we have seen, had set before themselves as their
main object to sink the differences between the
two races, Boer and Briton, and weld them into
one South African community intent only on the
welfare of their common heritage. It was no easy
task, for on both sides the rancour nurtured by
the recent war was still alive. The British victors,
in a minority in all the South African states except
Natal, felt that, with the large Boer majorities in
the two defeated states, the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State, and with a preponderance of
Boer voters even in Gape Colony, the fruits of
victory had been thrown away ; while the Boers
on their side, especially in the Free State, were
inclined to make up for their defeat in the field by
their voting power in the elections. To Botha
and Smuts it appeared that much of this racial

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

antagonism might disappear if the four indepen-
dent colonies could be merged into a comprehen-
sive st^te concerned with the common well-being
of the whole. There were other practical reasons
for such a union. Each had its own customs
policy, each its own railway system, to a great
extent competing with those of the other three
colonies, and each its own separate legal system
and law courts. In fact, South Africa was over-
governed, a cause, inter alia, of wasteful expen-
diture. Smuts, indeed, almost from the outset of
responsible government in the Transvaal, had
begun studying the question of federation or even
complete union and comparing the different
systems adopted for one of these solutions in the
Union of England and Scotland, the Dominion of
Canada, and the more recent Commonwealth of
Australia ; and, no doubt also, the clumsy old
system of - the former Dutch Republic. Others
had also been working along parallel lines,
especially some of Milner's former " Kinder-
garten," as it was called, young enthusiasts such
as Lionel Curtis, Robert Brand, Richard Feetham
and Philip Kerr (Marquess of Lothian) ; while
at the Cape men such as Merriman, Schreiner,
Hofmeyr, and the new governor of the Transvaal,
Lord Sclborne, were turning their thoughts in the
same direction. Indeed, as early as 1903 Milner
had made a first attempt by his Intercolonial
Council to deal with the common problems of
railways and police for the two recently conquered

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

Transvaal and Orange River colonies as a first
stage towards closer co-operation throughout
South Africa.

The question was first brought to a head in 1907
at a meeting of the Intercolonial Council, to
which were now added Cape Colony and Natal.
At this meeting the divergent interests of the four
colonies were found so irreconcilable under
existing circumstances that the only resolution
adopted, on Smuts's motion, was that " the best
interests and the permanent prosperity of South
Africa was only to be secured by an early union,
under the Crown of Great Britain." Accordingly
in 1908 a National Convention was summoned of
representatives from all the four colonies. * Mean-
while a battle royal had been going on between
the looser federationists and the advocates of the
closest possible union. The most notable advo-
cates of the federal solution were Hofmeyr and
W. P. Schreiner at the Cape, neither of whom,
however, was a member of the Convention, for
Jan Hofmeyr always preferred to work behind
the scenes, while Schreiner had accepted a brief
for Dinizulu, the Zulu chief, whose trial for
treason was impending, and so felt unable, for
the time being, to accept other work.

The Transvaal in fact was the headquarters of
the unitary movement. Botha and Smuts had

* Delegates with a watching brief were also admitted from
Southern Rhodesia, as it was then thought that colony might
later join the Union.

6s

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

fully made up their minds that the closest possible
union would be the only effective solution of the
fissiparous difficulties in the existing constitutions
of the four existing colonies. " There is no
alternative to Union except separatism. We must
go the whole hog, one way or the other .
What use is there in these tin-pot shows in South
Africa . . . [We must] start a Union to rule
the country from Table Bay to the Congo, and
even beyond that " * was Smuts's ambitious
scheme. To this end much good spade work was
done by the so-called " Kindergarten " and their
friends, both in the Transvaal and the Cape.
Accordingly, when the National Convention was
opened at Durban,f the Transvaal deputation,
headed by Botha and Smuts, was the one best
prepared to carry their views. Smuts indeed
proved the most effective advocate of the unitary
system, for he, in the words of the historian of the
Convention, " had made a deep study of the
question in all its details, and there seemed no
aspect of the problem that he had not investigated
with his habitual , thoroughness . . . the
clearness of his mind was fortunately accompanied
by a corresponding lucidity of expression, and
after the opening days there was no delegate that
carried greater weight than General Smuts " ;
and of his speech in favour of the unitary system
he says that it " made an impression that will

* N. Levi, Jan Smuts, 1224.

t Later the meetings were transferred to Gape Town.
66

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

67

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

never be effaced from the minds of those who
heard it."* So convincing indeed was this speech
that Jameson, hitherto a protagonist of the looser
federal constitution, acknowledged that he had
been convinced by Smuts's arguments, and
thenceforward supported the solution of complete
unification.

But though thus early in the proceedings the
crucial question of the form of union had been
settled, there were still many difficulties to be
overcome. At the outset Jameson, the ex-raider,
had greatly facilitated a good understanding
between the delegates by carrying his motion that
English and the Taalf should both be regarded
as official languages. Many other contentious
questions arose, one of which, the question of the
capital of the Union, aroused so much feeling
among the different delegations that for a time it
almost looked as if the whole scheme would have
to be abandoned. It was in such difficulties that
Botha stood out as the wise conciliator. He had
not the wide knowledge or the daemonic energy
of Smuts, who, besides taking a notable part in
the daily discussions, was often working half the
night in preparing for the next meeting, while
Botha preferred to relax with games of bridge in
the evenings. But, when it came to momentous
decisions, by his tact in dealing with his fellow-

* Sir . Walton, Inner History of the National Convention of South
Africa, 1912.

t The form of Dutch used by the Boers in South Africa.

68

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

countrymen such as De la Rey and others, the
respect in which he was held by them as well as
by the British delegates, and his practical common
sense in seizing upon the essential factor in a
difficult situation, Botha was outstanding. It was
largely due to him and Smuts that a solution was
found for the difficulty about the Union capital.
When, for example, De la Rey was proving
obstinate about this question, Botha finally
convinced him of the wisdom of the compromise
finally adopted, telling him that " the Empire and
the world were looking at them, and they would
be eternally disgraced if they broke up the Con-
vention on such an issue. What would be said of
us ; what would the King say of us at such a
fiasco ? " The final compromise, whereby Pre-
toria was declared the seat of government, Cape
Town the meeting place of the Union parliament
and Bloemfontein the seat of the Supreme Court,
was not in itself an ideal solution : but at any rate
it was then the only means of preventing a break-
down of the whole negotiation. After the final
sitting of the convention, the correspondent of
The Times went to see Botha and found him
" looking like a happy schoolboy " at the con-
clusion of their prolonged and anxious discussions.
Thus finally was accomplished, largely owing
to the initiative and enthusiasm of Botha and
Smuts, a union of the four governments in South
Africa, which, as far back as the middle of the

69

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

nineteenth century, had been the ultimate aim
to be attained by different methods no doubt of
governors like Harry Smith and Grey and Frere,
secretaries of state such as Carnarvon and repub-
lican presidents such as Brand of the Free State
and Kruger of the Transvaal. It came at the
earliest moment that it could have come without
what would have amounted to civil war ; and it
has been, on the whole, a most successful venture.

This successful issue of the National Conven-
tion's labours though helped on by the har-
monious relations between the delegates, in spite
of differing opinions, and by valuable interven-
tions on crucial matters by Merriman, Jameson,
Farrar, and other delegates, and not least by the
deeply respected chairman, Chief Justice De
VilHers was mainly due to the exhaustive prepar-
ation made for it by the Transvaal delegation and
on critical points of difference, by the influence of
its two leaders Botha and Smuts. Smuts indeed
had been the thinker throughout with a complete
scheme which he had carefully thought out and
which he was equally successful in expounding.
But when it came to almost insuperable difficulties
such as the question of the capital, Botha was the
great conciliator and guide. The habit of
command which he had acquired in war he never
abandoned, and all who approached him acknow-
ledged it to be his right. He also had the saving
70

FROM RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT TO UNION

gift of childlike simplicity. When the great work
of the Convention was concluded, he rejoiced at
its success like a boy at play. Childlike also was
his loyalty to friends and causes, and his inability
to understand what seemed disloyalty in others.*
Notable too is the letter he wrote to Asquith
after the happy conclusion of the Convention :
"Now that the South African Bill has safely
passed both Houses of Parliament and thereby
the Union of the four self-governing Colonies
in South Africa has practically become an
established fact, I cannot refrain from con-
gratulating you and the great party of which
you are the leader upon the success which
has followed your liberal policy in South Africa
.... Only one thing is certain that only the
liberal policy of your Government has made
that Union possible .... Only after a policy
of trust in the whole population of Transvaal
and O.R.C. had taken place of one of coercion
could we dream of the possibility of a Union
of the Colonies, and above all of the two white
races. My greatest regret is that one noble
figure is missing one man who should have
lived to see the fruits of his work the late Sir
Henry Campbell Bannerman."f

* As special correspondent for The Times at the South African
National Convention, I was privileged to know most of the
delegates, notably that lovable Irishman, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick,
of the Transvaal, and to learn much of the Convention's
proceedings and difficulties.

t Memoirs and Reflections by the Earl of Oxford and
Asquith I. 197.

71

Chapter Five

Union Versus the Two Stream
Policy

WHEN the Union Constitution, embodied in
the South Africa Act, had been passed by
the Imperial Parliament and assented to by the
King on 20th September, 1909, the question arose
as to who should be the first prime minister of the
Union, and whether the first ministry should be
a coalition ministry of all parties or one con-
structed on purely party lines. To the post of
prime minister Merriman, the Nestor among
South African statesmen, the last premier of the
Cape and easily the greatest orator in South Africa
in the noble Gladstonian manner, had consider-
able claims, even though these great merits were
to some extent offset by his being too great a
master of flouts and gibes. Undoubtedly, how-
ever, the chief reason why the Governor General,
Lord Gladstone, offered the post to Botha rather
than to Merriman was that in the National
Convention which had elaborated the new consti-
tution, the Transvaal delegation, headed by Botha
and his lieutenant Smuts, had been the prime
72

UfrlON VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

movers and the most influential delegation.
Botha accordingly accepted the post of prime
minister. In forming his ministry he at first
considered the scheme strongly urged by Jameson
for a coalition ministry composed of the best and
most representative men chosen from all parties
in the Union ; but, on consulting the leading
members of his own South African party, he found
them dead against it, nor did the chief Cape
politicians favour it. But, though he rejected the
idea of a non-party ministry, he was naturally
careful to include in his cabinet representatives of
each of the former colonies ; he could hardly do
less in the recently formed union of provinces, the
respective interest of which had to be carefully
considered, at any rate until a more comprehensive
South African feeling had come to maturity. As
before, his most trusted colleague was Smuts, to
whom were assigned no less than three portfolios,
of Defence, Mines and Interior.* He himself,
besides being prime minister, also took, as before,
the department of agriculture as his special
province.

It is no derogation to several of the very able
men included by Botha in his first South African
Ministry that the only two members who really
counted in it for general policy were Botha him-
self and his second in command, Smuts. Their
partnership in politics which had begun almost

* The Ministry of the Interior corresponded in function with
that of Colonial Secretary held by Smuts in the Transvaal.

73

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

immediately after the peace of Vereeniging, in
1902, thenceforward lasted unbroken till Botha's
death. Now that they had united the four South
African colonies, their great aim was to reconcile
the two European races, Boer and Briton, and
merge them in one united South African com-
munity with common aims and interests. As early
as 1904, when bitter memories of the war were
still vivid, Botha had declared, " Let us learn
English, let the English learn Dutch, that will
increase the chances of our forming a great
nation " ;* and in 1912 as prime minister of the
Union he declared his deliberate policy to be " the
building up a united nation on non-racial lines."
Later Lord Buxton, who as Governor General was
in constant touch with Botha, and left a touching
appreciation of him, thus described his aspira-
tions,f "that the Omnipotent Father would
embrace with unanimity all the white inhabitants
of South Africa, so that one nation may arise from
them fit to occupy a position of dignity among the
nations of the world, where the name of Boer will
be greeted with honour and applause." J And in
this aspiration he found an enthusiastic supporter
in Smuts, who, since the grant of self-government
to the Transvaal, had entirely shed all the pessi-
mistic views he had entertained directly after the
peace of Vereeniging. Smuts indeed " Jannie "

* Engdenberg, 231.

t Buxton, General Botha, 12.

J/&. 11.

74

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

as Botha called him affectionately was far
cleverer than his leader, and ready out of his own
brain to find ingenious solutions of difficulties.
Botha himself was the first to realize this ; and,
when an old Boer complained to him that Smuts
had too much power in his cabinet, replied :
" Old son, you people don't know Smuts yet.
Our country is too young yet to play about with
brains."* Moreover, except with Botha, he was
more secretive in arriving at his decisions, which,
though generally wise, were, owing to this secrecy,
not so readily accepted by his opponents or
sometimes even by his own party. In his long-
drawn-out controversies with the diabolically
ingenious Gandhi,*}* for example, he by no means
always had the best of it, and, though he finally
arrived at a working solution of the Indian diffi-
culty, on several points he was obliged to climb
down. On the other hand, in constructive
schemes, such as the South African constitution,
he always took a wide and tolerant view, which
generally gained for them wide acceptance. Thus
the two men were an ideal combination, as is well
expressed by Botha's biographer: J "What Smuts
was able to accomplish, thanks to his trained

* F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1944.

t Gandhi has always been a specially difficult man to deal
with, largely because he never becomes bitter or angry in his
controversies. When he was in prison in Johannesburg he made
a pair of sandals which he presented to Smuts, who had put
him there.

J Engelcnberg, I.e. 332.

75

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

intellect, Botha achieved by sheer intuition. Botha
and Smuts mutually felt the need of each other in
public life. No petty jealousies ever vitiated
their relations."

As Minister of the Interior, Smuts still had to
tackle the thorny problem of Indian immigration,
on which as Colonial Secretary of the Transvaal
he had already had serious passages of arms with
that redoubtable adversary, Gandhi. Indians
had been admitted to the Transvaal during
Kruger's regime, but only as hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and were compelled, like the
natives of South Africa, to live in separate loca-
tions and forbidden to own land : during the
South African war many more, who had been
doing hospital work for the British Army, found
their way in, and, by the time responsible govern-
ment was granted to the Transvaal, over 15,000
Indians had settled there, some having come
direct from India and many more having trickled
through from Natal, where they had at first been
welcomed as cheap labourers on the sugar-
plantations. The native inhabitants of South
Africa were enough of a problem in themselves,
but the added complication of another non-
European race, mostly at a lower stage of civili-
zation from Boers and British, was one that Smuts
was determined, if possible, to remove. But,
though Smuts himself was called " slim," he met
in Gandhi one much slimmer than himself.
Gandhi's chief points were first, that Indians as
76

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

members of the British Empire, were entitled to
migrate to other parts of that Empire, and
secondly, that though it might be reasonable to
impose restrictions on the free movement of
coolies at a low level of civilization, it was out-
rageous that highly-educated Indians, like him-
self, should be forced to live in sordid locations
where their freedom of movement was seriously
restricted.* Gandhi by his agitation succeeded in
securing the powerful support of the Indian
Government against South Africa's restrictive
policy ; and, by the time he left South Africa in
1914, to embark on his campaign for swarqj (self
government) in India itself, he had secured a
notable alleviation of Indian grievances in South
Africa.f He was indeed one of the very few men
in whom Smuts more than met his match.

Smuts's main achievement in the early days of
the Union Government was his successful measure
as Minister of Defence for the organisation of a
national defence force. This task involved prob-
lems even more difficult than those concerned
with education. Hitherto the British Colonies of

* When Gandhi, who had been called to the bar, first
travelled from Durban to practice at Johannesburg, though
armed with a first-class ticket, he was roughly
police into one of the carriages reserved fojt-Jxrtfivef,
entirely uncivilized.

t It was not, however, till 1927, that aj^atou^dnent,
by Smuts with the Indian Government ira924ytyas given legal

force by an Act passed by the Hertzogf 1 *"' A

summary of the Indian trouble is givenL, ,_ ___

to* South 4frica, 1804. II <l D P R [

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

the Gape and Natal had mainly depended for
protection against native risings on volunteer
organisations recruited in South Africa ; but, in
the case of serious difficulties even against natives
such as the Basutos, and still more in the Trans-
vaal War of the 1880's and the South African War
of 1899 1902, the main fighting had to be under-
taken by troops from Great Britain, reinforced in
the latter case by voluntary contingents from
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. After the
peace of Vereeniging the old Boer commando
system of the Transvaal and the Free State was
naturally in abeyance and a considerable body of
imperial troops was retained in South Africa to
meet any emergency. But, on the grant of self-
government to the two Boer states and still more
after the consummation of Union, it was obvious,
both to the imperial government and to South
Africa itself, that the Union itself must assume full
responsibility for its own internal and external
protection.

Thus one of the new government's most urgent
problems was to raise a national South African
force capable of defending the frontiers against
any foreign enemy or, in case of serious civil dis-
turbances, to supplement the police force of the
Union. The old Boer system of raising comman-
dos from the various districts of the Transvaal and
Orange Free State had proved hardly a practical
method of meeting the difficulty, for, though every
able-bodied Boer was by law required, when
78

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

summoned by his district field cornet, to present
himself with his own horse and gun and provision
for his own and his horse's upkeep, this system had
been proved too haphazard to be satisfactory even
in such a national war as that of 1899 1902. The
full strength of a commando could never be relied
upon, as its members were apt to take French
leave to visit their families at home or on the plea
of obtaining fresh provisions ; and it required the
authority of a Botha or a de Wet to enforce a better
discipline among the men under them ; and even
they often found it impossible to prevent not
infrequent leakages. Indeed Smuts, in a parlia-
mentary debate, went so far as to suggest that, but
for the Boers' lack of discipline and trained officers,
the result of the South African War might have
been different. For a national force to be ulti-
mately responsible for good order throughout
South Africa and, if need be, for defence against
an external foe, it was obviously necessary to
establish a disciplined national force not liable to
evaporate at the moment of need. For this
difficult task, especially difficult as being alien to
the established customs of the Boer section of the
community, Botha, relying on the practical
resourcefulness and energy of Smuts, was well
content to leave him in charge of the problem,
especially as he could hand over to him sugges-
tions he had received from Haldane, during a
recent visit to England, about the reforms in the

79

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

reorganisation of the British Army fcarried out by
that great war minister.

As early as March, 1911, Smuts was able to
outline to Parliament, his ideas of military
reorganization, and in the following year presented
his completed bill. " We want," he said, in an
address to the staff college at Bloemfontein, " an
organisation that shall not be Boer or English, but
a South African Army." There was to be a
nucleus permanent force of 20,000 25,000 men,
made up chiefly from such former regiments as
the Cape Mounted Rifles, the Mounted Police and
the Cape Garrison Artillery, all voluntarily
enlisted men. Next there was to be a Citizen
Reserve, comprising men between the ages of
twenty-one and forty-five who had voluntarily
submitted to training ; lastly there was to be a
National Reserve, to be called out only on the
gravest emergency and to comprise all citizens
from seventeen to sixty. It was stipulated, how-
ever, that neither the permanent force nor the
national reserve could be called out except for the
defence of South Africa itself. He introduced his
bill in a characteristically exhaustive speech,
lasting two and a half hours and passed it without
great difficulty. Naturally the scheme took some
' time to be elaborated in practice, and though one
of the main considerations for its ready acceptance
by the Boers was that the national force, when
fully organised would render unnecessary the
garrison of imperial troops that had been retained
80

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

in South Africa since the peace of Vereeniging,
few months had elapsed before these troops were
found indispensable for the maintenance of order
in the Union owing to a dangerous strike on the
Rand in 1913. But in the following year, 1914,
when an even more serious outbreak threatened
life and property at Johannesburg, the govern-
ment were able to quell it entirely with the
defence force, and at the end of the same year,
when every British regiment was needed at home
to fight the Germans, the remaining regiments
still in South Africa were sent back to England,
leaving the Union entirely dependent on Smuts's
new defence force for internal and external
protection.*

Meanwhile Botha had been called upon to heal
a serious breach in the harmony of his cabinet, on
the all-important question of the relations between
Boer and English citizens of the Union, especially
in the Free State. In Cape Colony and the
Transvaal, indeed, though the Dutch were in a
majority, the citizens of British origin were
numerous and influential, and, in those provinces
of the Union, while it is true there were some
irreconcilables on both sides, their influence was
comparatively negligible ; in Natal the white
population was mainly of British origin, but on
the whole this province worked well with the

* To be strictly accurate, the last British soldiers quartered
in South Africa, for the defence of Table Bay, did not quit till
1921, a century and a quarter since we first established a
garrison there*

81

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

conciliatory policy of Botha and Smuts : the real
difficulty was in the Orange Free State province.
Here a remarkable change of attitude had taken
place since the death of President Brand, who had
kept his state in friendly relations with the Cape,
and was by no means in agreement with Kruger's
anti-English attitude in the Transvaal. But, after
Brand's death in 1888, the two succeeding
Presidents, Reitz and Steyn, were violently anti-
British ; and, both during and after the Boer War,
some of the most prominent " bitter-enders "
came from this state. For a long time after the
peace of Vereeniging, among the leading Free
Staters who at first refused to acknowledge British
sovereignty, were ex-President Reitz and his
sons.* Even among those who accepted the peace
of Vereeniging, many in the Free State would
have nothing to do with Botha's and Smuts's
conciliatory policy and aimed at continuing the
rift between the two nationalities. The most
prominent of these was tlertzog, Minister of
Education of the Free State till the Union, and
then included in Botha's South African ministry
as Minister of Justice.

Though Hertzog had accepted office under
Botha, who for his part was pledged to the recon-
ciling policy of moulding into a South African
nation both Boers and British, and so, as he put it,

* One of these sons was Deneys Reitz, who later became
reconciled and was subsequently High Commissioner for South
Africa in London.

82

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

establishing " the gospel of lasting peace among
the white races," Hertzog on the other side aimed
at keeping the two races apart by what he called
his " two-stream policy." For some time Hertzog,
though outwardly polite to Botha at cabinet
meetings, had been going about the country
decrying the British connexion and emphasizing
his own " two-stream policy " in opposition to the
rest of his colleagues. He especially opposed any
contribution from South Africa to the Royal Navy,
though Botha had declared that " the cabinet
recognised their responsibility to undertake the
naval defence of South Africa, as they had done on
land," asserting that he had the Dutch people
behind him in loyalty to the Empire.

Hertzog was a cultivated, well-read man, with
a considerable knowledge of the classics, an enter-
taining talker on non-political topics, a clever
lawyer and an able debater. But he had an
idle fixe about the necessity of keeping his own
people, the Boers, uncontaminated by too close
an identity of interests with the British section of
the community, by his " two-stream policy " as
he called it. Occasionally swayed by a less
exclusive and more generous impulse, as, later, he
was for a short time after Balfour's definition at
the Imperial Conference of 1926 of the absolute
freedom in unity of the British Empire's com-
ponent parts, he was always apt to revert to his
particularist attitude about his Boer fellow-
countrymen. Botha and Smuts, as well as

83

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA -

Hertzog, were good South Africans, but, as Olive
Schreiner said of the last, " he had the hardness
and narrowness of South African life." At any
rate at an early stage of his official career in the
first Union cabinet, he began preaching his par-
ticularist " two-stream " doctrine, not so much
at cabinet meetings, but at excited meetings of
his own Boer fellow-countrymen in the country-
side, decrying the British connexion, and doing
his utmost to counteract the more generous policy
of Botha and Smuts to unite in their common
interests the two races, British and Boer, and so
to create a South African, rather than a racially
divided, community. In fact, Hertzog seemed to
be doing all he could to exacerbate and perpetuate
the differences between the two races.

Botha himself, when forming his ministry, had
been very doubtful about offering a place in it
to Hertzog, whose bitter anti-English attitude had
been to some extent illustrated by his much less
liberal education act in the Free State than that
drawn up by Smuts for the Transvaal ;* " When
Hertzog thought to improve relations between the
two races, as he caustically put it, 4 by talk about
the possible treachery of the British' he reminds
me of a man on his honeymoon telling people
what he would do if his wife proved unfaithful to
him. "t But he had been over-persuaded by
Smuts to admit him to the cabinet. For a long

* See above, p. 61.

t H. Spender, Gvurd Botha, 334.

84

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

time Botha, though himself convinced that " the
true interests of South Africa are not, and need
not be, in conflict with those of the Empire, from
which we derive our free constitution," bore with
the difficulties Hertzog was creating by his
inflammatory speeches in the countryside. But
finally, in 1912, after a speech from Hertzog
denouncing two of the most prominent English
members of the South African Parliament as
" foreign adventurers," whereupon the only
representative of Natal in the cabinet resigned,
Botha declared that his choice was, either to work
with Hertzog ** and see the two white races of
South Africa divided into two hostile camps, or
to remain true to the principles of co-operation
upon which party and government had been
formed,"* and that he had no alternative but to
call upon Hertzog, as the real source of trouble in
the cabinet, to resign. Hertzog characteristically
refused to resign from a cabinet in which he was
in a minority of one ; so Botha felt that the only
course left open was to resign himself on behalf of
the whole cabinet. The Governor-General, Lord
Gladstone, thereupon called on him to form a
new cabinet, from which, of course, Hertzog was
excluded. Botha himself, besides being Prime
Minister, resumed his office of Minister of Agri-
culture, for which he was so well fitted ; Smuts
gave up his previous portfolios of Interior and
Mines, but retained his post as Minister of Defence

* L. E. Ncamc, Central Htrt&g, 137.
B4 85

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

and was also charged with the Finance Ministry.

At the Treasury Smuts was not perhaps at his
best in his budget speeches, in fact after one of
them, when troubles at Johannesburg had made
him for the time being a tired man, he suffered a
defeat for one of his proposals. But as Minister
of Defence he, in conjunction with Botha, had
a signal success in overcoming two serious dis-
turbances on the Rand. The first of these was in
July, 1913, when the white miners came out on
strike and created a dangerous situation by firing
public buildings, and, what seemed even more
serious, urging the native workers to come out on
strike also and attack the white inhabitants of the
city. Botha and Smuts at once came up to the
threatened city and, as the new South African
defence force had not yet had time to be effectively
organized, they were obliged to call up contin-
gents of the Imperial forces still in South Africa,
to quell the rising. Thereupon for the time being
a somewhat unsatisfactory truce for it can be
called no more was made with the strike leaders.

Early in 1914 there was a far more serious strike
with even more violent rioting, started by the
railwaymen, w&ich for a short time paralysed the
railways, and supported by the Rand workers. For
a time Johannesburg was almost in the power of
the strikers. But this time the government was
well-prepared. Martial law was proclaimed, but
there was no need to call out the Imperial troops,
for the defence force of the Union was then ready
86

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

to take action. A commando of 1000 citizen
soldiers was brought into Johannesburg and De la
Rey from the west came up with another force
and trained guns on the headquarters of the
strikers in the Trades Hall. In imminent danger
of their lives Botha and Smuts went about, almost
unguarded, through the city, getting into touch
with the truculent leaders and finally, in view of
the display offeree, persuading them to call off the
strike. But this time stern measures were taken
with the chief fomenters of the disturbances, who
were not let off so easily as in the previous year :
for Smuts, apparently on his own responsibility
alone, and without any judicial formalities,
secretly sent off nine of the strike-leaders to
Durban, where they were forcibly put on the
Umgeni and deported to England before they had
time to apply to the courts for a writ of Habeas
Corpus.* Naturally this high-handed action was
questioned not only in England, but also in the
South African parliament, where the government
introduced an Indemnity Bill to cover it. Smuts
himself spoke for three and a half hours on the first
day of the debate on the second reading and
another two hours on the second day ; and,
though the second reading was carried, he had to
face prolonged opposition on every clause of the
bill in committee. Finally the bill was passed

* One of these men thus deported, as in the case of Gandhi,
showed no animus against Smuts, and later became secretary of
Smuts's political party.

87

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

rather unwillingly by the South African parlia-
ment. In England, too, Smuts's high-handed
action was seriously questioned by many who had
hitherto given continued support to him and
Botha.

It was fortunate that by 1914 Smuts's defence
force had been fully organised for action, since
with the opening of the " World War " with
Germany in that year the British Government had
to recall for action in Europe the remainder of its
troops in South Africa. Fortunately, too, the
Botha Government was able to assure the London
cabinet that not only was it prepared to assume
full responsibility for the defence of Union terri-
tories, but also to undertake the conquest of
German South-West Africa, which otherwise
might prove not only menacing to South Africa
but also a danger to our command of the alterna-
tive route to India and our other eastern posses-
sions. Accordingly orders were issued for the
mobilisation of the defence force, to be directed by
Botha himself, with Smuts as his second-in-
command, for immediate action against the
German colony.

But before carrying out their engagement to the
Mother Country the two statesmen had to deal
with a serious internal danger. It was charac-
teristic of Botha's cautious and deliberate methods
that, though he had forthwith assured the British
Government that he would undertake the con-
88

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

quest of German South-West Africa, for some
time he made no public announcement of his
intentions. From the outset he had seen he would
have to tread warily with his own people. Many
of the South African Dutch who favoured the
" two-stream " policy of Hertzog, especially in
the Free State, and many even of Botha's own
supporters in the Transvaal, besides a considerable
section in Cape Colony, were disposed to take up
the attitude that the war was none of their busi-
ness and that South Africa should remain neutral.
As early, however, as in 1911, when the Dutch
paper Volkstem was putting forward a plea for the
rights of the Dominions to be neutral in any war
in which Great Britain was involved, Botha had
declared that, according to constitutional laws
affecting the Empire, such neutrality was un-
thinkable, and no enemy would respect it.*

Nevertheless, in 1914 he was soon faced with a
serious revolt against his policy. Beyers himself,
the commandant of the new burgher defence
force, de Wet in the Free State and Maritz com-
manding the force on the German frontier, took
up arms against the policy of active intervention
in the war, some of them even in concert with the
Germans. Botha's own feelings at this revolt of
his own people, many of whom had recently been
his trusted companions in arms against the
English in the Boer War, and his equal determin-
ation to do his present duty as a member of the

* Engelenberg, I.e. 281.

89

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRIGA

British Empire are plain from his answer to a
deputation from Pretoria : " For myself I am
willing to submit to any personal humiliation, if
this is necessary, rather than take up arms against
my own people, many of whom fought with me
through the war. But I will not betray my trust
and if, after I have tried every method of nego-
tiating, they still refuse to come in, I will move out
against them with the commandos that I know
will stand by me : " and to the new Governor-
General, Lord Buxton, he said : " It is my duty
[to command the loyal forces], and it is the only
thing for me to do. Beyers and De Wet are strong
men and have a big following in the country.
There is no one else I can put in my place just
now, so I must go myself." Moreover he tried his
best to avoid fratricidal bloodshed. " My orders,"
as he told Lord Buxton, " were that the rebels
were to be scattered and captured : let the rebels
fire first. " * In words recalling President Lincoln's
attitude to the South he said, " I consider the
central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity
that is upon us of proving that popular govern-
ment is not an absurdity. We must settle this
question now : whether in a free government the
minority have the right to break up the govern-
ment whenever they choose."f It was charac-
teristic too of his determination to avoid the
danger of renewing an Anglo-Boer racial conflict

* Lord Buxton, Central Botha, 78 sqq.
t Neame, I.e. 174.

90

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

that the commandos numbering some 40,000 men
he called out to suppress the rebellion were taken
almost entirely from the Dutch districts. On
28th October with these loyal Dutch commandos,
since the rebels would not give in, he smote Beyer's
main force near Rustenberg so effectually that it
never recovered cohesion, while Beyers himself,
after wandering about with small detachments,
was drowned in the Vaal on 8th November. In
the same month Botha had defeated de Wet's
force at Mushroom Valley, near Winburg, and
de Wet himself was captured by a force under
Coen Brits after a long flight through the western
desert. By the end of February, 1915, the last
rebels in the field had surrendered.

While Botha was thus disposing with con-
siderable ease of the rebel forces in the field, Smuts,
hisfidus Achates , had been doing yeoman's service
as Minister of Defence at Pretoria. When Beyers,
before taking the field, had sent him a bitter letter
denouncing Great Britain for overlooking the
rights of small nations, disregarding treaties and
employing barbarous methods in the South
African War, Smuts sent him a truly devastating
reply : " your bitter attack on Great Britain
. . . is entirely baseless . . . your refer-
ence to barbarous acts during the South African
War cannot justify the criminal devastation of
Belgium, and can only be calculated to sow hatred
and division among the people of South Africa.
You forget to mention that since the South African

91

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

War the British people gave South Africa her
entire freedom under a constitution which makes
it possible for us to realize our national ideals
along our own lines, and which incidentally
allows you to write a letter for which you would
without doubt be liable in the German Empire to
the supreme penalty . . . My conviction is
that the people of South Africa will have a clearer
perception of duty and honour than is to be
deduced from your letter and action."* To
Smuts's work at headquarters during the rebellion,
directing the movement of troops to reinforce this
or that commando in the field, Botha paid this
glowing tribute : " Nobody can appreciate suffi-
ciently the great work General Smuts has done.
It has been greater than any other man's through-
out this unhappy period. He was at his post day
and night. His brilliant intellect, his calm judg-
ment, his undaunted courage have been assets of
inestimable value to the Union in the hour of
trial."t Smuts in his turn nobly acknowledged
the even greater debt South Africa owed to his
chief for the line he took in these critical months :
" Few know," he said, " what Botha had gone
through in the rebellion. He lost friendships of a
lifetime, friendships he valued perhaps more than
anything in life. But Botha's line remained
absolutely consistent. No one else in South Africa
could have stuck it out. You wanted a man for.

* R. H. Kiernan, General Smuts, p. 73.
t N. Levi, Jon Smuts, 246.

9*

UNION VERSUS THE TWO STREAM POLICY

that, very broad-minded, large-hearted. People
may say he went too far in that direction, but it is
a policy that helped South Africa over its worst
stile. It was quite on the cards that after the Boer
War the bad old policy would revive. Botha
managed to wean the people of that."*

After the complete defeat of the rebels in the
field Botha and Smuts showed a wise clemency.
Only one man was condemned to be shot and that
for a peculiarly dastardly and unnecessary murder
of twelve loyalists : of the rest only the leaders
had mild punishments, de Wet, one of the worst
ringleaders, for example, though sentenced to six
years' imprisonment, being released after a few
months. In fact the two statesmen's chief aim was
to wipe out the memory of this fratricidal incident
as soon as possible ; for, as Botha told Lord
Buxton, " For myself, personally, the last three
months have provided the saddest experience of
my life. I can say the same for General Smuts.
This is no time for exultation or recrimination.
Remember we liave to live together long after the
war is ended."f

* Lcvi, l.c. 260. Engdcnbcrg, I.e. 332.
t Buxton, l.c. 81.

4* 93

Chapter Six

Botha and Smuts
in the Great War

A S soon as the rebellion had been quelled,
./jLBotha and Smuts resumed the task they
had undertaken for the British Government, to
take an active part against the Germans in South-
West Africa. This German territory comprised an
area of some 322,000 square miles, stretching from
Portuguese Angola in the north to the Orange
River on the south and from the sea to Bechuana-
land on the east, with a narrow " Caprivi strip "
on the north-west giving access to the Zambesi.
Before its annexation by Bismarck in 1884 we had
taken possession of Walvis Bay, the only good port
on the Atlantic, leaving only two very inferior
ports, Swakopmund, just north of Walvis Bay,
and Luderitzbucht, further south, to the Germans.
It was mostly an arid tract of territory, chiefly
inhabited by wandering tribes, many of whom had
been ruthlessly exterminated by a previous
governor. The coast belt was almost uninhabit-
able, with hardly any water in the red-hot sand
and burning rock ; but the interior rose to an

94

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

average height of 4,500 feet and had much
potential wealth. When war was declared the
regular armed forces of the Germans amounted
to 2000 men, with 140 officers, under Colonel
Heyderich ; but in addition the settlers could
provide some 7000 reservists ; and there was a
plentiful reserve of arms. Already, too, the
Germans had established a system of railway
communications, 1400 miles in length, with a line
through the central plateau from Kalkfontein,
near the southern border, to Tsameb, no great
distance from Angola in the north, and connected
by branch lines with Luderitzbucht in the south-
west and Swakopmund in the north-west of the
colony. Among the chief reasons why the British
Government had asked Botha to seize the territory
was that at the capital, Windhoek, in its centre,
was a powerful wireless station, able to send
messages to Berlin about the movements of our
shipping along the west coast of Africa, and that
at the beginning of the war the Germans had-
seized Walvis Bay, our only port on the west coast.
In this campaign also Botha took supreme
command in the field, for, as he told the Governor
General, " the plain fact of the situation is there
is no one available to be placed in supreme
command, except myself, who would have the
full confidence of both sections, English and
Dutch, of which [our troops] are composed."*
But this time it was no longer necessary to confine
* Burton, I.e.

95

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

himself almost entirely to Boer units of the
national defence force, since both sections were at
one in wishing to remove the German danger
from South Africa. Already, before the rebellion,
described in the last chapter, had begun, a force
of 2000 under Colonel Beves had been sent by sea
to seize Luderitzbucht with the ample provision,
in view of the waterless, barren coast-country to
be invaded, of 750,000 gallons of water and 500
tons of cold storage meat ; the port had been
taken without difficulty, and its 750 German
inhabitants transferred to Cape Colony. While
the rebellion lasted, operations in South-West
Africa had been more or less at a standstill, though
a small detachment of 257 had been cut off by
the Germans in September, 1914, partly no doubt
owing to the defection of Maritz, who was in
command of the South African troops on the
southern border of German South- West Africa.
As early, however, as 8th February, 1915, the
rebellion had been scotched and Botha was able
to take stock himself of the position by visits to
Luderitzbucht and Walvis Bay, which had already
been recaptured from the Germans, and Swakop-
mund, which they had evacuated in January.

In actual manpower Botha had a great
superiority over the Germans, with 40,000 Union
troops all told, but in other respects the Germans
had great advantages, with their command of a
well-planned railway system enabling them to
concentrate troops rapidly on any threatened

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

points, whereas, until the railways had been
secured, Botha's forces had to march through arid
deserts where, too, many of the existing water-
holes had been carefully poisoned by the
Germans. Accordingly, Botha's primary object
was to obtain control of the railway lines as soon
as possible. Having secured the principal bases
on the coast, Swakopmund and Walvis Bay on
the north and Luderitzbucht on the south, his
plan was to advance along the railway from those
points and close in on the enemy's main forces by
a pincer movement. He himself took immediate
command of the northern advance, while to Smuts
was entrusted the direction of three converging
forces up the main central line from the south.
The three forces assigned to Smuts were Berrange's
advancing from Kuruman on the east across a
long stretch of the Kalahari desert, Deventer's
from south of the Orange River in the centre, and
Mackenzie's on the west from the base already
established at Luderitzbucht.

By the end of April, Smuts's three columns had,
after some fighting and considerable hardship in
the march by desert tracks, reached the central
railway, as planned ; and Smuts, after a visit to
Botha in the north took directions for an advance
up the railway simultaneously with the Comman-
der-in-Chief 's advance, north-east from Swakop-
mund. Smuts himself, after the advance up the
central railway had been continued for some time
by his three columns under Berrange, Deventer

97

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

and Mackenzie, had to return to Pretoria, where
his presence was urgently needed at the Ministry
of Defence in seeing to the prompt despatch of
stores and equipment to the front ; and the brunt
of the fighting fell to Botha and his immediate
command. By a magnificent march of forty miles
without a halt through waterless country, Botha
reached Karibib at the junction of the central and
north-eastern railway lines, thus securing on
18th May the bloodless surrender of the capital,
Windhoek, where the wireless station had already
been destroyed by the Germans. Thereupon the
German commander made the cool proposal that
each side should be left in possession of the terri-
tory it was then holding, a proposal summarily
rejected by Botha. Accordingly, after a month's
halt at Windhoek for a needed rest and reorgani-
sation of his troops, he continued his sweep up the
central railway with his main body, until he
reached the last junction, Otavi, with detachments
under Myburgh and Brits ahead of him further
north. Then at last, on 9th July, the German
governor, Seitz, was forced to agree to the
surrender of all German South- West Africa ; but
in other respects Botha's terms were lenient, as he
felt, so hetold the Governor-General, Lord Buxton,
that " we should not do anything to hurt their
pride unnecessarily ; and you know how bitter
such demands (at Vereeniging) on us made 'us
feel."* The German troops, numbering by that

* Buxton, Lc. 114.
98

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

time 204 officers and 3166 other ranks, were
allowed to keep their arms for defence against the
natives and to return to their farms. Of the
40,000 South African troops engaged, only
269 were killed and 263 wounded, so that this
important conquest was lightly gained. It is
notable that the British Navy gave useful assistance
in this campaign by keeping the waters clear of
mines, escorting Union troops to the disembar-
kation ports and even providing armoured motor-
cars for the northern advance.

To Botha there was no vainglorious exultation
at his victory. In a spirit of simple piety he thus
addressed his men : " When you consider the
hardships we met, the lack of water, the poisoned
wells and how wonderfully we were spared, you
must realise and believe God's hand protected us
and it is due to His intervention we are safe
to-day."* On the conclusion of negotiations, too,
he issued to them this characteristic order :
" Peace having been arranged in South- West
Africa, all ranks of the Union forces in that terri-
tory are reminded that self-restraint, courtesy and
consideration of the feelings of others on the part
of the troops whose good fortune it is to be victors
are essential." Throughout, too, Botha's attitude
was all of a piece with this generous behaviour to
a beaten foe : when, for example, after the
torpedoing of the Lusitania, there were fierce anti-
German riots in Johannesburg, he took the same

* Buxton, I.e. 40.

99

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

noble line : " Those johnnies," he declared, " are
too funky to fight armed Germans, so they are bent
upon ruining the unarmed ones, and wreaking
their vengeance on poor women and children. I
shall insist on protecting our German citizens."*

This successful campaign of a South African
army, composed of British and Dutch fighting
side by side, was characterised by Smuts, as
Minister of Defence, in a general order to the
troops, as " the first achievement of a united
South African nation : both nations have com-
bined all their best and most virile characteris-
tics.'^ But, unfortunately, this healthier form of
Union between the two races was not recognized
so fully in the political field. The general election
of 1915 was fought most bitterly, largely on racial
lines. The antagonism to Smuts in some of the
Dutch districts was especially virulent, and even
Botha was hailed as "Judas, traitor, bloodhound,
murderer," by some of his former supporters.
Still, Botha's government retained a majority over
the so-called Nationalists, while a strong party of
Unionists, mostly British, in the main supported
his policy.

At the outset of the war Botha's ministry,
especially in view of the divided attitude of their
own people in South Africa, had proposed to con-
fine their military activity to the conquest of
German South-West Africa, the most obvious

* Engelenberg, I.e. 284.
t N. Lcvi, Jon 5mU, 256.

zoo

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

danger-spot to the Union itself. But they very
soon came to realise that the war could not be
carried out in watertight compartments, and that
a German victory in East Africa or even in
Europe might threaten the independence of
South Africa itself. Accordingly, when in 1915
the British Government appealed for further
support from Botha's government, not only in
East Africa but also in France, a ready response
was made in allowing purely voluntary contin-
gents to serve on both these fronts : and for the
rest of the war South African troops gave
valorous support to the Empire's efforts in Africa
and in Europe.

In German East Africa the need for help was
especially pressing. This vast territory, co-
terminous on the north with Kenya and Uganda,
on the west with the Belgian Congo, Nyasaland
and Northern Rhodesia, and on the south with
Portuguese East Africa, was a standing menace to
South Africa itself. At first the British Govern-
ment appears to have thought that a force of
8000 Indian soldiers sent to Kenya and naval
activity on the coast of German East Africa would
at least enable us to hold our own. But unfor-
tunately in September, 1914, H.M.S. Pegasus was
sunk by the Konigsbtrg at Zanzibar, and though in
the following July the Konigsberg in her turn was
sunk, her crew and ten of her guns were safely

101

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

landed and much needed rifles and ammunition
were also brought ashore. Moreover, in their
commander-in-chief here, von Lettow Vorbeck,
the Germans had one of their ablest and most
resourceful leaders, with his comparatively small
force of some 3600 Europeans and 11000 Askaris,
the finest native fighters in East Africa, and with
sixty guns and eighty machine-guns at his disposal.
By the end of 1915 the Germans had established
themselves at Taveta within Kenya Colony itself
and were threatening its main railway communi-
cation between Mombasa and the capital Nairobi.

By the beginning of 1916 reinforcements from
South Africa were arriving in Kenya, and Smith
Dorrien, famous for his gallant stand at Le Gateau,
had been sent out to take command of operations
in East Africa. But Smith Dorrien became so
seriously ill on arrival at Cape Town that he had
to be replaced. The British Government's first
choice for the command had been Botha. He,
however, felt that he could not abandon his post
as Prime Minister, especially as communications
with him in Kenya would be difficult, whereas in
German South West Africa he was within com-
paratively easy reach of his own country. The
next choice was Smuts, and, as South African
troops were already there, Botha consented to his
accepting the command.

Smuts lost no time in getting to work. Appointed
commander-in-chief on 6th February, 1916, he
arrived at Mombasa on the 19th, and immediately

102

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

went up country to make a personal reconnaisance
of the enemy's position. As one who fought under
both Botha and Smuts writes : " In German
South- West Africa General Botha and in German
East Africa General Smuts were either with, or
immediately behind, and in closest touch with the
fighting troops throughout the advances. The
presence of their commander was looked for by
the commandos, whose soldiers would have en-
tirely misconstrued the action of a commander
who conducted their operations remote from
them."* Nay more, when, during the subsequent
campaign, Smuts wished to make certain of the
position, it is recorded that on at least two
occasions with a few staff officers he went well
ahead of his troops to reconnoitre, on the second
occasion with only one Mauser pistol between the
whole party, which might easily have been cap-
tured by half a dozen Askaris.f But, as in his
incursion into Cape Colony during the Boer War,
he seemed to have a charmed life.

During this preliminary reconnaissance he
found the German invaders strongly posted on the
eastern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro and holding the
Ngulu gap between Kilimanjaro and the Same
and Par Mountains from Taveta in Kenya
towards the Sangani River to the west. He at
once decided that the first thing to be done was

* J. J. Gollycr, The South Africans with Smuts in German East
Africa, 74.
f Ib. passim.

103

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

to clear the enemy out of the colony and then
drive them southwards through their own terri-
tory. By a turning movement of detachments east
and west of Kilimanjaro, synchronising with an
attack on the enemy's force holding the Ngulu
gap, he drove them entirely out of Kenya towards
the Same and Par Mountains south of the Ngulu
gap. In connexion with this auspicious opening
of Smuts's campaign, it is related that, when von
Lettow Vorbeck met Smuts after the war, he asked
him why he had posted Deventer with a small
force on a hill overlooking a German outpost.
" Why," answered slim Jannie, " to induce you
to bring up reinforcements there, so that I could
circumvent you further west, as in fact occurred."
After this initial success he halted for a redistri-
bution of his own forces. Deventer, the ablest of
his generals, who had already done good work in
South- West Africa, was given a semi-independent
command with the task of guarding the western
flank of Smuts's main advance. Starting from
Moski, south of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Deventer was
to turn the Germans out of their strongly-held
position at Kondoa Iranji and thence to push for-
ward to Dodoma, on the central railway from
Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika to Dar-es-Salaam,
in co-operation with Belgian and British forces
sweeping eastwards from the Belgian Congo,
Uganda and Lake Tanganyika. Smuts himself,
with the main force, proposed to clear the enemy
out of the Par and Usumbara Mountains south
104

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

of the Ngulu gap, obtain command of the sub-
sidiary railway from Morika to Tanga on the
coast, and then to advance southwards to Moro-
goro, east of Dodoma, on the central railway,
where Deventer was to rejoin him.

Deventer, with one division, was the first to
start on the southward march on 3rd April, 1916,
reaching Kondoa Irangi on the 19th. Here he
had to remain for three months, short of supplies
and exposed to attacks from the enemy under the
command of von Lettow Vorbeck himself ; but
he managed, with difficulty, to hold his own.
Smuts, who had retained the other two divisions
under his immediate command, had an even more
arduous task. Repairs had to be made to the
railway ending at Tanga, part of which was now
in his hands, and a reshuffling of his forces to be
carried out ; and it was not till 22nd May that he
was able to advance. By the end of May he was
master of the Par6 Mountains, which the German
missionaries on the spot had predicted it would
take him two years to accomplish. When the War
Office requested him to remove these German
missionaries he protested on the ground that " it
was an odious task which would be resented by
Christians everywhere " ; they were, he said, a
civilising element, and, if these special missionaries
must go, he urged that well-disposed missionaries
should at once replace them, so that the good they
had achieved should not be entirely lost,* On

*J.J.Collyer,l.c. 135.

105

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

2nd June, during a halt for supplies to come up,
he undertook the cross-journey of 300 miles to
Kondoa Irangi to discuss Deventer's difficulties
with him on the spot. Arriving there two days
later, he found him hard pressed for adequate
supplies and transport, and, after arranging for
these defects to be remedied, was back on his own
front by 10th June. By 12th June the Usumbara
Mountains to the south of the Par Mountains had
been cleared, and Smuts established his head-
quarters at Handeni, some 100 miles north of his
rendezvous with Deventer on the main railway.
At Handeni, however, there had to be a long
halt. The fall of torrential rains made the trans-
port of much-needed supplies a slow and laborious
business, while thirty-one per cent, of his troops,
including Smuts himself, were for a time stricken
with malaria and other tropical diseases in the
pestilential climate. But during this dreary period
of sickness and inaction, there was one brief ray of
light, when Botha himself found time for a flying
visit of two days to Smuts's headquarters, much to
the delight of the South African troops and of
Smuts himself, who 'was able to discuss plans and
news of South Africa with his wise and experienced
chief. Already, by 7th July, Smuts had secured
the whole of the German northern railway, inclu-
ding the important port of Tanga, from Moski
to the sea ; and now he began his drive down to
the central railway, the only one still left to the
.Germans. By the end of July, Deventer had
1 06

BOTHA AND SMUTS IN THE GREAT WAR

reached Dodoma, due south of Kondoa Irangi,
according to plan ; less than a month later Smuts
himself was established at Morogoro, the capital
of German East Africa, further down the line ;
early in September he had captured Dar-es-
Salaam, the last important sea-port, while the
whole railway from Kigoma on the eastern bank
of Lake Tanganyika to Dar-es-Salaam was in the
hands of the imperial troops. By the end of Sept-
ember practically the whole coast from Mombasa
to the Portuguese border was in our possession, so
that the Germans could no longer hope for any
help from Europe.

Meanwhile von Lettow Vorbeck had taken up
a position in the Uluguru Mountains just south of
the railway with another detachment in the
Mahenge range further to the south-west, almost
the only fairly healthy parts left to him. Smuts,
now co-operating with Deventer, had cleared the
Uluguru range by the end of September, but was
never able to gain a complete victory over the
main German forces, which, by the end of the war,
though much attenuated, were still unbeaten. At
this stage of the war Smuts realized that troops of
European origin were too much subject to malaria
and other wasting diseases to be of much further
use, and began sending many of his South Africans
home, relying more on Indian and West African
troops who were less liable to these tropical
diseases. He himself at the beginning of 1917 was
needed in London for consultation with the

107

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

imperial government, since Botha still felt he could
not absent himself from South Africa : he had
therefore to give up his East African command.

During one year in that pestilential and difficult
country he had worked wonders, aided, it is true,
in the later months of his command by contingents
from Uganda, the Belgian Congo, Nyasaland and
Northern Rhodesia. Von Lettow Vorbeck's force
of 2700 Europeans and 12000 Askaris had by this
time been reduced to 155 and 1168 respectively,
and hardly any healthy parts of the colony were
left to him ; still he managed to give some trouble
and maintain his tiny force in being till peace had
been declared. It is characteristic of Smuts's
appreciation of a gallant enemy that, hearing of
the German's promotion to the Prussian Ordrepour
le nitrite, he at once sent him news of it by a flag of
truce, " proof,'* as his adversary said, " of the
mutual personal esteem and chivalry which
existed throughout."* For his own men, Smuts
was the ideal commander : he understood them,
and they understood, him and had immense con-
fidence in him : he not only shared their dangers
in the fore-front of the fighting, but took even
greater risks than most of them by his adventurous
scouting expeditions. Assuredly in his own con-
duct of these operations he cannot be accused of
the errors of which he accused some British

* V. Lettow Vorbcck, My Rermmsctncts in East Africa, 1920,
p. 170.

108

BOTHA AND SMtJTS IN THE GREAT WAR

commanders : " You are prepared to lose a cer-
tain number of men, and you make your plans
accordingly, but when a temporary check comes,
you do not care to commit yourselves, and some-
times you do not follow up a victory fast enough
. . . Tired, thirsty ! there is no such thing
when the success of a big operation trembles in
the balance."*

Meanwhile Botha had not been having an easy
time in his own country. Though he had won the
election and was in most respects supported by the
Unionist party, he was constantly faced with
carping criticisms from Hertzog and his party, who
while professing their loyalty to the Vereeniging
settlement, made no secret of their preference for
a purely republican form of government outside
the Empire. In 1917 they opposed the grant of
leave to Smuts to go over to England and in 1918
Botha's motion hoping that God would bring
victory to Great Britain. They made great play
with the difficulties that had arisen as to the price
to be paid by Great Britain for the South African
woolclip, on which nevertheless South African
farmers eventually made large profits. At the
conclusion of the war Hertzog renewed his claim
for more freedom from the British Government for
South Africa in a fiery speech declaring that " our
blood had been poured out, our money wasted,
our markets closed to forward the interests of Great
Britain . . . our task master " : " in fact,"

* Quoted by N. Levi, Jan Smuts, 290.

109

BOTHA, SMUTS AND S6UTH AFRICA

he concluded, " we are the spittoon of the Em-
pire."* Hertzog and his friends even chartered
a Dutch ship, refusing a passage offered them on
a British man-of-war, and through the kind offices
of Botha, then in Europe, had an interview with
Lloyd George to press their views for a republican
constitution no longer subject to Great Britain ;
but they obtained from him, as might have been
expected, no satisfactory answer.

Botha took this opposition of Hertzog and many
of his old companions-in-arms very hardly. But,
whatever his personal grief, he held staunchly to
his oath of allegiance at Vereeniging, made all the
more binding to him after Campbell Bannerman's
generous gesture of trust, in the grant of responsible
government so soon after the Boer War. In those
hard years he missed the help of his dear friend
Smuts, while Smuts was absent in East Africa or
London, especially as he himself was often ailing
with the seeds of the illness in him which was so
soon to carry him off. In those hard years, how-
ever, it is good to feel he could always count on
the Governor General, Lord Buxton's, sympathy.
To him Botha's lovable nature, child-like some-
times in desponding moods, but always rising
above his troubles when he saw his duty plain,
was crystal clear. Buxton's General Botha is indeed
a noble tribute to Botha as a man and a statesman.

* L. . Neamc, General Hert&g, 2002.
zxo

Chapter Seven

London, Pretoria & Versailles :
Death of Botha

SMUTS arrived in England on 17th March,
1917, expecting no doubt to return to his
post in South Africa within a few weeks or at most
a month or so. In fact, he remained in Europe for
just on two years and a half. He had not indeed
been in England for more than a few weeks before
he showed what a valuable counsellor he would
prove at the headquarters of the Empire, "full of
courage," as he said of himself, and fertile in expe-
dients to hasten on victory at a time when at best
we seemed drifting to a stalemate. But his deepest
conviction was expressed in the inscription he
wrote on one of his photographs in this year :
" Let us have faith that Right is Might, and in
that Faith as to the end try to do our duty.
J. C. Smuts."

Very soon after arriving in England he went on
a tour of the French front, and on his return to
London strongly urged a diversion of some of our
troops either to Salonica or Palestine, whereupon
he was offered the command of an army in Pales-

in

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

tine. This he refused, as he had little confidence
in the policy of Robertson, then chief of the staff at
the War Office.* The Jews, however, grateful for
his advocacy of their cause, subsequently named
a strip in the valley of Zebulan Ramat Jochanan
Smuts. In May he was entertained at a banquet
in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, with
Lord French, his old adversary in the Boer War,
in the chair, and made a notable speech defining
the British Empire as a misnomer, but rather as a
community of states and nations, not forming one
nation in itself, but a community " for consul-
tation and co-operation, plus complete autono-
my " for its constituent parts anticipating in fact
Balfour's famous definition of the Empire in 1926.
In June he was invited to a seat in the War
Cabinet and accepted it, subject to the proviso
that he should not be called upon to deal with the
purely internal affairs of Great Britain ; even that
stipulation, however, as will appear, was not
strictly observed. So effective indeed were his
speeches on imperial, and sometimes even on
domestic affairs, that the well-known journalist,
A. G. Gardiner, not inaptly dubbed him the
" Orator for the Empire."

How pregnant with prophecies, later to be veri-
fied, his speeches often were, may be illustrated by
his estimate of the consequences of the* Russian
revolution, at a time when most Englishmen
deplored it, as marking the loss of an ally, and the

* D. Uoyd George, War Memoirs, IV, 1830 sgq.
112

DEATH OF BOTHA

fall of Russia into a quagmire from which she was
never likely to escape. Very soon after the first
appearance of Lenin, Smuts at the end of May,
1917, prophesied that " Russia . . . now
seething in the revolutionary crisis . . . will
concentrate itself, organise itself, discipline itself
and then march again at the head of civilisation."
Two months later, on the eve of the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations, " If I were a German statesman," he
said, " I would bear in mind the wise old Bis-
marckian policy and avoid making the Slav the
future historic enemy of the Teuton," adding, even
in the dark days of 1918, before the Germans had
collapsed, " Let the Germans remember that
Russia, now blind and turning the mill at Gaza
may yet make the whole proud structure of
German Imperialism topple down in ruin and
confusion,"* words which some of our own states-
men might well have borne in mind.

Apart from his invigorating speeches about the
Empire, his organising capacity had very early
been recognised by Lloyd George and put to
practical uses. Among other activities he was set
to preside over the Committee for reorganising
the Air Force : on his advice it was greatly in-
creased, partly to deal more efficiently with the
Zeppelin attacks on London ; and, largely owing
to his insistence, the R.A.F. was given an indepen-
dent .command, with a status equal to that of the

* Quoted in 77k* Times, 7-5-43.

113

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Army and Navy.* He also became a sort of
handyman to the cabinet in going out to report
on various fronts. Thus, he was sent out several
times to France to hear Haig's views, to Egypt to
discuss the Palestine and Mesopotamia operations
with Allenby ; and he accompanied Lloyd George
to consult about the restoration of the Italian front
after the disaster of Caporetto. He went alsp on
two secret diplomatic missions to Switzerland to
meet Mensdorff and an emissary of the Prime
Minister Gzernin, when Austria was toying with
the idea of a separate peace, " dapplings for
peace," which came to nothing, as the Austrians
were too much bound to Germany to venture, .
when it came to the point, on a separate under-
standing. On both these missions, it is interesting
to note, he was accompanied by his friend of the
South African National Convention days, Philip
Kerr (Marquess of Lothian).

Moreover, though lie had originally stipulated
that he should take no part in purely English
politics, he even consented, at a critical stage of
the war, to try his hand at stopping the Welsh
miners' strike at Tonypandy. As he was leaving
London, Lloyd George gave him just one word of
advice : " Remember that my countrymen are
great singers." So, when faced with an uproarious
meeting of strikers apparently determined not to

D. Lloyd George, War Mtmoirs, IV, 1883 sqq. ; R. H.
Kkraan, Gmmd Smuts, 100109.

4

DEATH OF BOTHA

listen to him, Smuts, in a momentary pause in the
din, shouted to them : " I come from far away,
as you know. I do not belong to this country.
I have come a long way to do my bit for this war
and I am going to talk to you about this trouble.
But I've heard that the Welsh are among the
greatest singers in the world, and before I start I
want you to sing to me some of the songs of your
people." The response was immediate. Some
started singing The Land of our Fathers. Thereupon
the others to a man joined in the glorious singing :
Smuts then had to speak for only a few minutes
before the assemblage agreed to call off the
strike.*

When, in November, 1918, the armistice was
signed, the last service given by Smuts as a member
of the British ministry was to preside over the
committee to deal with the question of demobili-
sation, but on 18th December he resigned so as
to be able to take an independent line on the peace
negotiations as one of the South African
plenipotentiaries.

Lloyd George, who had ample opportunity of
judging Smuts's work, said of him : " He is one
of the most remarkable personalities of his time.
He is that fine blend of intellect and sympathy
which constitutes the understanding man.
[Though a great fighting man], his sympathies
were too broad to make of him a mere fighting
man . . He had rare and fine gifts of mind

* D. Lloyd George, Ib. Ill, 1373 sqq.

"5

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRIGA

and heart. Of his practical contributions to our
counsels during these trying years, it is difficult to
speak too highly.*

Meanwhile Botha, during the long period when
his faithful colleague was not there to help him
with his buoyant optimism and fertility in expe-
dients to overcome difficulties, was having a hard
time in South Africa. He took especially to heart
the persistent attacks of Hertzog and of so many
of his old comrades in the South African war.
They resented his loyalty to Great Britain and
determination to rule South Africa in the common
interest of the British as well as the Dutch section
of the population. Of Botha's difficulties in 1917
Smuts from England said : " He is bearing a
burden in South Africa which no other man can
bear, and it is unfortunate in a sense that I have
to take the place [in Europe] of my right honour-
able friend." To add to his difficulties Botha in
that same year was seriously troubled, no doubt
with the illness which ultimately proved fatal a few
years later. Writing to a friend he said : " I was
absolutely finished. I had given up hope en-
tirely, thinking I should never see you people
again ; I felt that to go on living was an absolute
impossibility " ; but his spirit was great, and he
ends Jthe letter with these words of courage : " For
a month now I have had no pain whatever

* D. Lloyd Geoigc, Ib. IV, 176S-4.
116

DEATH OF BOTHA

. . . the heart is strong . . . blood-
pressure rather high, but better than it was ; I
walk up to nine miles a day and ride three hours
. . . my mind is clear ; I am full of ambition
and schemes for a long life."*

In many respects he was more successful in
dealing with his Boer compatriots than was Smuts
with all his cleverness. Smuts, for example, was
too impatient to deal with them in the old leisurely
way to which they had been accustomed in
Kruger's time, when they could come as a depu-
tation to talk over some grievance with the old
President and were allowed to sit on his stoop,
smoking, drinking coffee and slowly discussing the
matter for hours. Botha, on the other hand,
favoured the old President's method. He would
allow them to go through all their grievances, and,
even if they did not obtain all they wanted, they
felt some satisfaction in having been able to put
their case at length. Botha, too, could smooth
them down, even if he did not give way to them,
by a joke or a happy retort that they could appre-
ciate, as in the instance, already quoted,t of his
answer to a deputation of angry Boer farmers
demanding the dismissal of the English director
of agriculture and the replacing of him by a Boer.
By such tactful methods, indeed, Botha, in spite
of his parliamentary difficulties, in which he was
perhaps not at his best, or at any rate not so skilful

* Engdenberg, I.e. 332 sqq.
t See above, p. 59.

BS "7

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

in debate as Smuts, was often able to smooth away
the opposition of his country Boers.

Botha, too, was fortunate in always being able
to depend on the sympathy and good counsel of
Lord Buxton, the Governor-General during the
period of the war, and above all of his own
beloved wife from the first days of his married life
to the end. She, indeed, while never interfering
with his work, made their successive homes in the
Vryheid district and, after the war, in Pretoria
and the farm at Nooitgedacht, the havens of rest
and happiness that he needed. When, as so often
happened during his life as prime minister,
successively of the Transvaal and of South Africa,
he had to be in Pretoria or Cape Town without
her, every night his clerk had to get Standerton
on the telephone : then Botha would take up the
receiver and a lovely smile would come over his
face : "Is that you, Annie ? " and, after being
assured she was well, he would enquire about the
state of the farm : "Is the dam full of water ? "
" Yes." " Well, that's all right," and so to bed
happy. It was indeed a true love match to the
end. An English friend once happened to be
calling on him at his hotel in London on an
evening when General and Mrs. Botha were to
dine at Buckingham Palace : after he had had
some talk with Botha, Mrs. Botha .came in,
dressed for the occasion, and asked Botha, " Louis,
do I look all right ? " " Annie," he answered,
" you look beautiful," and kissed her. Lord
118

DEATH OF BOTHA

Buxton, in his little volume oh General Botha, gives
the most intimate and charming picture we have
of the man. " I have known many big men," he
writes, " Botha was the most human and the most
lovable of them all. He was," he adds, " dignified,
simple and natural, courteous and considerate :
his stand was based on his natural sense of honour,
duty and obligation. Essentially modest and
unassuming, he hated personal quarrels, was a
steadfast friend and a chivalrous enemy." His
simple piety is well illustrated by his address to his
men after the South- West African campaign,
recorded by Lord Buxton, in which he attributes
their safety and success to God's hand protecting
them.* Above all, Botha, as a politician, was
determined to do all he could to break down the
barriers between the two races, English and Dutch,
in South Africa. As the American statesman,
Lansing, said of him after meeting him at Ver-
sailles : "A less broadminded and far-seeing
statesman than the Transvaal general would have
kept alive a spirit of revenge among his country-
men and counselled passive resistance to the
British authorities, thus making amalgamation
between the two nationalities a long and painful
process. It would have conformed with the
common conception of patriotism and the usual
sentiment of the vanquished towards the victors,
but it did not conform with General Botha's views
as to what was wise and practical . . . He
* See above, p. 99.

< 119

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

did not permit vain regrets or false hopes to cloud
his vision as to the future or to impair his sound
common sense in dealing with new conditions
resulting from the British victory . . . He
accepted the fact of defeat with philosophic calm-
ness and exerted all his influence in reconciling
his fellow-countrymen to their new allegiance. Of
the men I have met Botha was one of the
greatest. 5 '* Even Hertzog, after Botha's death, was
fain to admit that "the two races are learning
more to appreciate what in the past they had re-
garded as each other's shortcomings." Of Smuts,
Lansing took a less favourable view, saying that
"he was often head in air and lost in thought . . .
He had vivacity of mind which comes from a rest-
less imagination and . . . impatience." But this
restless imagination, even the impatience with
obstacles, formed just the right complement to
Botha's wise caution. At any rate they worked
together to the same ends. Between these two
great South Africans there was never a misunder-
standing, still less a rift. Botha, speaking of this
affectionate intimacy, would dilate on " the
brilliant intellect, calm judgment, amazing energy,
undaunted courage " of his beloved friend : what
Smuts felt for Botha was expressed in the touching
funeral oration he made when the final parting
had come.

For the peace settlement at Versailles Botha had
come to Europe as representative of South Africa,

* Qpoted in Engelenberg I.e. 332 and Armstrong, Grey Steel, 250.
120

DEATH OF BOTHA

together with Smuts, already on the spot. Smuts's
last piece of work for the imperial government
was to preside over the cabinet committee on
demobilisation, but naturally, when appointed a
South African plenipotentiary at Versailles, he
resigned from the British cabinet. The great con-
tribution that Smuts made to the peace conference
was his earnest support of President Wilson's
scheme for a League of Nations. In fact, Smuts
has almost as much claim to the paternity of the
scheme as Wilson himself, for it was he who drew
up the original scheme of the charter which, with
amendments added after discussion by the full
conference, was finally adopted at Versailles.
Unfortunately, owing to the subsequent defection
of America, Smuts proved wrong in his prophecy
that " the League of Nations supplies the key to
most of the new troubles . . . and it will
bring America to our side in the politics of the
future." At Versailles Botha used to sit next to
Milner, since his South African days much
mellowed as a statesman and one of the most
helpful ministers in Lloyd George's cabinet. To
Milner Botha during the peace proceedings said :
" We have triumphed because justice has tri-
umphed ; but you must not in revenge . destroy
a nation ... I and my colleague General
Smuts alone here have fought a war and lost all,
government, flag, all and we remember. We
knew the bitterness of defeat. [But] the English
gave us peace without vengeance. They helped

121

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

us to rise again, and that is why we stand by them
again."* Smuts took the same line : " You may
strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her arma-
ments to a mere police force and her navy to that
of a fifth-rate power ; all the same in the end, if
she feels herself unjustly treated in the peace of
1919, she will find means of exacting retribution
from her conquerors."f

No wonder then that, when the treaty had been
elaborated by the allies, and the Germans, with-
out an opportunity of discussing its conditions,
had no alternative but to sign what their enemies
had decided, such a peremptory conclusion to
their labours proved a bitter disappointment to
Botha and Smuts. Maybe they judged the
Germans by their own standards, and believed
that, had they been given more generous terms, or
at any rate ,been consulted, as had been the case
at Vereeniging, the chances of a lasting peace
would have been greater. Smuts indeed went so
far as to refuse at first to sign the treaty, till he was
urged by Botha not to stand aloof after all his hard
work at Versailles, and reminded by him that
without the treaty his own special clauses creating
a League of Nations to prevent future wars, would
fall to the ground : so Smuts finally gave his
signature. But he afterwards wrote : " This
Treaty is not the peace ; it is the last echo of the
war. It closes the war and armistice stage. The

* H. C. Armstrong, Grey Steel, 324 5.

f Millin, I.e. II, 209 sq.
122

DEATH OF BOTHA

real peace must still come and it must be made
by the Peoples." Botha wrote on his agenda
paper for that day in Dutch : " God's justice will
be meted out to every nation in His righteousness
under the new sun. We shall persist in prayer in
order that it may be done to mankind in Peace
and Christian charity. To-day, the 31st May,
1902, comes back to me."

After the conclusion of the treaty Botha at once
returned to South Africa. Smuts was much
pressed to stay in England and he was sorely
tempted to do so, but, as he said himself, " In the
end I came back because of Botha. It was a choice
between my loyalty to Botha and my missioner's
feeling for the League. Almost at once I was left
to do my work alone. It was good that I came
back." So long had he been away that his two
youngest children barely knew him : the two
eldest, he found, thought he should not have
signed the treaty.*

It was well that Smuts returned to South Africa,
for, within a few weeks of his return, Botha him-
self, literally worn out by his incessant cares and
labours in the field and the council-chamber, died
on 27th August, 1919. His death was a calamity
to South Africa, and hardly less so to the whole
British Empire. Loyal Devoir might well have been
his motto. Once having given his word for peace
at Vereeniging, still more owing to the prompt
trust reposed in him and his by the grant of self-

* Millin, I.e. II, 28992 ; see p. 199, for Smuts's children.

"3

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

government, no power in heaven or earth the
advice of old companions in arms or momentary
political expedience could move him from its
implications. In his last speech, delivered at
Bloemfontein only a week before he died, " he
spoke," says Deneys Reitz, " in homely words of
his desire for peace and unity."* His not infre-
quent visits to London had won him the respect
and affection of Englishmen. His few brief
speeches, always given in Dutch and rendered
into English by an interpreter, breathed an air of
sincerity and gallant courtesy, and above all of
loyalty to his trust as a subject of the King that
carried conviction of the man's nobility of nature.
In his own country the verdict of the immense
majority of both English and Dutch was the same.
True, some of those, like Hertzog, who had parted
from him, thought he was too much wedded to
the English connexion : but all felt him to be a
simple, God-fearing man, with a lovable nature,
not clever, but with the immense wisdom of the
patient and the loving, such as he was. He was at
his best, and certainly happiest, in his own
prosperous and beautiful farm, where, with his
beloved wife and family, he lived a patriarchal
life, entertaining simply, and always the best
of hosts.

Smuts, the colleague most unlike him in most
ways, yet the one who knew and loved 1dm best,
said these words at his graveside : " He had no

* No Outspan, 27.
124

DEATH OF BOTHA

equal as a friend. We have worked together with
a closeness seldom vouchsafed to friends. This
entitles me to call him the greatest, cleanest,
sweetest soul of all my days. Great in his lifetime,
he was happy in his death. To his friend is left
the bitter task of burying him and to defend his
works, which were almost too heavy for him to
perform."

BS* "5

Chapter Eight

Smuts, Philosopher and Statesman

IT was said of Smuts : " With far greater intel-
lectual power than Botha, with equal tenacity
of purpose and indefatigable energy, with the same
ardent patriotism, the younger statesman is not
so well endowed with the gracious patience that
made the late prime minister's person so winsome,
for all men." Smuts himself recognised this when
he said : " I deal with administration, Botha deals
with people." Later Smuts learned from hard
experience some of Botha's gracious patience, but
not till he had been tried in the wilderness of
opposition for nine years, and then after close on
seven years of co-operation with the man who first
drove him from power in South Africa.

On Botha's death in 1919 Smuts naturally
succeeded him as prime minister : but the results
of the general election in 1920 showed that he
could not carry on in the existing state of parties,
for he mustered only forty supporters of his South
African party against Hertzog's forty-five Nation-
alists, the rest of the House being composed of
twenty-five Unionists (British), twenty-one Labour
126

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

members and three Independents. First Smuts
made a bid for support from Hertzog's party, but
that fell through on the issue of a republican
system, then Hertzog's sine qua non, whereas
Smuts's attitude was that " if freedom could be
gained only by way of a republic, I should be a
republican. But our present status as a member
of the Empire and of the League of Nations gives
us complete freedom." Accordingly he then
approached the Unionists, who in fact differed
little from Smuts's policy, and agreed to be
merged in his South African party. On this
understanding he went to the country again in
1921, and obtained a comfortable majority of
seventy-nine for his new South African party
against Hertzog's forty-five and Labour's nine.
It was unfortunate, however, for the prospects of
the new ministry, composed of five Dutchmen and
five Englishmen, that almost immediately after its
formation Smuts himself was called to attend
another Imperial Conference in England. At this
conference Smuts was one of the first to warn the
Empire about the dangers of Japan's jingoistic
policy in the Pacific, which he regarded as a
special menace to South African security. As
usual, too, he was invited to resume his role as
handyman of the Empire. He was asked to draft
the King's speech for the opening session of the
Ulster parliament, a speech which contained a
message of peace not only to Ulster but also to the
rest of Ireland, then seething with discontent.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Smuts indeed was keen on Ireland as a whole
obtaining Dominion status, but, from his own
experience in South Africa, had no sympathy with
de Valera's claim for an independent Irish repub-
lic ; so when Lloyd George asked him to discuss
matters with de Valera, then in hiding in Ireland,
he at once agreed. Travelling as " Mr. Smith,"
he was taken to meet de Valera, Griffiths and
Erskine Childers in their secret lair in Dublin ;
and, though he found de Valera and Childers
opposed to any compromise on complete indepen-
dence, Griffiths agreed to dominion status, as
afterwards adopted. During this sojourn in
England Smuts came very close to George V, and
was much impressed by his " wisdom, modesty,
and unselfishness," adding that he had " the
honour to be called his friend."

He returned to South Africa to find difficulties
accumulating. The short boom which had
followed the peace was succeeded by a period of
intense depression. To make matters worse, in
January, 1922, another strike broke out in Johan-
nesburg, supported by some of the Nationalist
party : there was a reign of terror in the city, and
some of the leaders openly demanded a republic.
So serious was the situation that Smuts himself,
immediately after a speech in parliament, secretly
went off by train from Cape Town -to supervise
measures on the spot. Some way from Johannes-
burg his train was brought to a standstill by demo-
litions on the line : but this did not deter him.
xS

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

Commandeering a motor car he drove on to the
city, past crowds of strikers who even fired on him :
he himself was not hit, but a tyre was burst and
while it was being mended he remained cool and
unruffled by the roadside surrounded by an angry
mob. On arriving at Johannesburg he took
personal command of the situation. Absolutely
fearless at a time when many of the Rand and
business magnates had fled to their country houses,
he went about unarmed to address murderous
crowds, escaping with his life solely by the respect
his dauntless behaviour inspired ; and, after
calling in the citizen defence force, finally scotched
the rebellion. When order had been restored he
urged the mine-owners to show leniency to the
strikers and reinstate most of the rank and file in
their jobs.

In spite of this personal success, the economic
condition in South Africa showed no sign of
improvement, and, as usual in such circumstances,
the government bore most of the blame for the
depression, while Hertzog's prospects of obtain-
ing power were rapidly improving. The prospect
of a Hertzog government in the near future was
especially unfortunate at this time for Smuts's
cherished scheme for a greater South African
state extending to the Zambezi and even beyond.
It so happened that the first step in that direction
seemed feasible in 1923, when Southern Rhodesia
obtained responsible government. Smuts there-
upon undertook a missionary journey to the new

129

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

self-governing colony to persuade it to join the
South African dominion as one of its provinces,
instead of remaining isolated in the middle of
Africa. But the Rhodesians remained deaf to his
eloquent pleadings that they would not only gain
in material prosperity, but also carry more weight
in the counsels of the Empire than if they remained
a comparatively small and isolated community in
the middle of Africa. Had they been convinced
that Smuts and his South African party would
remain in power, they might possibly have listened
more favourably to his pleading : but the growing
strength of Hertzog's Nationalist party, which
then cared little for the British connexion, seemed
to them an irrefutable argument against any
change of status. Since then the opportunity has
never recurred.

In the same year Smuts, after attending another
Imperial Conference in London, returned to find
his majority in the South African parliament
gradually dwindling from the original twenty-five
to seven ; and, after a crushing defeat at a by-
election in the following spring, he dissolved
parliament. At the ensuing general election
Hertzog gained sixty-three seats against Smuts's
fifty-three, and, on a promise to give up his claim
to set up a republic, obtained the support of
Labour's eighteen members. Smuts at once ,
resigned and Hertzog formed a ministry, leaving
Smuts in opposition.

130

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

The nine years of opposition that followed
gave Smuts the time to deliver lectures,
eagerly sought after in England, Scotland and
America, and, in 1931, to preside over the
British Association. Above all, also, he now at
last found time to complete his book on Holism and
Evolution, the philosophical system which was
partly the outcome of his early talks and readings
with Sibella Kriege at Stellenbosch. He was able,
too, to take more holidays in the open air, such as
he had had very few opportunities of enjoying
since Vereeniging. His first recorded j aunt was on
his return from England in December, 1923, when
he went with his dear friend Deneys Reitz on a
trip to Zululand. On this journey, " his first real
holiday for many years," Reitz records,* " he
threw off the cares of state and we agreed to forget
our political troubles for the time being ; so we
rode along gaily and he told us many interesting
things about his work in England and Europe
during the past years." On their way natives were
warned of their approach by " bush-telegraph,"
and warriors appeared with tom-tom and war
dances and presented them with a fat goat, of
which they were supposed to take only the titbits,
the rest going to the chief's retinue : at another
place they were met by warriors of two hostile
tribes, but fortunately, instead of a battle between
them, they staged a combined war dance in
* Smuts's honour. Otherwise, when he could spare

* P. Reitz, No Outspan, 60, sqq.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

a few hours, Smuts's only physical relaxation was
climbing difficult pitches and there are many
on Table Mountain or in the Basuto Mountains.
Even in his book on Holism he manages to bring in
an allusion to his beloved pastime : " knowledge
has given the key of power and mastery over the
conditions which previously towered like an
unscaleable mountain escarpment athwart its path
of progress."* It is said that even to-day, when
this youthful septuagenarian occasionally clears
his brain by a stiff climb, the police escort attached
to him in war-time, men much younger but less
agile than himself, have considerable trouble in
keeping up with their prime minister.

Hitherto Smuts had been known in England
mainly for his work in the War Cabinet during
the 1914 1918 war ; but except for his address
to the Tonypandy miners, he had had little oppor-
tunity of coming into touch with the general
public, his work, as we have seen, having been
mostly administrative and diplomatic. But from
1924 to 1933, being more of a freelance, he was
able to respond to some of the numerous invita-
tions sent him from England, Scotland and the
United States to address learned societies and
others on any topic he might choose. In 1929 he
delivered the Rhodes Lectures at Oxford, dealing
chiefly with South African and especially native
questions in the Union, lectures which proved
somewhat disappointing to ardent negrophilists.

* J. C. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 249.
132

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

In 1931 he was elected president of the British
Association for its centenary meetings held in
London and at York and took his duties very
seriously, for besides his inaugural address on
The Scientific World Picture of To-day, dealing largely
with his own theory of Holism, he also spoke at
several of the sectional meetings ; and in the same
year he presided at the Clerk Maxwell Centenary
celebrations at Cambridge. From America also
he was overwhelmed with invitations to lecture.
One enterprising lecture-agent proposed to him a
lightning tour of the States, in which he was to
deliver fifty lectures on any subjects he might
choose, the remuneration offered being $500 for
each lecture : he was also invited to give a course
of lectures at Johns Hopkins university : both
these offers he turned down. On the other hand
he accepted with enthusiasm a proposal that he
should make a tour of American and Canadian
universities to address them on the League of
Nations, the topic which he had almost more at
heart than any other : it was a strenuous tour, but
it probably did more than ever had been done
before to arouse interest in the western continent
on this subject. During this period, too, ever
watchful of the Jewish problem in Palestine,* he
made vigorous protests against the stringent regu-
lations on their entry into what he had hoped
would be a real national home for the Jews.

By 1934 he was once more in a South African

* See above, p. 112.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

ministry, nevertheless he managed in that year to
fulfil a long-promised engagement to deliver the
Rectorial Address, some time overdue, to the
University of St. Andrews. This proved to be one
of the most interesting of his speeches in Great
Britain. The subject he chose was Freedom, taking
as his text a favourite passage from Pericles's
Funeral Oration, " Happiness is based on
freedom and freedom on courage." At the
start he put his Scottish audience in good humour
by telling them of a talk with an old Hottentot
shepherd at the time of the Majuba war, who,
when asked who would win, replied " the
English " : " Are then the English the greatest
nation in the world ? " " No," was the olid
Hottentot's answer, " the Scots, of whom the
English are very much afraid." Then drawing a
parallel between the Scots and his own Boer
countrymen as belonging, both of them, to small
nations, while both took their full share in shoul-
dering the burdens and promoting the welfare of
their common Empire, he enlarged specially on
the great civilizing and humanitarian work of
their fellow-countryman, Livingstone, in his own
continent. Passing on to the failure of Christian
civilization in the Great War and the great chance
missed for a better ordering of the future at the
peace of Versailles, he then struck the more opti-
mistic note of his central creed. In spite, he said,
of past errors, " the world is still good to-day, it
is a friendly world, built for heroism, but also for

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

beauty, tenderness, mercy : that is my ultimate
credo : for there is no decadence, but more good-
will and good feeling than ever before : " and
that in spite of " the new tyranny (in Germany),
disguised in attractive, patriotic colours, which is
enticing youth everywhere into its service, a new
tyranny, which in the words of Burke, was
' a weed which grows in all soils, and it is its
nature to spread.' " As opposed to this new
tyranny " to me the individual is basic to good
world order. Individual freedom, individual
independence of mind, individual participation in
the difficult work of government seem to be the
essential of all progress . . . Freedom is the
most ineradicable craving of human nature ;
without it, peace, contentment and happiness,
even manhood itself, are not possible. The fight
for human freedom," he concluded, " is the
supreme issue of the future, as it has always been
in the past."

This last passage in his address at St. Andrews
is specially interesting as introducing one of the
main ideas underlying Smuts's book on Holism and
Evolution, published in 1926, the result of half a
life-time's thought since his first crude attempt to
expound his philosophy of life in Walt Whitman, a
Study in the Evolution of Personality.* Since that
first attempt he had found further inspiration in
the works of Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan and

* See above, pp. 24-5.

135

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Adler, who said that in Holism 4< I see clearly
described . . . the key of our science " ;
while Robert Bridges declared that his own
Testament of Beauty was a poetical adumbration of
an almost identical thesis.

In this mature volume Smuts sets out by de-
fining " Holism " as " underlying the synthetic
tendency in the universe, and the principle which
makes for the origin and progress of wholes in the
universe ; " and by stating his aim as being " to
account for the fundamental unity and continuity
which underlie and connect Matter, Life and
Mind," not merely in the human personality, but
in varying degree throughout nature animate and
inanimate. Well equipped for his task by his
mastery of Darwin's theories of natural selection,
he had also studied to some purpose Einstein's
concept of space and time in advance of Newton's
discoveries, and he was familiar with the experi-
ments made by Rutherford and others on the
nature of the atom and of radio-activity in matter.
Making full use of these recent advances in science^
he claims that his theory of wholes or holism
explains " tlie structure of matter and the arising,
in, or through, matter of life and mind and per-
sonality," or, as he might have put it, mens agitat
molem. To him indeed Personality is " the whole,"
expressed, not only in its highest, human aspect,
but throughout nature, and always implying
Freedom : " the function," as he puts it, " of the
136

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

ideal of Freedom is to secure the inward self-
determination of the personality, its riddance of
all alien obstructive elements, and thus its perfec-
tion as a pure, radiant, transparent, homogeneous
self-activity." Again, evolution to him is not
merely a process, but is actually creative of " new
materials and new forms from the synthesis of the
new with the old materials."

An interesting parallel to Smuts's theory of the
whole is to be found in that notable Essay on the
Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff by Maurice
Morgann (1777):

"Bodies of all kinds, whether of metals, plants,
or animals, are supposed to possess certain first
principles of being, and to have an existence
independent of the accidents, which form their
magnitude or growth ... It was not enough
for Shakespeare to have formed his characters in
the most perfect truth and coherence ; it was
further necessary that he should possess a won-
derful facility of compressing, as it were, his own
spirit into these images, and of giving animation
to the forms. This was not done from without;
he must have felt every varied situation, and have
spoken through the organ he had formed. Such
an intuitive comprehension of things and such
a facility, must unite to form a Shakespeare. The
reader will not now be surprised if I affirm that
those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen
only in part, are yet capable of being unfolded and
understood as a whole ; every part being in fact

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

relative, and inferring all the rest ... If the
characters of Shakespeare are thus whole > and as it
were original, whilst those of all other writers are
mere imitation, it may be fit to consider them
rather as Historic than Dramatic beings ; and,
when occasion requires, to account for their
conduct from the whole of character, from general
principles, from latent motives, and from policies
not avowed."

Professor A. D. Ritchie's view of Smuts's theory,
which I am allowed to quote, is that " What
seems to me the most interesting part of his theory
is that it is an attempt to mediate between the
view that what is new and emergent comes from
without by sheer magic and the view that it is
imposed from without by a transcendent Creator.
The second view precludes any attempt at a scien-
tific account by introducing something of which
science itself is not cognisant. The first seems
scientifically absurd. Holism is an attempt at a
third line of approach."

Whether one accepts Smuts's views on the
nature of man and the universe generally or not,
at any rate there are moving passages in this
book which not only stimulate thought but also
give a noble and encouraging stimulus to human
endeavour.

Take this passage in which he imagines a uni-
verse without mind : "It would have gone on
sublimely unconscious of itself. It would have
had no soul or souls ; it would have harboured no

138

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

passionate exaltations ; no poignant regrets or
bitter sorrows would have disturbed its profound
peace. For it, neither the great lights nor the deep
shadows. Truth, beauty and goodness would
have been there, but unknown, unseen, unloved.
[With mind has come] sin and sorrow, faith and
love, the great vision of knowledge, and the cons-
cious effort to master all hampering conditions and
to work out the great redemption. Purpose marks
the liberation of Mind from the domination of cir-
cumstances and indicates its free creative activity
from the trammels of the present and the past ; "
or this noble passage in his last chapter :

" This is a universe of whole-making, not of
soul-making only . . . Wholeness or the
holistic character of Nature . . . has its
friendly intimate influences and its subtle appeal
to all the wholes in Nature and especially to the
spiritual in us. For the overwrought mind there
is no peace like Nature's, for the wounded spirit
there is no healing like hers. There are indeed
times when human companionship becomes un-
bearable, and we fly to Nature for that silent
sympathy and communion spent under the open
African sky . . . The intimate rapport with
Nature is one of the most precious things in life.
Nature is indeed very close to us, sometimes closer
than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but
the extension. The emotional appeal of Nature is
tremendous, sometimes more than one can
bear ...

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

" Everywhere I have seen men search and
struggle for the Good with grim determination and
earnestness, and with a sincerity of purpose which
added to the poignancy of the fratricidal strife.
But we are still very far from the goal to which
Holism points. The great war, with its infinite
loss and suffering, its toll of untold lives, the
shattering of great States and almost of civilization,
the fearful waste of goodwill and sincere human
ideals which followed the close of that great
tragedy has been proof enough for our day and
generation that we are yet far off the attainment
of the ideal of a really Holistic universe. But,
everywhere, too, I have seen that it was at bottom
a struggle for the Good, a wild stirring towards
human betterment ; that blindly, and through
blinding mists of passion and illusions, men are
yet sincerely, earnestly, groping towards the light,
towards the ideal of a better, more secure life for
themselves and their fellows. Thus the League of
Nations, the chief constructive outcome of the
Great War, is but the expression of the deeply felt
aspiration to a more stable holistic state of society.
And the faith has been strengthened in me that
what has here been called Holism is at work even
in the conflicts and confusions of men ; that in
spite of all appearances to the contrary, eventual
victory is serenely and securely waiting, and that
the immeasurable sacrifices have not been in vain.
The groaning and travailing of the Universe is
never aimless or resultless. Its profound labours
140

SMUTS, PHILOSOPHER AND STATESMAN

mean new creation, the slow painful birth of
wholes, of new and higher wholes, and the slow
but steady realisation of the Good which all the
wholes of the Universe in their various grades
dimly yearn and strive for.

" It is in the nature of the Universe to strive for
and slowly, but in ever increasing measure, to
attain wholeness, fullness, blessedness. The real
defeat for men, as for other grades of the Universe
would be to ease the pain by a cessation of effort,
to cease from striving towards the Good. The
holistic nisus which rises like a living fountain
from the very depths of the Universe is the guaran-
tee that failure does not await us, that the ideas of
Well-being, of Truth, Beauty and Goodness are
firmly grounded in the nature of things, and will
not eventually be endangered or lost. Wholeness,
healing, holiness all expressions and ideas spring-
ing from the same root in language, as in experi-
ence lie on the rugged, upward path of the
Universe, and are secure of attaining it in part
here and now, and eventually more fully and
truly. The rise and perfection of wholes in the
Whole is the slow but unerring process and goal of
this Holistic Universe."

Since this was written, even worse calamities
have befallen us : but Smuts himself and those
who share his noble belief in human progress have
never faltered in the struggle for a better, kinder
and more holistic world.

Chapter Nine

Coalition with Hertzog :
Heading for War

A LTHOUGH during his nine years out of
jLVoffice, Smuts found time, not only to com-
plete his philosophical work on Holism and
Evolution, but also by his lecturing tours in Great
Britain and America to act as a missionary both ot
the Empire and of the League of Nations ; yet he
never neglected his duties as leader of the opposi-
tion in the South African parliament. He took
part in the heated discussions on the Union Flag
Bill which lasted through the three sessions of
1925 27, and, with Hertzog and Thielman Roos,
finally settled the difficulty by the compromise
flag, which, though hardly inspiring as a national
emblem, at any rate allayed the respective
susceptibilities of the Dutch- and British-born
citizens and averted a threatened secession from
the Union by Natal.

On the far more important question of the
natives' rights, and especially their exercise of the
franchise, on which Hertzog introduced four bills
in 1926, Smuts was critical not so much of
143

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

Hertzog's principles as of his methods of dealing
with the difficulties : but at any rate Smuts's
criticisms of Hertzog's proposals and the still more
fundamental objections of the ardent defenders of
the natives' rights, such as Rose Innes, formerly
chief justice at the Cape, and Hofmeyr, one of
Smuts's own most faithful supporters in other
respects, caused the postponement of a final
decision on Hertzog's proposals for another 'ten
years, by which time Hertzog, Smuts and Hofmeyr
were colleagues in the same ministry.

Meanwhile Hertzog seemed more firmly estab-
lished in power than ever by his success in the
general election of 1929 ; a result at which Smuts
was frankly disappointed. But he agreed with
Hertzog in deploring Great Britain's refusal at the
Imperial Conference of 1930, to consider a policy
of colonial preference, and went so far as to say
that " What might have been the most brilliant,
the most successful and greatest of all Imperial
Conferences has ended in disillusion and dis-
appointment for every part of the British Com-
monwealth ... If the final settlement of
Dominion status had gone hand in hand with a
great gesture of fellowship and comradeship, with
the holding out and the grasping of a helping hand
all round in this common hour of trial, what a
landmark the Conference would have been in the
history of the Empire."* But at any rate he had
the satisfaction of finding that Hertzog agreed

* Quoted in Annual Register, 1930.

143

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

with him in welcoming Balfour's definition of the
Empire at the previous conference of 1926 as
" autonomous communities within the British
Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate
one to another in any aspect of their domestic or
external affairs, though united by a common
allegiance to the Grown and freely associated as
members of the British Commonwealth of
Nations," a definition finally given the force of
law in the Statute of Westminster of 1931.

But by 1931 Hertzog's majority had begun to
disintegrate. By that year the general slump in
trade had spread to South Africa, and the Labour
members who had hitherto supported him
declared that their pact with him was at an end.
Smuts was one of the first to realise that the main-
tenance of the gold standard, already abandoned
by Great Britain, would lead the country into
bankruptcy. But Hertzog obstinately clung to it
and was supported by a report from a packed
committee of parliament. Natal, disgusted with
Hertzog's policy, again threatened secession, and
even Hertzog's Nationalist party was getting
restive ; a by-election at Germiston, regarded as
a safe Nationalist seat was won by Smuts's South
African party. Then appeared, the man who
regarded himself as the Deus ex machina to settle the
country on a secure basis Thielman Roos, a
former minister under Hertzog, who had recently
accepted a judgeship, which he now resigned with
the intention of securing a coalition government

144

COALITION WITH HERTZOG I HEADING FOR WAR

from Hertzog's nationalist and Smuts's South
African party, undfcr his own leadership.

Smuts himself also called on Hertzog to resign
and to make a new start with a really national
government on non-racial lines, for, as he told the
House in February, 1933, South Africa's economic
plight was so parlous that it could be cured only
on national lines by a merger of his own South
African party with Hertzog's Nationalists : "if
there is a general election," he said, " I do not
fear the result ; but even with a complete victory
for my party, people will feel that bitterness will
remain. There is no way towards a change except
through the resignation of the government ; " and
that then, not Roos, nor himself should be prime
minister, but that Hertzog should resume office
as head of a coalition government taken from
Hertzog's and his own parties. Accordingly, at
this time, as always, great as the temptation may
have been, he carefully abstained from saying
anything bitter about his opponents, as he might
have had good excuse for doing : for he always
remained faithful to the great aim that he and
Botha had set before themselves, to have a real
union between the two European races in South
Africa.

And so it was arranged in that same year, 1933,
no more being heard of Roos, who was then almost
a dying man. But then came a hitch. Hertzog
naturally offered high office in the new cabinet
to his old rival Smuts, as leader of the South

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

African party : but Smuts himself, who had been
in opposition to Hertzog for more than twenty
years was at first unwilling to serve under him and
even thought of retiring from politics altogether,
in spite of his party's urgent demand that he
should still lead them. Finally however, after a
climb on his beloved Table Mountain with a
couple of old and trusted friends to think things
out in peace, he decided that, if there were no
other reason, he could not leave in the lurch such
faithful supporters as Patrick Duncan, Hofmeyr
and Deneys Reitz, who had decided, on his own
advice, to join the new ministry. So he accepted
Hertzog's offer that he should take the post of
deputy prime minister. Smuts himself said of his
own party, which, in the general election of 1933,
obtained a majority, " we deliberately gave up
certain victory for the sake of peace and co-opera-
tion between the two white races of South Africa."*
For the next six years Smuts and Hertzog
worked together in the same ministry. Hertzog
by this time seemed to have become quite recon-
ciled to the inclusion of South Africa within the
British Empire on the lines laid down by Balfour
in 1926 ; he had come to recognise that for the
financial stability of the Union the abandonment
of the gold standard, as Smuts 'had urged, was
essential. On the great question of the abolition
of the parliamentary franchise for natives, which
had been hanging fire for nearly ten years, and

* D. Reitz, No Outspan, 16770 (on election).
146

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

the substitution of some more effective means of
securing the representation of native views and
interests, there appeared to be no fundamental
divergence between them, though, in fact, Smuts is
more liberal-minded on native questions than
Hertzog ever was ; but he agreed to Hertzog's
native policy for fear of breaking up the ministry.
Undoubtedly, during these six years, Smuts though
occupying only the second place in the ministry,
was the master-mind of the cabinet : as Hertzog
himself said to J. W. Lamont, an American writer
well acquainted with South African conditions :
" Yes, I have the title [of prime minister], but it
is General Smuts who runs the Government."* In
private Hertzog could be a pleasant companion
he was well-read and, like Smuts, had, as we have
seen, more than a bowing acquaintance with the
classics ; but in politics he was of an uneasy and
somewhat jealous temperament and apt to resent
criticism by his colleagues. As Reitz said of him :
" He was a man of culture and a gentleman, but
of an uneasy temperament, and there were fre-
quent crises when some of our colleagues resigned ;
he never realised that his wing of the Unity party
was a minority kept in power, "f Smuts, on the
other hand, throughout the six years of the
coalition showed real statesmanship in the vital
effort on which he was engaged to get Dutch and

* Quoted by J. W. Lamont in Saturday Review of Literature,
N.Y.,'6May, 1944.

t D. Reitz, JVb Outspan, 230 sqq.

147

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

English to work together, and was determined not
to break up the coalition except on a question of
national importance.

In this coalition government's first six years,
when the country was at peace externally and
internally, important schemes for developing home
industries and natural resources were carried out
with great success. The Vaal-Harts irrigation
scheme, originally projected by Rhodes, was
carried to completion chiefly under Reitz's super-
vision, whereby, at a cost of ^6,000,000, a vast
inland sea of some ninety miles of fresh water was
created to irrigate a specially thirsty land. Reitz
too was largely responsible for developing the
great Kruger National Park, where visitors in
their motor-cars can drive in perfect safety to
within a stone's throw of lions, buffaloes, giraffes,
hippopotami and every kind of deer, though they
are ranging where they list in perfect liberty.
Sometimes Reitz would persuade Smuts to
accompany him on an aeroplane jaunt of inspec-
tion, when the two friends chaffed each other,
enjoying themselves like a couple of schoolboys.
The only pastime in which Reitz would not join
his chief was mountaineering, and he had the
laugh of him once when he found him in bed with
two doctors attending him for overstrain on Table
Mountain, and quoted to him the Japanese
saying : "He who hasn't climbed Fujiyama once
148

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

is 4 fool, and he who climbs him twice is a
damned fool."*

In 1935 Hertzog introduced the government's
two measures for dealing with the native question :
(1) the Natives Representation Bill, and (2) the
Native Trust and Land Bill. By the first Bill it
was proposed to abolish the franchise hitherto
allowed to educated natives in the Cape and
Natal, except in the case of individual natives
then living and already exercising it. In Natal, it
is true, the native franchise had always been a
farce, applying to only a handful of natives ; but
in the Cape it actually gave the natives entitled to
the vote a majority in certain constituencies ;
though in fact, as the representatives they elected
were exclusively of European origin, these repre-
sentatives, after election, rarely paid much atten-
tion to their native constituents' interests. It was
proposed, however, as compensation for the loss
of voting power, to set up a Natives' Represen-
tative Council, empowered not only to discuss
native needs and grievances for representation to
the government but also to elect four European
senators to represent their views in the South
African parliament. This Bill aroused a good deal
of opposition, not only among the educated
natives of the Cape, but also from an important
section of the white community, especially in the
Cape Province, which for long had prided itself
on having enfranchised educated natives. The

* Reitz, l.c. 196210.

B6 . 149

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

opposing partisans were led by the veteran ex-
chief justice, Sir James Rose limes, and supported
by Smuts's friend J. H. Hofmeyr, who resigned
from the ministry on this question. Smuts,
speaking on this Bill, emphasised the important
role of the proposed Natives' Representative
Council, as providing for the first time a platform
for the expression of genuine native opinion and
wants. The second, Native Trust and Land, Bill
was intended to create a trust for securing more
land for native settlements. Such a measure was
urgently needed since, according to the official
statistics of 1929, while the European population
of the Union was 22.4 per cent, of the total popu-
lation, that of the natives amounted to 67.9 per
cent., whereas the land available for native settle-
ment was at best in inverse proportion. By this
Native Trust and Land Bill more land was to be
gradually acquired to remedy this glaring dis-
crepancy : but, though the Bill was passed, it
does not appear that the natives have yet acquired
a sensible, or at any rate a sufficient, increase c.
land.

In some respects the Natives' Representation
Act has been of advantage to the natives. Smuts
himself went to preside at the first meeting of their
Representative Council in December, 1937, and
for the first time the native community was able
to feel that serious attention was being paid to
their needs and grievances. Moreover, there is
no doubt that in parliament itself the presence of
150

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

representatives elected by the Native Council,
such as Mrs. Ballinger who for years has been
devoting her noble energies to improving the lot
of the natives in compounds at Johannesburg and
other cities where there is a large demand for
native workmen and servants, and generally
looking after their interests is attracting more
serious attention to the needs of South Africa's
largest, but, as far as rights go, most neglected
population. It must be all the more galling to
natives educated up to European standards at
such colleges as that at Fort Hare, or of the calibre
of the late Tengo Jabavu, that eminent native
journalist, and of his son, Professor Davidson
Jabavu, on the staff of the Hare University College
or of native doctors who are sometimes consulted
by European patients, to have been deprived of
the Cape franchise. Smuts himself, as will appear
later, has gradually, owing to his experience in
the present war, begun to realise that a section, at
any rate, of this population deserves better
treatment than has hitherto been allotted to it.

Meanwhile Germany was fast moving towards
war, which Smuts, among the very few in South
Africa, was beginning to realise might be inevitable.
Hertzog, in his New Year message of 1937, took a
highly optimistic view of the prospects of peace ;
Smuts was less hopeful. " Faith," he said, " in
international co-operation and in collective secu-
rity seems almost to have perished from the earth,

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

and, in despair, the nations are rushing to arms
and arming for safety."* Of one thing, however,
Smuts was convinced, that if it came to war
between Great Britain and Germany, South
Africa must take her part on Britain's side, and in
the general election of 1938 he made his position
on that point perfectly clear. The aim of the
government, he said, was to maintain the best
relations with Great Britain and the British
Commonwealth of Nations : " That position," he
added, " is final. We are not thinking of seces-
sion. Even though some of our old republicans
sometimes talk of republicanism, they have bound
themselves in honour as members of our party and
adherents to our policy to stand by the British
Commonwealth of Nations."

But as the prospect of war became clearer in
1939, a cleavage of view in the cabinet itself
became apparent. In April, Hertzog made a
speech indicating that, though the Union would
never break with her greatest friend, Great Britain,
she would not necessarily, in case of war, take up
arms on Britain's side'; Smuts, speaking at his
birthplace, Malmesbury, a little later, declared
emphatically that in such a case South Africa
should and would fight with the mother-country.
Then came the declaration of war by Great
Britain against Germany on 3rd September, 1939.

At this juncture it was fortunate for Great
Britain and for South Africa that the lawyers dis-

* Annual Register, 1937.

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

covered that the life of the Senate would expire
within a few weeks, and that, unless parliament
met on 2nd September to extend its period of
office, no legislation could be passed. It was
fortunate because it appears to have been the
intention of Hertzog, as head of the government,
to declare, without consulting parliament or
apparently even the cabinet, that, subject to
certain contractual obligations to Great Britain,
South Africa would remain neutral. Questioned
by members on his policy at the first meeting of
parliament on the 2nd, Hertzog postponed his
answer in parliament for two days and summoned
the cabinet for the 3rd September to hear his
decision. According to Reitz, who gives a graphic
account of the; cabinet meetings,* Hertzog opened
the discussion in the cabinet with a speech lasting
three hours, in which he raked up all his grievances
against England and praised Hitler's policy, and
thereupon adjourned the discussion to the follow-
ing day, when he again delivered a lengthy
harangue on the policy he had chosen. Smuts,
supported by Reitz, thereupon declared that he
would test this decision in a parliamentary debate.
When the House met, on 5th September, Hertzog,
as he had informed the cabinet, moved that South
Africa should remain neutral in the European war.
He was followed by Smuts, then Deputy Prime
Minister and Minister of Justice, who moved as
an amendment: (1) that the Union's relations

* M Outspan, 23044.

'S3

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

with Germany should be severed, (2) that the
Union should carry out the obligations to which
it had agreed and continue co-operation with the
British Commonwealth of Nations, (3) that the
Union should take all defence measures necessary,
but not send forces overseas ; and (4) that the
Union's freedom and independence was at stake
and that, it should oppose force as an instrument
of policy. After Reitz had supported Smuts's
amendment a long debate ensued, and finally
Smuts's motion was carried by eighty votes to
sixty-seven. Thereupon Hertzog asked the Gover-
nor-General, Sir Patrick Duncan, to dissolve
parliament and have a general election, .a
proposal rejected by Duncan owing to the critical
state of affairs. Hertzog then had no alternative
but to resign, and Smuts formed a new ministry,
with himself as Prime Minister and Minister both
of Defence and External affairs, and including
his friend Reitz as Minister of Native affairs and
Hofmeyr of Finance and Education, while Colonel
Stallard, the Labour representative, accepted the
Ministry of Mines : - it was a strong and united
ministry which since then has lasted with very
little change.

Nevertheless for the first year and a half of its
existence Hertzog and his friends made no less
than three more attempts to draw out of the war.
In January, 1940, Hertzog moved " that the time
had come for the war against Germany to be
ended and for peace to be restored." Smuts in his

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

reply emphasized that " no outside pressure of
any kind [as Hertzog had suggested] had been
put upon us ... Great Britain had asked
us for nothing, had given us no advice . . .
but left the matter entirely to the free decision of
the people of South Africa and so we have decided
. The decision ... is first and fore-
most in the interests of South Africa . . ."
Germany was still anxious to recover her old
colonies, especially South- West Africa, and " we
have no hope of defending South- West Africa if
Great Britain stands aside and if the British fleet
is not helping us." Again, in August, 1940, after
Dunkirk, Hertzog once more moved that South
Africa should forthwith make peace with Germany
and Italy, arguing that England was then without
allies and had but the slenderest chance of victory
against the powerful combination against her,
while South Africa was " doomed like a second
Sancho Panza to serve as Europe's imperial
satellite on behalf of Europe's warmonger [Eng-
land]." Smuts made a slashing reply, reprobating
Hertzog for glorifying Germany, for "praising Herr
Hitler to the skies," for proposing to take the
" Petain road," and he reminded the House of
German ambitions in Kenya, South- West Africa
and of other dangerous designs in their continent.
Hertzog's motion was this time defeated by
eighty-three to sixty-five. One more attempt, the
fourth and the most long-drawn of all, was made
by Hertzog's friend, Dr. Malan, by a motion of no

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

confidence in the government, the debate on which
lasted from 4th to 7th February, 1941 . Once more
Smuts dwelt on the danger of German and, by
this time, Italian ambitions in Africa, and, as a
counterpoise, on the Union's increasingly good
relations with the Portuguese and Belgian colonies,
and above all on the closer relations between the
British Commonwealth of Nations and the
Americas, all to the advantage of their own
country, for by sticking to Great Britain, he
argued, South Africa would be able to develop as
a young country without any compulsion. This
time he defeated his opponents by seventy-six to
fifty-eight.

In this last debate Hertzog took no part, for he
was no longer in parliament. The leaders of
the opposition, Pirow and Malan, who succeeded
him, were even more ferocious opponents of the
British connexion than himself. A week before
this last debate Smuts had made a generous gesture
to Hertzog, his former colleague and old opponent,
in proposing that a pension should be voted to
him in his retirement. He had not, he said,
proposed it when Hertzog left the ministry in 1939,
as it might have looked like a bribe. But now he
felt free to eulogize Hertzog's clean fighting,
unselfishness and public spirit : " our political and
public life in South Africa in general is clean,
clean of corruption," he said, echoing a somewhat
similar eulogy by Rhodes of the Cape Parliament,
as contrasted with " the methods of Australian

136

COALITION WITH HERTZOG : HEADING FOR WAR

and other colonies, where members indulge in
vulgar personalities."* " We are pleased," con-
cluded Smuts, " to do honour to General Hertzog
as one of the most outstanding leaders the people
of South Africa have ever had." Hertzog died
less than two years later, in November, 1943.

* Quoted in my Cecil Rhodes, 188. The extracts from the

speeches made in these debates are quoted from House of
Assembly Debates.

B6* 157

Chapter Ten

Smuts and the War in Africa

"T7UROPE has landed itself in a terrible
JLJmess;" said Hertzog in May, 1940, "through
the stupidity of General Smuts we are in it too."
Smuts's reaction was different : " Yes, I'm well,
I'm ready. The time is here, and I'm ready
. I am going to fight Germany ; and I
don't care where it is, so long as it is against
Germany. Some want to fight it behind this river
or behind that mountain, and hope to heaven the
enemy is not there. But we want to fight Ger-
many. She is the enemy and the enemy of the

, human race ; Germany is our enemy and Africa
is a big place in which to fight." Like Churchill,
he had no doubt about the event. " The Germans
will take Paris," he realized in May, 1940, " the
Italians are in : we'll win the war." From the
very beginning he was convinced first, that the
U.S.A. were bound sooner or later, to come in
and secondly that " you cannot defeat the English,
because their hearts are too strong." Still he
realised that in those early days it was a matter of
touch and go, and quoted tp a friend the prayer
of Adam Kok, King of the Griquas : " God ! in

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

spite of all our prayers, we keep on losing our
battles. Tomorrow we are fighting a really big
battle. We need help very badly, God, and there
is something I must say to You. Tomorrow's
battle will be a serious affair. It will be no place
for children. I ask You therefore not to send
Your Son to help us. Come Yourself."

Unlike Churchill, he had no united country
behind him. In June, 1940, when Germany was
winning all along the line, " the Nazi opposition
(in South Africa) have issued an appeal for
surrender " it was recorded, " they propose to
hold protest meetings and generally hinder the
Government's war efforts. General Smuts," they
say, " offers up South Africa once again and
perhaps for the last time on the altar of im-
perialism, his personal lust for honour and his
cold-blooded contempt for our country's most
sacred interests. He now declares that he is
prepared to make South Africa a partner in
England's fate to the bitter end. The time has
come to call a halt to General Smuts's mad
progress."*

Smuts indeed was faced with a hard task when
he undertook to bring his country into the war on
the side of Great Britain. It is true that in each of
the debates on the issue of peace or war, recorded

* The quotations in these two paragraphs are taken from
Mrs. Millin's World Black Out, 1944, in which she records, in
diary form, opinions she heard in South Africa during the first
three years of the war.

'59

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

in the last chapter, he had carried the day by
slightly increasing majorities, but in each of these
debates it appeared that considerably more than
a third of the members were, if not pro-German,
at any rate violently opposed to any intervention
on behalf of the Allies. But these figures hardly
represented the real views of the country. Accor-
ding to an estimate made by Deneys Reitz* and
subsequently verified by the election of 1943, of
the total white population, consisting only of
between two and three millions, fifty-five per cent,
were of Dutch and forty-five per cent, of British
descent ; but of the fifty-five per cent. Dutch only
about half stood aloof from the war effort, holding
that the war was only in the interest of Great
Britain and that there was no need for South
Africa to be drawn into the maelstrom ; the
remaining half of the Dutch made common cause
with the British population : in other words,
about seventy-two per cent, of the white popu-
lation were on Smuts's side for active participation
in the war : but to the end the dissentient
minority of twenty-eight per cent, was a heavy
burden for Smuts to carry.

For one thing, though foiled in successive
attempts to reverse the war policy, the extreme
members of the opposition both in parliament and
in the country, started more or less secret organi-
sations with the avowed object of sabotaging the

* No Outspcm, 276.
1 60

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

war effort. The most dangerous of these organi-
sations was the so-called Ossewa-Brandwag (the
ox- wagon picket). This was started in 1938 by
Van Rensburg, then administrator of the Free
State, for the comparatively innocuous purpose
of celebrating the centenary of the great Boer trek
up country in 1838 to escape from British rule in
Cape Colony. Smuts himself took part in this
Boer national celebration, addressing, with Van
Rensburg, a great Boer gathering at Pietersburg
on that occasion, and, it is related, after his speech
joining his fellow-Boers at a huge bonfire where
they all toasted sausages and sang patriotic songs:
but, needless to say, he had no sympathy with the
subsequent activities of Ossewa-Brandwag. For
after 1939 it was used, not so much by Van
Rensburg himself, as by its extremist members, as
an instrument for opposing Smuts's war policy,
and for a time was active in sabotaging railways
and factories, and even in beating up or murdering
supporters of the government ; in the early stages
of the war it claimed to have as many as 250,000
members, and was obviously dangerous. It
identified itself, as far as possible, with Hitler's
Nazi organisation; its members adopted the
Swastika badge, gave the Hitler salute, armed and
drilled in secret, took up the slogan " Wir fahren
nach England," threatened death to the Jews and
the bureaucrats, had camps with barracks, each
holding sixteen members of the organisation. " In
fact," as Smuts said, " we are fighting this war

161

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

not only at the front, but internally as well."*
Some of the worst offenders, caught red-handed,
suffered the due penalties of the law : but Smuts,
supported by his friend Reitz, wisely thought it
would be a mistake to take too drastic measures
with the organisation as such, believing, as he said,
the South Africans were too level-headed to be led
astray by such nonsense, and that it would be a
mistake to create cheap martyrs. " Leave it to
us," he said, to those who urged the total suppres-
sion of the organisation, " Leave it to us, we know
what we are doing : please don't rock the boat."f
In one respect, however, the Germans played
into Smuts's hands. They had not forgotten that
their two colonies of German South- West and
German East Africa had been lost in the previous
war, and made no secret of their intention to
recapture them and so once more to become a
menace to South Africa itself *- and few even of
the most rabid anti-British Boers were keen to
have such uneasy neighbours once more on their
borders. Already too, the German Navy and its
swarms of U-boats were threatening South African
communications with Europe and the East, which
the British Navy, then barely holding its own in
the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was in no
position to safeguard. The loss, in October, 1940,
of Dakar, the most westerly French port on the
Atlantic, " as important in its way as Suez," as

* Millin, The Reeling Earth 66-7.
t D. Reitz, No Outspan, 256 sqq.
162

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

Smuts said, " involved all our movements in the
Atlantic."* All these dangers were clear enough
to him, who, at the outset and throughout the
war, tried to bring home to his people that, if for
no other reason, it was essential for their own
safety and practical independence, within or
outside the British Empire, to resist German and
Italian aggression. Smuts no doubt himself
realized from the earliest days of the war, that it
could not be confined to separate compartments
of the globe, and that a defeat of the Germans
and Italians in Europe would bring their designs
on other parts of the world to nought even
more effectively than victories in Africa. But he
had to work with the tools available at any given
moment, and realized that, with his people divided
his most effective appeal to them for the time being
was to bring home to them their own peculiar
danger from the Axis powers on the continent of
Africa. And so at first it was agreed on Smuts's
own motion in parliament that, while South
African soldiers might be called upon to fight
anywhere in Africa, they should not be sent out-
side their own continent.

Not content with calling on his own people to
defend their heritage, he realized that German
ambitions might very well affect other parts of
South Africa. As early as 1924 he had, as we have
seen, tried to induce Southern Rhodesia tp join in
a common policy with the Union on matters of

* 7A 9Q 1f\
ID, tO 9 O\J,

163

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

defence, etc., but had then found no response.*
Now, however, with the threat from common
enemies to all British possessions in Africa, he
found a readier response. " Now is the time,"
said Smuts, " for us to readjust our outlook on
African affairs and to develop a new conception of
our relations with our neighbours . . . We
cannot stand aloof, we of this richly-endowed
South Africa. If we wish to take our rightful place
as leader in Pan- African development and in
shaping future policies and events in this vast
continent, we must face realities of the present
and seize the opportunities which those offer, "f
This time his proposal was welcomed. In a ges-
ture of complete trust the South Rhodesian
government confided their armed forces to the
command of General Smuts ; and Sir Godfrey
Huggins, their prime minister, worked in close
co-operation with Smuts and his ministers.
Similar co-operation was agreed upon between
South Africa and the crown colony of Northern
Rhodesia, with Nyasaland and even the distant
Kenya, where South African troops were lining
the borders against Abyssinia even before the
Italian threat had materialised. Smuts also
extended his invitations to co-operation in the
defence of African interest against German and
Italian ambitions to the Belgian Congo and the
Portuguese provinces of Angola and Lourengo

* Sec above, p. 130.
t Annual Register, 1940.
164

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

Marques, invitations which were glady accepted.
So effective had this new policy of co-operation
among all the anti-Nazi communities throughout
the African continent become that in September,
1943, Smuts was able to present it as an accom-
plished fact. " The most striking thing about
Africa to-day," he said, " is the new conception
which is slowly growing up. People are no longer
thinking in terms of sovereignties and flags, but
of common action and common interest . . .
In Africa, to-day, South Africa, the Rhodesias,
the Congo and the Portuguese colonies are
gradually evolving common policies on matters
such as trade, transport, communications and
native affairs. This means a complete reversal of
the old Roman theory, whereby you had
Imperium or sovereignty first, and then ruled the
country as you wanted it. Now the countries
work together in harmony on common principles,
without seeking to conquer each other or upset
local loyalties, or languages, or methods of
administration . " *

There was indeed much leeway to be made up
in providing even for the defence of South Africa
itself. As early as 1924 an agreement had been
made by Smuts and Churchill that instead of the
British admiralty South Africa should thence-
forward be responsible for the defence of the naval

* Quoted from South Africa of 4 Sept., 1939. A more detailed
exposition of Smuts's view in this respect was given by Mr.
Heaton Nichols at Chatham House on The Part of the Union in
the Development of Africa, on 27 March, 1945.

.65

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

base at Simonstown : but it was not till the out-
break of war in 1939, that the Union created a
Seaward Defence Force for patrolling the coast,
minesweeping, etc., a force which soon proved
very effective against German and, later, Italian
sea-marauders. An even more important change
was made in the duties of the South African
defence force. As this force was originally consti-
tuted by Smuts himself in 1912, it was doubtful
whether it could be required to act outside the
borders of South Africa;* accordingly he now
started a new army on a voluntary system, whereby
recruits undertook to serve " anywhere in Africa,"
so as to be available to resist any encroachments
by the Italians from f Abyssinia or the Germans
from overseas on British or Allied possessions in
Africa. This re-organisation proved an immense
success : recruits of both Dutch and English
lineage flocked to the colours ; and every man or
woman embodied in this new African defence
force wore the " orange flash," indicating willing-
ness to serve anywhere in the African continent.
In fact, by March, 1S44, Smuts was able to claim
in the South African Parliament that one out of
every three South Africans between twenty and
sixty had volunteered for the forces ; "an
incredible feat," as he called it.

An important subsidiary to this force was ob-
tained by the voluntary enrolment of natives,
unarmed, indeed, but of the greatest service for

* See above, pp. 80-1.
166

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

work as pioneers, and signalmen and for road-
making and transport. Among the tribes most
forward in supplying men for these pioneer corps
were Swazis and Basutos, and besides them there
were Indians domiciled in South Africa ; and all
were proud of the valiant help they were able to
give. As a Basuto Sergeant in a Pioneer Signals
Company said : " We belong to the Eighth Army.
We charged their batteries, drove their trucks,
unloaded their signal stores, carried their telegraph
poles, mended their wires. We were bombed with
them, we enjoyed the same rations, we laughed at
the same jokes, we were blown up by the same
mines."* By January, 1943, no less than 70,000
African tribesmen were serving in the army and
of" coloured " troops (i.e., Indians or Malays), as
many as 45,000.

Apart from the voluntary forces enlisted for the
defence of Africa, of which South Africans are
justly proud, they have also cause for pride in the
readiness with which, under the inspiration of
their great ruler, they turned a country hitherto
chiefly concerned with internal and mainly peace-
ful interests into a veritable arsenal for total war-
fare. The rapid development of the seaward
defence forces and of a new army prepared to fight
anywhere in Africa has already been noted : but
these activities form only a small part of South
Africa's contribution to victory. Smuts himself

* Quoted from South Africa of 4 Sept. 1943.

267

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

has always been air-minded, and, as we have seen,*
has some right to be called the father of the Royal
Air Force of Great Britain. During the twenty
yea,rs interval of peace he delighted in long air-
borne voyages in South Africa, often with his dear
friend Deneys Reitz : nevertheless at the outbreak
of the second war in 1939, the supply of operational
craft and trained pilots in South Africa was
alarmingly short. Accordingly he at once set
about repairing deficiencies, aiming first at three
complete squadrons, partly for patrolling thou-
sands of miles of coast-line and safeguarding the
all-important Cape route by sea, partly for active
operations on land. So effective were these
measures that within twenty-four hours of the
outbreak of war with Italy, South African airmen
were raiding Italian bases in Abyssinia and
Somaliland, and, though greatly outnumbered by
the Italian air force, almost from the outset
established complete air superiority. By August,
1941, on the South African Air Force's twenty-first
birthday, Smuts could claim that it contained
27,000 personnel and would eventually number
some 50,000 a remarkable contribution from a
population of well under 3,000,000,

In many other respects South Africa made
valuable contributions to the war effort. Already,
during Hertzog's last ministry, the great Iron and
Steel Corporation, Iscor, near Pretoria, was
starting an important new industry, so was fully

* See above, p. 113.
l6S

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

prepared to switch off to manufacturing armour-
plate, steel helmets, shells and spare parts of
equipment, besides providing most of the steel
required for factories engaged in producing
howitzers, mortars, armoured cars, etc. Hence,
South Africa was soon prepared, not only to
supply most of its own military requirements, but
also through the British government or the Eastern
Supply Council to bring help to other fronts. In
fact, by 1942 South Africa had become the repair
shop for the Middle East.* The manufacture of
explosives, needed in great quantities by the mines
in peace time, was easily switched off to provide
some of the vast quantities of ammunition required
in such a war. With the restrictions now inevit-
able on importation from other countries, new
industries had to be improvised to supply neces-
sities. Paper for example, for which South Africa
depended largely on Norway, suddenly became
alarmingly scarce ; accordingly three new fac-
tories, equipped with special machinery, were
established, one of which was soon able to provide
some 12,000 14,000 tons of paper and cardboard
annually. South Africa, the home of diamonds,
used to export to Holland, the headquarters of
the world's diamond-cutters, most of the diamonds
needed for industrial purposes, such as lens-cutting
and various processes in munition factories ; but
with the capture of Holland by the Germans, this
outlet was closed ; accordingly, in May, 1942, a

* Annual Register, 1942.

169

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

factory was established in Johannesburg for this
special industry. The most curious of all these
new industries was that on which three men of the
South African Medical Corps were employed in
catching and extracting serum from cobras, puff-
adders and mombas, the most dangerous snakes in
South Africa, for the manufacture of the very
necessary anti-snakebite serum for men bitten in
many of the snake-haunted districts of Africa.

The work, too, of the women of South Africa,
as in other countries, has been an indispensable
adjunct of the war effort. In November, 1939,
the Women's Auxiliary Army Service and the
Women's Auxiliary Air Force, each with a mem-
bership soon amounting to 5,000 were officially
constituted. The ease and rapidity with which
these services were organised were, however, due
to the foresight of South African women more than
a year earlier. Already in 1938 they realised that
war was impending, and immediately began, as
the South African Women's Auxiliary Service,
registering the names of women willing, in case of
need, to give their .help. Thus, when war was
actually declared, the government was presented
with a comprehensive register of women volun-
teers, with thousands of names card-indexed into
categories of service, thereby enormously assisting
the rapid organisation of the two women's corps
for service with the army and the air force and of
those required for munitions work, or as operators
of delicate technical instruments in the coastal
170

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

defence system, quite apart from the many women
engaged in the new factories and industries needed
for the war effort.

The Union indeed might well be proud of its
contributions to the war effort of the Allies. In
June, 1943, it was officially stated that the Union
defence force had a total strength of 169,000
European men and women not including 30,000
discharged 50,000 volunteers on part-time ser-
vice, and 60,000 in the women's auxiliary services.
With only 570,000 males between twenty and
sixty years of age the number of 190,000 males
volunteering for service (one in three of the age
group) was unsurpassed by any of the Allied
Nations. Of these 86,000 had served in East
Africa, the Middle East and Madagascar. In
addition, 30,000 of the 102,000 volunteers from
the Malay, Indian and native communities had
served outside South Africa. War supplies valued
at 100,000,000 had been sent to Britain and the
Allies, including armoured cars supplied to British
and French units in Africa and in Burma. In
addition, there were 130 factories of army clothing
and equipment, and mass production of foodstuffs
for home and abroad.*

Over all these new activities, as well as over the
military activities of the Union in Africa itself and
beyond, brooded the spirit of South Africa's great
prime minister ; and his tireless exertions were
well supported by the united cabinet he had

* These figures are taken from the Annual Register, 1943.

171

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

created. It is no derogation to the value of the
other members to pick out two of them as those on
whom he specially relied, Hofmeyr and Deneys
Reitz. Hofmeyr had, as noted above, withdrawn
for a time from the coalition cabinet under Hert-
zog, feeling as he did so strongly on the native
question, as well as on a somewhat dubious
appointment to the cabinet : but when Smuts
had formed his cabinet he soon returned to office
and eventually, as Minister of Finance, proved
singularly effective in providing funds for his
chief's warlike efforts. Deneys Reitz, Smuts's
dearest friend, became deputy prime minister,
and also took over the portfolio of native affairs ;
but when, in 1942, there was a vacancy in the
office of High Commissioner in London, Smuts
chose him for this part. No choice could have
been happier, for though Reitz had at first, after
Vereeniging, remained a bitter-ender and taken up
a job as transport rider in Madagascar, he had,
after being nursed through a dangerous illness for
a year by Smuts and his wife, become entirely
converted to his host's broader and wiser outlook.
In fact, during the last war he had taken part in
Smuts's campaign in German South Africa and
eventually became colonel of a Guards battalion
on the western front. As High Commissioner in
London, he was an ideal representative of his
country, courteous and accessible to all, and, while
jealously guarding the independent rights of his
dominion, doing more than any previous High
172

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

Commissioner, except perhaps Schreiner, in
strengthening the bonds of union between Great
Britain and South Africa. His sudden death in
October, 1944, was a grievous loss to both
countries. To Smuts himself, to whom he was
the dearest of companions, probably the only one
hi these strenuous days intimate enough to relieve
something of the stress of war by his genial, boyish
chaff and deep affection, this sudden death came
very hard. In a tribute to him Smuts spoke of
him as " a dear friend and comrade, a faithful
companion through vicissitudes such as few have
passed through. He was true, straight and
upright every inch of him and he leaves a
personal memory which I shall cherish all my
days." To us in England, he is best known by his
three delightful tales of adventure and good com-
panionship, On Commando, Trekking On and No
Outspan, which rank with Sir Percy Fitzpatrick's
Jock of the Bushveld as the most engaging pictures
we have of South African scenery and personalities
at their best.*

South Africans were justly proud of their men's
achievements in the war against Germans and
Italians in their own continent. When Italy
entered the war South African forces were ready
/or them on the borders of Kenya and took their
part in driving the Italians out of their ill-gotten

* The concluding words of this paragraph were written
immediately after the touching memorial service to Dencys Reitz
at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a service partly in Dutch, partly
in English, on 25 October, 1944.

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

possession of Abyssinia. In switching off" to
Northern Africa they still had to deal with Italians
in Tripoli, but were also ranged against the far
more formidable Germans under Rommel. In
May, 1942, two South African brigades were
captured in Tobruk, whereupon Smuts in a broad-
cast appealed not vainly for 7,000 recruits to
come forward to fill the gaps ; in September
Tobruk was recaptured and the 1st South African
Division under General Pienaar had the honour
of being the first to re-enter the town. Already in
June the South African Brigade of the 8th Army
had borne the brunt of the successful fight at
Alamein, but in Montgomery's final victory at the
same place the South African forces were too
depleted to share in the victory. When, however,
after this defeat, Rommel was in full retreat from
North Africa, there was nothing left for Smuts's
reorganised army, with its " orange flash," to do
on their own continent except tedious garrison
work. But by that time, as Smuts had foreseen,
South Africans generally had awoken to the fact
that such a war, against such an enemy could not
be confined to one continent. They were proud
of their army and proud of its commander-in-chief,
as was shown in 1943 by a gift of 250,000 raised
from voluntary subscriptions to Smuts personally,
a gift which he handed over for the use of the
troops.

Smuts himself had always realized that a victory
for Hitler in Europe or for Japan in the Pacific

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

might be just as fatal to South African security as
a complete defeat in Africa. Accordingly in May,
1942, after the fall of France, he had sanctioned
the embarkation of a South African detachment
on the fleet commanded by Admiral Syfret, him-
self a South African by birth, to secure Mada-
gascar, dangerously close to South Africa, from
falling into the hands of the Japanese. In
January, 1943, he was attacked in Parliament for
this apparent breach of the understanding that
South Africans should not fight outside Africa,*
but easily carried the House with him, when he
pointed out the imminent danger it would be to
the country to have the Japanese within such easy
reach of South Africa. Encouraged by this
success, a fortnight later he moved that the general
ban imposed on South African troops from
fighting outside their own continent should be
repealed so that they could carry on the pursuit
of the Germans and Italians, then driven out of
North Africa, into Sicily and Italy, reminding the
House that Great Britain's Navy and Air Force
were still contributing a large part to the security
of the South Africans' own coastline : and that it
was impossible to mark out a total war such as
this into watertight compartments. After the
debate, to which the opposition contributed most
of the fifty-two speeches made, Smuts carried his
motion by a handsome majority.

Accordingly, from 1943 onwards, South African

* See above, p. 163.

175

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

troops were fighting as gallantly as ever in the
Middle East, notably in the easy conquest of
Sicily and the correspondingly arduous and
bitterly-contested campaign in Italy. As Smuts
declared, after one of his visits to the Italian front,
" I have seen for myself something of the terrain
over which our (6th) division has been advancing
often through rain and mud over the mountains
and deep valleys. They have accomplished pro-
digious feats. They have fnaintained their
pursuit in country where every feature has
favoured the defence . . . We can be justly
proud of this crack division, rivalling in prowess
our First and Second Divisions in North Africa."
Throughout the war, indeed, Smuts himself always
made a point of heartening the troops by visits to
them in the forefront of operations, whether in
Africa or in Europe.

Encouraged by his majority in the debate of
January, 1943, Smuts decided to have a general
election in the autumn of 1943 in spite even of
Reitz's advice that the. risk of reducing his majority
was too great ; to which he replied : " We are
fighting for liberty and I am going on with it."
This decision was more than justified by the
event. In the old parliament he could reckon at
most on eighty-four supporters against an oppo-
sition of sixty-six : by the new general election he
increased his own United Party to eighty-nine
with general support from Labour, Dominion and
176

SMUTS AND THE WAR IN AFRICA

Independent parties numbering eighteen more,
while the opposition had dwindled to forty-three.*

Smuts owed this notable electoral success chiefly,
no doubt, to the resounding success of his policy,
partly also to his tactful dealing with the oppo-
sition in parliament and its intestine feuds. The
three most prominent members of the opposition
were Van Rensburg, the founder of Ossewa-
Brandwag,t who had been Administrator of the
Orange Free State province, Pirow and Malan,
who had been ministers in Hertzog's cabinet. Van
Rensburg himself was a man with a sense of
responsibility and, though opposed to the war, on
the whole acted on constitutional lines, though in
the first two years of the war many of the members
of his Ossewa-Brandwag were guilty of sabotage
on the railways and even murder, being to some
extent influenced by one Leibbrandt, an extremist
and a noted boxer, said to have been landed from
a German U-boat, but now locked up in gaol.
Pirow was at first the most dangerous of Smuts's
opponents, he had been an able minister and
already before the war, when he visited Germany,
had come under Hitler's influence : but now
being no longer in parliament, with but a small
personal following, he is much less formidable.
Malan, a very eloquent and sincere man, the only
one of the trio still in parliament, is endeavouring

* Later a by-election at Wakkcrstroom, always an uncertain
constituency, raised the opposition to forty-four.

t See above, p. 161.

177

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

to gather together the various sections of the
opposition to form a united party. Smuts himself,
though respected, was perhaps still, as his best friend
once told me in the early years of the war, hardly
popular in his own country. He is, and always
will be, too quick in sizing up the maun points of
policy to be pursued and in acting promptly on
his decisions for his solid, slow-thinking Dutch
fellow-countrymen ; for he has never had the
inspired patience of Botha in discussing with them
at enormous length the pros and cons of policy.
But his wonderful success in the conduct of the
war, his wisdom in allowing as much rope as
possible to his opponents, a growing mellowness
in his outlook, and above all, perhaps, his con-
viction of the major part to be played on the
African continent by the Union are bringing
even his opponents to recognize his patriotism and
his wisdom. Though there are still, and no doubt
will long remain, extremists in the two camps of
British and Boer lineage, their number is gradually
diminishing, owing partly to the great increase in
mixed marriages, but chiefly to the increase of
common interests in this war for self-preservation
and to the wise tolerance of their great prime
minister.

178

Chapter Eleven

Smuts on (i) Native and

(2) Empire Problems ; (3) Smuts

at Home

(i) NATIVE PROBLEMS

TAKEN up as he has been during the war with
world affairs, Smuts, in spite of his seventy-
five years, is still young enough in spirit to discover
and attempt to remedy defects in the social and
administrative conditions of his own beloved South
Africa, especially in regard to the natives. It is, it
may be admitted, hardly surprising that the South
Africans of European lineage should have con-
siderable uneasiness as to their security where the
native population so greatly exceeds the
Europeans. Smuts himself at one time shared
these apprehensions, for it is related that, shortly
after the Boer War, he and Botha, being much
disturbed by rumours of a proposed native rising
in the east, went to General Lyttelton, then
G.O.C. in South Africa, to express their fears.
" Don't you be worried," said the bluff old
general, " we have managed somehow to beat

179

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

you, so you need have no fear that we shall not be
able to deal with a native rising." But Smuts
himself soon shed his apprehensions, especially
after many journeys into regions mostly inhabited
by natives, which made him deeply interested in
their customs. One of his daughters, when at
college, visited the Realm of the Rain Queen, on
which a Kriege nephew published a book in 1943,
in a far-distant corner of East Africa, and he
himself, stirred by their descriptions, visited this
" wonderful woman," as he called her, " the rain-
maker par excellence of South Africa, well over
sixty, but strong in body and character, every inch
a Queen." So enthusiastic was he that he wrote
a preface to his nephew's book, finding it " a fasci-
nating distraction to the war problems which form
my life," and the Queen sent him a letter when he
was prime minister, saying how glad she was to
have met the man " wearing the crown of South
Africa." Both he and Deneys Reitz in their
travels and inspections before and during the war,
sometimes together, sometimes separately, always
made a point of getting into touch with the
natives, especially in out-of-the-way districts,
where they were at their simplest and best.

Lord Harlech, recently High Commissioner in
charge of the three native territories, Basutoland,
Swaziland and Bechuanaland, an acute and sym-
pathetic observer of South African conditions,
reckons the population of the Union itself at
10,000,000, of whom only two and a quarter
1 80

SMUTS ON NATIVE PROBLEMS

millions are of European race forty per cent, of
these being English and sixty per cent. Dutch-
speaking the remainder including 7,000,000
natives and 500,000 Cape coloured (made up of
Bushmen, Hottentots, Malays) and 250,000
Indians. Small as the proportion of Europeans is
to other races in South Africa he points out that
they are actually more in number than the total
number of Europeans of all races throughout the
whole of the rest of the continent, including even
French North Africa. Unfortunately among these
Europeans in South Africa is a considerable
number of so-called " poor whites," who are mostly
illiterate and have sunk below the level of many
educated natives, but still cling to their rights as
belonging to a Herren Volk. Considerable strides,
as he points out, in providing education for the
natives have recently been made ; the great
native college at Fort Hare in Cape Colony is a
constituent of the University of South Africa and
admits to full university degrees ; and even in the
Transvaal, which is not so advanced in outlook on
native affairs as the Cape,* the Witwatersrand
University has opened its medical faculty to the
natives, especially in view of the great need of
medical services in predominantly native districts.
The difficulties of race contact are most promi-
nent where the natives are working in the mines
or on the railways and other public works, and not
least when serving as domestics in European

* Education, it must be remembered, is a provincial concern.
B7 l8l

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

households in the towns. In most of these services
they are housed in compounds, often at a con-
siderable distance from their work and not only
destitute of any amenities, but overcrowded and
sometimes barely in a sanitary condition. Some-
thing indeed has already been done to improve
such conditions, largely through the devoted
services of such workers as Mrs. Ballinger, who is
one of the representatives of native interests in
parliament : but there is still much leeway to
make up. Those undertaking work on country
farms are generally better off, living as they do on
the farms, sometimes with their families, and on
the whole carefully provided for by the farmers.
Those living on the native reserves, such as the
Transkei, where Rhodes's Glen Grey Act, pro-
viding them with separate allotments and encour-
aging individual enterprise, are the best off in the
Union. But so great is the demand for native
labour, that a great many natives come in for
periods of work from Zululand or from outside
the Union, especially from Portuguese East Africa,
and have for their term of service to live without
their families.

One of the crying grievances of the natives
domiciled within the Union, is the comparatively
small amount of land reserved for them. When in
1936 the franchise was taken from them, as a
partial compensation a Native Land Trust was
established to hold 7,250,000 morgen (about
14,500,000 acres) of land for settlement by native
18*

SMUTS ON NATIVE PROBLEMS

families ; but by 1943 only 3,000,000 morgen had
been acquired for that purpose, most of it at a
vast expense ; for one farm, for example, in the
Pietersberg district, valued at 89, the price was
raised to 700 for the Land Trust and similar
fantastic sums were demanded and paid in other
districts.

Smuts himself, largely no doubt owing to the
enthusiastic support by the native community of
the war effort, and the gallantry of the unarmed
native auxiliaries in the field, of which he had
personally been witness in his visits to the
front, made a striking confession in an address
to the Institute of Race Relations at Cape Town in
January, 1942. f Three views, he said, had hither-
to been held in South Africa on the question of
the policy to be adopted with natives : (1) for
equality between the races, white and black ;
(2) for the theory of the superior race of the
whites over the natives ; (3) for trusteeship which
Rhodes had proclaimed as the duty of whites as
guardians of their black fellow-citizens who should
be treated as wards ; or, as was expressed in the
Mandates Section of the League of Nations
Covenant " the advancement, the upliftment of
the backward peoples is the sacred trust of
civilisation." This trusteeship was not merely,
he added, an ethical or religious question, but one

t This speech has been published, and it is commented on in
Alexander F. Campbell's Smutt and the Swastika, 1932.

B8 183

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

of self-interest for the trustee, who, if he neglected
it, would sink to the level of his ward, and per-
petuate the alienation between black and white.
In two departments, he added, there was much
leeway to make up in education, though much
had been done by the missionaries, the efforts of
the government had been halting and tardy, while
for health practically nothing had been done to
prevent the heavy death rate of the native children
and sickness of the adults, who, as he said, were
" carrying the country on their backs " ; and he
called special attention to the need of improved
health services and decent housing for natives in
the urban districts and for more adequate wages
and living conditions. " We have," he concluded,
" accepted the idea of trusteeship ; we must now
begin to carry out our obligations " ; and he
found much encouragement for the future in
" the excellent feeling in the armies of North
Africa between natives, not only from South
Africa," and their comrades of European descent.
Undoubtedly the growing claims of the natives
for better conditions and more opportunity to
control their own affairs are meeting a response
from many of their Dutch .and British fellow-
citizens. Hofmeyr, one of Smuts's chief ministers,
has always been the staunch apostle of native
rights ; of another minister and special confidant
of Smuts, Deneys Reitz, Minister of Native
Affairs until he went to London as High Com-
missioner, the Native Representative Council
184

SMUTS ON NATIVE PROBLEMS

recorded its " appreciation of the meritorious
services [he] rendered to the cause of Bantu
progress. By his courageous utterances on Union
native policy and his obvious determination to see
justice done to the African he did much to restore
the confidence of the African people in the
Ministry of Native Affairs." Then the presence
in the South African Parliament of the earnest
advocates elected as their representatives by the
natives in council enables the native point of view
to be effectively presented. In the Transvaal
alone the number of native children in school has
sensibly increased, and the Union grant for that
purpose has risen by over 220,000 in three years.
Enlightened mine managers, too, on the reef and
other employers of native labour have for some
years been improving the conditions of native
labour and even encouraging the native workers
to discuss their own wants and suggest im-
provements.*

In many other ways evidence is given, not only
of the growing claims of the natives for better
conditions of life and more opportunities to gain
control of their own concerns, but also of the help
given them to satisfy these claims by many of

* When I was on a visit to Johannesburg in 1936 I was
privileged to attend a discussion group of native mine-workers on
the Rand, in a club-room reserved for them by the managers,
where there was no attempt to interfere with the free debate by
any European. An address, on 28 February, 1945, by the
High Commissioner for the Union of South Africa to the Royal
Empire and Royal African Councils gives an encouraging
account of recent advances in Native policy.

'85

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

their Dutch and British South African fellow-
citizens. The South African Outlook^ " a monthly
journal dealing with missionary and racial
affairs," gives interesting particulars of native
life, native grievances and more and more of the
evident inclination not only of the government
but also of some of the great industrial organisa-
tions to meet their just demands. We find in it,
for example, an interesting report from a judicial
commission on riots at the Pretoria municipal
compounds, the main conclusions of which are
that the city council should " improve the living
conditions of its native employees," that the
natives should have an " improved scale of
rations," and that " an endeavour should be made
to give reasonable satisfaction to the native
demand for some voice in the management of
their own affairs." It is encouraging, too, to read
of a Johannesburg Joint Council of Africans and
Europeans with its Bantu Children's Holiday
Home at the seaside, where sick African children
are sent for a couple of weeks' convalescence, of
the raising of salaries for teachers in native
secondary schools, of proposals for raising the very
low pay of natives in the mines, and of no colour
line being admitted for benefits by the South
African Gifts and Comforts Fund and the South
African Red Cross during the war. There is also
a quarterly magazine, Race Relations, dealing with
such subjects as the Crisis in Native Education,
Immigration and the Future of the Non-Europeans
1 86

SMUTS ON NATIVE PROBLEMS

and the Record of a Joint Council established in
the mining district of Germiston " to promote
the welfare of the country through discussion
and co-operation between Europeans and non-
Europeans." E pur se muove.

There is still of course a good deal of appre-
hension among many of the backveld and even of
other South Africans who dread the danger of too
well-educated natives rising in their millions
against the much smaller dominant Anglo-Boer
community, but the example set by Smuts,
Hofineyr and Deneys Reitz is gradually bringing
home the almost certain truth that a general rise
in native education and fairer dealing will only
result in a more homogeneous community of South
Africans, black as well as white, co-operating in
an even more stable and self-respecting state.

(ii) EMPIRE PROBLEMS

Smuts, like Churchill, has been an indefatigable
traveller during the war, visiting his men wherever
they might be fighting in Africa or in Italy
heartening them by his presence and rejoicing in
their successes. He also kept well in touch with
the centre of the Empire by visits to England. His
work indeed both for South Africa and for the
British Commonwealth of Nations was fully
recognised in May, 1941, by the award to him of
the supreme military distinction of Field-Marshal
in the British Army ; though at home in South
Africa he and his people still affectionately cling

187

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

by preference to his title of General, the rank he
held during the South African war as one of the
outstanding leaders of a Boer commando, and
also, after the Union, when he commanded British
and Boer South African units in the East African
campaign.

In his visits to England, as usual, he was called
upon to address enthusiastic audiences, who were
always heartened by his confident views on the
ultimate results of the war and on the whole-
hearted unity of the British Commonwealth of
Nations. Among his speeches specially to be
noted is his address to both Houses of Parlia-
ment on 21 October, 1942, in which he paid this
notable tribute to our own Prime Minister and the
spirit of our nation : " He [Churchill] remains
the embodiment of the spirit of eternal youth and
resilience, the spirit of a great undying nation in
one of the greatest moments of history. Let us
recognise with gratitude that we have been nobly
blessed with wonderful leadership, both in the last
war and in this ... I speak of that inward
glory, that splendour of the spirit which has shone
over this land from the soul of its people . . .
I feel I have come to a greater, prouder, more
glorious home of the free than I ever learned to
know in its palmiest days. This is the glory of the
spirit, which sees and knows no defeat or loss but
. . . sustains the will to final victory." In the
concluding words of this speech he turns to the
future of the world, expressing a hope that this
188

SMUTS ON EMPIRE PROBLEMS

struggle will bring about a new spirit of human
solidarity between nations and result in much-
needed improvements in our health, housing,
education and decent social amenities : " May it
be our privilege to see that this suffering, this
travail and search of man's spirit shall not be in
vain."

A year later, encouraged by the result of the
general election in South Africa, he was able to
spend some two months in England for further
consultation on war plans. This time he was
called upon to address a representative audience
at the Guildhall in October, and to make another
speech to a meeting of both Houses of Parliament
in November. Now too he could speak with more
assured confidence in a complete victory for the
Allies and go on to consider the methods to adopt
for securing the future peace of the world. Spec-
ially interesting and suggestive was the second of
these addresses, in which he outlined his ideas
about the future of the British Empire. Assuming
that the end of the war would result in the pre-
dominance of the three great Powers, " Russia the
colossus of Europe, Great Britain with her feet in
all continents, but crippled materially here in
Europe, and the United States of America with
enormous assets, with wealth and resources and
potentialities of power beyond measure," he is
specially concerned with the future of Great
Britain. In Europe he foresees that Great Britain,
as contrasted with Russia and the United States

189

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

with their vast internal resources, will be weak in
her European resources, and suggests that we
should strengthen ourselves here " by working
closely together with the smaller democracies in
Western Europe, which are of our way of thinking,
. . . but which by themselves may be lost, as
they are lost to-day, and as they may be lost
again." In this way Great Britain, he believes,
may still, as protector and close ally of these
liberal democracies, preserve her position as one
of the great pacific powers of Europe. Turning
then to Great Britain's supreme source of strength
as leader of the world-wide agglomeration of self-
ruling states and dependencies within the British
Empire, he has nothing but praise for " the
strength of soul, the inner freedom " which
characterize the free relations between the Mother
Country and her self-governing Dominions. But,
as he had said as early as 1930, " the last ten years
have been devoted to the elaboration and per-
fection of the freedom of the Dominions ; the next
ten years should be given to the elaboration of
co-operation within the Commonwealth."

On the other hand, as opposed to this principle
of decentralization, there is the closely centralized
system of our Colonial Empire, scattered as it is
all over the globe ; and he doubts whether such
a dual system can endure within the Empire
centralized and the Commonwealth decentralized.
Accordingly he suggests that it is necessary to
reduce the number of independent colonial units
190

SMUTS ON EMPIRE PROBLEMS

and group others, " and so tidy up the show." In
this connection Smuts's abortive attempt in 1923
to induce the new self-governing colony of
Southern Rhodesia to join up with the Union*
will be remembered. Now he was in a much
stronger position for pressing his suggestion for
" tidying up the show." Southern Rhodesia had
already gone so far as to put its war contingents
under his command, t Since then the Colonial
Office has recently established a consultative
council to discuss the common interests of the
Southern and Northeryl Rhodesias and Nyasa-
land ; and Southern Rhodesia is already deman-
ding that these three colonies should be amalga-
mated under one government. J If such an
amalgamation took place it would no doubt be
but the prelude to the design attributed to Smuts,
though never so far expressed by him publicly, of
comprehending within the Union of South Africa
itself these three northern colonies, which, with
the addition of South- West Africa, already man-
dated to the Union, would create a Dominion, or
Union, for the whole of Southern Africa.

To Smuts himself and to South Africans gen-
erally no doubt the most pressing scheme for
" tidying up the show " relates to the three native
territories, Basutoland, Swaziland and Bechuana-
land, which, though on or within the borders of

* See above, pp. 129-30.
t See above, pp. 164-5.

J An interesting leading article in South Africa of 28th October,
1941, prases for such a solution.

B8* 191

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

the Union, are still under a High Commissioner
sent from England. South Africa has long been
anxious to incorporate them within the Union,
a transfer which no doubt would long ago have
been effected, were it not for the fact that all three
tribes prefer to remain under the Imperial
government. It remains to be seen how far the
more liberal native policy urged by Smuts* will
remove their objections, and satisfy Downing
Street.

Suggestive, too, was the Letter which, at the
request of the Council for Education in World
Citizenship, Smuts sent on Armistice Day, 1943, to
the Youth of Britain. Recalling that twice before
he had been invited to send similar letters in
1931, " when the small storm cloud was gathering
far away in Manchuria," in 1937, " when the
threatening storm centre had passed to Africa, to
Abyssinia ; and now when the storm has burst
and spread over the whole world ... so do
small mistakes lead in the end of their immeasur-
able consequences." Telling of a talk he had
recently " with one of the greatest scientists in the
worldf who had escaped from the Nazis, he found
him " strangely optimistic ; in spite of the
catastrophe which had so suddenly overtaken
them ; they felt that England was bound to win
in the 9nd, and that all they had lost would be
recovered again . . . Millions have lost their

See above, pp. 183-4.
t Einstein presumably.
192

SMUTS ON EMPIRE PROBLEMS

lives, many more millions have lost all hope, and
drift along like dumb, driven cattle. But some-
thing remains, greater than disaster, greater than
all the countless losses. It is faith, faith in our
cause, faith in good, faith in God. Truly it is no
world tonday for easy optimism, but for holding
on with both hands and with our very souls to the
things we believe in, the things which have raised
us above the mere animal level, and have never
let us down. Faith is the password " ; a truly
heartening message and one that no man more
than Smuts is justified in handing down to the
young.

Both as leader of his country and as far-seeing
statesman of the Empire, Smuts was naturally
called upon to play an important part in formu-
lating the post-war settlement. Arriving in
London on 3 April, 1945, in his aeroplane which,
incidentally, had been struck by lightning in the
middle of Africa, he attended an Empire con-
ference before proceeding to the San Francisco
Convention which was to draw up the Charter of
the United Nations. There his main work was as
president of the commission to deal with all
matters connected with the General Assembly,
which included provisions for security, the creation
of a Social and Economic Council and the system

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

of Trusteeship. He was also in demand for con-
sultation and discussion on the numberless difficult
problems which cropped up in other departments
of the Convention, and was entrusted with the
drafting of the Charter's Preamble, which, with
slight amendments, was adopted by the Convention
in the following form :

" We, the peoples of the United Nations, deter-
mined to save succeeding generations from the
scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,
in the dignity and value of the human person,
in the equal rights of men and women and of
nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice
and respect for the obligations arising from
treaties and other sources of international law
can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards
of life in larger freedom,

and for these ends

to practise tolerance and live together in peace
with one another as good neighbours, and

to unite our strength to maintain international
peace and security, and

by the accepting of principles and the institution
of methods to insure that armed force shall not be
used, save in the common interest, and

to employ international machinery for the pro-
motion of economic and social advancement of all

SMUTS ON EMPIRE PROBLEMS

peoples have resolved to combine our efforts to
accomplish these aims.

Accordingly, our respective Governments,
through representatives assembled in the City of
San Francisco, who have exhibited their full
powers found to be in good and due form, have
agreed to the present charter of the United
Nations and do hereby establish an international
organization to be known as the United Nations."

On May 1 he presided over a plenary session
of the Convention in which he urged strongly that
the five Great Powers' unanimity for taking action
was essential ; and by the calm force of his wisdom
prevented a breaking up of the proceedings on this
crucial question.

Not content with his arduous labours at San
Francisco, at their conclusion this gallant young
man of 75 found time and energy to address the
Canadian Club at Ottawa. In this address he
spoke on his favourite theme that " the human
soul is not in the long run satisfied with material
goods. Man cannot live by bread and comfort
alone. . . If he has no right sense of ultimate
values, he will (as the Nazis did) create false
debased values, which always end in brute force.
At heart our human problem is this issue of
ultimate values, of ultimate beliefs, of religion,
the recession or decay of which has been, and

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

may be again, the precursor of untold mis-
fortunes to mankind." On 2 July he flew
to London ; had a great reception from South
African returned prisoners of war at Brighton ;
visited the South African troops still in Italy and
Egypt and finally arrived at Pretoria on 16 July.
During his three and a half months' absence he
had flown 29,000 miles and, when not in the air,
had been working unceasingly. Small wonder
that his South Africans gave him the greatest
home-coming welcome accorded to any South
African, as he made his triumphal progress through
Pretoria's crowded streets, lined with troops and
with an aerial escort, to the Union buildings. He
himself said at San Fransciso that this was " the
last battle of the old war-horse " credat Judxus.

(iii) SMUTS AT HOME

We have seen in an earlier chapter how closely
Jan Smuts and Sibella Kriege Jannie and Isie
as they arc known to their closest friends were
bound together, ahjiost from childhood, by
common interests and enthusiasms an intimacy
hardly interrupted by Smuts's absence at Gam-
bridge and the English bar, and in May, 1897,
when he was finding his feet at the Johannesburg
bar, crowned by their happy marriage.* But by
that time the storm was gathering which for over
two years was to part husband and wife. After

* See above pp. 23-5, 27.

SMUTS AT HOME

the occupation of Pretoria by Roberts in the
middle of 1900 the Boer Government had been
dispersed, and Smuts began his apprenticeship for
the guerilla warfare which eventually brought
him through the Free State and Cape Colony
almost up to its north-western border.

At first Mrs. Smuts stayed on at Pretoria, where
their little son, their only child so far, died. Later
she was deported by the British to Pietermaritz-
burg in Natal. Not only did she never see her
husband during these two years, but received no
letters from him, only stray rumours, generally to
the effect that he had been killed. While in Natal
she was anxious to help the other mothers and give
some teaching to the children in the concentration
camps, but was not allowed to do any teaching ;
and she suffered all the more in her enforced idle-
ness, under her bereavement by the little son's
death, by her anxiety about her husband's fate,
and from her grief and horror at the deaths of
many thousand women and children in the
concentration camps.

After the treaty of Vereeniging, Smuts and his
wife returned to Pretoria, he to resume his
practice at the bar, and both at first embittered
by the results of the peace and the grievances they
felt against the Milner regime. She, even more
than her husband, lived a very quiet life here,
quite independent of society of any kind, busying
herself chiefly with her new babies, her books and

'97

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

her household affairs. At that time she seldom
wrote even to well-tried friends in England, such
as Miss Hobhouse, who had exposed the evils of
the concentration camps, but if any such came to
see her she always had a warm welcome for them.
She fully shared the views expressed by her
husband in a letter to Miss Hobhouse which was
published in England, 1 " and on one occasion
created quite a flutter in government circles by
appearing in the Pretoria Zoological Gardens with
a Vierklcur flag as a kerchief draped across her
breast.

But when, in May, 1904, Botha founded Het
Volkfi not only to reconcile the so-called Hands-
uppers who had fallen by the way with the more
stalwart Bitter-enders, but also to give voice to the
needs of the Boer people, not in opposition to, but
in co-operation with the English section of the
community, she, with her husband, threw herself
enthusiastically into the movement. Thereafter,
always in close unity with him, she entered more
and more into the greatness of his work in building
up co-operation between those who, in the past,
had fought each other. Under her leadership a
band of women colleagues went about the country
with her, travelling on arduous journeys, arousing
and organizing the interest of women in the cause.
Her organizing powers at elections were put to

* See p. 52.

t See above, p. 53.

198

SMUTS AT HOME

even more important use during the last and the
present wars. She has always loved young people,
so it was natural that the fighting forces of South
Africa stirred her deepest sympathy. In both wars,
especially in this one, she has been foremost in
arranging from home for their support in every
way that her quick understanding prompted ;
gifts and comforts in well thought out detail have
been sent under her inspiration to every front
where South African soldiers, English- or
Afrikaans-speaking, as well as native and coloured
auxiliaries, are to be found. In this connexion
Smuts himself, hard worker as he is, has often said
that he could never have done what she has
accomplished.

At home Smuts and his wife have been blessed
with three daughters and three more sons to succeed
the son they lost in those three bitter years of the
Boer War Santa, married to Mr. Weyers, the
manager of Smuts's home farm, who has three
children ; Gato, who married an English girl,
Miss Clark, and has five children ; Jacob Daniel,
"Jappie," born 1906, now married with four
daughters ; Sylma, who married an English South
African ; Jannie Christiaan, born 1912, married
to an English South African girl ; Louis Annie
(named after Botha and his wife), born 1914, now
a qualified doctor and married to an Ulsterman.
When their father came back in 1919 after his
long absence in German East Africa, in England

199

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

and the continent, the two youngest children
barely knew him, while the eldest thought he
should not have signed the Treaty of, Versailles.*
At any rate it looks as if the Jannie and Sibclla
Smuts stock is not likely to be soon extinguished.

When in office, during the parliamentary
session, Smuts lives at Groote Schoor in the Cape
peninsula, left by Rhodes to the prime minister of
the Union he foresaw : but, beautiful as its house
and grounds are, it is inconvenient in many ways
and expensive to keep up. Smuts's real home is
at Irene, the next station to Pretoria on the railway
to Johannesburg. Originally bought in a some-
what ramshackle condition shortly after the Boer
War, it was then quite small, but has gradually
been enlarged, somewhat at haphazard, to meet
the needs of a growing family. It is still a modest,
typically Boer house, with its wide stoep, the chief
meeting-place of the family and of his numerous
visitors.

Like Botha, too, Smuts has aspirations to be
a farmer. He cultivates, with the help of a
manager, the farm comprised in his Irene property
and keeps there a prize bull and pedigree cattle.
He also owns a back-veld farm, seventy miles north
of Pretoria, where he has a herd of Afrikaner
cattle for trek-work ; and, considering his other
manifold activities as statesman, philosopher and
writer, he has proved successful even in that field,

* Mrs. Millin, World Block Out, 70.
3OO

SMUTS AT HOME

In their hospitable home at Irene, both Smuts
and his wife are only too glad to welcome their
numerous visitors from all parts of the world ; and
fortunate are those invited to stay for the family
tea, presided over by Mrs. Smuts, where the
general talk is unrestrained and always interesting.
Specially favoured guests are then sometimes
invited to a private talk with the master himself in
his vast library, his special sanctum and the most
notable room in the house.* Smuts's library con-
tains the books he needs for his almost encyclopaedic
interests books on philosophy, religion, science in
all its branches, history political and constitu-
tional memoirs, military strategy and tactics,
poetry. He himself is a voracious reader, able,
even in the times of the greatest political or military
crises, to throw off for the moment the affairs of
state to master some new book on an apparently
extraneous topic. In the black December of 1939,
for example, he remarked casually to a friend :
" I've been reading two new books about Jesus, by
a Frenchman and a Jew."f I n reality such a
confession may not be so paradoxical as it at first
sight appears : for after all the primum mobile for
Smuts in all his hotly-contested wars has been to
clear away tyrannies and shackles on the human
spirit and get down to the really important business
of peace, the abolition of tyranny and the growth

* A delightful account of Smuts's table-talk is given in
B. K. Long's In Smuts's Camp, pp. 86-91.

t Mfflin, World Black Out, 70.

201

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

of the human spirit. As he himself once said to an
American friend during a night talk together in
the Kruger Park : " I have but* one merit, that
of never despairing. I remain at heart an opti-
mist ; " an optimism which his friend attributed
to " His bodily vigour, his power of work, the
range and clarity of his mind, his delight in the
fauna and flora of his own beloved native land,
his immense interest in almost every phase of
science . . . and his sure conviction that in
this world Good is finally more powerful than
Evil."*

* I. W. Lament, Smuts, World Leader in War and Peace t in
Saturday Review of Literature, N.Y., 6 May, 1944.

I am deeply indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Gillctt, friends of
General Smuts for nearly a quarter of a century, for information
in this and many other chapters.

2O2

Chapter Twelve

Botha and Smuts Par Nobile
Fratrum

'TT'HERE can be few, if any, parallels in history
JL of such close co-operation between two
statesmen, so utterly different in training, attain-
ments and character, as that between Botha and
Smuts. Richelieu and Father Joseph may at first
sight come to mind ; but in that instance, though
there was close co-operation directed towards the
same ultimate objects, the statesman and the
subterranean worker were always strictly in the
relation of master and servant. Botha and Smuts,
on the other hand, are always rightly thought of
as colleagues and the closest of friends, each having
the same objects, and each contributing his own
special characteristics to the furtherance of their
common aims. Among our own statesmen, the
close alliance of Cobden, the great thinker on free
trade, and Bright, the great orator of the move-
ment, may be a closer parallel to the great South
African pair.

Both South African statesmen took a leading
part in persuading their people to agree to the
treaty of Vereeniging, not because they liked it,

203

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

but because they realized that it was the only
means left for preserving them as a people at all.
Having accomplished this as the first step to
resurgence for a time, but only for a brief time,
the two took different lines. Botha forthwith set
himself to revive the spirit of his Boer fellow-
countrymen, constituting himself their natural
leader and adviser in all their difficulties, pressing
their claims on the Milner government, and setting
them an example of good husbandry in giving up
his ruined farm at Vryheid and gradually building
up a new model farm with first-class stock and
up-to-date equipment at Standerton. Smuts,
perhaps for the only time in his life, gave way to
despair and bitterness of spirit, but this phase
lasted only until, in 1904, Botha started organizing
Het Volk to express the grievances and aspirations
of his people and so to exert pressure on the
British government. Smuts at once joined the
new organisation with enthusiasm ; and forth-
with became one of its main leaders after Botha.
Then, on the formation of the Campbell Banner-
man government, he went, with Botha's blessing,
to England to press his country's claims to have a
voice in their own affairs, and was doubtless largely
instrumental in persuading the prime minister to
make his wise and magnificent gesture, to confer
the franchise on those who only four years before
had been England's enemies in the field.

From this time forward Botha and Smuts
became the almost undisputed leaders of South

BOTHA AND SMUTS PAR NOBILE FRATRUM

Africa, bound together not merely by patriotic
aims but also by the closest personal affection.
In this happy combination Botha, Oubaas the old
chief was the man of poise and sober judgment,
Smuts the brilliant adventurer, onze Jannic, the
Klein Baas, as he was called by the chief for whom
he had an almost filial love. It was they who, after
the brief period of responsible government in the
Transvaal and the Free State, were the leading
spirits in settling the form of Union adopted by the
four South African colonies. They also were the
only two ministers who counted in the first two
Union ministries until the death of Botha in 1919.
No two men could have been better complements
to one another. Botha was one of those rare men
who appear, and are, solid as a rock. Not clever,
nor, as a rule, quick in arriving at his decisions,
more sensitive than Smuts to opposition, he had
his occasional fits of depression : but when, after
discussions with his fellow-countrymen, sometimes
carried on to inordinate length, he had once made
up his mind, he was immovable in abiding by the
decision he had come to. Smuts, on the other hand,
impatient of long discussions and relying mainly
on the cabinet of his own mind, often came to his
decisions secretly and rapidly, much to the dis-
turbance of his slow-thinking fellow-Boers and
sometimes even of the more agile-minded English
section. Instances of such surprise decisions may
be found in his secret deportation of labour leaders
after the riots and strike in Johannesburg in 1914,

205

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

and his own secret and risky journey to the same
city to deal, personally and unguarded, with the
even more serious riots in 1922.*

Of the two, Botha was less an object of violent
attack from his own Boer nationals than Smuts.
Always more accessible to the common man, a
farmer himself, as were most of his own country-
men, and so easily understanding their difficulties,
Botha was always willing to talk with them on
topics with which they were familiar, as the old
President, Kruger, used to do on his stoep. But
even he had his moments of depression, especially
in the last few years of his life, when he was left
alone without his beloved Jannie, then in England, .
to help him, and when he was laid low by
his growing illness and had increasing difficulties
with his own countrymen. But even then, as
appears in Lord Buxton's loving appreciation of
him, he still had brave powers of resilience.
Happily in the last years of his life he was able to
rejoin Smuts at Versailles and to persuade him to
agree to the treaty, though both of them disagreed
with some of its provisions, so that the League of
Nations clauses, so dear to them both, might be
preserved. Even his opponents could assent to
Smuts's touching words at his burial : " the
greatest, cleanest, sweetest soul of all my days."
To us in this country he must always appear as
one of the great bulwarks of our safety by his
staunch adherence to the oath he had taken at

* See above, pp. 87, 128-9.
206

BOTHA AND SMUTS PAR NOBILE FRATRUM

Vereeniging and to the debt he owed us in
icturning to our Boer fellow-citizens of the Empire
the practical independence they had lost in the
Boer War.

Smuts is a far more complicated character. He
is not only a statesman and a successful soldier in
war, but also a notable student and philosopher,
with a complete theory of the universe of his own.
Indeed, one might call him one of the most all-
embracing geniuses of our age. This very
diversity of interests has made him suspect to
many, both here and in South Africa, who cannot
believe that such a comprehension of so many
interests does not conceal some hidden flaw. But
in his variegated career he has always, when the
need has appeared, put first things first. As a
soldier in the Boer War, and in German West
and East Africa he was absorbed in military needs
and strategy to the temporary exclusion of all his
other interests. As a statesman in South African
politics before the Boer War and as minister after
the war, his only rival to pre-eminence was his
friend Botha, during Botha's too short-lived career.
Nor has his statecraft been limited to South Africa.
During the last war he took a notable part in
British and continental politics and administration,
and he has been one of the foremost advocates of
the League of Nations, which owed much to his
enthusiastic initiative and support, both at its
inception at Versailles and since then by hearten-
ing addresses delivered in Europe, America and

207

BOTHA, SMUTS AND SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa. In this present war he has still
shown himself pregnant of wise counsels for ths
rehabilitation of a shattered world. In his
politics he has never been static, especially in his
growing appreciation of the need for developiijg
and encouraging better treatment of the native
races and for giving them more direct control of
their own affairs. As an athlete he has long been
known as a formidable mountaineer on the by no
means negligible mountains of South Africa.
Last, but not least, he has a philosophy of life and
the universe expounded in his eloquent and
attractive volume on Holism.

How far does this almost universal genius of his
carry conviction, it may be asked. To be entirely
popular he has perhaps spread himself too much.
No one section of the populations he has addressed
in person or through his books feels inclined to
award him the highest palm, for there is always an
instinctive distrust of the universal genius. Never-
theless there can be no question but that he is one
of the most vital and effective personalities of his
age, whether as statesman, soldier or thinker.
How far is he popular ? In this country immensely
so, by his understanding of our way of life, of our
politics and of our literature, and his readiness to
express his sincere admiration of the charac-
teristics of which we are most proud. As to his
popularity in his own country I once asked one
of his dearest friends if the remark of one of his
biographers that he was " the idol of the army "
ao8

BOTHA AND SMUTS *AR NOBILE FRATRUM

was true. " No," was the reply, u hardly that :
he is respected, but hardly popular," a verdict
which would probably satisfy Smuts himself.
Today, however, the wonderful enthusiasm with
which Oubaas (as he is now in turn called) was
acclaimed by the gigantic gathering of all sections
of the South African community, on his return
from San Francisco in July, 1945, indicates that he
has attained popularity as well as profound
respect.

To both these great men may be applied that
brave Boer motto :

Alles zal recht kom.

209

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following books and pamphlets have been found to
be useful material for this book.

Annual Register (various dates).

H. C. Armstrong, Grey Steel (i.e., J. C. Smuts), 1937.

Lord Buxton, General Botha, 1924.

A. F. Campbell, Smuts and the Swastika, 1942. General

Smuts, 1943.
J. J. Collyer, The Africans with General Smuts in German East

Africa, 1939.

F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1944.

J. H. V. Crowe, General Smuts 9 s Campaign in East Africa, 1918.
P. V. Engelengbcrg, General .Louis Botha, 1929.
J. H. Hofmeyr, South Africa.*
R. H. Kiernan, General Smuts, 1943.
J. W. Lament, Smuts : World Leader in War and Peace, in

Saturday Review of Literature, N.Y., May, 1944.
N. Leyis, Jan Smuts, 1917.
D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs (v.d.)

B. K. Long, In Smuts 1 s Camp, 1945.

Sir Chas. Lucas, The Empire at War, Vol. 4, 1925.

S. G. Millin, General Smuts, 2 Vols.; World Black-out, 1944.

The Reeling Earth, 1945.
L. . Ncame, General Hertzog, 1930.
Official History of the Great, War ; East Africa I, 1941.
Race Relations News, a monthly bulletin on native questions.
D. Reitz, On Commando, Trekking On, No Outspan (v.d.)
. W. Smith, Aggrey of Africa, A Study in Black and White,

1929. (Useful for native questions).
H. Spender, General Botha.
J. C. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1926. Reviewed in :

Journal of Philosophic Studies, 1927. Nature, 1927.

International Journal of Ethics, 1926-27.
Addresses by f Africa and Some World Problems, 1930.
Gen. Smuts \ Freedom, 1934. And many others.

sio

South African House of Assembly Debates.

Von Lcttow Vorbcck, My Reminiscences in E. Africa, 1920.

South African Outlook. (Useful for native questions).

South Africa 9 weekly journal published in London.

E. Walker, The British Empire.

Sir E. Walton, Inner History of National Convention of South

Africa, 1912.
Basil Williams, Cecil Rhodes; Articles on Botha in D.N.B. ;

South Africa in Encycl. Brit.

I have also been much helped by information given in
talks and letters of the late Deneys Reitz, S. E. Goetzee
at South Africa House, and many others.

2ZZ

Index

African Field Force, 166
Afrikander Bond, 13, 14
Air Force (S.A.), 168
America, Smuts lectures in,

133, 142
Angola, 7
Askaris, 102-3

Bakenlaagte, 43

Balfour, A. J. (Earl), defines
Empire, 144, 146

Ballingcr, Mrs., 151, 182

Basutos, 12

Beira, 7

Beves, Col., 96

Beyers, Gen., in Boer rising,
89-91

Bitter-enders, 53, 198

Bloemfontein Convention, 5 ;
Conference, 29, 30

Boer farmers in Cape, 11-14

Botha, Louis Birth, family,
early life, i, 16-19 ;
marriage, 19, 20 ; at Vry-
heid and Swaziland, 19, 20 ;
in Volksraad, 21-2 ; in
S. African War, ch. Ill ;
Commandant General,
35-6 ; saves gold mines, 37 ;
seizes bank deposit, 39 ;
organizes guerilla war, 41 ;
meets Kitchener in 1901, 42;
destroys Benson's Column,
43 ; at Vereeniging, 47-8 ;
to Europe, 49, 50 ; farm at
Standerton, 50 ; gets French "
sheep, 50-1; 53; 55-7 ; P.M.
of T.V., 56-60, 62 ; at
Imperial Conference, 62 ;
for Union, 63-4 ; at Na*
tional Convention, 66-71 ;
P.M. of S.A., 72-4 ; on
Smuts, 75-6, 120 ; on Hert-
zog, 82-5 ; and Boer rising,
88-93; i** German S.W.

Africa, 94-100 ; at general
election, 1915, 100 ; in
front line, 103 ; in E. Africa,
1 06 ; difficulties in S.A.,
109-10, 116-7 > andBuxton,
118-9 ; at Versailles, 120-3
last speech, 124 ; death and
funeral, 123-5; I26 J 1 7&'
198 ; summary, 202-8

Botha, Mrs. (Annie Emmet),
19, 20, 118

Brand, Sir J. H., 62

Brits, Coen, 91

Buller, Gen. Sir Redvers,
33-6, 38

Burger, S. W.V.-Pres. of T.V., 6

Buxton, Sidney, Earl, and
Botha, 16, 74, 90, 93, 95,
98, no, 118, 205

Campbell Bannerman, Sir H.,

gives resp. govt., 54-5 ; 71 ;

death, 56; 203
Cape Colony, early history,

1-3, 8-10 ; resp. govt., 10

(see too Boer farmers)
Carnarvon, Lord, 6, 70
Chamberlain, Joseph, 15, 29
Chinese on mines, 52 ; sent

back, 60-1
Churchill, Rt. Hon. W., cap-

tured by Botha, 33, 158-^,

165

Colenso battle, 33-4
Concentration camps, 49
Cronje, Gen., surrenders, 35
Gullinan diamond, 62
Curtis, Lionel, 64

Defence scheme (S.A.), 77-81,

88

Delagoa Bay, 7
De la Key, J. H., 40-1, 43. 7

3X3

INDEX

De Valera, Eamon, talk with

Smuts, 128
Deventer, Sir J. L. V., Gen. in

E. Africa, 104-7
DC Vffliers, Lord, 70
DC Wet, C. R.,gucrilla fighter,

41, 43 ; his Three Tears' War,

46 ; in rebellion, 90-1, 93
Diamond fields, 9
Diamond Hill battle, 38, 40
Dinizulu, Zulu Chief, 19, 65
Doornkop, 37
Duncan, Sir Patrick, 146 ;

Gov. Gen., 154
Durban, 4
Dutch in S.A. divided on war,

1 60
Du Toit, Rev. S. J,, 12, 13

East Africa, German, cam-
paign, 1 01-9

Emmet, J. C., Mrs. Botha's
father, 19, 20

European population in S.A.,
181

Farrar, Sir Geo., 70
Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, 71 (note),

French, J. D. P., F.M., E. of
Ypres, and Smuts, 44-6, 112
Frcre, Sir Bartlc, 70

Galekas, 12

Gandhi, Mahatma, 62, 75-7

General elections (S.A.), 100,

126-7, 130, 176-7
George V, Smuts on, 128
German danger to S.A., 162-3
German E. Africa, 8 ; Cam-
paign, 101-9 (see too Tan-
German S. W. Africa, 7 ; Cam-
paign, 94-100, 155
Gillctt, Mr. and Mrs., friends
of Smuts, 201 (note)

Gladstone, Herbert, Vst., G.G.

72,85

Glen Grey Act, 14, 182
Gold discoveries in T.V., 9, 10
Gold Standard, 144, 146
Gough Gen., reverse, 43, 75
Greene, Conyngham and

Smuts, 30
Grey, Sir George, govr. of

C.C., 70
Griqualand West transferred

to C.C., 9, 10
Groote Schuur, 199

Haldane, R. B., Vst., 79
Hands-uppers, 53, 56, 198
Harlech, Lord, H. C. in S.A.,

180-1

Hertzog, Jan H., 43, 61 ;
two stream policy, 82-5 ;
opposition, 109-10, 127-8 ;
on Botha, 120; P.M. after
election, 129-30, 142-5 J
coalition with Smuts, 145-8 ;
character, 147 ; native poli-
cy, 149-50 ; on Germany
and war, 151-6 ; resigns,
154; 155; pension, 156;
death, 157; 158; 168
Het Volk, 53-4, 56-?, 198
Hcyderick, Col., 95, 98
Hobhouse, Eleanor, 52, 197
Hofmeyr, Jan. H. (elder),

12-14, 25-6, 64-5

Hofmeyr, J. H. (nephew), 77,

146 ; resigns on native

question, 150 ; in Smuts's

cabinet, 154 ; his value,

172 ; on natives, 184, 187

Holism and Evolution, 24, 131-2,

135-42,207
Huguenots at Cape, 2

Imperial Conferences, 62, 83
Indians in T.V., 76-7 ; in
Union, 181

INDEX

Inter-colonial Council, 64-5
Isandhlwana, 6
Iscor, 168-9

Jabavu, Tengo, 151
Jameson, Sir Lcandcr Star,

raid, 15, 21, 26, 29, 62,

68, 70, 72
Johannesburg captured, 37 ;

riots, 86-7, 99, "8-9
Joubert, P. J., 6, 21 ; in S.A.

War, 32-5 ; death, 35, 36

Keate award, 9

Kilimanjaro Mm., 103

Kindergarten, Milner's, 64, 66

Kitchener, H.H., Earl, meets
Botha, 42 ; proclamation to
Boers, 42-3 ; at Vereeniging

47-8

Kok, Adam, on God's help,
158-9

Konigsberg sunk, 101

K6tze, Judge, 37

Kriege, Mrs. Smuts's brother

Kriege, Sibella (see Smuts,
Mrs.)

Kruger National Park, 148

Krugcr, Paul, 3, 6, 10, 14-15,
21-2 ; and Smuts, 27-8 ;
at Bloemfontein, etc., 29,
30 ; 36 ; escapes from Pre-
toria, 38-9 ; 70, 117, 205

Ladysmith, siege and relief,

Lansing, Robert, on Botha and

Smuts, 119-20
Lanyon, Sir Owen, 6
League of Nations, 121-2,

142, 206

Leibhrant, boxer, arrested, 177
Lettow Vorbeck, von, 102,

104-5, 107-8

Lloyd George, David (Earl),

and Smuts, 113-16
Lyttelton, Alfred, constitution,

Lyttelton, Gen. Sir Neville,
179

Maitland, Sir Peregrine, govr.

of G.C., 24
Majuba, 6
Malan, Dr., motions against

Smuts, 155-6, 177
Manufactures, War, in S.A.,

169-71
Mareuil, Gte de Villebois

volunteer with Boers, 36
Maritz, rebel, 96
Meredith, George, rejects

Smuts's first book, 25
Merriman, J. X., P.M. of G.C.,

57, 64, 70, 72
Meyer, Lukas, 19, 21, 32
Milner, Sir Alfred, Vst. H.C.

at Cape, 29, 30, 35, 39, 40 ;

at Vereeniging, 47, 51-2,

57,61 64
Missionaries, German, Smuts

on, 105
Morgann, Maurice, Falstaff

quoted, 137-3

Nachtmaal, Annual, 1 1

Natal founded, 4, 8 1 ; minister
resigns, 85 ; threat of seces-
sion, 142, 144

National Convention (Union),
66-71

National Scouts, 48, 53

Nationalist party, 44-5

Natives (S. A.), education, 181 ;
enrolled in war, 166-7
franchise in C.C., 10,
146-7; abolished, 149-51;
in mines etc., 181*2 ;
Land Trust, 182-3, l8 5

INDEX

Ookicp, 45

'Orange flash', 166, 174

Orange Free State, 55, 64,

8 1-2
Ossewa-Brandwag, 161-2, 177

Paardeberg, 35

Pienaar, Gen., 174

Pieter's Hill, 35

Pirow, O. M. L. A., 156, 177

Poor Whites, 181

Population of Union, 180-1

Pretoria captured, 37, 51

Rain Queen, 180

Reitz, Deneys, on Boer politics,
I3 44, 53, I2 4 i jaunts with
Smuts, 131-2, 146-9, 153,
1 68 ; in Smuts's ministry,
154, 1 60, 162 ; High
Commr. in London, 172-3 ;
death, 173, 176, 180 ; on
natives, 184-5, l8 7

Reitz, F. W. ex-president
O.F.S., 46, 82

Responsible government to
T.V. and O.R.G., 55-6

Rhodes, Cecil, 7, 8, 14, 15, 23 ;
and Smuts, 25-6; 56-7, 148,
156, 182, 199

Rhodesia, Southern, 65 (note) ;
Smuts urges union with S.A.,
129-30 ; co-operates with
S.A. in war, 163-5

Ritchie, Prof. A. D., on
Holism, 138

Roberts, Fred., Earl, 35-7, 160

Rommel, F.M., in N. Africa,

74

Roos, Thielman, 142, 144-5
Rose Inncs, Sir James, C.J.,

on natives, 143, 150
Rufthof, Botha's farm, 50

Sand River Convention, 5

Schreincr, Olive, 84

Schrciner, W. P., 64-5, 173

Seaward Defence Force (S.A.),
1 66

Seitz, Governor, surrenders
German S.W. Africa, 98

Selborne, Earl of, 64

Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 6

Sidgwick, Henry, Smuts
attends lectures, 24

Slagtcr's Nek, 3

Smith, F. B., and Botha, 59

Smith, Sir Harry, 70

Smith Dorrien, Gen. Sir H. L.,
102

Smuts, Jan Christiaan, 7, 16 ;
parentage, early life, 22 ;
at Stellenbosch, 23-4 ; at
Cambridge, 24 ; at Middle
Temple, 24-5 ; book on
Whitman rejected by Geo.
Meredith, 25 ; at Cape bar,
25 ; speaks for Rhodes,
26-7 ; disowns Rhodes and
goes to T.V., 26-7 ; mar-
riage, 27 ; State Attorney,
27-8 ; at Bloemfontein con-
ference, etc., 29, 30 ; ne-
gotiates with Greene, 30 ;
his Century of Wrong, 31 ;
supports Botha for C. in C.,
36 ; urges destruction of
gold mines, 37 ; saves Boer
gold, 39 ; trains for guerilla,
war, 39, 40 ; raid into-
O.F.S. and C.C., 43-5 ; at
Vereeniging, 46-7 ; returns
to bar, embittered, 51-2 ;
joins Het Volk, 53-4 ; sees
Campbell Bannerman, 545 \
T.V. ministers, 57-9 ; edu-
cation policy, 6 1-2 ; for
Union, 63-5 ; at National
Convention, 66-70; 72, 74;
and Gandhi, 75-7 ; Defence
scheme, 77-81, 85, 88 ; at
Rand riots, 86-8 ; at re-

315

bcllion, 91-3 ; in S.W.
Africa, 94, 97-8, 100 ; in
general election, 100 ; in
E. Africa campaign, 102-10;
in front line, 102 ; and
v. L. Vorbeck, 108 ; care
of men, 108-9 > to England,
109 sqq. ; and Jews, 112,
133 ; in War Cabinet, 112 ;
on Russia, 112-13; orga-
nizes R.A.F., 113-14;
missions abroad, 114 ; with
Welsh miners, 114-15; im-
patience, 117 ; at Versailles,
120-2 ; returns to S.A.,
123 ; at Botha's funeral,
124-5 > compared with
Botha, 1 26 ; prune minister,

126 ; approaches Hertzog,

127 ; to Imperial Con-
ference, 127 ; to Ireland,
127-8 ; to J'burg riots,
128-9; resigns, 130; lec-
turing tours, 130-5 ; Holism
and Evolution, 126-41 ; in
opposition, 1424 ; on col-
onial preference, 143 ; coal-
ition with Hertzog, 146-8 ;
mountaineer, 146, 148-9 ;
jaunts with Reitz, 148-9 ;
on native policy, 150 ; on
Germany and war, 152-6 ;
forms new ministry, x 54 ;
replies to Hertzog, etc.,
i55- ; tributes to Hertzog,
156-7 optimism on war,
158 ; difficulties, 159-63 ;
on pan-African co-operation,
163-6 ; inspires war effort,
171, 173; tribute to, 174;
at Italian front, &c., 176,
178, 187 ; interest in natives,
179-80, 183-4, 187, 191-2 ;
visits Rain Queen, 180 ;
Field Marshal, 187 ; visits
and speeches in England
and Canada, 187-92, 195-6 ;
on United Nations Charter,

INDEX

193-5 ; children, 199 ;

home at Irene, 199, 200 ;

farmer, 200 ; library, 200-1;

optimist, 20 1 ; summary,

202-8
Smuts, Mrs. (Sibclla Kriege),

23-5, 131 ; marriage, 27,

172, 196-200
S. African Republic (see

Transvaal)

Taal (Boer language), 12, 68
Tabanayama battle, 34-5
Tanganyika, 8 (see too German

S.W. Africa)

Transvaal (S. African Re-
public), 4, 5, 6, 55, 65
Trek, Great, 3

Uitlanders, 14, 15, 21, 28
Union flag, 142
Union of S.A. formed, 64
Usibepu, Zulu chief, 18-20

Vaal-Hartz irrigation, 148
Van Rensburg and Ossewa

Brandwag, 161, 177
Vereeniging treaty, 46-9, 78,

202

Versailles treaty, 120-3
Vryheid, Botha at, 19, 20

Walvis Bay, 7, 94-7
Westminster, Statute of, 144
Whitman, Walt, Smuts on, 25
Windhoek, 95, 98
Witwatersrand goldficlds, 10
Wolstenholme, J., helps Smuts

at Christ's, 24
Women's war work, 170-1

Zululand, Botha in, 18, 19

216

INDIAN
ftj\ OCEAN

II