Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
Emily in a somewhat calmer frame of mind, but this was short-lived; she had hoped to speak to Milner in private, and now discovered she was lunching with him and eight other men, none of whom she knew.
Milner stated his discussion with Emily during lunch in the company of all the other men, but she cut him short and implored him “to give me a few minutes afterwards.”
When Milner demurred, saying that he had too much work, Emily pleaded that “this was part of the work and of great importance”. Milner then “promised me fifteen minutes, not more”.
After lunch they sat down on a sofa in his living room and embarked on an animated exchange of views.
“We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour.” She made sure that Milner was left under no illusion about the spirit of the Boer women, as she had met many of them: “How do you think will you govern thousands of Joans of Arc?” she asked.
She also requested rail trucks to take her relief supplies of food and clothing along to the interior, and asked that she be allowed to be accompanied by an Afrikaner woman.
Surprisingly, Milner acknowledged that the scorched-earth policy was a mistake. He had seen women being transported in open railway trucks, and it had left him “uncomfortable”. “Finally he agrees to forward my going around to the camps as a representative of the English movement and with me a Dutch lady whoever I and the people here like to choose as a representative of South Africa …” There was a condition, however: Lord Kitchener, overall commander of the British forces, would have to agree.124
Emily did not have much hope of obtaining Kitchener’s approval. The chances were slim that the “Butcher of Khartoum”, and a “women-hater” to boot, “may welcome two women because of the difficulty he has created for himself of dealing with thousands”.125
On leaving Government House, Emily felt “as if wings were attached to my feet”, convinced that she and Milner had parted as friends. “Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one. It might be developed if he had not, as he says he has, made up his mind to back up the military in everything. He struck me as amiable and weak, clear-headed and narrow.”126 While awaiting Kitchener’s response, Emily collected evidence from northerners who had managed to reach the Cape Colony. She also met eminent people such as the church leader Dr Andrew Murray, the chief justice Sir Henry de Villiers and his wife, and Sir William Bisset Berry, the speaker of the Cape Parliament.
On 17 January Emily received a letter127 from Milner informing her that Kitchener had agreed per telegram that she could travel to the Free State, but on certain conditions. Two of these were that she could only go as far north as Bloemfontein, and that she preferably did not take a “Dutch lady” along. This was bad news, as Emily had hoped to travel with Mrs Elizabeth Roos, a well-known community leader, who would act as interpreter in interviews with Boer women and assist Emily in locating certain towns and places.128
In Kitchener’s telegram he referred to the “Dutch Refugee women kept out of their homes by the Boers.” In terms of his logic, the situation was very simple: as soon as the last Boers surrendered, the war would be over and everyone could go home – the women and children too. Hence the converse was also logical, albeit that he would not have admitted it openly: As long as the Boers refused to surrender, their wives and children would have to bear the brunt.
Emily preserved the telegram carefully, not because of its contents, but because of the access it gave her. At the top she wrote: “This was Kitchener’s telegram which I carried everywhere in the camps.”
She decided to pay Milner another visit. Couldn’t something be done to make it possible for her to also visit other camps that were further north? she inquired.129 Milner agreed to make a rail truck available for the relief supplies she wanted to take along, but this was the most he could do; Kitchener had the final say.
She set about purchasing food, clothing, blankets and other necessities, but the prices were high and she had only the £300 she had raised in England. To Leonard she wrote that she had bought six tons of clothing and six tons of food, but this would still not be enough. She hoped that the Conciliation Committee could send more money, as “it will be horrible to be up there with empty hands which would be the case in a very few weeks …”130
From early in the morning to late at night on Monday 21 January Emily packed the rail truck at the Cape Town station, but it saddened her that the goods she had managed to buy left it barely half full. In the meantime she had met Charles Fichardt131 from Bloemfontein who was in the Cape “on parole” (which meant that he had undertaken to return to Bloemfontein). He offered that she could stay at his parental home in Bloemfontein when she arrived there.
The following evening, a large group of new friends came to see Emily off at the Cape Town station. They had packed a food basket for her that included a kettle, jam and bread, as well as fruit.
She was venturing on her own into the unknown, a depressing world of conflict and destruction.
Regarding the goodbyes at the station and the nocturnal train journey, Emily wrote: “It was a glorious night. Their kindness had been unceasing and I felt I had in them a solid background in case of need. But as the train moved off towards the strange, hot, war-stricken north with its accumulations of misery and bloodshed I must own that my heart sank a little and I faced the unknown with great trepidation, in spite of the feeling that the deep desire of months which had laid so urgent a call upon me, was indeed finding accomplishment.”132
The journey she had embarked on would change her life dramatically.
4
Looking into the depths of grief
“Those truckloads of women and children unsheltered and unfed – bereft of home, bearing the vivid recollection of their possessions in the flames – and that mass of the ‘sweepings’ of a wide military ‘drive’ – flocks and herds of frightened animals bellowing and baaing for food and drink – tangled up with wagons and vehicles of all sorts and a dense crowd of human beings – combined to give a picture of war in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness such as not even the misery of the camps (with their external appearance of order) could do.”
– Emily Hobhouse, near Warrenton, April 1901
Emily was the only woman on the slow-moving troop train to Bloemfontein. At halts along the way she did not see a single woman at any of the stations. She found it difficult to buy food at stations because of the throng of soldiers crowding around the food outlets. The food basket from the Cape friends was her salvation: bread, apricot jam and drinks of cocoa. She would later survive on this kind of food for weeks and months on end, with the result that in time “I could not bear the sight, much less the taste of an apricot”.133
She found the landscape strange, with its unfamiliar vegetation, the heat, dust and unusual rock formations; the solitude of the veld; the lack of trees and shade, and the exceptional silence.134
“As far as extent and sweep and sky go the Karoo is beautiful,” she wrote with regard to the completely new world that greeted her as the sun rose. “On the second day there were horrible dust storms varied by thunder storms. The sand penetrated through the closed windows and doors, filled eyes and ears and turned my hair red, and covered everything like a table cloth … From Colesberg on it was a desolate outlook. The land seemed dead and silent, absolutely without life as far as the eye could reach, only carcasses of horses, mules and cattle with a sort of mute anguish in their look and bleached bones.”135
On Emily’s arrival in Bloemfontein on 24 January, it struck her immediately that the entire city was controlled by the British miltary authorities.136
Everyone’s movements were under surveillance, and the city was crawling with soldiers. No one could do anything without the permission of the British.
The first night she spent in an inn after having found her rail truck with the relief supplies and arranging for the goods to be unloaded. The following day Caroline Fichardt, the mother of Charles whom she had met at the Cape, sent her carriage