CHAPTER FIVE: THE FOURTH ESTATE

“This proposed trial of Jameson next month is giving us something of a problem,” said the GB, after I’d parked my rump opposite him in his threadbare study.

“How can that be?” I asked.

“Because it wouldn’t do if it were to come out in Court that members of the Brotherhood had been involved in the Raid.”

“But we weren’t,” I said. “Neither Rhodes, Jameson, Beit nor, for that matter, any of the others in the dock were or are members. Besides which, the public don’t even know the Brotherhood exists”

“And that’s the way we want to keep it. But I’m afraid that your first assertion is not quite true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, although you’re not going to be on trial, it’s bound to emerge under cross-examination that you were constantly consulted on the planning and you can’t escape from the fact that you were captured by the Boers in flagrante as it were.”

“That’s ridiculous; I was travellin’ in the opposite direction. Anyway, why does it matter?”

“Of itself, it doesn’t, but you are my brother-in-law and I’m a known friend of Chamberlain’s. Neither the trial judge nor Jameson’s lawyers are members of the Brotherhood and I - and others - are worried that the latter will try to make a connection via you and me to the Colonial Secretary, thereby deflecting responsibility for the Raid onto the British government. Under the circumstances, it would be an easy connection for a clever lawyer to imply, whether or not it’s true.”

“But you and I both know that the connection was non-existent and that Chamberlain and Salisbury had nothin’ to do with the plannin’ of the Raid!” I protested.

“Salisbury, no, but…”

“Do you meant to tell me,” I said, as realisation dawned, “that the whole racket was got up in London?”

“Not exactly, but it wouldn’t do for Chamberlain to have to answer questions about it under oath in Court.”

“So what’s to be done?”

“We need you out of harm’s way before the trial starts.”

“Well, once we’re back from Russia I’ll go to my house in Wrexham. My sister won’t mind.”

“Not nearly far enough, I’m afraid. You’ll have to be out of the country - and with a good reason not to be here.”

“Then I’ll go and stay with Brother Flashman in Paris.”

“Far too close to London.”

“You’re not serious?”

“I’m afraid that I am. By the way, speaking of Brother Flashman, he tells me that you are a very fluent writer and an excellent reporter,” he added somewhat inconsequentially.”

“What of it?” I demanded.

“Are you aware of the events in Matabeleland?” he said, going off on yet another tangent.

“Not in any detail,” I lied, for I couldn’t with any certainty have located it on a map, let alone given an account of its affairs. Then I remembered the old fool who’d presided at Dorothea’s christening all those years ago. “Isn’t that the place your late cousin, Charles-Henry, had his bishopric?”36

“It was.”

“Have his choir boys’ parents been complainin’? Or do you want me to go and recover some incriminatin’ papers of his?” The GB ignored this slur on his family.

“It’s not in connection with Church or family matters - thank God - that I raise the subject.”

“So why have you?” He didn’t immediately answer my question. Instead he again went off in quite a different direction.

“I’ve spoken to Brother Wolseley and he tells me that you are now considered to be beyond the age for active service.” 37

“I should damned well hope so,” I said, with some vigour.

“But Wolseley also says that, through an oversight, you are still on the Active List, albeit it on half-pay?”

“Ye-es,” I said cautiously, for I thought I could now see where all this was leading.

“And you are still, therefore, technically under his command?”

“Unless I resign my commission and permanently don civvies, which won’t please your sister - particularly if I wouldn’t be able to wear regimentals at the Tsar’s Coronation.”

“No indeed. Nor does it serve my purpose.”

“Which is?”

“To ensure your absence from the reach of the Court. To which end, Wolseley has agreed to appoint you an official war reporter for the current conflict in Matabeleland.” WHAT!

It took me a moment or two to recover from this awful announcement. The last time anyone had suggested that I become an accredited hack was during the Paris Commune affair and that was a memory I didn’t want to invoke.38 When I’d recovered my breath, with the stiffest upper lip I could manage at short notice, I asked:

“When am I supposed to report for duty in Bongobongoland? And for which bloody rag am I goin’ to be writin’?”

“Immediately. Your reports will be pooled for the whole of Fleet Street.”

“But I’ll miss the Tsar’s Coronation and the rest of the Season,” I protested.

“And the start of the trial next month, which is the reason you have to leave now. Anyway, it can’t be helped and, if it’s any compensation, Wolseley has agreed that you’ll be the War Office’s Senior War Correspondent in Matabeleland in the temporary rank of Colonel.”

“Substantive,” I said with some feeling.

“What’s that?”

“If you and the Commander-in-Chief want me to become a member of the Uniformed Branch of the Fourth Estate, then it will have to be in the substantive rank of Colonel. And proper recognition in the London Gazette - and in the Honours List when I return.”

“I’ll speak to Brother Wolseley and see what can be arranged,” he said in a resigned sort of voice.

Two days later I received a letter from the War Office informing me that I was now a fully paid up member of the General Staff in the permanent rank of Colonel. The letter was, however, silent on the matter of the long-overdue tap on the shoulder, as I informed C-G.

“It’s a disgrace,” was her monosyllabic response.

But whether that was in respect of my missing the Tsar’s Coronation, my new rank, the posting to Africa or the lack of what she has always referred to as ‘the recognition due to your service to the Crown’ she didn’t say: it was probably all four, knowing C-G.

In the meantime, I ordered Fahran to pack my traps whilst his brother Atash packs theirs. Well, I was damned if I was going back to the African bush to face assegai wielding wogs without proper protection. Speaking of which, the assegais that is, I also decided that I’d better find out what was happening at my destination on the Dark Continent, so I got Searcy to give me a briefing.

“It seems, Colonel, that whilst the Jameson cat was away the Matabele mice decided to come out and play.”

“Speak English, Searcy,” I said with some heat: the prospect of further Foreign Service at my advanced age had not improved my temper.

“It’s like this, Colonel: when Dr Jameson assembled his forces for the Raid, he stripped the British South Africa Company’s territory which he administered, an area known as Matabeleland, of most of its troops. This gave a local religious fanatic, the Umlimo,39 the opportunity to stir up the Ndebele and the Shona tribes into a revolt against white rule.

“Playing on the ignorance of the natives, the Umlimo preached that the winter drought, cattle pest and a recent attack of locusts were all the fault of the Company’s settlers. With the tribesmen thirsting for revenge, the Umlimo’s next move was to leverage this anger by calling for an uprising against the Company’s rule at an annual tribal event called The Big Dance - a sort of Matabele Coming Out Ball - which was due to be held on the 29th March last. With the aid of a generous supply of alcohol, the Umlimo planned to get the tribesmen to seize the regional capital Bulawayo then kill or drive-out all the white settlers in the territory.

“It was a sound stratagem, but it went off at half-cock. Unfortunately for the Umlimo’s coordinated plan of attack on the settlers, a group of young Ndebele jumped the starting gun on the 20th, killed a native policeman and then went on the rampage murdering farmers and mining prospectors. By the 24th the Ndebele rebellion was in earnest and some two thousand warriors, armed with everything from rifles to clubs, were killing every white man they could find. By the 27th March some two hundred and fifty settlers were dead and most of the colonial infrastructure was in flames.

“However, the tribal leaders, who had been told by the Umlimo that British bullets would turn to water on impact and that our artillery shells would turn into eggs – I assure you I’m not making this up - severely underestimated the settlers resilience and determination. Under the leadership of a former big game hunter by the name of Selous,40 those settlers who had survived barricaded the centre of Bulawayo with wagons protected by broken glass, mines and barbed wire. However, these plucky lads were not content to sit and wait for the Crown to ride to their rescue but, instead, formed a flying column, which they dubbed the Bulawayo Field Force. This Force mounted raids on the Ndebele to keep them at arm’s length from Bulawayo, whilst at the same time rescuing beleaguered settlers in the outlying homesteads. By the beginning of this month there were over a thousand Europeans and their families in Bulawayo, but their living conditions were pretty terrible.”

“So what were Rhodes and Robinson doin’ whilst Matabeleland went up in flames?” I asked as my brain reeled with dreadful echoes of the Indian affair in which I’d been so reluctantly involved back in ’57. “And why didn’t the wogs simply overwhelm the stockade in Bulawayo and finish the job before the cavalry could ride to the rescue?”

“To answer your second question first, Colonel, I understand that - following their experiences of an earlier uprising in 1893 - the Ndebele tribesmen are very leery of Maxim guns and so have been reluctant to make an assault on the settlers’ laager in Bulawayo. As to what the colonial authorities were doing, fortunately for them the Ndebele failed to cut the telegraph from Bulawayo to Mafeking, so Mr Rhodes and Sir Hercules Robinson were quickly alerted to the rebellion and were able to organise several Relief Columns. The first to reach Bulawayo last week were led by Mr Rhodes and Colonel Beal, who approached Bulawayo from Salisbury and Fort Victoria in the north, and by Lord Grey and Colonel Plumer,41 who approached the town from Kimberley and Mafeking in the south. By the beginning of this week the Columns had met, driven off the besiegers and secured the town - and by the end of this week, General Carrington,42 along with his Chief of Staff, Colonel Baden-Powell,43 will have arrived to take overall command.”

“Well, it sounds to me as though the rebellion will be over by the time I get there,” I said with some relief.

“I fear not, Colonel. According to the telegraphic reports we have received at the Nehemiah from Lord Grey’s man,44 there are now an estimated fifty thousand armed natives concentrated at their stronghold in the Matobo Hills under the leadership of the Umlimo - and General Carrington has orders to flush them out and destroy them. To make matters worse, the Shona, who had promised from the start to aid the Ndebele have finally made good on their undertaking. It seems that you are bound for a very bloody colonial conflict.”

…

So, on 5th May 1896 I made my departure for the Matabele Front armed - as befitted my appointment as Hack-in-Chief - with one of Waterman’s new patented and guaranteed-not-to-leak reservoir pens (and a plentiful supply of black ink),45 a going-away present for Searcy; a semi-automatic pistol-cum-carbine with a hundred rounds of ammunition, the very latest from Mauser,46 a gift from Charlotte-Georgina; and one of Khazi’s Khyberi knives, which Miss Prissy tearfully pressed into my hand as I was leaving.

“Massa Colonel, I wants yousa to have this um blade as belonged to ma man,” she said sentimentally. Then she turned to her two oldest boys. “Yousa listen heres, you two no darned good scallywags, yousa takes good care of the Massa,” she told them on the steps of the house. “And don’t yousa think to show yours no good faces here again without him!”

“No, mother,” said Atash as he rolled his eyes in a most Khazi-like way.

“We’ll take very good care of the Colonel, don’t you worry,” said Fahran, a sentiment somewhat surprisingly echoed by my wife.

“Look after yourself, Jasper,” she said, as she gave me a rather perfunctory peck on the cheek, “and write to me in Russia. Dorothea will want all your news, as will I and Father Stragorodsky.”47

You see, because of my posting to Bongobongoland, C-G had decided to go on her own to Russia for the new Tsar’s Coronation and, at the same time, to visit our daughter, Dorothea, and to indulge in yet another Orthodox retreat with the latest starets-of-the-moment.

“Telegraph your address to the Lievens in St Petersburg and I’ll send you all the news on the ceremony and your grandson,” she ended.

I may have forgotten to mention that we’d earlier received the news that Dorothea was at last in whelp. At that point the child had not yet been born, but C-G’s medicine man had written to her that God had told him in a vision that it would be a boy. Honestly, the Russians and my gullible wife were as bad as the Ndebele when it came to their faith in old men with bones through their noses or felt chimney pots on their heads. It was no surprise to me later when I heard that Dorothea had fooled everyone, not least the Orthodox Church, and she produced twin girls. But I digress.

The journey to Bulawayo was, thanks to the transport provided by the boys at the Colonial Office, swift but damnably hot. Instead of chugging down the west coast of Africa on a Union or a Castle Line mail tub, fanned by balmy off-shore breezes, I took the boat train from London to Paris (unfortunately there was no time to stop off and see Flashy), then a train to Marseilles, a fast steam sloop to Port Said and on to Beira on the coast of Portugoose Mozambique and finally a goods train from there to Fort Victoria in Mashonaland. Forty years previously that journey would have taken me three months or more – and given me plenty of chance for mischief. On this occasion I achieved it in just over three weeks, with no chances whatsoever to misbehave, thanks to the latest steam power on land and sea. The final leg, from Fort Victoria to Bulawayo, was in the saddle and I shared the journey with Carrington’s Chief of Staff, a cavalry half-Colonel called Baden-Powell, who’d been sent by his chief to bring forward further reinforcements for the ‘big push’ into the Matobo Hills.

At this point, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Baden-Powell (“do call me ‘B-P’ ”) was a largely unknown quantity to me as we’d never served together before. A rather slight Hussar (the unfashionable 13th, I think), he was just shy of forty, with a bristly moustache, bright eyes and a determined manner. I soon gathered that he’d seen extensive service in India and Africa, with a spell in between in Malta and military intelligence. He was rarely without a sketchbook and he drew well with either hand, which was a marginally more manly pursuit that Kitchener’s knitting, I suppose.48 He was also a damned good storyteller, as I found out each night en route to Bulawayo whilst we sat around the camp fire sipping tea and chewing biltong.

That was all on the positive side. On the negative side, as I was about to find out, he was one of the most ruthless sods I had ever met, who was convinced that democracy was the work of the devil and that the ancient Roman system of government – including, presumably, its vices - was infinitely preferable to our own.

…

Editor’s Note: Readers will note shortly that, as in previous volumes of The Speedicut Papers, Speedicut expresses his views on the sexuality of some of the principal players in his narrative. Whilst there exist no hard facts that he was right on this subject, there is plenty of circumstantial but well-documented evidence to support his opinions. As previously, I did consider editing out these passages but decided that such censorship would compromise the story.

…

Anyway, I hadn’t spent long in Baden-Powell’s company before I had reached the conclusion that he was cut from the same cloth as Gordon, Slatin and Kitchener. Why? Because when he wasn’t sketching, spinning his yarns around the camp fire or waxing lyrical about the virtues of ‘absolute obedience to the system’, he expounded his thoughts on what he called ‘scouting’, an idea he’d picked up from a flamboyant Yankee professional tracker-turned-soldier called Fred Burnham.49

It appeared that, when he retired, Baden-Powell was going to set up an organisation for young boys that would take the little buggers away from home at week-ends and put them deep in woodland under the supervision of bachelor beaks. The organisation was to be called The Scout Movement and the beaks were to be called Scout Masters. Their job would be to teach the little innocents, who were to be known as Scouts, something called ‘field craft’ - and a lot more besides, I didn’t doubt. In developing his proposed retirement project, Baden-Powell had adopted Burnham’s ideas as his own, along with the Yank’s Stetson hat and fancy neckerchief, both of which were reminiscent of another Yankee madman from my past: George Custer,50 who I knew during the Civil War. Of course, he was filleted by the Sioux, along with the rest of his command, at some place called the Big Cow Pat, or some such, back in ’76. Honestly, the idiots I’ve known. Anyway, Burnham was – so B-P said - of the view that the ancient ‘woodcraft’ of the North American savages, with whom he’d been raised, could be put to good use as a way of training boys to become useful members of society and, although B-P didn’t say as much, compliant cannon fodder for King & Country. The future soi disant Chief Scout had fallen for this tosh - and, I suspected, Burnham - hook, line and sinker. All I could think was that it was just as well that Oscar Wilde was still safely locked away in Reading Gaol, and that Bosie Douglas was hiding out on the Continent, or they’d be the first to sign up for bare knees, whistles, woggles, nude bathing and jolly sing songs around the camp fire.

By the time we got to Bulawayo… well, let’s just say that, for once, I was glad to get to the seat of war and report to Carrington, an old Africa-hand who resembled a walrus as he sat behind a desk piled high with papers and maps.

“Ah, Speedicut, welcome!” he rumbled, getting up and extending a paw. “Glad to have you on board. Take a seat.” He waved me to a chair in front of his desk. “With you in charge of the propaganda, we should at last be able to get some of the actual facts onto the breakfast tables of England.” He may have looked like a walrus, but as I was about to find out he behaved more like a killer whale. “I won’t beat about the bush. If we’re going to restore order and white rule quickly to these territories,” he went on without drawing breath, “we’ve got to cut out the root of the rebellion and that can only be done by eliminating the Umlimo.

“Fortunately, Burnham, my Chief Scout, has this morning received intelligence of the savage’s whereabouts and I’m sending him, Baden-Powell and the native commissioner, Bonar Armstrong, to capture the fellow or, if that proves to be impossible, to kill him. But under no circumstances are they to let him escape. I thought you might like to go along with them: it will make a cracking opening story for you.”

“Indeed,” I said, trying not to be sick.