To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [17]
While impatiently awaiting war, Milner allowed himself a few relaxations: cycling, hunting for jackals, and archery, which he practiced on the lawn of Government House. He also took solace from a new arrival in Cape Town, Rudyard Kipling. In his early thirties and already a best-selling poet, novelist, and journalist, the writer sensed that South Africa was the next battleground for the expansion of the British Empire, and so had come for the first of what would be several lengthy visits.
Both Kipling's grandfathers had been Methodist preachers, and there was an almost evangelical fervor to his celebration of imperialism and to some of the countless phrases he added to the language, from "east of Suez" to "the white man's burden." Born in India, he later worked there as a newspaper reporter, spending long hours in the British army barracks in Lahore. Absorbing soldiers' stories, he had come to relish feeling part of a small elite of bold, resourceful Britons—weeks away from home by ship and, when Kipling was born, out of reach by telegraph—carrying out the lonely task of governing a vast population of Indians. There was "no civilizing experiment in the world's history," he said, "at all comparable to British rule in India." In the nobility of this work he could believe fully because, as George Orwell wrote of him after his death, the poet never acknowledged "that an empire is primarily a money-making concern." Although India was unusually free of wars during his time as a journalist there, no one has ever written more lovingly and sympathetically about the British soldier than this man with his distinctive thick spectacles, heavy eyebrows, and bushy mustache, who never served in uniform.
Kipling was the last great writer in English whose work was equally beloved across the class spectrum; privates and generals alike knew many of his seductively melodious poems by heart. In the seamless universe of his writing, adventurous schoolboys turned into brave soldiers, loyal natives were always grateful for British rule, and the magnificent empire was untroubled by any undercurrents of dissent. Although well read in English, French, and Latin, and friendly with many of the leading writers of the day, Kipling nonetheless preferred the company of army officers, of bold empire builders like the business tycoon Cecil Rhodes and America's Theodore Roosevelt, of men willing to provoke war for what they believed in, like Alfred Milner. He and Milner hit it off and would remain fast friends the rest of their lives.
New detachments of troops sent from England at last had the effect Milner wanted. Seeing that hostilities with Britain were inevitable, the two Boer republics decided that their best hope was a series of swift attacks before yet more British troops arrived. And so, on October 11, 1899, to Milner's delight, they declared war. In London, British politicians were equally happy that their enemy had been maneuvered into appearing the aggressor. Another cabinet member wrote to the colonial secretary: "Accept my felicitations."
Slaughters like Omdurman aside, what today we call the Boer War was Britain's first in nearly half a century, and the public greeted it almost as if it were a continuation of the Diamond Jubilee. Everyone expected Milner's War, as some referred to it, to be gloriously won by Christmas. As a bonus, this decisive victory would send a strong warning to Germany, just then launching