To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [24]
Blue-eyed and fair-haired, Emily Hobhouse was 40 years old. In most of the photographs we have of her, she looks at the camera with unusual directness for a woman of her time, as she must have looked at Milner that day. We can only guess at what opened her mind to the injustices of a world far wider than the one she had been raised in. Possibly it was the way her father, an Anglican minister, angrily broke up a romance she had with a local farmer's son whom he considered beneath her—a relative of his had worked as a maid in their house. Or possibly it was the time she spent, some years later, studying child labor conditions with the encouragement of a liberal-minded aunt and uncle, well-known reformers. It was only after the death of her widowed father, whom she cared for through many years of illness in his rural parish, that she felt free to go her own way in life. She traveled to Cape Town on a cheap steamboat, second class, and apparently expected to do no more than put her organization's relief supplies in the right hands. That was before she found out about the concentration camps and went toe-to-toe with Milner.
On a bright moonlit night, Hobhouse boarded a train in Cape Town for a 600-mile journey into the interior. At the first camp she visited, the heat was overwhelming, flies covered everything, and in the tents where destitute, traumatized families were living, the nearest thing to a chair was often a rolled-up blanket. In the chaos of being rounded up by British troops, she discovered, some of the Boer women had gotten separated from their children. The food was terrible, drinking water came from a polluted river, and up to a dozen people were crowded, sick and well together, into each tent. When it rained the tents flooded. While she was interviewing one woman, a puff adder slithered into the tent. As everyone else fled, Hobhouse, no more intimidated by a poisonous snake than by a viceroy, tried to kill it with her parasol. Elsewhere, she saw corpses being carried to mass graves. "My heart wept within me when I saw the misery." (When a final tally was made after the war, it would show that 27,927 Boers—almost all of them women and children—had died in the camps, more than twice the number of Boer soldiers killed in combat.)
As the days went by and she continued touring the archipelago of camps, the scenes of horror only multiplied: "a little six months' baby gasping its life out on its mother's knee," she wrote to her aunt. "...Next, a girl of 24 lay dying on a stretcher." Furious, she issued demands to startled British officers: for milk, for a boiler for the drinking water, for nurses, clothing, medicines, soap. None of the camp commandants were quite sure who this well-dressed, well-connected woman was, but they knew she was angry and they were not about to say no to her. "I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can," she wrote, blaming the outrages she saw on "crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling." It was not only to her aunt that she sent letters. Thanks in part to a stream of them Hobhouse sent to English newspapers, the existence of the camps rapidly burgeoned into an international scandal. Antiwar members of Parliament denounced them in the House of Commons, leaving an alarmed Milner seeing this as the war's main public relations problem: "If we can get over the Concentration Camps," he told the colonial secretary, "none of the other attacks upon us alarm me."
To read the many letters Emily Hobhouse sent from South Africa is not only to see a war's hidden toll on civilians; it is to see, in this age that was so restrictive for