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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 to collect Emily.

Caroline sent word that they were already under surveillance in terms of martial law, and Emily could only stay with them if Major General George Pretyman, the military governor of Bloemfontein, gave his permission in writing. Caroline was worried that if she were to put a foot wrong, her two daughters and Charles would be punished. Emily went to see Pretyman forthwith.137

He nearly “jumped out of his skin” when he heard that she intended to stay with Caroline, whose husband had died six months earlier, as she was supposedly “a bitter woman”, but Emily was ready with a reassuring explanation: “My visit may have a softening effect upon her.”138 Pretyman reluctantly granted her permission to stay with the Fichardts in their beautiful home, Kaya Lami. Emily used the opportunity to ask Pretyman for a permit to visit the camps south of Bloemfontein. She made it quite clear to him that she was not there to do the military authorities’ work for them, but to give advice and to investigate the condition of the women and children in the camps and render assistance where she could. Everywhere she learned that farms were being burnt down indiscriminately and that more concentration camps were being erected in the Free State and the Transvaal.

From his remarks, too, it was obvious that Kitchener despised the Boers and “[i]n general ... had a low opinion of [them], describing them as ‘savages with only a thin white veneer.’”139 About the women he said that they “were outstripping men in their bitterness and commitment to the war, and the only remedy to bring them to their senses would be to confine what he called the worst class to a camp.”140

It was only Emily’s second day in Bloemfontein, and she was already disillusioned with the officers who had no plan for providing the women with clothing. She did not mince her words: “Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling. I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can, because it is so good for them; but I can’t help melting a little when they are very humble and confess that the whole thing is a grievous and gigantic blunder and presents an almost insoluble problem, and they don’t know how to face it.”141

The concentration camp at Bloemfontein was about three kilometres from the city centre, situated on the southern slope of a koppie in the barren veld without a single tree. There were 2 000 women, 900 children and a few men – the “hands-up men” (handsuppers, as the Boers called them) – in the camp. These were men who had laid down their arms voluntarily and in most cases had signed an oath of neutrality.142 The first woman Emily met there was Mrs PJ Botha. There was nothing in her tent – only flies, heat, her five children and a black servant girl. Several other women joined them in the tent to tell their stories too. They cried and even laughed together, and “chatted in bad Dutch and bad English all the afternoon”.143

While they were sitting there, a snake slithered into the tent and everyone ran out. Emily, who “could not bear to think the thing should be at large in a community mostly sleeping on the ground”, attacked the creature with her parasol until a man arrived and finished it off.144

Over the next few days, the women each told Emily their personal stories: how their farmhouses and crops had been burnt, their livestock killed or injured and left to die; how they had been transported for days on wagons and/or trains and been forced into the camp … They were stories of loss, exposure, starvation, illness, pain and longing. “The women are wonderful; they cry very little and never complain … Only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.”145

Within four days, Emily discovered the nature and extent of the misery in the camp. The most basic necessities of life were lacking. There were not even candles; they were only used when someone was seriously ill. There was no soap, and none had ever been supplied.

There was no mortuary tent; the dead lay in the heat among the living until they were buried. Flies lay thick and black on everything. Six people on average were crowded into one little tent, but in many cases a tent housed about nine or ten inmates.146

There was no school for the children. There was virtually no wood or coals to boil any drinking water or food, and the water of the Modder River was filthy. Typhoid was rife. Water was limited to two buckets for eight people – for drinking, washing and cooking. The food rations were not nearly sufficient to stave off hunger and disease.

It was “murder to the children” to keep these camps going, which were probably housing 50 000 people by this time, Emily realised.

Her suggestion to Captain Albert Hume, who had been designated to give her a hearing, was that a railway boiler be obtained and that all water be boiled in it. The 50 cows that were supposed to provide the camp inmates with milk were so starved that they produced only four buckets of milk per day. She was also concerned about the “native camp” with about 500 people who were in need of aid.147

Emily meticulously recorded the rations as they were measured out in the Bloemfontein camp on 16 January 1901 (see sidebar).

“Refugees”

Flour or mealie-meal: 1 lb per day

Meat: ¾ lb per day

Coffee: 1 oz per day

Sugar: 2 oz per day

Salt: ½ oz per day

“Undesirables”

Mealie-meal (or samp, potatoes, flour, rice): ¾ lb per day

Meat: 1 lb, twice a week

Coffee: 1 oz per day

Sugar: 2 oz per day

Salt: ½ oz per day

Children under 6 years (“Refugees”)

Flour or mealie-meal: ½ lb per day

Meat: ½ lb per day

Milk: ¼ tin per day

Sugar: 1 oz per day

Salt: ½ oz per day

Children under 6 years (“Undesirables”)

Mealie-meal: ½ lb per day

Meat: ½ lb twice a week

Milk: ¼ tin per day

Sugar: 1 oz per day

Salt: ½ oz per day148

Emily’s plan was to tell the “other side” of the war story based on an eyewitness account, an alternative narrative to the one that the military authorities and the British politicians were presenting to the world. She started writing down individual women’s stories (which eventually appeared in her book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell).149 She also aimed to use the evidence she was gathering to compile a report for the South African Conciliation Committee in England.

Day after day Emily walked from tent to tent, with people calling her from all over: “Come and see, Sister.” (Many of the women regarded Emily as a nurse, hence the name “Sister”.) Among the sights that she saw:

A baby of six months “gasping its life out on its mother’s knee”.

Children who were so weak from measles that they were uable to walk, lying there “white and wan”.

A dying 24-year-old woman lying on a stretcher on the ground.

Emily became exasperated with Captain Hume who considered her too sympathetic towards the camp inmates (she “wanted to box his ears”), and sent him to fetch some brandy for the dying woman.150

A man came up and asked her to look at his son, who had been sick for three months. “It was a dear little chap of four and nothing left of him except his great brown eyes and white teeth from which the lips were drawn back, too thin to close. His body was emaciated.”

An appalled Emily called Hume to observe the scene. “‘You shall look,’ I said. And I made him come in and showed him the complete child skeleton. Then at last he did say it was awful to see the children suffering so …” Yet there had been no milk available for the dying child.

“I can’t describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse – it is just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one hates to stand and look on at such misery and be able to do almost nothing.”151

The British soldiers regarded her as if she were “a fool, an idiot and a traitor combined”. The material destruction and bodily suffering were one thing, Emily wrote, but the worst aspect of war was the moral miasma that grew from it and infected everything.

It was during this time that she noticed Lizzie van Zyl152 in the hospital tent in the Bloemfontein camp. On the well-known photo of an emaciated Lizzie the doll Emily gave her lies next to her.

The English nurse told Emily that the seven-year-old Lizzie’s mother was to blame for the child’s condition, as she had starved her. Emily found this hard to swallow, and asked people in the camp about the case. She was told that the starvation allegations originated from the Van Zyls’ neighbours, who were so-called “Refugees”. Lizzie’s mother, on the other hand, was classified as an “Undesirable” because her husband was still on commando. As “Undesirables”, the Van Zyls received less food than the “Refugees”.

Lizzie’s mother subsequently removed her from the hospital tent because the child was being neglected there. Emily reported later that she “used to see her in the bare tent, lying on a tiny mattress which had been given her, trying to get air from beneath the raised flap, gasping her life out in the heated tent. Her mother tended her, and I got some friends in town to make her a little muslin cap to keep the flies from her bare head. I was arranging to get a little cart made to draw her into the air in the cooler hours, but before wood could be procured, the cold nights came on …”153

Lizzie died in early May 1901, probably from typhoid. Other diseases that were prevalent in the camps included measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, bronchitis, diarrhoea in babies, diphtheria and pneumonia. Few people in the camps were completely healthy.154

The atmosphere in Bloemfontein was so depressing that Emily felt paralysed and intimidated, “like being in continual disgrace or banishment or imprisonment. Some days I think I must cut and run … The feeling is intolerable. To watch all these Englishmen taking this horrible line and doing these awful things …”155

She was concerned about the image of her country, and the devastation that England was causing; nevertheless, she remained patriotic. “[I]f only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination – picture the whole miserable scene and answer how long such a cruelty is to be tolerated …”

Appealing to Aunt Mary in a letter, she asked whether her aunt “couldn’t write such a letter about it in the Times as should make more people listen and believe and understand – which would touch their conscience? Is England afraid of losing her prestige? Well, that’s gone already in this country.”156

The day before Emily left to visit the first of the other concentration camps, she met the wife of President MT Steyn, Rachel Isabella Steyn (née Fraser),157 known as “Tibbie”, which was her Scottish nickname. Prior to their meeting Emily had seen her walking about in Bloemfontein, always followed by a soldier because the English did not trust her. “A handsome woman, dignified and self-controlled,” Emily wrote later. The two women had a long and heartfelt conversation, and took an instant liking to each other.

Tibbie said about Emily: “She was a beautiful woman, extremely intelligent and committed heart and soul to improving conditions in the camps. We owe her an incredible debt because if it had not been for her, the death rate among the women and children would have been much, much higher.”158

Emily left Pretyman under no illusion as to what she thought of his camp. What horrified her most was the condition of the sanitation facilities. The slop buckets were not emptied regularly, and the stench at the tents that stood downwind was terrible.159

Pretyman was quick to cast suspicion on her. Emily had said beforehand that her mission was non-political, he wrote to Milner, but “I hear that since her arrival the refugees in this camp have suddenly found out that they are very badly treated and ought to be supplied with many more comforts than at present afforded them … I can see she is very much in sympathy with our enemies … I fear this class of fanatic will not do the cause much good from our point of view.”

Yet Pretyman also made a surprising admission: “But at the same time I could not help in my heart agreeing with her that this policy of bringing in the women and children to these camps, is a mistaken one.”160

On 2 February 1901 Emily set off on her own on a goods train for Norvalspont, about 195 kilometres south of Bloemfontein. She found herself in an alien, searingly hot, dusty world. In her letters to Aunt Mary, she gave her address as “The Land of Nod” – the place east of the biblical Eden where Cain was exiled by God after he had murdered his brother Abel.

After what she had witnessed at Bloemfontein, Emily feared what awaited her at Norvalspont, where the camp housed 1 500 people. But she was impressed with the camp superintendent, Captain Du Plat Taylor, because the inmates did not have to use water from the Orange River but instead had access to piped water from a spring. The food was slightly better than at Bloemfontein and no diseases had broken out, although everyone who went to the hospital tent died there. There was a school for the children, but clothes were urgently needed.

Most people in the Norvalspont camp were “prisoners of war”, as Emily referred to them, while “Refugees” were in the minority. She noticed in the camps she visited that there were in reality very few who fell in this latter category, and that they were housed in big marquees with furniture and other luxuries they had been allowed to bring along. But the military authorities still insisted to her that most of the inmates were “refugees” who had come to the camps of their own free will.

From here Emily took the train to Aliwal North, about 155 kilometres east of Norvalspont. While the town had only 800 inhabitants, the concentration camp was home to 2 000 inmates. Here, too, she was impressed with the camp commandant, Major Apthorp, who kept the camp neat and made sure that inmates received dried vegetables and potatoes twice a week.161

Emily distributed clothing. Like in all the other camps, there was no soap. “This seems to have been due to a careless order from Headquarters with regard to the rations, and men don’t think of these things unless it is suggested to them, they simply say: ‘How dirty these people are!’”162

While Emily was travelling from one camp to the other, the authorities increasingly took note of her activities. Major Sir Hamilton Goold-Adams, who had succeeded Pretyman in the meantime, reported to Milner: “Miss Hobhouse has been playing the dickens with the women in the camps.” She, Tibbie Steyn, Maynie Fleck and Caroline Fichardt were “creating a great deal of unrest by impressing upon such people the hardships they are enduring”.

“I have it on good authority,” Goold-Adams wrote, “that Miss Hobhouse is here on behalf of the Liberal Party to collect information for them for the usual purposes, and she has sent round circulars asking for information from various individuals as to their circumstances and whether their farms have been burnt.”163

Emily in turn described Goold-Adams as energetic, open and affable, but short on brains. She found it unbearable that such men were determining the fates of women and children. She did not seem to have much respect for their military abilities either, commenting that “this army it is thought will never catch De Wet”. There was “too much riding and shooting and picnicking and polo and golf playing for war to have much place … All those Tommies asleep upon the line and all the badly kept offices. Oh dear it is dreadful … it is remarked as a surprise when an officer does behave like a gentleman.”164

The people in the concentration camps informed her that they would never submit to British rule. The English, for their part, “hate the Dutch and take every opportunity of shewing it and of saying so. But the Dutch women are aghast at the barbarities committed by what they believed to be a civilised nation.”

On 21 February (1901) Emily was back in Bloemfontein, where many letters from home awaited her. Aunt Mary recounted that Uncle Arthur had assisted at the swearing in of the new king, Edward VII, son of the late Queen Victoria. Kate Courtney informed her that the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund Committee had met after receiving her letters; they would make a further sum of £500 available to her at a bank in Cape Town.165 The money could not arrive soon enough, as the need in the camps was enormous.

Education had always been close to Emily’s heart. She got the idea to select a few of the young girls with the most potential from the camps and send them to a good school. In Bloemfontein there was a “Ladies’ Institute” (later renamed the Eunice High School) which, from what she had heard, was one of the best girls’ schools in the country. She selected four girls: Hettie and Lizzie Botha, Eunice Ferreira and Engela van Rooyen, whose ages varied from 14 to 18 years. (The Botha girls were the daughters of Mrs PJ Botha [née Stegman] she had met on her first day at the Bloemfontein camp and who had assisted Emily diligently.) It cost £100 to keep the girls at the school for a year; the money covered school fees, clothes and boarding fees.166

It took up to a month for letters between South Africa and England to reach their destination. The committee was still reluctant to send the news they had received from Emily to the newspapers for publication. They did not know that she had already visited three concentration camps; at this stage they were only aware of the information she had gathered in the Cape, and that she was on her way to the other camps.

Though there were suspicions in England that all was not well in the camps, information was very sketchy. Meanwhile the death rates in the camps continued to rise. Emily compared the situation to the rural parish of her youth in St Ive, which had a population of about 2 000. While a funeral was a rare event there, “here some 25–30 are carried away daily”.167

“They accused me of talking politics, whereas we could only talk of sickness and death, they objected to ‘shewing sympathy’ but that was needed in every act and word. It was all kept very quiet; after a while the corpses were carried away at dawn, and instead of passing through the town approached the cemetery another way – many were buried in one grave.”168 The death rate now stood at 200 to 390 per 1 000 people, Emily reported.169

She went to see the new camp superintendent at Bloemfontein, Captain Trollope, about the high mortality figure. He asked sarcastically why she could not just provide everyone in the Free State camps with clothing! And would she also donate money for the erection of a children’s hospital?

Emily made it plain to him that it was the British government’s responsibility to build a hospital. Because she had not been permitted to visit all the camps, she undertook to supply clothing to the women and children – not the men – in the camps she was allowed to visit.170

Meanwhile some of the Cape women, led by Caroline Murray, also sent food and clothing to the camps. Emily repeatedly called for the release of people interned in the camps who had relatives outside who could care for them, but nothing came of this. Her insistence on more nurses at least resulted in the arrival of four English women from the Cape, but one turned out to be a drunk and another’s qualifications were falsified.

Every morning Caroline Fichardt’s horse-drawn carriage transported Emily to the camp outside Bloemfontein, where she would walk from one tent to another in the heat and dust all day. In the evenings she returned on foot to the Fichardts’ residence, a distance of two miles. This was her daily routine, also on Saturdays and Sundays. She hardly ever took a break. Slowly but surely the conditions in the camps improved somewhat, but Emily still wished that “the jingos would come out here and have a good course”.171

Emily now regularly came across the Reverend Adrian Hofmeyr, who ministered to the spiritual needs of the camp inmates in his own way. He endeavoured to convince the “undesirable” women that there was no hope that the Boers could still win the war. Likewise, Piet de Wet, a brother of General Christiaan de Wet, tried to persuade the women to convince their menfolk who were still on commando to lay down their arms. The women would listen to them patiently, but then turn their backs on them and walk away.

Kitchener now aggressively followed a three-pronged strategy to end the war: the scorched-earth policy was applied more ruthlessly (even churches were burnt and all forms of food were destroyed); the concentration camps were expanded and new ones were created; and systematic drives were used to herd the Boer commandos across the veld and trap them by means of barbed-wire fences between blockhouses.

In late February 1901 the British Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick, wrote to Kitchener and asked for a report on what was happening in the field and in the camps. From what he had heard, the wives and children of Boers who were still fighting were getting only half rations. Kitchener denied that half rations were given, but conceded that coffee and sugar rations were reduced for such people. “Allowance is sufficient and families in camps satisfied and comfortable,”172 he claimed.

During a debate in the House of Commons on 25 February, there were calls for an end to farm burnings, the destruction of private property and the internment of women and children in camps without adequate accommodation and food. In reply to questions, Brodrick stated that the women were free to leave the camps if they wished to do so.173

Three days later Lord Kitchener and General Louis Botha met in Middelburg (Transvaal) for peace talks at which Kitchener demanded that the two Boer republics surrender and relinquish their independence by becoming British colonies. Botha refused.174

In an effort to make the camps look less like a military operation, they were now taken over by a so-called civil administration. Henceforth officials, including soldiers who worked in the camps, had to wear civilian clothes instead of khaki uniforms.

Emily was not fooled by this change. “So we play at pretending the war is over … It is hollow and rotten to the heart’s core,” she wrote to her brother Leonard.

“To have made all over the state large uncomfortable communities of people whom you call refugees and say you are protecting, but who call themselves prisoners of war, compulsorily detained and detesting your protection. The whole object, of course is to enable Chamberlain to say in parliament that the country is settled and civil administration begun. It’s a farce.”175

Emily became so exhausted as a result of the hard work in the camps, the emotional pressure of listening to people’s stories and working even on Sundays when she sorted supplies, that she decided to stay in bed for a day and rest. Not for long; she took up her pen and wrote to her brother to ask if he could try to get someone to attend to the concentration camps for black people. She herself did not have time to focus on those camps too, but “from the odd bits I hear it seems to be much needed”.

She also asked a Bloemfontein women’s organisation, the Loyal Ladies League, to investigate the matter of the black camps. She did not have much hope in this regard, however: “But though they said they would I could see that they were not the right kind of person to be of any use and they were quite sure beforehand that there was neither sickness, suffering or death amongst those people [blacks]. I hear there is much of all three.”176 The Bloemfontein Post got wind of Emily’s meeting with the Loyal Ladies and reported that some of the women were upset, especially because Emily had insisted that attention should also be paid to the black camps.

From that point on all her letters were censored, but this did not prevent her from sending her brother photos taken in the camp.

The circumstances weighed more and more heavily on Emily, particularly the oppressive Martial Law provisions. She was frustrated and angry about what she was witnessing in the interior, and the failure of people at home to take note of it. And even worse: that the Liberal Party did not seem to be doing much about it.177

Her sense of duty trumped her frustrations and exhaustion. She wanted to visit more camps, such as those at Kroonstad and Kimberley, as well as the “large and important ones in the Transvaal”. But Kitchener refused to permit her to travel further north than Bloemfontein. She wrote twice more to obtain permission for this; in both cases he refused.

Early in March 1901 Emily set off again to the southern camps in the Free State after leaving her relief work in the Bloemfontein camp in the hands of a small group of women. Although she had been granted a permit for the Kimberley camp, she was not allowed to go south of Norvalspont. So she first had to travel to De Aar and then north again from there to reach Kimberley. Emily did not indicate how she obtained the permit for Kimberley, as the town is 165 kilometres northwest of Bloemfontein.178

On 4 March she was at Springfontein, about 145 kilometres south of Bloemfontein, where she stayed at the home of the Reverend Sandrock, a German missionary, whose family was also battling to keep body and soul together. The camp at Springfontein was comparatively small, and the inmates “poorer and more utterly destitute” than any she had yet seen.

Emily had brought along three cases of clothing and sat on the Sandrocks’ stoep where some of the camp inmates came shuffling up to her in groups. She had enough supplies to clothe about 60 people every day.

“Some are scared, some paralysed and unable to realise their loss. Some are dissolved in tears, some mute and dry-eyed, seem only to be able to think of the blank, penniless future – some are glowing with pride at being prisoners for their country’s sake. A few barely clothed women had petticoats out of the rough brown blankets so-called khaki blankets.”179

The blouses that had been sent from England were unsuitable as they were much too small for “the well-developed Boer maiden, who is really a fine creature”. Could they please send any “out-out women’s sizes”, she asked Aunt Mary.

At Springfontein there was no fuel for fires and although the people were given meat and mealie-meal, they were unable to cook anything because the veld was bare and the vegetation sparse. “I thought Kitchener was considered such a great organiser, but is it good organising to have so little forethought and make so little preparation that thousands of people find themselves dumped down in strange places where there is nothing ready for their reception?”180

Next on Emily’s itinerary was a second visit to Norvalspont. As usual, she wrote letters during her train journey – always with plans aimed at finding solutions.

Again she raised the need in the black concentration camps with the Distress Fund Committee, and appealed to the committee (in the same letter to her aunt) to send people to investigate the conditions there. From what she had heard, there were many large “native” camps where the death rate was also high. Shouldn’t the Society of Friends – the Quakers – that already had people in South Africa who provided relief aid, send someone? Or the Aborigines’ Protection Society, she suggested.181 182

As a liberal by conviction, Emily considered it self-evident that no distinction should be made between the distress of whites and that of blacks. “In my camps there are many kinds of nationalities. They are all suffering alike and it is not always possible to pick out the pure Boer and leave those mixed or intermarried. Often there are little black servant girls whipped up and carried off with their mistresses and these need clothing. Decency demands that all should be provided …”183

In the camp at Norvalspont (where Emily arrived on 8 March) she soon clashed with the camp doctor, as he was of the kind “who cannot open his mouth without using invectives against the Boers”. She felt “ashamed in the name of the English”. In her view he was “an insufferable cad”, and she told him so to his face.184

At this camp the authorities had succeeded in persuading 28 Boer men to fight on the English side. Emily was disgusted as she believed it to be unworthy of an English officer to sink so low, especially because these men had taken the oath of neutrality. “I long to escape from this network of lies and horror,” she wrote.185

Two days later she tried to continue her journey by train via Noupoort to Kimberley, but she had to spend the whole day in the station’s waiting room as conditions were too unsafe for travelling. The sounds of gunfire could be heard, and, according to rumours, the Boers were in the vicinity. By ten o’clock that evening the train had still not arrived, and the only solution was to sleep on the floor of the railway staff officer’s office.186

When she stepped outside later to get some fresh air, the railway officer followed her. Shyly he offered that she could spend the night in the conductor’s carriage, which he had fitted out as his sleeping quarters. He himself would sleep elsewhere. Overhelmed by relief at this kindness, she collapsed on the small bed and started crying.

When she looked around her, she saw that he had prepared a bath for her and made the bed. Oh, it was a wonderful night, she wrote. To her, the man, a certain Pates, seemed almost like a saint.

The following day the train finally departed for De Aar, where they had to wait for hours. She rested in the station’s waiting room but was thrown out by the guard. The train to Noupoort only arrived at four o’clock the following morning.

Emily saw several trains that were on their way to Cape Town. She was sorely tempted to board one of them and end this interminable waiting in the middle of nowhere. She forced herself to look away because the temptation was almost irresistible.

The journey to Kimberley was a melancholy one for Emily; besides feeling unwell, she knew that their line would take them through a succession of battlefields: Belmont, Graspan, Modderrivier, Magersfontein … In the distance she saw trenches and graves.187

On 12 March she finally reached Kimberley, where she stayed in the Queens Hotel, 20 minutes’ walk from the camp. The camp commandant was a Major Wright whom Emily quickly sized up as a “coarse, lazy, indifferent old man”. There was no nurse in the camp, the tents were overcrowded and dirty, and measles and whooping cough were rife.

Among the unfortunate inmates was a Mrs Douw who had been captured on her farm with her children, including a 17-day-old baby, by General Paul Methuen and his troops. She had pleaded with Methuen to allow them to take the donkey along, as the baby could drink only donkey’s milk. Methuen had given special commands that the donkey had to accompany her, but once they reached the Kimberley camp the donkey disappeared. They had tried to give the baby cow’s milk, but the child kept wasting away.188

When Emily arrived at the camp a new donkey had been found, but the baby was already so weak that it was past recovery. “It was still alive this morning when I called,” Emily wrote, “but in the afternoon it was dead. They beckoned me to see the tiny thing laid out – with a white flower in its wee hand. A murdered innocent.”189

In an attempt to soften the grief, Emily bought Mrs Douw black material for a mourning dress; it was a fitting present from England, she thought. She wondered how Methuen’s wife would have felt if it had been her baby.190

The women at Kimberley were more bitter and antagonistic than those she had encountered in the other camps; not towards her, but as a result of what had happened to them. She wished that she could send six of the young girls to England so that they could tell the British Cabinet what was being done in South Africa in the name of England; “you couldn’t beat them in argument – or anything else”.

The women told her that some of them had been brought to the station at Vryburg by large groups of armed black men who were fighting on the English side. They had experienced their treatment as “terrible”. She heard more and more accounts of farms burnt by black people, sometimes without a single British officer being present.

In a long letter to her brother Leonard, Emily wrote: “You must not think that I pick out bad cases to send home. I never pick out at all. The tents are entered at random and I note what they say and often leave a camp without having seen people who have had the worst experiences.”191

Emily wanted to return to Bloemfontein but did not have a permit to do so, and Pretyman, who was now stationed in Kimberley, did not make it easy for her after she had confronted him about the child deaths in his camp. He was angry. Ignorant mothers were causing their own children’s deaths with their home remedies, was his defence.

No, he decided, she could get a permit for a trip to De Aar or Cape Town, but not to Bloemfontein.

Emily now had to decide on her next move. Maybe back to Cape Town to collect another rail truck full of clothing? But in the meantime she had heard that a camp had been opened at Warrenton, and that the need there was terrible. Perhaps she should go there as well as to Mafeking? In the end she opted for Cape Town; without supplies she could not really help alleviate the need.

Meanwhile the South African Conciliation Committee had met at the home of Lord and Lady Hobhouse in Mayfair, London, to read out Emily’s letters, while she was again alone on a train full of sick Tommies on her way to Cape Town. She cared for the sick soldiers, cooked food for them, and took walks with them in the veld when the train stood waiting somewhere for hours.192 On the way she saw rail trucks full of armed black men and told herself: It’s naive to think that they are not part of the war.

On 24 March (1901) Emily arrived in Cape Town, where she stayed once more with Caroline Murray. She addressed a large meeting in the city for one and a half hours, explaining in detail what was happening in the camps. She was probably the only person who had personally visited so many of the camps.193 The packet of letters to her that she received in the city had been “mostly censored, some doubly censored”.194

Emily met with Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the new governor of the Cape Colony, who gave her the necessary permits to visit both Warrenton and Mafeking. He was also very cooperative in arranging for tons of clothes, which the Cape women had helped to collect, to be sent by train to the various camps. This time Emily had the supplies delivered directly to the camps in question. The journey from Cape Town to Kimberley took five days, but she was determined to assist the distressed people in the Kimberley camp once more.

The train journeys were exhausting and lonely; there was no one Emily could talk to about her real thoughts and feelings. Invariably she fell back on pen and paper and wrote lengthy letters to the family in England, albeit that they would first be scrutinised by the censors. Despite buying a first-class ticket and being at the station hours before a train’s departure, she seldom managed to get a seat in first-class carriages. The English officers simply shoved her aside and sat wherever they wanted to. “First class here is about equal now to third class at home so that anything below is very dirty, smelly and disagreeable.”195

Four days later she was again on her way to Mafeking when the train halted at Warrenton. Here she found 310 women who had been “pushed” into the church and the school because there were no tents for them. And hundreds more women and children were on their way here after all the Boer commandos of Hoopstad had also been captured, a young British captain informed her on the train.196

Somewhere outside Warrenton, on her way to Mafeking, Emily witnessed a scene next to the railway line that would stay in her memory for the rest of her life, the result of the British forces’ “sweeping” of the countryside:

Crowds of human beings, both black and white, milling around.

Captured women and children.

Soldiers.

Thousands of animals of many kinds. Carts and wagons. The animals were bellowing for food and water.

The faces of the women and children wore grimaces of pain as a result of exposure, hunger and exhaustion. The scene represented the cruelty and horror of war in its clearest form.

Emily was shocked to the very fibre of her being. These people were on their way to Warrenton where there was not even a tent to put them into, let alone food and medicine. Things would only get worse for all of them. She happened to know, as she had just come from there.

Moreoever, it was 9 April 1901, her 41st birthday.

The next day she arrived in Mafeking for the first time: “ … a lonely, lonely spot. Mafeking itself feels like the end of the world and the camp seems like driving six miles into space.”197

The camp had been in existence for almost a year, and was the oldest of the camps she had visited. Its 900 inhabitants were very surprised that an Englishwoman had arrived at this remote spot and seemed to care for them and their suffering. She spent three busy days at the camp, interviewing people, recording what was happening and trying to convince the military authorities to improve the conditions.198

Here, too, there was no soap, and many people had no blankets. Emily distributed clothing and formed a committee of seven camp women to help her with all the work. A certain Mrs Coetzee (“a real character”), after lamenting her fate for almost a hour, ended with solemn thanks to the Lord that the English people cared enough to send someone just to look upon the Boers’ misery.

Emily was still haunted by the scene next to the railway line outside Warrenton. Passing through this town again on her way to Kimberley, where she was on 13 April, she found that only 150 were left of the more than 300 people who had been there earlier. At the station there were two trainloads of people, about 240 in all, waiting in open coal trucks. They followed Emily’s armoured train to Kimberley. From her inquiries there it was clear that no one had known that these people were supposed to arrive there. No one could help, and no one knew where to get hold of fuel or kettles late on a Saturday night.199

When Emily returned to the Kimberley camp two days later, she heard that seven children had died during the few days she had been away. The rain kept pouring down and it was cold inside the tents, most of which were leaking. The meat the people received was maggotty, and those who complained did not get meat again.200

On her way to Bloemfontein, Emily got off the train at the Springfontein camp. She was shocked to find that the camp population had increased from 500 to 3 000 since her previous visit. At the station she found another 600 women and children who were forced to sit waiting in open trucks with no shelter from the sun, wind and rain. They had been there for two days. This was even worse than what she had witnessed at Warrenton.

It was a Sunday morning. Clara Sandrock, the daughter of the German missionary at Springfontein, had seen Emily’s train arriving and had run down to the station with a can of hot coffee for her. Emily did not drink any of it herself and gave the coffee as well as all the food she had on the train with her, a “two-penny loaf” and some tinned meat, to the women in the open rail trucks.

The children were crying from hunger because they had not eaten anything for three days. Emily gave Clara money to buy all the food she could find and told her to take it to the women, with a further instruction: “Leave the church today.”201

It pained Emily that she could not see to the alleviation of the people’s plight herself, but her permit did not allow her to break her journey to Bloemfontein. With a heavy heart she jumped back on the train, just in time for its departure. The women and children in the open trucks she had to leave to the mercy of the elements. Even though she was wrapped in her thick grey shawl, it was still bitterly cold.202

Just because Emily stayed at the home of Caroline Fichardt in Bloemfontein, Caroline’s permit was withdrawn so that she could no longer ride out to their farm Brandkop to visit her husband’s grave.

At the Bloemfontein camp Emily found that the number of women and children had almost doubled in the six weeks she had been gone; the population now stood at 4 000. “My camp work grows so fast and so rapidly that I feel it is almost impossible to cope with it.”203

“It is endless and hopeless,” she wrote to Aunt Mary. “I feel paralysed in the face of it. I feel money is of little avail and there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to stop trying and hasten home to state plain facts and beg that a stop may be put to it all.”204

The camp would only increase in size, Goold-Adams assured her after she had gone to talk to him again. Meanwhile 62 people had died there while she was away. The doctor himself was sick, and two of the Boer girls who had been trained as nurses were among the dead.205

There was still no soap in the camps. The official answer Emily got was that it was a luxury, and that the soldiers were not given soap either. According to the authorities, feed for the emaciated cows – her solution so that they could produce more milk for the children – was too precious to be used for this purpose. And, no, railway boilers could not be procured for the boiling of water. Boilers could be built from bricks, but this was too expensive.206

Emily was appalled at the condition of many of the people in the Bloemfontein camp who had been hale and hearty during her earlier visit. “Disease and death were stamped upon their faces.”207

Emily was convinced that unless there was a constant influx of doctors, nurses, other workers, food, clothing and bedding, nothing would improve. The death rate had now risen to about 20 per cent, and there was no hope that it would decline. She pleaded with Goold-Adams that he should try to improve conditions in the camp, but he informed her that inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Free State were now being placed in camps on an increased scale; “a new sweeping movement has begun”.208

She made a last attempt to visit the northern camps, such as the one at Kroonstad. Again she requested Goold-Adams’s permission, and again he refused. This time he was very direct and told her the reason for his refusal was that she “was showing personal sympathy to the people”.

Astonished, Emily replied that that was exactly what she had come to do – as well as to help in “personal troubles”. Goold-Adams was of the view that “gifts could be dealt out in a machine-like routine” without personal involvement. “I said I could not work like that, I must treat people like fellow-creatures and share their troubles. He believed this unnecessary.”209 It dawned on Emily that her personal sympathy was being confused with political sympathy with the Boers’ cause. “It was no question of political sympathy. On that score I always maintained a negative attitude.”210

She was shocked when she read Kitchener’s claim in a newspaper that the families in the camps “had a sufficient allowance, and were all comfortable and happy.”211 She knew that they were “all miserable and underfed, sick and dying”,212 and realised that the British public was being sold lies.

This brought Emily to a point where she had to take an important decision: “To stay among the people, doling out small gifts of clothes, which could only touch the surface of the need, or return home with the hope of inducing the Government and the public to give so promptly and abundantly that the lives of the people, or at least the children might be saved.”213

After much reflection she decided to tackle the evil at its root, with those who had started it and had the power to end it. Please book me a passage on a ship to Southampton, she wrote to Caroline Murray in advance.

On the way to Cape Town, the train stopped once again at Springfontein. To Emily’s horror, the same group of about 600 women and children she had seen when passing north ten days earlier were still stuck at the station.214 There was neither water nor toilets, and very little food.

She also came across the elderly uncle and aunt of President Paul Kruger at Springfontein. Despite the cold, the old lady was half naked. Emily took off her own petticoat and draped it over the woman.

Some of the other women clung to Emily in the hope that this angelic figure would deliver them from their misery. “The picture photographed in my mind can never fade,” Emily wrote later.

Though it was bitterly cold, there was no shelter for the women and children. Some tried to sleep under the rail trucks. Others had found some sailcloth from which they constructed makeshift shelters.

Emily was called to one of these shelters where a woman sat with her fast-fading child on her lap.

In a last-ditch effort to save the child’s life Emily sent a message to Captain Gostling, the camp commandant, to request a few drops of brandy, but he let her know that their supply was limited.

Emily was present when the child died in silence.

“The mother neither moved nor wept. It was her only child. Dry-eyed but deathly white, she sat there motionless looking not at the child but far, far away into depths of grief beyond all tears. A friend stood behind her who called upon Heaven to witness this tragedy and others crouching on the ground around her wept freely.

“The scene made an indelible impression upon me. The leading elements in the great tragedy working itself out in your country seemed to have gathered under that old bit of sailcloth whose tattered sides hardly kept off sun, wind or rain.”215

After this gruelling morning she still had enough stamina left to brave the concentration camp, to which she had to walk. Captain Gostling followed her like a shadow, engaged her in seemingly innocent chitchat and kept steering the conversation in a political direction. But Emily was nobody’s fool, and avoided saying anything that smacked of politics. Late that night she boarded the train again as it slowly made its way southwards. The next day she got off at Norvalspont and, as usual, headed straight for the concentration camp where she spent the day.

Late that afternoon she returned to the station on foot, only to hear that the train to Cape Town would only arrive the following day. She had nowhere to sleep, as all the available beds in the town were occupied by the troops. Trudging back to the camp was her sole option. It was pitch dark when she arrived at the tent of an old acquaintance, a Mrs Boshoff, who was overjoyed to see her. Early the next morning Emily crawled out of the tent, in time to catch the train just after seven o’clock.216

When Emily finally reached Cape Town on 5 May, she had not washed for six days. She was indescribably dirty, covered in red dust from top to toe. On some days she had not even been able to wash her hands. There was little time to rest, however, as she had to decide at once whether to leave for England on the Saxon in two days’ time, or wait a while longer. Besides, all the ships were packed to capacity.217

Within an hour she decided to embark on the voyage as soon as possible.

To Emily’s great surprise, Sir Alfred Milner was a fellow passenger on the Saxon.218 “There also on a little raised dais sits His Excellency alone in the upper deck. He has told the captain he does not wish to mingle with anyone nor speak with any lady. However he came and spoke to me as soon as waves and wind allowed and I plunged into my subject, but a noisy windlass cut us short,”219 Emily wrote to Caroline Murray.

Learning “the Taal”220 from fellow passengers was pointless, Milner’s private secretary Walrond informed her, as she should not be allowed to visit South Africa again. Emily suspected him of spreading malicious gossip about her on the ship because many passengers turned their backs on her. Nevertheless, she got another opportunity to speak to Milner when the ship stopped at Madeira and everyone was admiring the view from the deck.

Emily knew somehow that military spies had watched her in Bloemfontein and provided Milner with all kinds of falsehoods about her, such as that she had caused trouble in the camps. No fewer than 60 reports on her had been sent to Milner, and now she had the chance to confront him about it. She pointed out “the low class sort of people that were willing to be informers”, and that he had to be spending a lot of money on informers.221

She emphasised again that she was not in South Africa for political reasons, and also told Milner how Captain Gostling had tried to provoke her into making political statements. She had the impression that he believed her.

“There were two Alfred Milners – there was the charming, sympathetic, gracious and cultivated man, whose abilities and culture found rather a desert in South Africa, and whose liberal leanings were in contrast to the military men surrounding him. And there was the politician who had given his word to carry out the ideas of the English statesmen and felt bound in honour to do so. The clash must have given him many dolorous moments of agony.”222

Emily parted from Milner with these words from the writer Macrobius when a Roman knight had been censured unfairly by Augustus Caesar: “Caesar, when you make inquiries about honourable men, see that you employ honourable men to do it.”223

On 24 May 1901 Emily was back in England after having left for South Africa five and half months earlier. She still had no idea of how exactly she would bring the need in the concentration camps to the attention of the English public in a way that would engender sympathy instead of giving offence.

What she did know was that her experience of the conflict in South Africa had imbued her with an intense aversion to war and everything it entailed. She had seen clearly what war did to people:

“You can no longer be an individual, you are one of a herd – and that herd preserves itself by the reversal of the principle of virtue. Untruth, lies, hatred, inhumanity, destructiveness, spying, treachery, meanness innumerable, suspicion, contempt, unfair dealing, illegality of every kind flourish and become as it were the ‘virtues of war’.

“The atmosphere thus created is a moral miasma.”224