Читать книгу 26.2 - The Incredible True Story of the Three Men Who Shaped The London Marathon - John Bryant - Страница 14

Sometimes it would take six weeks for the letters from Mama to reach the hands of Wyndham Halswelle, but when they eventually came they were long and well worth waiting for. The evocative letters reminded him of England and London itself. Mama’s words would bring back the smell of cut grass on the lawn, the gentle rain that kept the great park in Richmond so very green, and strolls beside the River Thames, along the waterfront towards the gardens at Kew. But she would also write to him of serious matters, of war and politics.

The letters would remind Halswelle, too, of what made him a soldier – a word here or a phrase there would transport him right back to playing with those tin soldiers in Richmond or marching proudly in his playroom uniform. Mama would also bring him London’s news of the war. She wrote so vividly of the relief of the siege of Mafeking in South Africa and the heroism and example of Robert Baden-Powell in Afghanistan.

‘Never forget,’ she wrote, ‘that you and he were at the same school. You played in the same grounds. He’s a great hero and a great soldier.’

By the time Halswelle arrived in South Africa in the spring of 1902, the great Boer War had been won, but was not yet finally over. The tide had turned with the arrival of two of Britain’s most respected Generals: Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. Field Marshall Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Baron Roberts of Kandahar (known throughout the army as ‘Little Bobs’), was virtually hauled out of retirement to turn the course of the difficult war. A tiny man, just over 5 feet tall – 2 inches below the minimum height for enlisted soldiers – with a large, drooping white moustache, he was legendary for marching his army 300 miles across the wastelands of Northern India from Kabul to relieve the besieged garrison at Kandahar. It was the sort of legend to inspire Halswelle – that and the Victoria Cross Little Bobs wore for his bravery during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Roberts returned to Britain at the beginning of 1901 in triumph. He was met by the Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VII, and paraded through the crowds on the streets of London, cheered as the war’s great hero.

His command was taken over by Kitchener – a fine, if ruthless soldier, who had the task of mopping up the guerrilla war being waged by the Boers. There was still plenty of skirmishing, and a smouldering resentment fired up the Boers against the imperialism of Britain. Destined to last for another eighteen months, the war was to lay the British open to charges of rape and torture and to bring about the establishment of concentration camps.

By the time Halswelle arrived, Kitchener was ordering farms to be burned and food destroyed to reduce the Boers’ infrastructure. Barbed wire and blockhouses further limited their manoeuvrability, and the raids steadily became less frequent.

With time on their hands, the principal enemy for officers like Halswelle was boredom, and there was an immense amount of debate in the regiment about the charges laid against the British, both by the Boers and by their sympathisers around the world, who wanted to grab every opportunity to attack the British armed forces. Nothing angered Halswelle more than these charges of dirty tricks.

The British army had taken some heavy defeats before its leaders realised that their tactics were outdated, for the Boers were a fast and highly mobile guerrilla force, using the new smokeless cartridges in their German rifles, which hid their positions. They employed hit-and-run tactics that not only caused losses the British could ill afford, but thoroughly frustrated the Empire’s view of a fair fight.

It was a letter from his mother that brought Halswelle the news that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was about to leap to the defence of the Empire and fair play. Charges of war crimes, Conan Doyle believed, could not go unchallenged. Always a man who loved a cause, he was angry. ‘In view of the persistent slanders to which our politicians and our soldiers have been equally exposed, it becomes a duty which we owe to our national honour to lay the facts before the world,’ he said.

Conan Doyle was certainly familiar with the subject of warfare and the Boer War in particular. Just before Christmas 1899, in what was known as the ‘Black Week’, the British military suffered three staggering defeats at the hands of this army of rag-tag South African farmers. In Britain, there was concern together with an upsurge of patriotism, and on Christmas Eve, Conan Doyle declared to his horrified family that he was going to volunteer for the war.

Although his great reputation came from his Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle’s real love was writing historical fiction: he loved tales of war and heroism, and wrote stories about the Napoleonic wars too. He was in love with the tales of chivalry learned at his mother’s knee. Having written about many battles in his historical works, he felt it was his duty to try his own skills as a soldier. However, the army had little use for a forty-year-old, somewhat overweight recruit and rejected him, so when the chance came for him to go to the front as a doctor, he jumped at it.

A friend of his, John Langman, was sending out to South Africa at his own expense a hospital of 50 beds, and he suggested that Conan Doyle should help him choose the team and should supervise the entire operation. The Langman hospital sailed in February 1900, reaching Cape Town on 21 March, and Conan Doyle was to spend his next few months in a wartime hospital devoted to the treatment of typhoid, fevers and other assaults on the intestines.

As soon as he arrived in South Africa, Conan Doyle started to assemble notes for a history of the campaign. The charges that the British had committed atrocities enraged him, and in just one week he wrote a 60,000-word pamphlet rebutting them. Published in January 1902, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct sold for six pence per copy in Britain. Thousands of translations were given away in France, Russia, Germany and other countries, and all the profits from the sale of the book were donated to charity.

There was not a trooper in the whole of South Africa who had not read Conan Doyle’s sixpenny pamphlet, and for Halswelle, the writer became more than a hero: he was a role model. ‘Here is a man,’ he would say to his fellow officers, ‘who’s passionate about fair play in war, sport and life.’ It was true that Conan Doyle had always taken pride in being a sportsman – he was an expert in cricket, golf, body-building and even baseball. He made a century at Lords, once took the wicket there of W. G. Grace and was inspired to write a poem about it; he was even invited to referee the first world heavyweight boxing contest between a white and black boxer in America, the so-called ‘Fight of the Century’ of Independence Day 1910, between Jack Johnson and Jim Jefferies in Reno, Nevada. Following this, he wrote an extravagant West End play about prize fighting and the gambling and dirty tricks surrounding it, entitled The House of Temperley.

For Halswelle, Conan Doyle’s sixpenny pamphlet gave him all the ammunition he needed in his battle for fair play. Sometimes he would ride back to camp with a bunch of troopers still breathless from a raid on a Boer farmhouse. On one such raid, they had come across snipers picking off the troopers. The Boers had put up a white flag but the British had been warned constantly about this tactic, for all too often the farmers would feign surrender before opening fire again. There had been a skirmish, and several Boers were killed or ran away; there were two dead children and three dead adults – one a pregnant woman. But several troopers had been wounded and one killed the day before, and in their anger, the British troopers burned down the farmhouse and chased the survivors. A man and a woman tried to run away but were shot. Those were Kitchener’s orders.

Back at the camp, Halswelle watched the soldiers unwind; their mission achieved, they would drink – but still they were uneasy.

‘Kitchener knows what he’s doing,’ they said, ‘this thing could drag on forever if we don’t clear it up now.’

‘That bloody white flag,’ said another, ‘why do they do it? And all these stories they put out – the bayoneting, what we do to their women… I read it in the papers. My father wrote to me from London – it’s all in the French and German papers; they tell these lies. Conan Doyle, he’s right, he’s been out here. Have you seen what he’s writing? That’s a man who knows the truth.’

The lies that so angered Conan Doyle were certainly getting worldwide coverage. Typical was a report in January 1902 from the Boer General, Jan Smuts, later Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa:

Lord Kitchener has begun to carry out a policy in both the Boer republics of unbelievable barbarism and gruesomeness which violates the most elementary principles of the international rules of war. Almost all farmsteads and villages in both republics have been burned down and destroyed. All crops have been destroyed. All livestock which has fallen into the hands of the enemy has been killed or slaughtered. The basic principle behind Lord Kitchener’s tactics had been to win, not so much by direct operations against fighting commandos, but rather indirectly by bringing the pressure of war against defenceless women and children.

The truth was that even in Britain, prominent voices were speaking out against the slaughter. David Lloyd George, who later served as the British Prime Minister during World War I, vehemently denounced the carnage during a speech in Parliament on 18 February 1901. He quoted from a letter by a British Officer: ‘We move from valley to valley lifting cattle and sheep, burning and looting and turning out women and children to weep in despair beside the ruin of their once beautiful homesteads.’

One Irish Nationalist MP, John Dillon, spoke out angrily against the British policy of shooting Boer prisoners of war. On 26 February 1901, he made public a letter by a British Officer: ‘The orders in this district from Lord Kitchener are to burn and destroy all provisions, forage etc. and seize cattle, horses and stock of all sorts wherever found and to leave no food in the houses of the inhabitants, and the word has been passed around privately that no prisoners are to be taken.’

Dillon produced other letters from soldiers in the Liverpool Courier and the Wolverhampton Express and Star alleging that wounded Boers and prisoners would be shot. His denunciation of the war carried special significance: while British troops robbed the Boers of their national freedom in South Africa, Dillon was implying that the British government also held the people of Southern Ireland under colonial rule against their will.

One crusading English woman, Emily Hobhouse, alerted the world to the horrors of the prisoners’ camps. ‘In some camps,’ she reported, ‘two and sometimes three different families live in one tent. Most have to sleep on the ground. These people will never, ever forget what has happened. The children have been the hardest hit. They wither in the terrible heat and as a result of insufficient and improper nourishment. To maintain this kind of camp means nothing less than murdering children.’

To men like Conan Doyle and Halswelle, such charges were outrageous: they were fighting for King and Empire, a cause they believed in, against an enemy who used dubious tactics. ‘It’s the Boers that started this,’ the men would say to Halswelle. ‘We take too many prisoners. The trouble with you, Halswelle, is that you want to fight like you play cricket. There aren’t any bloody umpires out here! They’ll get you, if you don’t watch it. We don’t mind a scrap, but these Boers have got to learn to stand and fight, not cower behind their women and children.’

The men who shared the barracks with Halswelle were merely echoing the views of their leader. ‘The Boers would never stand up to a fair fight,’ complained Lord Kitchener, and it was this view that angered so many in the British ranks.

For the success of his sixpenny pamphlet rebutting the charges of war crimes, Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted on 9 August 1902. Intriguingly, he considered refusing the offer because he said he wrote the work out of conviction and not to gain a title. Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, explaining that he was reluctant to take it up, but friends and relatives, and above all his mother, persuaded him that he should accept the knighthood and that it was a suitable way to honour his patriotism.

Back in London, the gossipmongers took a more cynical view, however. They said that the King was an avid Sherlock Holmes’ fan and that he’d put Conan Doyle’s name on the honours list to encourage him to write more stories. Whatever the reason for the knighthood, His Majesty and many thousands of his subjects must have been delighted when, in 1903, the Strand Magazine started serialising The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Back in London, Halswelle’s mother was equally delighted. ‘There’s no finer writer in the land,’ she wrote to her son, ‘than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.’