Big Boer

GENERAL SMUTS (Vol. I)--Sarah Gertrude Mijlin--Little, Brown ($3.50).

If Jan Christian Smuts's career were graphed it would look like a broker's nightmare. He has been a lawyer, a politician, a soldier, a rebel, a turncoat, a philosopher, a diplomat. Among his own countrymen he has touched the nadir and the zenith of popularity. During the Boer War the British pursued him with blood in their eye; in the World War they made him a general. Smuts has attracted more hatred from varying sources than any man in South Africa. But through all his ups & downs he has kept the quiet consciousness of duty done. Volume I of Sarah Gertrude Millin's General Smuts is no campaign document blocked out with a whitewash brush but a sympathetic biography of a Big Boer.

Smuts was born (1870) a British subject, because his father's farm happened to be in British territory (Cape of Good Hope), but he was an out-&-out Boer. A solemnly earnest, religious youth, he worked to such good purpose at college in Stellenbosch that he won a scholarship to Cambridge. Back in Capetown after graduation he hung out his shingle as a lawyer. Empire-building Cecil Rhodes had his eye on Smuts, intended to make him one of his young men. And Smuts, believing in Rhodes's dream of a united South Africa, was eager to follow-until the scandal of Jameson's Raid and the worse scandal of Rhodes's implication in it. Then Smuts shook the perfidious English dust from his feet, went north to join Kruger in the Transvaal.

Oom Paul quickly recognized young Smuts's ability, made him State Attorney at 28, though he was not legally eligible. Smuts saw that war was imminent, worked like a Dutchman to prevent it. Nevertheless it came. (According to Author Millin, neither side really wanted war which was the work of one man, Sir Alfred--later Lord--Milner, British High Commissioner.) Once it started, the Boers thought their 60,000 burghers had a good chance of winning. They had beaten the British before, at Majuba: they remembered the successful U. S. War of Independence: they expected the Cape Colony to rise and hoped for help from Europe. The first months of the war were encouraging, but then the weight of numbers began to tell. Just before the British took Pretoria, the Transvaal capital. State Attorney Smut? robbed a bank of its Government funds, sent them off to safety. That nestegg of a half-million pounds kept the Boers going two years more, against England's outlay of -L-200,000,000.

By the time Smuts joined the fighting the Boers knew their goose was cooked but meant to burn it to a crisp before they quit. With famed Guerrillas Botha, de Wet, de la Rey, they raided in mounted commandos, depending on prisoners for rifles, ammunition, clothes, often literally fighting to eat. The British took to burning farms, interning the women and children in concentration camps (20,000 of them died there). When the Boers took prisoners they swapped rags for uniforms, then turned the soldiers-loose. With a commando of 360 Smuts set out to invade the Cape, still hoping the Boers there would rise. In his saddlebags he carried two books: a Greek Testament, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The British stuck grimly to his heels. There was no rising, and his raid was an almost continuous running fight. His march of 700 miles in five weeks was a record even for Boers. At the end, with 50,000 British troops after him. Smuts had added 3,000 to his force, was besieging a British town when the war ended.

Peace came as a letdown for Smuts. For a while he was simply an embittered veteran. Then the Liberals came into office in England and gave back self-government to the Boers, only four years after the war ended. Smuts was struck all of a heap. "Has such a miracle of trust and magnanimity ever happened before? Only people like the English could do it. They may make mistakes, but they're a big people." Smuts straightway buried the hatchet, tried to get his brother-Boers to do likewise. When he took office under Botha, who became Prime Minister, both were accused by diehard Boers of being turncoats. Botha was the popular idol but Smuts was the brains of the administration. Discontented criticism centred on him.

When the Transvaal began to heave and simmer over the volcanic question of Indian immigration, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi-not vet a Mahatma but already a smart agitator-challenged the Government to slippery grips, it was Smuts who had to bear the onus of sending him to jail. When labor troubles invaded the Johannesburg mines, it was Smuts who alienated the workers by ordering out troops, arresting and deporting the labor leaders without trial. It was also Smuts who got most of the criticism, little of the credit, for the. Union of South Africa (1910).

Many a vengeful Boer looked on the outbreak of the World War as a good chance to win back independence from Britain. De Wet and de la Rey led the revolt, roused nearly 12,000 Boers to their flag. But Smuts stood pat. The revolt was put clown at the cost of more than a .thousand casualties. When England urged the Union to mop up German Southwest Africa Smuts took fire again with Rhodes's great idea. Then, with German Southwest Africa mopped up. Smuts was given the harder job of absorbing German East Africa. Here he found the Boer War tables exactly turned: this time it was Smuts who had the overwhelming numbers and the enemy who raided, retreated, but were never quite caught. By 1917 Smuts had the country, if not the enemy, in his pocket. Lloyd George invited Ex-Boer Smuts to join Britain's War Cabinet. There Biographer Millin closes her first instalment.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.