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A Handbook of the Boer War by Gale and Polden, Limited

G >> Gale and Polden, Limited >> A Handbook of the Boer War




Again Retief with a hundred followers waited upon Dingaan at
Umgungundhlovu, and after military displays on each side received from
him a grant of the same land which Chaka had already given to the
British pioneers of Durban. Next day the Boers were received in farewell
audience by Dingaan, by whose orders they were treacherously surrounded
and led out to the place of execution, a hill of mimosas outside the
royal kraal, where they were put to death.

There remained the defenceless plantations on the Tugela. Before the
news of the massacre could reach them, and while they were hourly
expecting the return of Retief, Dingaan's impis swooped down upon them
from Zululand. At the cost of the lives of 600 men, women, and children,
the tribes were driven back, and the little town of Weenen, the "place
of weeping," remains to mark the spot.

Soon other parties of emigrants came in from beyond the Drakensberg, and
in 1838 an expedition under Potgieter failed to punish Dingaan for his
treachery. Nor did an attempt to help the emigrants made by the British
settlers at Durban meet with success. A small force of Natal natives
under an Englishman named Biggar was greatly out-numbered at the mouth
of the Tugela and perished almost to a man. Dingaan retaliated by
sending an impi to Durban, which he held for a few days; the settlers
taking refuge on board a ship in the Bay.

The Boers were disheartened and many of them trekked back to the veld
beyond the Drakensberg passes, which is now the Orange River Colony.
Their position in face of Dingaan seemed hopeless; but in November,
1838, there came out of the Cape Colony one Pretorius. He had heard of
their distress, and he organized a force of 500 men, with whom, on
December 16, he successfully encountered Dingaan's army and slew 3,000
of his warriors at the Blood River, an affluent of the Buffalo. Dingaan
fled and the column marched on to Umgungundhlovu, where Retief's
mouldering body was found on the hill of mimosas, and on it the deed of
grant of land at Durban. Pretorius was ambushed by Zulus disguised as
cattle, crawling on all fours and wearing ox hides; but he escaped with
slight loss, and returned to the Tugela. "Dingaan's Day," December 16,
is kept by the Boers as a festival of thanksgiving and rejoicing.

Soon a new complication beset the harassed emigrants. In December, 1838,
the British Government, anxious to stop the wars between the Boers and
the natives and to exclude the former from the sea, sent one hundred
soldiers to Durban and issued a proclamation in which the Boers were
declared to be British subjects who had unlawfully occupied Natal, and
who were morally responsible for all the blood that had been shed. They
protested against the imputation and against the military occupation of
Durban, but took no active steps to resent the affront.

When twelve months had passed without hostilities between Boer and
native, the British Government withdrew its hundred warriors from Durban
and tacitly handed over Natal to the emigrant Boers. Hardly had the
little transport _Vectis_ catted her anchor when the Republic of Natalia
was proclaimed and its flag run up on the staff of the forsaken British
Camp on Durban Bay.

But the dog-in-the-manger policy of neither incorporating Natal in the
British Empire nor frankly allowing the Boers to occupy it could not be
indefinitely maintained. Each present difficulty wriggled out of made
the future more embarrassing. Soon, as might have been anticipated, the
Boers were again in trouble with the natives. Panda, the father of
Cetchwayo, whose impis forty years after washed their spears in the
blood of 800 British soldiers at Isandhlwana, broke away from his
brother Dingaan, taking with him into Natal many thousand Zulus who were
awaiting an opportunity of shaking themselves free from the tyranny and
cruelty of Dingaan. Panda made overtures to the Boers and was gladly
received as an ally, and with his help Dingaan was finally crushed and
driven into Swaziland, where, in the hands of a hostile tribe, he
perished miserably by torture.

The emigrants were now favourably situated in Natal. They had
established an equitable if not a legal claim to it; Dingaan was out of
the way; and the British Government seemed indisposed to inter-meddle.
But the fatal and grotesque alliance with Panda, which culminated in his
installation as King of the Zulus by Pretorius in 1840, and which was
entirely inconsistent with the attitude hitherto assumed towards the
natives, was the undoing of the trekkers of 1836.

Panda's men as native auxiliaries eager to avenge themselves on the
common enemy Dingaan were all very well in their way. Most of them,
however, belonged to Natal and joined him in the hope of recovering the
tribal lands from which they had been evicted by Chaka and to which they
had a better right than the trekkers.

The Boers now began to reap the harvest of the Panda alliance. They
regarded the new arrivals as intruders, refused to acknowledge their
claims, and finally in August, 1841, decreed their expulsion from Natal.
The location chosen for their settlement was a district in Pondoland in
the possession of a chief under British protection, who already had had
occasion to lodge at Capetown a complaint against the Boers.

The British Government now found it necessary to intervene again in
Natal. A military occupation was announced by proclamation in December,
1841, and 240 men, under the command of an infantry captain named Smith,
were sent up to Durban to give effect to it.

When Smith, after a difficult march along the coast, reached his
destination on May 4, 1842, he pitched his camp on the flat which forms
the base of one of the promontories enclosing the Bay. He at once
lowered the Republican flag flying over the block-house at the Point,
and soon found that 1,500 Boers were occupying Congella on the shore of
the Bay. An attempt to surprise them by night failed disastrously;
Smith's force was reduced to half its strength, and the block-house was
captured by Pretorius.

Smith was now besieged in his camp, and the nearest help that could come
to him was at Grahamstown, five hundred miles away. Thither a gallant
civilian named King, who was one of the pioneers, rode in ten days; and
on June 25, when the little garrison was in extremity, it was relieved
by sea. Pretorius withdrew into the interior, and the Volksraad at
Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the Republic of Natalia, voted the
submission of the Boers. Pending a final settlement it was allowed to
remain in authority over the settlers, but the district around Durban
Bay was at once taken over as British territory. In May, 1843, a year
after the landing of Smith, the Republic of Natalia passed away and
Natal was proclaimed a British Colony.

The final settlement did not come for some time. The Volksraad was
abolished, but the claims of the Boers to the lands upon which they had
squatted were liberally considered. They were, however, dissatisfied
because the rights of Panda's men were also regarded, and many trekked
away across the Drakensberg. Those who remained protested that their
lives and property were insecure in the presence of the natives, and
Pretorius was deputed to go and lay their grievances before the British
Governor at the Cape.

The ill success of his mission provoked him to reprisals, and he
proceeded to stir up trouble in the Orange River Sovereignty, which had
recently been formally proclaimed British Territory. If not actively
loyal it was peaceably disposed until the arrival of Pretorius, who soon
drove out the British Resident and the little garrison of Bloemfontein
and set them on the run as far as Colesberg in the Cape Colony. He was
defeated at Boomplatz in August, 1848, by Sir Harry Smith, a veteran of
the Peninsular War, and British authority was for a time reestablished
over the Sovereignty. The Colonial Office soon however tired of the new
possession and gladly scuttled out in 1854 in order to avoid the task of
reaping the harvest of a clumsy and grotesque policy, which it had
formulated a few years before, of hemming in the _voortrekkers_, who had
settled north of the Orange River, with a barrier of native states set
up for the purpose on the east and west; and which now threatened to
involve it in a quarrel which naturally arose between Moshesh, the
Basuto chief, and the emigrants whom he had been appointed to restrain.

Pretorius retired across the Vaal where he joined Potgieter, who, after
the failure of his attack on Dingaan in 1838, had gone into
Moselekatse's country and had driven him beyond the Limpopo. A Republic
was set up beyond the Vaal which the British Government recognized as
independent in the Zand River Convention of 1852.

Such is in brief the story of the Boers' claim to Natal. They considered
it to be their lawful heritage out of which they had been jockeyed, and
in October, 1899, they seemed to have a chance of recovering it. They
boasted that they would not only win back Pietermaritzburg, which was
named after two leaders of the Great Trek, Pieter Retief and Gert
Maritz, but that they would establish themselves on the shores of the
Indian Ocean. It was not the vainglorious gasconade of a swashbuckler.
Four months after October 11, 1899, when the Boer ultimatum expired, the
British Army was still engaged in endeavouring to drive out the Boers
from British territory, and hardly a rifle had been discharged in the
enemy's country.

Napoleon was in the habit of impressing upon his officers the necessity
of studying past campaigns, both modern and ancient; but those who
anticipated confidently that the Boer War would soon be brought to a
successful close by the British Army were led into their error by the
history of past campaigns. There was, however, one campaign, the War of
Independence in North America, which the discerning might have
recognized as an analogous struggle; but it was overlooked, and the
history of the great European conflicts was established as the leading
authority. The occupation of the populous places and the control of the
means of access to them, which seemed to present few difficulties, meant
the end of the war and the subsequent negotiations as to the amount of
the indemnity or other penalty to be paid by the defeated.

But not only were the necessary preliminary successes deferred far
beyond the expected time of their accomplishment--Bloemfontein was not
occupied until five months, nor Pretoria until eight months had rolled
by since that October dawn when the Boers crossed the frontier into
Natal--but the prospect of the end of the War soon began to recede into
the perspective of infinity: and even now, after an interval of some
years since the peace of Vereeniging, when, like the proportions of some
huge edifice which can be truly comprehended only by the observer who
views it from a distance, the various incidents and phases of the War
begin to assume their relative importance, the difficulty of discovering
some guiding principle which shall reconcile the Great Boer War with
other wars is as great as ever.

Sometimes a cause can be found _a posteriori_ by groping in the dim and
deceptive light cast by an effect: or a process of exhaustion and
elimination may be set up in which the qualities common to each side are
cancelled and the result attributed to the credit balance which will
appear under one of the accounts. We saw for some months a gallant and
well equipped if somewhat amorphous British Army impotently
endeavouring, though in superior numbers, to make headway against an
aggregation of Boer commandos, and checked at various points on an arc
drawn wholly in British territory and extending in a circuit of over 500
miles from Ladysmith in Northern Natal through Stormberg and Colesberg
to Kimberley and Mafeking; and at each extremity of the arc was a
besieged city. Was the military art as taught in Europe founded upon
error, or had the British Army been negligently instructed in it?

Yet no European troops had had so much recent experience of active
service. We had lately fought in the Soudan, in East and West Africa, in
Burmah and on the North-West frontier of India; there was in fact hardly
a year in the preceding decade in which the portals of the temple of a
British Janus would have been closed. Moreover, our fighting had not
been against trained soldiers, but against enemies who like the Boers
were undisciplined, collectively if not individually brave men
patriotically defending their own country. We therefore entered the
arena with experience which no other European Army possessed.



II. PATRIOTISM, DUTY, AND DISCIPLINE.


Many hard things have been said of Patriotism.[6] Dr. Johnson's
definition is well known, and more recently it has been styled the
sublimest form of Selfishness. These, however, are not definitions but
rather criticisms of certain phases of Patriotism, which is closely
allied to Family Affection and, like that sentiment, originates in the
helplessness and the egotism of the Individual.

The weak infant clings to his mother for sustenance, comfort and
protection, and the tender care which is bestowed upon him while his
body and his mind are developing fosters the notion of the subjective
importance of the human unit. Human nature is so constituted that the
Individual is disposed to over-estimate his own consequence and to
regard his own surroundings as superior to the surroundings of all other
persons, and therefore more worthy of recognition, encouragement, and
admiration. As the Child grows in years this sentiment is gradually and
unconsciously modified, but it is never wholly eradicated. The inward
emotion aroused in his heart by parental solicitude becomes partially
altruistic and outward and is transmuted into Gratitude and Love.

The Child emerges into Youth and thence into Manhood, and the area of
his immediate environment is enlarged. He needs further succour and
assistance, and the Family Community to which he belongs and which
nurtured and watched over his early years can no longer supply his
requirements. He is in want of new fellowships and must strengthen
himself by joining various bodies and associations. With these he
incorporates himself more or less and his friendly attitude towards them
for his own good is a development of the primitive Family Affection. In
the case of a class, a social, or professional community the sentiment
is termed _Esprit de Corps_;[7] in view of recognized civil institutions
by which he perceives that he benefits, it is Loyalty; while with
respect to the Fatherland it is Patriotism, which denotes the adherence
of the helpless individual Ego to the Supreme Community. Patriotism,
like Family Affection, is a growth and culture of the idea of Self. It
is the expression of the Individual's thanks for the support,
countenance, protection, and other moral and material advantages claimed
by him from the Supreme Community, to which in return he readily attorns
with respect and admiration. He is, however, patriotic because with
unconscious egotism he regards his Country as part of himself rather
than himself as part of his Country. Even the act of a man who
sacrifices his life for the good of his country may not be wholly
unselfish, for some natures are so constituted that they can discount
the future and be gratified by the prospective award of posthumous
honour. There can, however, be no doubt that Patriotism, though possibly
of not very noble origin, is a sentiment beneficial both to the
community and the individual, and is therefore worthy of encouragement.
Happily, those cold heights of philosophy on which every man is loved as
a brother and every nationality held in equal honour and esteem are
unattainable by human nature; for without the stimulus of Patriotism
National Life would be impracticable.[8] It's chief defect is that like
most of the emotions it is sometimes hasty and unreasoning.

Such, it is believed, is briefly the history of Patriotism, and the
theory is supported by the fact that the British soldier is not
patriotic by nature. It is not his fault. The class from which he is
usually drawn has unhappily less reason for respecting and admiring the
Supreme Community than any other class, for it participates fully in the
distresses and meagerly in the successes and good fortune of the Nation,
from which, though not actually unpatriotic, it stands sullenly aloof.
It can hardly be denied that the power and prosperity of Great Britain
have favourably affected the position of the upper and middle classes to
a greater degree than they have ameliorated the condition of the lower
classes, and it is therefore not surprising that the latter seem to take
little or no pride in their nationality, and sometimes even act
perversely in opposition to its interests.

The private soldier has never been taught to think about his country.
The education which he may have received at the Board School is not
calculated to arouse in him a feeling of national pride which is
non-existent in his home life. The display of the National Flag, which
flutters over so many distant lands, is discouraged in the primary
schools of Great Britain as tending to "flag-worship." In the United
States, on the other hand, the Stars and Stripes are hoisted in every
school yard. No systematic effort is made to interest the children of
the operative classes in Greater Britain. India and the Colonies are
facts in geography troublesome to learn and easy to forget. The history
of the British Empire is sterilized before it is imparted to them. They
are not taught to realize that the happiness and prosperity of a large
proportion of the inhabitants of the world are dependent upon the moods
of the population of a small group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and
that in the ballot-boxes of Great Britain are cast the fortunes of many
millions of their fellow-creatures.

Foreigners have remarked that the minstrelsy of Great Britain is
singularly devoid of patriotic songs. The British soldier has no
"Star-Spangled Banner" or "Wacht am Rhein" to sing on the line of march
or in the bivouac, but only the last comic or sentimental ditty which he
may have heard at the Garrison Music Hall before embarking on active
service. The National Anthem is not a patriotic song but a prayer for
Divine Protection for the Sovereign, to which have been appended some
inappropriate stanzas now rarely heard; while "Rule, Britannia!" might
have been composed for the gasconading swashbuckler of an extravaganza.

It would therefore be surprising if the recruit joined the Army with a
highly pitched conception of the work he has undertaken. Destitution; or
trouble about a woman, or with his own people, or with the police; or
the mysterious magnetism of an adventurous life rather than the desire
to serve his country, has induced him to enlist. An existing or
prospective War always keeps the recruiting sergeant busy, but the
object of a War is a matter of indifference to the recruit. Most of our
wars have been waged for political reasons which he cannot understand.
Apart from the difficulties of language and of unaccustomed
environments, he would as readily serve in any other Army in which the
pay was as liberal and the restraint of discipline not more irksome. How
is it, then, that lacking the stimulus of Patriotism through no fault of
his own and being, in fact, a mercenary, he becomes an excellent
soldier; perhaps, next to the Turk, the best in Europe?

The answer seems to be that he soon acquires a high sense of Duty. Duty
may be defined as the necessity to do something for one's own or for the
general good which is not naturally pleasurable or agreeable or
instinctively desired. In the trite proverb it is contrasted with and
takes precedence of Pleasure. As a motive for action it stands on a
higher plane than Patriotism.

The alchemic process by which the indifferent, unemotional, and
sometimes unintelligent recruit is transmuted into the precious metal of
the soldier who wins battles seems to be somewhat as follows: Of his own
volition he has taken on a certain job and his dogged pride or obstinacy
will not allow him to be beaten by it, however little enthusiasm it may
arouse in him and however distasteful it may be to him at first. He
offers no "ca' canny" service, but plods on and does his best in his own
way. The lack of the enthusiastic temperament does not seriously retard
the progress of his military education, and without much ado he becomes
a stolid dependable unit of the Army. He is not carried away by success
nor unduly depressed by failure. His instincts tell him that they are
the accidents of Duty.

It has been noticed that the word Glory and its derivatives[9] rarely
appear in the accounts of the action of the British Army on service,
except in a War Correspondent's letter or telegram. No reference is made
in reports, orders or despatches to the so-called "glorious" incidents
of a soldier's life in time of war. He is commended for his endurance,
his tenacity and his matter-of-fact acceptance of the vicissitudes of
war as "part of the day's work." The truest Glory is the conscientious
performance of Duty.

If through the incompetence or neglect of his leaders he is called upon
to sacrifice himself, he sacrifices himself without a murmur. If he is
compelled to keep himself alive on scanty rations of horseflesh and to
wet his parched lips with the trickle of a dwindled and tainted spruit,
he believes that his officers have done their best for him. He is
ordered to fall in upon the deck of a burning troopship and to stand at
attention while Death inspects the ranks. He is besieged in a hill fort
on the Indian frontier by a horde of fanatics eager to kill or to
mutilate him. He lies wounded on the field of battle from which, after
an indecisive engagement, each combatant has retired; and there,
scorched by the mid-day sun and starved by the cold of the night, and
perhaps also in danger of being burnt alive by a veld fire, he waits
without water for the armistice which shall bring up the ambulances. He
returns to his own land where he soon finds that he is not of much
account. After a great war there may be a period of evanescent
patronage; or a deed of Dargai, Rorke's Drift, or Balaklava may have
temporarily thrilled the audience into Music Hall enthusiasm; but he is
not greatly impressed, and stoically reflects that like the battle, the
starvation, and the Field Hospital it is "all in the day's work" and
will soon pass away.

There has probably never been a struggle in which the private soldier
more fully earned the gratitude of his country than in the South African
War. The most unfriendly critics in the foreign staff offices have paid
tribute to the excellence of the British soldier: sometimes, however,
sneering at him as a mercenary, whom, by a curious perversion of the
probabilities, they profess to think unlikely to be as efficient as
their own conscripts who are forced into military service; but they
never hold him responsible for the ill-success of the war. Throughout
their criticisms there lurks a feeling of pained astonishment that the
British "mercenary" proves himself to be as good or even a better
soldier than the continental conscript, coupled with a comfortable
conviction that Discipline is not well maintained in the British Army.

The final cause of Discipline is the efficient use of arms on the field
of battle. Discipline is the result of an irksome educational process by
which a man is taught to submit his wishes, his instincts, and, to a
great extent, his personal liberty to the control of one who may be his
inferior morally, mentally, and physically. It has also been cynically
defined as the art of making a man more afraid of his own officers than
of the enemy. Its function seems to be the formation of certain military
qualities which Patriotism and the Sense of Duty are by themselves
believed incapable of creating. It has always been considered an
essential part of a soldier's training; but this view, though probably
correct, is not confirmed by the South African War, in which an
undisciplined force held its own for some years against greatly superior
numbers of disciplined men.

The ideal Army, patriotic, full of the sense of Duty, and perfect in
discipline, would be invincible; but such an Army has never yet been
seen. A deficiency of one or two of these qualities may be made up for
by a fuller measure of the others. The history of each war will seem to
indicate for a time the proportions in which the qualities should be
blended, which is the essential, and whether any one of them can be
omitted; but the inferences thus drawn from one war will probably be
found misleading in the next war.

The inference to be drawn from the South African War seems to be that
the value of those military qualities which are created by Discipline
and training has been over-rated, and that a passionate bigoted belief
in the justice of a cause is a more potent factor in the making of a
soldier. Even if every allowance be made for the strategical advantages
possessed by the Boers, of fighting in their own land on interior lines
in a sparsely populated country peculiarly adopted for _guerilla_, it is
difficult to account for their success if the tests by which the
efficiency of a European army is measured are applied to them. It may be
that war has hitherto been regarded too exclusively as a statical and
dynamical problem and that the moral element has been overlooked. It
certainly was overlooked in South Africa; for the war which Lord Roberts
in October, 1900, believed was practically at an end had in fact then
run little more than one-third of its course.

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