A damned messy business
Giles Foden
THE NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM BOOK OF THE BOER WAR by Field Marshal Lord Carver Sidgwick, £25, pp. 280 The spectacle of the writing general is not always a happy one. One has to go back When the Boers captured British soldiers they often stripped them of their trousers.
as far as Caesar to find a master. The current state of military writing may be gauged from a glance at Colonel Samuel E. Riddlebarger's website of advice for fight- ing scribes (vvww.airpower.maxwell.af.mil). As he eloquently puts it: After pushing a pencil for the Air Force from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s and from the squadron swamps to the Pentagon peaks, I've seen lots of briefings and brochures on how to write more effectively. Much of that guid- ance stressed simplified writing. And much of that advice came from ivory-tower types with little 'combat time' when it comes to writing. My scar tissue says it ain't necessarily so; sim- pler is not always better.
I doubt whether Field Marshal Lord Carver (former Chief of the General Staff) has read these nostrums by Colonel Riddlebarger (USAF, retired), but he is certainly one of the best and most prolific military authors writing today. He has pro- duced 13 books and edited two others. In all of those that I have read, he has avoided reducing conflict to strategy alone: he eschews what that greatest of war corre- spondents, H. W. Nevinson, once called `the algebraic formulae of slaughter' and gives us in place of it a clear sense of the man on the battlefield.
The task he has now set himself is in this vein — to recapture the Boer war
as seen through the eyes of those participants whose letters, diaries or other papers are held in the archives of the National Army Museum.
As Lord Carver explains, it is inevitable that what he presents is a partial view 'there is only one contribution from the Boer side' — nor does one get much sense of the large role played in the war by South Africa's majority population. Only now, as revisionist historians build on the pioneer- ing work done by Thomas Pakenham, is the contribution to the war by millions of black Africans (as both auxiliary staff and armed soldiers) being restored to light. At the time, a great deal of hypocrisy was evident, as both sides used black soldiers but pro- fessed not to. The Boers shot armed `British blacks' on sight. Sometimes, as in a notorious case involving troops command- ed by General Smuts, these killings amounted to massacres.
For the writers in Lord Carver's antholo- gy, black lives and deaths (including tens of thousands in the 'concentration camps' the British would establish at the end of the war) were more or less invisible. So whether or not the varied experiences he has collected here, in the letters and journals of British officers and men, really present 'a clear picture' is a moot point. These gaps having been taken into account, however, one gets a good partial view of the experiences of the British soldier, from the jingoistic, 'it'll be over by teatime' ethos of the early days in 1899 to the blood-weary months of early 1902 when the guerrilla war waged by the Boer commandos finally ground to a halt, worn down by Kitchener's policies of farm- burning and civilian internment, By that time the Victorian era had become the modern one and, as Kipling would put it, the British Empire had been taught 'no end of a lesson'.
As I found myself, when excavating my own great-grandfather's letters from South Africa for the purpose of researching a novel about the siege of Ladysmith, there is nothing like an unstructured first-person account to give a powerful sense of what this messy and unnecessary war' (as Carver calls it) was like.
Take this unnamed sergeant's descrip- tion of the relief of Ladysmith (my ancestor would have been on the reception commit- tee):
The garrison lined the street , . , We expect- ed to find them looking bad on 3oz mealie meal, a biscuit and a little horse flesh per diem, but were shocked to see how attenuat- ed & weak they really were; some of them like shadows, their drawn faces, and sunken eyes, hardly strong enough to stand; in fact some dropped to the ground as we were passing, but still raised a feeble cheer.
As well as privation and tragedy (many descriptions of bullets ripping through flesh, horrific but first-rate from a literary point of view), Carver's collection also gives us a glimpse of the comedy that is so often part of the ordinary soldier's lot how, for instance, the Boers (who were short of uniforms) used to strip British cap- tives before releasing them into the veld, naked except for their raincoats. There is an amusing cartoon of this expe- rience in Tabitha Jackson's book The Boer War (Macmillan, £18.99), produced to accompany the forthcoming Channel 4 documentary series on the conflict. Jackson gives a wider, if less personal view of the war, making the point that one of the rea- sons there were so many letters and jour- nals from the front was that between 1841 and 1900 the literacy rate shot up from 633 per cent to 92.2 per cent.
The Boer war was a police-keeping war that turned into a public relations night- mare for the British government. It was, as Jackson says, 'to cast a long shadow' over the next 100 years. As we approach its cen- tenary, it is interesting to reflect whether — in an era when soldiers don't seem to record their experiences in the same way as their Victorian forebears — we are in dan- ger of losing sight of what battle actually means. It says something for the power of words that despite the visual directness of television pictures of laser-guided bombs from the Gulf and suchlike they seem to insulate rather than convey the damage caused. Lord Carver's anthology is a timely reminder that for those on the ground, soldiers and civilians alike, death is as near as ever.
Giles Foden is deputy literary editor of the Guardian. He is the author of The Last King of Scotland and, most recently, Lady- smith, published by Faber.
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