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Aftermath.

The account above is typical of the way in which the British army reverted to archaic methods which had proven inadequate in actual battlefield situations; indeed the more one reads about the army over the years since its inception, the more one sees that time and time again after a war, it seemed to fold- in on itself, and batten down the hatches, only emerging into the real world when a crisis was imminent. This is true of the High Command structure as within everything else. The Generals in charge of the British army in the Boer War were skilled in the principles of fighting savages and tribesmen. Years of Imperialist expansion had tested them against almost everything and every country where Britannia wished to plant her flag. The problem was that, although acquitting themselves well in small wars, where a little technology could be absorbed to help defeat the enemy, while allowing traditional methods of drill and training to win the day, now the boot was being placed firmly on the other foot, and it was the new improvements in machine-guns, rifles and artillery firepower, together with entrenchments and barbed-wire, that made it imperative to revaluate strategy as well as tactics.

Men like Lord Methuen, Sir John French, Sir Redvers Buller and Sir George White had their minds firmly fixed in the warfare of the 1870’s and 1880’s, and considered that defeating the Boer’s would be no different from disposing of the Zulus or the Dervishes, and because they had no experience of warfare on the continental standard, they naively expected the Boer’s to behave no differently from their normal foes.

Even with the arrival of Lord Roberts as commander-in chief of the British forces in South Africa, it was yet another case of employing a commander who had never before seen action against Europeans, or for that matter had never come up against an enemy armed with modern rifles and artillery; not only this but he had not been at the head of an army since 1880. What he soon grasped was that there were sever limitations to the accepted tactics of the British infantry when confronted by modern firepower and sophisticated entrenchments.[1] The main problem was that as soon as his back was turned his subordinates reverted to the same old methods that had cost them so dear at the commencement of the war. Kitchener was placed in the position of operational commander, and although he was a great organiser and administrator, he had little or no understanding of the tactical realities of modern warfare. His assaults on the Boer position at Modder River cost the British infantry over 1,000 unnecessary casualties, and only when Roberts came back to take over, were the infantry withdrawn and the artillery used to smother the Boer position with shellfire.[2] That Roberts understood the changes brought about by modern warfare becomes clear when one reads, ‘Success in war cannot be expected unless all ranks have been trained in peace to use their wits. Generals and Commanding Officers are therefore not only to encourage their subordinates in doing so by affording them constant opportunities of acting on their own responsibility, but they must also check all practices which interfere with the free exercise of their judgment, and will break down by every means in their power the paralysing habit of an unreasonable and mechanical adherence to the latter of the orders and to routine.’[3]

The Second Boer War was not a “small war” in which the British army was able to defeat and subdue a semi-backward enemy according to its training. The war in South Africa grew into a very serious conflict, which, while it brought volunteers from every part of the Empire to the assistance of the mother country, seriously strained its resources and exhibited to the military critics on the continent of Europe the numerous shortcomings of the British army. Although it was the Boers who had declared war, the sympathy of the continent was behind the Boers. The skill and tenacity with which a group of farmers had resisted the professional forces of a great Empire were very much admired.[4] To distant observers the war must have appeared as a contest between liberty and despotism, and in particular one would like to know what the feelings were in the United States when juxtaposed against their own struggle with British Colonialist/Imperialist expansion? Every victory of the Boers was received with rapturous enthusiasm by both the French and the Germans, and even the Tsar of Russia, whose own domestic government was no model for freedom, proposed a general alliance of the continental powers against Britain.[5]

As luck would have it Europe was powerless to intervene, but could only look on as Roberts and Kitchener retrieved the early reverses of the British army and wore down the Boer resistance. The fact was that the British Navy, and her supremacy at sea dominated the situation so that no continental power could challenge Britain in almost anything she chose to do. What it did kick-start however was to instil in the mind of the German Kaiser the need to meet Britain head on by creating a fleet that would match it. With over 400,000 troops tied down in South Africa, all of this makes one wonder what would have happened if the Germans had already built a fleet comparable with Britain’s, and what the consequences of Gavrilo Princip’s actions fourteen years earlier at Sarajevo would have done to make Britain reconsider her military commitments?

Given the power and resources of the British Empire there can be little doubt that the Boers were virtually doomed before the first shots were fired. That being said, one still has to consider how complacent the British army had become, and how faulty was its command structure, to say nothing of its strategical and tactical limitations when confronted with modern warfare. The phenomenon of a small but highly mobile force manoeuvring at will over the vast plains of South Africa was the precursor of the desert campaigns of 1940-43, and the sheer size of the British armies commitment to a “colonial” war can been seen as the proverbial “sledgehammer to crack a walnut.” Nevertheless the fact that the army was able to rectify many of its mistakes before any major conflict with a real modern state occurred shows that the lessons had sunk-in. The almost total lack of experience by the British generals in their handling of large bodies of men was an acute failing, and one sees here that this was due, in the main, to the almost total lack of infantry training grounds in England that could be used for division or corps manoeuvres, however one is still left with the feeling that, even allowing for improvements in the use of mass troop movements, the British high command was still not adaptable enough to take in new tactics.

What the Boer War did for the British army was to make it revaluate its methods and armaments, to say nothing of its status in the eyes of the general public. The old class-conscious British army was not destroyed, as Lord Wolseley had hoped.[6] On the other hand, ‘the War Office machine was given new premises, a new general staff, and a thorough overhaul. The Cabinet decided the partnership with the Commander-in-Chief was impossible and created a Chief of the Imperial General Staff instead, without warning the incumbent C-in-C, Roberts. He arrived one morning on 1904 to find that he had officially ceased to exist.’[7] With all of this “new broom”, the fact still remained that with the outbreak of war in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force still crossed over to the continent under a commander who had proven himself lacking in determination and tactical skills during the Boer War- this in itself is a damning indictment of the blinkered vision of the British army during this period.

 

Graham J.Morris

March 2004

 

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