David Nash. History Today. Volume 49, Issue 6, June 1999.
The latter part 19th century was the era of western imperialism whose objectives were accomplished by military campaign and conquest. This began to change as reports about the brutality of Boer War in South Africa emerged in the early 20th century. It became clear that British domination of other cultures was in itself a source of deterioration of English civilization. Liberal radicals J.M. Robertson and J.A. Hobson were influential in enlightening people about the social and moral decay that resulted from the justification for destroying other cultures and societies.
Writing in the 1930s, George Orwell was convinced that the military and those associated with it had become essentially anathema to British public and cultural life. But such naked suspicion and mistrust of the soldiering profession had not originated overnight, and, arguably, had been produced by a series of ambivalent military episodes which had served to discredit the institution. Similarly, the philosopher Karl Popper, writing in the 1960s, believed that the experience of the South African War in particular, had had a lasting effect on British public opinion. Repugnance at what war had become, stimulated by the experience of this conflict, he argued, had definitely affected Britain’s attitudes in 1914 and in the inter-war period had laid the foundations for the policy of appeasement.
The later years of the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic surge in popular enthusiasm for imperial adventures as well as the courage and generalship that made them possible. Comics, novels, popular songs and even poetry and literature celebrated the innate heroism of England’s civilising mission. On occasions this could also be given the blessing of religion and higher morality, which made it into a remarkably potent cultural package. Thus the enthusiasm of the population for soldiering could be said to have come alive as the old century died.
However, this cultural development did not go entirely unchallenged. Liberalism had traditionally entertained an innate distrust, even hatred, of military adventures and their consequences. The fear of the over-eager and over-ambitious ‘man on the spot’ who led Britain into colonial disaster was a commonplace of liberal rhetoric. The great theoretician of Manchester economics, Richard Cobden, had argued that the cultural and political dominance of what he saw as an aristocratic caste and its role in imperial government served to lock Britain dangerously into the imperialist system. The answer of Cobden and his followers in the later nineteenth century was to preach the value and virtues of Free Trade and the avoidance of territorial conquest. But, in response to the changed atmosphere and the perception that Britain had moved from supremacy to competition, meant that the heirs to Cobden’s ideological legacy had, by the end of the century, developed more fundamentally moral critiques of the imperial and military ethos.
The watershed between the last years of the nineteenth century and Orwell’s acerbic comments was clearly the South African War. In many ways this was a conflict with far-reaching repercussions for both Britain and other European societies. It was one of the first wars in which technology and modern methods of combat played a decisive part. In particular the new rifles with which the combatants were armed transformed the soldier’s capacity to inflict injury and death. They were accurate as never before, and, most importantly, smokeless, meaning that death could now be dealt out from a distance and unseen, thereby transforming war forever. Ideologically, also, this was the first war that had brought Britain into conflict with other Christians since the Crimean War. This gap of over forty years had witnessed many changes in British society that crucially altered the country’s attitude to the idea of war. In particular, the 1880s had witnessed the growth of a new style of tabloid journalism, which could claim to be responsible for the formation of opinion as much as for providing news. Alongside many other concerns, critical commentators held these newspapers and periodicals largely responsible for the glorification of imperial expansion and their dissemination of it in popular forms. The strong emotions and the opinions that this new style journalism seemed capable of inspiring posed questions for the liberal mind about the maintenance of civil rights and free speech and the practice of morality.
Criticism of the South African War ranged from mild misgivings to out-right opposition, with individuals holding a number of overlapping views. The most obviously visible opposition to Britain’s stance and its conduct of the war were those individuals labelled by domestic opinion, rather too easily, as ‘Pro-Boers’. These included people like David Lloyd George and Emily Hobhouse, whose positions varied between championing the rights of the Boer republics, to criticising Britain’s methods of waging war—the so-called ‘scorched earth’ policy, and the internment of the civilian population in what came to be termed ‘concentration camps’. The future Liberal prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, upon hearing Emily Hobhouse’s reports of the situation in South Africa, famously termed such policies ‘methods of barbarism’. Members of this group were in the fore-front of organised opposition to the war, and staged lectures and demonstrations throughout Britain, many of which were attacked and disrupted by mob violence.
While this ‘pro-Boer’ viewpoint focused on the facts and implications of the war itself, there was also a coalition of ideas which saw the war as symptomatic of the breakdown of British society and its ability to conduct civilised relations among its own population and with other nations. These critics of imperialism generally came from the radical wing of liberalism and from the socialist camp. Their critiques of society took in everything from the part that economic motives had played in causing the conflict; the increasingly unnerving nature of popular culture, and the growing cult of militarism; right through to the explicitly dangerous role that religion had played in promoting the war.
The last of these was a particularly potent criticism that was singled out as a fundamental flaw in the structure of British civilisation. This critique argued that the missionary zeal of the mid-century, personified by David Livingstone, was a mere memory and had been replaced by an altogether more cynical approach to empire—graphically displayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The thirst for imperial adventuring and expansionist policies were seen by critics and dangerous justifications for war, conquest, and the subjugation of ‘heathen’ peoples, sanctified by the religious thanskgiving of the conqueror. For progressive liberals this denied the existence of an enlightened rationalist ‘spirit of the age’, which, they argued, should have been the standard by which the behaviour of civilised nations towards the uncivilised should be measured.
Evangelism in the spread of missionary work, the cult of ‘Muscular Christianity’ with its attendant literature glorifying military figures (perhaps reaching its zenith with the heroic portrayal of Gordon of Khartoum) and the very ‘militarisation’ of Christianity itself, all served to provide examples of Christian culture underpinning imperial and military adventures. Moreover, the benign and saintly figure of Gordon was replaced at the end of the century by that of the more morally ambivalent ‘hero’ Kitchener, who had desecrated the tomb of the Mahdi as his first act after his victory at the battle of Omdurman.
Religion was seen by its critics as playing a particularly dangerous role in the propaganda battle that centred around the South African War. This also marked a new and worrying change since the earlier part of the century, which had seen Christian culture marshalled to advance the welfare of small nations whose cause could be shown to be both civilised and moral. Critics saw the sacred British Empire, entrusted to the nation by God, at war with a bigoted frontier people who considered themselves to be the chosen race. The Freethinker wrote in October 1899 that,
The Boer has a Mauser rifle in one hand and a Dutch Bible in the other, while the Britisher has weapons in both hands and a Bible behind his back. Each relies on the God of that book. Each prays to the God of that book. Each informs the God of that book which side he ought to take in the quarrel.
Humanitarian critiques of Boer society drew on reports of their treatment of the native population and its sanction by Scripture—one commentator suggested that if the Boers behaved as the chosen race, then the natives were clearly treated with the same barbarism reserved for the Canaanites. Similarly, a missionary’s account that the Boers had categorically denied that the natives had souls, was used as a stick which simultaneously beat Christianity and the failure of it to promote civilised behaviour among its most pious adherents in Africa.
J.M. Robertson was probably the most famous secularist and liberal radical to speak out in opposition to the war. He had begun a career as a literary critic before the war, and was to progress via journalism to politics, and eventually to a place in Asquith’s Liberal cabinet. By the outbreak of the war he had already attracted notoriety as an anti-imperiaist theoretician and a particularly close associate of the economist J.A. Hobson, through their mutual attendance at the South Place Ethical Society. Less than three years before the war Robertson had attacked imperialism as ‘the practice of international burglary’; concluding that Britain’s relations with so-called uncivilised states were ‘almost wholly barbarous’. Roberton’s ideas were published as a book Patriotism and Empire in which he railed against a whole range of attitudes that made an outsized colonial war a certainty:
To put the case shortly, if nationalism is bad, imperialism is worse. If to intoxicate oneself on fatherland be unwholesome, to grow drunken on empire is pestilent.
He attacked Kipling as a barbarian sentimentalist, and saw in his work a thoroughly distasteful imperialism:
We figure for ourselves in the rest of the new gospel as the Dominion Race, beside whom Baboos, Home Ruler’s, and Russians, are as creeping things.
The fact that British society had adapted itself to allow brutal imperial adventures to become a central part of popular culture and the entertainment industry was also of considerable concern to Robertson and other critics. Whilst the Music Hall preached revenge for the early British defeats of ‘Black Week’, there were other ways in which the nation was made comfortable with its part in the conflict. Both Robertson and the editor of the Secular Review, William Stewart Ross, criticised the idyllic pictures that were painted of the British soldier. Kipling’s ‘Tommy Atkins’ was portrayed sitting on the veldt munching his bar of chocolate thoughtfully provided for him by the courteous consideration of his monarch—all captured by the latest Box Brownie camera of which Kodak was to loudly boast. In such circumstances, the reality of war and the notion of motive in the conflict was being dangerously swept under the carpet, claimed the critics.
The economic theorist J.A. Hobson developed a radical critique of the war which started from economics but ended with ethics. The optimism of Cobden had been undermined for Hobson by an increasingly autocratic and bureaucratic approach to governing the empire. Economic expansion no longer benefited all, but now, as the South African war demonstrated for him, could cause chaos. Hobson blamed international financiers with links to the military and aristocracy for drawing Britain into an unjust war for material gain.
Both Hobson’s and Robertson’s critiques of the war took on even greater significance since they both were not content merely to write from a distance, but actively involved themselves in the war as eyewitnesses and journalists. Sent to South Africa for the Morning Leader, Robertson sent regular reports home under the nom de plume SCRUTATOR. He was one of the first to alert domestic opinion to the indiscriminate burning of farms as a military tactic (a theme to be reiterated in Emily Hobhouse’s book The Brunt of War). Robertson was condemned by The Times for his ‘lack of patriotism’. Upon his return from South Africa Robertson held a series of meetings, at one of which, in December 1900 at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel, he suggested that the suppression of news had effectively turned the more jingoistic elements in the British Press into election agents for the Tory party. He also emphasised that the stories of Boer atrocities were calculated to justify the scorched earth policy, and that many in the Cape Colony were convinced that peace in South Africa would only be possible if the independence of the two Boer republics was won and assured.
Robertson’s reports for the Morning Leader were subsequently collected in a book published in 1901 with the controversial title Wrecking the Empire. This book, boycotted by many booksellers, contained what one review described as:
… one long record of arbitary proceedings on the part of the military authorities towards the Dutch in Cape Colony and Natal; of unjustifiable arrests and imprisonment of innocent men; of warring upon women and noncombatants; of a systematic policy of humiliating the Dutch throughout South Africa, and acts of the grossest injustice perpetrated under the license inseparable from Martial Law; the whole constituting a damning indictment of the war … of a nature to cause every fair-minded Englishman to blush with shame at the infamies which have been perpetrated in his name in South Africa.
To accompany the publication of his book Robertson took his lantern slides of wartime atrocities on a tour of the provinces, and these exhibitions were, toy many who opposed the war, the first exposure to its graphic reality.
Robertson was a realist, and he was conscious that the empire was an obligation that could not be avoided or shirked. If anything his experiences of the Second Boer War sharpened this realisation, and he pressed fellow anti-imperialists to accept the stark reality of imperial responsibility. Once this had been faced, Robertson hoped that imperial nations as a whole would exercise their duty to promote and encourage self-government among former colonies. Even after the war had ended, Robertson continued to attack both the glorification of empire and what to him appeared to be the need to popularise it for its galvanising patriotic effect. These two tendencies seemed to him to come together in the person of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, whose War in South Africa (1902) appeared to be aimed at both audiences. In an attempt to refute this book Robertson produced an open letter denouncing what he saw as the surrender of reason which Conan-Doyle’s work actively encouraged.
The Second Boer War was a singularly unpleasant reminder of how two Christian civilisations could marshal their respective conceptions of God and empire to defend and justify their actions in the war. Not only did this appear to signal the end of reason and compromise between nations, but such attitudes had further stoked the jingoism that had led all too easily to the infringement of civil rights that those opposed to the war experienced. This was clearly seen in the excesses of the Tory triumphalist post-war ’Khaki election’ which Robertson himself, perhaps wisely, boycotted.
The increase in religious and moral re-armament must have seemed to these pacifists not unlike the escalation of the Cold War in the early 1980s. Peace campaigners at Greenham Common and elsewhere not only felt that they stood between civilisation and barbarism, but also that the enhanced climate of fear allowed civil liberties to be more easily compromised. This atmosphere of gathering gloom in the 1980s is cogently conveyed in E.P. Thompson’s Writing By Candlelight and The Heavy Dancers in a way that the work of Hobson and Robertson does for the first years of the century. For liberals and pacifists looking back in 1919 it increasingly appeared that the religio-moral rearmament instigated by the Second Boer War had led inexorably to the wanton sacrifice of the First World War. Soldiers appeared to become more destructive as they became still more ‘civilised’, and war itself became, shockingly, another job of work. Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, the daughter of the freethinking MP Charles Bradlaugh, and herself a liberal campaigner, wrote of the feeling of desolation that the Second Boer War engendered among those who feared that jingoism was the ideology of the future.
Where, then, is the gain from all this sickness and suffering, from all this death and despair? That is the question we must put to one another. The gain is not to be counted by earldoms and money grants to generals; by fortunes to army contractors; by 200 per cent dividends to Birmingham Small Arms shareholders; by the aggrandisement of a few capitalists. It is to be counted by the gain to us, the people’s gain, the national gain, the imperial gain, the gain of which a true patriot may be proud. It is to be counted by the verdict which posterity will pass on this two years history, which has been traced in indelible letters of blood … In South Africa the seeds we have sown are the fruitful tares of iniquity, and the harvest we are leaving our children to reap is a harvest of hatred and sorrow.
But, despite this pessimism, the war in South Africa ultimately discredited imperial adventuring. Popular response to events such as the relief of Mafeking may have depressed the radicals, but imperialists made no lasting gain from them since their post-war clamour for compulsory conscription went unheeded. In many respects, this indicates the level of success enjoyed by the pacifist analysis which saw a military complex as a danger to civilisation. Nonetheless the danger to civil society posed by total war that Robertson identified, became still more prescient in the context of the First World War and the passing of D.O.R.A. (Defence of the Realm Act, 1914) with its draconian curbs on civil liberties. Despite this, the subsequent campaigning of organisations like the Union of Democratic Control; and of individuals like H.N.Brailsford to invite popular opinion to take a more active part in foreign policy, was a positive inheritance from the peace campaigners of the Boer War. Robertson himself had, in a similar manner during the Boer War, tried to influence foreign public opinion through the establishment of an International Union.
Moreover, a long-term perspective suggests that other components of modern peace politics had their genesis in this conflict. The identification of women’s special status as potential peace brokers and guardians of civil liberties personified in different ways by Emily Hobhouse (‘that bloody woman’ as Kitchener called her), and Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, had their counterparts in the Hague Peace Congress of 1915 and the campaigns against Cruise missiles in the 1980s. The peace campaigners of the Boer War, for the first time, focused upon the sheer destructiveness of the weapons and tactics deployed. This line of argument would be used again by pacifists advocating the absolute avoidance of war. The Boer War also gave birth to the genre of ‘military incompetence’ literature that leads onwards through Sassoon’s war poems to ‘O What a Lovely War’ and Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22. The genuinely lasting legacy of the Second Boer War has been for the liberal and pacifist campaigners’ attitudes to be absorbed into western civilisation during the course of the twentieth century. Conscientious objection became a widely accepted option by the Second World War, and this was in part a recognition of the destructive power of war itself. By the end of the century war had become no longer an adventure, an opportunity for commercial expansion, or fought solely by the military. Nor indeed can war today be fought with the ardent support of religion. With the arrival of total war, the sanction of Christianity for this course of action has been either tentative, or actually ambivalent. An example of how far the atmosphere had changed was the vociferous opposition by some clerics – notably by Bishop George Bell of Chichester—towards the area bombing policy of ‘Bomber’ Harris in the Second World War.
The Second Boer War gave us concentration camps, scorched earth, and the Dum-Dum bullet. But it also produced the most coherent body of anti-war poetry of any conflict up to that date. The legacy to Western culture of Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge can be seen not simply in the works of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney, but perhaps also in films like Breaker Morant. This spoke to a generation critical of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for whom ‘scorched earth’ had become ‘destroying villages to save them’, and for whom the trial of Lieutenant William Calley for the massacre of unarmed civilians at My Lai was a desperately uncomfortable reminder of what war was perpetrating upon their society and that of other nations.