THE RENEWAL OF THE WAR AND THE BOER PRISONERS.
THE peace negotiations entered into between Lord Kitchener and the Boers have been broken off by the latter. The partial armistice is therefore at an end, and we may soon expect to hear of further activity at the front. In view of the fact that the Boers in South Africa, and Mr. Kruger and his entourage in Europe, seem to have regarded our willingness to treat as a sign of weakness, we cannot express any very great surprise or even regret at the event. If peace had been madeon such a misunderstand- ing it could not have been a lasting peace, and a lasting peace is the one thing essential for South Africa. It would be far better to carry on the war for another three months and spend another twenty millions or so than to leave the Boers with the impression that we always tire before they do, and that when we are tired it is easy to get good terms out of us. Such an impression would probably have led to another war as soon as the troops had come back. We are all for showing generosity towards the Boers, but it must be a generosity which cannot be represented as a sham and as extorted from us by fear. We must beat the Boers completely before we can afford to be magnanimous. In all probability, then. it is best that the war should be fought to a finish. Any surrenders which may now take place must be by indi- vidual leaders and bodies of combatants. That is, the surrenders must be unconditional, or rather, only personal conditions must be considered.
It may take some time to deal with the Boer commandos still in the field, but the position of the enemy is distinctly less favourable than it was at the beginning of the year. In the first place, the invasion of Cape Colony, which seemed at one time so threatening, has proved a complete failure. To put the matter shortly, the Boers have caused a good deal of damage and loss to their friends in the Colony, have secured the di sfranchisement of a certain num- ber of Dutch voters, and have created a good deal of anti- Boer feeling in districts where it was before non-existent, but any other effect has been small. No doubt the Boers got a few recruits, but that did not matter, as the Boers are never formidable from numbers, and a thousand men more or less in the field matter very little. Next, the Beers during the last three months have lost immensely in guns, in horses, in cattle, in ammunition, in rifles, and lastly, in prisoners. Their forces are distictly less well found in all respects than they were in the middle of January, which was their high-water mark. Next, our hold on the railways has become very mudi firmer, and the breakings of the line are much less frequent. At the same time, our occupation of the towns and undis- turbed districts both in the Orange Colony and the Transvaal has been greatly solidified. Though the pro- cess is slow, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Bloemfontein are gradually settling down, and even the anti-British elements in those places are accepting our control and finding it by no means intolerable. And while the flier military power has been dwindling our power has been increasing. We are infinitely better organised for war now than we were in January. The supply of horses has been improved, and is still improving, and very shortly we shall have over twenty thousand fresh mounted soldiers to supply the wastage of our army. We are, that is, in a very good position for beginning another four, or six months of war, if that should be necessary. War, nevertheless, is always uncertain, and it may be that, contrary to all the omens, we shall have a fresh series of disasters. Well, if we do, we must and shall bear them in the future as we have in the past.. Beer successes, if they occur, will only make more sure the inevitable end. The burghers may be assured that, even if we have to fight them for another twenty years, the British people would see the thing through. The Boers, and their supporters here, are wont to point to the American War, and to say that we shall get tired of this war as we got tired of that. In the first place, there is no real analogy between the two struggles, for the
Americans did not attack us and had justice on their side, But, leaving that apart, there is this grand difference. The American War was carried on by a Government resting on a factious and corrupt aristocracy ; this war by a democracy resolute and sound al heart. It is the British people, not a changing coterie of great families, that has waged, and is waging, the present war, and they have no notion of giving in .(to borrow a phrase from Bacon) either from " niceness or satiety."
As the war proceeds we must look forward to the number of prisoners of war, of whom we now hold some eighteen thousand, being still further increased, and thus the prisoner problem, already very important, is likely to become one of the most pressing that will meet us at the close of the war. Many of the prisoners will no doubt be able to go back to their farms and occupations, will be helped by friends and relations in the two new Colonies or in the Cape, and so will soon cease to be a preoccupa- tion to the Government. There must, however, be a large number of prisoners, and especially the younger ones, who will have nowhere definite to go to and nothing definite to do when they are released. Many of them were land- less men when they joined the Boer commandos, many have become landless since. Others were in various ways hangers-on of the Transvaal State, for that wealthy Republic, though nominally it had no standing army except its artillery force, kept in touch with a great number of fighting men, and made it worth their while to be "on hand" in case of difficulties. Again, there were a large number of men who regularly worked under Government in various forms, whose occupations must now be regarded as gone. In other words, there will at the close of this war, as in the case of every other war ever fought, be a number of broken men who will have practically no future, and who, if they are simply dumped down into South Africa, cannot help becoming, a source of trouble and anxiety. What is to be done with these broken men ? We do not, as our readers know, desire that these men should be pampered and set up as gentlemen farmers at the expense of the British or of the Colonial taxpayer, and thus come out of the war better off than the loyalists who have shed their blood for the Empire. That is not business. Still, something must be done with the broken men. The suggestion we have to make is one which we have no doubt will be greeted in certain quarters with derision, but, nevertheless, is one which, if worked loyally by men who believed in it, could, we are convinced, be made to produce very good results. We would imitate Chatham's action in regard to the b. oken men of the Highland clans. The close of the rebellion of 1745 and the subsequent period of unrest left Scotland full of broken men. Chat, ham raised the first Highland regiments from among these very men. We propose that when the war is over we should raise five or six regiments of Irregular Horse from among the men broken in the Transvaal War ; to be used not of course in South Africa, but in other parts of the Empire, such as India, or %Vest or Central Africa, where forces of the kind would be useful. It will be urged, of course, that the men who have fought against us and for the Boers would never join such a force. Our reply is— try. If they refuse to join such corps, no great harm will have been done ; if they do join, then the scheme is at any rate not moonshine. But it will be said that, in any case, these wild, undisciplined men would never make soldiers, that they would be disloyal, and that they would be useless. We answer that all these things were, of course, said in regard to the wild Highlanders. They were, no doubt, alleged to be too disloyal and too undisciplined to be turned into regular soldiers. The qualities that would make a clansman charge with his claymore at the word of his own chief and for his own country would not make him, it could be plausibly urged, a serviceable unit in a regiment. He might be a formidable fighting-man in his own glens and on his own moors, but elsewhere he would be worse than useless. Besides, the hatred of the High- lander for England and the English was ineradicable, and would prove most dangerous. The better the experi- ment succeeded the worse would be the ultimate results. Fortunately Chatham did not attend to these prima' facie reasonable considerations, but with the insight of a man of genius saw that he could at one and the same time help to settle the Highlands and raise a very formidable fighting force by enlisting the broken clansmen. In spite, then, of all the obvious arguments against the proposal, we trust that the experiment may be tried. There are plenty of British officers who have formed a strong feeling of sympathy for the Boers, and who admire them. Such men, if carefully selected, would have, we believe, no difficulty in raising corps of irregular cavalry or mounted infantry among the Boer prisoners. General Ian Hamilton made the other day the very statesmanlike suggestion that we were missing a great opportunity in not dealing with the Boer prisoners in a more rational spirit, and we recommend our suggestion to his notice. If he could be spared from here (which we fear is not likely), he would be the very man to superintend the raising of the force, and to give it the tone and character it requires. But even if he could not be spared, there are plenty of other officers well fitted to undertake the work. Presumably the great majority of the Boer prisoners would not want to join, but even if only five or six corps of five hundred men each were established, the result would be well worth achieving. At present, of course, it is too early to do anything. We must wait till the war is over before the offer can be made to the men. When it is over, how- ever, we sincerely trust that the military and Colonial authorities will consult on the matter, and at least give it consideration. They may have to decide against it, but we hold that there is a strong enough prinui facie case for the proposal not to be dismissed at sight.
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