No complaints while on the warpath
William Boyd
MARCHING OVER AFRICA by Frank Emery
Hodder & Stoughton, £12.95
Queen Victoria certainly kept her armies busy. There were the big wars Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, the Boer War — but almost every year seemed to initiate another campaign: the Opium War, the invasion of Afghanistan, fighting in Bur- ma. And Africa, of course. Between 1868 and 1898 there were major military con- frontations with the Ashanti in West Afri- ca; the Xhosa, Pedi, Sotho and Zulu nations in South Africa; wars against Egyp- tian loyalists, and latter-day Moslem fun- damentalists in the Sudan; the first Boer War (1880-1) against the Afrikaners of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, not to mention a host of bloody skirmishes and punitive expeditions throughout the col- onies and protectorates. Indeed, from one angle the history of Africa in the 19th century can be viewed almost exclusively in terms of military activity — a vast con- tinental Beirut, as it were, riven with the bloody strife of warring factions provoked or encouraged by vastly more powerful interested parties.
In his fine and interesting book Frank Emery concentrates on those major con- flicts listed above which provide the famil- iar roll-call of British Imperial History — Rorke's Drift, Tel El Kebir, Majuba Hill, Omdurman etc. My one reservation here is that the net might have been cast a little wider. There are less well known corners of African military history that could profit from some illumination. The Matabele Rebellion, for example, or the Uganda Mutiny of 1898 or the fascinating and disastrous punitive expedition to Benin in 1897. It's perhaps a little unfair to Emery to mention these as his book is not in- tended to be a history of African colonial wars and the areas he does cover are largely dictated by the source material he has at his dispoal. Emery provides us with a brief historical context to the wars but his main aim is to acquaint us as directly as possible with the experience of soldiering in 19th-century Africa. He does this pre- dominantly through the use of contempor- ary letters home, written, in the main, by other ranks. One hears, then, the voice of Tommy Atkins in person, addressing an intimate private audience with no eye on posterity. Emery has done his research assiduously and many of the letters he reproduces are extraordinary documents, not only for what they reveal about the day-to-day business of being a Victorian soldier, but also for the high degree of literacy they exhibit. The tone, indeed, is surprisingly modern and direct, freed as it is from the posturing hindsight of the military 'memoir' and the smug corn- placencies of jingoism. Here is a cavalry- man telling his parents about the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman.
It festered, and I had a funny hand for about three days but it is healed up now and I am ready for another man-killing job. It is nice to put a sword or a lance through a man; they are just like old hens, they just say 'guar'.
From the dozens of voices and personali- ties that are revealed to us through the selection of letters a sort of photofit por- trait of the 19th-century British soldier emerges: tough, stoical, with a meagre vein of sentiment (for 'poor chaps' who get killed, horses shot out from under him, and grudging admiration for the suicidal brav- ery of his enemy), a scant interest in the reasons for his presence in Africa, and absolutely no compunction when it comes to killing as many of the continent's inhabi- tants as possible. Perhaps this is true of all soldiers at all times (one is reminded of paratroopers in the Falklands who kept insisting they were only 'doing a job of work') but the almost total absence of moans, complaints and criticism in these letters home is quite intriguing. Conditions in most of these campaigns were so harsh (Scottish regiments in kilts and spats, a 16-hour march on empty stomachs to find fouled wells at the end of it, for example, to say nothing of disease and climate) that one would imagine a few more notes to dissent.
This, I suppose, is the result of relying so heavily on source material. Emery found many of these letters reprinted in contem- porary local newspapers where one would be unlikely to discover much outspoken criticism or general bitching. It is in this area that I think the book could have benefitted from more editorial comment and instruction. For example, when a naval surgeon tending the seriously wounded at Majuba Hill says 'All we had to give them was water and a little opium', I would like to know something more about this treat- ment. How was it administered? Was this a common anaesthetic on the battlefield? And perhaps the account would benefit from some more general information about the care and survival prospects of casual- ties in those days? Again, one correspon- dent says 'it would be too sickening' to give details of the way the Zulus mutilated dead bodies. Emery then implies that he knows what went on but does not tell us. One's interest in the details, the 'nuts and bolts' of soldiering, is quickened not from pedan- try or ghoulishness but because increasing- ly — especially in the field of military history — this kind of precise specification is the norm. Historians such as John Keegan and Richard Holmes led the way and have transformed the way war and battle are written about. Emery's reticence here is disappointing if only because of the very intimacy of much of his material. One feels something of an opportunity has been lost, that Marching Across Africa had the potential to become a minor classic, of the order of, say, Evan S. Connell's brilliant book about Custer's final campaign against the Plains Indians, Son of the Morning Star. It is exactly contemporary with some of Emery's campaigns (1876) and it em- ploys the same method of extensive use of original source material. It's true that from time to time Emery achieves this same vividness, especially in the chapters on the wars in the Sudan, but too often one wants to know more or one has to fall back on imagination and reading between the lines.
About one aspect of Victorian soldiers in Africa, however, Emery is wholly candid: their brutal and unreflecting racism.
We repassed the battlefield on our right, where our dead were still lying unburied and came across some wounded niggers whom we shot at once. I got some breakfast and lunch, and all started again at 3.30 p.m. for the Nile.. .
The utterly casual slaughter of wounded enemy on the battlefields of Africa is perhaps the most important revelation in the book. It was widespread and effected with enthusiastic diligence. These Victo- rian soldiers regarded their African ene- mies as sub-human, and would think no more of bayonetting a wounded Dervish than they would of swatting a fly.
0 tempora! 0 Mores! No doubt Victo- rian soldiers could offer our century the same rebuke, and more, but there is something particularly rebarbative about that brand of sanctimonious Victorian hypocrisy, especially when it is couched in the terms Sir Garnet Wolseley employed when exhorting one of his commanders about to go on the warpath in Africa:
I envy you the good fortune of being once more upon the warpath, the only path upon which it is worth travelling in these degener- ate days of cant, puffed-up philosophical cosmopolitanism and maudlin humanitarian- ism. I know that wherever you go you will do well and maintain our national reputation for hard straight hitting and gentle humanity of a manly nature.
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