The role of Britain’s navy was to raid and harass shipping, ports and coastlines to bring the enemy to the negotiating table. Within such a policy, overseas possessions were primarily needed as bases to revictual the fleets. From these, in the course of time, merchants, soldiers and adventurers conquered vast tracts of land. They found that a small armed presence was usually enough to maintain control of even the largest overseas dominions, although much of these was hostile uninhabitable land like the northern part of Canada and the Australian interior. Weapons improved, and in a short time Britain acquired and maintained a vast empire extending far beyond any real power that it could deploy.
Citizen armies
Compulsory military service is not a new device. Press-gangs that kidnapped able-bodied men in seaports and forced them into the slavery of naval service had been keeping the navies manned for many years before Prussia set up a system of compulsory military service in 1733. Prussian regiments, each based in a Kanton or county, kept records of local men and summoned them to military service as needed. But when Napoleon attacked, the Prussian army was mauled and humiliated by the French and the defeat was blamed upon its inefficiency. Two out of three men had been given exemption from military service, so that the Prussian army in the field consisted of mercenaries and peasants in about equal numbers.4 Now Prussia created a system of service which exempted very few healthy men whatever their social class. They were not simply called in time of war. Each citizen spent a year in uniform and returned to the colours throughout his life.
But compulsory military service as we know it was born, like so many other intolerable devices of the centralized totalitarian state, out of the French Revolution. In 1793 the war minister proposed to the National Assembly that every healthy single Frenchman aged between 18 and 25 should be summoned to the army. Married men of the same age would go into the armoury workshops, and males aged from 26 to 40 would be entered on a reserve list for service in wartime.
Thus Germans and Frenchmen spent their adult lives at the beck and call of the generals. In 1870 the two systems of mobilization could be compared. The Germans attacked France with an army of 1,200,000 men. In that same two weeks of crisis France had mustered only half that number.
By 16 February 1874 Helmuth von Moltke was able to stand up in the Reichstag and claim that the army’s prodigious use of civilian manpower had been ‘raising the nation for almost sixty years to physical fitness, mental alertness, order and punctuality, loyalty and obedience, love of our country, and manliness.’5 It had also enabled Prussia to thoroughly thrash her neighbours, including France, into abject submission.
It is difficult to be sure whether the prospect of military service was as unpopular in France and Germany as it was in Britain. But in France and Germany public opinion was disregarded by the government; Britain was different. Dating from Anglo-Saxon times, its army consisted of small companies raised by noblemen under royal commission. Only in dire emergencies were citizens called to serve. Although nineteenth-century Britain was not a democracy – no European state enjoyed democracy – public opinion in Britain was important. This importance did not depend upon the vote. In Britain in 1901 only two-thirds of the men, and no women, had the vote. Government was confined to a small, carefully defined and exclusive class, and these men decided that universal conscription was not politically acceptable.
During the nineteenth century, Britain was protected by its coastline and its unchallenged navy. Half of the army was stationed in India, and most of the other half was winning a succession of small colonial wars in other distant possessions. Only at the century’s end was Britain’s power tested. In southern Africa, where the world’s largest gold deposits had recently been discovered, the Boers, farmers of Dutch descent, besieged garrison towns. Closing their minds to the appalling inefficiency their army had demonstrated in the Crimean War (1854–56), the British decided to exercise their unique resources by dispatching an army to fight six thousand miles away from home. No other country could equal or counter such an expedition. The part that wealth played in such power had long been celebrated in a music hall ditty: ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.’6
Britain still had the money but, despite the tied markets provided by her Empire, less and less of it was coming from manufacturing and exporting goods. Financiers, rather than factory owners, were the new elite. Overseas investments in railways, mines and urban expansion were now bringing enough money into London to make up for the drop in exports, but it was another ominous sign that Britain was losing the trade wars to rivals such as Germany and America.
There were also danger signals about the workforce. The British government was reportedly shocked to find that 38 per cent of men volunteering to fight the Boers – a sampling one would expect to be in good health – were not fit enough to serve with the colours. And this despite the way in which the army’s height requirement had been brought down to five feet! A subsequent official report stated that about a quarter of the inhabitants of Britain’s industrial towns were undernourished because they were poor.
The Boers were fit and strong, hunters and farmers fighting in terrain they knew how to exploit. Moving rapidly on horseback, they fought on foot, using Mauser repeating rifles with deadly accuracy. Lacking discipline, organization, medals and military textbooks, they knew when to sneak away from a lost encounter. There were never more than 40,000 Boers in the field but it took a British army of unprecedented size almost three years to subdue them. Helped by the Dominions, Britain mobilized half a million men.
The controversies, scandals, triumphs and disasters of the war came at a time when rotary presses and improved typesetting machines provided cheap newspapers for a newly literate public. Winston Churchill reported the war for the Daily Telegraph, Edgar Wallace, a famous crime novelist, covered it for the Daily Mail and Rudyard Kipling worked there on an army newspaper. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was running a field hospital and Mahatma Gandhi was a stretcher-bearer.7
The conflict had a profound effect on European politics. The French, the Dutch and the Germans, who had colonized foreign lands with varying degreees of cruelty, objected to the British colonizing European settlers. And Britain’s rivals relished the sight of her army suffering humiliating defeats at the hands of a few skilful and tenacious white farmers. When the British started to get the upper hand, their European neighbours became more critical of them and more pro-Boer. Disease-ridden prison camps caused the deaths of many thousand Boers and brought accusations of deliberate murder. The British explained that it was incompetence, but by the time the war was over, Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe was clouded by resentment.
The fighting in South Africa had provided some glimpses of how future wars might be fought. But the machine-gun, which would dominate future battlefields, played little part in the fight against the Boers. It was not a weapon unknown to the British army. Various forms of machine-gun had been used by them since 1871. It had been used in the Ashanti campaign in 1874, the Zulu War, and by General Kitchener in the Sudan. It had killed some 11,000 Dervishes at Omdurman. No wonder Hilaire Belloc’s poem, ‘The Modern Traveller’, confidently claimed that:
‘Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’
But machine-guns did not defeat the Boers. Some said the British sense of fair play and an antipathy to replacing heroes with machinery made them reluctant to massacre white men with automatic fire.8 There are other reasons too. The army had given the Maxim, which weighed 40 lb, to artillery-men who put it on a carriage weighing 448 lb, with wheels almost five feet in diameter. Such a large and cumbersome weapon was not so effective against Boers who avoided frontal attacks, used