The Victorian Soldier in Africa Plms 9/7/04 9:00 Am Page Ii
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Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page i general editor John M. MacKenzie Established in the belief that imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies, Studies in Imperialism seeks to develop the new socio-cultural approach which has emerged through cross-disciplinary work on popular culture, media studies, art history, the study of education and religion, sports history and children’s literature. The cultural emphasis embraces studies of migration and race, while the older political and constitutional, economic and military concerns are never far away. It incorporates comparative work on European and American empire-building, with the chronological focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when these cultural exchanges were most powerfully at work. The Victorian soldier in Africa Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page ii AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF BRITISHNESS ed. Dana Arnold BRITAIN IN CHINA Community, culture and colonialism, 1900–1949 Robert Bickers NEW FRONTIERS Imperialism’s new communities in East Asia 1842–1952 eds Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot WESTERN MEDICINE AS CONTESTED KNOWLEDGE eds Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews THE ARCTIC IN THE BRITISH IMAGINATION 1818–1914 Robert G. David IMPERIAL CITIES Landscape, display and identity eds Felix Driver and David Gilbert SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ed. Saul Dubow EQUAL SUBJECTS, UNEQUAL RIGHTS Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, 1830s–1910 Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips and Shurlee Swain EMIGRATION FROM SCOTLAND BETWEEN THE WARS Opportunity or exile? Marjory Harper EMPIRE AND SEXUALITY The British experience Ronald Hyam REPORTING THE RAJ The British press in India, c. 1880–1922 Chandrika Kaul LAW, HISTORY, COLONIALISM The reach of empire eds Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR REAPPRAISED ed. Donal Lowry THE EMPIRE OF NATURE Hunting, conservation and British imperialism John M. MacKenzie IMPERIALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE ed. John M. MacKenzie PROPAGANDA AND EMPIRE The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960 John M. MacKenzie THE OTHER EMPIRE Metropolis, India and progress in the colonial imagination John Marriott GENDER AND IMPERIALISM ed. Clare Midgley GUARDIANS OF EMPIRE The armed forces of the colonial powers, c. 1700–1964 eds David Omissi and David Killingray FEMALE IMPERIALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire Katie Pickles MARRIED TO THE EMPIRE Gender, politics and imperialism in India, 1883–1947 Mary A. Procida IMPERIAL PERSUADERS Images of Africa and Asia in British advertising Anandi Ramamurthy IMPERIALISM AND MUSIC Britain 1876–1953 Jeffrey Richards COLONIAL FRONTIERS Indigenous–European encounters in settler societies ed. Lynette Russell WEST INDIAN INTELLECTUALS IN BRITAIN ed. Bill Schwarz JUTE AND EMPIRE The Calcutta jute wallahs and the landscapes of empire Gordon T. Stewart THE IMPERIAL GAME Cricket, culture and society eds Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandiford BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page iii The Victorian soldier in Africa Edward M. Spiers MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page iv Copyright © Edward M. Spiers 2004 The right of Edward M. Spiers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK and ROOM 400, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by PALGRAVE 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC PRESS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2029 WEST MALL, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6121 0 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 6121 9 First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Trump Medieval by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page v CONTENTS List of maps — page vi General editor’s introduction — vii Acknowledgements — ix Abbreviations — xi Glossary — xii Introduction page 1 1 Fighting the Asante 20 2 Campaigning in southern Africa 35 3 Battling the Boers 59 4 Intervention in Egypt 77 5 Engaging the Mahdists 99 6 The Gordon relief expedition 112 7 Trekking through Bechuanaland 132 8 Reconquering the Sudan 137 9 Re-engaging the Boers 159 Epilogue 180 Select bibliography — 193 Index — 203 [ v ] Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page vi LIST OF MAPS 1 Asante War, 1873–74 page 22 2 Anglo-Zulu War, 1879 39 3 Anglo-Boer War, 1880–81 62 4 Intervention in Egypt, 1882 78 5 Operations near Suakin, 1884–91 101 6 Egypt and the Sudan, 1885–99 113 7 Northern Sudan, 1884–98 142 8 Bechuanaland and the South African War, 1899–1902 158 [ vi ] Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page vii GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Visit almost any military or regimental museum and you will find mementos of individual lives. These take many forms: medals, uniforms, bibles, letters, diaries, paintings, photographs; or sometimes collected ‘ethnic’ materials, both the weaponry of opponents and the artefacts of their peaceful activities. The relatives of soldiers, NCOs and officers usually find solace in donating such materials to the museums where they feel they will be cherished, will be useful to those wishing to study military history, or will be displayed for public view. Sometimes, the donations happen after their owner’s death in action; sometimes at the end of a full life of survival and return to ‘civvy street’. Naturally, much of this material relates to the two World Wars of the twentieth century, but, given Britain’s imperial past, it is striking that a high proportion of these donations relate to the imperial campaigns of the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. This is also true of so many of the colours and battle honours that hang in churches, testimony to a communal pride, or to the large numbers of memorials, brass plaques and gravestones to be found around the country. For the observant visitor, colonial campaigns have a habit of turning up almost anywhere, not only in the museums, churches and graveyards of the imperial power, but also in the landscape, memories and preserved artefacts among the peoples against whom these campaigns were fought. Although there has been a plethora of many different types of military his- tory, this book is one of the first to consider the lives and attitudes of individ- uals both in the officer corps and in the ranks, in this case exclusively on the British side. Each war also stimulates a small wave of publications, something apparent again in the Falklands, Gulf and Iraq wars of the last quarter century. Soldiers still write letters, keep diaries (now sometimes audio diaries) and occasionally write books, all with an eye both to their relatives and to a wider public. Each war throws up its criticisms and its controversies and after each there is a sort of ‘appeal to the ancestors’ as a means of modifying policy, improving conditions or equipment, and as testimony to bravery and incom- petence, political strategy and military tactics. This book takes a sequence of colonial campaigns in Africa and sets out to illuminate them from the materials left by British combatants. These men were taken from familiar surroundings to highly unfamiliar ones, to ‘small wars’ that Sir Charles Callwell described as ‘campaigns against nature’. ‘Nature’ in this instance was not just the environment, but the nature of con- ventional warfare, the nature of opponents who often turned out to be more competent than any over-confident imperialist expected, and indeed the nature of the British soldiery who had to cope with climatic conditions, dis- ease, and indigenous tactics such as they had never imagined. Inevitably, the soldiers reflected on all of these in their letters and diaries, in their judgments [ vii ] Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page viii GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION of the situations in which they found themselves, and in their attitudes to superiors and the ‘enemy’ which were often severely tested and modified in the course of campaigns. In doing so, they invariably kept people at home informed in ways that were not always possible in the press. For, after all, the writings and materials that went home were all part of the manner in which an imperial society tried to make sense of the warfare into which its elite led it. The materials that are revealed and analysed in this book were part of the reciprocal character of the imperial experience: warfare was not just some ‘distant noise’. Through its combatants’ connections with families and friends, it was, in some senses, a set of surprising, often disorientating, and sometimes tragic events, which were also experienced by those at home. John M. MacKenzie [ viii ] Plms 9/7/04 9:00 am Page ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Quotations from material in the Royal Archives appear with the gracious per- mission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Other use of Crown copyright material in the National Archives (Public Record Office) or other repositories is by permission of Her Majesty’s Controller of Stationery. I should like to acknowledge permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, the Trustees of the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire (Salisbury) Museum, the Trustees of the Military Museums of Devon and Dorset, the Trustees of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Museum and the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives to quote from papers in their archives.