Part 9

Thus the West Indies have fallen for ever from their high estate; and it is only by an actual visit to them that we can divine what they once were. Ruined forts, ruined barracks, ruined store-houses, old guns slowly mouldering away, pyramids of round shot so welded together by rust that they cannot be moved--these are the more visible tokens of past greatness. But a searching enquirer will turn his steps to the desolate graveyards, and tearing his way through rank herbage and tropical scrub will approach the crumbling head-stones, and there he may read--or at least I could read thirty years ago--what a visitation of yellow fever meant in the old days. Field-officers, captains, lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants, corporals, drummers, rank and file of battalion after battalion lie there in row upon row, as if on parade, while the land-crabs hurry from grave to grave, and deadly snakes lie coiled upon the heaps of crumbling stones which once were monuments. I know no more melancholy sight than this. How many British soldiers and sailors lie in these and other unknown graves in the Caribbean Islands? I know not; but the lowest figure that I should suggest would be three hundred thousand, and the highest perhaps half a million. And the pity of it is that the value of the islands disappeared just when the means of economising life began to be perfected. The formation of negro regiments, though bitterly opposed by the planters, who dreaded the slightest emergence of the black race from the status of servitude, was a great and courageous act of statesmanship--courageous because formerly the West Indian interest could muster a solid phalanx of eighty votes in the House of Commons, and was thus able to overset a Government. Now too in these later days yellow fever has yielded up its secrets to science, and can be disarmed of its terrors. But it is too late. No one cares for the West Indies nowadays. No one remembers that at one time Cuba was deemed more valuable than Madras. The whole of the Antilles are now entrusted to the protection of one white battalion, one black battalion, and two companies of artillery; and the great bulk of these men are kept there not for the sake of the once wealthy sugar islands, but to ensure the safety of the naval station of Bermuda. One could contemplate such a change with equanimity but for the recollection of perhaps half a million lives sacrificed to no purpose.

I turn now to the seat of the most difficult of all of our colonial wars, South Africa; the most difficult because it is of vast extent, inhabited by warlike natives for the most part, and without waterways. Our first attack upon it in 1795, when we were opposed by Dutch troops and Boers only, is remarkable as an example of a campaign conducted by three thousand white soldiers without any transport whatever, and without even gun-teams. The distance from the base, Simonstown, to the objective, Capetown, was only twelve miles, nearly all through deep sand; but the enemy were as strong as the invaders; and, when everything has to be dragged by white men's arms or carried upon white men's backs, the difficulties of movement are so great--especially if the march be opposed at every step--as to be almost insuperable. However, a large proportion of the force was turned into beasts of burden, and their numbers were supplemented by bluejackets and marines; the general having wisely decided that both Services should share alike in the drudgery of transport and in the more congenial work of fighting. Thus Capetown, by a tremendous effort, was taken for the first time. When we attacked it again in 1806 we disembarked at a different point; and the enemy's general was obliging enough to come out to meet us at once, and to be beaten. Thus our force, about six thousand strong, was enabled to victual itself from the fleet at the end of the first day's advance, and to march into Capetown at the end of the second.

Since then we have fought many wars in South Africa against both natives and Dutch colonists; and in all of them the main difficulty has been that of feeding the troops. There is of course the country-transport which is familiar to us--the huge tilted waggons with their eight yoke of oxen, each in the charge of two skilled natives--of which we heard so much twelve years ago. Of its kind it is good. But such large vehicles and teams are very unwieldy; they must be left in charge of natives who cannot be trusted (and small blame to them) not to run away in moments of danger; and lastly the ox, though patient, plucky and persevering to an uncommon degree, has his defects as a draft animal. He is very slow and he must not be hurried; he needs time to chew the cud after feeding; and he cannot work with the full power of the sun beating upon his back. In fact he has his times and seasons which must be carefully observed, or he will die; and he is sensitive not only to sun, but also to cold and wet. The enemy, being fully aware of his limitations, can foresee their effect upon the movements of the force opposed to them, and can lay their plans accordingly. Another disadvantage to European troops in South Africa is that European horses do not naturally take to South African pasture, and that there are poisonous plants to be found in it which native horses have learned to avoid, but which European horses will innocently devour. Hence forage becomes a great difficulty also; and on the veldt there is the further drawback that no wood for fuel exists. As in most new lands, the roads are mere tracks, and all the innumerable rivers must be crossed by fords, for there are few bridges; while the extent of the territory that may be covered by military operations in so vast a continent is appalling.

In one of our earliest Kaffir wars--that of 1835--Sir Harry Smith described himself as having only twelve hundred men, eight hundred horses and four guns, with which to act in a theatre of war of four thousand square miles; and he added, "It takes just two hours for a commissariat train to arrive, from the moving off of the first waggon to the arrival of the last, when the road is good. When the column is stretched out along the road it looks as if each soldier had a waggon to himself at least." Yet on one occasion with a small force he marched eighty-four miles in three days; and he covered nearly two hundred and twenty miles in a rugged and mountainous country, much broken by deep rivers, in seven days and a half. In the more serious war of 1850-53 the hostile tribes could not put into the field more than three thousand fighting men; but by betaking themselves to their fastnesses of mountain and forest they prolonged their resistance for nearly three years. The British soldier was at every disadvantage in bush-fighting, and the Kaffirs were far too cunning to encounter him in the open; yet by dint of hard work and perseverance this brave and wary enemy was at last worn down. He might have been subdued much earlier but for the constant and insane reductions of the Army ever since Waterloo. It is actually a fact that at this time the military power of England was strained almost to breaking point by three thousand naked savages.

The next war--that of 1877--came at a time when our Army, owing to the recent introduction of short service, was in a state of transition, and taught us a very severe lesson. We were engaged in war with the Zulus, a very formidable tribe, which had been organised into a great military power by a chief who, in his own way, was a genius. One of his armies came upon a British force of something over a thousand troops at a disadvantage, and after a desperate fight destroyed them almost to a man. But for the determined resistance of a small post of eighty or ninety men at a ford of the Tugela, the Zulus would probably have overrun Natal to the sea, and extinguished the white inhabitants of that Colony. There was great agitation in England, and several battalions were hurried out to the Cape with no special regard to their condition or quality. It had been forgotten that the old long-service-soldier had become extinct; and that the old single-battalion-regiments were also in course of extinction, to give place to regiments of two battalions, whereof one was always to be at home and the other abroad. The Army and the nation had not taken kindly to the change; and the immediate result was that the battalions at home had become merely assemblies of boys who, as soon as they approached manhood, were drafted off to feed the battalions abroad. Some of these groups of boys, raw and half-trained, were shipped out to South Africa in the expectation that they would be as strong and as steady as the old battalions composed of men who counted ten to twenty years' service. Of course they were not. They were very sickly, very ill-disciplined, and very far from well-conducted. However, the war was ended, and the power of the Zulus was broken without further serious mishap; and we learned by this experience the lesson that a force of seasoned soldiers must at all times be held ready for what is called the police-work of the Empire.

Our last experience of war in South Africa is too recent for me to presume to say much about it, except that in many respects it bore a singular resemblance to the American War of Independence. The operations of the latter war embraced at least eleven hundred miles of coast-line, as the crow flies, and in places penetrated inland as far as a hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Only facilities of water-carriage enabled armies to be moved at all over this vast tract; and it was rare for bodies even of ten thousand men to remain for long united. The theatre of war in South Africa was quite as vast. Our two principal bases of operations were nearly a thousand miles apart--as far, say, as Antwerp is from Lisbon, with the enemy's capital situated at Warsaw. But for the existence of a few railways the conquest of this enormous tract might have taken thirty years, for there are no waterways and the country produces little wheat. As things were, it was accomplished more or less in three; and a force of three to four hundred thousand men was fed with a regularity highly creditable to the officers responsible for that duty. But the expense was terrific; and although it was possible by great exertions to bring up food for the men, there were moments when it was impossible to provide sufficient forage for the animals. Hence the waste of horses in the cavalry and artillery was enormous, for they could not live on the African pasture as did the horses of the enemy. In fact a community with a more or less empty continent at its back can, with good management, prolong resistance for an almost indefinite time; for the chances are that the invader will be more quickly exhausted than the invaded, while the former is always subject to troubles and diversions at home which may weaken him at a critical moment. That is the secret of the power of Russia and of the United States. It is impossible to hurt them seriously, for the further you penetrate into their country the weaker you are. Little countries, such as our own, may be pierced to the heart at the first thrust. Space in fact means time where war is concerned; and time is the most powerful of all allies. The Americans themselves discovered that when they invaded Canada in 1812.

There is another description of colonial war of which we have had experience, and which from the extreme peculiarity of the country and people deserves special notice. I speak of New Zealand. Roughly speaking the two main islands of New Zealand exactly correspond to Italy in our own hemisphere; and if you suppose the sea to close round the northern frontier of the Alps and to cut the peninsula in two by washing a channel through it somewhere about Rome, you will find the actual shape of New Zealand very closely reproduced. Both countries consist of a backbone of volcanic mountains, with a broad margin to east and a narrow margin to west; and in each there is a wide fertile plain made up of débris washed down from the mountains and furrowed by rivers flowing from the glaciers. This great plain, however, is in the south island of New Zealand; and all of our wars were in the north island, corresponding in the southern hemisphere to the southern portion of Italy. The north island, which contains several active volcanoes, is for the most part mountainous and was to a vast extent covered with dense forest, with a strong undergrowth of vines--known as supple-jacks--and of fern, very like our own bracken, which grows higher than a man's head. The inhabitants were themselves invaders from the North Pacific, or possibly from some part of the American continent, and, according to their own traditions, must have occupied the country at about the time of our own Norman Conquest. They were called, as of course you know, by the name of Maoris, and were split up into a number of tribes which passed their time in continual warfare with each other, and hence possessed some degree of military organisation. Their weapons and tools were made of stone, the best of them of jade. With such tools they had skill to build canoes and art to ornament both prow and paddle with not unbeautiful carving. They were cannibals, for the simple reason that they could get no other meat; for until the white man came there were no four-footed creatures in the two islands--nothing but birds. They caught and dried fish, however, and had little provision-grounds of potatoes. But their chief business, as I have said, was fighting; and they were a fine athletic and high-spirited race. For the rest they had a natural gift of fortification. They needed no great talent to select good positions in so hilly a country where natural strongholds abound; but they showed great skill in throwing up tiers of earth-works and erecting stockades of trees a foot in diameter, tightly bound together with supple-jacks.

The first white men came to them in the form of whaling skippers, who initiated them into the use of fire-arms, and sold such weapons as they could spare to one or two chiefs. The remaining tribes soon discovered that, if they were to escape extermination, they must obtain fire-arms also; and thus there grew up a large trade in arms and ammunition for which the Maoris paid in native flax--_phormium tenax_--laboriously scraped with shells till only the tough fibre was left, and of supreme excellence from this careful method of curing. Two-barrelled fowling pieces--_tuparas_ as they called them--were the favourite weapon, and the Maoris soon became expert in their use; adding thereupon rifle-pits and covered trenches to their fortifications to meet attack with the new weapon. Incidentally this natural craze for fire-arms materially injured the race, for, in order to scrape flax enough to pay for them, the whole tribe was obliged to come down from the hill-tops and live by the swamps where the _phormium tenax_ grows and abounds.

How we came into collision with the Maoris, who had frequently received white men--deserting sailors and such like--into their tribes with much friendliness, is not a pretty story; being only one of the many variations on the old theme of the white man's greed for the black man's property. Of course it was necessary to send troops out; and our commanders, hearing of the fortifications or _pas_ erected by the Maoris, thought that such works could not have been thrown up except to defend something, and that it would be desirable to capture them. They therefore brought up a gun or two with infinite labour, and after firing a certain number of rounds, let loose their assaulting columns to the attack. Now as a matter of fact the Maoris built their _pas_ upon no such principle; and the loss of a _pa_ was nothing to them so long as no life was lost with it. They therefore continued to build _pas_ in the hope that the white men would ram their heads against them; and they did so with considerate cunning, erecting their first _pa_ close to the edge of the forest, retiring from that to a second further within the woods, so as to lure the English deeper and deeper into disadvantageous ground, and from that in turn to a third. By the time the third was reached the English were unable to bring their food any further, and, having lost heavily in their assaults, were fain to retire and await reinforcements.

The chief difficulty, as in all savage campaigns, lay of course in transport and supply. There were no roads or bridges, and few animals, whether horses, mules or cattle; but as all the settlements were on the sea, the Maoris had built their _pas_ in the vicinity, so as to be ready to attack the whites at any moment. Still, even when the difficulty of transport and supply was overcome, our commanders were greatly puzzled how to injure the Maoris. So powerfully were the tree-trunks of a stockade laced together, that even when broken by a shot they did not fall, but remained suspended, a nasty if not impossible obstacle, by the binders of supple-jack. Thus assaults were always costly, and somehow the Maori garrison always contrived to escape. Again and again a _pa_ was surrounded, but there was always a ravine or a watercourse by which the Maoris slipped away; and when the British column, maddened by heavy losses, broke into the earth-works, it was to find no one there. Once two British columns stormed a _pa_, enduring heavy fire until they reached the summit, when the Maoris dived down into their subterranean galleries. The British soldiers, rushing in from opposite sides, met at the top, and poured a staggering volley into each other, whereupon up came the Maoris from underground, and sent the assailants flying down again in panic. Altogether the problem of the _pa_ seemed to be insoluble, for the galleries and rifle-pits of the Maoris were so cunningly constructed that a bombardment inflicted only trifling damage on them. Critics at a distance wrote that every success (for such the capture of a _pa_ was deemed to be) should be followed by a rapid advance into the forest. But deep ravines and gullies covered either with a network of supple-jacks, or with fallen logs and trees hidden in bracken six or seven feet high, is not ground over which men can advance rapidly. I know it because I have tried it; and the unhappy soldiers, who had also tried it, waxed furious over the ignorant presumption of those who talked such nonsense.

At last it occurred to a British officer that the Maoris wished their _pas_ to be assaulted, and that they considered it a victory when several scores of British fell in an attack upon a worthless stronghold, while the defenders quietly retired with at most two or three casualties. And this was the fact. Having grasped this truth the officer determined not to attack them; but marched up to the vicinity of a _pa_, sat down in front of it, and entrenched himself and his guns before it. This did not suit the Maoris at all. They saw that they would be obliged to go back sooner or later, without the satisfaction of killing fifty or sixty of the enemy, and they did not see where the process might end. In desperation they attempted several attacks against the English earth-works, but were repulsed with heavy loss, and were fain to draw back to another _pa_ further within the forest. The British followed, and went through the same performance again, with the same result. In a few weeks these particular Maoris gave in, for they saw no prospect of emerging from the forest again; and though they might have kept themselves alive on fern-root, they knew that their warriors would soon lose all physical strength upon such a diet. The Maori wars lasted in one way or another for nearly twenty years in a desultory fashion, partly owing to mismanagement, partly, I fear, because so many contractors in the colonial towns made money out of them that people were unwilling to let them come to an end. When the Imperial troops and money were withdrawn, and the colonists were left to finish the job for themselves, the trouble with the Maoris soon ceased.

Lastly we come to those expeditions which even in these days tend to be most dangerous and costly, I mean those to such fever-stricken coasts as the Gold Coast and the Delta of the Congo, where all supplies and stores must be carried on the heads of men and women, and where even the strictest care may fail to avert deadly sickness. Twice within forty years has a British force marched to Coomassie; but the wise tendency nowadays is to entrust such work almost exclusively to native troops who do not suffer from the climate. The number of these troops has increased enormously of late years with the extension of our rule in Africa; and we are accustomed to treat the fact as a matter of course, without a thought for the man who has made these foreign levies what they are, and without whom they are nothing--the British officer.

I have sketched for you very briefly the rise of the Empire, and now at the close of this third lecture I am going to say a word for the man who has had the chief share in winning it--the British regimental officer. It is the fashion in some circles to belittle him; and the press, in the plenitude of its ignorance, took occasion during the South African War to cover him with vulgar abuse, reproaching him for his ignorance of his profession and various other shortcomings. As a matter of fact he was the one man in South Africa who understood his business, and it was he who brought the war to a successful conclusion. In these days of democracy, so-called, it is common to vituperate, concurrently with the officer, the English public schools where he obtained his education. Neither officers nor public schools make any reply to such criticisms; and they are quite right, for the British Empire is a sufficient reply to the critics, who are fonder of framing theories than of studying hard facts. I am not saying that our public schools are perfect, for in many respects they seem to me very faulty; nor shall I contend that the men who spring from them are, in the ordinary sense of the term, educated, for they are not. The German _gymnasium_ and French Lycée undoubtedly produce men who are better schooled to the study of books, and more amply filled with a certain description of facts. But at any rate the pupils from our public schools become men who, after a certain amount of military training, do not shrink from command, and are willing to take responsibility. In brief, they are formed in character if not cultivated in intellect; they are not ignorant of men, whatever they may be of books; and they are willing to undertake the government of men, not from mere lust of power, but from instinctive delight in the task.