by Gwynne Dyer
From the point of view of a Canadian statesman, I don’t see why they should commit their country to the expenditure of lives and money for a quarrel not threatening Imperial safety.… Sir Wilfrid [Laurier] told me the other day that if the question were reconsidered he shd [sic] call a cabinet council and ask me to be present. I hope he won’t, for I shd be in a nice muddle, my chief at home thirsting for blood, all my friends here ditto, and myself while recognizing Imperial responsibilities, also seeing the iniquity of the war, and that the time for Colonial support has hardly yet arrived.
Lord Minto to Arthur Elliott, (Private), September 28, 1899
However, Minto knew where his loyalty lay: he kept his doubts to himself and dutifully pressed the colonial secretary’s demands for Canadian troops on Prime Minister Laurier. He had an eager accomplice in Major-General Edward Hutton, the British officer commanding the Canadian militia, who as early as July had drawn up a secret draft plan for the dispatch of a Canadian contingent of about twelve hundred men to South Africa.
On October 6 General Hutton wrote confidently to Lord Minto: “Considering that the Laurier Gov’. are expecting the Imperial Gov’. to force the Alaska Boundary Question upon the U.S. Gov’., and that Sir Wilfrid himself referred to arbitration or war (which latter can only mean armed intervention by the Imperial Gov’.), I do not understand how they can hold aloof from giving material support to the Imperial Gov’. in the present Crisis.”
Minto applied the screws, sending Laurier a letter warning of the impression that may be produced in the Old Country by a decision on the part of Canada not to offer troops: “It may be taken perhaps to indicate a certain want of loyalty here, which would be all the more unfortunate at a time when we are relying a good deal upon Imperial support in the Alaska question.”
J. S. Willison, the editor of the Liberal Globe, warned Laurier privately that he had only two alternatives: “either send troops or get out of office.” Laurier travelled on to Ottawa and on the evening of October 13 held a meeting with leading members of the Liberal Party to try to find some solution that would not hopelessly alienate either English Canada or French Canada. A federal election was due within a year, and Laurier could not possibly regain office without the support of both Ontario and Quebec Liberals. Yet his Quebec lieutenant, Israel Tarte, and most other Quebec cabinet members were vehemently opposed to sending Canadian troops to the Boer War, while Postmaster General William Mulock, of the Ontario Liberals, stormed out of the meeting in fury when Laurier appeared to be hesitating on the question.
The prime minister had a compromise up his sleeve that he hoped would mollify all the conflicting demands on him—English Canadian, French Canadian and British—though it would not fully satisfy any of them. He proposed that the Canadian government should authorize the formation of a Canadian contingent and pay for its equipment and transportation to South Africa, after which the British government would pick up its costs. Moreover, rather than sending regular troops or an existing militia unit, which would give the proceedings too official a character, it should be a special force made up entirely of volunteers who wanted to go to this particular war. It was pure hairsplitting, of course, but that is what most politicians reckon they are paid to do.
Mulock and the Ontario Liberals accepted Laurier’s compromise, and so did Israel Tarte, who had previously been threatening to resign from the cabinet if troops were sent. (Tarte did, however, insist on a public statement that this decision would not constitute a precedent for future Canadian actions.) So Laurier proceeded to authorize a force for South Africa without calling Parliament. The Order in Council, dated October 14, 1899, read:
The Prime Minister, in view of the well-known desire of a great many Canadians who are ready to take service under such conditions, is of the opinion that the moderate expenditure which would thus be involved for the equipment and transportation of such volunteers may readily be undertaken by the Government of Canada without summoning Parliament, especially as such an expenditure under such circumstances cannot be regarded … as a precedent for future action. [emphasis added]
Laurier fully understood Britain’s long-range purpose in seeking Canada’s agreement to send troops overseas to this little war: that was why the announcement stressed that it did not imply any future commitments. But four days later Henri Bourassa, his close friend and political confidant, who quit his seat in Labelle in protest (and was re-elected by acclamation), summed up all the forebodings of French Canada in his public letter of resignation to Laurier. Bourassa wondered, somewhat ironically, whether the British empire was really in danger:
Or are we face to face with an attempt at military federation of the Empire, a scheme dear to Mr Chamberlain? … The Orderin-Council providing for the enlistment and dispatch of our troops seems to state a reservation about the future, and excludes the present action from being considered as a precedent. The precedent, Sir, is the accomplished fact. [emphasis added]
Among English Canadians, swollen by “racial” pride and urged on by imperialist propaganda, there was little concern as to where this exciting little war might eventually lead Canada. The real debate was among French Canadians, who knew perfectly well where it was leading and didn’t want to go there at all. But most of them still believed that their old bargain with Britain was essential to their national survival, even if the terms were being unilaterally changed by the British and the English Canadians. Laurier was considerably more than just an adroit political fixer, and there was real anguish in his reply to Bourassa’s letter of resignation: “Tell me what attitude should the French Canadians take in the Confederation? … It is necessary that we choose between English Imperialism and American Imperialism. I see no other alternative. If there is one I wish you would indicate it to me.” There probably was no alternative, given the state of English Canadian opinion at the time. But Bourassa was right: a precedent had been set.
As soon as the proclamation had been issued the volunteers flocked in, and 1,061 men on a one-year enlistment sailed for South Africa from Quebec City on October 30, 1899, as the 2nd (Special Service) Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment. During the month-long voyage to Cape Town on the cramped little ship S.S. Sardinian (renamed the “Sardine” by the troops), the battalion commander discovered that few of his supposedly trained militiamen knew more than the rudiments of military drill. Lieutenant-Colonel William Otter, a native-born Canadian regular officer, had commanded militiamen in battle once before, during the North-West Rebellion of 1885, and he was determined not to lead raw troops into battle again. Although the Boer armies had inflicted a number of major defeats on the British by the time the Canadian troops arrived in South Africa, he managed to get two months at Belmont, near Kimberley, to turn his enthusiastic Canadians into soldiers before they were committed to battle. And they did quite well in their first big battle, at Paardeberg.
[Lord Roberts hesitated to attack], but agreed when the Royal Canadians volunteered to lead the action. Commanded by Colonel W. D. Otter, they were made up of “elegant extracts” from the best-known militia units in the Dominion, including a fine French company.…
In the dark of early morning they advanced to within sixty yards of the trenches before a withering fire compelled them to lie flat, but they kept up the attack for two hours.… Between 5 and 6 a.m. the Boers raised white flags above their trenches facing the Canadians. Other groups followed suit.… Roberts at once ordered the cease-fire.
Rayne Kruger, Goodbye, Dolly Gray (London, 1959)
It was our turn to advance the trench.… At two we rose and advanced. Some had shovels and some had bayonets, for we did not know where we would need them. It was very dark, so dark that we were told to advance holding hands.… We had gone about 300 yards when orders came whispered along to entrench. We had only been at that a few minutes when again we got whispered word to advance. That order should not have been given.
We had gone about 100 yards when all of a sudden there was a blaze of rifles. W
e had walked right on top of the Boer trenches. In a flash we were on our faces hugging the ground. We dare not return the fire as it would give us away. To lift one’s head would mean sure death.
Had the Boers not been afraid to rise up and fire low, not one of us would have escaped.… After a while we crawled or rolled back to our trench.… When dawn came the Boers found we had covered their position and so gave in.… Leavitt is not expected to live. Boers surrendered to the Canadians. Roberts said we did fine work.… Men are horribly shot.… Herb. Leavitt walked over four hundred yards after being shot. Anniversary of Majuba thus it was avenged.
Albert Perkins, Royal Canadian Regiment, Battle of Paardeberg, February 27, 1900
Military historians depict battles in terms of logic and purpose, so Rayne Kruger’s version of the final phase of the Battle of Paardeberg, written in 1959, is somewhat different from Albert Perkins’s version, written in his diary on the day it happened. In fact, Colonel Otter didn’t volunteer his regiment to do anything, and there was no planned attack. The Boer army of five thousand men was outnumbered six-to-one by the British, and it had been surrounded in open country and shelled incessantly for ten days. The Boers were hungry and demoralized by the time the Canadians went stumbling off into the dark to dig new trenches, and General Cronje had already decided to surrender. The Canadians just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But Paardeberg was the first British victory after four miserable months during which the British army had suffered one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Boers, so the imperialist press turned the Canadians into heroes, not just in Canada but throughout the empire.
After Paardeberg, the Royal Canadian Regiment took part in the great British advance that captured the capitals of both Boer republics by June 1900. A second contingent of one thousand men, once again raised at the Canadian government’s expense, arrived in time to participate in the grim guerrilla war that followed the surrender of the main Boer armies, in which the Boers’ farms were burned and their women and children rounded up and put in concentration camps, where about twenty thousand of them died of disease (or from being fed ground glass, according to the version still believed by most Afrikaners). Other Canadian units followed, although these were paid for not by Ottawa but by Britain or by private individuals like Lord Strathcona, the Canadian high commissioner in London, who spent £200,000 of his own money to raise and equip a six-hundred-strong cavalry regiment called (of course) Lord Strathcona’s Horse.
In a guerrilla war the whole population is the enemy, including women and children, and like most of the British empire’s troops in South Africa the Canadian soldiers frequently indulged in looting. Small portable items were especially popular: “We had no trouble getting up at the right hour. You could hear alarm clock bells in nearly every heap of blankets and the veldt hummed like a telephone office. (When a soldier loots a house the first thing he grabs is the clock.)” Nevertheless, most of the Canadians felt a certain sympathy for the people they were fighting, and often their rural instinct to help out people in distress mingled strangely with the ruthless nature of modern counterinsurgency warfare. One of the most vivid accounts of the confused behaviour that often resulted was a long letter published in the Ottawa Citizen by its editor, Lieutenant E.W.B. Morrison, who was serving in South Africa with the Canadian Artillery. He described an attack on the village of Dullstroom in the northern Transvaal by Canadian troops.
The main street was full of smoke and fiery cinders and as the flames belched out in huge sheets from one side or the other our horses shied and plunged from side to side. The place was very quiet except for the roaring and the crackle of the flames.
On the steps of the church were huddled a group of women and children. The children didn’t seem to know whether to cry or to be diverted by the spectacle. The women were white but some of them had spots of red on either cheek and their eyes blazed. Not many were crying. The troops were systematically looking the place over and as they got through with each house they burned it. Our Canadian boys helped to get their furniture out, much as they would do at a fire in a village at home. If they saw anything they fancied they would take it … but they had not the callous nerve to take the people’s stuff in front of their faces. Of course in the case of shops it was different.…
I went into a very pretty little cottage standing in a rose garden on a side street. The C.M.R.’s [Canadian Mounted Rifles] and R.C.D.’s [Royal Canadian Dragoons] were looting it, but really helping the woman out with her stuff more than sacking the place. The woman was quite a good-looking lady-like person and the house was almost luxuriously furnished. She was breathlessly bustling about saving her valuables and superintending the salvage operations. A big dragoon would come up to her and say in a sheepish sort of way: “What you want next, lady?” and she would tell them and they would carry it out. As I stood looking on she turned to me and said: “Oh, how can you be so cruel?” I sympathised with her and explained it was an order and had to be obeyed. She was a good-looking female in distress and had quite the dramatic style of an ill-used heroine.
I certainly was sorry for her—we all were—until the house began to burn and a lot of concealed ammunition to explode and nearly killed some of our men. But all the same it was a sad sight to see the little homes burning and the rose bushes withering up in the pretty gardens and the pathetic groups of homeless women and children crying among the ruins as we rode away.
Lieutenant E.W.B. Morrison, The Citizen, Ottawa, January 2, 1901
In all, over seven thousand Canadians enlisted for the South African war, of whom about five thousand arrived in time to see active service there. For most English Canadians at home the war began as an exciting distraction and ended at least as a successful demonstration of Canada’s military prowess and its unbounded loyalty to the empire. But there were a few nagging details that detracted from this cheery view of the war: of the eight companies of the Royal Canadian Regiment that had enlisted in the first rush of enthusiasm, for example, six flatly refused to extend their service when their year’s contract expired in September 1900.
Even in English Canada the war was not without its critics (although the criticism tended to be limited to farmers’ weeklies and radical labour journals). Journalist and historian Goldwin Smith was appalled by the brutalization of Canadian society. He particularly disliked the war toys being given to children: “puppets made by their distortions and squeaking to resemble the agonies of dying Boers.” But the mainstream English-language press was overwhelmingly jingoist, and its readers had no quarrel with its view of war as a morally positive and virtually cost-free spectator sport.
In the late afternoon of January 12, 1901, two of the volunteers came home. To greet them, 2,000 citizens of Paris, Ontario, gathered at the Junction Station “to welcome” (in the words of the Paris Star-Transcript), “Our Boys who had Done so well—Gunners Arthur Flanagan and Alex Hume.”
When the locomotive came puffing and clanking into the station, the band struck up “See the Conquering Heroes Come!” and the crowd raised a series of mighty cheers. Then, “as the Kaki clad heroes alighted, there arose upon the air that familiar refrain, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ ”.…
After passing along streets of decorated and illuminated houses and through lines of cheering spectators, and after serenading the homes of the heroes and setting off a mass of brilliant fireworks, the procession wound its way to the town hall, [where] a number of long orations were delivered.… George Shepherd, John Vine, and John Jefferson, Paris boys who were still in South Africa … together with the two returned heroes, were praised for the part they had played in helping to defend “Truth, Justice and Christian Civilization.”
Donald A. Smith, At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
But five volunteers was actually not a very impressive total for a town of over four thousand people. In fact, the average native-born English Canadian man was not nearly so eager to go off and die for the empire as his poli
tical leaders, his social betters and his newspapers assumed.
Almost 30 percent of Canada’s volunteers for the Boer War were British immigrants, though they made up only 7 percent of the total population. Even more significantly, Canada’s total contribution lagged far behind that of the other white dominions: it had a larger population than the Australian and New Zealand colonies put together, but they raised over three times as many men for the war. As for French Canadians—the “fine French company” of the Royal Canadian Regiment had francophone officers, but two-thirds of its men were actually English speakers. Only 3 percent of those who served in South Africa were French Canadian, although francophones comprised 30 percent of the Canadian population.
Individual French Canadians went to South Africa for the sorts of personal motives that will induce some men, at certain times in their lives, to go to a war almost regardless of what it is about, and once there they fought just as well as anybody else. But the war was almost universally unpopular in French Canada, where some of the young wore buttons bearing the name of Kruger, the Boer leader, to show where their sympathies lay. In March 1900 there were three days of rioting between English and French students in Montreal, and the militia had to be called out. Meanwhile, the more rabid sections of the English Canadian press called the French Canadians scoundrels and traitors and warned of civil war. Lord Minto, the governor general, reported that some eastern Ontario farmers went to bed at night with guns by their sides because they feared a French Canadian invasion.
Nevertheless, Laurier’s compromise had succeeded. He won the 1900 election comfortably, and the country moved on to other concerns. In January 1903 the Alaskan boundary dispute was decided entirely in favour of the United States (because the British representative on the arbitration tribunal voted for the American case in order to avoid a clash with Washington). There was great fury in Ottawa and across the country, and the two Canadian representatives on the tribunal refused to sign the decision in protest, but Laurier’s government survived. By then the South African War had been over for six months, and all the Canadian volunteers had come home except for the 224 who were buried there. It was a gentle enough introduction to the business of fighting foreign wars—and not too many Canadians were bothered by a little thing like a precedent.
