In 1901, a group of Bushveldt Carbineers, a South African raised regiment of imperial mounted infantry, many of them Australians, were so enraged by the loss of a comrade that they refused to give quarter to a group of captured Boers, and shot several prisoners. Lieutenants Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were later convicted, among other things, on charges of murdering several Boer prisoners, along with a German national, and executed.Footnote 1

Abuse of civilians and combatants in wartime, like the Breaker Morant incident, is a tragic yet regular occurrence. The development of modern international law, and definitions regarding acceptable behavior in war, have made some impact in protecting the rights of combatants and noncombatants alike, but war crimes on both the large and small scale continue. One of the reasons for this is that societal attitudes regarding proper conduct are confined to a cultural moment. What is viewed as an acceptable action by one people at one time may differ considerably from how others view the same action. What a society may deem morally acceptable in peacetime can also radically differ from the behavior it condones during wartime. Definitions of proper and aberrant behavior can tell us much about a society. So can the actions it takes to prevent misconduct because notions of discipline and punishment are subject to the same societal forces.

Crime committed in South Africa by the British army during the Anglo-Boer conflict remained mostly hidden from its public. Indeed, the general consensus in the aftermath of war was that crimes against Boer civilians and soldiers were extremely limited in extent. Comments by the Daily Mail's Edgar Wallace were typical: “Whatever may be said of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902,” he wrote, “it must be confessed that never was war waged where so much humanity was displayed on both sides as in that war!”Footnote 2 Three decades later, J. F. C. Fuller reinforced this idea in his book on the South African War, The Last of the Gentleman's Wars.Footnote 3 This attitude continued well into the century as most accounts of the war, both general and academic, stressed adherence to the rules of law and general civility in the field and glossed over some of the war's more disturbing features. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously cultivated the image of the British soldier as an honorable, law-abiding figure with a strong sense of fair play in his newspaper reports, pamphlets, and books.Footnote 4

There are two major reasons why military historians after Fuller continued to view the conflict in South Africa as a gentlemen's war with honorable soldiers.Footnote 5 First, most works have focused on British commanders and have detailed the set-piece battles that they conducted primarily in the first year of the war. These books are mostly concerned with troop movements, weaponry, personal leadership, and displays of heroism.Footnote 6 If they discuss the enemy at all, it is simply to mention their numbers and give brief biographical sketches of their commanders. Although the conventional phase of the South African War ended in June 1900 with the fall of Pretoria, the Transvaal's capital, and a June 2 war council, in which Boer commando leaders decided to switch to a guerrilla strategy, and the war lasted almost two more years, historians tend to shy away from this later stage. In the first year of the war there were certainly incidents of white-flag abuses, occasions in which illegal weapons were utilized (such as the employment of expanding Mark IV or dumdum bullets), and there were allegations on both sides of looting and farm burning. However, these subjects are really side notes to this stage of the war and they do not in any way overshadow the conflict in arms. The same cannot be said of the latter stage of the war, when the British brought the conflict to the homesteads and farms of Boer civilians. This part of the war, however, has traditionally been neglected by military historians.Footnote 7 Second, only recently has the methodology of the social historian, which has been so prominent in the historical field since the late 1970s, begun to make an impact on military history. In recent years, the “new military history” has been applied to British colonial wars like the South African War, and new aspects of the conflict are now gaining attention.Footnote 8

One subject that remains virtually untouched by historians of the South African War is the subject of discipline and punishment in the British army. Did the British employ the methods of barbarism, as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal leader and one of the most outspoken critics on the conduct of the war, famously stated, and were these methods part of an overarching strategy to defeat the enemy? Or were they simply acts of cruelty and abuse on the part of the soldier in the field? Can the two be separated—the actions of the state and the actions of its army—or do they feed off one another? Did British soldiers step beyond the rules of justice in war as defined by their leadership or perhaps as defined by the Hague Convention and contemporary international law, and, if so, how were they punished for their actions? How did soldiers view their own behavior? This study shows that the army defined crime and punishment not simply to produce obedience but also to satisfy the moral conventions of Victorian society wherever it was transmitted.

Books on policing usually avoid mentioning the military police altogether; those on prisons and punishment rarely discuss the system of court-martial.Footnote 9 Military historians have seen the army as an institution somehow entirely removed from society and not subject to the same pressures that in the nineteenth century moved Great Britain away from corporal and public punishment and toward a reforming ethos that promoted education, indoctrination, and incarceration. Following General Sir Charles Napier in the mid-nineteenth century, military historians and commentators have emphasized that military law, differing from civil law, is not designed to punish moral crime or “make men good” but simply to produce obedience. Soldiers are not governed by peer pressure, religious upbringing, or a sense of right or wrong, for example, but simply by a system of “punishments and rewards.” Napier postulated that unlike in civil society, it is better that an innocent be punished than a guilty man be set free.Footnote 10 The purpose of military law, therefore, is so unique that it needs to be studied independently. Recent thinking, however, suggests that soldiers with moral integrity are also those most likely to behave in a disciplined manner in peace and in war, or, as Mark Osiel has put it, the concerns of ethics and efficacy are increasingly congruent.Footnote 11

Alan Skelley's groundbreaking work in the 1970s on the Victorian army situated crime in the military in the larger context of crime in Great Britain. He demonstrated that just as “detectable” crime decreased in civil society in the late Victorian era, so too did it decrease in the army. He also showed that trends in prosecutions and in the severity of punishments meted out by courts-martial likewise mirrored the practices of civil courts. Recidivism was a universal problem and drunkenness often was a gateway to more disturbing crimes.Footnote 12 More recently, David French has examined several of the methods employed by the British army to reduce crime, such as the establishment of temperance societies, the improvement of barracks life, the growing uniformity in the court-martial system, and the reduction in time between charge, prosecution, and punishment.Footnote 13 Again, all these trends in the military can be found in civil society as a whole.Footnote 14 The one area neither Skelley nor French explores fully is how the system of crime and punishment in the army played out overseas. Although there has been a great deal of recent interest in World War I and military executions, soldiers on active service during the Victorian period have yet to be the subject of much historical investigation.Footnote 15

Military law's evolution in the late nineteenth century reflected contemporary trends in civil law and social norms in general. Most notably, Britain finally joined the rest of Western Europe in abolishing flogging in the wake of the deaths of Privates White in 1846 and Slim in 1867.Footnote 16 In 1881, the first Army Act was passed, codifying military offenses and establishing a transparent system of prosecution and punishment. Laws regarding summary judgments and penal servitude were reformed, punishments were reduced, and more checks were put into place safeguarding against vindictive or negligent courts-martial.Footnote 17 Simultaneously, Britain altered its notions of acceptable conduct in war by joining the Geneva Convention in 1865 and submitting to further changes in international law agreed to at Brussels in 1874 and the Hague in 1899.Footnote 18

The Hague Convention, which Britain signed just two months before the outbreak of hostilities with the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, is particularly relevant to evaluating British conduct in the South African War, even though the South African republics were not participants. The invitation list put together by the Great Powers at Russia's prompting omitted their inclusion over fear of British objections.Footnote 19 Since the laws that emerged from the Hague talks were only binding between signatories of the convention, Britain did not legally have to abide by them in the war.Footnote 20 Morally, however, it is very difficult to argue that Britain was not in some way still subject to them. For some commentators, this posed no problem. Even if the Hague Convention was binding, they argued, British conduct fell well within its limits. G. B. Beak, writing immediately after the war, defended British actions by hiding behind historical precedent and “autant que les necessités militaires le permettent.”Footnote 21

Most disagreed. Thomas Baty, later Joint Secretary of the International Law Association, condemned the refusal of quarter, the right of a combatant to surrender and be treated fairly under the rules of the convention, which appeared to be increasing with some alarm, especially in more remote sectors of the war. He also argued that the Boers should not have been treated as irregulars and therefore denied the rights granted to those who wore uniforms; instead, they should have been recognized as a levee en masse defending their invaded country.Footnote 22 Emily Hobhouse, the self-appointed advocate of the South African Women and Children Distress Fund, whose tour of the concentration camps and vivid descriptions of the suffering of women and children brought a burst of public and political outcry back home, also cited the Hague Convention in her famous tract The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell. She listed some of the articles of the Hague Convention that she believed Britain had violated: Article 45 precluded the compulsion of occupied people to pledge oaths of allegiance, Article 46 demanded the respect of lives and private property, Article 47 prohibited pillage, and so on. She also pointed out that the Manual of Military Law, revised in 1899, dictated proportionality, that is, “as the object of war is confined to disabling the enemy, the infliction of any injuries beyond that which is required to produce disability is needless cruelty,” and that British troops had gone far beyond what could be viewed as reasonable in this situation.Footnote 23 Although Baty and Hobhouse can perhaps be marginalized on account of their opposition to the war, Major General Sir John Ardagh cannot. Ardagh was Director of Military Intelligence and Great Britain's representative to the Hague Convention. Ardagh unequivocally thought that the army was bound by the agreement.Footnote 24

Commentators on both sides of the argument rarely concerned themselves with how the Hague Convention applied to black South Africans in the war. The myth that the South African War was solely a white man's war fought between Britons and Boers was only recently shattered in the 1980s by the research of Peter Warwick and Bill Nasson.Footnote 25 In 1900, most contemporary Britons had little idea how important and how extensive were the roles of black South Africans in the war. The maltreatment of blacks during the war was similarly a subject few knew about and perhaps fewer cared about. Episodes like the defense of Mafeking, for example, created a hero out of Sir Robert Baden-Powell despite his neglect of the Barolong, many of whom starved during the siege, and his attempts to cover up their heroism in the conflict were largely successful.Footnote 26 Typically, when the suffering of blacks was discussed by the press, it was customary to hold the Boers responsible, not the British. Actions directed against the white population, designated as official combatants, however, were of concern to the British public and to politicians.

Problems of military discipline can be understood in the context of the events of the South African War, which the British found unexpectedly difficult to fight. The war began in October 1899 with the expiration of a Boer ultimatum to the British government. The Boers quickly went on the offensive, invading the British-governed South African colonies: Natal and the Cape Colony. Despite the rattling of their sabers and making of threats for several months, the British were not ready for the Boer offensive and the Boers were able to determine the initial course of the war by laying siege to three key strategic and economic points. Due to political and public pressure, British command abandoned its predetermined, aggressive strategy and took the war to the Boers on their terms. The result was the disastrous “Black Week” of mid-December 1899, when three British armies attempting to lift the sieges were all stopped in their tracks. The shock of Black Week forced the British from their complacency and general assumption of yet another easy imperial victory. They readied supplies, recruited volunteers, mobilized more divisions, and dispatched new military leadership.

In the course of the next six months, thanks mostly to overwhelming numbers, the British, now commanded by Lord Roberts, succeeded in relieving the besieged towns and captured the capital of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, and the major political and economic centers of the Transvaal: Johannesburg and Pretoria. Most Boer commandos in the field, however, refused to surrender and turned to guerrilla tactics: destroying railroads and telegraph lines and targeting isolated British outposts. Thanks to their mobility, the Boers managed to stay one step ahead of their adversary. Roberts's confidence that the war would end by Christmas 1900 led him to believe that the British should continue to fight the war on their own terms and not be pulled into a war of insurgency. In this decision, Roberts was heavily influenced by Colonel C. E. Callwell's seminal work on military theory, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. In a situation where a central authority existed, the objective in war was clear, Callwell advised: the capital, or in the case of the Boer Republics, capitals, should be seized. Fighting, according to Callwell, may continue afterward, but it was of secondary importance.Footnote 27 Although Roberts introduced some counterinsurgency measures, notably farm burning, his policies were not part of a well-conceived strategy designed to counter the developing Boer guerrilla tactics.

Roberts left South Africa before 1900 had ended and announced victory to a satisfied British public. The war, however, was far from over. Roberts's successor, Lord Kitchener, was aware that a change of strategy was necessary to break resistance. To do this, Kitchener employed two basic counterinsurgency techniques. One involved the erection of a series of blockhouses designed to pen in the remaining Boer guerrillas or bittereinders. British mobile columns were used to drive the Boer commandos toward these blockhouses. The other technique specifically targeted the families of the men who remained on commando. Kitchener ordered a more comprehensive policy of farm burning, the confiscation or destruction of livestock, and the development of a network of concentration camps to remove noncombatants from the field and thus prevent the wives and children of armed burghers from supplying them with aid.Footnote 28 These policies were designed to strip the Boers of their resources and to break their will.Footnote 29

After the conventional war had ended and the guerilla war had begun in earnest, British soldiers increasingly came into contact with Free State and Transvaal Boers, both as combatants and noncombatants. As a result, the risk of personal violence or exploitation by soldiers in the British army directed against Boer persons and their property increased at the same time. After June 1900 the size of the functioning British army unit in the field also shrank considerably. The division or even the battalion or regiment became too unwieldy and too impractical to guard blockhouses, search Boer farms, and escort prisoners from the occupied and annexed territories to the coast for deportation. Discipline in the company or squadron, often commanded by an inexperienced junior officer, was much more likely to break down, and did. And finally, after June, large numbers of volunteer soldiers, organized mostly as imperial yeomanry, militia, and volunteer corps, began to arrive from Great Britain and its empire.Footnote 30 These men often had no more than a few weeks’ training before they arrived; some even received their training in South Africa and, as a result, they were often exposed to hardships and experiences for which they were not prepared. Discipline among these volunteer troops was typically more difficult to maintain than among those who served in the regular army.

British soldiers charged with crimes while on active duty were to be immediately taken into military custody. Although Royal Military Police (MP) could do this more often than not, there were too few MPs to go around, so specially assigned regimental troops arrested soldiers. Almost the entire corps was utilized in South Africa, and many more men were drafted. MPs were typically busier trying to close down brothels and prevent arms from illegally entering the country than they were policing their own troops.Footnote 31 As a result, the force had little impact on regulating crime and changing behavior in general.Footnote 32

Once the accused was taken into custody, the officer in command had to begin an investigation of the charge within forty-eight hours (with exceptions for holidays). The officer could then dispose of the case, refer it to a superior authority, or adjourn for evidence to be written out. A summary judgment could quickly deal with minor offenses, such as drunkenness. Penalties for these types of incidents included detention, fines, deductions from ordinary pay, short field punishments, and confinement to barracks. Serious crimes and all charges leveled against officers needed to be heard by a court-martial. The type of trial—general, district, regimental, or field general court-martial—was determined by the rank of the charged, the nature of the crime, and the expediency of the trial sought by the commanding officer or provost marshal. Rules governed the size and makeup of each court, how evidence was to be heard, and what types of punishment could be meted out. The army was given the greatest latitude in field general courts-martial, which could only be conducted on active or overseas service. In this type of trial no charge sheet or written evidence was required; the president of the court-martial could be a subaltern and could come from the same regiment or battalion as the charged; yet the trial was still given the power to make life-or-death decisions.Footnote 33 Also, all soldiers, at least in theory, were subject to civil laws and civil courts in addition to military law and military courts.

In the South African War, the British army conducted 10,012 general courts-martial and over 5,000 district courts-martial.Footnote 34 In addition, there were countless infractions that commanding officers dealt with summarily. A quick glimpse at the records reveals that officers and the courts were busy most of the time with minor charges such as drunkenness, sleeping on sentry, and absence without leave.Footnote 35 Other more serious charges stemming from crimes against Boer persons and property, however, were also leveled against British and imperial soldiers. In the late Victorian army, there were several offenses for which a conviction on active service by general or field general court-martial meant possible death by hanging or firing squad. Among these were mutiny and sedition, violence to a superior officer in execution of office, disobeying with willful defiance a lawful command given personally by a superior, murder, and treason. There were also many offenses in which the court-martial could choose to employ the death penalty but had at its disposal greater latitude in punishing the wrongful party. This list was much longer and included such offenses as shamefully abandoning one's post, aiding or harboring an enemy, doing violence to persons or property of inhabitants, and sleeping or being drunk when on sentry.Footnote 36 Close to half a million men served in British uniforms in South Africa during the course of the war. Numerous men were charged with capital offenses; many were found guilty, although only four of them were put to death by the order of a court.Footnote 37

For instance, Captain Charles Cox, New South Wales Lancers, ordered the murder of Jan Dolley, an African servant who refused to get him a bridle. Cox returned to his native Australia without a trial.Footnote 38 Privates William and Moseley shot and killed an African. They were sentenced at their court-martial to one year of hard labor.Footnote 39 Lance Corporal J. Ryan, 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, pointed a loaded rifle “towards natives in a threatening manner.” The rifle went off, a man was killed, and Ryan was later convicted of manslaughter.Footnote 40 On the night of 2 November 1899, during the siege of Mafeking, Lieutenant Murchison, Protectorate Regiment, dined with a war correspondent working for the Daily Chronicle named Parslow. The two men started drinking and arguing about Murchison's role in driving off the Boers’ attack two days earlier. Murchison suddenly “drew his revolver, turned round and shot Parslow through the back of the head.”Footnote 41 Murchison was found guilty of murder by a court-martial and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the general officer in command, and in May 1900, just a few days before the siege was lifted, Murchison was released from jail to help to defend the town against another attack.Footnote 42

Crimes that were defined as murder back in Great Britain were often redefined by officers and soldiers alike in the context of war and in racialized terms. Of course, the most renowned murders committed by soldiers in the South African War, as mentioned above, were those attributed to the Bushveldt Carbineers. Defenders of Morant and Handcock to this day, however, are primarily interested in situating the event within a discussion of state versus imperial identity.Footnote 43 Convinced that British officials were not concerned with justice but only in finding a “scapegoat for empire,” they are more outraged over the punishment than in looking at the actual capital crimes committed.

The execution of prisoners certainly has to account for the majority of murders committed by British and imperial soldiers in South Africa, although as one would expect, the numbers are not readily accessible. The killing of prisoners was never an official policy of the British army. Nor does there seem to be any evidence, as some believe, that it was an unofficial policy endorsed by Lord Kitchener, although even Lord Roberts was unclear on this point when he wrote to Kitchener in January 1901 from his offices in London, asking him if indeed orders had been given to shoot all captured Boers.Footnote 44 The shooting of prisoners does appear to have occurred with some regularity and must have been condoned by many British officers, although there is little evidence to suggest how often, how many British soldiers took part in the illegal exercise, and how many Boers were killed. Unfortunately, few cases are as well documented as the incident involving the Bushveldt Carbineers in which the court found Captain Taylor's order “that no prisoners were to be taken was against the usage of modern warfare … and rendered him personally responsible for the shooting of the six Boers who were coming in to surrender and who made no defense when fired on.”Footnote 45

Most unpublished memoirs, letters, and diaries of soldiers who served in the war made some reference to this subject and many were sympathetic to the activity, though none admitted to carrying the practice out. Perhaps Private C. Chadwick, 3rd Grenadier Guards, came closest to an admission when he wrote, “The Boers cry for mercy when they know they have no chance of shooting you down, but we take no notice of the crying, and stick the bayonet through them.”Footnote 46 Even here, however, Chadwick cloaked his responsibility within the context of collective action. H. Hayes, 84th Battery, RFA, likewise sympathized with his comrades who killed their prisoners, but he himself admitted no guilt:

Frank Stephenson, 10th (Sherwood Rangers) Company Imperial Yeomanry, wrote home in April 1901, “There is an understanding out here among all our Soldiers that no prisoners are to be taken, if it can be possibly helped.”Footnote 48 Although he himself did not acknowledge taking part in this practice, he indicated that Strathcona's Horse, a Canadian unit raised during the war, was killing its prisoners and he supported them. H. R. Lister, City of London Imperial Volunteers (CIV), explained in his diary why he supported the shooting of prisoners:

One of Lord Methuen's staff officers, Major W. A. W. Lawson, complained bitterly after Methuen buried a French foreign volunteer with full honors who had served with the Boers. Lawson wrote home with disgust, “All the Froggies cried and one made a speech at the funeral. Adieu, mon General, etc., and Methuen shook hands with him, God knows why, as they ought all to have been shot.”Footnote 50 And Frank Charge, 16th (Worcestershire) Company Imperial Yeomanry, wrote to his father, “the Boers are a dirty treacherous lot. … We do hate them down here like poison. The rascally dirty varmints, they must be exterminated; the country swarms with them.”Footnote 51

Not all British soldiers who supported this activity and perhaps were even directly involved in it were motivated by hatred of the Boers. Their motivations were mixed and complex. Some recognized the organizational difficulties and the great amount of resources needed to transport and take care of the men who had surrendered. Others, like Lieutenant W. S. Power, 8th (Derbyshire) Company Imperial Yeomanry, were aware of the manpower strains that multiple escort and guard detachments put on units in the field. Power wrote to his cousin in July 1900, “Not a word has been said yet, about not taking the man who had the rifle, prisoner. I don’t want any prisoners, no good to me, only have to put a guard over them, and after you have turned them over to the [authorities] they are given a pass and told to go back to their farms.”Footnote 52 And still others wondered if these prisoners, who would lay down their weapons, take oaths of neutrality, and return to their farms, might someday return to the battlefield and face them once again. “All this leniency on our part,” E. Craig Brown, 1st Battalion Cameron Highlanders, wrote in his diary, is “thrown away on and unappreciated by the Boers, however, who do not understand such treatment from the victors and only consider us weak in consequence.”Footnote 53

Regardless of their reasons, the murder of prisoners was clearly a violation of both British and international law. However, senior British officers took little action to curb the practice. None of these personal accounts, for example, mention any threats or warnings coming from officers. Indeed, if Kitchener and his staff expected that the executions of Morant and Handcock would send a strong message to the troops and encourage better behavior, there is no evidence to suggest that their plan worked. Word certainly spread, but the conclusions reached by Captain J. G. Wrentmore about the case, that there would probably be many more such incidents, were common and were certainly not what Kitchener had hoped for. In a letter from Cape Town, he wrote, “There have been some terrible stories of atrocities in out of the way districts in the Transvaal, and I regret to say two officers of one of the Irregular Corps have been shot by order of the Commander-in-Chief for murder. I do not think such a thing has ever occurred in the annals of the English Army before, but their provocation was very great, and I am afraid if the war continues much longer, it will degenerate into pure savagery in out of the way parts.”Footnote 54

Although many British soldiers have left behind records that indicate their views on how male prisoners should have been treated in the war, none attempt to justify the use of violence against women, although they do recognize the violent impact of dispossession and the force often needed to turn women and children from their homes. Women were sometimes very active in their associations with locally raised commandos, and some even took up arms, but none were to be treated as enemy combatants. Nevertheless, as in any war, crime against noncombatants did occur regularly. Officially, rape almost never occurred. In the course of the war, only fourteen British and imperial soldiers were charged with rape, attempted rape, or aiding and abetting rape, and of these, nine were acquitted.Footnote 55 These numbers seem doubtful. Unfortunately for the historian, both official and unofficial records have left behind little information to give us more insight as to the numbers and the overall impact of sexual violence on the Boer community. British soldiers were unlikely to disrupt the bonds formed through primary group cohesion by turning in perpetrators; victims were just as unlikely to go to authorities to press charges. Indeed, in the very traditional Dutch Reformed Boer family, commentators like Emily Hobhouse tell us, victims of rape would probably not have even told their husbands or fathers, let alone British authorities.Footnote 56

Even if the victims were able to overcome traditional cultural attitudes, they would have been skeptical about receiving justice in a British court. Furthermore, if they wished to report the crime, practical impediments stood in their waf:y. In July 1900, Commandant General Louis Botha brought to the attention of Lord Roberts a case involving two British soldiers who had raped a young Boer woman. Botha in his official protest included a sworn statement given by the victim. Roberts replied that he would look into the “allegation” but wanted the woman to travel to Pretoria to identify the perpetrators.Footnote 57 Roberts's request would have both required the woman (and her family) to make an arduous wartime journey and face the men who had attacked her. Even then, she would not have been guaranteed a conviction. In all likelihood, if the case followed patterns similar to those back in Great Britain, she and not the accused would have become the suspect. The court would have questioned why she was not under the supervision of a male guardian, why she should risk publicly announcing the loss of her sexual innocence, and why she failed to defend herself.Footnote 58

It was in the interest of Roberts, Kitchener, and the government to keep the official number of rapes down. After all, they were trying to sell a heroic image of the British soldier to outsiders and to their own public, and they would have to come to terms with the Boers after the war. They would have been hard-pressed to do this if reporters frequently shared stories of abuse and assault. The newspapers rarely did. Mortimer Menpes's War Impressions strictly followed the official line: “To see Tommy with a Boer woman was … delightful. His behavior was chivalry itself. Whenever a woman appeared on the scene, whether as a prisoner or the mistress of her own farmhouse, the men were perfectly charming. They chaffed each other among themselves to flatter her; while the woman showed that she was flattered by trotting round, giving Tommy this and Tommy that—in fact, she fell in love with him at once.”Footnote 59 A contemporary account of the Guards Brigade offered the same conclusion: “There have certainly been cases of immoral conduct, but in no single instance … has forced been used. [Soldiers] only go where they are invited and where they are welcome.”Footnote 60

The self-image and public image of the British soldier as chivalrous by definition resulted in the inability of the court-martial to find guilt. As a result, relatively few sexual violations made their way into the printed record. The journalist and antiwar advocate W. T. Stead followed a series of court-martial trials in April 1901 and published them as an appendix to his polemical treatise The War in South Africa: Methods of Barbarism. At these trials, one woman testified that a British intelligence officer threatened to shoot her if she did not submit to his sexual demands. Although her clothes were ripped and she received some bruises, she managed to escape his grasp. Stead tells us the court concluded that the man could not have been a British soldier and was most likely some anonymous rogue. Another Boer, Mrs. Jacobs, testified that a group of British troopers forced their way into her home at gunpoint and jumped onto the bed where some of her four daughters lay. The court welcomed the suggestion from defense council that the soldiers were simply tired and wanted a bed to sleep upon. A third victim, Mrs. Gouw, testified that a soldier attempted to rape her, but she managed to run away from him. She pleaded with the court to make no mention of this event to her husband. And finally, Mrs. Botha of Middelkraal came forward to tell her story of how she was strangled, beaten, dragged, and then raped. Stead does not tell us how this case ended up, but based on the above numbers it is likely that either the case was dismissed or the court recognized that a wrongdoing had occurred but was reluctant to take or assign responsibility for it.Footnote 61 The Judge Advocate General's office and officers involved in courts-martial chose to ignore or deemphasize laws governing rape and other forms of violence directed at noncombatants even though they were very clear.

Laws governing the murder of Boers, prisoners or otherwise, were also very clear as defined by international law and as accepted by Lord Salisbury's government as a signatory to the Hague Convention, regardless of the Boer Republics’ ambivalence to that same convention and British interpretations of what constituted a legitimate armed force. Morant's supporters argued that other units were killing prisoners or that there was an unwritten understanding that it was an acceptable practice, but they could find little legal ground to justify their actions.

The laws governing confiscation of property during wartime, however, allowed for much greater flexibility of interpretation. Lieutenant Colonel S. T. Banning's Military Law, which served as a guidebook for British junior officers preparing themselves for promotion and was updated after the Hague Peace Conference, explained that the property of the enemy could not be destroyed unless it was “imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.”Footnote 62 Roberts initially stood against the destruction and confiscation of enemy property, but his attitude changed by September 1900.Footnote 63 In a poignant telegram to Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary of State for War, Roberts wrote, “It is difficult to come to any settlement with an army broken up into small fractions and without a recognized leader, and it is equally difficult to deal with bands of marauders in accordance with civilized warfare, yet it is hardly clear whether we should be justified in treating them as rebels without their having been given due notice. Hoche's method of pacifying La Vendée is being carried out.”Footnote 64 Both he and Kitchener issued a number of directives stating that not only was the destruction of Boer farms and the confiscation of livestock permissible under certain conditions but that it was a requirement of British officers in the field to carry out the practice. They were specifically to target the homesteads of Boers on commando, those who aided the war effort by harboring the enemy and supplying him with food or weapons, those who misused the white flag, and those situated near strategic positions, like railway lines, where Boer activity had interrupted British communication and supply. What if a British unit desperately needed wood or food and the only source was a neighboring Boer farm which was not in active support of a commando? Could it be interpreted as a necessity of war to procure those supplies? And what of the farm on which no owner was to be found? Should soldiers assume the owner was away on commando? According to A. W. M. Atthill, 2nd Norfolk Volunteer Service Company, in a section of his account of the war entitled “Hints in Returning to Civilization,” “It is not advisable when hunting, having called on your neighbour and finding him out, to jump to the conclusion that he is ‘on commando,’ and straightaway burn his house down; he might feel annoyed.”Footnote 65 Although Salisbury may not have shared Atthill's sense of humor, he had similar concerns. While he was willing to accept Roberts's views that repressive measures were necessary and could, as Roberts indicated in other letters, save lives in the long run, he questioned the scope and extent of the exercise.Footnote 66 But as the war went on, Roberts and, even more so, Kitchener proved willing to stretch the limits of what could be defined as a military necessity.

British soldiers regularly burned farms and commandeered livestock and property. Occasionally, payment was made for goods; more often, government receipts were handed out; and, most typically, nothing was exchanged. Soldiers had a hard time differentiating between need and want, and inexperienced junior officers had trouble maintaining discipline, especially over volunteer units. As a result, looting became endemic in the South African War. Occasionally officers made threats, but rarely took actions to prevent or deter further acts of pillage.

Because so many soldiers took part in this practice and because they could justify it as part of what Roberts and Kitchener defined as a legitimate part of the British strategy to win the war, few of them tried to hide their actions from their friends and families back home. “I went for a ramble round [Lydenburg] and came across several houses empty and broken into,” wrote a sergeant in the Scottish Rifles. “I went into one and got a fine dressing case and some wearing apparel, Carter found some false teeth which he gave to our boy. We broke into a Jew's store and found a case of wines, which we immediately carted off to our wagon.”Footnote 67 Private Tucker took some silks from a farmhouse, and H. R. Langmore, a civil surgeon, happily wrote in his diary that he found a Kruger penny when he was looting in the Western Transvaal.Footnote 68 And Captain L. March Phillips, Rimington's Guides, wrote with much enthusiasm about his looting experience at Pretoria:

Men could only view their looting as morally neutral when the consequences of their actions were hidden from them. However, seeing the immediate impact of the destruction and the confiscation of goods on Boer women and children troubled many of them and forced them to reclassify their actions as morally suspect. Frank Stephenson, for example, wrote to his family with great sorrow that he was tired of searching Boer houses and “push[ing] around families.”Footnote 70 When the 1st Battalion Wiltshire Imperial Yeomanry was ordered to seize 30,000 sheep and slaughter them, Captain H. B. Burnaby wrote that this was the “most disgusting thing [I had] to do.” With great shame, he wrote, “what brutes the Boers must think us.”Footnote 71 Lieutenant W. S. Power shared a story with his cousin that must have occurred on a regular basis. “I was out foraging,” Power wrote, “[and] I came to a house where there was a fine flock of geese, also at the house, a fine flock of daughters. I was after the geese!! But one fine pretty lassie persuaded me to have bread, milk and butter, so I went inside and had a talk with them. Quite a nice girl. The end of it was, I had to go somewhere else for my geese, for how could I rob defenseless women and children!!”Footnote 72 Power recognized that what he was doing was wrong, and perhaps a crime even under these circumstances. It can be assumed that he acted similarly before and probably continued to do so after this event. But in this case, where a face was attached to the victim, he could not go through with it and felt great shame.

Because British soldiers were ordered to search Boer farms, confiscate certain types of property, and raze the homesteads of those families who were deemed active in their support of the enemy's efforts, perhaps it was inevitable that a certain amount of looting took place. Tired, hungry, and undersupplied soldiers were put in situations where their plight could be improved, even if temporarily, through theft. No doubt it was often hard to differentiate between farms supporting the war effort and farms attempting to remain neutral. Of course, at other times, soldiers stole simply out of greed; for instance, a group of regulars and volunteers who were ordered to protect a gold mine near Johannesburg looted it instead.Footnote 73 A few companies of the Imperial Yeomanry force, however, moved far beyond what perhaps could be expected under these circumstances and gained the notorious distinction among their comrades as “looters.” Sergeant Murray Cosby Jackson wrote in his diary of the war that the reason that the Imperial Yeomanry could never catch up to the Boers was because their horses were laden with booty.Footnote 74 Several colonial units also had bad reputations. Edgar Wallace wrote, “They say that when Brabant's Horse has passed though a sniper district the very locusts starve!”Footnote 75 Reginald Rankin wrote in his account of the war that the South African raised Rimington's Guides earned such a reputation that “if a farm had been looted, if women's rings had been stolen off their fingers, if a remounts officer's best horses had been driven off, with one accord the detractors shouted ‘Rimington's again.’”Footnote 76 And J. H. M. Abbott wrote in Tommy Cornstalk, “‘Looting’ comes to [the Australian] naturally, though apparently not quite so naturally as to the Canadian, who is the most accomplished ‘looter’ in all the world.”Footnote 77

The troops who most often broke the laws of war and earned the reputation of notorious “looters” were supplied no better or worse than other British units. They were not active in a particular region or setting, nor were they recruited from a different social class that could lead one to make general assumptions about the men's characters. One conclusion that can be drawn is that these units lacked the discipline of other companies primarily because of the failings of their officers. This conclusion is based on the fact that after complaints to high command and the imposition of a more rigid discipline, looting ceased. For example, the 17th (Earl of Carrick's Ayrshire) and 18th (Queen's Own Royal Glasgow) Companies Imperial Yeomanry looted a village in the southeastern Free State in June 1900. The following month they did it again, this time under a new senior commander. The C.O. immediately condemned the looting, threatening soldiers with very harsh disciplinary measures.Footnote 78 The looting stopped. An anonymous account provides some further evidence. On 17 May 1901, the 16th (Worcestershire) Company Imperial Yeomanry looted two farms. Two days later, some soldiers broke into a jeweler's shop. The officer in command held a field general court-martial, found one of the soldiers guilty, and sentenced him to be shot by firing squad. The following day, according to the account, all looting stopped for good.Footnote 79 J. H. Settle wrote that strict orders were given to the men as they approached Jacobsdal. As a result, “Not even an apple was taken from the trees. A sentry was placed over each orchard, and soldiers were only allowed to enter when desiring to make a purchase. Several soldiers who broke the order were severely punished. One man, for helping himself to a chicken, was sentenced to 58 days imprisonment. A Canadian soldier, who so far forgot himself as to annex a chicken from a Boer farmyard, received no less than 12 months imprisonment. A private of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, for robbing a miner at Kimberley, was given 14 days imprisonment.”Footnote 80 After that, only a few disobeyed the orders. Discipline, clearly, went a long way in solving the looting “problem.”

Strict discipline, however, could do little to curtail the problem of drunkenness. Alcohol abuse was an endemic problem in the South African War, just as it had been historically in the British army and in Victorian society in general. Alan Skelley calculated that drunkenness in itself and as a cause of other wrongdoings accounted for 75 percent of all crime in the late 1880s.Footnote 81 A quick glance at the court-martial records for the South African War would indicate that little had changed in a decade.Footnote 82 And it was not just the rank and file who were drinking too much. On 24 March 1901, Lieutenant J. O. Black, 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, VSC, was arrested for drunkenness while on active service. He was dismissed from service. Lieutenant G. Fitzgerald, Reserve of Officers, was charged with the same crime and likewise dismissed. Lieutenant C. E. K. Lambart, 23rd Company Imperial Yeomanry, got drunk while in command of a picquet. He was cashiered. Lieutenant G. R. McClintock, 22nd Company Imperial Yeomanry, got drunk and then disobeyed a superior officer's orders. He was dismissed as well.Footnote 83 The list goes on and on, indicating the link between drunkenness and other crimes, some much more serious. Lieutenant C. W. D. Gandy, 1st Battalion Liverpool Regiment, was cashiered for getting drunk. He was also charged with behaving in a scandalous manner unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman, for as he was being marched off by some MPs he yelled out, “‘You are a bloody whore’ or words to that effect.” The court recommended mercy on the second charge since he was drunk at the time.Footnote 84 Three privates in the 2nd Seaforth Highlanders got drunk and abandoned their blockhouse. They were sentenced to one year of hard labor. Corporal Blevin received a slightly longer sentence and a fine for getting drunk and then breaking into a house.Footnote 85 And, finally, Corporal D. McAlhane, Royal Irish Rifles, had too much to drink and refused to stop. He demanded more, and failing to get it, took out his rifle and shot two men, fatally wounding both. He was charged with manslaughter.Footnote 86 In sum, alcohol use both led to an increase in crime but paradoxically mitigated assignment of guilt.

Murray Cosby Jackson recounted the story of a trooper who was posted on sentry duty; sometime later an officer came by, found him asleep, and reprimanded him. It turned out, however, that the officer was drunk and did not realize that the trooper had already been relieved.Footnote 87 James Barnes, a special correspondent for the New York Observer and the McClure News Syndicate, described a sentry getting drunk at Trompsburg: “I suppose in the history of drinking no man ever got quite so drunk in such a short space of time and went through so many phases from hilarity to solemnity in so few minutes as did this man.”Footnote 88 Frank Perham, 5th New Zealand Mounted Rifles, wrote about an episode that occurred while escorting donkey teams across the Riet River: “A fair part of the load comprised cases of whisky and somehow many of the cases had fallen to pieces. It was very tempting to the ‘Scotties’ [Scottish Rifles] and most of them became hopelessly drunk. They were brought before the heads and charged with being unfit for duty on the Veldt, and were sentenced to seven days’ C.B. If the stuff they had pinched had been Army property the charge would have been stealing, and the sentence about three months’ hard.”Footnote 89 The Judge Advocates Office did not know how to solve the problem. “The frequent cases of drunkenness in S. Africa and the punishment inflicted call attention to the present state of the law. … It is difficult to impose the punishment of imprisonment when troops are at the front. A fine is undoubtedly insufficient. Summary punishment, which was introduced as an alternative can only be ordered in cases of ‘aggravated drunkenness’ … and that offense can only be legally committed when the drunkenness was ‘on the march’ or after the offender was otherwise on duty or was warmed for duty.”Footnote 90 The problem of drinking persisted throughout the war and only got worse.Footnote 91 Fines, terms of imprisonment, and even harsh methods of discipline such as lashing the guilty soldier spread-eagled to the wheel of a moving wagon did little to encourage sobriety.Footnote 92

During the war, soldiers were sentenced for embezzlement, theft, forgery, losing equipment and animals, disobeying superior officers, manslaughter, attempting to commit suicide, willfully maiming themselves, absence without leave, and even trying to sell medals.Footnote 93 They were fined, cashiered, reduced in rank, imprisoned, sentenced to hard labor, and occasionally subject to corporal punishment. Private J. H. Burn-Murdoch, Lumsden's Horse, saw a very disturbing sight of a “poor ‘divil’ [sic] of a ‘Tommy’ tied up to a stake” at a camp at Bloemfontein.

Of course, as mentioned above, courts-martial could impose capital punishment in the most serious cases. Many British and imperial soldiers were condemned to death during the course of the war, although the vast majority of these sentences were commuted. More often than not, the charge stemmed from cowardice or abandoning a post.

British surrenders in the South African War were so common that the army felt it necessary in October 1900 to issue Army Order 208, which demanded that whenever a surrender occurred, a court of inquiry would look into the conduct of the senior officer or solider present.Footnote 95 Upon hearing the findings of the court, the general officer in command could then, at his discretion, call for a court-martial. Army Order 110, issued in May 1901, required a court-martial of any officer or soldier who displayed the white flag. In addition, the army now required that oaths be taken of all men who gave evidence before a court of inquiry.Footnote 96 Lieutenant J. P. Milne-Home, 1st Battalion Highland Light Infantry, was found “guilty for shamefully delivering up a post” at Dewetsdorp in November 1900, although he was found not guilty of “Knowingly doing, when on active service, an act calculated to imperil the success of Her Majesty's Forces.” He was dismissed from service. Major S. L. Cotton, 1st Battalion King's Liverpool Regiment, was similarly convicted of quitting his post at Helvetia, but acquitted on the charge that he had neglected to the prejudice of good order and military discipline certain precautions. He too was dismissed.Footnote 97 Kitchener was so troubled by the rash of these kinds of incidents that after Helvetia he officially warned that he would confirm any death sentence given to a man convicted of sleeping at his post.Footnote 98 There is no evidence to suggest that Kitchener was true to his word. Incidents of cowardice and neglect continued, and sentences did not get tougher.

Official records lend little more than names, dates, charges, and court findings, often stated in the one word “acquitted,” to our understanding of how the British army defined crime and how its officers treated infractions in the South African War.Footnote 99 Still, in part through these records, along with the letters, diaries, and memoirs of soldiers, published newspaper accounts, exposés, and autobiographies, we can piece together information to shed some light on how British soldiers acted during the war, how they viewed and treated combatants and noncombatants, and how closely they adhered to international law.

The image of Tommy Atkins underwent a major transformation in late Victorian society. As Great Britain embraced a new type of patriotism, more aggressive and centered around the expansion of empire, the army often became the focus of society's attention. Soldiers became frequent heroes of literature, particularly children's and adventure stories, plays, and music hall songs. The army cleaned up barracks life; provided social services, religion, and education for their men; and attacked the vices and excesses associated with garrison towns. At the same time, it reached out to civilians through its auxiliary corps. With the creation of the volunteer movement in the late 1850s, the middle class was given its own uniforms for parade and rifles for drill. The volunteers helped bridge the gap between soldiers and civilians and often became a valuable point of civic interest.Footnote 100 Tommy Atkins was no longer Wellington's “scum of the earth.” The inclusion of a large volunteer force in the war after 1900 insured not just public support for the troops but assumptions about their wartime behavior.

Most British soldiers did not fit the models that either Conan Doyle or Stead crafted for them. They were not chivalrous heroes, nor were they vice-ridden monsters. They were laborers, regulated by order and strict discipline, under very dangerous and often chaotic conditions. At times, they did act against army regulations. Soldiers drank, got into fights, slept at their posts, surrendered unwarrantedly to the enemy, and looted and destroyed civilian property. Of the most serious nature, there were certainly instances of murder and rape. But tellingly, neither the army nor British civilian authorities in South Africa felt the need to create new policies to deal with these types of crimes. Significantly, capital punishment was almost never meted out by the courts-martial, proof that the army was never afraid of a breakdown in overall discipline. There were also no demands emanating from the war office or from the British public in general because Britons continued to view the behavior of their soldiers in a positive light.

In general, British soldiers did not hate their enemy. They hated their own declining material conditions, the direction of the war, particularly when it dragged on past the winter of 1900, and many of the routine and burdensome tasks they had to perform, but they did not hate the Boers for the situation in which they found themselves. This is not to say they liked the Boers either. British cultural attitudes were shared by their citizen-soldiers in South Africa. For the most part, the Boers were deemed to be superstitious, backward farmers. Racially, they were viewed as inferior. These same attitudes, even more hardened, were projected onto black South Africans, many of whom served with or aided the British in their efforts. Race could and did affect the interactions of soldier and civilian, and the courts-martial were subject to the same cultural biases and assumptions, yet capital crimes were still relatively uncommon in the war.

The British army violated the Hague Convention throughout the war primarily because, after the summer of 1900, as British soldiers failed to draw the Boers out onto the battlefield, they felt forced to bring the war directly to Boer homesteads. As mentioned above, Roberts and later Kitchener endorsed a strategy aimed at breaking the morale of the enemy and preventing them from obtaining the resources needed to continue fighting. This mandated activities directed against civilian populations and culminated in slash-and-burn tactics and the construction of a network of concentration camps. As the war continued, the definition of enemy property continued to be widened. Coupled with their own decreasing resources, looting became endemic. But as much as Roberts and Kitchener wanted to win the war, they were also very aware that excess destruction and theft could make negotiation very difficult and rebuilding after the war enormously expensive. It would also cause great animosity among the defeated. Roberts and even more so Kitchener were required to regulate their soldiers’ behavior.

The army cannot be viewed as an isolated institution, and similarly the behavior of soldiers even in wartime cannot be dismissed as situational. Indeed, in the South African War, more than 20 percent of imperial troops were volunteers who brought with them a civilian understanding of crime and punishment. By situating military law within the context of law in general and the army within the context of service in the empire, we are rewarded with a deeper awareness of both Victorian cultural norms and imperial attitudes.