Wars can often cast very long historical shadows by creating, accelerating and distorting economic, social and psychological conditions which profoundly affect the lives of people long after the fighting has finished. Large casualities, bled from the ranks of particular age groups, may produce serious social and economic circumstances. War production may also alter the nature and structure of a nation's economy. Moreover, success, defeat or the propaganda machine built to attain victory can transform a people's mentality and create feelings of guilt, insecurity or superiority which influence subsequent national and international behaviour. Although Canadian participation in the South African War (October 1899-June 1902) produced few traumatic social or economic consequences, it nevertheless left its peculiar mark on Canadian society.
The Campaign for Canadian Participation
Canadians were scarcely taken unawares by the war which began on October 11, 1899 between Britain and the South African Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Months before, both French and English language newspapers had watched with growing interest, anticipation or foreboding the deteriorating relations between the Boers (Afrikaaners) and the British which had never been cordial since Britain took possession of the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope following the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. To escape British control the Boers, descendents of Dutch, French and German immigrants, had moved north into the South African interior and after intermittent fighting the British had recognized the independence of the two Boer republics, the Orange Free State (1852) and the Transvaal (1854). The republics retained their independence until 1877 when, under threat of Zulu reprisals, they were forced to accept British protection and control. But their subservience was short lived. Soon after Britain imposed peace on the area, the Boers under the leadership of Paul Kruger, later President of the Transvaal, and Petrus Joubert, demanded a return to independence. This they achieved in 1881 but only after a successful rebellion against British domination. The Conventions granting Boer self-determination, however, were imprecise and not beyond conflicting interpretations such as the clause which demanded legal equality for the white races of the area. When the discovery of gold and diamonds drew large numbers of foreigners, outlanders, chiefly British, into the Transvaal, this clause proved a convenient pretext to justify British intervention. Under this clause the British claimed that Kruger's denial of the franchise to foreigners was a violation of the negotiated terms of self-government.
Historians, depending upon time, place and perception have offered many conflicting interpretations of the people and circumstances responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in October 1899. Contemporary interpretations ranged all the way from a conspiracy theory involving the machinations of international finance capital to explanations justifying British intervention as part of a civilizing mission to bring peace, justice and freedom to an otherwise dark and troubled continent. Today, most historians view the conflict in more global terms. They seem to see it simply as a piece in a large conflict: the European rivalry over the partition of Africa.
Few, but only a few, English-speaking Canadians questioned the cause and justice of Canada's participation in this conflict. Those who opposed Canadian participation were drawn largely from the ranks of farmers, radical labour, clergy and Anglophobes, notably of Irish and German descent. They deplored the war's senseless waste for a cause fabricated by the "Randlords" who were backed by dubious finance, venal politicians and a sensation-mongering yellow press. They saw it as a cause far from Canadian concern and destructive of national unity.
Most English-speaking Canadians rallied readily to the British side. They rationalized their support with arguments drawn from a large, well-worn repertoire of imperial rhetoric. Idealists, fed by a lively body of popular literature depicting the romantic, adventurous Deeds That Won The Empire, saw the South African War as an impelling religious mission or a white man's burden to bring law, liberty and freedom to pagan Africa. More pragmatic considerations, economic, military, and political, moved others to advocate Canadian participation. To them membership in the Imperial Club brought material benefits - capital, people and markets - and to remain eligible, Canadians periodically had to pay club dues. Once war seemed inevitable, material gain was never far from the minds of hard-headed business people and politicians. "Canada has a strong commercial reason for seeing British ideas prevail in South Africa," E. B. Biggar, a Canadian war propagandist, wrote soon after war began; and he went on to describe how Canada could profit from the export of food, boots, cottons, leather, agricultural machinery, bicycles, hardware, furniture, canned goods and lumber. War contracts alone brought Canada an estimated seven and a half million dollars, which more than compensated for the $1,996,867 that were to be spent despatching troops. These material arguments were often used to persuade the indifferent or doubtful. And Laurier's Liberal party needed no tutoring, for they knew only too well how to use them effectively.
Others put the case for participation in military terms. They argued that Canada, dependant as it was on British protection to maintain its tenuous territorial claims in North America against an avaricious aggressive neighbour, particularly along the tense Alaskan boundary, must do "Its Bit For The Thin Red Line", to quote the Canadian poet, Wilfred Campbell, not only to repay Britain the estimated fifty-five million dollars it had spent on Canadian defence since Confederation, but also to guarantee future British aid. This was another version of the club membership argument. Pragmatists, therefore, saw the war as an opportunity to secure profit, security and credit, redeemable on demand.
French-speaking Canadians, apart from their high clergy, their politicians and their military, failed to share their English-speaking Canadian compatriots' vision or confidence. They greeted the war with apathy, apprehension or outrage. To them the war was but a part of a larger imperial conspiracy directed by the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and executed by a small coterie of British officials in Ottawa, notably the Governor-General, Lord Minto, and the General Officer Commanding the Canadian Militia, Major-General E.T.H. Hutton, to rob Canada of its self-government and dragoon it into an imperial federation centred in London. To French-speaking Canadians this imperial coterie appeared hostile to diversity and utterly immune to regional sentiment. Their fear of the strength of this group was unfortunately fed by Laurier's 'unconstitutional' failure to seek parliamentary approval before despatching Canadian troops to South Africa. They believed that the destruction of Canadian self-government would sabotage 'survivance', the attempt to retain French Canada's distinctive culture based on language, religion, and tradition. Moreover they suspected the English-speaking Canadians' desire to impose liberty, law and freedom on South Africa when they demonstrated so little regard for French Canadian rights at home. French-speaking Canadians were painfully conscious of the racial element pervading much imperial oratory. They associated imperialism with unilingualism, militant protestantism and compulsion or majoritarianism, represented by men like D'Alton McCarthy, the president of the Canadian Imperial Federation League, the man who led the assault on French Canadian linguistic rights outside Quebec. It mattered little that McCarthy's activities were unrepresentative of the League's views and had led to his removal from the League's presidency in 1891. French Canadian confidence in English Canadian goodwill had been too badly shattered to trust in tokens.
French-speaking Canadians on the contrary tended to identify with the Boers, a minority who like themselves were trying to preserve their cultural identity against the eroding influence of an Anglo-Saxon monolith. Some French Canadians carried their moral support to extravagant lengths. They lauded the Boers' sense of right against might which they described as characteristic of their Latin origins. In short, as one perceptive Ontario politician observed, French Canadians "saw a race, not English, about to be brought into subjection by the whole force of the Empire and suffer the loss of their race ideals. Apprehension can easily draw parallels."
The Contingent Crisis
This conflict of French-English perceptions together with an aggressive pre-war press campaign for Canadian participation, which was led by large English language urban dailies like the Montreal Star created a tense political situation dubbed the "Canadian contingent crisis." The politicians, particularly those on the Liberal government side, dependent as they were upon Quebec and Ontario votes and anticipating an early federal election, strove to avoid any action which might alienate their existing electoral support. The Prime Minister himself, confident to the last that war would be avoided, attempted to discourage any hope of official government action. He claimed that the Militia Act forbade the despatch of Canadian troops overseas and tried instead to encourage private offers of assistance from Canadians anxious to participate. But his Cabinet was divided on the subject. And when war began the Cabinet could no longer continue debate on the virtues of participation. It had to act and at once.
At the end of a tense two-day Cabinet meeting, the government announced its final decision, a compromise designed to satisfy few but alienate none. The government, it declared, would recruit 1,000 volunteers, divided into units of 125 men to be attached to British regiments. Recruited and equipped by the Canadian government, this contingent was transported and paid by the British government and made part of the British Army in South Africa. To English Canada the government described its policy as a strict adherence to Chamberlain's earlier specifications for colonial assistance. To French Canada it explained its decision as a means of permitting enthusiastic English Canadians to fight for the British, a decision which would create no precedent for the future.
The government's policy fooled few. Essentially it was a surrender to urban English Canada. "The precedent is the established fact," retorted Henri Bourassa, the able young Quebec Liberal marked for a Cabinet post, who resigned his seat to protest the government's actions. The truth was that 1,000 Canadian troops had been authorized and more than 6,000 more were to follow. To Bourassa the decision represented a dishonourable capitulation to an unscrupulous press campaign bent on coercing French-speaking Canada. And he did not have to look far to find evidence to support his analysis. Hugh Graham, the editor of the Montreal Star, had gone to extravagant lengths to stampede public opinion by publishing exaggerated, emotional press accounts of reported Boer atrocities, of the trainloads of British women and children killed and injured by Boer sabotage. Graham's most notorious tactic consisted of his despatch of pre-paid and often pre-worded telegrams to all the reeves, mayors and prominent clergymen across Canada soliciting their opinions on the war which after careful selection and editing he printed alongside hostile or reluctant French Canadian replies. "Our Country Must Be Kept British", the Star headline of October 11,1899 read, and it took no imagination to understand the message.
The Soldier
The socio-ethnic composition of the first Canadian contingents suggests the shape of imperial sentiment in Canada. Although the Toronto Globe felt that "every person in connection with the force should be a Canadian by birth or residence," almost one out of every three men in the first contingent gave a United Kingdom address for his next of kin. Contemporary estimates of `young Englishmen' in the Strathcona's Horse, a more elitist regiment raised at the expense of the Canadian High Commissioner to Great Britain, Lord Strathcona, placed their number as high as 70 per cent; in fact it was almost 50 per cent. Men in the first contingent came primarily from the larger urban centres where unemployment and boredom were highest and the propaganda of the press, pulpit and recruiting agent most effective. In rural areas, recruitment lagged and a company of the first contingent originally allotted to Western Ontario had to be filled with city men. The young, the educated (McGill University alone boasted thirty-four men in various Canadian contingents) and the restless; in short, those most susceptible to the lure of adventure and idealism inherent in the imperial idea, readily volunteered. Only 3 per cent were French-speaking Canadians. There were, understandably, very few French-speaking Canadians.
The volunteers' motives, like those of most men, are difficult to determine with any degree of precision. Extant information is suggestive at best. Boredom, adventure, glory and even poverty drew some men to the colours. Moreover, Canadians had been primed for this war, not only by the wealth of popular imperial literature but by the recent spectacular American invasion of Cuba, a war painted by the yellow press as a noble crusade which had produced instant reputations and heros bigger than life. Early Canadian recruits saw the Boer War as a 'gigantic picnic', a poorly contested march to the Transvaal capital of Pretoria, where everyone would enjoy Christmas before returning home to the infinite gratitude of his compatriots. Patriotism, a sense of mission, duty, or loyalty doubtless claimed others. But patriotism could also cloak baser motives. Some Canadians, for example, were charged with and convicted of selling arms to the Boers doubtless claimed others. Coercion, appeals to courage, loyalty and manliness may have moved others. "Where is the son of the Minister of Militia?" the Halifax Herald, a strident imperialist (and Conservative) journal, asked on its front page following the despatch of the first contingent. The Minister's son, H. L. Borden, a third year medical student, volunteered for the next contingent against his father's advice. Six months later he lay dead, killed in a vain attempt to storm the Boer defences at Witpoort Ride.
The War
The war, for convenience, can be divided into three distinct phases. The first began with the October euphoria which marked the commencement of hostilities and culminated in the dark days of 10-15 December, 1899, called "Britain's Black Week." This phase characterized by repeated British blunders and defeats shocked and startled the Empire. A small pastoral people armed with modern weapons and the determination to defend their homeland had held at bay the military might of an Empire and had even pressed the war into British territory. The second phase beginning in February and lasting until August, 1900 reversed the trend. During this period the British re-enforced, re-organized and under new leadership made their slow but sure march to Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria. After Pretoria fell in June and Kruger fled to Europe in August, the war continued another two years. But by this time it had bogged down into dull, dirty, relentless guerilla warfare which aroused relatively little Canadian interest and considerable opposition owing to the distasteful and scarcely romantic methods of British warfare which included farm burning and concentration camps for women and children. Conditions in these camps despite official British assurances were far from satisfactory. A scarcity of food and the outbreak of disease claimed an intolerable toll; as many as 1,878 out of 105,347 refugees died in August, 1901, which was admittedly one of the worst months. Recruitment in Canada became more difficult; the war had lost its appeal.
Yet the initial success of Canadian arms in South Africa went well beyond popular expectations. It gave the lie to the precipitous prediction of the British General Officer Commanding the Canadian Militia, E.T.H. Hutton, that Canadians might as well try to fly to the moon as stand by British regulars. In the twenty-nine or so engagements in which Canadian troops participated, they had no difficulty standing by British regulars. In fact the former commander-in-chief of the British Army, Sir Garnet Wolseley, testifying before the Elgin Commission of Enquiry into the war's conduct, declared that, in his opinion, colonial troops would have had no difficulty facing seasoned European regulars. This was high praise from an important source.
The unorthodox guerilla warfare which at first baffled the well-trained, disciplined British regular, maximized the Canadian martial virtues of skill, stamina and initiative without seriously exposing their lack of training and discipline. Moreover, the timing of the arrival of Canadian troops enhanced their reputation considerably; they arrived in South Africa too late to experience the shattering blunders of Black Week and just in time to join the long victory march.
The reported conduct of Canadian troops, their tenacity, drive and daring during the battles of Paardeberg, Zand River, Klip River, Liliefontein and Harts River earned them an enviable reputation at home and abroad, which they proved time and again in the guerilla war which followed. Canadians at home watched their soldiers' success with growing pride and celebrated their victories by massive street parades and demonstrations sometimes lasting several days. The Patriotic Fund, Soldiers' Wives' League, Red Cross Society and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire as well as civic committees, local organizations and individuals showered the men at the front with books, magazines, lime juice, chocolate, comforts, cholera belts and balaklava caps, a form of vicarious participation in the hardships and ordeal of the war.
The Aftermath
The South African War altered the Canadian demographic map relatively little. Neither the temporary displacement of some 8,372 (a figure which includes the 1,000 men sent to relieve the British Garrison at Halifax for service in South Africa) nor the loss of the 270 men who were killed or died of wounds and disease had any visible effect on the structure of Canadian society. Their numbers, though an immeasurable human loss, represented only a small fraction of the emigration from Canada to the United States during a normal year.
A precise balance sheet of the war's economic effects is difficult to calculate since it is impossible to place a price on human life. Shrewed businesses seeing the war as an opportunity to develop trade did their best to profit from the war by opening Africa to Canadian trade, supplying war contracts, staging patriotic concerts in which they demanded half the proceeds and advertising anything from insurance to powder for tired feet used by the men of the first contingent.
Nor did the Canadian government lack industry, initiative and foresight. Soon after war began, Sir Richard Cartwright, the Minister of Trade and Commerce, sent a commercial spy, James Cummings, later our South African Trade Commissioner, to see how Canada might increase its commerce with South Africa. There he found representatives of Canadian enterprise: the Massey-Harris Company, the Canada Carriage Company, and the Dominion Radiator Company who had preceded him and were already doing a brisk business. Cummings, in an address to the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Manufacturing Association, urged other Canadian businesses to follow their enterprising compatriots' example, confident there existed a buoyant market far Canadian boots, shoes, lumber, furniture, bacon, cheese and wheat. The fact that the annual value of Canadian exports to British Africa, predominantly British South Africa, jumped from $127,838 in 1897 to $1,136,442 in 1905, suggests that businessmen followed Cummings' advice. In fact by 1907 the government granted the Elder Dempser & Co. Steamship Line a subsidy of $146,000 to inaugurate direct service between Canada and South Africa to exploit trade begun by the war. A Canadian small arms industry also dates from the Boer War days when the Canadian government, failing to obtain a sufficient supply of rifles from Britain, decided to create its own rifle industry.
French-English conflict probably proved the war's most bitter legacy. The reluctant acceptance of the war by the large, politically controlled French language urban dailies, La Patrie, La Presse, Le Journal and Le Soleil and the repeated protestations of 'loyalty' from the high clergy and the politicians disguised the deeper sense of disenchantment, particularly among the young, who openly sported Kruger buttons to demonstrate their sympathy. La Vérité, Les Débats, La Semaine Religieuse (de Québec), Le Passe-Temps, Le Monde illustré and Le Samedi, small but articulate weeklies, spoke more bitterly of their opposition to the war and its dangers.
While some English language dailies like the Toronto Globe, content with its victory, preached cultural peace, a few went to scandalous lengths to stir strife and dissension. They spoke of French-speaking Canadians as traitors, of the need for troops in Quebec and of the dangers of civil war. They compared Quebec to priest-ridden Ireland and called the French-speaking Canadians malcontents and enemies of the Empire. According to Lord Minto, some eastern Ontario farmers feared a French Canadian invasion and went to bed at night with guns at their sides.
In Montreal the war of words erupted into open violence in a three day riot (1 March 3 March, 1900) begun by McGill students celebrating the relief of Ladysmith. The incident stunned sensitive civic and federal officials conscious of the tense atmosphere prevailing in the city. And when outraged townsmen on both sides took up the torch of revenge, the city, fearing further violence, called out the militia. Despite Laurier's stirring references to the rebirth of national unity on the battlefields of South Africa, French-English relations suffered severely from Canadian participation.
Elsewhere civil liberties were often in jeopardy: editors were silenced, teachers dismissed, curricula prescribed and minorities threatened. For example, one self-styled socialist, Louis Gabriel who rented a hall in Winnipeg to vent his views on the war was driven from the hall by "1,000 labour men singing patriotic songs" and, the source fails to add, a hail of rotten eggs and debris. Few dissenters received a sympathetic audience, particularly among those supposedly fighting for British freedom, liberty, justice and fair play.
The war, however, gave English Canadians an intoxicated sense of power and helped alter the direction of Canadian imperial sentiment. It also swelled the ranks of Canadian autonomists, those who sought a separate political destiny for Canada. Canadian confidence in the strength and invincibility of British leadership suffered a rude shock during the early months of the war and Canadians sought an explanation. The reported poor physical quality of the common British soldier, slumborn and undernourished, Canadians believed, had bred a lethargy among the troops which they attributed to industrialism. Class distinctions, Canadians felt, had created a lack of initiative, a dependence upon superiors. In contrast, they saw themselves as men "taller and sturdier than infantry of the line, grim, solid men as straight as poplars," products of their nordic environment, resourceful, reliant and accustomed to acting upon their own.
Concerned imperialists began to worry about the fate of an Empire. They spoke of race deterioration and pressed Canada to assume a more active leadership, perhaps becoming the future seat of imperial power. This idea is clearly captured by Sara Jeanette Duncan's novel The Imperialist, first published in 1904, two years after the Boer War. In this novel the hero, Lorne Murchison, an ardent imperialist from a small Ontario town, is sent to London, the heart and Mecca of the Empire, on a business trip where he meets a young Englishman of his own age and sympathies. Appalled by London's decadence and the social impediments imposed on this young, intelligent, go-ahead Englishman, Murchison tries to persuade his friend to emigrate to Canada since, he declares, "in the scrolls of the future it is already written that the centre of the Empire must shift - and where, if not to Canada?"
Autonomists carried their critique one step further. Stung by their encounters with imperial officers who were scornful of colonials (two of whom were relieved of their duties owing to their improper treatment of colonial troops) they argued for a clearer line of division. Their encounter with British soldiers and the social structure they represented increased their alienation. They returned to Canada not living advocates of imperial integration but, to use the words of one Canadian poet, "Singing their own Canadian war song."
The war, contrary to the confident expectations of imperialists, did not cement the formal ties of the Empire; it loosened them. Imperialists and autonomists alike saw the war as some sort of primitive initiation rite, a blood letting, which granted Canada membership into the community of nations, a partner in imperial affairs. Laurier captured this sentiment in an eloquent speech following the bloody battle of Paardeberg when he declared. "Is there a man whose bosom did not swell with pride, that noblest of all pride, the pride of patriotism, the pride of the consciousness that that day it had been revealed to the world that a new power had arisen in the west."
