More Than Just War: Narratives of the Just War and Military Life by Charles A. Jones

Author:Charles A. Jones [Jones, Charles A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780415811088
Google: 018_qKcOl6MC
Goodreads: 16234023
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-15T11:18:21+00:00

10

Irregular Warfare

Scapegoats of Empire

And so they buried Hector breaker of horses.

(The Iliad)

Crane does not argue, as do Scott and Cooper, by using inversions of stereotypical categories to unsettle the loyalties of their readers. Instead he uses imagery, repetition, bathos, and the disruption of conventional narrative forms to explore the most pragmatist of themes – the moral formation of the individual in a world drained of meaning – a feat that is all the more effectively accomplished because of the seeming conventionality of the battlefield.

In the case of George Witton and his comrades-in-arms Handcock and Morant, the eponymous breaker of the 1978 film, no individual author problematized the narrative of events in the South African War of 1899–1902. As with Shakespeare’s Henry V or the Christian just-war tradition, the problematization arises from successive tellings and re-tellings and their resonance with later wars. In this process, the central concern moves from an original concentration on the moral superiority of colonial troops deriving from their closeness to nature to the shrugging off of moral responsibility by a High Command willing to reduce their soldiers to nothing more than the means to a political end. At the same time, there is a pronounced change of genre, from memoir to courtroom drama, as concerns with public justice erase an admittedly problematic individual testimony more concerned with the interplay of private passions and public duty.

Soon after war broke out in 1899 between Britain and the Afrikaaner republics in Southern Africa, humiliating initial reverses led the British to mobilize forces from across the empire of settlement, India excepted. This was no small colonial struggle. By the end, in May 1902, combined civilian and military deaths on both sides totalled 75,000, many from disease, and the British had fielded an army approaching a quarter of a million men. George Ramsdale Witton (1874–1942), a gunner with the Victorian Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery, was one of many young Australians who volunteered for service in South Africa. Notwithstanding his training in the artillery, Witton was soon selected for the Australian Imperial Regiment because he was an accomplished shot and an experienced horseman. Rapidly promoted to sergeant, he embarked for South Africa, receiving further training en route, including an introductory course in military regulations and law. Disembarked at Beira, a railhead in the Portuguese territory of Mozambique, Witton and his comrades found themselves waiting in vain for transport and far from the action during the closing phase of the conventional war, as imperial troops under Lord Frederick Roberts relieved the siege of Mafeking and took the Boer capitals of Pretoria and Johannesburg in May 1900.

A recurrent knee problem had kept Witton from serving with his unit after they reached their base in Rhodesia. Instead, he found himself before long acting as quartermaster-sergeant at the Australian depot in Maitland, in Cape Town, the main base for cavalry and artillery in the district, including the irregular mounted forces and all colonial troops. So it was not until the war had entered its

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