War minus the killing (usually) – Frank McNally on the strange world of military re-enactments, now also on ceasefire

It’s not just sport that coronavirus is threatening to wipe off the map this summer. War has been badly affected too. Or at least the re-enactment of war, which for its many enthusiasts is itself a kind of sporting discipline.

Among the fixtures already cancelled, for example, is the annual re-run of the Battle of Waterloo, which normally takes place on or around June 18th, just as the GAA championships are starting to heat up.

I had the unusual experience of watching the 2015 version – an especially big affair because of the bicentenary – from a media enclosure. Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington (or the actors playing them, anyway) even held rival press conferences beforehand.

Napoleon appeared so confident at his that I thought he might reverse the result this time.

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But that doesn’t happen at re-enactments, where maximum fidelity to the original events is one of the goals. On the other hand, the involvement of real weapons and gunpowder (if not real bullets), along with a lot of horses, means the action is still live enough to be dangerous.

For this reason, participants have to undergo some training, usually.

But the re-enactments can also extend beyond the battlefields to include military encampments, equally faithful to the period, and other social settings.

No amount of training could have eliminated the risk there from this year’s main enemy, transnational and invisible. Hence the cancellation.

The other thing war re-enactors have in common with footballers, by the way, is that they too sometimes change colours, depending on event logistics. Despite the cost, most re-enactors have more than one period uniform. Many Irish participants wear the blue of France regularly, or the green of the Irish wild geese regiments. At Waterloo, however, in a sort of English revenge for the Granny Rule, they usually don the Duke of Wellington's red.

The 2020 event would not have been as big as the bicentenary, but the five-yearly re-enactments are larger than most, so there would still have been at least 2,000 people involved, including a busload from Ireland. The pandemic put paid to that. Now, the re-enactment has been postponed until 2021, at which time it will coincide closely with another bicentenary, that of Napoleon's death.

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Perhaps the more diehard enthusiasts could pass the time until then by recreating scenes from Bonaparte’s lockdown period. Yes, at 10 miles long by 5 wide, the island of St Helena was a bit more generous than the 2km-radius circles to which approved exercise is now confined in Ireland. But most of it was mountain, so walking routes were limited.

We have already seen the idea of locked-down households putting interesting things in windows to amuse passers-by. Maybe it's time for passers-by to return the favour. Dressed as Napoleon, out for a stroll with his Irish-born doctor-in-exile Barry O'Meara – two metres apart, of course – you'd be sure to become a local talking point, if not a hit YouTube video.

But speaking of St Helena, so synonymous is the island with Napoleon that, until recently, I did not realise it had ever held other celebrity prisoners.

As I know now, it was also used a century later for some of the defeated leaders in the Boer War, including General de Wet, whose name is immortalised in the ballad Monto, as a taunt for Irishmen in British uniform: “You’ve heard of the Dublin Fusiliers, the dirty ould Bambooziliers/De Wet’ll get the childer, one, two, three/Marchin’ from the Linen Hall, there’s one for every cannon ball . . . ”

Another prisoner there was Piet Cronje, also a Boer general. But unlike De Wet, Cronje is not a hero to Dutch-descended South Africans. Some of the unpopularity derives from his surrender in the actual war (1899-1902). But a big part of it arose from his controversial involvement, after release from St Helena, in the earliest staged re-enactments.

These were a feature of the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis. And under the direction of a South African circus impresario, the ultra-realistic spectacle proved hugely popular with Americans, running twice daily for months. Alas, disgusted South Africans mocked it as the “Boer Circus”.

Nor was Cronje, despite suing the producers, adequately compensated for the contempt it earned him.

Among the event's more positive aspects is that some participants also represented South Africa in that year's Olympics, which coincided with the fair. But as for the re-enactment becoming a vehicle of reconciliation between the warring parties, as it was supposed to, that didn't work so well. According to one account: "Regular skirmishes occurred between Boer and Briton which led to injuries and even death."