The word "Boer" is soon to be outlawed in South Africa, thus confiscating from history the name by which the world knows one of the most despicable wars of the past bloody century. Its true amoral awfulness is only really apparent to us now. Yet most of the participants - at least of European origin - had no doubt at the time that what they were doing was right. Few seem to have questioned the ethics of conducting a war in a land which they were such small minorities. In truth, natives didn't count; the diamonds and gold of the Transvaal did.
One hundred years ago today, two groups of Irishmen began to move into battle against each other. On the one hand were the recently recruited defenders of the Boer Republic, the Irish Transvaal Brigade, which had largely been raised by John MacBride, and which was part of an Afrikaner incursion into the British-ruled state of Natal. There, waiting for the Irishmen of Johannesburg, were two regiments from the home country: the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
Distant mirror
The Boer War, as it turned out, in the distant mirror it provided for events in Ireland, was a remarkably prescient instrument. Transvaal Irish republicans were to fight the Irishmen of the British Army. Irish Home Rule civilians who were living in the region - men such as Alfred O'Flaherty, an Oxford gold medallist in Sanskrit from Galway, who had been editor of the Standards and Diggers News - tended to support the British; and on the other side stood the tough miners, often explosives experts, representatives of a robust form of unconstitutional nationalism whose most eminent defenders at home were John O'Leary and Maude Gonne. Yet paradoxically, the most coherent opponents of the war in the United Kingdom were John Redmond's party.
So the veldt reflected little facets of Ireland's complexities. On their way into Natal from Transvaal, the Irish Brigade, in the van of the Boer army, passed by the graves of Gen George Colley from Dublin and Lt Maurice O'Connell, nephew of the Liberator, killed in action in 1881 at Majuba in the first Boer war of 1881.
The governor of Natal was an eminent Irish unionist, Walter Hely-Hutchinson; and one British soldier to become an early Boer captive was James Craig, later to be the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, just as another Boer War veteran, ex-Dublin Fusilier Jack Hunt, would be helping to raise and train the new Free State army.
Prisoners of war
For as Donal McCracken remarks in MacBride's Brigade - Irish Commandos in the Anglo- Boer War (Four Courts Press), from which much of this Diary is drawn: "Even 10,000 kilometres from home nothing was simple for the Irish." Quite - pace Roger Casement, who later in the war denounced the Boers for allowing Irish prisoners of war (captured as British soldiers) to enlist as soldiers in the pro-Boer Irish Brigade. Tut tut. And what is one to make of Arthur Lynch, a fighter for the Boers who was sentenced to death by the British but reprieved, and later became MP for Galway, later still a colonel in the British army?
One hundred years ago today MacBride's soldiers moved south from the Natal town of Newcastle, to the moveable contents of which they had generously helped themselves. The two sides, defenders of the Boer Republic and Defenders of Natal, met at the Battle of Dundee (or Talana). The heights were held by the Boers, a flank by the Transvaal-Irish. The assault on them was led by the Irish Fusiliers and the Dublin Fusiliers, the heights bloodily and slowly taken.
As it happens, for all the bloodshed, much of it Irish, the two sets of Irish barely met, which might be a relief; but all things considered, does it matter who kills you? At least the battle gave rise to a marvellous poem of which I reprint merely one verse:
On the mountainside the battle raged, there was no stop or stay;
Mackin captured Private Burke and ensign Michael Shea, Fitzgerald got Fitzpatrick, Brannigan found O'Rourke;
Finnigan took a man named Fay and a couple of lads from Cork.
Sudden they heard McManus shout, "Hands up, I'll run you through,"
He thought it was a Yorkshire Tyke - 'twas Corporal Donaghue!
McGarry took O'Leary, O'Brien got McNamee, That's how the English fought the Dutch at the Battle of Dundee.
Personal link
MacBride's Brigade finally fleshes out the myth of John MacBride; he fought bravely for a cause - but more out of hate than love. He, and others, helped create a strong historical and personal link between the Transvaal in 1899 and the GPO in 1916 -and for a while vital funding for the IRB came from the Boers.
This fine work has caused me to moderate my opinion about John MacBride. He was a complex, violent, haunted and sad man; and in death there was none braver. If you are remotely interested in this period of our history, read MacBride's Brigade - if only for the rest of the wonderful poem quoted above.