Adelaide: Rigby, 1983 ISBN 072701739X
Kit Denton is most famous for his novel The Breaker, a fictionalized account of the life and trial of Breaker Morant and the atrocities of the Bushveldt Carbineers. When it was made into a popular movie by Bruce Beresford, awareness of the incident was heightened, which allowed Denton to spend more time and money on his researches. A little chastened that his fiction was being taken for fact (The Breaker used much artistic licence to create a good story), he wrote Closed File to try and set the record straight.
Set the record straight it (mostly) does, but that has not stopped many Australians to continue to clamor for a posthumous pardon for Morant, Handcock and the others based, it seems, on the fictional version of events. One wonders if these people have delved deeply into the evidence surrounding the incident.
The story of Morant, Handcock, and the Bushveldt Carbineers is fascinating, and it is easy to see why it makes such great fodder for film and fiction. By the time this unit was formed, the Boer War had entered its final, most brutal, phase. The Boers who were still fighting had retreated to the outer edges of the colony, and were mainly carrying out guerrilla-style attacks on British columns, trains, and collaborating farmers. The British were pushing the Boers further into the country, employing scorched-earth tactics to deprive them of supplies, and moving the population into the first-ever concentration camps.
The war had moved beyond set-piece battles and marching armies: the British had begun to fight fire with fire, forming small units of horse-borne troops, who lived out bush and tried to beat the Boer Commandos at their own game. These units often consisted of a preponderance of Colonials - Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians - owing to these troop's superior bushcraft and horse handling skills. As the Colonial contingent's initial sign-on period drew to a close, those who wanted to stay signed on with these newly-formed units, which soon became filled with those who wished to continue fighting.
The Bushveldt Carbineers was an even more murky unit: formed and funded by businessmen in Pietersburg, its main task was to protect the railway lines in the area. It was not an official unit of the British Army - its members wore no insignia - and, operating in the rough and remote country of the Spelonken, oversight of its activities was limited.
The main actors in this drama centre around Harry Harbord Morant - "The Breaker". The main reason the incident is remembered at all is due to Morant's bush exploits and verse, which had garnered a following in Australia after his repeated publication, especially in The Bulletin. With mysterious origins (about which Denton can only speculate), Morant drank, gambled and versified his way through country Australia from Queensland to South Australia, from where he signed up with the South Australian Mounted Rifles for service in South Africa. It seems that he had a good time while serving with this unit, enjoying many "extra-curricular" activities, but at the end of his enlistment when he took a free passage to England, received a letter of commendation from his Commanding Officer.
Soon enough he was back in South Africa, to join the Bushveldt Carbineers with his good friend Frederick Hunt. It was Hunt's death and mutilation at the hands of a Boer unit that changed Morant's behaviour completely. That he "court-martialled" Visser and had him shot, and that he shot Boer prisoners was never denied. That he organised for Heese and Van Buren to be killed is highly probable - Handcock admitted to Witton that he shot Heese - and so even though it can be said Morant might have been provoked, it's clear that Morant, Handcock, Witton and Picton were guilty of heinous crimes.
Their defence at the trials - that they were following orders, and that other units had done similar things - was as spurious then as it would be now. In fact, members of the Bushveldt Carbineers refused to take part in such atrocities at the time. It is also hard to sustain the claims of British conspiracy and cover-up. The claim has been made that these men were scapegoats for all British atrocities, in a bid to try and improve relations with Germany, which was outraged especially by Heese's death (Heese was a German national). Denton points out that Morant and Handcock were acquitted of that charge. Denton shows that, as far as can be known, the trials were conducted properly, and the fact that the case files are no longer extant is down to the record-keeping protocols of the time, not some dastardly plot by the British. The discrepancies that are harder to fathom are the discrepancies in sentences, with Captain Taylor escaping punishment.
There was a controversy at the time in Australia, but it was not about the question of guilt or innocence, but that the newly-minted Australian Government was not consulted about the trial of its nationals. Australia had become a nation during the war, and it's clear that the British military leaders failed to take this political fact into account.
It remains to state that all war is hell, and that all lives lost in war are tragic losses. If we believe in the concept of just action in war, it's clear that fighters on both sides in South Africa were guilty of atrocities: the fact that others didn't face justice for their crimes does not mean that the sentence handed out in the Bushveldt Carbineers incident was in any way unjust.
For a clear-headed and informative guide to this incident, Closed File is worth reading.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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