Book Review - Good-Bye Dolly Gray by Rayne Kruger

 Good-Bye Dolly Gray: the Story of the Boer War by Rayne Kruger

London: Pan Books, 1974 (first published 1959)    ISBN 03300238612

Apart from (even in?) South Africa, how many of the combatant nations remember the Boer War of 1899-1902? My hometown has a magnificent memorial in the main street commemorating the 250 Victorians who died fighting in South Africa, but I'm sure most passers-by these days assume the memorial is to World War One if indeed they notice it at all.

The Boer War was the progenitor of many things: blockhouses and barbed wire entanglements, concentration camps, armoured trains, mounted infantry, and not least the participation of most of the Empire. Kruger's book, originally published when some combatants were still alive, is a good "traditional" narrative history of the conflict, covering the military and the political quite well, the social less so.

"The Boers said the war was for liberty. The British said it was for equality. The majority of the inhabitants, who were not white at all, gained neither liberty or equality." This quote from the final pages of the book is pithy, and is not far from the truth. The Great Trek, undertaken the generation previous to that fighting this war, was undertaken so that the Boers could maintain their independence from the British, who had taken the Cape Colony and Natal for their own. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were in nearly all senses independent states, which both sides found acceptable.

That is, until gold was discovered in the Transvaal. The rush brought many foreigners (Uitlanders) to the state, mainly British. Fearing loss of control, the Transvaal government restricted the franchise of non-Boers. The Uitlanders complained to the Crown. The British had long harboured a desire to unite their colonies with the Boer republics to create a South African state. They thought that supporting the Uitlanders in their claim for representation may be a way to achieve such an outcome via the franchise and demographic takeover. So, like many other wars and revolutions throughout history, the fundamental cause of the Boer War was essentially about taxation without representation.

Militarily, the British Empire was always going to win a long drawn-out struggle. The best the Boers could hope for was to make Britain pay such a price that they would make terms. Eventually this is basically what happened in 1902, when the Boers recognised the suzerainty of the English and South Africa became a reality, but the Boers maintained their culture and language and eventually gained political preponderance over the new territory via their own demographic takeover. The War spilled much blood and spent much treasure to only reach a position that could realistically have been negotiated.

The opposing military forces could not have been more different in 1899. The initial British force, under General Buller (whose reputation suffered an irretrievable collapse during this conflict owing to his caution and tactical blunders) might have been wearing khaki and carrying modern Lee Metford rifles, but were old-fashioned in other ways. Their huge columns, with baggage trains consisting of thousands of carts drawn by oxen, officers that ensured that they brought with them champagne, baths and other luxuries, were no match for the Boers. Boer mobile commandos, who lived off the land (supported by many residents), were incredibly mobile owing to their horsed infantry that travelled without impedimenta, and were tactically supple as everyone had a say in how battle was commenced and fought.

Unfortunately the unique structure of the Boer fighting force also became a weakness as the war developed. With no fixed military structure, Boers came and went from the battle-ground as they pleased, and each commando could decide to engage how it chose to, whether that supported Boer strategy or not.

The British eventually dominated the battlefield through combining two seemingly opposing principles, which they fused into a strategy which eventually brought the Boers to the negotiating table. The first was to create units that copied the Boer way of fighting: mobile columns of mounted infantry, lightly equipped, that could cover distance quickly to bring the enemy to heel. The second was the construction of thousands of blockhouses - small forts that linked together into a military fence across the country. By using the mobile columns to push the commandos onto the lines of blockhouses, the British eventually wore down the Boer forces so much that their will to continue fighting began to fail. The Boers had hoped since the start of the war that their cousins who lived in Cape Colony and Natal would rise in rebellion and support them. This support did not materialise even after the Boers "invaded" the Cape and caused much trouble there. This fact also helped seal the fate of the Boers.

The British, while eventually "winning", also paid a heavy price. As many wars have, the Boer War brought down a government, and also a way of governing. The many failures of both politics and military during the war led to the British public losing faith in the rule of the upper classes. The Liberals took over politics, and the British officer class, where commissions were bought rather than earned, was dismantled after the war by Kitchener, who was the modernising leader of the forces in South Africa.

Kruger's book lists a catalogue of military blunders, with the British consistently underestimating the capabilities of the Boers, and the Boers suffering from too much or too little caution, often failing to press home their advantage or fruitlessly attacking points that were too strong. Early in the war the Boers laid siege to Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberly. They failed to take any of these places, and if they had the war may have taken a different turn.

By the same token, if Buller had moved more decisively and had more tactical nous, the Boers may not have won their early victories and in fact might have suffered defeats that may have led to them putting down their rifles much earlier than they did.

Kruger spends a few chapters on the political aspects of the war, particularly in England, but glosses over the politics of the participation of the Empire in the war, as well as the politics of the Cape Colony and Natal during the conflict. While he describes the concentration camps, again it is a side-issue in this book to the descriptions of the military activity.

If you want to get a grip on the military progression of the Boer War, Good-Bye Dolly Gray (the title comes from a well-known song from the era) is not the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Robert Baldice

London: Penguin Books, 1990 (first published in French in 1938, this translation first published 1963)

ISBN 0140181806

My first foray into Sartre, and Sartre's first novel. A novel that I'll mull over for quite some time. A story of angst, a struggle to find the meaning of - or at least some meaning in - life. The claim on the back cover of the edition I read is that this is Sartre's first foray into the ideas and philosophy that became known as existentialism. The novel takes the form of a diary of Antoine Roquentin, who is temporarily residing in Bouville where he is undertaking research into a biography that his is writing of an aristocrat from the Revolutionary era.

Antoine is going through a crisis, through which he is stripping away the layers of his life one-by-one. As the diary moves on he becomes less and less sure of his place in the world, of his views about his fellow man and society more generally, and finally about the physical world itself.

He grapples with these questions via interactions with people in the town, in the cafes, the library and on the street, and with the physical buildings, parks and trees that surround him. What does it mean to be a person - if the present is the only thing that actually exists, how can a human life have a trajectory or meaning (we create ourselves and the world through storytelling).

But what is it that we are telling ourselves? How can we be sure of anything when the past doesn't exist or things are merely things and cannot hold other meanings? "Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance." The book, and Antoine, seem to be heading to the most nihilistic of endings - Antoine even moves beyond the idea of suicide, as to do the deed is just as meaningless as anything else.

The climax of the diary is Antoine meeting his former girlfriend Anny in Paris. She has come to the same conclusions about life as Antoine, and is resigned to "mere existence". Antoine hopes for some sort of reconciliation, as during the meeting he realises that he has in fact missed her presence, but their meeting concludes with Anny explaining how that part of their life is over. Having long since realised that his book is pointless, Antoine returns to Bouville one last time before moving to Paris, and, in what I see as a deliberate ironical twist, begins to think about writing a different sort of book, a book very similar to the one the reader is reading...

Nausea is, I think, both a product of its time and its author. Sartre's existentialism - Antoine's ennui and disaffection - spring from the trauma of World War One: what is meaning after such slaughter, what meaning can the past have and what does the future look like when the old certainties no longer hold? It is also a young man's book. Many of Antoine's insights are not revelatory to someone older, so I wonder if some of the dramatic impact of the thought in this novel was lost on me. I actually bought this for my eighteen year old son who has an interest in philosophy, so I will be interested in his reaction once he has read it.

As someone who has read quite a bit of modernist fiction, it is interesting that so many different people in Britain and Europe were working with fiction in a similar way at a similar time - it really does reflect a change in how people (middle-class people to be sure) viewed themselves, society, and the world at large. In my opinion Nausea fits into that tradition.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell