West Indies grew and grew in wealth, and were more and more coveted
by all nations. Hence the great William Pitt himself was eager to
appropriate as many islands as possible, setting thus a very evil
example to his son. At the end of 1758 six battalions were sent
out to capture Guadeloupe, which they duly did, being handled with
great skill by General Barrington, before the hurricane season
began. Three of the six battalions were left there as a garrison,
and, before the year was out, about half of them had died. In 1762
Pitt's successor, acting upon his designs, sent eight thousand
men to capture the remaining French islands; and, this being
accomplished, not without heavy loss from sickness, the remnant of
the force joined a detachment of troops under Lord Albemarle in the
siege of Havana. Twelve thousand men were employed in this siege,
which lasted two months, and was one of the most deadly in which
British soldiers were ever engaged. Before its close one brigade
of four battalions was reduced to twenty men fit for duty. Over
five thousand men were buried in Cuba alone in four months, while
hundreds more perished both there and in North America, whither
they had been transported in the hope of saving their lives.
Several French islands passed into our possession at the Peace
of Paris, all of course demanding garrisons which required to be
totally renewed every two years; but Guadeloupe, Martinique and St
Lucia were left to the French; and it was in order to gain a safe
harbour in St Lucia, commanding the French naval base at Martinique
close by, that a descent was made upon it in 1778 by five thousand
British troops from America. The operations were conducted in
a masterly fashion both by sea and land; and the capture of the
island atoned in some measure for that of sundry British islands
by the French. But the virulence of yellow fever was everywhere
terrible; and the usual mortality was heightened in 1780 by a
hurricane of peculiar violence. In Barbados four thousand human
beings, nine thousand cattle and horses, and smaller stock without
number were destroyed in a few hours. Still, by laying the forest
flat and thus destroying the harbour for mosquitoes, the hurricane
abated the sickness in St Lucia.
And now we come to the war of the French Revolution, when Pitt
thought to compel France to submission by taking all her colonies
and depriving her of all colonial produce, whether as a luxury or
as a source of revenue. France had but three islands to windward,
Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia and to leeward the western end
of St Domingo, called Haiti; but all were flourishing settlements;
and Haiti was considered the richest possession in the world, its
produce being valued at four millions annually. All three had been
shaken, and Haiti half-ruined, by the doctrines of the National
Assembly, which had not only abolished slavery, but preached the
doctrine of equality among all men to such effect that the negroes
had risen and either massacred or driven out two-thirds of the
whites. In the hope of restoring order and regaining their wealth
the remainder of the whites invited the General at Jamaica to
occupy their territory, an offer at which that officer grasped
eagerly, knowing by reputation the wealth of the place. Shortly
afterwards at the end of 1793, but two months too late, Pitt sent
seven thousand troops under General Grey and a fleet under Sir John
Jervis, better known as Lord St Vincent, to capture the French
Windward islands. The two commanders were excellent men in their
professions, and on affectionate terms with each other. Their
operations prospered. The three islands were taken after two months
hard work; and then with the coming of the unhealthy season the
men began to die. Emissaries, one of them a West Indian mulatto
of great energy and ability, arrived from France with arms and
reinforcements, proclaimed the equality of all men, and stirred
up the negroes to root the English out. The negroes responded;
and not in the French islands only, but in all that had ever been
French, they rose in insurrection against the whites. Meanwhile
Pitt had sent the British regiments no reinforcements, no stores,
no clothing; and they had now a most formidable task before them.
It was no longer a case of meeting white men of like weakness and
disabilities with themselves, but of contending with black men
to whom the climate was favourable and who knew every inch of the
country.
By the end of the year 1794 five out of seven thousand of Grey's
men had died, and Guadeloupe had been recaptured by the French.
By the summer of 1795 St Lucia had also been recaptured; and
the British even in their own islands of St Vincent and Grenada
had been dispossessed of all but the two forts and capitals.
Scattered regiments of boys sent out by Pitt sufficed only to fill
the graveyards, for they could not stand the active work of the
campaign; and at last Pitt was obliged to despatch a fresh army of
seventeen thousand men to recover the lost ground. The expedition,
owing to the usual blundering, started too late, and the troops
were of the worst quality, young, untrained and of poor physique.
However, thanks to their commander, Sir Ralph Abercromby, they
managed to recapture the lost islands, which by that time had been
reduced to desolation by the insurgent negroes; and then of course
they died like flies. Meanwhile ever since 1793 Haiti had swallowed
up more and more troops, the black insurgents opposing the British
most gallantly but proving far less deadly than the yellow fever.
Year after year reinforcements arrived to complete the work of
conquest, and year after year the army was reduced to a shadow
before it could accomplish its task. But Pitt, still insatiable,
sent Abercromby out a second time in 1797 to capture Trinidad and
Porto Rico, which latter island by great good fortune was too
strong for him. It was not until 1798 that the bickering over these
miserable islands ceased, and even then by no fault of Pitt's. It
was a military officer who decided on his own responsibility to
evacuate Haiti, against the wishes of the Government, but none too
soon. By that time Pitt's military policy, so called, had cost us
100,000 men, but had not contributed in the slightest degree to
check the aggression of Revolutionary France.
After this awful lesson the Government began to train black
soldiers to take the place of white in future West Indian
expeditions; while the white garrisons were largely composed of
foreigners and battalions of convicts. But while struggling to
create an army at home by the mistaken methods which I have already
described to you, Addington opened the second part of the war by
capturing St Lucia, Tobago and Dutch Guiana, thus multiplying
unhealthy stations which ate steadily into our own strength without
diminishing that of the enemy. Ultimately a series of expeditions,
exceedingly well managed, swept the whole of the West Indies,
excepting the Spanish, into our net, and put an end to all warfare
in that quarter for the remainder of the war. By the peace of
1814 Martinique and Guadeloupe were restored to France, but were
recaptured by us in 1815 during the Hundred Days, and then finally
given back to be captured no more. The sequel is melancholy enough.
For about a quarter of a century after Waterloo our miserable
pittance of an army was hidden away in great measure in the
Islands; and then suddenly the British nation in one of those fits
of conscientiousness to which it is occasionally subject, decided
practically to destroy these possessions by abolishing slavery and
repealing the duties which protected their produce. The abolition
of slavery was no doubt a good thing, but as it extended at first
to the English islands only, its immediate effect was to give a
tremendous impulse to the slave trade, with all its horrors, in the
French, Dutch and Spanish islands. To all intent it penalised our
own islands to the advantage of the Spanish islands, and favoured
our few negroes to the prejudice of ten times their number of
others. This evil after some years passed away, as the abolition
of slavery was accepted by other countries; but the West Indies
have never recovered from the shock of the double blow. Moreover,
apart from these two legislative enactments, Pitts policy of
ruining France by taking her colonies has resulted in the ruin of
the colonies for the benefit of France. For, being deprived of
all colonial produce, French men of science sought out the means
of growing some of that produce in France itself; and hence arose
the manufacture of sugar from the root of the beet, and an immense
industry not in France only but all over Europe, which drives the
best West Indian sugar out of the market. So little can even great
men foresee the consequences of their actions.
Thus the West Indies have fallen for ever from their high estate;
and it is only by an actual visit to them that we can divine what
they once were. Ruined forts, ruined barracks, ruined store-houses,
old guns slowly mouldering away, pyramids of round shot so welded
together by rust that they cannot be moved--these are the more
visible tokens of past greatness. But a searching enquirer will
turn his steps to the desolate graveyards, and tearing his way
through rank herbage and tropical scrub will approach the crumbling
head-stones, and there he may read--or at least I could read thirty
years ago--what a visitation of yellow fever meant in the old
days. Field-officers, captains, lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants,
corporals, drummers, rank and file of battalion after battalion
lie there in row upon row, as if on parade, while the land-crabs
hurry from grave to grave, and deadly snakes lie coiled upon the
heaps of crumbling stones which once were monuments. I know no more
melancholy sight than this. How many British soldiers and sailors
lie in these and other unknown graves in the Caribbean Islands?
I know not; but the lowest figure that I should suggest would be
three hundred thousand, and the highest perhaps half a million.
And the pity of it is that the value of the islands disappeared
just when the means of economising life began to be perfected.
The formation of negro regiments, though bitterly opposed by the
planters, who dreaded the slightest emergence of the black race
from the status of servitude, was a great and courageous act
of statesmanship--courageous because formerly the West Indian
interest could muster a solid phalanx of eighty votes in the House
of Commons, and was thus able to overset a Government. Now too
in these later days yellow fever has yielded up its secrets to
science, and can be disarmed of its terrors. But it is too late.
No one cares for the West Indies nowadays. No one remembers that
at one time Cuba was deemed more valuable than Madras. The whole
of the Antilles are now entrusted to the protection of one white
battalion, one black battalion, and two companies of artillery;
and the great bulk of these men are kept there not for the sake of
the once wealthy sugar islands, but to ensure the safety of the
naval station of Bermuda. One could contemplate such a change with
equanimity but for the recollection of perhaps half a million lives
sacrificed to no purpose.
I turn now to the seat of the most difficult of all of our colonial
wars, South Africa; the most difficult because it is of vast
extent, inhabited by warlike natives for the most part, and without
waterways. Our first attack upon it in 1795, when we were opposed
by Dutch troops and Boers only, is remarkable as an example of a
campaign conducted by three thousand white soldiers without any
transport whatever, and without even gun-teams. The distance from
the base, Simonstown, to the objective, Capetown, was only twelve
miles, nearly all through deep sand; but the enemy were as strong
as the invaders; and, when everything has to be dragged by white
men's arms or carried upon white men's backs, the difficulties of
movement are so great--especially if the march be opposed at every
step--as to be almost insuperable. However, a large proportion of
the force was turned into beasts of burden, and their numbers were
supplemented by bluejackets and marines; the general having wisely
decided that both Services should share alike in the drudgery
of transport and in the more congenial work of fighting. Thus
Capetown, by a tremendous effort, was taken for the first time.
When we attacked it again in 1806 we disembarked at a different
point; and the enemy's general was obliging enough to come out
to meet us at once, and to be beaten. Thus our force, about six
thousand strong, was enabled to victual itself from the fleet at
the end of the first day's advance, and to march into Capetown at
the end of the second.
Since then we have fought many wars in South Africa against both
natives and Dutch colonists; and in all of them the main difficulty
has been that of feeding the troops. There is of course the
country-transport which is familiar to us--the huge tilted waggons
with their eight yoke of oxen, each in the charge of two skilled
natives--of which we heard so much twelve years ago. Of its kind
it is good. But such large vehicles and teams are very unwieldy;
they must be left in charge of natives who cannot be trusted
(and small blame to them) not to run away in moments of danger;
and lastly the ox, though patient, plucky and persevering to an
uncommon degree, has his defects as a draft animal. He is very slow
and he must not be hurried; he needs time to chew the cud after
feeding; and he cannot work with the full power of the sun beating
upon his back. In fact he has his times and seasons which must be
carefully observed, or he will die; and he is sensitive not only
to sun, but also to cold and wet. The enemy, being fully aware of
his limitations, can foresee their effect upon the movements of the
force opposed to them, and can lay their plans accordingly. Another
disadvantage to European troops in South Africa is that European
horses do not naturally take to South African pasture, and that
there are poisonous plants to be found in it which native horses
have learned to avoid, but which European horses will innocently
devour. Hence forage becomes a great difficulty also; and on the
veldt there is the further drawback that no wood for fuel exists.
As in most new lands, the roads are mere tracks, and all the
innumerable rivers must be crossed by fords, for there are few
bridges; while the extent of the territory that may be covered by
military operations in so vast a continent is appalling.
In one of our earliest Kaffir wars--that of 1835--Sir Harry Smith
described himself as having only twelve hundred men, eight hundred
horses and four guns, with which to act in a theatre of war of four
thousand square miles; and he added, "It takes just two hours for
a commissariat train to arrive, from the moving off of the first
waggon to the arrival of the last, when the road is good. When the
column is stretched out along the road it looks as if each soldier
had a waggon to himself at least." Yet on one occasion with a small
force he marched eighty-four miles in three days; and he covered
nearly two hundred and twenty miles in a rugged and mountainous
country, much broken by deep rivers, in seven days and a half.
In the more serious war of 1850-53 the hostile tribes could not
put into the field more than three thousand fighting men; but by
betaking themselves to their fastnesses of mountain and forest
they prolonged their resistance for nearly three years. The British
soldier was at every disadvantage in bush-fighting, and the Kaffirs
were far too cunning to encounter him in the open; yet by dint of
hard work and perseverance this brave and wary enemy was at last
worn down. He might have been subdued much earlier but for the
constant and insane reductions of the Army ever since Waterloo. It
is actually a fact that at this time the military power of England
was strained almost to breaking point by three thousand naked
savages.
The next war--that of 1877--came at a time when our Army, owing
to the recent introduction of short service, was in a state of
transition, and taught us a very severe lesson. We were engaged
in war with the Zulus, a very formidable tribe, which had been
organised into a great military power by a chief who, in his own
way, was a genius. One of his armies came upon a British force
of something over a thousand troops at a disadvantage, and after
a desperate fight destroyed them almost to a man. But for the
determined resistance of a small post of eighty or ninety men at
a ford of the Tugela, the Zulus would probably have overrun Natal
to the sea, and extinguished the white inhabitants of that Colony.
There was great agitation in England, and several battalions were
hurried out to the Cape with no special regard to their condition
or quality. It had been forgotten that the old long-service-soldier
had become extinct; and that the old single-battalion-regiments
were also in course of extinction, to give place to regiments of
two battalions, whereof one was always to be at home and the other
abroad. The Army and the nation had not taken kindly to the change;
and the immediate result was that the battalions at home had
become merely assemblies of boys who, as soon as they approached
manhood, were drafted off to feed the battalions abroad. Some of
these groups of boys, raw and half-trained, were shipped out to
South Africa in the expectation that they would be as strong and
as steady as the old battalions composed of men who counted ten
to twenty years' service. Of course they were not. They were very
sickly, very ill-disciplined, and very far from well-conducted.
However, the war was ended, and the power of the Zulus was broken
without further serious mishap; and we learned by this experience
the lesson that a force of seasoned soldiers must at all times be
held ready for what is called the police-work of the Empire.
Our last experience of war in South Africa is too recent for me
to presume to say much about it, except that in many respects it
bore a singular resemblance to the American War of Independence.
The operations of the latter war embraced at least eleven hundred
miles of coast-line, as the crow flies, and in places penetrated
inland as far as a hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Only
facilities of water-carriage enabled armies to be moved at all over
this vast tract; and it was rare for bodies even of ten thousand
men to remain for long united. The theatre of war in South Africa
was quite as vast. Our two principal bases of operations were
nearly a thousand miles apart--as far, say, as Antwerp is from
Lisbon, with the enemy's capital situated at Warsaw. But for the
existence of a few railways the conquest of this enormous tract
might have taken thirty years, for there are no waterways and the
country produces little wheat. As things were, it was accomplished
more or less in three; and a force of three to four hundred
thousand men was fed with a regularity highly creditable to the
officers responsible for that duty. But the expense was terrific;
and although it was possible by great exertions to bring up food
for the men, there were moments when it was impossible to provide
sufficient forage for the animals. Hence the waste of horses in the
cavalry and artillery was enormous, for they could not live on the
African pasture as did the horses of the enemy. In fact a community
with a more or less empty continent at its back can, with good
management, prolong resistance for an almost indefinite time; for
the chances are that the invader will be more quickly exhausted
than the invaded, while the former is always subject to troubles
and diversions at home which may weaken him at a critical moment.
That is the secret of the power of Russia and of the United States.
It is impossible to hurt them seriously, for the further you
penetrate into their country the weaker you are. Little countries,
such as our own, may be pierced to the heart at the first thrust.
Space in fact means time where war is concerned; and time is the
most powerful of all allies. The Americans themselves discovered
that when they invaded Canada in 1812.
There is another description of colonial war of which we have had
experience, and which from the extreme peculiarity of the country
and people deserves special notice. I speak of New Zealand. Roughly
speaking the two main islands of New Zealand exactly correspond to
Italy in our own hemisphere; and if you suppose the sea to close
round the northern frontier of the Alps and to cut the peninsula in
two by washing a channel through it somewhere about Rome, you will
find the actual shape of New Zealand very closely reproduced. Both
countries consist of a backbone of volcanic mountains, with a broad
margin to east and a narrow margin to west; and in each there is a
wide fertile plain made up of débris washed down from the mountains
and furrowed by rivers flowing from the glaciers. This great
plain, however, is in the south island of New Zealand; and all of
our wars were in the north island, corresponding in the southern
hemisphere to the southern portion of Italy. The north island,
which contains several active volcanoes, is for the most part
mountainous and was to a vast extent covered with dense forest,
with a strong undergrowth of vines--known as supple-jacks--and of
fern, very like our own bracken, which grows higher than a man's
head. The inhabitants were themselves invaders from the North
Pacific, or possibly from some part of the American continent, and,
according to their own traditions, must have occupied the country
at about the time of our own Norman Conquest. They were called, as
of course you know, by the name of Maoris, and were split up into
a number of tribes which passed their time in continual warfare
with each other, and hence possessed some degree of military
organisation. Their weapons and tools were made of stone, the best
of them of jade. With such tools they had skill to build canoes and
art to ornament both prow and paddle with not unbeautiful carving.
They were cannibals, for the simple reason that they could get no
other meat; for until the white man came there were no four-footed
creatures in the two islands--nothing but birds. They caught and
dried fish, however, and had little provision-grounds of potatoes.
But their chief business, as I have said, was fighting; and they
were a fine athletic and high-spirited race. For the rest they
had a natural gift of fortification. They needed no great talent
to select good positions in so hilly a country where natural
strongholds abound; but they showed great skill in throwing up
tiers of earth-works and erecting stockades of trees a foot in
diameter, tightly bound together with supple-jacks.
The first white men came to them in the form of whaling skippers,
who initiated them into the use of fire-arms, and sold such weapons
as they could spare to one or two chiefs. The remaining tribes soon
discovered that, if they were to escape extermination, they must
obtain fire-arms also; and thus there grew up a large trade in arms
and ammunition for which the Maoris paid in native flax--_phormium
tenax_--laboriously scraped with shells till only the tough fibre
was left, and of supreme excellence from this careful method of
curing. Two-barrelled fowling pieces--_tuparas_ as they called
them--were the favourite weapon, and the Maoris soon became expert
in their use; adding thereupon rifle-pits and covered trenches
to their fortifications to meet attack with the new weapon.
Incidentally this natural craze for fire-arms materially injured
the race, for, in order to scrape flax enough to pay for them, the
whole tribe was obliged to come down from the hill-tops and live
by the swamps where the _phormium tenax_ grows and abounds.