12 - Perspectives on the South AfricanWar

Summary

The twentieth century's first modern war

The Second Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902), commencing in the final months of the nineteenth century and overshadowing the beginning of the war-ridden and genocidal twentieth, represented the first modern war, as is now widely recognised. In terms of its participants, its political and economic impact, and also its literary representation, the war was international in scope in large-scale ways that other late nineteenth-century conflicts like the Crimean and the Spanish-American wars had anticipated but did not match. In technological and military terms, too, the war cast long shadows across twentieth-century world history. In the major formal battles of the war's first pre-guerrilla phase – Elandslaagte, Modder Rivier, Colenso, Magersfontein – modern devices such as the field telephone, hot-air balloon reconnaissance, and the smokeless rifle were used in combination with conventional drillblock advances for the first time. The empire's volunteer army numbered up to a million men, many of them literate and educated, drawn from all corners of the globe – Canada and New Zealand, Ireland and Australia – and the Boers, too, drew on diverse international support, including from France, Russia, the Netherlands, and, again, Ireland. Correspondents hailing from as many countries again reported on activities on both sides. The powerful long-range weaponry, barbed-wire fortified trenches, and, notoriously, concentration camp installations that marked the war, and also the guerrilla tactics the Boers deployed from June 1900, represented critical, even shocking, new departures in the annals of warfare, whose destructive impact, on amass scale, the 1914–18 conflict only magnified.