Blue Shirt and Khaki: A Comparison

by James F. J. Archibald

“Yes, quite sure,” was the answer, and the entire party was passed without any further trouble, and for all the sentry knew they might have gone straight to the Boer camp, which was only a few miles away; but owing to the fact that the party was one apparently of gentlemen, he did not see fit to refuse the permission to pass through the lines, even though the field marshal had given his strictest order to the contrary. This was not a single occurrence; any person could pass through the lines at any time, providing he did not speak English with a Dutch accent. To do that was to arouse immediate suspicion, and at times our own “Yankee twang” was enough to cause the Tommy to ask questions; but a few words of explanation invariably brought a polite apology.

The Englishman makes a natural sailor, but he is not a natural soldier, and it requires a great amount of training to make a good man of him in the field; he may drill well, march well, and look well, but he needs much training and good leadership to fight well. When he has that, there is no better soldier to be found. It is in this respect that the Americans, as well as the Boers, excel the English as soldiers. They have been taught to hunt wild game in the wilderness of the great plains and deep forests; they have been taught to shoot and to ride in their childhood. The reason is obvious—they are a people of a new country; both Americans and Boers have but recently fought back the way for civilization, and, in fact, are still doing the same thing. New York has forgotten the stress, Chicago is fast forgetting it; but the great West has not forgotten it at all, and everywhere in America the spirit of adaptability to rough conditions still pervades our life. Each year every man, woman, and child who can get there seeks the mountains or the woods for a few days or weeks, to satisfy the natural American longing for the wild out-of-doors life that our forefathers knew. But in England there is no open shooting as we know it, there is no camping as we know it. It is true that the great estates have excellent shooting, so far as their idea of hunting goes; but to our point of view it is a senseless slaughter. Tame deer are driven up to the guns to be shot, or domesticated wild birds are flushed by beaters toward the hidden shooting party. The size of the day’s bag depends merely on the supply of ammunition or the endurance of the trigger finger.

Heliographing from Diamond Hill to Lord Roberts in Pretoria.

All this has to do with war only as it suggests one reason why the British soldier has met his master in the art of war in South Africa. The training that makes a fighting man, if not a soldier, is hunting where the snapping of a twig or the approach on the wrong wind means the loss of the prey. Guns and gunning are for the rich alone in England, and the class that makes up the rank and file of the army never have a firearm in their hands until they enlist. It cannot be expected, therefore, that they can become sufficiently proficient in its use to cope successfully in equal numbers with men who have handled rifles since childhood. Not even the London police carry firearms of any sort. The soldier is taught to load and shoot, and learns his marksmanship at the target ranges; but he might as well be taught pigeon-shooting in a street gallery with a .22 calibre rifle. Target practice and firing in action are different games, and the latter can be learned only by actual practice if the instinct is not present.

When the British forces were landing at Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, to make their march into Rhodesia, there was a company of volunteers belonging to “Carrington’s Horse,” already entrained and ready to start for the front. In conversation with one of the men I found that they were from Edinburgh, and that the name of their company was the “Edinburgh Sharpshooters.” Merely from curiosity I asked what qualifications were required to join their organization of sharpshooters, and whether they had to make any particular score.

“Oh, no,” he said, “none of us have ever shot a gun at all yet, but as soon as we get up here we are going to learn.” When they left home they wanted a name, and they liked that of “sharpshooter,” so they took it. That is the way in which many of the British soldiers are made; they receive a uniform, a gun, and a farewell address, and then it is thought that they are ready to meet any foe. In some cases our own volunteers have been as unqualified as were these young Scotchmen, and we have suffered for it; but our men have in general a better fundamental training than those of most other nations. One mark of the difference between Englishmen and Americans (and also Canadians) is to be seen in the toy-shop windows. The American boy’s first plaything, after he tires of tin soldiers, is a toy pistol with paper caps. The boy then begins to “play Indian,” and to shoot and scalp his little sisters. In a few years, if he is favored by fortune, he will have a little rifle, and then the Winchester will follow. That boyish training helped to make the Canadian and Australian volunteers superior to the English troops, and it is also in boyhood that the Boer farmer learned to be the great fighter that he is. That same mimic use of deadly arms in childhood, and the constant use of guns against game in youth, has made the North American Indian not only the most formidable fighter in the world, but also the world’s tutor in modern warfare.

Switzerland has adopted the idea of the advantage of training in the use of firearms, and every man is furnished with a rifle by the government, and also with a certain amount of ammunition each year. The people of that little republic could retire into the fastnesses of her mountains and withstand the armies of Europe for months. If Austria, for instance, should again attempt to invade the cantons, the Swiss would show the world that they can do the same that the Boers have done, and at least sell their land and liberty at a tremendous cost of human life.

If the British common soldier is properly led, and if he has full confidence in his leaders, he will go anywhere; but he must be led, for he has no initiative and does not think for himself in the field any more than he does at home. What would an American soldier think of a special privilege created in a regiment because there came a time when all the officers were killed or wounded, and the non-commissioned officers took the regiment through the fight? There is an English regiment in which the non-commissioned officers all wear their sashes over the same shoulder as do the commissioned officers, because in a long-ago battle they led the regiment when their superiors were put out of action. In the American army this would have been done by the non-commissioned officers as a matter of course, or by privates if the sergeants and corporals were disabled; and in the terrible slaughters of the Civil War more than once this happened, demonstrating the resourcefulness of the American soldier. While talking with British prisoners taken by the Boers, I asked them why they surrendered so soon, when they had ammunition left and when so few had been hit. Some of them said that it was much better to be a prisoner than it was to be dead, and seemed to take it more as a joke on the rest of the army that still had to fight while they were now in safety. Some of them blamed their officers. But not one seemed to feel that it was at all incumbent upon the privates to fight it out alone or to take the lead when there was no officer near. In all the months of imprisonment in Pretoria and in the vicinity, the soldiers did not make any attempt to escape, although there were enough of them to have taken Pretoria empty-handed. There were several thousand British soldiers in one field enclosed in wire, yet they made no effort to regain their liberty. The reason undoubtedly was that they had no leaders with them. In such an attempt some of them, of course, would have been killed, and possibly a great many of them; but there is no doubt that with the proper spirit an escape could have been made.

The care of the dead is a problem to which the British government has not given much attention. Certainly there is nothing in the field that would indicate that it had been seriously considered. But in this act of grace the American War Department maintains a system which is in the highest degree praiseworthy and which commands the deference of the world.