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.