British Army During The Victorian Era - The Army To The End of Victoria's Reign (1868-1901) - Second Boer War

Second Boer War

The Second Anglo-Boer War, which broke out almost at the end of Victoria's reign, was another major milestone in the British Army's development. Britain was able to mobilise unprecedented numbers of troops including reserves and volunteers to fight in South Africa, and to transport and maintain them there thanks to Britain's industrial resources, the Royal Navy and Britain's merchant fleet. However, many shortcomings in administration, training, tactics and intelligence were revealed.

The war began in 1899 after tension between the British and the two Dutch Boer republics culminated in the Boers declaring war. The outnumbered British forces in Natal and Cape Colony were quickly surrounded and besieged, but it was generally expected that a quickly mobilised Army Corps under General Redvers Buller, one of Wolseley's most famous protégés, would soon overcome the Boers. Instead, the British suffered a number of defeats at the hands of Boers using magazine rifles and modern field artillery, culminating in Black Week.

It was evident that British tactics had not kept up with improvements in weapons technology. Experience gained against enemies such as the Zulus or Sudanese proved irrelevant against the Boers. Troops trained in the field for only two months each year; the rest of the time was spent in ceremonial or routine barrack duties. Officers, where not preoccupied with sporting or social activities, were engaged in tedious paperwork; each company required monthly returns totalling 400 pages.

The Royal Artillery several times deployed guns in exposed positions within rifle range of concealed Boers. This was sometimes the result of a misleading analysis of Prussian artillery tactics during the Franco-Prussian War, when guns had often been pushed into the front line to suppress enemy infantry. The same tactics applied in South Africa resulted only in needless casualties.

The infantry were not as good at marksmanship and fieldcraft as the Boers. Individual fire was discouraged, and troops still relied on firing volleys on the orders of an officer. Attempts to repeat Wolseley's tactics at Tel-el-Kabir against the Boers resulted in heavy losses at battles such as Magersfontein. The infantry finally won decisive victories only once properly coordinated with artillery, for example at the Relief of Ladysmith.

The cavalry, obsessed with the charge with cold steel, had "ceased to be in any useful sense mobile". They used heavy chargers as mounts rather than lighter horses. The heavy mounts required acclimatisation and recovery after long sea voyages, and needed plenty of forage when grazing was sparse. They were also overloaded with unnecessary or over-decorated equipment and saddlery. The average life expectancy of a British horse from the time of its arrival in South Africa was around six weeks.

Although reformers such as Major Henry Havelock and the Canadian Lieutenant Colonel George Denison had long advocated the adoption of mounted infantry tactics, they merely provoked varying degrees of opposition and obstruction from the cavalry's senior officers. Most of the tactical and strategic tasks traditionally undertaken by light cavalry were therefore performed by detachments of mounted infantry, which infantry battalions formed from the late 1880s or by colonial (Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African) contingents of Light Horse. Later in the war, the dispersal of many of the Boers into small guerrilla bands made artillery units redundant, and several units of Royal Artillery Mounted Rifles were formed from among the RA.

The supply arrangements often broke down, though this was partly caused during the early part of the war by the existence of three separate establishments (Home, Indian and Egyptian) for units and formations. Lord Kitchener's attempts to impose a single system in early 1900 led to him being nicknamed "Kitchener of Chaos".

Even before Black Week, concerns over the overall direction of the war had caused the government to mobilise yet more troops, including contingents of volunteers, and appoint Lord Roberts to command in South Africa. Roberts used his superiority in strength to overwhelm the Boer armies, and capture the capitals of both Boer republics. Although his forces suffered few casualties in battle, shortcomings in the transport and medical sections resulted in many needless casualties through shortage of supplies and enteric fevers.

Having announced the annexation of the Boer republics, Roberts returned to an appointment as Commander in Chief in Ireland, leaving Lord Kitchener to oversee the final operations. In fact, the Boers maintained a guerilla fight for over a year. The British response was marked by the indiscriminate removal of Boer non-combatants including women and children into concentration camps where many died, again through poor rations and sanitation. Kitchener's methods against the very mobile Boer fighters were often expensive and wasteful, until near the end of the war when the Boers were finally worn down by exhaustion.

The war also saw the first substantial deployment outside their own borders of troops from the present and future Dominions (Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa).