Scapegoats of the Empire, the True Story of Breaker Morant's Bushveldt Carbineers

• Author: Lieutenant Commander David D. Furry
• Pages: 07

2007] BOOK REVIEWS 127

SCAPEGOATS OF THE EMPIRE, THE TRUE STORY OF BREAKER MORANT'S BUSHVELDT CARBINEERS1

REVIEWED BY LIEUTENANT COMMANDER DAVID D. FURRY2

Lieutenant George Witton of the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) was found guilty of murdering Boer prisoners of war and sentenced to death by a British court-martial in 1902.3 Witton, however, did not face the pointy end of a British firing squad; his sentence was commuted by Lord Kitchener, the British commander-in-chief, "to one of penal servitude for life."4 Witton's co-defendants, Lieutenants Harry "Breaker" Morant and Peter Handcock, were not so spared. Morant and Handcock's execution on 27 February 19025 launched them to near-mythical proportions and controversy that lingers today.6 Scapegoats is Witton's fascinating account of his service, court-martial, imprisonment, and release in 1904 from an English prison. Witton makes a compelling case that he and his co-accused were indeed "scapegoats of the empire," although later evidence, primarily from Witton himself, undermines many of his claims. Nonetheless, Scapegoats is replete with many thought-provoking issues that resonate 100 years later in the Global War on Terror.

"[The Boer War] was the culmination of two and a half centuries of Afrikaner expansion and conflict with Africans and British."7 Although the proffered justification for the war was to secure the political rights of British settlers who had rushed to the gold fields of the Boer-controlled Transvaal in the 1880s, others saw it as an attempt by "empire builders" Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit to secure these gold fields for the British empire.8 The British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, "regretted

that there was 'too much of 'money-bags' about the whole business.'"9 One commentator of that era noted, "[i]f there was a good case for the Boer War . . . it was indifferently put, and I doubt if a single nation understood it."10

The Boers declared war in October 1899, and by June 1900 the British occupied the capital, Pretoria.11 Lord Roberts, the British commander-in-chief, announced that the war was all but over and returned to England.12 However, Boer commandos kept up the fight using guerrilla tactics for which the British, and Lord Kitchener, Roberts' relief, were unprepared.13 "[The British Army's] regulations had not contemplated-to any practical purpose, at least-an enemy who was a combatant one day and a civilian the next."14 Kitchener responded with a scorched-earth policy: he confined Boer women and children to concentration camps, and crisscrossed the countryside with barbed wire to corral Boer commandos.15 And he created an "irregular" unit, the BVC, to prosecute a guerrilla war for which his regular army units were not trained.16

Into this imperial, guerrilla war stepped Australian George Witton. His patriotism is inspiring. Reflecting a turn of the century style that pervades throughout, he opens Scapegoats by stating:

When war was declared between the British and the Boers, I, like many of my fellow-countrymen, became imbued with a warlike spirit, and when reverses had occurred among the British troops, and volunteers for the front were called for in Australia, I could not rest content until I had offered the assistance one man could give to our beloved Queen and the great nation to which I belong.17

Connoisseurs of formal, late-Victorian English will enjoy this manner of writing. Other modern readers may find this style wordy and unwieldy, with some passages requiring more than one reading just to follow the narrative.

Witton was well-suited for duty with the BVC. A big man at six foot two inches, he was "born in the bush, could ride almost as soon as [he] could walk, and had learned to shoot almost as soon as [he] learned anything."18 Writing chronologically, Witton first describes his deployment from the Australian bush to the African veldt. Readers anxious for details of the Morant case will have to...