Circa 1865
The British eventually subjugated the Boers in the same manner
as the Northern States under Lincoln subjugated the American South, with
overwhelming military and economic might, but not superior fighting
ability or leadership. Within twenty years of their victory over the
Boers, the British were again fighting in a desperate war which cost a
total of 40 million lives. Of that number, nearly 900,000 British and
colonial troops died in trench warfare, hopeless infantry charges
against machine guns and terrifying artillery barrages. With American
assistance, the British and French were victorious, imposed a punitive
defeat upon Germany, and set the stage for a nationalist leader to seek
revenge for his defeated country.
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“Almost a year after the successful conclusion of the Sudan campaign,
the British Army found itself at war again in Africa, right at the
other end of the continent, and this time the enemy was not natives
armed with spears and a grasp of tactics which was straight out of the
Dark Ages, but Europeans with Mauser repeating rifles and Maxims of
their own, who proved themselves to be masters of mobile warfare.
This is considered the first time machine-gun-armed armies had faced
each other . . . and it was, as Rudyard Kipling was to comment
presciently in The Captive, published in 1903, ‘A dress parade for
Armageddon.’
The Boers 37mm ‘pom-pom’ Maxims proved to be particularly effective
against British field artillery detachments, often reducing them
completely before they could get into action.
British infantry sent into the set-piece battles such as
Magersfontein, Colenso and Paderberg with no better tactics (though
considerably better discipline) than the Khalifa’s Dervishes had
employed against them in the Sudan; they advanced over open ground with
fixed bayonets, and were cut down in swathes by the machine guns of
defenders they couldn’t even see.
The tactics of close-quarter battle which General James Woolf had
devised after Culloden in 1746 and used so successfully against the
French in Canada, and which successive British generals had adopted
throughout the nineteenth century, were finally beaten, though few in
London – or, indeed, in any of the other capital cities of the world –
would yet acknowledge the fact, and it was to take further decade and
the bloodiest, most costly war the world had ever seen to drive the
message firmly home.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is incredible that the British
Army, which had been instrumental in obtaining proof that the machine
gun was absolutely lethal when deployed in defensive positions, had not
itself learned the lessons it had taught so widely and so effectively,
but that was true not only in 1899, but also in 1914.”
(The World’s Great Machine Guns: 1860 to the Present, Roger Ford, Barnes & Noble Books, 1999, pp. 32-33)
