World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
dark-grey-corduroy-wearing countrymen. Middle-class college schoolboys were undoubtedly among the keenest recruits who responded to Smuts’s initial call for the raising of two volunteer UDF divisions for defence. Indeed, virtually their only enlistment worries seemed to have been those of either having to vegetate in tedious home garrison duties, or of the war ending too quickly for them to have experienced it properly.
For those reared on the milk of school cadet training camps, it was a natural transition from corps drill to mature infantry service in what would become the Union’s emblematic Springbok or Springbokken volunteer contingents. There, they would realise the larger South African cause of the war in which they would be participating as individual soldiers. ‘Springboks’, urged one of the fiery English/Dutch war columns of the Diocesan College Magazine early in 1915, ‘remember, it is not for England that you are fighting, but for the British Empire … and in fighting for it, you are fighting for South Africa. Young South Africa is going to the battlefields, and will come back a nation.’30
From this quarter, the matter could not have been more straightforward. At the heart of the compulsion to join in the waging of war lay the indivisibility of the Union and the Empire. Through their youthful soldiering manhood, the best South African volunteers would find the virtue of final nationhood, and in that the best South African would also be the best Briton. The realisation of that harmonious wartime end would become a recurring refrain.
For these new soldiers, their expeditionary beginning of 1915 was, though, well before the sight of another end, that of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917. Those Western Front horrors would not deliver the visionary future of a national harmony, of a Union fully at ease in the British imperial world. Instead, what would come would be more sobering. For what they would leave in the schools that were the nurseries of infantrymen would be the enduring and poignant markers of cherished lives lost, the memorial halls and chapels, plaques and remembrance rolls, that reflect the heart-rending agony and sadness of headmasters, housemasters and others who were left behind.
Initially strong volunteer impulses from close-knit patriotic circles were not confined to the country’s grander English schools. Among British Empire migrants who formed self-consciously national diaspora communities in urban and industrial areas, there was also banding together. Asserting pride in an empire identity that was one part their host country and one part their country of birth, ‘Transvaal New Zealanders’, ‘Rand Australians’, ‘Cape Irish’ and ‘Bloemfontein Scottish’ were among the first groups to press themselves forward as volunteer fighting groups. Falling in alongside were a number of other fraternities with packaged local identities, including the Natal ‘Sons of England at Harrismith’ volunteers, the Port Alfred ‘St George’s Warriors’ and Kimberley’s ‘Warrior Owens’ (Welshmen).
The Natal branch of northern England’s Lancashire and Yorkshire Association pulled out a squad of ex-colonial militia ruffians, ‘The Rosebuds’. All thorns rather than fragrance, these misguided roughnecks seemed to view the war as an opportunity to repeat their sterling performance against rebel Zulu peasants in the early 1900s. For such martially minded men, veterans of the later nineteenth-century colonial land wars or blooded in the guerrilla phase of the Anglo-Boer War and in the subsequent suppression of the Bhambatha Rising, the view of a European conflict as decent duelling for colonial militiamen clearly carried some attraction.
More green recruits came from the hundreds of mostly immigrant British mineworkers who mobilised themselves in packs of infantry volunteers, seeking to enlist as ‘labour legions’, sticking together as fraternities of workmates who knew one another socially and were bound together by neighbourly familiarity and friendship. In a way, this made several of the main Reef towns of the Witwatersrand resemble Britain’s famous – and ill-fated – ‘Pals’ battalions’, in which neighbourhood and peer groups of industrial workers, clerks, shop workers and others in shared labouring occupations joined up together.
As a social and cultural basis upon which to volunteer, the act of accepting service as part of a knot of Natal English or Kimberley Welsh may well have represented the desire for ordinary civilian social exclusivity to be carried over into military service. Thus, far from dissolving the divisions within pro-war white society, the war may simply have sustained them. As a letter-writer to the Rand Daily Mail observed at the end of August 1914, army life for professional or clerical men would be ‘rendered truly amenable’ if its ‘various duties and many tasks were to be performed in proximity to others of similarly good class’.31 Viewed comparatively, as in the case of some British Pals’ battalions in 1914 and 1915, volunteering in kindred groups was ‘actually less about who you served with, but much more obviously about who you didn’t serve with’.32 Gentlemanly accountants, lawyers and other ‘university men’ had no wish to be lumped in with common, coarse or rough Afrikaners, men ‘of the railways type’, or ‘from roads and various diggings’ who were coming forward to serve only because they were unemployed.33
Many of those gentlemanly individuals, whose support for the Union’s war was rooted in individual choice and in the conviction that it was a just cause, were Christian in a Bible-reading and churchgoing sense. As the flock of militant Anglican priests, they were assured regularly of the righteousness of their volunteering mission. The message from English-language church pulpits was not merely a stirring condemnation of Prussian militarism and an endorsement of the Union’s war policy; in its grammar of Christian patriotism, it was that the war was a spiritual opportunity for South Africa to partake in a higher calling.
Naturally, the war was consecrated in holy terms, presented as a crusade for the preservation of the British Empire’s Protestant principles of freedom, honour and purity. The Union would be making ‘a mighty contribution’ to their survival, trumpeted a Transvaal Anglican bishop in September 1914. For, in taking up a selfless fight, the country would be ensuring ‘that the cause of right may prevail’.34
Pro-war Anglicanism had some equally tireless church company. A number of Roman Catholic clergymen spread the word that the war was a sacred opportunity for Catholics in South Africa to bear witness to how French they were, and to open their hearts to the cry of Germany’s suffering victims. In urging war service, Methodist and Presbyterian churchmen assured followers that it would stiffen their Christian humanity in a great battle for a new and better world civilisation. When it came to dealing with talk of neutrality or of pacifism, Anglican rhetoric was, again, particularly blunt. ‘Peace’, bellowed one Anglican rector, was ‘dishonourable’, when there was ‘decency’ to be fought for.35 Other churchmen denounced anti-war feeling as sinful, almost tantamount to paganism and atheism.
Meanwhile, although the UDF was not exactly throwing its doors open to loyal Africans, missionaries linked arms with magistrates, Department of Native Affairs commissioners, Cape judges and parliamentary senators to address various urban and rural meetings, as well as church meetings. Earnest administrators and politicians did their best to explain the inexplicable significance of the Triple Entente (the pre-1914 alliance formed by Britain, France and Russia) for the future of civilisation and progress in South Africa. On occasion, they also explained that a tyrannical and immoral Germany was after the fair and prosperous colonies of a Christian Britain, with the intention of enslaving their native people. All the while, attending clergy enlightened African mission congregations and village field audiences on who the German enemy was, and on how Germans had become the sordid, barbaric and ‘bloodthirsty’ enemies of God, ‘the brutish sword of Ungodliness’.36
What pro-war patriots expected to hear from the mainstream Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) churches in 1914 was not exactly what they thought that they would get, or at least not automatically in the opening stage of the conflict. In August and into September, prominent Dutch Reformed clerics were notably cautious, rendering unto Caesar that which was his. At pains not to tread on the corns of the government, predikanten (preachers) largely skirted anything too controversial when it came to the issue of support for the war. Although that mood would change before very long, a number of ministers even came out openly in support of the Union’s war policy. Law-abiding dominees of starchy, ordentlike (respectable) congregations in larger cities like Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town called the war tragic and distressing, but nevertheless advised men to respond to the national duty of loyal