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Loyalty, Patriotism andResistance: Canada'sResponse to the Anglo-BoerWar, 1899–1902CARMAN MILLER aa McGill University ,Published online: 14 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: CARMAN MILLER (1999) Loyalty, Patriotism and Resistance:Canada's Response to the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, South African HistoricalJournal, 41:1, 312-323, DOI: 10.1080/02582479908671896

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South African Historical Journal 41 (Nov. 1999), 3 12-323

Loyalty, Patriotism and Resistance: Canada’s Response to the Anglo-Boer War,

1899-1902

CARMAN MILLER McGill University

Until overshadowed by the Great War, for many Canadians the South African War was the most significant public event of the twentieth century. According to Canadian historians the War had a profound impact upon Canadian life and politics. In their view, the War weakened Canada’s imperial tie to Great Britain,’ broke Wilfrid Laurier’s power in Quebec,* strengthened French Canadian nationalism, split open the cleft between French and English Canadian~,~ launched the twentieth-century French Canadian separatist m ~ v e m e n t , ~ stimulated militia reform’ and served as the dress rehearsal for the Great War conscription crisis:

On 30 October 1899, about 1 200 young Canadian volunteer soldiers sailed from Quebec City for Cape Town, South Africa, to join British forces in a war against the two Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. During the next thirty months, until this bitter conflict came to an end on 3 1 May 1902, another 6 000 Canadian soldiers would follow them to South Africa. The outbreak of war has been attributed to various causes, ethnic, economic and strategic; and need not concern us here.

The Canadian contingent that sailed for South Africa in October 1899 was Canada’s first overseas expeditionary military force. As we know, it was not the last. The decision to send troops was a controversial one. The government of the day had taken this unprecedented decision only after a heated, at times hysterical,

1. 2. 3.

4.

5 .

6.

R. Page, Imperialism and Canada 1895-1903 (Toronto, 1972), 1. W.L. Morton, The Kingdom ofCanada (Toronto, 1963), 398. M. Wade, The French Canadians 1760-1945 (Toronto, 1956), 49; R. Page, ‘Canada and the Imperial Idea in the Boer War Years’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 5 (Feb. 1970), 48. S. Mann Trofimenkoff, The Dream ofNation (Toronto, 1983), 171; J. Levitt, Henri Bourassa and the Golden Calf(Ottawa, 1969), 15. C.F. Hamilton, ‘Defense 1812-1912’, in A. Shom and A. Doughty, eds, Canada and Its Provinces (Toronto, 1914), 442ff. Wade, The French Canadians, 448.

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public debate, and an acrimonious two-day Cabinet meeting that appeared to divide the country along ethno-linguistic lines.

The first Canadian contingent left a country still debating the wisdom of the government’s decision to participate in this colonial conflict, that threatened no apparent Canadian interest, and from which Canada derived no apparent gain, and which appeared to threaten the unity of the country. How do we account for Canada’s decision and desire to participate in this distant conflict?

To Canada’s post-First World War historians, Canada’s participation in this colonial military adventure was an embarrassment. Busily charting Canada’s evolution from colony to nation, and anxious to restore the French and English Canadian harmony so recently shattered by the Great War’s divisive conscription crisis, these historians regarded Canada’s participation in this imperial expedition to crush Afrikaner nationalism as a backward step in the country’s slow but steady evolution from colony to nation. In their view, Canada’s participation in this War was a function of its regrettable colonial status. According to their construction of events, Canada had been forced into the Boer War by a conniving group of imperial officials, that included the Governor General, the British Officer Commanding the Canadian militia and the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Faced by their concerted conspiratorial pressure the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had but two choices: to send troops or resign. This explanation has had a hardy existence in Canadian historiography, and is still alive and well in some general texts.

Not only do we now know that there was no Chamberlain-inspired conspiracy to force the Canadian government to participate in the War, but we know that the Laurier government committed Canada to participation in the War owing to the strong public pressure at home, from a pro-War coalition which received forceful expression in the urban English Canadian press.

Although this imperial conspiracy myth has been exploded, few historians have chosen to analyse the nature and extent ofthat home-grown Canadian support for the War. Most seemed content to attribute Canada’s participation to the deep ethno-linguistic divide that allegedly characterized Canadian history. In their view, English Canadians’ reflex response was as simple as it was ideological; but it was not one that French Canadians could share. This explanation was put best by the articulate French-Canadian Liberal Member of Parliament and opponent of the War, Henri Bourassa, who explained that English Canadians had two countries, England and Canada; whereas French Canada had only one, Canada. In other words, Canada’s reaction to the War was little more than another tedious example of the struggle between the two irreconcilable variant national visions that have defined Canadian historical development. Viewed from this perspective, English Canada’s supposed all-but-unanimous support of the War in South Africa and its

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insistence upon Canadian participation was exceeded only by French Canadian opposition to the dispatch of troops.’

This simplistic, stylized characterization of Canada’s reaction to the South African War does a grave injustice to the complexities of the Canadian response to the turn-of-the-century conflict, and to the country it attempts to describe. Not only were there several competing visions of English Canadian national destiny at the time, including one that claimed the allegiance of many of the War’s opponents to Canadian participation, but those who called for, condoned and consented to Canadian participation in this conflict did so with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and for other than ethno-linguistic reasons. Nor were their responses frozen in time, unchanged by the fortunes of the War.

First, contrary to a popular myth, there was resistance to the War in English Canada. In an article I published previously,’ I tried to dispel the pervasive notion that only two small rural Ontario journals opposed Canadian participation in the War, the Farmer’s Sun and the Bobcaygeon Independent, both owned by Goldwin Smith, the wealthy eccentric, former Oxford don resident of Toronto. In fact, at least ten other English-language Canadian journals actively opposed British military intervention in South Africa, and more particularly Canadian participation in the conflict. Others opened their columns to War critics. Altogether a small, unco-ordinated opposition existed in English Canada, drawn from the rural community, radical labour, Protestant clergy and anglophobic groups of Irish and German descent. They based their opposition on a broad range of liberal, socialist, pacifistic, anglophobic and practical considerations.

Most farm critics invoked classical liberal principles. Opposed to big government, big business, taxation and standing armies, they feared that Canadian participation in this War was tantamount to accepting an invitation to Empire, that would create a dangerous, costly precedent, violate their sacred principle of no taxation without representation and waste human and physical resources so desperately required to develop the Canadian economy, especially the Prairie West. In their opposition to the War the farm community tended to identify with the Boers, with whom they claimed to share race and creed, describing the Boers as cousins who were worshipping the same God and pleading the righteousness of their cause at His feet. They professed to see the Boers as God-fearing, sober, simple folk, a poor pastoral people, bravely defending their homelands.

7. In fact, Canadians ‘accepted’ though they didnot ‘support’ the War: see J . Macfarlane, ‘Ready, Aye, Ready? French Canadians and the South African War, 1899-1902’ (Paper, Canadian Historical Association annual meeting, 1998). C. Miller, ‘English Canadian Opposition to the South African War as seen through the Press’, Canadian Historical Review, 5 5 , 4 (Dec. 1974), 422-38.

8.

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While radical labour shared many of the farm critics objections to the War’s cost, its wastage of men and resources and the growth of a threatening military establishment, they tended to hold capitalism as a system, rather than a few capitalists, responsible for the War. In their view war was the logical outcome of a greedy and exploitive system, and they called upon soldiers and workmen to refuse to fight, to ‘Stop the War and Arrest the Murderers’, to use the slogan of one hand bill circulated by Montreal trade unionists. Moreover they condemned those who went to war as curs, who left their families destitute to bayonet human beings for $.40 a day and the chance to get a medal.

Within the ranks of radical labour’s War critics, however, there existed a clear division between Christian socialists who wondered what Christ thought of imperialism and what he might do if he were on Earth; as opposed to the editors ofthe British ColumbiaNew Denver Ledger, amining community’s journal, which sarcastically retorted that God was always on the side that had the most men and the greatest number of guns.’

As for Protestant churches, although the Society of Friends, the Mennonites and the Brethren in Christ reaffirmed their traditional and dogmatic opposition to War, the only other Protestant organisation to oppose the War was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and only then during the first months ofthe conflict. Nevertheless some Christian clergy and prominent laity of all Protestant denominations, Presbyterian, Methodist, Church of English, Congregational and Baptist, incurred the wrath of parishioners by pronouncing publicly against the War.

By far the most violent verbal forays against Canada’s participation in this foreign war were from the War’s anglophobic critics of German and Irish descent, anxious to settle old scores and humble an ancient foe. The Irish opponent’s rhetoric was especially virulent. They saw the South African conflict as yet another example of English persecution of minorities and described their cruel methods of warfare in vivid Irish language.

The assumption that most English Canadian newspapers competed with one another in demonstrating their zeal for England’s cause in South Africa not only ignores this body of English Canadian anti-War sentiment but the existence of a large number of journals that were simply indifferent to the conflict. In fact, between English Canada’s pro-War advocates and their opponents lay another amorphous body of opinion almost entirely ignored by historians of the War, a body of opinion that through its apathy, conviction or blind partisanship adopted a more tentative attitude toward the War. Among this group were many rural weeklies, partisan Liberal journals, especially in the Maritimes and Western Canada. These journals frequently served as a forum for alternate opinion and

9. New Denver Ledger, 9 Nov. 1899.

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sought to check the excesses and intolerance of their more committed Central Canadian urban contemporaries. During the acrimonious pre-War debate their opinion assumed an inordinate importance among sensitive politicians, especially among those seeking -to avoid a difficult decision. Once the politicians had committed themselves to Canadian participation, the views, qualifications and quibbles of the moderates counted for little.

The existence of English Canadian resistance and indifference to this celebrated imperial conflict, however, must not distort the centrality of the apparent widespread English Canadian support and endorsement of the War, especially among Central Canada’s English, urban, middle classes. This heterogeneous pro-War party consisted of a loose coalition of influential progressives, pragmatists and party politicians with strong ties to the urban press. The more hysterical voices of this party pressurized Laurier’s government, on the eve of a federal election, into committing Canadian volunteer soldiers to participation in this conflict and lobbied for additional military contributions.

The nature of and reason for Canadian support of late nineteenth-century imperial ventures has been the subject of some dispute among Canadian historians. In his celebrated monograph, The Sense of Power, Carl Berger has argued that Canadian interest in imperialism before the Great War was but another expression of English Canadian nationalism, ameans to map a distinctive national community on this continent, and to secure greater rather than lesser control over its national life. l o On the other hand Douglas Cole has contended that Canadian imperialism was but a local variant of a pan-Britannic nationalism, a sense of belonging to a transnational community with shared cultural values that claimed the allegiance of late nineteenth-century Britons wherever they resided.”

An analysis of English Canada’s pro-War lobby suggests that the co- existence of these two expressions of imperialism were not mutually exclusive. The first group I would call Patriots and the latter Loyalists. The patriots based their claims on civic and pragmatic considerations; whereas the loyalists insisted upon transnational ethnic and cultural affinities. Both insisted upon Canada’s participation in the South African War but for different reasons.

Of course Patriots were more than mere pragmatists. Many attempted to justify Canada’s participation in the War as a natural and beneficial extension of Canada’s experience abroad. ‘Our War’, is how Winnipeg’s Wesley Students paper, the VOX, described the South African conflict.” T.G. Marquis, the prolific

10.

11. 12.

C. Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1967-1914 (Toronto, 1971). D. Cole, ‘Britannic Nationalism’, Journal ofCanadian Studies, 6 (Aug. 1970). Quoted in R. Allen, ‘Children of Prophecy: Westley College Students in an Age of Reform’, Red River Valley Historian (Summer, 1974), 17.

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author and professor of English at Queens University and one of the War’s most strident exponents, was more explicit. He compared the Uitlanders’ cause to that of the Canadian Reformers’ struggle for responsible government against the Family compact; and likened Canada’s acquisition of the prairie west to Britain’s civilising mission in southern Africa in which the South African Chartered Company played the role of the Hudson Bay Company, the beleaguered Red River Canadian party became the Uitlanders of their day, and the Metis resistance assumed the role of the Boers, resisting civilisation and progre~s.’~ The national myths and heroes invoked by patriotic war advocates to inspire and fortify recruits for the War were drawn from a growing repertoire, which included Wolfe, Montcalm, Brock and De Salabeny, myths which lauded the martial virtues of the citizen soldier and made specific reference to the repulsion of the American invasions of 1755 and 1812, and the Fenian raids. The War in South Africa was merely an extension abroad of Canada’s civilising mission.

Other patriots viewed the War in more utilitarian political terms and assigned more heady motives to their support for it. Convinced of the nation-building qualities of war, they felt that participation in this conflict would extinguish sectional and ethnic differences in Canada and forge a new national unity, born of struggle. E.N. Parent, the Mayor and soon to become Premier of Quebec, predicted before the crowd assembled in his City to say goodbye to Canada’s first contingent, that

if the West should ever cry for separation from the East, the blood of lads from British Columbia, Quebec and the Maritime provinces will cry to us from kopje and veldt, we will be true to our past and remain united.

Similar aspirations were captured by Laurier, in his eloquent post-Paardeberg House of Commons oration, in which he lyrically declared that the War had united the two branches of the Canadian family, and that with the bones of French and English heroes would be buried the last vestiges ofour former antagonism. Clearly the Prime Minister, a devotee of English literature, had been reading too much Romeo and Juliet.

Other pragmatic patriots saw the War as an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate its unity, strength and character; and rid itself of its irksome colonial status, to prove itself within the community of nations, and gain greater influence and responsibility within the imperial community. They seemed to see Canada’s participation in this conflict as a bloody initiation rite to establish beyond doubt Canada s claim to a voice in the Empire’s councils. The Canadian Minister of Militia, F.W. Borden, in addressing the departing troops of the Canada’s first

13. T.G. Marquis, Canada’s Sons on Kopje and Veldt (Toronto, 1900), 21,23.

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contingent for South Africa, informed the men that they were nothing less than the voice of Canada, announcing to the World that Canada was no longer a colony but a mature nation of the Empire. Some months later, the Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, went further. Immediately following the first Canadian contingent’s reputed decisive role in the Battle of Paardeberg, he declared in the House of Commons that Canada’s place in this battle and its alleged part in its success demonstrated that a new power had arisen in the West. Intoxicated by this event, others took up the inflated nationalist rhetoric, declaring that it was now easily seen what nation was going to rule the world. Soldiers themselves identified their motives for enlistment in patriotic language: they had gone to ‘hold up the Maple Leaf Forever; and if they died ‘twill help the Maple Leaf to Live’.14

In keeping with these nationalist objectives, the Canadian government named, organised and clothed its battalions to establish its distinctiveness. It insisted that the volunteer soldiers be organised into battalions, under Canadian officers, rather than be broken into companies and placed in British units. The first two battalions were special units of the Canadian militia; they carried their own designation and answered formally to Militia Headquarters in Ottawa. Organised into eight regionally based companies, one of which was designed to be bilingual, Canada’s first battalion carried kit and equipment different from regular British Army issue, including a distinctive Maple Leaf Canada Badge affixed to their helmets.

Even more pragmatic motives moved other patriotic War supporters to advocate Canadian participation in this conflict. They regarded Canadian participation as a means of purchasing greater continental security in this age of American imperialism, more especially along the contentious Alaskan border then in dispute. By doing its bit for ‘the thin red line’, to use the words of the Canadian poet, Wilfred Campbell, not only would Canada repay Britain a portion of the estimated $55 million that Britain had spent on Canadian defences since Confederation, but it would establish a Canadian claim to British support of Canada’s tenuous territorial claims against its avaricious neighbour. According to one author, Norman Penlington, this consideration was the public’s single most important reason for insisting upon Canadian participation in this War.

Some pragmatic patriots tended to base their advocacy on even more tangible, material rewards. In short, ‘War made Good Business for Canada’.’’ Canada had strong commercial reasons for seeing British ideas prevail in South Africa, one pro-War advocate argued in a popular pamphlet entitled The Boer War and its Causes and its Interests to Canada; and went on to itemise the commercial

. 14.

15.

Private James Herrick, in G.P. Labat, Le Livre d’Or (Montreal, 1901), 128; National Archives of Canada, Victor Odulum Papers. vol. 15, Sentinetel Review, 28 Aug. 1900. Labat, Le Livre d’Or, 156.

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products that enterprising Canadians might export to South Africa, food, agricultural machinery, lumber, hay and numerous manufactured products.16 The Canadian Manufacturers Association’s journal Industrial Canada was no less blatant in its promotion of profitable imperialism, boasting that Canadian troops provided excellent advertisement for Canadian products. While some Canadian manufacturers such as the Canadian Carriage Company, the Massey-Harris Company and the Allen Manufacturing Company needed no prompting, the Canadian government appointed a special South African trade commissioner and subsidised a steamship service to assist Canadian business and others to exploit or develop the South African market. In fact the War provided many commercial opportunities, quite apart from what the Canadian government spent in equipping and dispatching soldiers to South Africa. For example, the British War Office spent some $ 7 3 million in purchasing war supplies in Canada. Altogether the value of annual trade between Canada and southern Africa increased ten times between the years 1897 and 1905. Even on a personal level, many of Canada’s citizen soldiers viewed the War as an opportunity to secure material benefits, and South Africa as a land of wealth where one might sojourn for a time even after the War.” Canada’s pragmatic patriots, then, saw the War as a natural and beneficial extension abroad of Canadian development, an opportunity to secure material profit, unity, status, security and credit, redeemable on demand.

On the other hand Canada’s Loyalist War supporters, those who identified with a shared pan-Britannic culture, framed their advocacy of Canadian participa- tion within a more global perspective. They appealed to transnational interests and sentiments, to race, religion, progress and civilization. Many professed to a desire for an imperial identity larger than that understood by the average Britisher.’* Loyalists of course were not confined to British-born residents in Canada. But if one can assume that British-born residents might be more susceptible to the claims of a pan-Britannic culture, the most concrete evidence of their support for Canadian participation in the War was the disproportionate number of British-born young men who enlisted in the Canadian contingents. Although only 7.8 per cent of Canada’s population at the time was British-born, their numbers accounted for 30 per cent of all the Canadian citizen volunteers. ‘My father is an Englishman and I am the son of England’ is how one Canadian volunteer soldier explained his decision to enlist.” Many of these volunteers were restless, adventuresome young men, farmers, farm hands, ranchers, cattlemen, miners, packers, a number of

16.

17. 18. 19.

E.G. Biggar, The Boer War, its Causes and its Interests to Canadians, 6th ed. (Toronto and Montreal, 1900), 3 1 . C. Miller, Painring The Map Red (Montreal, 1998), 58-60. E. Morrison, With the Guns in South Africa (Hamilton, 1901), 61. A. Mellis, Our Boys Under Fire (Charlottetown, 1900), 29.

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whom were sons of gentry who viewed the Empire as their estate and its defence as their duty. In two of the Canadian contingents, the Canadian Mounted Rifles and the Strathcona Horse, significantly recruited after Black Week when British forces were reeling from a string of humiliating defeats, the number of British- born recruits rose to 50 per cent.

Loyalists framed their advocacy of Canadian participation in the War in terms of loyalty, Queen, flag, kith, kin, language, religion and governance. They supported the War in terms of their community of language, institutions and values, of what they saw as its necessity given the mission of ‘our race’. Some explained the War and justified their support of it in more progressive language, the need to ‘fight and bleed for the world’s great need’,20 as a defensive, humanitarian rescue operation to save helpless British peoples from medieval tyranny and discrimination. Others took a more aggressive, militant stance; they saw the War as a missionary crusade, an opportunity to set things right, a War of freedom and right, comparable to the United States Civil War or the more recent American War against Spain. ‘Civilisation Advances’ is how one English Canadian journal announced the beginning of the War. The view of war as a means to achieve moral or cultural improvement was typical of this period.”

Churches, especially those with strong trans-Atlantic loyalties, such as the Church of England and the Presbyterian churches articulated these sentiments in forceful and pointed language. For them, the War was a question of religion, a progressive crusading missionary endeavour, an occasion to compel the decadent and medieval nations to conform to the canons of common civilisation, in which soldiers were little more than missionaries togged in khaki, bibles at the end of guns. The Reverend Frederick Scott, who preached the farewell sermon to the men of Canada’s first contingent, told the anxious recruits that the charter of the world’s freedom once given to the Israelites was now in England’s keeping and could only be maintained if Britain, ‘that democratic Monarchy’ and its Empire were prepared to destroy the tyranny of Dutch seventeenth-century despotism. For another War advocate, the War was simply a God-given opportunity to rescue Africa from Dutch terrorism. The Revd. W.T. Herridge, of Ottawa’s St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, bade farewell to the Strathcona Horse in similar language. While many Loyalist war advocates professed a desire for a peaceable settlement in South Africa, they were prepared for sterner methods, in their words ‘to have progressive ideas knocked into them’.

In summary, then, Canada’s response to the South African War was more than a simple reflexive ethno-linguistic response, an ethnic contest between French

20. 21.

J.D. Borthwick, Poems andSongs ofthe South African War (Montreal, 1901), 125. K . Hosti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order 1648-1 989 (Cambridge, 19911, 161.

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and English Canadians designed to settle old scores at home; nor was its response monolithic. In fact its various responses mirrored Canada’s ambivalent attitudes to the amorphous imperial ideology of the day, an ideology capable of various interpretations, and to a range of notions of identity.

Of the two positive responses to the War identified by this article, the War itself appears to have promoted and vindicated the patriots’ agenda. In South Africa, as loss and the wear and tear ofwarfare obliterated the material distinctions of Canadian military kit and equipment, Canadian soldiers became more aware of, and sensitive to, social marks of distinction between themselves and their imperial comrades. They noted differences of accent and expression, different preferences for songs and sports, of attitudes and manners. Generally they preferred to serve in Canadian units and be commanded by Canadian officers, and had little tolerance for those among their number who aped British mannerisms.

Occasionally tensions between Canadian soldiers and imperial officers reached critical levels of misunderstanding, as I endeavoured to argue in an article entitled ‘Unhappy Warriors’ in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

In other ways, too, the War fed Canadians’ sense of separateness. The British Army’s initial difficulty dealing with the unorthodox character of Boer warfare shook many Canadian citizen soldiers’ confidence in British military leadership. Canadian soldiers blamed the British failure on physical and social causes, on the British hidebound commitment to form, red tape and ‘five o’clock teaprinciples’. The Canadian critique was fed by British self criticism, which focused on what they called race deterioration, and their frequent somewhat romantic assertions that man for man colonial troops, half soldier by their upbringing, were physically superior to the slum-born British tommies, believed to be inferior to their grandfathers who fought at Waterloo.

Canadians’ relative successes against the unorthodox methods of Boer warfare encouraged their citizen soldiers and their admirers back home to view themselves as a new, healthier, hardier breed, born of their Nordic environment. They described their citizen soldiers as taller and sturdier than infantry of the line, grim, solid men as straight as poplars, men without superior in the British Army, clearly products of their Nordic environments, lords of the northland, the new Norsemen, resourceful, resilient, reliant and accustomed to acting on their own.

Freed from the oppressive British social constraints of class, these men and the country they represented were more than ready to control their own future within or outside the Empire, a confidence and self-assertiveness fed by the country’s growing prosperity and physical expansion; and an independence that worried many imperialists.

For many Canadian soldiers themselves the War underlined and reinforces their sense of self-reliance and steeled their determination to be organised as

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separate Canadian units and commanded by Canadian officers. In battles such as Lieliefontein and Harts River, Canadian troops demonstrated their toughness, initiative, courage and tenacity; battles in which their British comrades’ lack of leadership and courage, in the case of Lieliefontein, when British units fled leaving the Canadians to fend for themselves, reinforced the Canadians’ sense of self- reliance. Veterans ofthese conflict returned to Canada determined that in the next war Canadian troops would be formed in one division. Other units were no less convinced of the War’s lessons: ‘Never forget you are Canadians,’ was Sam Steeles’ parting message to the officers and men of the Strathcona Horse, which he had commanded.

Clearly the War had achieved much of the pro-War advocates’ nationalist agenda. ‘Today, Canada is a nation,’ asserted one proud chronicler of the War, ‘and one that, henceforth, all the other nations of the world must take into consideration’.22 And in the post-War era, these patriots used the War to identify, map and reinforce a distinctive national identity. In their patriotic lectures, stories, sermons and orations on the War, they helped construct a collective memory ofthe conflict which stressed British military incompetence and ineffectiveness, their humourless, compliant dependence on orders and instructions, their mindless deference to class and social distinctions, against which they compared their compatriots’ physical prowess, energy, initiative, resourcefulness and their freedom from constraint, distinctions which post-War writers and cartoonists parodied and popularised. The best examples were the Racey cartoons and Ralph Conors’ novels.

The organisation, funding and inauguration of an impressive number of Boer War monuments - statues, busts, plaques, and stained-glass windows - were civic occasions to reinforce and refine this image. Placed in various public spaces, in schools, universities, armouries, town halls, churches and clubs, these monuments remained tangible silent witnesses to Canada’s collective contributions, laundered and interpreted by countless commentators. Similarly, organisations created by the War, the Boer War Veterans’ Association, the South African Veterans’ Mutual Protective Association, the Patriotic Fund, the Soldiers’ Wives League, and the IODE Imperial Graves’ Commission, all helped perpetuate these images. The 7 000 or so veterans themselves participated in the patriotic reconstruction of their history as they gathered for their annual Paarderberg Day celebration, which became an important patriotic anniversary; and during these occasions the memories of their failures, their strife and conflict gave way to a more refined and heroic version of their war and how it was won.

In response to this new sense of self-confidence and independence, Canadians insisted that Canadian officers command their militia, that their defence

22. Labat, Le Livre d’Or, x

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CANADA’S RESPONSE TO THE ANGLO-BOER WAR 323

policy and organisation reflect their own needs and assumptions; and that they adopt distinctive kit and equipment, including the notorious Ross Rifle. It is no coincidence that the first suggestion for the creation of a department of External Affairs was made in Sanford Evans’s The Canadian Contingents: The Boer War. Its Causes and SigniJicance to Canadians. It undoubtedly also contributed to Canada’s willingness to enter the Great War. While this was not an agenda shared by French Canadians, its emphasis on a territiorial definition of nationality, self- interest and autonomy did not exclude French Canadians either. In choosing between what Bourassa called English Canadians’ two Patries, England and Canada, however, the patriots’ choice was unmistakable.

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