Why Give a Dead War Criminal a Counterfeit Get-Out-of-Gaol Card?

“Breaker” Morant was an Englishman who spent his early adulthood in New South Wales. In 1900, he joined the Boer War as a lieutenant in a British unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers. In action, Morant participated in the summary execution of several Boer (Afrikaner) prisoners and the killing of a German missionary. He was court-martialled and executed for murder. Over the past three decades in Australia, various groups have sought a review of the sentence given Morant. Others have argued his execution was justified. Craig Wilcox is an Australian historian, a former fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, and an honorary Associate of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. Jim Unkles is a lawyer and legal officer with the Royal Australian Naval Reserves. He is also an advocate for an official pardon for Breaker Morant. On Tuesday 17 April 2012, Craig Wilcox and Jim Unkles addressed The Sydney Institute to debate the issue of Breaker Morant’s execution.

WHY GIVE A DEAD WAR CRIMINAL A COUNTERFEIT GET-OUT-OF-GAOL CARD?

CRAIG WILCOX

The Serbian-born American poet Charles Simic visited his native Belgrade last year, just before the arrest of General Ratko Mladić for war crimes during the breakup of Yugoslavia back in the 1990s. Simic came back to write a wistful article for the New York Review of Books[i] about the land of his childhood, but it includes a despairing passage about the support Mladić received  “from ordinary people, who disgraced themselves by calling him a hero”, who were stonily unmoved by the suffering Mladić once inflicted. The Bosnians Mladić shot out of hand weren’t members of the Serb tribe, so scarcely matter to some Serbs today.

What if, instead of carting a general off to The Hague, a mere lieutenant had been seized and tried for war crimes? Say for shooting prisoners? No doubt some Serbs would have rallied round even more fervently, shouted even louder that the shootings were simply typical of the war, condemned the tribunal as illegitimate foreign meddlers, and asked how any soldier below the rank of general could be guilty of any crime when he was only – as your lower-ranked Nazi liked to say in 1945 – following orders.

It’s a reaction like this that Jim Unkles wishes to rouse with his campaign for a somewhat belated pardon for the bushman, ballad-writer and boozer born as Edwin Murrant but who we call “Breaker” Morant, executed by British army firing squad in 1902 after being court martialled for murdering unarmed prisoners of war in South Africa eleven decades ago. Morant was as English as bad weather and Brighton Rock, but became an honorary member of our tribe and left for the Boer war from Adelaide in 1900. After a brief and unsung service in the front line, then a few months’ leave in England, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Bushveldt Carbineers, no Australian regiment but a wartime unit raised by the British army. He went to one of the Carbineers’ outposts that had begun to kill unarmed, unresisting men, African as well as Afrikaner, during the winter of 1901. Morant then orchestrated a dozen or more of the killings.

Unkles is the latest in a long line of defenders of Morant’s involvement in this war crime, and his arguments are familiar ones. Morant was a mere lieutenant caught up in a brutal war being conducted by Lord Kitchener, a brutal general. Along with his sidekicks Peter Handcock from Bathurst and George Witton from Gippsland, Morant had little choice in how he fought that war. Court martialled for the same crimes others committed, Morant and Handcock found themselves on the wrong end of a death sentence while other, equally guilty, soldiers got off scot free.[ii]

These arguments begin to look weak simply by shifting the scene momentarily outside Australia and our own tribe – hence my musing about likely Serb reactions to hauling a lieutenant off to The Hague in place of Mladić. Some Serb anger would be justified. But much of it would be an avoidance of the fundamental truth that the lieutenant, after all, had committed a war crime in shooting his prisoners. Wouldn’t we want Serbs to deplore what was done instead of excuse it? Wouldn’t we want them to accept the essential justice of bringing an officer to account for killing unarmed, unresisting civilians? A lieutenant mightn’t be a general, but he’s no mere soldier either. As an officer his rank gives him responsibility, room to make choices, moments in which to take a less brutal path.

But the truly bad news for the arguments underlying Jim Unkles’ pardon campaign is that the Bushveldt Carbineers killings weren’t set in some hell like Srebrenica. No general was responsible for them. There’s much we don’t know, and will never know, about the killings. But what’s incontestable is that ethnic cleansing by mass murder wasn’t the British army’s aim during the Boer war. Kitchener was no saint or even much of a strategist, but neither was he a Mladić. Above all, Morant’s job in the Bushveldt Carbineers was to safeguard local civilians, not shoot them down.[iii]

The first killings were carried out a fortnight before Morant reached the scene. British army columns had recently rolled over a hot, dry upland north of Pretoria and then rolled on. The Carbineers were not front-line troops but an armed constabulary sent to help secure the conquered region. After forming a string of outposts, their tasks included hunting down the few remaining enemy bands and escorting the majority of white men – most of them Afrikaners, or “Boers” in the slightly offensive jargon of the day – heeding their obligation under martial law to come into town, sign an oath of allegiance, hand in any weapons, and sometimes go into one of the war’s infamous concentration camps – disgraceful pens of malnutrition and disease, yet never designed to kill. This process was loosely called surrendering, and the locals who underwent it became, technically, prisoners of war. But “surrendering” had nothing to do with throwing down one’s rifle in the heat of battle, and those who underwent it – “hands-uppers”, as they were called – were declaring themselves to be non-combatants, sometimes even loyal subjects of the new regime.

In July 1901, James Robertson, a Western Australian captain commanding one of the Carbineers’ outposts, and Alfred Taylor, his Irish-born intelligence officer, decided that a group of six hands-uppers should be executed instead of escorted. At the time, Kitchener was calling on the army to use every means possible to stamp out enemy resistance. Soon he would demand that military columns leave no living thing behind them, and that every hostile Boer should have his property confiscated. Column commanders were eventually permitted to court martial and execute enemy combatants disguising themselves in full British uniform.

The aim of these wild words and harsh punishments was largely to frighten the enemy into giving in, but plenty of soldiers saw them as permission to refuse enemy surrenders in combat. Some solders refused anyway, waging lethal vendettas against Boers whom they believed, or imagined, to have breached the rules of war. Headquarters was inclined to turn a blind eye to this. All this was shocking enough, and deserved condemnation. But it had some kind of logic to it, some agreed limits, and could even be tamed a little by politicians in London. Taylor seems to have twisted Kitchener’s words, exploited this undercurrent of vendetta and forged a verbal license to slaughter non-combatants far from any battlefield – an unprecedented, unauthorised and potentially limitless extension of the war’s brutality.

No written “orders” from Taylor have survived, and no wonder. For a start he wasn’t legally in command – Robertson was, and later Robertson’s successors, including Morant. Then there’s the improbability of the British army ordering the deaths of harmless hands-uppers in one small patch of South Africa, a counter-productive move in stark defiance of common sense. One Carbineer later lampooned Taylor’s “false proclamations” as “bogus” announcements that only “the very green” at the outpost believed were authentic.[iv] The Carbineers’ officers must have known better. Why else would Peter Handcock have gunned down one of his own soldiers a day or two after the six hands-uppers were killed, by most accounts to prevent word getting out of what had happened?[v]

Regional army headquarters tried to hush up the killing of the six hands-uppers rather than investigate what happened. James Robertson was merely removed, not punished. In his place went Morant and Morant’s captain, Percy Hunt from England. Later, at his trial, Morant would say that Hunt had informal orders, straight from Kitchener’s office no less, not to accept Boer surrenders.[vi] How convenient, given Hunt was dead by then and couldn’t be questioned. It was Hunt’s death in action against hostile Boers, a rare incident in an otherwise easy war for the Carbineers, that launched further killings in August, this time under Morant’s watch. He hunted hostile Boers in the best vendetta spirit, caught one with a couple of items of khaki uniform on him, and had him shot by firing squad. It was the one recorded killing in this trail of slaughter that had anything to do with combat, and even then the guns had been silent for a day or two. There may have been similar executions never recorded.

“We’ve killed 13 of them up to date, now – and that crowd haven’t a blanket left to wrap themselves in,” Morant crowed to his commanding officer on 17 August.[vii] A week later he led the worst of the killings, arranging the execution of a group of eight hands-uppers. Handcock shot two of them himself. George Witton shot one, later saying the victim had rushed him. Perhaps the poor man had, in a desperate attempt to avoid the fate staring at him from the barrel of Witton’s rifle. Morant and the others then seem to have slaughtered the Boers’ African servants, and Handcock topped a fine day’s work by killing another potential witness, this time a harmless local missionary called Daniel Heese.

The final killings were carried out in September. Another lieutenant, a Queenslander called Charles Hannam, had his men fire into some wagons sheltering women and children as well as men. Two days later, Morant, Handcock and a few other Carbineers killed a father and his two sons. None had fought against the British army. Morant made them dig their own graves before they were killed. The youngest son, a desperately ill boy, was twelve years old when he died.

Within five months, Morant and Handcock would be dead themselves, having been arrested, confined, interrogated, court martialled, executed. Witton would have died beside them had the verdicts not been referred, punctiliously, to the British government in London. “I should myself have been inclined to shoot all the three officers,” the Secretary of War fumed after the men were found guilty of murdering the eight hands-uppers, but Joseph Chamberlain, the powerful Secretary of State for Colonies, serenely ruled otherwise: “Two executions ought to be sufficient.”[viii]

Alfred Taylor, along with Robertson and Hannam, got off scot free. Unkles is right to point to these men’s charmed escape. He’s also right to point to flaws in the trial process, though some of these are mythical or exaggerated. There’s no proof Kitchener showed much interest in the trial, let alone wanted the defendants to take the heat off him for waging a barbaric war. The claim the defence had virtually no time to prepare its case before the trial is almost as mistaken. The court’s first act was to grant the defence an adjournment. The trial was in fact a series of courts martial held over five weeks, with gaps between them. These probably gave the defence another sixteen days for preparation.[ix]

Whatever the flaws in the trial, Morant could deny few of the killings he had orchestrated. Thus he tried to explain them away, sometimes with a bravado that might have served the army better on the battlefield. He mocked the court that “we were out fighting Boers, not sitting comfortably behind wire fences. We got ’em and shot ’em under Rule 303”.[x] He was more circumspect when attention turned to the death of Daniel Heese. Not only was Heese a harmless man of God; he was both a British subject and, having trained in Germany, should have been protected under the army’s agreement to safeguard German missionaries. Unfairly, but inevitably, Heese’s blood was bound to speak more eloquently than that of the hands-uppers, and his death sparked the investigation that led to the trial. Still, no one had seen Heese die – no white witness, at least. Handcock confessed to killing Heese before the trial began,[xi] but by the time the case opened he and Morant were able to fabricate an alibi that shielded them, in this one instance, from a guilty verdict.

My count of days available for trial preparation is a modest example of a positive result of the pardon campaign, and of previous efforts to whitewash Morant’s crimes or repaint them a more credible shade of black. Since the 1970s, dozens of researchers for or against Morant have raked over old evidence and turned up new evidence. But the problem remains of what this evidence means. It helps to think historically, to read carefully, to keep a cool head, and to test the new against the old. The supposed recent discovery of a 1901 memo by a British army legal adviser, pinning Taylor as primarily responsible for most of the killings, apparently inclined our previous federal attorney general, Robert McClelland, to endorse Unkles’ approach to the British government for pardoning Morant.[xii]

But the memo is hardly new, having been known of for decades (I read it 13 years ago, and used it when writing a book published in 2002 on Australia’s part in the war). Its intention was not to exonerate Morant, and it’s hard to see how it can be used to that end today. Its author understood that, like the imaginary Serb lieutenant hauled off to The Hague, Morant was an officer – and in an age when British officers had some of the status of gentlemen, and many of the privileges too.

I don’t think it merely pious to expect Morant to have resigned his commission on finding himself at an outpost where war had become unrestrained slaughter. A decent man would have done just that; and, after all, Morant’s greatest personal talent lay in getting himself a new gig when he didn’t like the old one. At the very least, Morant could have challenged Taylor’s pretence to command rather than advise. He could also have telegraphed regimental headquarters at any moment to check if there really were these strange, unprecedented orders to kill unarmed, unresisting non-combatants. Morant was no uneducated bumpkin, no humble soldier in the ranks. He had status. He made choices. If he rarely initiated the execution of innocent and unresisting civilians, he orchestrated it with gusto. Then he conspired with Handcock to kill an innocent missionary.

Law will only take us so far in understanding the Morant affair, or any other slice of the past. But focussing on the trial is an intriguingly clever device for shifting public attention from the misdeeds that sparked it. Discussion can be narrowed from a whole war to a single court room where the weight of an army comes down on a few defendants, where the only victims in the Morant affair become members of our own tribe; where what seems to have happened at their trial can be measured against a rule book and, if procedure falls short, the verdict can be ruled illegitimate. Notorious facts, even serial killings, can be dismissed as irrelevant. Much historical evidence can be ruled out because, like most fragments humans leave behind them, its meaning has to interpreted rather than simply read. Other historical evidence becomes inadmissible, such as Witton’s 1929 letter, now in the Mitchell Library, admitting that Handcock killed Heese.

Should we listen to Jim Unkles, shrug our shoulders and cover our eyes to what some of our soldiers did in the Boer war? Should we say that the war was barbaric, that unlawful killing after combat was all too common, and pretend that shooting unarmed, unresisting civilians was common as well – thereby assuring ourselves that no one, certainly not from our tribe, deserves blame? Should we say that only Morant’s superiors should have taken the rap? That if Taylor got off, then Morant and Handcock should have got off too, and that every ounce of guilt must lie with a cartoon depiction of one man, Kitchener, supposedly an English Ratko Mladić? Should we focus on the shortcomings of the court martial, and forget the lives cut short by Morant?

If we want a military history based on self-serving evasions, on wilful misconceptions about the past, then the answer’s yes. If we want to pretend that we only fight other people’s wars and bear no responsibility for how they’ve been waged, then the answer’s yes again. If we want an Australian Charles Simic to begin a poem one day with words like “Millions were dead; everybody was innocent”,[xiii] then the answer’s yes as well. If we want our government to put time and resources into reviewing a trial eleven decades old, generations too late for any practical help to go to any wrongly accused man, then the answer’s yes once more.

But I hope we refuse to take what we might call the Serbian option, condemning a process to whitewash a war crime, and turn our attention instead to some of the problems in the justice system we live with today. Why give Morant’s corpse a counterfeit get-out-of-gaol card—not to mention an absurdly belated one?

ENDNOTES

[i] 18 August 2011.

[ii] For the long defence of Morant, indeed hero-worship of him, see Craig Wilcox “Breaker Morant: the murderer as martyr”, chapter 2 of Craig Stockings ed., Zombie Myths of Australian Military History, New South, Sydney, 2010. For Bruce Beresford’s influential film see Craig Wilcox, ‘The dubious legacy of Breaker Morant, Quadrant, May 2010.

[iii] The following account of the Bushveldt Carbineers affair draws on Margaret Carnegie and Frank Shields, In Search of Breaker Morant, self-published, Melbourne, 1979; Arthur Davey ed., Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers, Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town, 1987; William Woolmore, The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse, Slouch Hat, Melbourne, 2002; and Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War; Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, chapter 14 and its endnotes.

[iv] Adelaide Observer, 12 April 1902.

[v] Handcock was not tried for this killing, but even George Witton, in Scapegoats of the Empire, Paterson, Melbourne, 1907, pp. 48-9, could scarcely bring himself to deny what happened. The loophole in the argument that the murdered soldier was a traitor was recognised immediately: “Even if [he] was shot because he was suspected of being a traitor there appears no reason why he should not have been arrested & tried either on the spot or at Pietersbur.” (National Archives [UK], WO93/41, ff. 43-4 memo by deputy judge advocate general to deputy assistant adjutant general, 22 November 1901).

[vi] Witton, Scapegoats of the Empire, p. 83.

[vii] Mitchell Library, Am77/3, letter from Morant to Maj Lenehan, 17 August 1901.

[viii] National Archives [UK], Kitchener papers, PRO30/57/22, letter Y/128 from Brodrick to Kitchener, 22 February 1902; Chamberlain in John Mordike, An Army For a Nation, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, p. 99.

[ix] Calculating from trial reports in The Times, 17 April 1902, and Witton, Scapegoats of the Empire, the available days seem to have been 16, 20, 25 and 30-1 January 1901 and 1-2 and 7-16 February 1901.

[x] Morant in Frank Renar [pseudonym of Frank Fox], Bushman and Buccaneer, Dunn, Sydney, 1902, p. 36.

[xi] National Archives [South Africa], Pretoria, CS1092, memo from Maj Bolton to Capt Bourne, 3 April 1907; memoir by de Bertdano, 10 January 1953, in Davey, Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers, pp. 60-1; Mitchell Library, Am77/8, letter from Witton to Thomas, 21 October 1929.

[xii] National Archives [UK], WO93/41, ff. 43-4 memo by deputy judge advocate general to deputy assistant adjutant general, 22 November 1901; Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2011, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/australian-call-for-justice-long-denied-breaker-morant/story-e6freuzi-1226172303540.

[xiii] The opening to Simic’s ‘Paradise motel’, published 1994.