The Equid Cost of the Boer War

In 1899, the world saw the tiny Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State take on the might of British Empire. This seemingly backwater country in a very inhospitable landscape would be the site of a costly war that would pit a literal David against Goliath. David, in this case, didn’t win. Goliath brought to bear significant quantities of men and resources that the Boers could never hope to match. However, in providing so much logistical support for their operations, the British would find themselves wasting a significant portion of their resources including their horses. The numbers are staggering.

	Numbers	Provided
Source	Horses			Total	Cost (£)
	With Units	Remounts	Mules and Donkeys
Home (Britain)	20,251	56,984	167	77,402
South America	**	26,544	**	26,544
Canada	**	14,621	**	14,621
US of America	**	106,658	80,524	187,182
Australasia	**	23,028	**	23,028
Austria (i.e. Hungary)	**	60,352	**	60,352
Spain	**	**	15,229	15,229
Italy	**	**	7,004	7,004
Cyprus	**	**	128	128
South Africa	**	158,816	45,290	204,106
Uganda (i.e. E. Africa)	**	**	306	306
Purchased for British South Africa Company in US of America	**	3,220	1,000	4,220
Total provided by Remount Department	20,251	450,223	149,648	620,122	14,495,394*
Home, provided by Imperial Yeomanry	2,500	4,500	**	7,000	200,000
From India	5,549	3,062	1,114	9,725	233,900
Colonial Contingents	27,473	1,431	19	28,923	199,287
Austria, provided by Imperial Yeomanry	**	3,805	**	3,805	110,725
Totals	55,773	463,021	150,781	669,575	15,329,306
	Total Horses:	518,794
Lost in Voyage	13,144		2,816	15,960
Balance expended during campaign	347,007		53,339	400,346†

* Exclusive of cost of animals with units before the outbreak of hostilities.

† This includes casualties prior to shipment. The real wastage was even greater, as the total of 669,575 given above does not include captures of ponies or mules on the veld, a very considerable item.

​

With over 15 million in 1901 British Pounds spent for the animals provided by the remount service (horses and mules), we’re looking at over £1.7 billion in today’s currency. Now I’m an American so I translated that into dollars: $2.34 billion. In theory, that could almost cover 2 years of my University’s operating budget. However, I feel it is far more noteworthy to mention that despite the cost and effort to procure the horses and mules, the wastage of horseflesh and equids was quite extreme. To say “PETA would have had a fit” is a gross understatement.

This is why I asked the question: why, for all the effort the British put into the war, did they waste so many horses (and mules)? Of the animals provided by the remount service, approximately 350,000 horses and 50,000 mules perished. These figures indicate that 67%, or 2 out of every 3, horses died and 33%, or 1 out of every 3, mules. Like most historical questions, there are a multitude of factors that played into these losses.

First, the British Remount Service managed to procure, throughout the war, over 600,000 equids. If you lost your horse, good news! We’ve got another hundred to replace it! The British bought horses from all over their empire and the world. Over 200,000 horses were shipped to South Africa with relatively little loss. In fact, the wastage on board ships would be the smallest source of wastage of horses throughout the war. Some of these figures are shown in the table below.

​

REMOUNTS – HORSES*	Shipped	Loss	Percentage of Loss
United Kingdom
1899	2,308	172	7.45
1900	16,871	886	5.25
1901	26,859	1,865	7.95
Totals	46,038	2,923	6.34
India
1899	245	2	0.81
1900	2,805	58	2.06
Totals	3,050	60	1.96
Australia
1899	706	10	1.41
1900	7,196	297	4.12
1901	11,828	318	2.6
Totals	19,730	625	3.16
United States
1900	20,086	843	4.19
1901	56,045	1,605	2.14
Totals	76,131	2,448	3.21
Argentina
1899	2,981	6	0.2
1900	22,891	186	0.81
Totals	25,872	192	0.74
Austria
1900	6,999	212	3.02
1901	16,939	285	1.68
Totals	23,938	497	2.07
Canada
1900	3,738	196	5.27
1901	7,566	262	3.46
Totals	11,304	458	4.05
Grand Totals	206,063	7,203	3.49

* Table data only concerns remount horses shipped to S.A. between 1 September 1899, and 31 December 1901.

​

Second, orders. Company commanders would often, via telegrams, be told to march their troops at a moment’s notice to critical locations dozens of kilometers away. Even though marching often killed their horses and rendered units combat ineffective at times, the choice between dead animals or court martials wasn’t very hard to make. During the engagement at Modder River, the 62nd Royal Field Artillery Battery was asked to cover 62 miles in 28 hours. The forced march claimed 4 horses, and an additional 40 never recovered from the effects. I have been unable to ascertain the number of horses assigned to the 62nd but I expect these casualties to have been a significant loss to the battery.

Third, the rail and transport systems of South Africa were already stretched to the very limit with everything that needed to go to the front. Reports compiled after the war suggested that the British Army in South Africa needed 3,000 tons of supplies daily. This figure does not seem to include munitions or replacement weapons or parts. To meet this need with 10-ton train wagons, the British would need 300 wagons a day transporting supplies to the front. Horses were just another commodity that needed space on these trains. Although it was recommended to situate the horses in 2 groups of 3 facing each other so that food and water can be set between them, it was often preferred to set them perpendicular to the tracks so that you may get 8 or 9 horses in a single car. Additionally, post war reports noted that trains carrying large numbers of livestock just didn’t have enough hands to take care of the animals.

In one instance, 500 horses were loaded onto train cars for an 11 day journey. They were packed in and only partially fed and watered while being forced to stand in unventilated wagons in their own waste material. They then marched 2 days after being disembarked from the train. Within 3 weeks, 300 of the initial 500 remounts were dead because they didn’t have enough time to recover from the effects of the train. What’s more surprising than this atrocious 60% casualty rate was that 200 of these starving, exhausted, and dehydrated beasts were still alive.

This is not to say that the British didn’t try to preserve their horses. After all, they spent a considerable amount of resources and effort just getting the horses to the fronts. As mentioned earlier, the least amount of wastage was at sea. The most significant challenge that plagued the British was their haste. They had little time to condition and acclimate the horses for work in South Africa, so it was preferable to maintain the horses’ fitness at sea. Part of the way they achieved this was by keeping the animals well fed while on board the ships, to the point of overfeeding. A telegram from an officer to the Secretary of State for War stated:

Cape Town, 15 February, 1900. Please instruct mounted units to feed animals liberally on board ship. Better to lose 10 per cent from colic and indigestion and land remainder fit than to have horses and mules full of soft diet quite unfit for immediate work. We have no time to make them fit after landing.

Additionally, the British also ensured that ships coming from home ports (ie England) did not sail for South Africa without a veterinary surgeon on board. Foreign chartered ships often had no such advantages. Interestingly, the wastage of horses on British ships was still significantly higher than those of foreign vessels.

Despite these efforts, it was on land and by rail that many horses were perishing. Most for the reasons listed above. The British recognized that this was an issue and in a telegram to Lord Kitchener, stated:

War Office, 26 November, 1901. The question of resting horses seems to us of the first importance. We will certainly send officers to help you. But no change of hand will be effective unless you lay it down authoritively that columns must rest till horses are in proper condition. We cannot continue indefinitely to send 10,000 to 12,000 remounts per month to be used up column commanders in a few days.

To this end, the British experimented with establishing rest farms at various remount depots for the horses. However, as these depots were located inland, feeding up to 6,000 horses at nearby farms was considered impractical. Horses sent to these farms were first identified as one of 3 types: horses who can recover in 1 month, those who can recover in 2 months, or those who can’t recover at all/those who would take too long. The last category, to prevent from drawing on already stretched supplies, were either sold or destroyed. In principle the farms worked, and other remount depots followed some of the practices pioneered, but it was not systemically implemented.

There was essentially, only one solution to this problem that wouldn’t negatively affect the war effort: end the war as quickly as possible.

Sources

• “The procurement, transportation, conditioning, casualties, and acclimation of animals by the British in the Boer War; and main lessons drawn therefrom” Price, Terrill E. Command and General Staff School. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
• “The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902” Vol VI. Amery, L. S. London. 1909
• “History of the War in South Africa” Vol IV. Grant, Maurice H. London. 1910
• “The Boer War” Belfield, Eversley. London. 1975

##The Cyrus Cylinder - Myth, Fact and Forgery

Probably no other inscribed clay artefact of ancient Mesopotamia has been so thoroughly misunderstood, misinterpreted and misused as the Cyrus Cylinder. The artefact can be fairly narrowly dated to about 538 BC, give or take a year. If you have never studied the period in question in any detail, you likely think the Cyrus cylinder was a decree of law, emancipatory declaration or even *gag* the first assertion of human rights. It was, of course, none of these things.

In the 6th century BC, Cyrus, as most people know, conquered much of the territory that would later be re-integrated and reformed into the Achaemenid Empire of Darius I, who later usurped the throne of the realm from Cyrus' sons Cambyses and Bardiya. Otherwise, very little is known of him, and the Cylinder is one of very few contemporary sources available to us. While the contents are highly formulaic, we can still gain a glimpse of the great conqueror by studying what they say - and what they omit.

###The Cylinder

Some 20 x 10 centimeters, the Cyrus Cylinder is not particularly impressive at first glance, but a close look reveals the astounding intricacy of the Akkadian inscription. A decent portion of it is damaged, but the most vital parts are largely preserved. The first four lines are damaged, but the rest of the initial thirteen lines are written in third person. The first that can be made out is:

An imitation of Esangil [Marduk's temple] he [Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king] he made [...] to Ur and the other cult-centers

A cult order that was unsuitable [...] he spoke daily, and, an evil thing

he stopped the regular offerings [...] he placed in the cult-centers. The worship of Marduk, king of the gods, he removed from his mind.

He repeatedly did that which was bad for his city. Daily [...] he destroyed all his subjects with an unending yoke.

Jn response to their lament the Enlil of the gods [Marduk] grew very angry [...] their territory. The gods who lived in them left their dwelling-places.

Despite his anger [Marduk's?] he [Nabonidus] brought them into Babylon...

It goes on for a few more lines about how terribly Nabonidus was. The last line quoted is particularly interesting - we know from the Nabonidus chronicle that he did indeed remove the statues from their temples... for safekeeping, due Cyrus' defeat of the Medes and invasion of Babylonia. You should let this set the tone for reading the rest of the cylinder and understanding what it is - pure, unabashed propaganda.

The Cylinder goes on to explain that Marduk searched the land for a just ruler, and found Cyrus, the king of Anshan. Anshan was a very old Elamite city, close to the modern city of Shiraz. The traditional understanding which takes Cyrus to have been of Persian descent and that Anshan had been conquered by his family a few generations ago, generally maintains that Anshan is here used as an archaic name for Fars in general. This isn't very important for our purposes, but it is worth noting that there is only a single Akkadian document that actually refers to Cyrus as a King of Persia (the title used by Darius), and it postdates the ascension of Darius. The exact territory Cyrus and his family ruled and whether they spoke Persian or not, will probably never be known. Culturally, Elamites and Persians were very close at this point.

From line fourteen and on, Cyrus speaks in the first person.

I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters,

the son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of Anshan, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of Anshan,

eternal seed of kingship, whose reign was loved by Bel and Nabu and whose kingship they wanted to please their hearts.

...

My many troops marched through Babylon peacefully. I did not allow any troublemaker to arise in the whole land of Sumer and Akkad.

The City of Babylon and all the Cult-Centers I maintained in well-being. The inhabitants of Babylon, [who] against the will [of the gods..] a yoke unsuitable for them,

I allowed them to find rest from their exhaustion, their servitude I relieved. Marduk, the great lord, rejoiced at my [good] deeds.

Me, Cyrus, who worships [Marduk], and Cambyses, my son, as well as all my troops

he blessed mrecifully. In well-being we walk happily before him. At his great command, all the kings, who sit on their thrones,

from all parts of the world, from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea, who dwell in distant regions, all the kings of Amurru, who dwell in tents

brought their heavy tribute to me and kissed my feet in Babylon. From [...] Ashur and Susa,

Agade, Eshnunna, Zamban, Meturnu and Der as far as the territory of Gutium, the cities of the other side of the Tigris, whose dwelling-places had of old fallen into ruin

the gods who dwelt there I returned to their home and let them move into an eternal dwelling. All their people I collected and brought them back to their homes.

The last part of the Cylinder details how he returned the idols to their places and goes on to describe his building-works, in a fragmentary manner. In summarizing the contents of the Cylinder, I can hardly do better than Amelie Kuhrt (1983):

A (= 1-19): historical preamble and Marduk’s role in it (in the third person)

B (= 20-22): royal protocol and genealogy (in the first person)

C (= 22-34): Cyrus’ correct behaviour in returning everything to normal

D (= 34-35): prayer by Cyrus for himself and his son

E (= 36-37): statement that everything in the empire is in order

F (= 38-45): Cyrus’ building works in Babylon.

It is interesting to note at this point what the Cylinder omits. The previously mentioned Nabonidus chronicle details that after Nabonidus had moved the idols into Babylon, Cyrus and his army sacked Opis, plundered it, and slaughtered the people who lived there. Opis is in fact entirely absent from mention in the Cylinder. The last lines quoted, about how Cyrus let people return to their homes, have often been taken to support the Biblical tradition that he emancipated the people of Judaea and rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. But, notes Kuhrt in The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period:

[These lines] have been used to underpin the OT account that Cyrus gave orders for the temple in Jerusalem to be restored and the Israelites deported by Nebuchadnezzar II to return. But (a) the cities to be restored are in Assyria, south-west Iran and east of the Tigris; (b) the order for restoration and repatriation was part of the roster of conventional acts of 'reversal' > 'restoration' initiated by a new conqueror. Whether Cyrus really played a role in restoring the people of Jerusalem is disputed and the cylinder cannot help to resolve the question.

Point (b) is important in a broader sense. The section detailing Nabonidus' alleged impiety is mirrored by Cyrus' reversal of it. Having helped himself to the power and wealth of the Babylonian Empire, some nominal acts of charity and piety by Cyrus could hardly have been particularly onerous. The idea that any of this would make Cyrus a particularly enlightened or righteous ruler is entirely unfounded.

Week 52

 

We made it to one year. Only twenty-seven left. Hurrah! It's time for a clip show.

No, I would never do that. I promise. But, since a few readers observed that it is not so easy to go back through all the previous weeks, I have actually compiled a summary, with links and a short breakdown of the arguments of each one, that I put at the bottom of the page.

That said, I'll this very modest achievement of posting for fifty two consecutive weeks as an opportunity to (go a bit off the rails – hope you don't mind) and to review the purpose of the whole thing. That is – to begin at least – to follow week by week the formation of the core elements, the appearance, the rise and political affirmation of fascism in Italy, its evolution and transformation into a more and more authoritarian government, and finally its (perhaps incomplete) incarnation in a totalitarian regime, its eventual crisis, its fall and its last short lived resurrection. And in doing so to give back to the reader neither the incisive truth of certain suggestive summaries of fascism, nor the detailed arguments and well thought out structure of academic literature; but one thing that, for their form, purpose and natural limitations, those outlets can not provide: some insight into the rhythm, the pace, the organic patterns through which a country evolves into a new political and social formation, until it becomes almost impossible to tell apart Italy and Fascism, country and regime, nation and empire.

There are many different reasons why the general public around the world has retained or re-discovered an interest towards fascism; but I must confess that for me – and it's one reason I have almost picked up along the way – those echoes of fascism that many seem to hear in the world outside are perhaps less fascinating that some old, slightly outdated, problem of identity. That is, the relation between fascism and national identity in its various naturalistic, spiritualistic, materialistic and – just for the sake of historical completeness – racial formulations.

Now, the existence of a relation, more or less well defined, between fascism and the Italian social, cultural and political formations is almost a given. What is much less clear though, is the nature of such relation: whether it be causal (the Italian system caused fascism), collateral (fascism was an accident on the way), epiphanic (fascism revealed the true characters of the Italian system), etc.

If the need to interpret, understand and explain fascism was present already since the first months of the progressive affirmation of the new political force in the 1920s; the need to understand it in the form of an Italian phenomenon, and especially as an Italian phenomenon, was less ubiquitous and less unchallenged. In part, the understandable desire within the historian community to look at fascism as a broader European phenomenon encouraged an approach that abstracted from its characters deriving from the Italian social and political system – a certainly legitimate approach, which nonetheless is always at risk of going back and applying its super-national template of fascism to national fascisms in a prescriptive rather than descriptive manner – and in part the convenience of separating Italy and Fascism, the people and the dictatorship, to treat Fascism as a parenthesis within Italian history.

That such an approach could not suffice was a central point of the first attempts of a “revision” of the fascist historiography made in the 1960s. Explained Costanzo Casucci, in the introduction to his anthology on the interpretations of fascism [Fascismo e storia in Il Fascismo; antologia di scritti critici 1961 – also cited by De Felice, R. in Il Fascismo; le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici 1970], that

fascism belongs to us, it's ours, a product of our history, like it or not, and therefore has to be taken in; but exactly because it's ours, of our country, it does not transcend it, but is transcended by it. For a sort of metaphysical denial we anti-fascists would almost like for fascists to be fascists and nothing else […] so that the Italians, once become fascists, would have ceased to be Italians. […] And yet that's wrong. It was Italy, it was the Italians that, at a certain point, became fascists without ever ceasing to be Italians, to become then democrats or to return to be democrats: the purpose of historiography is the analysis of such a process in its full entirety, without hiatus, without parenthesis, without picking apart its components, but identifying them and connecting them back to the unity of history.

The issue though, runs a bit deeper than the need for the Italian society as a whole to accept the fascist experience as a part of its national “history-heritage”, and the realization that for the Italian historiographical world Fascism was not only an object of study but also a major component of their formative experience (“the crisis of those generations who had matured during fascism”, as Casucci described it) – at times even of their academical formation. Because, as mentioned before, accepting that a relation exists is not establishing the nature of the relation. I'll keep stealing from De Felice's introductions here but, if – in the words of Angelo Tasca - “to define fascism is to write its history”, then to define such relation is to write a history of the Italian national identity, to see if Fascism was, and to what extent, an expression, an element, an incarnation of the national experience until then, or even a possible formation of an immanent national character.

It's worth remembering that one should always be extremely wary of positing a derivation of social and political formations from some assumed, natural national characters; as well as of the assumption that one political formation could – or should – work to reform and shape a national character. And it is perhaps a curious trait of Fascism, that a political form that so many have superficially explained with the nature of the Italian people, struggled so much in the effort to re-shape the Italians, as if the besieging forces surrounding the Regime weren't those of Bolshevism and Plutocracy but its own national legacy.

There is nonetheless a persistent fascination with the chance of explaining the social and political evolution of Italy by appealing to a “national character” - an ideal form, removed at times entirely from the historical process, resulting both of memories of a far remote past and factors of natural, geographical and environmental influence. An echo of these arguments can be found in Marcello Veneziani's analysis of the “Italian ideology” [La rivoluzione conservatrice in Italia. Genesi e sviluppo dell'ideologia italiana 1987] , where themes of character, natural inclination, heritage appear inextricably tied together:

anti-conservative without being progressive […] it keeps in constant polemics with the present, while awaiting on one side for a better future and on the other calling back to the memory of a nobler past, pairing in such manner a feeling of active decadence with a longing for redemption, historical pessimism and ethical optimism; it engages with the themes of modernity and development but places them within a context of ethical and humane values […] populist albeit not egalitarian […] it's wary of rationalism and contemptuous of liberalism […] it translates artistic and literary myths onto the political field, to the point of conceiving a true experience of aesthetic politics […].

And while the author is describing certain natural traits of the Italian identity – in a depiction that one may find difficult to disagree with entirely – it's rather evident that many of the selected identifiers could work just as well in the context of a definition of Fascism. It's not an uncommon theme (albeit often kept within the subtext) that “Fascist identity” and “Italian identity” were in fact much closer than a certain fraction of post-Resistance historiography has argued. What separates a “naturalistic” approach such as that of Veneziani's from a more critical take on the fascist experience [E. Galli Della Loggia - La morte della Patria 1996] is that the latter argues that the Fascist rule and even more the following Civil War have created such an insoluble tangle of fascist and national identity that one could not get rid of the former without destroying the latter – which is not a “naturalistic” approach but, we may say, an “active historical” one.