The Boer War

Abstract

In every war there are incidents that take hold of, and remain in, the public imagination. They are usually few in number, and sometimes not all that important in themselves, but in a significant way they focus contemporary feelings and define the image of the war for subsequent generations. Most commonly, they mingle a sense of reassurance with a sense of anxiety, frequently combining an illustration of courage with questions about whether courage alone is sufficient; as such, these incidents are likely to express the contradictions that lie at the heart of a nation’s involvement in a conflict. Not surprisingly, these are the episodes that appear most often in novels, poems and plays (and, with the passing of time, in history books and films) about the war in question. It is easy to identify the significant events of this nature in the Victorian era. In the Crimean War, the incident that made the greatest impact was the Charge of the Light Brigade: a triumph of glory over strategy, of bravery over pragmatism, for many it defined the inadequacies of an aristocratic military leadership. The image of Florence Nightingale at Scutari is, of course, equally evocative, with everything that it suggests about the roles the Victorians assigned to women, but also what it tells us about a shift of attention at this time from the moment of military confrontation to the human consequences of war. The significance of Nightingale is most apparent if we consider how difficult it would be to associate any such image with the Wellington era.