Our Little Army in the Field: The Canadians in South Africa, 1899-1902

Dean F. Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow at the Norman Paterson School of
International Affairs.

This history of Canada’s participation in the Boer War deliberately
avoids political issues to address, in detail, military operations by
Canadian units. The result is military history in the “old”
tradition: troop movements, casualty statistics, and dry, matter-of-fact
descriptions of the crash and roar of cannon that are unencumbered by
context or circumstance. Reid’s main argument, that Canadians fought
well in South Africa under extremely difficult conditions, is ably
presented, but the Boers, surprisingly, receive little praise for their
military prowess and British generals get off very fairly indeed.

Despite the avoidance of political themes, the book is infused with a
not-so-thinly-veiled disgust for the political caste, especially for
Laurier’s governing Liberals. A career soldier with more than 30
years’ service in the Canadian military, Reid might be excused a lack
of tolerance for political meddling in the military sphere, and his
account of the pernicious influence of political appointees on the field
force is entirely convincing. It is particularly convincing—and
damning— in the case of Sam Hughes, subsequently the minister of
militia and defence for much of World War I, whose outrageous exploits
are depicted in careful, inglorious detail.

The military drama that constitutes the core of Reid’s work is a
fragmented tale. Canada’s units fought individually throughout the
conflict as battalions, regiments, squadrons, and batteries in British
higher formations, and were often scattered across the theatre,
separated by hundreds of miles. The text tries to cover all of these
units in roughly chronological fashion, and does an admirable job, but
the resulting jumble of dates, place names, and minor actions will
appeal mainly to hard-core military-history buffs. The chapters are well
written and well researched, however, and the book provides a useful
complement to Carmen Miller’s definitive but less military Painting
the Map Red (1993).