Story of the Month

A Sahibs’ War
Umr Singh, a distinguished old soldier of the Raj, is the one telling this story, but the setting isn’t his native Punjab. He’s en route for Stellenbosch on the Cape at the time of the Boer War in South Africa, where the events he has to recount have taken place. Nowadays most of us haven’t ever heard much about that period, when England outraged liberal opinion at home and in Europe at large by declaring war against the two Boer Republics: control of the gold and diamonds there was at stake, whatever was argued beside. It makes the setting itself very fresh and the background details intriguing for the reader. ‘A Sahibs’ War’ offers an account of that conflict and of the Boers themselves, farmers and very religious, from a very particular perspective. Umr Singh’s ideas of the proper conduct of war are shaped by notions of honour and of revenge. He speaks to give his personal experience of the circumstances in which a much younger soldier, a ‘Sahib’, that is, an English officer, to whom he’d been close since the man was a small child, had been killed. Umr Singh describes the revenge he himself exacted. Ever since I read this story, many years ago now, ‘A Sahibs’ War’ has stayed at the back of my mind, troubling me. The feelings it leaves me with are powerful, not least my sensation of unease. This has only grown. When I visited the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein I learned for myself of the brutal indifference visited on the Boer women and children herded by the British into ‘concentration’ camps. Rations were meagre and not appropriate: many children died. For me, this brought into sharp focus the revengeful fury of British generals, at a loss when faced by a guerilla army of Boers. That complicated my impulse to accept Umr Singh’s take on the events he describes. And it made me question the position adopted by the man who created Umr Singh. Rudyard Kipling was not himself when he wrote this story. In the late autumn of 1901, just before it was first published, he was planning his third extended visit to South Africa since December 1900. The first of these had taken place barely ten months after the death of the child to whom he was so close, Josephine, a death of which he himself had been ignorant: too sick himself with pneumonia even to know she was ill, he recovered only to learn she had already been cremated. It was in South Africa and by means of identifying closely with British interests there that Kipling found a new focus and a place where he could fight his way back to equilibrium after the devastating double impact of barely escaping death and of losing his child. I don’t need to labour how Umr Singh with his cries of lamentation and his drive to be avenged owe their intensity to Kipling’s personal despair and to his rage. In his weakened state the blackest of the emotions he had known, even going back to his childhood, flooded in. It’s my guess that his vicious portrayal of the Boer family is shaped by such feeling.

A Sahibs’ War

Umr Singh, a distinguished old soldier of the Raj, is the one telling this story, but the setting isn’t his native Punjab. He’s en route for Stellenbosch on the Cape at the time of the Boer War in South Africa, where the events he has to recount have taken place. Nowadays most of us haven’t ever heard much about that period, when England outraged liberal opinion at home and in Europe at large by declaring war against the two Boer Republics: control of the gold and diamonds there was at stake, whatever was argued beside. It makes the setting itself very fresh and the background details intriguing for the reader.

‘A Sahibs’ War’ offers an account of that conflict and of the Boers themselves, farmers and very religious, from a very particular perspective. Umr Singh’s ideas of the proper conduct of war are shaped by notions of honour and of revenge. He speaks to give his personal experience of the circumstances in which a much younger soldier, a ‘Sahib’, that is, an English officer, to whom he’d been close since the man was a small child, had been killed. Umr Singh describes the revenge he himself exacted.

Ever since I read this story, many years ago now, ‘A Sahibs’ War’ has stayed at the back of my mind, troubling me. The feelings it leaves me with are powerful, not least my sensation of unease. This has only grown. When I visited the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein I learned for myself of the brutal indifference visited on the Boer women and children herded by the British into ‘concentration’ camps. Rations were meagre and not appropriate: many children died. For me, this brought into sharp focus the revengeful fury of British generals, at a loss when faced by a guerilla army of Boers. That complicated my impulse to accept Umr Singh’s take on the events he describes. And it made me question the position adopted by the man who created Umr Singh.

Rudyard Kipling was not himself when he wrote this story. In the late autumn of 1901, just before it was first published, he was planning his third extended visit to South Africa since December 1900. The first of these had taken place barely ten months after the death of the child to whom he was so close, Josephine, a death of which he himself had been ignorant: too sick himself with pneumonia even to know she was ill, he recovered only to learn she had already been cremated.

It was in South Africa and by means of identifying closely with British interests there that Kipling found a new focus and a place where he could fight his way back to equilibrium after the devastating double impact of barely escaping death and of losing his child. I don’t need to labour how Umr Singh with his cries of lamentation and his drive to be avenged owe their intensity to Kipling’s personal despair and to his rage. In his weakened state the blackest of the emotions he had known, even going back to his childhood, flooded in. It’s my guess that his vicious portrayal of the Boer family is shaped by such feeling.

“A Sahibs’ War”