#61 — Sunday, 1st March 1902
Two days ago, at dawn, in the yard outside Pretoria Gaol, Harry Morant and Peter Handcock were shot by a firing squad from the Cameron Highlanders.
I said this was coming. I said it three weeks ago, when the court-martial was still underway, and again last week, when I counted the days. I do not take pleasure in being right about executions. Being right about executions is the easiest and the most useless form of prophecy. The machinery was visible. Kitchener signed the warrant. The sentence was carried out less than eighteen hours after the verdict. Witton, the third Australian, was also sentenced to death but commuted to life imprisonment. He will be released in four years. He will write a book called Scapegoats of the Empire. The title will do the work of argument for a century.
Here is what happened, according to a prison warder who wrote a letter two days later:
Morant and Handcock were led out of the fort shortly before six o’clock. They walked hand in hand. Both refused to be blindfolded. When the firing party attempted to tie a handkerchief over Morant’s eyes, he pulled it off and said, “Take this thing off.” Then, seated in the chair, he folded his arms across his chest and said, “Be sure and make a good job of it.” He looked the firing squad in the face. The volley hit him in the left side. He died at once. With his arms folded and his eyes open, the warder wrote, you would have thought he was alive.
Later, the legend will improve on this. The words will become “Shoot straight, you bastards — don’t make a mess of it.” The legend is better poetry. The truth is better theatre. A man sitting in a chair with his arms folded and his eyes open, looking at the people who are about to kill him, and asking only that they do it well. The century will remember the legend. I will remember the warder’s letter.
During the trial, when asked about his method of dealing with Boer prisoners, Morant said: “We applied Rule .303. We caught them and we shot them under Rule .303.” The .303 is the calibre of the Lee-Metford rifle — the standard issue weapon of the British Army. Morant was not citing a regulation. He was citing a bullet. He was saying that the only law that applied in the Spelonken — the remote, malarial, violent corner of the Northern Transvaal where the Bushveldt Carbineers operated — was the law of the rifle. Not military law. Not civilian law. Not the Geneva Conventions. Not Kitchener’s orders, written or unwritten. The rifle.
I have been watching the century develop its relationship with rules for over a year now. The Platt Amendment. The concentration camps. The sorting at the White House dinner table. The Walker Commission reversing its own findings. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, signed in English, announced on schedule, its real purpose visible only to those who already understood it. The century has rules. The century loves rules. The century writes rules on paper and files them in cabinets and cites them in speeches and invokes them in courtrooms. And then, in the Spelonken, in the tunnel, on the mountain, in the camp, the rules dissolve, and what remains is Rule .303 — the law of the thing that is closest to hand, the instrument that works when everything else has failed or been forgotten or was never real in the first place.
Morant was a murderer. I have said this already and I will not unsay it. He killed surrendered men. He ordered the killing of schoolteachers. He operated under a “reign of terror,” as the investigating colonel wrote, which prevented his own men from reporting his crimes. These are facts. But Morant was also a product — a man made by a system that sent irregular troops into impossible conditions and then expressed surprise when the irregulars became irregular. The empire manufactured him and then executed him for being what it manufactured. This is not an excuse. It is a description. The century will produce many Morants — men who do what they are sent to do and are then destroyed for doing it — and each time the empire, or the republic, or the nation will express the same surprise, and each time the surprise will be less convincing, and each time someone will say they were only following orders, and each time the orders will have been unwritten.
Yesterday, the Senate censured Tillman and McLaurin. Fifty-four to twelve. Both men apologised, in such bitter terms that they nearly came to blows again. The Senate, having punished the fist, adopted a new rule: no senator shall impute to another senator conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming. Rule XIX. The rule will remain in force for the rest of the century and into the next, invoked occasionally, violated frequently, and most memorably tested in 2017, which is a year I am not supposed to know about but do.
Tillman survived the censure. He was re-elected twice. He died in office in 1918, still a senator, still a white supremacist, still unpunished for anything that mattered. McLaurin served out his term and went home. The century censures the fist and tolerates the ideology behind it. This has not changed. I am not confident it will.
The war is ending. Not this week, not this month, but soon. The Boers are exhausted. The camps are still full but the death rate is falling. Kitchener’s blockhouse lines — eight thousand small forts connected by barbed wire, partitioning the veldt into manageable squares — have reduced the commandos’ ability to move, to resupply, to fight. The land has been scorched, the farms burned, the livestock slaughtered. There is nothing left to fight over except the principle, and the principle is running out of men to carry it.
Peace will come in May. The Treaty of Vereeniging. The Boers will accept British sovereignty in exchange for eventual self-government. The camps will empty. The dead — twenty-eight thousand Boer women and children, at least fourteen thousand Black Africans, probably more, probably many more — will be buried in the numbers but not in the names. Morant will be buried first, in Pretoria, in a grave that Australians will visit for a hundred years, arguing over whether he was a villain or a victim, as though those are the only two options.
He was both. He was neither. He was a man who invented his own name, reinvented his own past, wrote bush ballads for the Bulletin, broke horses across three colonies, and ended up sitting in a chair in a gaol yard with his arms folded and his eyes open, asking only for accuracy.
Rule .303. Be sure and make a good job of it. The century obliges.
I remain. The war does not, for much longer. The rules do, for as long as anyone believes in them, which is never quite long enough.
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