Teddy Luther's War: The Diary of a German-American in an Irish-Boer Commando

By Donal McCracken

A German-American, in South Africa, fighting the British, in an Irish commando, in the Boer army Some years ago Donal McCracken was working on a book of Ireland and the Anglo–Boer War (1899–1902) when, in the British Ministry of Defence Library, the old War Office Library, off Whitehall, he came upon a slim volume. It was a war diary written by a young German from Halbertstad named Ernest Luther.

As a child, Luther went with his mother to New York. From there, in a short period, he fought as a volunteer in three wars: the Graeco–Turkish War, the United States–Spanish War and the Anglo–Boer War. In South Africa Luther joined an Irish commando in the Boer army and fought against the British. Aged around twenty, he was killed in action in September 1900 during the Boer retreat through the Eastern Transvaal (Mpumalanga) in the face of Lord Roberts’s advancing army. So we have a German-American, coming to South Africa to fight against the British, in an Irish commando, in the Boer army. The diary, published in 1900 in English, consists of only 54 small pages, but it is packed with action and invaluable as a source about the Boer retreat as well as about such matters as indiscipline in the commando, drunkenness, use of dum-dum bullets, which Boer leaders were where when, and so forth. But there is also a fascinating postscript. British Military Intelligence took the diary off the dying Luther. Within ten weeks, it had been shipped to London, possibly translated (the original is lost so we do not know if it was written in German), possibly altered and ultimately published by British Military Intelligence at 16 Queen Anne’s Gate. We also know that in at least one instance and probably others, the published diary was handed out to a journalist in the field with General Roberts. So the diary also opens a window into the actions of British Military Intelligence and the embedded journalist within the advancing British army.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 30 Degrees South Publishers
• Release date: Nov 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781928211136

Donal McCracken

Donal McCracken was born and educated in Ireland. Having been dean of humanities for many years, he is a senior professor of history in the Centre for Communication, Media and Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His books include Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (University of Leicester Press/Cassell), MacBride’s Brigade: Irish Commandos in the Anglo–Boer War (Four Courts Press), Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo–Boer War (Ulster Heritage Foundation), Saving the Zululand Wilderness: An Early Struggle for Nature Conservation (Jacana) and Inspector Mallon: Buying Irish Patriotism for a Five-Pound Note (Irish Academic Press). He is editor of the series, Southern African–Irish Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and sometime chair of the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives Advisory Board and of the Durban Botanic Gardens Trust. He is a former Irish universities’ debating champion and South African Genealogist of the Year. Having lived through the worst of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ and then witnessed the closing years of the South African struggle against apartheid, Donal McCracken holds strongly to the axiom that people are generally better than their opinions. His interest in war stems not from any fascination with armaments, strategy or perceived heroism but rather from the fact that war creates extraordinary and unique situations where ordinary people must often question and even sacrifice their established norms and certainties.

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Photo William Forgrave

Donal McCracken was born and educated in Ireland. Having been dean of humanities for many years, he is a senior professor of history in the Centre for Communication, Media and Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His books include Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (University of Leicester Press/Cassell), MacBride’s Brigade: Irish Commandos in the Anglo–Boer War (Four Courts Press), Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo–Boer War (Ulster Heritage Foundation), Saving the Zululand Wilderness: An Early Struggle for Nature Conservation (Jacana) and Inspector Mallon: Buying Irish Patriotism for a Five-Pound Note (Irish Academic Press). He is editor of the series, Southern African–Irish Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and sometime chair of the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives Advisory Board and of the Durban Botanic Gardens Trust. He is a former Irish universities’ debating champion and South African Genealogist of the Year. Having lived through the worst of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ and then witnessed the closing years of the South African struggle against apartheid, Donal McCracken holds strongly to the axiom that people are generally better than their opinions. His interest in war stems not from any fascination with armaments, strategy or perceived heroism but rather from the fact that war creates extraordinary and unique situations where ordinary people must often question and even sacrifice their established norms and certainties.

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eBook published in 2013 by:

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For

Hartmut Brückner

of

Hamburg, Zurich and sometime Durban

e9781920688134_i0003.jpg

The title page of Teddy Luther’s published diary, a slim volume of 52 pages that carries no publication details. However, we know it had been published by 19 November 1900, less than ten weeks after Luther’s death. It seems that it was published by British Military Intelligence for propaganda purposes. (Military Archives Library of Sweden, Stockholm)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Notes on the text

Acknowledgements

Commentary

Diary

Appendix

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

Preface

I first stumbled across a reference to Teddy Luther’s extraordinary diary in 1979 when I was working on the links between Ireland and South Africa in the period between 1877 and 1902. In the admirable appendix volume (VII) to Amery’s The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, published in 1909, one bibliography entry reads: ‘LUTHER, E.W. Diary of E.W. Luther of 201st Regt. of New York Vols. and of Blake’s Brigade. Pretoria (1900)–Intelligence Dept., South Africa.’

On a trip to London, I visited the British Ministry of Defence Library in Whitehall. This is the successor of the old War Office Library, whose 1906 catalogue also lists the diary. The librarian produced the diary, a small notebook-sized volume, about 115mm by 180mm (4½ x 7 inches). There were no illustrations with the 52 papers of text, nor were there publication details on the title page, only two rubber stamps, one of the Intelligence Department and a second for the War Office Library, both dated 17 November 1900. The booklet contains two ‘volumes’ in one, which suggests that two notebooks were found. What astonished me was that the diary could have been found by the British Field Intelligence Department and a printed copy be in London less than nine weeks after the death of its author.

For years I searched for other copies of the diary. Several institutions, such as the Canadian War Museum and the Talana Museum in KwaZulu-Natal claimed copies, but these turned out to be photocopies. Eventually I tracked down a genuine copy in the Swedish Military Archives in Stockholm. And it was because of this find that I have surmised the saga of Luther’s diary. It is an interesting story, involving both the shadowy world of military intelligence along with the sometimes indolent world of embedded journalists, of which there were some 260 with the advancing British army in South Africa.¹

The diary is informative as an historical document. It can only have been written by someone in the retreating Irish commando. Dates and some occurrences match other contemporary accounts, such as those published in the Freeman’s Journal by John MacBride.² In that sense, it is genuine. But whether it has been altered in places or cut is unknown. Possibly not, as there is a flow about the diary, though as the retreat across the old Eastern Transvaal (Mpumalanga) progresses and gets grimmer the entries become at once fewer and longer.

Underlying the action is a bittersweet image of a boy of eleven sailing with his mother from Germany to start a new life in America. Then, seven years later, an intelligent young man rushing back to Europe for adventure in the Greco-Turkish War, next signing up for America’s short-lived Latin American conflict with Spain, and finally setting out alone for Africa for what proved to be his final adventure.

Luther was born a German in Halbertstad and naturalised an American living in New York; fought for the Greeks against the Turks; the Americans against the Spanish; and the Boers (in an Irish commando) against the British, and all within a short life of 21 years. With eight different nationalities involved in this formula, the psychologist of identity could have a field day.

One hopes that Luther found what he was searching for in life among the devil-may-care, rough and irreverent, yet not irreligious, Irishmen who saw their fight for the Boers as embracing the fight for their own national freedom. As well as the fighting and, too often, fleeing from a hail of bullets and shrapnel, there was the blowing up of railway bridges in the Orange Free State (General Botha did not allow such practices in his own Transvaal); the stealing of food and the occasional horse; the punch-ups within the Irish commando; the getting drunk; the reluctance to obey orders; and the camaraderie of those Irish commandos who remained together as they were pushed steadily toward the Mozambique frontier by General Roberts’ grand army.

This camaraderie comes out in Teddy Luther’s diary in strange ways. There is a poignant scene in late July 1900. Middelburg was the first town of consequence along the Delagoa railway line west of Pretoria. It was here from about April to about October 1897 that the advanced Irish nationalist and intellectual Arthur Griffith had edited his first newspaper, the Middelburg Courant. As Griffith was pro-Boer and the paper was published in English, Griffith was subsequently not so popular with the local English-speaking inhabitants, a situation replicated with the Natal Witness a generation earlier.³ Griffith finally left the Transvaal Republic for Dublin near the end of 1898. There he, with the financial help of Maud Gonne, founded the United Irishman, established the Irish Transvaal Committee and went on to found the political organisation Sinn Féin, ending his days as the first leader of an independent Irish Free State.⁴

Less than three years after Arthur Griffith left this rural dorp, his County Mayo friend John MacBride, now a major and leader of the Irish commando (MacBride’s Brigade) entered the town with young Teddy Luther. It was pitch dark and a terrible storm was raging. In the dark, the major fell twice into a ditch. Both men were soaked as they scoured the all-but-deserted and locked-up town looking for food for themselves and their horses. Finally they retraced their steps and entered the Masonic Hotel, where they bought two tins of herring, all there was left. They then fled that eerie ghost town. Next day ‘that debonaire soldier’, Lieutenant-General Pole-Carew’s cavalry entered Middelburg.

Badly behaved, curious and the last to leave. That milieu suited the romantic and wayward Teddy Luther.

Notes on the text

Two comments need to be made regarding the format and text of Luther’s diary. The first is that this is not a reproduction of the original two notebooks, but a reproduction of the printed transcript which was published in 1900 by British military intelligence. We do not know whether or not in producing the volume transcribing errors or deliberate alterations were made. We also do not know if it was translated or even if it was originally written in English or German. Within the published text there are four names of people missing, indicated by a series of either dashes or dots in the text, three place-names and one number are also missing. There is also one swear word: _ _ _ _ _ d (page 68 of this volume). All of these are possibly the result of illegible handwriting. There are also several mysterious question marks in brackets (see pages 55, 65 and 70) and one equally mysterious ‘sic’ (page 73).

Luther’s diary is not a traditional form of war diary. It was not, like so many war memoirs, written at leisure after the conflict. This is raw material: two notebooks written in the saddle during the conflict in an army in rapid retreat. Conditions were primitive. Clothes and food got scarcer and scarcer; tempers began to fray; many commando members became ‘footsloggers’. This was the environment in which Luther jotted entries in his notebooks. It is, therefore, not surprising that there are grammatical and stylistic inconsistencies in the text. However, the staccato and at time disconnected nature of the text gives a refreshing immediacy for the reader. This was written in ‘real time’ and the result is text which is challenging to read in terms of a flowing discourse, but one which, like a flashing series of moving images upon a screen, presents a convincing picture of the Irish commando in its dying days.

Names used in the text and commentary are contemporaneous. Some place names have changed in recent years, including Belfast becoming eMakhazeni, Durban (greater) becoming eThekwini, Machadodorp becoming eNtokozweni, Pretoria (greater) becoming Tshwane and Witbank becoming eMalahleni. Provincially, the Orange Free State is now the Free State and the Eastern Transvaal is Mpumalanga.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following individuals who have assisted me with this project:

Ian Cowie, William Forgrave, Professor John Hilton, John Horan, Janet Lourens, Patricia McCracken, Sean McCracken, Lena Nordström, Brigadier J. Parker, Judith A. Sibley, Miss M.M. Simpson and Nicki von der Heyde.

The help of the following institutions is also acknowledged:

Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein

British High Commission, Pretoria

British Library, London

Don Africana Library, Durban

Library of Congress, Washington, United States of America

Military of Defence (British) Library, London

Military Archives Library (Krigsarkivets) of Sweden

Museum of Defence Intelligence (British), Chicksands

National Archives (Britain), London

National Army Museum, London

South African Archives, Pretoria

United States Military Academy, West Point

United States National Archives, Washington

University of KwaZulu-Natal

This work is in part based upon research sponsored by the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and therefore the National Research Foundation does not accept any liability in respect thereto.

Commentary

Foreigners in the Boer army

There were perhaps some 3,000 foreign volunteers in the Boer army fighting in the Anglo-Boer or South African War. They consisted mainly of Americans, Dutch (Hollanders), French, German, Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians and Scandinavians.⁵ The majority of these had been uitlanders working on the mines or related industries immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Most had taken an oath of allegiance to either one of the Boer republics.⁶ In the case of the Irish, they found themselves in the same position as the Cape Afrikaners, in that legally they were British subjects. Had they become burgers prior to the war, all was well, but some Irish joined after war broke out. The British considered becoming a burger in this latter situation contrary to international law, so subsequently any such Cape Afrikaner or Irishman captured was regarded as a traitor and liable to be shot.

In January 1900 the Natal Mercury reported that New York newspapers were claiming that wealthy Irishmen and Boer sympathisers were contributing toward equipment for Irish regiments to go to South Africa to fight for the Boer cause.⁷ The activities of the colourful Irish-American, 43-year-old Lieutenant John Y. Fillmore Blake of Bolivar, Missouri, are well documented. He had 13 years’ active service in the 6th United States Cavalry and was, until he abandoned it in May 1900, the commander of one of two Irish commandos –or Irish Transvaal Brigades as they grandiosely named themselves–in the Anglo-Boer War.⁸

Until April 1900 we know of only 12 American members of the approximately 250-strong Blake’s Irish commando.⁹ Then, on 15 February 1900, an Irish-American ambulance corps of approximately 58 men, many from Chicago and including seven medical doctors, under Captain Patrick O’Connor, set sail from New York with the intention of joining the Boers as combat troops. They were seen off by none other than the old veteran Fenian Patrick Egan.¹⁰ On their eventual arrival in the Transvaal on Good Friday, 13 April 1900, they were met by the now-colonel Blake and taken, via a meeting with President Kruger, to join the first Irish commando then fighting in the Boer retreat in the Orange Free State.

A second, and rival, Irish commando was by then led by an Irish-Australian journalist and literary figure called Arthur Lynch. This was a strange outfit which acquired for itself a bad reputation for looting and trading in stolen goods. It was a far more cosmopolitan unit, a member of Blake’s commando on one occasion describing it as a collection of ‘fifty or sixty soreheads, greasers, half-breeds and dagoes ... a gang of hobos’.¹¹

In addition to these Irish-dominated units, there was a scattering of Americans fighting in various commandos on the Boer side, such as Butch Wilson in the Heidelberg commando (‘a corps d’élite of the Boers’¹²); Herman Ramsland and Harry Wood in the Johannesburg commando; Charles Daly in the Pretoria commando; a man named O’Brien, who was quartermaster with Theron’s Scouts; and Arthur Donnelly, a former Pretoria detective, who was in one of General Cronjé’s commandos.

There were also Hassell’s American scouts.¹³

While the German press had no hesitation in following the French media in denouncing Britain in the war, the German government acted with extreme caution, despite the famous telegram to President Kruger sent in 1896 by the kaiser following the failure of the Jameson Raid. Even Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined not to be dragged into any dispute with ‘the fat English premier’ [Lord Salisbury] over the war. ‘We keep out of it!’ he scrawled on a diplomatic telegram. The kaiser even went so far as to visit Queen Victoria in November 1899 and to issue a decree stating that serving soldiers and reservists were ‘prohibited to go to Africa’. And the British, for their part, actually asked the Germans if their representative in Pretoria could take charge of their interests in the event of hostilities, a request the Germans wisely but politely declined.¹⁴ None of this, of course, stopped some 500 or so Germans from volunteering to fight for the Boers, some in Colonel Schiel’s