‘a standing army of around 1 million!’

I was recently made aware of this outlandish statement on one of the various Boer War Facebook sites:

Of course, and as we all know, the True Believers simply make things up to try to keep their myths of victimhood stumbling on a little longer, so it is little surprise that Kobus felt the need to resort to make-belief and claim that the standing British army was some 1,000,000 strong at the time. I mean, why on earth would he (heaven forbid) tell the truth?

In reality, the standing British army of the period was only 227,300 men,^[1] of whom 148,500 were infantrymen and 19,500 cavalrymen.^[1] While the Royal Artillery accounted for some of the remainder, many thousands of others were in non-teeth arms: engineers, pioneers, bandsmen, clerks, signalers, balloon companies, railway and transport companies, medical and veterinary units and so forth. 108,000 soldiers were based in the United Kingdom, 68,000 in India and the rest were scattered across the Empire in garrisons, the largest of which were in Malta (7,500) and Gibraltar (5,000).^[2]

So why the lies? Well, let’s be generous and assume that Kobus didn’t just pull this number out of the air, and instead presume he was taken in by the lies peddled by Breytenbach’s apartheid-regime-approved, pro-Kruger work. Desperate to keep the myths going, Breytenbach ludicrously claimed that the British had 1,053,865 soldiers under arms (a large majority of whom would be available for service in South Africa, apparently)^[3] and that this enormous number did not even include those in Uganda, British East Africa, British Central Africa, and Somaliland. All very damning at first glance, until one realizes that what Breytenbach did was to take a list of every single man who might have at one time worn any sort of uniform across the British Empire, and then claim that these were ‘available for service in South Africa’.

Rather surprisingly—given that he was supposedly an esteemed academic whose opinions are so willingly gobbled up by useful idiots like Pakenham—what he neglected to tell his readers is that the list he worked from was by no means the standing British army. Indeed, it contained not only the entire British Army including reserves, militia, and yeomanry, but also such things as the entire Indian army and reserves, the army of the Princely State of Hyderabad, the Canadian navy and police, the New South Wales navy and police, every member of the rifle clubs in Queensland and South Australia, the cadet force in Tasmania, volunteer militia men in the Falkland Islands and St. Helena, and the entire police forces of the West Indies, Fiji, West Africa, Cyprus, and Malaya.^[4] This is the sort of fantastical nonsense which is still regurgitated to try and explain away the republican defeat. The only surprise is that Breytenbach forgot to include the elite stormtroopers of the Salvation Army or the trained killers of the Boys Brigade in his lunatic computations.

Kobus sportingly declares that his interlocutor is ‘entitled to his own opinion’… but, guess what, Kobus? You are not entitled to make up your own ‘facts’.

NOTES:

[1] The Army handbook of the British Empire, 1893, p.15

[2] Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Boer War, p.13

[3] Breytenbach, Geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog 1899–1902, Vol. 1, ch.1

[4] Maurice, The History of the War in South Africa, 1899–1902, Vol.1, p. 89–95