BRITAIN’S attitudes to former foes, and vice versa, are much misunderstood abroad. Armies, in particular, have longer memories than anyone in them, and the British Army has a long history of colonial war, which can only be won by being less trouble than you are worth. Commonwealth Prime Ministers who have fought the British have about died out by now, but the British Empire never had better friends in peace and war than the Boer generals Smuts and Botha.
Outside the railway station in Ayr there is a memorial with a statue of a soldier of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, in uniform of the Boer War period, which must have given food for thought to a rather unusual lieutenant-colonel of that regiment, on his occasional visits to regimental reunions. Deneys Reitz describes in his memoirs killing some eight or 10 British soldiers while still in his teens, and in the big long-range battles it was probably much more. But he became a twice-wounded commander of the First Battalion in the First World War, highly regarded in the regimental museum in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street to this day, and a pro-Union minister and High Commissioner in London in the Second. He also became a personal friend of Lord Vivian, whom he had shot and wounded in Smuts’s great raid into the Cape Colony in 1901.
This week we have seen something quite different. Martin McGuinness (“Leaders pay tribute to McGuinness role in Ireland’s peace as ex-Ira chief dies”, The Herald, March 22, and Herald Obituary, March 22) chose never to bring a libel action against newspaper allegations, during his avowedly active IRA membership, that he had personally murdered eight British soldiers. We are beginning to hear of many more, and if we include the murders he approved, sometimes after torture, the list might be enormous. Murder by stealth of soldiers present to maintain peace, while claiming the rights of an innocent civilian immediately before and after, is different from war.
We must avoid repeating the mantra that the struggle against the IRA was unwinnable. Mr McGuinness’s role in the peace process was very much a second choice, forced upon him by a situation in which the armed struggle was doomed to failure like those of 1944 and 1957. The British Army had learned a very great deal, once inconceivable technological developments were appearing, and perhaps most important of all, the Army had avoided the oppressive over-reaction which the IRA had so long hoped to provoke. In that situation his appointment was a face-saver the British government handed to Irish nationalism.
Still, good may be found everywhere. We have already heard how the Queen welcomed President Ceaucescu of Romania on a state visit, although she is rumoured to have hidden behind a tree in Buckingham Palace gardens to avoid him. The picture of her shaking hands with Mr McGuiness should remind us even more forcefully that she will remain undegraded by any state visit she may be required to host in the near future.
John Wallace,
54 Glebe Street, Stranraer.
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