Saturday, March 8, 2008

Breaker Morant

"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household." - Matthew 10:36

That is the epitaph requested by Harry 'Breaker' Morant as he is led away to be executed by the British Army he had served, near the conclusion of Breaker Morant, one of the finest movies of the past three decades; i.e., one of my all-time favorites. The film concerns the court-martial of Lieutenant Morant, and his fellow soldiers Peter Handcock and George Whitten, accused of the summary execution of several Boer prisoners of war during the Second Boer War in 1901. The three men were members of the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular unit set up to combat Boer commandos using guerrilla tactics in the Northern Transvaal of South Africa. The fact of the prisoner executions is never in doubt; the trial primarily concerns whether Morant and his fellows were acting under orders. I will spare you too many more spoilers in case you haven't seen the movie. Just know that the story is riveting; the actors are perfectly cast in a number of excellently developed roles; the writing is astoundingly good. The screenplay, in its structure, is a model of economy, the type they teach you in film school; each line integral to each scene, each scene to each sequence; each sequence building upon what came before it. There's nothing superfluous here; from beginning to end, not a false note is struck. The movies culminates, in my view, in the stirring closing defense given by the men's lawyer, Major Thomas; a calm, reasoned, yet moving, summation of the nature of men at war:


There is no evidence to suggest that Lieutenant Morant has an intrinsically barbarous nature; on the contrary. The fact of the matter is that war changes men's natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations; situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed, and been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger, blood and death.


This is the first time I've watched Breaker Morant in a number of years so the parallels between the Boer Wars and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were not there to be drawn in previous watchings. And it occurred to me that the above quote is something the modern left has no truck with; they reject the idea that soldiers may sometimes understandably go beyond the bounds of normal warfare; they are ready to pounce on any such perceived transgression, and they will charge and convict in the court of public opinion on the scantiest of evidence. Previous generations were mature and realistic enough, not to condone such behavior, but to understand that it does happen, and to conclude that these incidents do not indict the overall war effort.

In another pivotal moment in the movie, we get this dialogue in a private moment between the three men on trial:


Whitten: [after Handcock has admitted to murdering the missionary] Major Thomas has been pleading justifying circumstances and now we're just lying.

Handcock: We're lying? What about them? It's no bloody secret our graves were dug the day they arrested us at Fort Edwards.

Whitten: Yeah, but killing a missionary, Peter?

Morant: It's a new kind of war, George. A new war for a new century. I suppose this is the first time the enemy hasn't been in uniform. They're farmers. They come from small villages, and they shoot at us from behind walls and from farmhouses. Some of them are women, some of them are children, and some of them...are missionaries.

This passage is meant to convey to the audience the historical fact of the changing nature of warfare as the twentieth century dawned. Previously, warfare had been a vocation, a profession with well-defined rules of behavior, which, if violated, conveyed dishonor and shame upon the perpetrators. While it is certain that this method of honorable warfare had begun to break down during the 19th century, the guerrilla tactics practiced by the Boer commandos in 1901 were still considered to be beyond the pale; an abomination that justified going beyond the conventional rules of engagement. This is in fact a central point of the movie; the Carbineers had been created precisely to fight this sort of evil, and until the arrest of Morant and his men, had been given the widest possible leeway in their treatment of the enemy. Political realities had now intervened and the men were considered expendable by the British if it meant the quick end to the war.

In another riveting scene, when Morant explodes during his questioning by the prosecution:


PROSECUTOR: Lt. Morant. Captain Hunt was a particular friend of yours?

MORANT: Yes- I mean, I was engaged to his sister in England.

PROSECUTOR: So his death was very disturbing to you?

MORANT: Well, it was more the way he died. He was mutilated.

PROSECUTOR: You were present at the actual incident where Hunt was killed?

MORANT: No.

PROSECUTOR: Well then, how do you know he wasn't killed in a fair fight?

MORANT: Because I saw the body.

PROSECUTOR: Sometime later! You can't possibly know how Captain Hunt met his death. So you cannot produce any evidence to connect Wisser with it. So then, why did you order him to be shot?

MORANT: It is customary during a war to kill as many of the enemy as possible.

JUDGE: And was your court at the trial of Wisser constituted in any way like this? What rule did you shoot him under?

MORANT: Like this? Oh no, Sir, No! It wasn't quite like this. No, No, Sir! It wasn't quite so handsome. And as for rules, we didn't carry military manuals around with us. We were out on the velt fighting the Boer the way he fought us. I'll tell you what rule we applied, Sir. We applied rule 303. We caught them and we shot them under rule 3-0-3!

The "Rule 303" that Morant refers to here is the British Lee-Enfield Caliber 303 rifle the Carbineers carried. It has become a catchphrase over the years to refer to any summary execution of prisoners. The movie, while presenting both sides of the moral dilemma of how far men may go when fighting an enemy that abides by no rules, clearly falls in with Morant. And just as obviously, so do I; I fall in equally with all the men fighting in the current wars. Breaker Morant remains highly entertaining almost thirty years after its release, but it also brings up uncomfortable issues that are relevant to current events. And it brings up the as yet unresolved question of whether a liberal democracy such as our own has the will to prevail in a drawn-out conflict against an enemy whose savagery has no limits.

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