The Boer War. A war that broke the imperial spirit which in the
end, the victory of the British more closely resembled defeat.
It was a war of striking personalities, forcefully imposed upon
events. The story of the Boer War is full of sudden charged
confrontations, pungent cameos of human conduct, bitter
vignettes. It was not a war on the gargantuan twentieth-century
scale. It was war recognizably between people, fighting for
targets all could see, commanded by generals everyone knew, and
raising conjectures all could voice. It was war in the open,
self-explanatory, affecting everyone. And the British; thereupon
the pinnacle of their success, they were represented in South
Africa by a gallery of originals, good and bad. There was Cecil
Rhodes, the great financier, half villain, half idealist, with
his mad ideas about British destiny and his infatuated love for
Oxford. There was Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford, “Our Bobs,”
the most beloved general of the British Army, whose only son was
killed upon the Tuge