The Great Boer War
The Great Boer War
It may come as a surprise that the creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote a history of the Boer War. The 40-year-old novelist wanted to see the war first hand as a soldier, but the Victorian army balked at having a popular author wielding a pen in its ranks. The army did accept him as a doctor and Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his work with a field hospital in Bloemfontein. Doyle's vivid description of the battles is probably thanks to the eye-witness accounts he got from his patients.
Book Excerpt
irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a
London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built
upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a
people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have
it imposed upon them by those who live under entirely different
conditions. They feel--and with some reason--that it is a cheap
form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered household
in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the relation
shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,
half-childish retainers. Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race
have grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.
The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants. It was upon this very point that the first friction appeared between the old settlers and the new administration. A rising with bloodshed followed the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his
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