These boots were made for walking
One of the more bizarre claims I have heard made to try and ridicule the British army of the Second Boer War was that, so utterly outdated was it, that the men were issued boots with no specific left or right ‘cut’. I was gleefully informed by one especially woeful battlefield guide in Natal that
Keeping the myth alive and well…
In a recent issue of the magazine of the Anglo-Boer War Study Group of Australia, Kopje, we were treated to a reminder by Professor Fransjohan Pretorius of what, since the 1940s or so, has become the standard way of looking at the Boer War. Rather like the Mel Gibson version of ‘Gallipoli’, however, the version
A War By Any Other Name
In one of the more thoughtful reviews of Kruger, Kommandos & Kak, it was mentioned that I use the name ‘the Boer War’ to describe the conflict, and then suggested that this was inaccurate: In the very first footnote Ash rubbishes the need to assign proper titles to events because “Boer War” is “the established name”.
Tomato, Tomahto, Commando, Kommando
There are those who, for whatever reason, delight in declaring that virtually every advance in modern warfare was ‘taught’ to the world by the wily old Boers. One of the more widely accepted such claims is that the British were so impressed by ‘the Boer way of fighting’ that, 40 years later, Churchill was inspired