Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

by Candice Millard

By the time the British began making their own claims on the Cape at the end of the century, the Dutch and the Huguenots, along with an infusion of German immigrants, had already transformed themselves from rogue splinter groups into an entirely new ethnic group—neither European nor African, but Boer. “In their manner of life, their habits…even in their character,” a journalist for The Times would write, “they had undergone a profound change.” The Boers even developed their own language, Afrikaans, which mixes Dutch with everything from French and Portuguese to KhoiKhoi.

even the word “sniper” was new to them. It had originated in India, where riflemen skilled enough to shoot a snipe, a small bird with a notoriously erratic flight pattern, were referred to as snipers. Churchill himself had used the word in print for the first time just a few years earlier, in his book The Story of the Malakand Field Force, and so foreign did it seem to him that every time he wrote it, he put it in quotation marks.

. . . and nothing changed a century later when coalition troops mocked the combatants in Iraq.

For the British, war was about romance and gallantry. They liked nothing more than a carefully pressed uniform, a parade ground and a razor-sharp fighting line. At most, British soldiers spent two months of the year actually training to fight. The other ten were devoted to parading, attending to their uniforms and waiting on their officers, for whom they were expected to serve as cook, valet, porter and gardener.

In their place reigned a…hazy confidence that British good fortune and British courage would always come successfully out of any war that the inscrutable mysteries of foreign policy might bring about.”

Not only were they forced to wear the dull, unromantic khaki, derived from the Urdu word for “dust,”