These men, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and simple, loose-fitting khaki uniforms, a white band with a red cross on it wrapped around their left arms, were known to Buller’s troops as “body-snatchers,” retrieving not just bodies from the battlefield but, they hoped, young men from the jaws of death. In all, there were about eight hundred of them in Colenso that day, and they were led by one man: a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer and civil rights activist by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi had been living in South Africa for six years when the Boer War began, and had already begun
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mind boggling
