Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  k This translation is by J. H. Schoeman, whose father and two uncles rode with De Wet.

  l Scheepers was not the youngest Boer leader. Commandant Piet van der Merwe, leader of another commando operating in the Cape, was only nineteen when he was killed in action.

  m An interesting aspect of the story, not revealed at the time, is that Mrs. Glueck was not British. Born Sarah Bella Abrahams in Lithuania of Jewish parents, she was educated in Europe and it was there she met and married Max Glueck. The couple emigrated to the United States, where their two children were born, and she had been in South Africa only seven years.

  n He was later to see even more soldiering: he took part in suppressing the rebellion of 1914, and in World War I he rose to the command of a British battalion. Later still he became a cabinet minister in the government of a united South Africa.

  o Such plunder is still to be found and sometimes in strange places. In 1972 an American from Fairfax, Virginia, returned to the South African Embassy a beautifully worked pulpit cloth looted by one of his forbears.

  p One out of every fifty men of fighting age in the Australian colonies volunteered for service in South Africa.

  q In this game each participant puts his hat on the ground. One takes a stone or ball and tries to throw it in a hat. When he succeeds, the owner of the hat must run and get it and throw the ball at someone else. The person hit then has to throw the ball in a hat. I am indebted to Advocate Gladys Steyn for this explanation of a game now seldom played.

  Holme, incidentally, returned to South Africa after the war and worked at the Aukland Park race course in Johannesburg, making friends of some of his former captors.

  r Melrose House on Jacob Maré Street, now a national monument.

  s The term “unconditional surrender” was still fairly new, having been first used during the American Civil War.

  t The nature of Steyn’s illness is still being debated. Dr. T. Fichardt, Steyn’s grandson, summed up the varying diagnoses in the South Africans Medical Journal (24 November 1973) and concluded that it could have been either myasthenia gravis or botulism, but probably the latter, the result of eating spoiled sausage.