Word: boers
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...world's first Boy Scout, who won his original fame for his defense of Mafeking during the Boer War, turns out to have been a very shrewd operator indeed. At a time when one bemedaled British generalissimo after another was getting his cavalry pants shot oft by those hairy, puritan Dutch farmers in South Africa, Colonel Baden-Powell turned himself into just the sort of hero his country was yearning for. His own reports about his stand at Mafeking gave the folks at home a rare excuse to dance in the streets, get patriotically drunk, and sing God Save...
There was not really all that much to shout about. In October 1899, by his own inept leadership, Robert Baden-Powell, commander of two regiments of a mobile "frontier force," succeeded in getting himself bottled up by Boer Commandant-General Piet Cronje. But if he was no military genius, Baden-Powell was an unquestioned success at public relations. During 217 days of siege, the dispatches from Mafeking were masterpieces of jocose understatement. Baden-Powell wrote some himself and censored those written by war correspondents. Either way, the adoring British public swallowed the stories avidly. They read of the jaunty commander...
Extravagant for Alexander. Now and then, Baden-Powell ventured into the Boer lines to reconnoiter their positions. Much of the time he engaged in games, sketching and composing his fanciful reports to London. It seemed almost a pity when a column under Colonel Bryan ("The Mahout") Mahon rode into town to effect the celebrated relief. The whole Empire went gaga. In London, "Mafeking Night" lasted five days. It was, writes Gardner, "a vast and apparently uncontrollable upsurge of joy, nationalism, and mended pride...
Died. Adolf Johannes de la Rey, 91, South African cattle farmer and provincial politician, who in 1899, as a Boer War guerrilla, captured a British journalist named Winston S. Churchill, a misfortune that Churchill subsequently observed "was to lay the foundations of my later life," when his escape within four weeks made him an instant national hero and prime parliamentary candidate back home; of a stroke; near Johannesburg...
...what was then 12 million raised an army of 1,000,000 and lost more than 40,000 dead. But Canadians have never fought in a conflict essentially their own, even though they may have been deeply committed to the principles at stake. They fought for Britain in the Boer War and the two World Wars, for the U.N. in Korea. Canadian soldiers have served in every U.N. peace-keeping mission except West New Guinea, and Canada is still a member of the ectoplasmic International Control Commission in Viet Nam. But despite its diplomatic aspirations, Canada carries little real weight...