Eventually, Britain brought overwhelming force to bear on the Boer fighters. Combined with the mistreatment of their civilians, that at last forced them to surrender, though that meant abandoning the independence of the two republics and accepting their absorption into the British Empire.

There were some lessons to be learned from the heavy work that the empire had to make to beat the small irregular force facing it. Whether Britain learned them is far from clear. Other nations, on the other hand, quickly cottoned on to the fact that the empire’s power wasn’t anything like as irresistible as Britain had tried to make it look. That gave some of the colonies the feeling that it might not be unrealistic to imagine they could break free from imperial control.

A striking example of someone moving in this direction was Mohandas Gandhi. He was in South Africa and had provided a stretcher-bearer service to the British army. Sadly, his reward had been a medal, followed by reduction to second-class citizen status, when the new British rulers of Transvaal decided to register all Indian and Chinese residents. Gandhi would, of course, soon emerge as the major figure of the Indian independence movement.

Just to add a more human touch to all the high principles, this episode also contains a fine love story, as impressive as the one between Charles and Katharine Parnell.

Illustration: Gandhi in front on his law practice in South Africa by Keystone Press Agency Ltd National Portrait Gallery x137615

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.