With the Guards’ Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back

Edward P. Lowry went out to South Africa as Senior Wesleyan Chaplain with the Field Force, and this 1902 volume covers the second half of his war. A scene-setting first chapter traces the quarrel that produced the Boer ultimatum, then the narrative proper opens with the British walking into Bloemfontein in March 1900 and follows the Guards’ Brigade north to Johannesburg and Pretoria, and east through Belfast to the Portuguese frontier at Koomati Poort. Lowry disclaims any ability to explain the generals. He sets down instead what a chaplain saw: open air parade services, the enteric epidemic that put 1,300 men in the Bloemfontein cemetery, a soldier buried in his own blanket, burnt farms, and the hungry monotony in between. The war gets counted here one soldier at a time.