Stones for My Father (18 page)

“Dit is die See van Galilëe,”
I told Corporal Byrne. It was even more beautiful than I had imagined.

Together, we walked to the water’s edge.

T
he culmination of a decades-long Scramble for Africa, the Anglo-Boer War (October 1899 — May 1902) was fought between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. It was the longest and bloodiest British war fought between 1815 and 1914. Firsthand witnesses included a number of prominent figures of the day and later decades — among them Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Robert Baden-Powell, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Roughly 8,600 Canadians volunteered to fight in the war, making this the first time that large contingents of Canadian troops served abroad. Claiming 22,000 British lives, as well as the lives of between 6,000 and 7,000 Boer fighters, the conflict came to represent the end of an era of “great” imperial wars. More than 26,000 Boer
women and children perished in the British camps. The number of African casualties remains unknown, but is estimated at over 20,000.

Soon after the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging, Britain granted limited autonomy to the occupied regions — a concession that would eventually lead to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910.