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Boer War   /bɔr wɔr/   Listen
Boer War

noun
1.
Either of two wars: the first when the Boers fought England in order to regain the independence they had given up to obtain British help against the Zulus (1880-1881); the second when the Orange Free State and Transvaal declared war on Britain (1899-1902).






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"Boer War" Quotes from Famous Books



... united opposition in Parliament for the first time for ten years. Question time was a positive joy to us younger members, who developed almost diabolical capacity for heckling Ministers on every conceivable topic under the sun. Our hostility to the Boer War also brought us into perennial conflict with the Government. The Irish members in a very literal sense once more occupied "the floor of the House," and there were some fierce passages-at-arms, resulting on one occasion in the forcible ejection of a ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... to go and investigate for himself. He took up a speaking-tube and said to his Lieutenant, M'Carthy—one of too many renegade Irishmen who in the terrible times that were to come joined their country's enemies as Lynch and his traitors had done in the Boer War: ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith

... for their own ends. But this, again, is a method which can only be practised successfully so long as it is not avowed. It is to some extent habitual in politics. The Unionists in 1900 won a majority on the Boer War, and used it to endow brewers and Church schools. The Liberals in 1906 won a majority on Chinese labour, and used it to cement the secret alliance with France and to make an alliance with Tsarist Russia. President Wilson, in 1916, won his majority on neutrality, and ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... sequentially and moved to the end of their respective chapters. The book's Index has a number of references to footnotes, e.g. the "(note)" entry under "Boer War." In such cases, check the referenced page to see which footnote(s) ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous

... as a requisite. Ever since I joined the Army in 1878—and before—there had been a vein of conservatism running through the upper ranks of the Royal Artillery. (When my battery proceeded from India to Natal to take part in the first Boer War in 1881, we actually had to change our Armstrong breech-loading field-guns for muzzle-loaders on the way, because breech-loaders had been abandoned at home and there was no ammunition for them.) Of late years a progressive school had come into ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... to a point it was good business, I don't deny. That's how we ran local politics, invented the Caucus: Corporation Street is the result. That's how we managed to run Unionism: made a hard and fast contract of it, and made them stick to it. That's how I ran the Colonies—and the Boer War. That's how I was going to run the Empire on a Preferential Tariff. That came just too late. I'd ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman

... philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of King Og that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of the twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst the jeering contempt of the whole world—and we felt it acutely for several years. We began to question ourselves. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... great organ of national song? Well, let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,' we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... been aristocratic: in the special sense of there being only a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept quite dark, though it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to be not so much the Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not to be so much South Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but distressing fact that every class of political leadership, as it comes to the front in its turn, catches the rays of this isolating lime-light; and becomes a small aristocracy. Certainly no one has ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... they may conscript them, but I doubt the necessity. But I run across such incidents as these: I met the Dowager Countess of D—— yesterday—a woman of 65, as tall as I and as erect herself as a soldier, who might be taken for a woman of 40, prematurely gray. "I had five sons in the Boer War. I have three in this war. I do not know where any one of them is." Mrs. Page's maid is talking of leaving her. "My two brothers have gone to the war and perhaps I ought to help their wives and children." The Countess and the maid are of the same blood, each ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... case of Germany concentrate attention on the spirit of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi and on the crime of the occupation of Belgium; of those who in the case of England can see nothing but the policy of Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, nothing but the Boer War. The mission of Switzerland is to realise the tragedy of mankind as a whole, and not to identify herself with any particular section of humanity. "Childish and stupid are the views of those for whom half of Europe should be placed in the pillory, while the other half should wear the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... reduced again to the old chaos and helplessness—how still more odious! As to the war—so like a woman to suppose that any war was ever fought with unanimity by any country! Look at the Crimea!—the Boer War!—the Napoleonic Wars themselves, if it came to that! Why was Fox a patriot, and he a traitor? ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... west door we pass down the north walk, pausing to observe a modern tablet which recalls the Boer War: it commemorates seven of the Queen's Westminster Volunteers who fell in South Africa, fighting side by side with their civic comrades the C.I.V.'s. Some round holes in the stone bench below are said to be the marks ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... while the superficial entente lasts, they smile and bow and are outwardly polite. I asked an English lady, the widow of a German official, if her husband, having married an English wife, did not cherish kindlier sentiments towards us than the majority of his countrymen. "He died during the Boer war," she said, "and he died in the sure and certain hope that ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... will be dreadful if it isn't, I suppose. But it won't really matter much to us, will it? I think a war would e so exciting. The Boer war was, they say, but I don't remember anything about it, of course. Miss Oliver, shall I wear my white dress tonight or my new green one? The green one is by far the prettier, of course, but I'm almost afraid to wear it to a shore dance for fear something will happen to it. And will you do ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... each had seen much of warfare, their campaigns had never coincided. Together they covered all recent military history. Scott had done Plevna, the Shipka, the Zulus, Egypt, Suakim; Mortimer had seen the Boer War, the Chilian, the Bulgaria and Servian, the Gordon relief, the Indian frontier, Brazilian rebellion, and Madagascar. This intimate personal knowledge gave a peculiar flavour to their talk. There was none of the second-hand surmise and conjecture which form so much of ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... by, more than a generation, since first we saw the shores of Southern Africa rising from the sea. Since then how much has happened: the Annexation of the Transvaal, the Zulu War, the first Boer War, the discovery of the Rand, the taking of Rhodesia, the second Boer War, and many other matters which in these quick-moving times are now ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard

... sent over huge shells, which mowed down all the trees on the kopje, while about fifty field pieces were incessantly barking away from a shorter range. Conan Doyle, in his book, "The Great Boer War," states that the British had concentrated no less than seventy-three guns on that kopje. In vain I implored the nearest Generals for reinforcements and requested our artillery in Heaven's name to ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... in special circumstances, as in the Boer war, marks in the nature of uniform have not been insisted upon, has, of course, no bearing upon the complaint now ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... being. It is necessary that he should have some extended residence in the country—unless his visit happens to coincide with such an incident as the Venezuelan controversy or the outbreak of the Boer War—before things group themselves in at all their right perspective before his eyes. The intensity of the feeling displayed at the time of the Venezuelan incident came as a shock to Englishmen at home; but those who had lived for any length of time in America (west ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... more than a thousand people stood around for almost an entire day waiting for the tedious rehearsals to end and the actual performance to begin. Frequently large bodies of men are used in pictures, such as troops of soldiers, and it is an open secret that for weeks during the Boer War regularly equipped British and Boer armies confronted each other on the peaceful hills of Orange, New Jersey, ready to enact before the camera the stirring events told by the cable from the seat of hostilities. These conflicts were essentially harmless, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... large and mysterious cabinet set in the corner of the wall, and asking their opinion, they all four in one voice began to object to any alteration of the program of the evening, adverting somewhat to the Boer War, the oppressions in Ireland, and to the Revolution and the War of 1812. When they had done, there was no one who cared to say a word for the Englishman or an Englishman, and Mr. Smitz announced that Confucius would be the next materialization and that all might address him in his native ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... out of the country, and compromised the industrial future of England. We have seen in our own day gilt-edged securities, bank, insurance, railway, and brewery shares in Great Britain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of L250,000,000 on the Boer War. We know that in economic history effects are, in a notable way, cumulative; so clearly marked is the line of continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a nail in all England that could not be traced ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... had greeted us, Lloyd asked: "Is all the world at peace, sir?" He had heard of the Boer war, and was pleased when we told him that it had ended in a victory for the British arms. His hunger for news touched us deeply, and we told him all that we could recall of recent affairs of public interest. I have said that his hunger for news touched us. As a ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... help reproducing here a letter which originally appeared in the Manchester Guardian at the time of the Boer War, and is quoted by Mr. Norman Angell in The ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... his little daughter Josephine died of the same disease. One cannot fail to note the intimate touches reminiscent of her in "They," published in "Traffics and Discoveries" (1904). Another trip, in 1900, was to South Africa, while the Boer War was in progress. The results are to be found in many poems and stories about ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... had gone up to Mafeking, and that he was to follow. In three days Baden-Powell was in Mafeking, the guest of Mr. Julius Weil, who gave an anxious England as much important news of the gallant little Mafeking garrison during the Boer war as the universal Reuter himself. Odd, too, it seems that while in Mafeking in 1896 B.-P. should write in his diary that "Plumer's force, specially raised here in the South, had got within touch of Buluwayo." Names how much ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... circle what the fellow's name was, but he only says: 'Shut up Black! An' listen. He's seen every darn thing in the world.' Well, I listened. He wasn't braggin'. He wasn't talkin' big. He was just talkin'. Seems like he'd been war correspondent in the Boer war, and the Spanish-American, an' Gawd knows where. He spoke low, not usin' any big words, either, an' I thought his eyes looked somethin' like those of the Black Cat up on the mantel just over his head—you know what I mean, when the electric lights ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... principle of democracy? But does it need a greater courage, a greater belief in the value of the democratic principle than the grant of self-government to the Transvaal and to the Orange River Colony within a few years of the Boer War? The courage and faith in the latter case have been abundantly justified, and were statesmen actuated by a similar courage and belief in democracy to propose a system of proportional representation there would undoubtedly be a public response which would astonish them; ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys

... And this in a country forming an integral part of the United Kingdom, where the fundamental basis of government is assumed to be the consent of the governed! Nor were any hopes entertained that the cloud would quickly pass. During the Boer war the prophets of evil, in predicting the calamity which was to fall upon the British Empire, took as their text the failure of English government in Ireland. When they wanted to paint in the darkest colours the coming heritage of woe, they wrote upon the wall, 'Another Ireland ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... and Chedsey, glad to talk of the major, told how he had left the club to be Major Lonsdale's man just after he came back from the Boer War. How things hadn't seemed to go well with the major after that; he lost money—just how, Chedsey didn't say, but gave one to understand that it was a misfortune beyond the major's control. In the end he was forced to give up his house, and Chedsey came back to the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... Collections and Recollections. The Great Boer War. Life of John Nicholson. Dean Hole's "Memories." Life of Gladstone. Psalms in Human Life. Wild Life in a Southern County. The Forest. The Golden Age. Sir Henry Hawkins's Reminiscences. Selected Essays. Life of Lord Russell of Killowen. Making of Modern Egypt. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... man, at one time, had been a top sergeant in the British army. He had served through the Boer war in South Africa. Hal had met him at the Fort Niagara training camp a few months before, and, while the man had failed to obtain a commission there, Hal had been able to have him enlisted in ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes

... Smuts was an active leader of the Boer Army in the field in the Boer war. He is a graduate of Cambridge University in England, served as state attorney for the South African Republic, and was known as a member of ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... their heads against facts, perpetuate the errors of their forefathers, and do their unconscious best to intensify the evils they deplore. It was erroneous to regard either the Canadian Rebellions or the Boer War as events which rendered responsible government more or less dangerous. Each of these events was itself the climax of a long period of irresponsible misgovernment dating from about the same period, the second decade of the nineteenth ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... first leg of the voyage, that is, while they were in transit from one neutral port to another neutral port, on the ground that they were to be subsequently shipped in another vessel to a Confederate port. Great Britain adopted and applied the American doctrine during the Boer War. The doctrine of continuous voyage, as applied by the United States and England, was strongly condemned by most of the continental writers on international law. The Declaration of London adopted a compromise by providing that absolute contraband might be seized when bound through third countries, ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane

... for foreign service already," Grenfel explained. "I saw a little fighting in the Boer war, you know. And I may be useful. So I thought I'd get my application in directly. If I go, I'll probably go quietly and quickly. And there may be no other chance ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston

... of those casualties are "wounded," of whom, according to one of the Netley authorities, nine in ten at least ought to recover; while those casualties also include "missing," or "prisoners," of whom the Germans claim to have now more than 16,000 in their keeping. In the Boer War our "wounded" amounted to 22,829, of which only 2018 proved fatal cases; while our total casualties for over two and a-half years of warfare, including 13,250 deaths from disease—which, in every campaign, is always far more fatal ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 15, Nov. 18, 1914 • Various

... and he is possessed of great moral and physical courage which never fail to assert themselves in the face of the most difficult situations. They were conspicuously shown during the Boer War when, with an extraordinary determination, he formed up his men on their tired and exhausted horses and advanced in extended order, galloping through the Boers in position, and reaching Kimberley as the result of his ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... drive Quebec into the camp of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin had between them managed to save a large majority of French-Canadians. The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the Boer War. It was fated not to end until either leader or the other should quit. Before the war Bourassa was flamboyant and defiant. After it began he was openly and brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizenship ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... is the outgrowth of work done in the Political Science Seminary of the Johns Hopkins University and is a portion of a larger study dealing with the causes of the Anglo-Boer War and the questions of international law arising ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... time of the split in our party over the Boer War, when we were in opposition and the phrase "methods of barbarism" became famous, my personal friends were in a state of the greatest agitation. Lord Spencer, who rode with me nearly every morning, deplored the attitude which my husband had taken up. He said it would be fatal to his future, dissociating ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... garrison of English soldiers were shut up in Lady Smith, South Africa, during the Boer War their courage to hold out against overwhelming odds and on insufficient rations through many weeks was kept up by the assurance that the patriotic English nation was doing its utmost to send relief, though the relief was long delayed. If the thought that their home people were not trying ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray



Words linked to "Boer War" :   warfare, war, Africa



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