ABSTRACT
Shortly after hostilities began in South Africa, the Daily News tried to provide its readership at home with a vivid flavour of the unravelling conflict thousands of miles away in a corner of the Empire by recounting a typical and frequent occurrence where ‘a party of Boers dash up towards a section of infantry, fire a volley at long range and are out of range or into cover in a twinkling . . . unless they [Infantry] have mounted men or cavalry attached it is, of course, a mere wild goose chase’. 1 Clearly this description is only a snapshot, although a very apt one, of a conflict that lasted thirty-two months, itself a comparatively long campaign by nineteenth-century standards. Even though the South African War constituted the 226th military campaign of Queen Victoria’s reign, the war would be very different to most previous colonial campaigns and would shatter many preconceptions held about the British Army’s application of tactics to contemporary warfare and in particular would question the whole nature of mounted combat at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
