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Part I, Great Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1900 As Field Marshall Frederick Roberts looked for a decisive conclusion to hostilities between his armies and the Afrikaner Boer guerrillas, his chief-of-staff, Lord General  Kitchener was tasked with rounding up Boer pockets of resistance near the Cape Colonies in the former Transvaal and Orange Free State . He had come down with the flu shortly after his arrival in South Africa  and thus it would be  Kitchener basically who had complete control over most of the British forces in country as the next highest ranking general and as the chief-of-staff. He took to his task of defeating the Boer insurgency with quickly and with fervor, marching across the Modder River to engage Piet Cronje’s commando Held up in a laager on the banks of the Moddan River at the Paardeberg Drift. The old Boer was with his wife and 4,200 Boer guerrillas under arms. Cronje would be a major prize for the British army if he could be neutralized. The victor o...

Part II, Great Anglo-Boer War, 1900-1902 The Second Anglo-Boer War, or Second Boer War of 1899-1902, brought the British Empire into conflict yet again with the Afrikaner-Boers, the European pioneers of South Africa , who sought independence from England for their brother-nations, the Orange Free State and Transvaal republics. Led by an aging Queen Victoria, Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa, and Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, and a slew of regular army generals, the British land forces looked to establish commonwealth control over the Boer republics, utterly rich in diamond and gold mines, the colonial importance of South Africa was paramount to  the military and political spheres in London  throughout the years leading up to conflict, 1896-1899. Remembered today as one of the last major colonial conflicts of the 19 th century, the Great Anglo-Boer War , named so rather heroically by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (b.1859-1930), left dead 22,000...

The film The Man Who Would be King is director John Huston’s interpretation of British Imperial policy and the idealized exploits of the adventurers and soldiers of Queen Victoria ’s Empire in the late 19th century inspired by the original short novel. In particular the movie concerns the exploits of two former British army officers’ adventures in Kafiristan, a remote part of the wild and open mountain ranges of Afghanistan . Based on the novel of the same name by famed Imperial era author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), The Man Who Would Be King is an historical inspired if ultimately idealize portrait of the imperial age and spirit. The real life adventures of James Brooke, the White Rajah of Brunei , mentioned very briefly in the original story, is most certainly an inspiration for Kipling's original 1888 novel. The story begins as the reminisces of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, two former soldiers in the British Army who are planning an expedition to the remote region of Kaf...