E-text editor's note: It may come as a surprise that the creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote a history of the Boer War. The then 40-year-old novelist wanted to see the war first hand as a soldier, but the Victorian army balked at having popular author wielding a pen in its ranks. The army did accept him as a doctor and Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his work with a field hospital in Bloemfontein. Doyle's vivid description of the battles are probably thanks to the eye-witness accounts he got from his patients. This, the best book on the Boer War I've encountered, is a long out of print lost classic that I stumbled across in a Cape Town second-hand bookstore.
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