1900 The Battle of Paardeberg Drift begins
This engagement, fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, was the first time that men in Canadian uniform, fighting in a Canadian unit, made war overseas. Troops from The Royal Canadian Regiment of Infantry under William Otter (who had taken part in putting down the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885) helped pin down some 4,000 Boers. Advancing by night towards the enemy lines, quietly digging trenches on high ground 65 yards from the Boer lines, they forced the enemy kommando to surrender.
It was the first significant British victory of the war, despite the blundering of British officers such as General Kitchener who insisted on frontal attacks on entrenched Boer positions — always a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of men on both sides, including 31 Canadians, died at Paardeberg.
I wish you would do an article of the utter stupidity of this “war” against the Boors. It was little more than British greed stealing the wealth of yet another nation. The Concentration Camps set up to exterminate the Boor’s women and children were as bad as the German’s. As a Canadian I am more than angry about this black mark on our history, and wish we would give the South Africans a sincere apology. Instead, we blockaded them again, in the late 1980s, for the same reason, ultimately, and ruined them again. Shame on us!
I’m in partial agreement with you, Gregory. The Boer War was unnecessary and Canada should have had no part in it, but imperial sentiment compelled us to. The concentration camps are a very black mark. But you can’t be for self-determination and still support the apartheid regime that existed before Mandela and de Klerk dismantled it — despite the mess that South Africa is in now