h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Shame she couldn't have raised morale by sacking the idiot generals and replacing them with better...

Funny thing. Just as the super high-tech Americans lost in Vietnam against a low-tech enemy armed with nothing much above infantry calibre weapons, and just as American history repeats itself in Iraq, we get a memory of the first war that put a serious dent in British world dominion.

For three years, the strongest and best Army in the world toiled against lightly-armed and swift-moving "guerilla" soldiers who took advantage of crap British generalship and battered the mighty British at evey turn. The eyes of the world watched and in some corners (Ireland?) the people watching were learning lessons about how to defeat the mighty British. An army that hadn't really fought much of a war against modern European nations since 1815, and which for much of the 19th century had been used to bully and batter natives and tribesmen, met its match in well-armed white Europeans.

This must have been the first crack in the British empire.

Other things coming out of the Boer war included the shocking neglect of Britain's people by her leaders - lookat the appalling physical state of potential recruits to the British army and the way so many had to be rejected because the average sort of life for the average Brit was so unhealthy.

(No wonder we ran out of men by 1918 and the manpower crisis was ten times more acute in 1944-45. The sort of mass depopulation caused in France by so many men dying in Napoleon's armies before they had a chance to father children - well, this hit Britain 100 years later and the Boer war was the start of it)

Maybe Quen Victoria's chocolates were a muddle-headed sort of way of attempting to repair the damage caused by neglect of Britain's human resources...

great article with a nice sense of period!

Another good thing that came out of the war was Lord Robert Baden-Powell's idea of the scouting movement. He was in the war and he came up with the idea of the Boy Scouts who are now known world wide.