With the Boer Forces

Hillegas, Howard Clemens, 1872-1918Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
360K words
Chapters
37

Tags

English Originals World HistoryMilitary Military StrategyAdventure JourneyHeroismDocumentary NarrativePopular NarrativeExotic CultureSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.With the Boer Forces by Howard Clemens HillegasAuthor: Hillegas, Howard Clemens, 1872-1918,Language: English, Class: DT: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Africa, Release Date: Aug 7, 2005

Editor's review

With the Boer Forces is Howard C. Hillegas's eyewitness account of the Boer War, based on his time with the troops, and a public-domain work of African history and war reporting. Its appeal is the reporter's perspective: not a war history compiled from the rear but observations of camp life, marching conditions and the state of the men made while moving with the forces, with a strong sense of the scene and personal judgment. Such texts fill in the everyday detail that formal histories lack, while reminding readers to note the reporter's standpoint and the limits of his time. Read it alongside the broader course of the Boer War, distinguishing firsthand observation from hearsay and conjecture. The prose is early twentieth-century reportage, with long sentences, suited to readers willing to read slowly and take notes. As a public-domain e-book it is easy to obtain and makes a useful firsthand supporting source for topical reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Learn the basic timeline of the Boer War first to reduce background obstacles.
  2. Mark firsthand observation versus hearsay and conjecture, and note the reporter's leanings.
  3. Summarize each chapter in two or three sentences so detail does not swamp the main thread.
  4. Compare with war reporting of the same period to see how different reporters treat similar scenes

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37

FAQ

Is this book neutral in its stance? It is a documentary text by a reporter accompanying the troops, with a clear observational position and personal judgment; it cannot be fully neutral. Note differences in the author's wording toward the two sides and treat the narrative as material from a particular perspective, not a final conclusion.
Can I read it without background knowledge of the Boer War? Yes, but spend a little time first on the war's origins and general course, or you may get lost among people and places. To sample the atmosphere of war reporting, start with the camp-life and marching passages, then fill in the background.
How difficult is the original English? It is early twentieth-century journalistic reportage, with long, heavily modified sentences but generally common vocabulary. Intermediate readers can read slowly with a dictionary; for research purposes, read the first and last paragraphs of chapters to grasp the main points before deciding what to read closely.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Hillegas, Howard Clemens, 1872-1918 Author · American · 1872–1918

Howard Clemens Hillegas (1872–1918) was an American journalist and writer. Public information about him is limited, and many details of his life remain obscure, but it is known that he traveled to South Africa to cover the Boer War and based his book With the Boer Forces on that experience. Written from the firsthand perspective of a war correspondent, the work records the wartime conditions of the Boer forces and combines the immediacy of reportage with historical value, making it one of the important contemporary sources for understanding that conflict. The library also holds his Uncle Paul's People, which suggests that his writing drew largely on field observation, with a plain and objective style that focuses on presenting the facts themselves. Though his output was small, his closeness to events has secured him a place in the relevant historical accounts.