Rudyard Kipling, Cape Town and Bloemfontein

This chapter follows Rudyard Kipling in his travels around South Africa: he visited those wounded at the Battle of Spion Kop, travelled on a hospital train to pick up the wounded from the Battle of Paardeberg, and then went to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where for ten hectic days he worked as an editor on The Friend, came under fire for the first time at Karee Siding, and observed the early days of the typhoid epidemic. It looks at Kipling’s romanticization of the colonial troops, and his portrayal of them in poems and stories, his growing disgust at what he saw as the treachery of the Cape rebels, and his criticism of the rigidity and snobbery of the British officer class, and in particular their folly in relation to the outbreak of typhoid.