Cecil Rhodes and Military History – I was in the village of Pniel in the Dwars River Valley outside Cape Town, from which grew the two stories, King or Kaiser and Shadows in the Veldt, when I found Cecil Rhodes had owned property in the area. Some years before an old man had mentioned he had met Rhodes and was asked what Rhodes was like. ‘I was only small at the time,’ he answered, ‘and for me Cecil Rhodes was a big horse with a shiny black boot hanging down its side.’ That’s the kind of human story that proper research turns up, even if the research is for military history.
Sullatober Dalton