The witness suppressed a sarcastic laugh. “My first sight of a Boer! And it wasn’t a pretty one!” He leaned forward, fixing the inspector with a hypnotic grey eye. “It was at Belmont. Our first touch with the enemy. A smart young Guards officer advancing up the kopje on our right flank stumbled on a well-concealed shelter pit. A Boer, wounded in the chest, suddenly rose up from it. He struggled to his feet and mouthed something. A pitiful sight. He was clearly dying of thirst as well as his wound. The Guardsman whipped out his water bottle and stepped forward, holding it out to him. The desperado’s response was to raise his rifle and shoot the officer’s face off.”

The inspector flinched, then pursed his lips. “That’s war. These stories take hold of the common imagination and snowball out of proportion. Faults on both sides, no doubt.”

Stung by the dismissive comment, the prisoner gave a withering response. “That’s a very newfangled view of war, young man. War is as old as Satan. And it has only one rule. In the same battle, we were on the point of taking out a stoutly defended kopje when a man with comrades at his sides emerged from the rocks waving a white flag. We immediately ceased fire and our officer went forward to accept their surrender when—bugger me!—he threw down the flag and they all fired a volley straight at us. We captured the lot of them, including the flag-waver, and such was the humanity and discipline of my men, even he was spared the bayonet. And if you think that’s just a snowballed story, you may check the facts in the Morning Post. Their correspondent was with us on the line. Edward Knight. He lost his right arm to a dumdum bullet in that encounter. Try explaining to a man with a throbbing stump that it’s due to nothing more than the common imagination running riot, and anyway, he’s probably done worse himself.”

“Well, we have you inching forward rather than striding towards your objective—the relief of besieged, bombed, starving Kimberley. Were you able to reconnect with your platoon after your swim? Did you have further orders?”

“I found five of my original unit.” With a thoughtful look, he added: “Not the ones I’d have liked to find still standing in some cases, but that’s war, as you would say. The boldest and best go first. We managed to collect ourselves, stand to attention with our rifles to hand and even look as though we knew what we were doing when a senior officer came riding up with orders from Lord Methuen. They were about to clear the land between the river and Kimberley of enemy. Not an easy task; the place was still crawling with them. He eyed us up and came to a decision.