LEST WE FORGET

This is the second memorial to those who died in the South African War (2nd Boer War) of 1899-1902 that I've noticed in the last couple of weeks, and they must be tucked away inside churches and parks all over the country. I suppose the overwhelming carnage of the Great War within the following 20 years overshadowed this war, but the causes of the war were not noble and in my opinion, whatever they fought and died for it wasn't Pro Patria. In all, the war cost around 75,000 lives; 22,000 British soldiers (7,792 killed in battle, the rest through disease), between 6,000 and 7,000 Boer fighters, and, mainly in British concentration camps, between 20,000 to 28,000 Boer civilians (mainly women and children) and perhaps 20,000 black Africans (both on the battlefield and in the concentration camps). Any of us around before the mid-1980s could well have known somebody who'd been in the war - I had a boyfriend in the 70s whose then-extant great-uncle had fought in South Africa, and one of my grandfathers was too young by a year to have been called up. Originally this memorial had a bronze statue of a soldier on top of it, but it was stolen in 1968 (vandalism and metal thieving is nothing new) and never replaced.
A few yards behind the memorial is the site of the Zeppelin Bomb marker stone.