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British officers talked of combat as so much sport. Men ordered to advance against Boer positions, called "beaters," were to flush the quarry from their hiding places as in pheasant hunting. A captain in the Imperial Yeomanry declared that chasing Boer horsemen across the veldt was "just like a good fox hunt." The first British commanding general in South Africa, the paunchy, double-chinned Sir Redvers Buller, ordered his soldiers not to be unsportsmanlike "jack-in-boxes" who ducked after standing up to fire their rifles.

The war, however, failed to unroll like the good hunt it was supposed to be. A succession of Boer ambushes and humiliating British defeats left the public stunned. Even more shocking, Rhodes, the richest man in the British Empire, who had grandly gone to the Cape Colony diamond center of Kimberley to tend to the protection of his mines, was trapped there, along with some 50,000 civilians and 600 British troops, when the Boers surrounded the town. From Rhodes's luxurious quarters in the town's red-brick Sanatorium hotel and spa, which he owned, he managed to send an angry message to Milner in Cape Town: "Strain everything. Send immediate relief to Kimberley. I cannot understand the delay."

Because Kimberley produced 90 percent of the world's diamonds, breaking the siege was a top priority. As a British force fought its way closer to the town, in the vanguard were cavalry detachments, followed by supply wagons, artillery, and a cart that unreeled telegraph wire as it rolled along. Joyfully in command, reclaimed by war from a cloud of scandals past and now a general, was John French.

At his side as chief of staff, fresh from Omdurman, was his old friend from India days, Major Douglas Haig. The two had left England for South Africa on the same ship, and when French saw that Haig had not been allocated a cabin, he invited Haig to share his own on the top deck. As usual, French was in financial trouble, this time having speculated unwisely on South African gold stocks. Although it was almost unheard of for a commanding officer to be in debt to a subordinate, French borrowed a hefty £2,000 from Haig, the equivalent of more than $260,000 today, to stave off angry creditors.

On February 15, 1900, French's scouts finished reconnoitering the last enemy stronghold between his troops and the besieged Kimberley, fortified positions held by some 900 Boer soldiers on two ridges about three-quarters of a mile apart. Then, surrounded by snorting horses, the jangle and creak of boots and spurs, and the smell of saddle leather, the impetuous general gave the order that all cavalrymen dreamed of: Charge!

Successive waves of shouting British troopers in tall sun helmets galloped up the gently rising valley between the two ridges: first the lancers with pennants flying, their khaki-clad chests crisscrossed by diagonal straps, proud swordsmen next, horse-drawn artillery in the rear. French himself led the second wave of troops. It was a bold move, and it worked. Some 3,000 cavalrymen suffered fewer than two dozen casualties. "The feeling was wonderfully exciting, just as in a good run to hounds," said a British officer. "An epoch in the history of cavalry," enthused the London Times history of the war; the Boer foot soldiers "availed nothing against the rushing speed and sustained impetus of the wave of horsemen.... This was the secret French had divined."

There was, however, less to this rushing speed and sustained impetus than met the eye. To begin with, the Boer defenders on these ridges had no machine guns. Also, in the scorching Southern Hemisphere summer the British horses charging across the bone-dry veldt raised such masses of dust that Boer marksmen couldn't see a thing, and most of them fired too high. Only after the great dust cloud slowly dissipated did the bewildered Boers realize that the cavalry had thundered past them almost entirely unscathed. Most important, the Boers had neglected to use something that was quite plentiful in South Africa