I don’t think the Boers will have a chance, although I expect there will be one or two stiff little shows here and there... I think they are awful idiots to fight, although we are of course very keen that they should.
Lieutenant Reggie Kentish,
of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, in a letter
from South Africa to his parents, 1899.
Perhaps they hadn’t even told him (a 19-year-old Cuban soldier shot dead through the chest) where he was going or whose war he was going to fight. Just as they never told us. All we knew was that the Angolans were fucking one another up and we had to move in before the Commies took over. But hell, it wasn’t our war either. Like that young Cuban, we were fighting someone else’s war for them.
SADF Troopie Louis Myngardt,
in Andre Brink’s novel Rumours of Rain.