Condition: DJ has small vertical closed tear at left front corner. Light edge wear and few small insect marks. Hardcover clean and tidy.
Format: Hardcover with DJ
Published: First Edition 1969 (Tafelberg)
Pages: 242
ISBN:
When the Adjutant ordered us to let him drop, one of the guardsmen said later, it made me sick. For weeks I had personally looked after him, and I felt as if I were burying my own brother. Back in the barracks a soldier remarked : Well, thats another of them despatched: To this one of his mates, Wilfred Harrison, retorted It looks much like premeditated murder to me
What happened to Gideon Scheepers, the gallant twenty-three year old Boer fighter who was executed by a British firing squad some months before the Anglo-Boer War came to an end? Though nobody knows, since his body was never found, this young heliographer became an almost legendary figure in the South African history and his name sacred to many Afrikaners. As he was considered innocent and had become an idol because of his daring exploits in the Cape Colony, Scheepers execution caused a great outcry throughout the world.
Despite his tragic end and the public interest aroused by the secret and apparently clandestine circumstances of his death, very little is really known about his exact movements and experiences. As a result of this the author envisages Sword in the Sand not so much as a biography of Gideon Scheepers, but rather a fragment of South African history centered around a key figure.
Of special interest is, above all, the translation of Scheepers diary notes written up to hours before his execution. The execution itself has now generally been condemned by Boer and Briton as a disgraceful act, but its consequences were more far-reaching than anyone could have foreseen at the time : Gideon Scheepers took his place in the martyrology of Afrikanerdom.
