Cool, thanks for posting this, it's heartening to see a good man given his proper due for his courage and service.
Sadly, it seems that these good men often go without even a simple "thank you" and sometimes even worse when the stupid politicians wrongfully scapegoat soldiers in the theatre of war only to save their own sad asses from some media-induced shitstorm...
From the Boer-Wars we get a classic pipe name, the "Oom Paul" (Uncle Paul Kruger), a tag which is taken to task with thoughtful reflection by Dr. Fred Hanna in his
must-read book:
"The Perfect Smoke".
Here's a clip about a truly fortified Australian vet that'll stiffen yer spine! (also features him smoking a Peterson!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0merscyHw
And if you've never seen the movie
Breaker Morant, it's a brilliant film that I highly recommend. It perfectly illustrates the disgraceful FUBAR brought about by political dimensions which can often be more damaging to the good man than battle itself...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-AKnXMEqhg
On a final note, here's a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, often voted by British citizens to be their favorite poem, yet ironically the poem is actually a condemnation of the British Government as led by Lord Salisbury...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK4HDCIr_E8
'In these straitened times, the old-fashioned virtues of fortitude, responsibilities and resolution, as articulated in "If...", become ever more important.'
Long may they remain so.
According to Rudyard Kipling, his famous poem "If— " was written in celebration of Leander Starr Jameson's personal qualities at overcoming the difficulties of the ill-fated "Jameson Raid", for which he largely took the blame.
Jameson never revealed the extent of the British Government's support for the raid. This has led a string of Kipling scholars to point out that the poem's lines
'If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you' were designed specifically to pay tribute to the courage and dignity of Jameson's silence.
But Kipling's anger at Jameson's treatment by the British establishment never abated.
Even though the poet had become the first English-speaking recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, he refused a knighthood and the Order of Merit from the British Government and the King, just as he refused the posts of Poet Laureate and Companion of Honour.
The tragedy was that Kipling's only son, Lieutenant John Kipling, was to die in World War I at the Battle of Loos in 1915, only a handful of years after his father's most famous poem first appeared. His body was never found.
It was a shock from which Kipling never fully recovered. But his son's spirit, as well as that of Leander Starr Jameson, lives on in the lines of the poem that continues to inspire millions.
