A WEST POINTER WITH THE BOERS

First edition: 411 pages, 8vo (210 x 150 mm), frontispiece portrait, many illustrations, blue cloth with a photograph of Blake mounted on a horse laid on upper cover, starting to wear at the front hinge, corners slightly bumped, uncut fore edge and bottom edge, a good copy.

Many of the Irish Brigade were, like the author of this memoir, Irish Americans who were both anti-English and anti-Imperial. Blake's memoir covers the first part of the war in Natal and the subsequent guerrilla phase in the Transvaal. His account is, despite its extremism, one of the best written by a foreign volunteer serving with the Boers. Blake was, like De Villebois-Mareuil, a frustrated idealist who was in conflict with the temper of his age. He died in a hotel room in New York in 1907 and is thought by many to have committed suicide.