BREAKER MORANT and the Bushveldt Carbineers

Publisher's brown cloth binding with dust jacket.

lxv + 238pp. Illustrated.

Captain de Bertodano, the man who initiated investigations into the suspicious activities of the Bushveldt Carbineers, later recalled, "One afternoon walking through the Camp, I met Morant out for exercise with a young Lieut. of the Wiltshire Regiment (dark red hair, but whose name I forget)... Morant came up to me and said that his trial for the shooting of the Missionary was a scandal and a disgrace to the Army, that he was innocent, and that he was selected as a victim because he had shot a few damned Boers. 'You are the man who has worked up all the evidence and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for the betrayal of your brother officers.' I replied very quietly, 'Morant, I am very proud of having been the cause of bringing you to trial. You know in your heart that you and Handcock murdered poor old Heese because you were afraid that he would report the shooting of the Boers in cold blood. But you were such damned fools as not to realise that we had all the evidence without calling on him. We know who is behind it all and has led you by the nose, but we haven't got him yet.' I referred to Bulala Taylor and he knew it, but I didn't mention his name. 'I don't recognize you and that poor fool Handcock as brother officers. You are guilty as Hell and I am glad to help send you there . . .  Where is your boy? He has disappeared. Have you murdered him, too?' I told the young officer that his prisoner was not allowed to speak to anyone and walked away."

From the front flap:

'Breaker Morant, the bold swashbuckler who faced a firing-squad in Pretoria in 1902 and was later enshrined, together with his friend Peter Handcock, as a ''scapegoat'' of callous British Imperialists, has become the centrepiece of an enduring legend. He has been portrayed in biographies and novels, on the screen and on the stage. The time has come to chip away inaccuracies and mis-conceptions to provide more credible foundations.

Drawing on sources in South Africa and elsewhere, as well as publishing a large selection of important documents, Dr Arthur Davey has sought and found definite or probable answers to a number of hitherto unresolved issues. Did Kitchener give secret verbal orders that no Boer prisoners were to be taken? Was this harsh autocrat ill-disposed towards Australian ''Colonials''? Were the groups of Boers who were shot ''train wreckers and marauders'' as Morant asserted? Were the courts-martial rigged? Underlying the trials was there an intent to placate Imperial Germany? Were the full proceedings deliberately suppressed or concealed from later researchers by the authorities of Great Britain? How comprehensive was Lieutenant George Witton's published account (1907) of the events?

Readers of Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers will also be intrigued to see that an Imperial officer, born and educated in Australia, led the Intelligence Department's investigations of the irregularities and will be introduced to Trooper Robert Cochrane, a Justice of the Peace of Western Australia, who was fortuitously at hand to record deposition after deposition by men of ill-starred corps. Illuminated, too, is the lot of Blacks in the Northern Transvaal, caught up in the tragic sequence as victims and allies in the sombre scenario.'