With Methuen to Kimberley : the advance reviewed by an eyewitness. N.J. Gillet, Cape Town, [1900]

With Methuen to Kimberley : the advance reviewed by an eyewitness.  N.J. Gillet, 5, Hout Street, Cape Town, 1900.

16 printed pages (slight browning; ). 140 x 210 mm. Staple bound in the original faded grey printed wrappers with an oval photogrpahic portrait of Major-General Lord Methuen on the front cover (spine worn but holding; some edges very slightly nicked). 

"President Steyn's villainy unmasked by the Boers. Receives £50,000 blood money. Afrikaner Bond as an aliby. Free States demoralised to the point of mutiny. Confessions of a C.M.R. gunner in the Boer ranks. The end of the war a hand." - printed above the photo. Gillet was still in the Cape Colony at the start of the Anglo-Boer War late in 1899, when he compiled a propagandistic publication, With Methuen to Kimberly: the advance reviewed by an eye-witness (Cape Town, 1900). He applied to become a naturalized citizen in 1902. This is a biased picture of the suffering and loss of life in the Second Boer War - is nevertheless a scarce contemporary pamphlet. Mendelssohn said, 

"The  author  of  this  sketch  appears  to  have  taken  notes  from  a  prisoner 
who  had  formerly  been  in  the  Cape  Mounted  Rifles.  Several  of  Lord 
Methuen's  engagements  are  described,  and  the  Boer  losses  at  Magersfontein 
are  put  down  at  2000,  which  information  is  certainly  not  borne  out  by  other 
reports.  The  burghers  are  represented  as  disorganised,  and  indignant  at 
Steyn's  alleged  acceptance  of  a  bribe  of  £50,000.  They  are  in  great  fear  of 
the  Lancers  and  the  lyddite,  but  have  their  spirits  kept  up  by  reports  of 
a  succession  of  victories,  manufactured  for  the  purpose  by  the  Free  State 
Ex-press  and  the  Friend  of  the  Free  State. "

OCLC Number, 1059449823. WorldCat locates three copies worldwide (one in Sweden and two in South Africa). Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography.

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