I was in All Saints church, Maidstone, recently for a carol concert. All Saints is a magnificent, if neglected, building in the English perpendicular style, situated in a town which has sacrificed charm for the convenience of a giratory system. On its walls are a number of memorials, but the brassy, Gothic ones – like the one above – are the ones that catch the eye. They commemorate the dead of the Boer War.

That imperial insurgency, at the beginning of the 20C, pitted the British Army (so often disappointing, except when fighting the French) against the Afrikaners [++corrected from Afrikaaners++ see comment below].

And the West Kents, memorialised on the wall, were a volunteer force raised after the Boers inflicted a series of defeats on the regulars.

The West Kents were reservists, a bit like today’s Territorials. Over 100,000 served in South Africa during that three year war. You can read more about them in Stephen Miller’s Volunteers on the Veld: Britain’s Citizen-Soldiers and the South African War, 1899-1902. The church wall records them dying of disease, killed in action, and one unfortunate “accidentally shot” – “blue on blue” in the contemporary euphemism. History has robbed the proud brass plaques (paid for by parents who had lost their sons) of any consequence. The empire has fallen. The sun set.

Today, the English are merely poorly-resourced auxiliaries for another English-speaking people. It isn’t disease but homemade bombs (“IEDs”), landmines and vehicle accidents that account for many of today’s deaths. Britain has a fighting force of fewer than 25,000 (Maidstone has a population of around 140,000), and its chief deployments are not in Africa, but in southern Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Of course, Maidstone still manages a cheer for its returning soldiers. But there are no new brass plaques in the empty church. And there are no futile wars fought in the present.