Two Years on Trek: Being Some Account of the Royal Sussex Regiment in South Africa

In the sweltering boredom of Malta, a regiment waits. Other units ship out to South Africa while the Royal Sussex Regiment languishes, restless and frustrated, reading newspaper accounts of battles they are not yet part of. This is the opening tableau of Louis Eugène Du Moulin's vivid memoir: young soldiers burning to prove themselves, officers wrestling with the machinery of deployment, and a palpable tension between anticipation and inaction that crackles through every page. When the regiment finally embarks for the Second Boer War, Du Moulin proves an exact and unsentimental chronicler of campaign life. He records the long marches, the scattered engagements, the strange interactions with Boer civilians and the South African landscape. But what distinguishes this memoir from mere campaign history is its attention to the texture of military existence: the black humor of soldiers enduring hardship, the hierarchies and friendships that bind men together, the small indignities and unexpected dignities of life in the field. Du Moulin writes with the eye of someone who observed everything and forgot nothing. Now over a century old, this memoir survives as a genuine voice from the imperial past, neither glamorizing nor condemning the war it describes but simply rendering it as those who lived it experienced it. For readers drawn to the inner life of war, the mechanics of empire, or the rhythms of Edwardian military memoir, Du Moulin's account offers something increasingly rare: the unfiltered testimony of a participant who knew precisely what he had witnessed.