In 1900 Simon Fonthill, Alice, Jenkins and the tracker Mzingeli are travelling across South Africa to meet Lord Kitchener when Boer commandos derail their train. The journey becomes a running encounter with mobile guerrilla warfare, and Fonthill is pulled back into military command as British forces try to locate and trap the elusive Christiaan de Wet. His experience as a scout becomes crucial in a landscape where railway lines, farms and long-distance movement matter as much as formal battlefields.
The historical setting is the Second Boer War as it shifted from conventional campaigning toward a prolonged guerrilla conflict. Kitchener’s increasingly systematic effort to restrict Boer mobility used blockhouses, scorched-earth operations and concentration camps, while commanders such as de Wet repeatedly evaded British columns. Wilcox places Fonthill between these opposing methods of war, using pursuit across the veldt to expose the cost and frustration of imperial counter-guerrilla operations.
