Painting the Map Red is based on extensive research into public and private papers from printed and manuscript sources in both Canada and Britain. Carman Miller attempts to explain why men volunteered for service in this distant conflict despite the rancorous pre-war debate on the wisdom of Canadian participation. He examines the difficulties of leading citizen soldiers and compares the differing styles of leadership. He also reveals how the soldiers' experiences in the field and the public's perceptions of the war altered Canadian opinion, politics, and military development.

Charles Henry Tweddell (1869-1921) was one of several thousand Canadian soldiers who fought with British forces in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). A methodical diarist, Tweddell recounts his year of service from the time he left Quebec City until his return. Tweddell's diary captures the sounds, sights, and stench of war, its friendships and rivalries, its routine and boredom, its death, disease, and injury. Readers are taken into the battlefield and the British military s disastrous medical services and facilities, and his month-long sight-seeing sick leave in London. Tweddell's diary...