About this time Arthur Desmond would later claim that he took time off to involve himself in South Africa's Second Boer War, that he was in fact "a member of Gen. 'Bob's’ light horse at Cape Town and Pretoria." Arthur Desmond also claimed to have been in the largest and bloodiest single battle of the Boer War – the Battle of Paardeberg in February 1900. When Desmond was arrested and put on trial in Chicago in 1904, he made newspaper headlines by claiming that the rifle he used to hold off a troop of Chicago police officers was one he had captured in the Battle of Baardeberg.