Leo Amery stated that “the police were first-class fighters, combining the skill of the Boer with the courage and self-sacrifice of the disciplined soldier”. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that the ZARPs were "bullies in peace, but were certainly heroes in war". The “fighting” ZARPs accompanied the Boer forces from the ZAR that invaded Natal. They participated in many major and minor engagements but gained enduring fame at the Battle of Bergendal where they were destroyed as a unit. Individual members as well as the last contingent of the ZARPs continued to fight in the ZAR during the guerrilla and final stage of the Second Boer War. The British historian Thomas Pakenham wrote about the way that British image of the ZARPs completely changed as: "How ironic that the notorious “bully boys” of Johannesburg, the epitome of the brutal Boer, who had helped precipitate the war by shooting Tom Edgar, should now come to be regarded by the British as heroes cast in their own mould."