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The German South-West Africa campaign and the battle at Sandfontein, which marked the first foreign deployment of the Union Defence Forces (UDF), as well as its first active participation in a war, are now largely forgotten. Yet this belies the importance of the campaign and of the first-battle experience at Sandfontein, for in many ways this was significantly unlike subsequent military operations of the German South-West Africa campaign and the wider South African participation in the First World War. This article uses the campaign as a lens through which to analyse the nature and organization of the UDF in 1914 and to assess the difficulties the South African staffs faced. South African military thinking, in terms of how it shaped Sandfontein and was in turn affected by that first-battle experience, is also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]