CAMPAIGN PICTURES

OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

(1899—1900)

Letters from the Front

BY

A. G. HALES

Special Correspondent of the “Daily News”

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED

LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE

1901

CAMPAIGN PICTURES.

AUSTRALIA ON THE MARCH.

BELMONT BATTLEFIELD.

At two o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 6th of the
month, the reveille sounded, and the Australians commenced
their preparations for the march to join Methuen’s army. By 4
a.m. the mounted rifles led the way out of camp, and the
toilsome march over rough and rocky ground commenced. The
country was terribly rough as we drove the transports up and
over the Orange River, and rougher still in the low kopjes on
the other side. The heat was simply blistering, but the
Australians did not seem to mind it to any great extent; they
were simply feverish to get on to the front, but they had to
hang back and guard the transports.

At last the hilly country faded behind us. We counted upon
pushing on rapidly, but the African mules were a sorry lot,
and could make but little headway in the sandy tracks. Still,
there was no rest for the men, because at intervals one of
Remington’s scouts would turn up at a flying gallop,
springing apparently from nowhere, out of the womb of the
wilderness, to inform us that flying squads of Boers were
hanging round us. But so carefully watchful were the
Remingtons that the Boers had no chance of surprising us. No
sooner did the scouts inform us of their approach in any
direction than our rifles swung forward ready to give them a
hearty Australian reception. This made the march long and
toilsome, though we never had a chance to fire a shot. At
5.30 we marched with all our transports into Witteput, the
wretched little mules being the only distressed portion of
the contingent.

At Witteput the news reached us that a large party of the
enemy had managed to pass between General Methuen’s men and
ourselves, and had invested Belmont, out of which place the
British troops had driven them a few weeks previously. We had
no authentic news concerning this movement. Our contingent
spread out on the hot sand at Witteput, panting for a drop of
rain from the lowering clouds that hung heavily overhead. Yet
hot, tired, and thirsty as we were, we yet found time to look
with wonder at the sky above us. The men from the land of the
Southern Cross are used to gorgeous sunsets, but never had we
looked upon anything like this. Great masses of coal-black
clouds frowned down upon us, flanked by fiery crimson cloud
banks, that looked as if they would rain blood, whilst the
atmosphere was dense enough to half-stifle one. Now and again
the thunder rolled out majestically, and the lightning
flashed from the black clouds into the red, like bayonets
through smoke banks.

Yet we had not long to wait and watch, for within half an
hour after our arrival the Colonel galloped down into our
midst just as the evening ration was being given out. He held
a telegram aloft, and the stillness that fell over the camp
was so deep that each man could hear his neighbour’s heart
beat. Then the Colonel’s voice cut the stillness like a bugle
call. “Men, we are needed at Belmont; the Boers are there in
force, and we have been sent for to relieve the place. I’ll
want you in less than two hours.” It was then the men showed
their mettle. Up to their feet they leapt like one man, and
they gave the Colonel a cheer that made the sullen, halting
mules kick in their harness. “We are ready now, Colonel,
we’ll eat as we march,” and the “old man” smiled, and gave
the order to fall in, and they fell in, and as darkness
closed upon the land they marched out of Witteput to the
music of the falling rain and the thunder of heaven’s
artillery.

All night long it was march, halt, and “Bear a hand, men,”
for those thrice accursed mules failed us at every pinch. In
vain the niggers plied the whips of green hide, vain their
shouts of encouragement, or painfully shrill anathemas; the
mules had the whip hand of us, and they kept it. But, in
spite of it all, in the chilly dawn of the African morning,
our fellows, with their shoulders well back, and heads held
high, marched into Belmont, with every man safe and sound,
and every waggon complete.

Then the Gordons turned out and gave us a cheer, for they
had passed us in the train as we crossed the line above
Witteput, and they knew, those veterans from Indian wars,
what our raw Volunteers had done; they had been on their feet
from two o’clock on Wednesday morning until five o’clock of
the following day, with the heat at 122 in the shade, and
bitter was their wrath when they learnt that the Boer spies,
who swarm all over the country, had heralded their coming, so
that the enemy had only waited to plant a few shells into
Belmont before disappearing into the hills beyond. That was
the cruel part of it. They did not mind the fatigue, they did
not worry about the thirst or the hunger, but to be robbed of
a chance to show the world what they could do in the teeth of
the enemy was gall and wormwood to them, and the curses they
sent after the discreet Boer were weird, quaint, picturesque,
and painfully prolific.

We are lying with the Gordons now, waiting for the Boers
to come along and try to take Belmont, and our fellows and
the “Scotties” are particularly good chums, and it is the
cordial wish of both that they may some day give the enemy a
taste of the bayonet together.

WITH THE AUSTRALIANS.

BELMONT.

Australia has had her first taste of war, not a very great
or very important performance, but we have buried our dead,
and that at least binds us more closely to the Motherland
than ever before. The Queenslanders, the wild riders, and the
bushmen of the north-eastern portion of the continent have
been the first to pay their tribute to nationhood with the
life blood of her sons, two of whom—Victor James and
McLeod—were buried by their comrades on the scene of action
a couple of days ago, whilst half a dozen others, including
Lieutenant Aide, fell more or less seriously wounded. The
story of the fight is simply told; there is no necessity for
any wild vapouring in regard to Australian courage, no need
for hysterical praise. Our fellows simply did what they were
told to do in a quiet and workmanlike manner, just as we who
know them expected that they would; we are all proud of them,
and doubly proud that the men in the fight with them were our
cousins from Canada.

The most noteworthy fact about the engagement is to be
gleaned by noting that the Australians adopted Boer tactics,
and so escaped the slaughter that has so often fallen to the
lot of the British troops when attacking similar positions.
Before describing the fight it may be as well to give some
slight idea of the disposition of the opposing forces. Our
troops held the railway line all the way from Cape Town to
Modder River. At given distances, or at points of strategic
importance, strong bodies of men are posted to keep the Boers
from raiding, or from interfering with the railway or
telegraph lines. Such a force, consisting of Munster
Fusiliers, two guns of R.H. Artillery, the Canadians, and the
Queenslanders, were posted at Belmont under Colonel Pilcher.
The enemy had no fixed camping ground. Mounted on hardy
Basuto ponies, carrying no provisions but a few mealies and a
little biltong, armed only with rifles, they sweep
incessantly from place to place, and are an everlasting
source of annoyance to us. At one moment they may be hovering
in the kopjes around us at Enslin, waiting to get a chance to
sneak into the kopjes that immediately overlook our camp, but
thanks to the magnificent scouting qualities of the Victorian
Mounted Rifles, they have never been able to do so. During
the night they disperse, and take up their abode on
surrounding farms as peaceful tillers of the soil. In a day
or so they organise again, and swoop down on some other
place, such as Belmont. Their armies, under men like Cronje
or Joubert, seldom move from strongly-entrenched
positions.

The people I am referring to as reivers are farmers
recruited by local leaders, and are a particularly dangerous
class of people to deal with, as they know every inch of this
most deceptive country. As soon as they are whipped they make
off to wives and home, and meet the scouts with a bland smile
and outstretched hand. It is no use trying to get any
information out of them, for no man living can look so much
like an unmitigated fool when he wants to as the ordinary,
every-day farmer of the veldt. I know Chinamen exceptionally
well, I have had an education in the ways of the children of
Confucius; but no Chinaman that I have come in contact with
could ever imitate the half-idiotic smile, the patient,
ox-like placidity of countenance, the meek, religious look of
holy resignation to the will of Providence which comes
naturally to the ordinary Boer farmer. It is this faculty
which made our very clever Army Intelligence people rank the
farmer of the veldt as a fool. Yet, if I am any judge, and I
have known men in many lands, our friend of the veldt is as
clever and as crafty as any Oriental I have yet mixed
with.

Now for the Australian fight. On the day before Christmas,
Colonel Pilcher, at Belmont, got wind of the assemblage of a
considerable Boer force at a place 30 miles away, called
Sunnyside Farm, and he determined to try to attack it before
the enemy could get wind of his intention. To this end he
secured every nigger for some miles around—which proved his
good sense, as the niggers are all in the pay of the Boers,
no matter how loyal they may pretend to be to the British, a
fact which the British would do well to take heed of, for it
has cost them pretty dearly already. On Christmas Eve he
started out, taking two guns of the Royal Navy Artillery, a
couple of Maxims, all the Queenslanders, and a few hundred
Canadians. Colonel Pilcher’s force numbered in all about 600
men. He marched swiftly all night, and got to Sunnyside Farm
in good time Christmas Day. The Boers had not a ghost of an
idea that our men were near them, and were completely beaten
at their own game, the surprise party being complete. The
enemy were found in a laager in a strong position in some
rather steep kopjes, and it was at once evident that they
were expecting strong reinforcements from surrounding farms.
Colonel Pilcher at once extended his forces so as to try to
surround the kopjes. Whilst this was going on, Lieutenant
Aide, with four Queensland troopers, was sent to the far left
of what was supposed to be the Boer position. His orders were
to give notice of any attempt at retreat on the part of the
enemy. He did his work well. Getting close to the kopje, he
saw a number of the enemy slinking off, and at once
challenged them. As he did so a dozen Boers dashed out of the
kopje, and Aide opened fire on them, which caused the Boers
to fire a volley at him. Lieutenant Aide fell from his horse
with two bullets in his body; one went through the fleshy
part of his stomach, entering his body sideways, the other
went into his thigh. A trooper named McLeod was shot through
the heart, and fell dead. Both the other troopers were
wounded. Trooper Rose caught a horse, and hoisted his
lieutenant into the saddle, and sent him out of danger.

Meantime the R.H. Battery, taking range from Lieutenant
Aide’s fire, opened out on the enemy. Their guns put a great
fear into the Boers, and a general bolt set in. The Boers
fired as they cleared, and if our fellows had been formed up
in the style usual to the British army in action, we should
have suffered heavily; but the Queensland bushmen had dropped
behind cover, and soon had complete possession of the kopjes;
another trooper named Victor Jones was shot through the
brain, and fourteen others were more or less badly wounded.
The Boers then surrendered. We took 40 prisoners, and found
about 14 dead Boers on the ground, besides a dozen wounded.
They were all Cape Dutch, no Transvaalers being found in
their ranks. We secured 40,000 rounds of their ammunition,
300 Martini rifles, and only one Mauser rifle, which was in
the possession of the Boer commander. After destroying all
that we took, we moved on, and had a look at some of the
farms near by, as from some of the documents found in camp it
was certain that the whole district was a perfect nest of
rebellion. Quite a little store of arms and ammunition was
discovered by this means, and the occupants of the farms were
therefore transported to Belmont. Our fellows carried the
little children and babies in their arms all the way, and
marched into Belmont singing, with the little ones on their
shoulders. Every respect was shown to the women, old and
young, and to the old men, but the young fellows were closely
guarded all the time. The Canadians did not lose a single
man, neither did any of the others except the
Queenslanders.

Another Boer commando, about 1,000 strong, with two
batteries of artillery, is now hovering in the ranges away to
the north-west of Enslin, but Colonel Hoad is not likely to
be tempted out to meet them, since his orders are to hold
Enslin against attack. However, should they venture to make a
dash for Enslin, they will get a pretty bad time, as the
Australians there are keen for a fight.

Concerning farming, it is an unknown quantity here, as we
in Australia understand it. These people simply squat down
wherever they can find a natural catchment for water. There
is no clearing to be done, as the land is quite devoid of
timber. They put nigger labour on, and build a farmhouse.
These farmhouses are much better built than those which the
average pioneer farmer in Australia owns. They make no
attempt at adornment, but build plain, substantial houses,
containing mostly about six rooms. The roofs are mostly flat,
and the frontages plain to ugliness. They do no fencing,
except where they go in for ostrich breeding. When they farm
for feathers they fence with wire about six feet in height.
This kind of farming is very popular with the better class of
Boers, as it entails very little labour, and no outlay beyond
the initial expense. They raise just enough meal to keep
themselves, but do not farm for the market. They breed horses
and cattle; the horses are a poor-looking lot, as the Boers
do not believe much in blood. They never ride or work mares,
but use them as brood stock. This is a bad plan, as young and
immature mares breed early on the veldt, and throw weedy
stock. Their cattle, however, are attended to on much better
lines, and most of the beef that I have seen would do credit
to any station in Australia, or any American ranch. They
mostly raise a few sheep and goats; the sheep are a poor lot,
the wool is of a very inferior class, and the mutton poor. I
don’t know much about goats, so will pass them, though I very
much doubt if any Australian squatter would give them grass
room.

On most of the farms a small orchard is found enclosed in
stone walls. Here again the ignorance of the Boers is very
marked; the fruit is of poor quality, though the variety is
large. Thus, one finds in these orchards pears, apples,
grapes, plums, pomegranates, peaches, quinces, apricots, and
almonds. The fruit is harsh, small, and flavourless, owing to
bad pruning, want of proper manure, and good husbandry
generally. The Boer seems to think that he has done all that
is required of him when he has planted a tree; all that
follows he leaves to nature, and he would much rather sit
down and pray for a beautiful harvest than get up and work
for it. He is a great believer in the power of prayer. He
prays for a good crop of fruit; if it comes he exalts himself
and takes all the credit; if the crop fails he folds his
hands and remarks that it was God’s will that things should
so come to pass. He knocks all the work he can out of his
niggers, but does precious little himself. In stature he is
mostly tall, thin, and active. He moves with a quick,
shuffling gait, which is almost noiseless. Some of his women
folk are beautiful, while others are fat and clumsy, and are
never likely to have their portraits hung on the walls of the
Royal Academy.

A PRISONER OF WAR.

BLOEMFONTEIN HOSPITAL.

I little fancied when I sat at my ease in my tent in the
British camp that my next epistle would be written from a
hospital as a prisoner, but such is the case, and, after all,
I am far more inclined to be thankful than to growl at my
luck. Let me tell the story, for it is typical of this
peculiar country, and still more peculiar war. I had been
writing far into the night, and had left the letter ready for
post next day. Then, with a clear conscience, I threw myself
on my blankets, satisfied that I was ready for what might
happen next. Things were going to happen, but though the
night was big with fate there was no warning to me in the
whispering wind. Some men would have heard all sorts of
sounds on such a night, but I am not built that way I
suppose. Anyway, I heard nothing until, half an hour before
dawn, a voice jarred my ear with the news that “there was
something on, and I’d better fly round pretty sharp if I did
not mean to miss it.”

By the light of my lantern I saddled my horse, and
snatched a hasty cup of coffee and a mouthful of biscuit, and
as the little band of Tasmanians moved from Rensburg I rode
with them. Where they were going, or what their mission, I
did not know, but I guessed it was to be no picnic. The
quiet, resolute manner of the officers, the hushed voices,
the set, stern faces of the young soldiers, none of whom had
ever been under fire before, all told me that there was blood
in the air, so I asked no questions, and sat tight in my
saddle. As the daylight broke over the far-stretching veldt,
I saw that two other correspondents were with the party,
viz., Reay, of the Melbourne Herald, and Lambie, poor,
ill-fated Lambie, of the Melbourne Age. For a couple
of hours we trotted along without incident of any kind, then
we halted at a farmhouse, the name of which I have forgotten.
There we found Captain Cameron encamped with the rest of the
Tasmanians, and after a short respite the troops moved
outward again, Captain Cameron in command; we had about
eighty men, all of whom were mounted.

As we rode off I heard the order given for every man to
“sit tight and keep his eyes open.” Then our scouts put spurs
to their horses and dashed away on either wing, skirting the
kopjes and screening the main body, and so for another hour
we moved without seeing or hearing anything to cause us
trouble. By this time we had got into a kind of huge basin,
the kopjes were all round us, but the veldt was some miles in
extent. I knew at a glance that if the Boers were in force
our little band was in for a bad time, as an enemy hidden in
those hills could watch our every movement on the plain, note
just where we intended to try and pass through the chain of
hills, and attack us with unerring certainty and suddenness.
All at once one of our scouts, who had been riding far out on
our left flank, came flying in with the news that the enemy
was in the kopjes in front of us, and he further added that
he thought they intended to surround our party if possible.
Captain Cameron ordered the men to split into two parties,
one to move towards the kopjes on our right; the other to
fall back and protect our retreat, if such a move became
necessary. Mr. Lambie and I decided to move on with the
advance party, and at a hard gallop we moved away towards a
line of kopjes that seemed higher than any of the others in
the belt. As we neared those hills it seemed to us that there
were no Boers in possession, and that nothing would come of
the ride after all, and we drew bridle and started to discuss
the situation. At that time we were not far from the edge of
some kopjes, which, though lying low, were covered with rocky
boulders and low scrub.

We had drifted a few hundred yards behind the advance
party, but were a good distance in front of the rearguard,
when a number of horsemen made a dash from the kopjes which
we were skirting, and the rifles began to speak. There was no
time for poetry; it was a case of “sit tight and ride hard,”
or surrender and be made prisoners. Lambie shouted to me:
“Let’s make a dash, Hales,” and we made it. The Boers were
very close to us before we knew anything concerning their
presence. Some of them were behind us, and some extended
along the edge of the kopjes by which we had to pass to get
to the British line in front, all of them were galloping in
on us, shooting as they rode, and shouting to us to
surrender, and, had we been wise men, we would have thrown up
our hands, for it was almost hopeless to try and ride through
the rain of lead that whistled around us. It was no wonder we
were hit; the wonder to me is that we were not filled with
lead, for some of the bullets came so close to me that I
think I should know them again if I met them in a
shop-window. We were racing by this time, Lambie’s big
chestnut mare had gained a length on my little veldt pony,
and we were not more than a hundred yards away from the
Mauser rifles that had closed in on us from the kopjes. A
voice called in good English: “Throw up your hands, you d——
fools.” But the galloping fever was on us both, and we only
crouched lower on our horses’ backs, and rode all the harder,
for even a barn-yard fowl loves liberty.

All at once I saw my comrade throw his hands up with a
spasmodic gesture. He rose in his stirrups, and fairly
bounded high out of his saddle, and as he spun round in the
air I saw the red blood on the white face, and I knew that
death had come to him sudden and sharp. Again the rifles
spoke, and the lead was closer to me than ever a friend
sticks in time of trouble, and I knew in my heart that the
next few strides would settle things. The black pony was
galloping gamely under my weight. Would he carry me safely
out of that line of fire, or would he fail me? Suddenly
something touched me on the right temple; it was not like a
blow; it was not a shock; for half a second I was conscious.
I knew I was hit; knew that the reins had fallen from my
nerveless hands, knew that I was lying down upon my horse’s
back, with my head hanging below his throat. Then all the
world went out in one mad whirl. Earth and heaven seemed to
meet as if by magic. My horse seemed to rise with me, not to
fall, and then—chaos.

When next I knew I was still on this planet I found myself
in the saddle again, riding between two Boers, who were
supporting me in the saddle as I swayed from side to side.
There was a halt; a man with a kindly face took my head in
the hollow of his arm, whilst another poured water down my
throat. Then they carried me to a shady spot beneath some
shrubbery, and laid me gently down. One man bent over me and
washed the blood that had dried on my face, and then
carefully bound up my wounded temple. I began to see things
more plainly—a blue sky above me; a group of rough, hardy
men, all armed with rifles, around me. I saw that I was a
prisoner, and when I tried to move I soon knew I was
damaged.

The same good-looking young fellow with the curly beard
bent over me again. “Feel any better now, old fellow?” I
stared hard at the speaker, for he spoke like an Englishman,
and a well-educated one, too. “Yes, I’m better. I’m a
prisoner, ain’t I?” “Yes.” “Are you an Englishman?” I asked.
He laughed. “Not I,” he said, “I’m a Boer born and bred, and
I am the man who bowled you over. What on earth made you do
such a fool’s trick as to try and ride from our rifles at
that distance?” “Didn’t think I was welcome in these parts.”
“Don’t make a jest of it, man,” the Boer said gravely;
“rather thank God you are a living man this moment. It was
His hand that saved you; nothing else could have done so.” He
spoke reverently; there was no cant in the sentiment he
uttered—his face was too open, too manly, too fearless for
hypocrisy. “How long is it since I was knocked over?” “About
three hours.” “Is my comrade dead?” “Quite dead,” the Boer
replied; “death came instantly to him. He was shot through
the brain.” “Poor beggar!” I muttered, “and he’ll have to rot
on the open veldt, I suppose?”

The Boer leader’s face flushed angrily. “Do you take us
for savages?” he said. “Rest easy. Your friend will get
decent burial. What was his rank?” “War correspondent.” “And
your own?” “War correspondent also. My papers are in my
pocket somewhere.” “Sir,” said the Boer leader, “you dress
exactly like two British officers; you ride out with a
fighting party, you try to ride off at a gallop under the
very muzzles of our rifles when we tell you to surrender. You
can blame no one but yourselves for this day’s work.” “I
blame no man; I played the game, and am paying the penalty.”
Then they told me how poor Lambie’s horse had swerved between
myself and them after Lambie had fallen, then they saw me
fall forward in the saddle, and they knew I was hit. A few
strides later one of them had sent a bullet through my
horse’s head, and he had rolled on top of me. Yet, with it
all, I had escaped with a graze over the right temple and a
badly knocked-up shoulder. Truly, as the Boer said, the hand
of God must have shielded me.

For a day and a half I lay at that laager whilst our
wounded men were brought in, and here I should like to say a
word to the people of England. Our men, when wounded, are
treated by the Boers with manly gentleness and kind
consideration. When we left the laager in an open trolly, we,
some half-dozen Australians, and about as many Boers, all
wounded, were driven for some hours to a small hospital, the
name of which I do not know. It was simply a farmhouse turned
into a place for the wounded. On the road thither we called
at many farms, and at every one men, women, and children came
out to see us. Not one taunting word was uttered in our
hearing, not one braggart sentence passed their lips. Men
brought us cooling drinks, or moved us into more comfortable
positions on the trolly. Women, with gentle fingers, shifted
bandages, or washed wounds, or gave us little dainties that
come so pleasant in such a time; whilst the little children
crowded round us with tears running down their cheeks as they
looked upon the bloodstained khaki clothing of the wounded
British. Let no man or woman in all the British Empire whose
son or husband lies wounded in the hands of the Boers fear
for his welfare, for it is a foul slander to say that the
Boers do not treat their wounded well. England does not treat
her own men better than the Boers treat the wounded British,
and I am writing of that which I have seen and know beyond
the shadow of a doubt.

From the little farmhouse hospital I was sent on in an
ambulance train to the hospital at Springfontein, where all
the nurses and medical staff are foreigners, all of them
trained and skilful. Even the nurses had a soldierly air
about them. Here everything was as clean as human industry
could make it, and the hospital was worked like a piece of
military mechanism. I only had a day or two here, and then I
was sent by train in an ambulance carriage to the capital of
the Orange Free State, and here I am in Bloemfontein
Hospital. There are a lot of our wounded here, both officers
and men, some of whom have been here for months.

I have made it my business to get about amongst the
private soldiers, to question them concerning the treatment
they have received since the moment the Mauser rifles tumbled
them over, and I say emphatically that in every solitary
instance, without one single exception, our countrymen
declare that they have been grandly treated. Not by the
hospital nurses only, not by the officials alone, but by the
very men whom they were fighting. Our “Tommies” are not the
men to waste praise on any men unless it is well deserved,
but this is just about how “Tommy” sums up the situation:

“The Boer is a rough-looking beggar in the field, ‘e don’tt
wear no uniform, ‘nd ‘e don’t know enough about soldiers’
drill to keep himself warm, but ‘e can fight in ‘is own
bloomin’ style, which ain’t our style. If ‘e’d come out on
the veldt, ‘nd fight us our way, we’d lick ‘im every time,
but when it comes to fightin’ in the kopjes, why, the Boer is
a dandy, ‘nd if the rest of Europe don’t think so, only let
’em have a try at ‘im ‘nd see. But when ‘e has shot you he
acts like a blessed Christian, ‘nd bears no malice. ‘E’s like
a bloomin’ South Sea cocoanut, not much to look at outside,
but white ‘nd sweet inside when yer know ‘im, ‘nd it’s when
you’re wounded ‘nd a prisoner that you get a chance to know
‘im, see.” And “Tommy” is about correct in his judgment.

The Boers have made most excellent provision for the
treatment of wounded after battle. All that science can do is
done. Their medical men fight as hard to save a British life
or a British limb as medical men in England would battle to
save life or limb of a private person. At the Bloemfontein
Hospital everything is as near perfection, from a medical and
surgical point, as any sane man can hope to see. It is an
extensive institution. One end is set apart for the Boer
wounded, the other for the British. No difference is made
between the two in regard to accommodation—food, medical
attendance, nursing, or visiting. Ministers of religion come
and go daily—almost hourly—at both ends. Our men, when able
to walk, are allowed to roam around the grounds, but, of
course, are not allowed to go beyond the gates, being
prisoners of war. Concerning our matron (Miss M.M. Young) and
nurses, all I can say is that they are gentlewomen of the
highest type, of whom any nation in the world might well be
proud.

I have met one or two old friends since I came here,
notably Lieutenant Bowling, of the Australian Horse, who is
now able to get about, and is cheerful and jolly. Lieutenant
Bowling has his right thumb shot off, and had a terribly
close call for his life, a Mauser bullet going into his head
alongside his right eye, and coming out just in front of the
right ear. His friends need not be anxious concerning him; he
is quite out of danger, and he and I have killed a few
tedious hours blowing tobacco smoke skywards, and chatting
about life in far off Australia. Another familiar face was
that of an English private, named Charles Laxen, of the
Northumberlands, who was wounded at Stormberg. I am told that
he displayed excellent pluck before he was laid out, firstly
by a piece of shell on the side of the head, and, later, by a
Mauser bullet through the left knee. He is getting along
O.K., but will never see service as a soldier again on
account of the wounded leg.

I had written to the President of the Orange Free State,
asking him to grant me my liberty on the ground that I was a
non-combatant. Yesterday Mr. Steyn courteously sent his
private secretary and carriage to the hospital with an
intimation that I should be granted an interview. I was
accordingly driven down to what I believe was the Stadt
House. In Australia we should term it the Town Hall. The
President met me, and treated me very courteously, and, after
chatting over my capture and the death of my friend, he
informed me that I might have my liberty as soon as I
considered myself sufficiently recovered to travel. He
offered me a pass viâ Lourenço Marques,
but I pointed out that if I were sent that way I should be so
far away from my work as to be practically useless to my
paper. The President explained to me that it was not his wish
nor the desire of his colleagues to hamper me in any way in
regard to my work. “What we want more than anything else,”
remarked the President, “is that the world shall know the
truth, and nothing but the truth, in reference to this most
unhappy war, and we will not needlessly place obstruction in
your way in your search for facts; if we can by any means
place you in the British lines we will do so. If we find it
impossible to do that you must understand that there is some
potent reason for it.” So I let that question drop, feeling
satisfied that everything that a sensible man has a right to
ask would be done on my behalf.

President Steyn is a man of a notable type. He is a big
man physically, tall and broad, a man of immense strength,
but very gentle in his manner, as so many exceptionally
strong men are. He has a typical Dutch face, calm, strong,
and passionless. A man not easily swayed by outside agencies;
one of those persons who think long and earnestly before
embarking upon a venture, but, when once started, no human
agency would turn him back from the line of conduct he had
mapped out for himself. He is no ignorant back-block
politician, but a refined, cultured gentleman, who knows the
full strength of the British Empire; and, knowing it, he has
defied it in all its might, and will follow his convictions
to the bitter end, no matter what that end may be. He
introduced me to a couple of gentlemen whose names are very
dear to the Free Staters, viz., Messrs. Fraser and Fischer,
and whilst the interview lasted nothing was talked of but the
war, and it struck me very forcibly that not one of those men
had any hatred in their hearts towards the British people.
“This,” said the President, “is not a war between us and the
British people on any question of principle; it is a war
forced upon us by a band of capitalistic adventurers, who
have hoodwinked the British public and dragged them into an
unholy, an unjust struggle with a people whose only desire
was to live at peace with all men. We do not hate your
nation; we do not hate your soldiers, though they fight
against us; but we do hate and despise the men who have
brought a cruel war upon us for their own evil ends, whilst
they try to cloak their designs in a mantle of righteousness
and liberty.” I may not have given the exact words of the
President, as I am writing from memory, but I think I have
given his exact sentiments; and, if I am any judge of human
nature, the love of his country is the love of his life.

“STOPPING A FEW.”

I saw him first, years ago upon a station in New South
Wales; a neat, smart figure less than nine stone in weight,
but it was nine stone of fencing wire full of the electricity
of life. He was in the stockyard when I first saw him,
working like any ordinary station hand, for it was the busy
portion of the year, and at such times the squatters’ sons
work like any hired hand, only a lot harder, if they are
worth their salt, and have not been bitten by the mania for
dudeism during their college course in the cities. There was
nothing of the dandy about this fellow. From head to heel he
was a man’s son, full of the vim of living, strong with the
lust of life. The sweat ran down his face, dirty with thet
dust kicked up by the cattle in the stockyard. His clothes
were not guiltless of mire, for he had been knocked over more
than once that morning, and there was an edge upon his voice
as he rapped out his orders to the stockmen who were working
with him. He did not look in the least degree pretty, and
there was not enough poetry about him just then to make an
obituary jingle on a tombstone. I little thought that day
that a time would come when he would prove the glory of his
Australian breeding in the teeth of an enemy’s guns on
African soil.

I saw him again—under silk this time—as a gentleman
rider. He was the same quiet, cool little fellow, grey-eyed,
steel-lipped, stout-hearted, with “hands” that Archer might
have envied. He rode at his fences that day as the Australian
amateurs can ride, with a rip and a rattle, with the long,
loose leg, the hands well down, and head up and back, and
“Over or Through” was his motto. I did not know him to speak
to in those old days. We were to shake hands under peculiar
circumstances away in a foreign land, in a foreign hospital,
both of us prisoners of war, both of us wounded. That was
where and how I spoke to little Dowling, lieutenant in the
First Australian Horse, as game a sample of humanity as ever
threw leg over saddle or loosed a rifle at a foe. He came to
my bedside the morning after I entered the hospital, and
standing over me with a green shade over one eye, and one
hand in a sling, said laconically:

“Australian ain’t you?”

“Yes, by gad, and I know you.” He reached out his left
hand, and placed it in mine.

“Been ‘stopping one’?” he remarked.

“Only a graze, thank God,” I replied.

Then the matron and the German doctor, as fine a gentleman
as ever drew breath, came along to have a look at me, and he
was turned out; but we chummed, as Australians have a knack
of doing in time of trouble, and I tried hard to get him to
talk of his adventures, but he was a mummy on that subject.
He would not yarn about his own doings on the fateful day
when he was laid out, though he was eloquent enough
concerning the doings of his comrades. All I could get out of
him in regard to his own part in the fray was that his men
and he had been ambushed, and that he had “stopped one” with
his head, and one with his hand, and another with his leg,
his horse had been killed, and he knew mighty little more
about it until he found himself in the hands of the Boers,
who had treated him well and kindly. I asked the matron about
his wounds, and she told me that a bullet had entered the
corner of his right eye, coming out by the right ear, ruining
the sight for ever. Another had carried away his right thumb,
and a couple had passed through his right leg, one just below
the groin, another ‘just above the knee. That was what he
modestly termed “stopping a few.”

After I had been in hospital a little while, the matron
gave me leave to prowl about to pick up “copy,” and my feet
soon led me into the ward where the wounded Dutchmen were
lying, and there I met a couple of burghers who had been in
the mêlée when Dowling was gathered in.
One of them was a handsome Swede, with a long blonde
moustache, that fell with a glorious sweep on to his chest,
as the Viking’s did of old. He was an adventurer, who knew
how to take his gruel like a man. He had joined the Boers
because he thought they were the weaker side, and had done
his best for them. He saw Dowling talking to me one day, and
asked me if I knew the “little devil.” “Yes,” I replied, “we
are countrymen.” “Americans?” he asked. “No, Australians.” He
raised himself on his elbow, whilst I propped his shoulders
up with pillows, and as he remained thus he gazed admiringly
at the slight, boyish figure which limped lazily through the
ward. “What a little tiger cat he is,” muttered the recumbent
giant. “I thought we’d have to kill him before we got him,
and that would have been a shame, for I hate to kill brave
men when they have no chance.” “Tell me about it,” I said.
“He won’t give me any information himself, only tells me he
‘stopped a few.'” The big, handsome Swede laughed a mighty
laugh under his great blonde moustache.

“Stopped a few, did he? If all your fellows fought it out
to the bitter end as he did, we should run short of
ammunition before the war was very old.”

A Boer nurse came over and asked us “what nonsense we made
one with the other, that we did laugh to ourselves like two
hens clucking over one egg.” The blonde giant turned his
joyous blue eyes upon her, and paid her a compliment which
caused her to bridle, whilst the blood swept like a
race-horse in its stride over neck, and cheek, and brow,
causing her dainty, girlish face to look prettier than ever.
“Ah, little Eckhardt,” he whispered, and then murmured
something in Dutch. I did not understand the words, but there
was something in the sound of the adventurer’s voice which
conjured up a moonlit garden, a rose-crowned gate swinging on
one hinge, a girl on one side and a fool on the other. The
nurse tossed her pretty head with its wealth of jet black
hair, and as she smoothed his pillows with infinite care she
murmured: “Fighting and making love, making love and
fighting—it is all one to you, Karl. I know you, you big
pirate; you are as a hen that lays away from home.” And with
that round of shrapnel she left us.

Karl got rid of a fourteen-pound sigh, which sounded like
the bursting of a lyddite shell. Then he slipped his hand
under his pillow and drew forth a flask of “Dop.” “Drink to
her,” he said. “To whom?” I asked, falling in with the humour
of the man. “To the girl I love,” he muttered like a
schoolboy. “Which one, Karl?” I asked, and I laughed as I
spoke. He snatched the brandy from my hand, lifted the flask
to his lips, and drank deeply. Then again his mighty laugh
ran through the hospital ward. “Which one? ” he said; “why,
all of them, God bless them. But the maid that is nearest is
always the dearest.” “Shut up, you Goth,” I said, “and tell
me about Dowling, for some day I shall write the story, and I
would like to hear it from the lips of one of his enemies.”
The Swede lay back upon his pillow, stroking the golden horns
of hair that fell each side of his mouth, and I noticed that
the lips which a little time before had been smiling into the
face of the nurse were now hard set and stern. So I could
have imagined him standing by the side of his gun, or rushing
headlong on to our ranks. A man with a mouth like that could
not flinch in the hour of peril if he tried, for his jaw had
the Kitchener grip, the antithesis of the parrot pout of the
dandy, or the flabby fulness of the fool.

“It was in the fore part of the day,” he said at length.
“We had been posted snugly overnight on both sides of two
ranges of kopjes, for we knew that your fellows were going to
attempt a reconnaissance next day. How did we know? you ask.
Well, comrade, ask no questions of that kind, and I’ll tell
you no lies. The truth I won’t tell you.

But we knew, and we were ready. We were disappointed when
we saw the force, for we had expected something much bigger,
and had made arrangements for a larger capture. It was only a
troop of Australian Horse that came our way, and ‘the little
devil’ was riding at their head. We bided our time, hoping
that he might be followed by more men, and, above all, we
expected and wanted some guns; but they did not put in an
appearance, so we loosed upon the little troop. They were
fairly ambushed; they did not know that a rifle was within
miles of them until the bullets were singing through their
ranks. Horses plunged suddenly forward, reared, lurched now
to the near side, now to the off, then blundered forward on
their heads, for many of our men fired at the chargers
instead of at the riders. Dowling’s horse went down with a
bullet between the flap of the saddle and the crease of the
shoulder, and the little chap went spinning over his head
amongst the rocks. But a good many saddles were empty. He was
up in a moment, yelling to his men to ride for their lives,
and they rode. We charged from cover, and rode down on the
men who had fallen, and as we closed in on them your
countryman lifted his rifle and loosed on us.

“One of our fellows took a flying shot at him at close
quarters, for his rifle was talking the language of death,
and that is a tongue no man likes to listen to. The bit of
lead took him in the eye and came out by his ear, and down he
went. But he climbed up in a moment, and his rifle was going
to his shoulder again, when I fired to break his arm, and
carried his thumb away—the thumb of the right hand, I think.
The rifle clattered on to the rocks, but as we drew round him
he pulled his revolver with his one good hand, and started to
pot us. He looked a gamecock as he stood there in the
sunlight, his face all bathed in blood, and his shattered
hand hanging numbed beside him. So we gave him a couple in
the legs to steady him, and down by his dead horse he went;
but even then he was as eager for fight as a grass widow is
for compliments, and it was not until Jan Viljoens jammed the
butt of his rifle on the crown of his head that he stretched
himself out and took no further part in that circus. We
carried him into our lines, and handed him over to our
medical man, though even as we gathered him up our scouts
came galloping in to tell us that a big body of British
troops were advancing to cut us off from our main body. But
we knew that if we left him until your ambulance people found
him, it was a million to one that he would bleed to death
amongst the rocks, and he was too good a fighter and too
brave a fellow to be left to a fate like that. Had he shown
the white feather we might have left him to the
asvogels.”

“And so,” said I, “that is how little Dowling, son of
Australia, came, as he said, ‘to stop a few’ for the sake of
his breeding. If I live, the men out in the sunny Southland
shall hear how he did it, and his name shall be known round
the gold-hunters’ camp fires, and be mentioned with pride
where the cattle drovers foregather to talk of the African
war and the men who fought and fell there.”

AUSTRALIA AT THE WAR.

ENSLIN CAMP.

Lately I have been over a very considerable tract of
country in the saddle. I might remain at one spot and glean
the information from various sources, but do not care to do
my business in that manner, simply because one is then at the
mercy of one’s informants. I find it quite hard enough to get
at the truth even when it is personally sought for. It is
really astounding how lies increase and multiply as they
spread from camp to camp. At one spot a fellow ventilates an
opinion that a big battle will be fought next day at a
certain spot; some other person catches a portion of the
conversation, and promptly tells his neighbour that a big
battle has taken place at the spot mentioned. A little later
a passing train pulls up at that camp, and a party possessing
a picturesque and vivid imagination at once informs the guard
that a fearful fight has occurred, in which a General, a
Colonel, twelve subs., and six hundred men have been killed
on our side, with fourteen hundred wounded and nine hundred
prisoners. The Boer losses are generally estimated at
something like five times that number.

The guard tells the tale later on to some traveller, who
embellishes it, and passes it along as a fact. He goes into
details, tells harrowing stories concerning hair-raising
escapes from shot and shell. He splashes the surrounding
rocks with gouts of blood, and then shudders dismally at the
sight his fancy has conjured up. When the thrilled listener
has refreshed the tale-teller from his whisky flask, the
romancist takes up the thread of his narrative once more, and
tells how the Lancers thundered over the shivering veldts in
pursuit of flying hordes of foemen, and for awhile, like some
graveyard ghoul, he revels in the moans of the dying and the
blood of the slain. Another pull at the flask sets him going
again like clockwork, and he makes a vivid picture out of the
thunder of the guns as our gallant (they are always gallant)
fellows bombarded the enemy from the heights.

Then he switches off from the artillery, and tells a
blood-curdling tale of Boer treachery and cowardice. He tells
how the enemy held out the white flag to coax our men to stop
firing. Then, in awe-inspiring tones, he sobs forth a tale of
dark and dismal war, how our soldiers respected the white
flag and rested on their arms, only to be mowed down by a
withering rifle fire from the canaille who represent the
enemy in the field. Having got so far, he does not feel
justified in stopping until he has thrown in some flowery
language concerning a Boer cannonade upon British ambulance
waggons, full of wounded; from that he drifts by easy and
natural stages to Dum-Dum bullets, and the robbing of the
wounded, and insults to the slain. And that is very often the
person who is quoted in newspaper interviews—as a gentleman
who was an eye-witness, and etc., etc., etc.

And yet, for some reason which I have been unable to
gauge, the military authorities talk of sending all
correspondents away from the front. It seems to me that it
would be far better to give bonâ fide newspaper
men every reasonable opportunity of discovering the truth
instead of hampering them in any way. I fail to see why Great
Britain and her Colonies should be kept in the dark
concerning the progress of the war, for all the foreign
Powers will be well supplied with information from the Boer
lines; and, if we are blocked, some at least of the British
newspapers will most assuredly go to foreign sources for
news, if they are not allowed to obtain it for themselves.
Others will content themselves with news gathered haphazard,
and the last state of the Army, as far as the public mind is
concerned, will be far worse than the first.

Colonel Hoad, who commands the Australians at Enslin, has
offered the seven hundred and sixteen men, who up to date
have acted as infantry, to the authorities as mounted
infantry, and the offer has been accepted, much to the
delight of the men, all of whom are very eager to get into
the saddle, as they imagine that when their mounts arrive
they will get a chance to go into action. They have been
practising horsemanship during the day, and did fairly well,
as many of them are expert riders, many more are fair; but a
few of them are more at home on a sand-heap than in a saddle.
There are not many of the latter kind, however. They will
soon knock into shape, for Colonel Hoad hates the sight of a
slovenly horseman as badly as a duck hates a dust storm. He
is an untiring rider himself, and will work the beggars who
cannot ride until they can.

After the arrival in Capetown of the two celebrated
soldiers, Lords Roberts and Kitchener, I made it my business
to converse with as many Boers as possible in regard to the
two Generals, and was astonished to find how much they knew
concerning them. How, and from whom, they get information
passes my comprehension, but the fact remains that they knew
all over the country as soon, if not sooner, than we did that
our great leaders had arrived. They do not seem to fear them,
though they invariably speak of them as wonderful soldiers.
“God and Oom Paul Kruger will look after us,” is their creed.
Their faith in President Kruger is simply boundless. Not only
do they fancy that he is a man of dauntless courage, great
sagacity, and indomitable will, but they really seem to think
that he has God’s special blessing concerning this war.

He is to the Boers what Mahomet was to the wild tribesmen
of Arabia, and it is as impossible to shake their faith in
him as it would be to shake their faith in the story of Mount
Calvary. It is all very well for a certain class of writers
to attempt to cast unbounded ridicule upon these men and
their leader, but it is not by ridicule that they can be
conquered. It is not by contemptuous utterances or by untrue
reports that they can be overcome. It is not by belittling
them that we can raise ourselves in the eyes of the men of
to-day or ennoble ourselves upon the pages of history. It
would be conduct more in accordance with the traditions of a
great nation if we gave them credit for the virtues they
possess and the courage they display.

It is hard to drag any sort of information from a Boer,
whether bond or free, but from what I can pick up they are
perfectly satisfied with what they have done up to date. They
think that President Kruger has astonished the world, and
they wag their heads, and give one to understand that the
same old gentleman has a good many more surprises in store
for us. It is impossible to get a direct statement of any
kind from them, but by patching fragments together I incline
to the opinion that they really count on Cape Colony rising
when Kruger wants a rising. Personally, from my own limited
observations, I would not give a fig of tobacco for the
alleged loyalty of the Cape Colony. If I am correct, this
“surprise” will give the enemy an additional force of 45,000
men, most of whom will be found able to ride well and shoot
straight.

It is nonsense to say that they will only form a mob
destitute of discipline and unprovided with officers. They
will not be a mob, they will be guerilla soldiers of the same
type that the North and South in America provided, and they
will take a lot of whipping at their own peculiar tactics. As
for officers—well, up to date, they have not gone short of
them. It is true they do not bear the hallmark of any modern
university, but they know how to lead men into battle, all
the same. They wear no uniforms, neither do they adorn
themselves with any of the stylish trappings of war, but they
are brainy, resourceful men, highly useful if not ornamental.
Like Oliver Cromwell’s hard-faced “Roundheads,” they are the
children of a great emergency, not much to look at, but full
of a “get there” quality, which many school-bred soldiers
lack entirely.

I rode down to Belmont a couple of days ago, and had a
look at the Canadians and Queenslanders, who are quartered
there. They are all in excellent health and spirits, and seem
to be just about hungry for a fight. The Munsters, who are
quartered there, are simply spoiling for a brush with the
enemy, and seem to be as full of ginger as any men I have
ever seen.

And every one of them with whom I conversed—and I chatted
with a good many of the burly young Irishmen—expressed a
keen desire to meet in open fight the Irish brigade now
fighting on the side of the Boers. Should it ever come to
pass during the progress of the war, I devoutly hope that I
may be handy to witness the struggle. It will not be a
long-range fight if I am any judge of men and things; it will
be settled at close quarters, and the “baynit and the butt”
will play a prominent part in the
mêlée.

A few of our New Zealand fellows got to close quarters
with the enemy recently up Colesberg way, and they did just
as we knew they would when it came to the crossing of steel.
The Boers stormed the position, and the New Zealanders joined
in the bayonet charge which drove them back. Our men had a
couple killed and one or two wounded. The enemy left a
goodish number of dead on the field when they retired, about
thirty of whom met their fate at the bayonet’s point. The
British losses were small. There was nothing remarkable about
the behaviour of the New Zealanders in action; they simply
did coolly and well what they were ordered to do, and proved
that they are quite as good fighting material as anything the
Old Country can produce. The gravest misfortune which has yet
befallen any of the Australians happened at the same
locality, when eighteen New South Welshmen allowed themselves
to be pinned in a tight place. Eight escaped, but the others
are either prisoners or killed. We do not like the surrender
business, and would rather see our men do as their fathers
and grandfathers used to do—bite the motto, “No surrender,”
into the butts of their rifles with their teeth, and fight
their way out of a hot corner. There has been a good deal too
much of this throwing up of arms during the present campaign,
and I hope that we shall hear less of it in the future.

We had a nasty night here at Enslin. Word reached our
headquarters that three thousand mounted Boers were on the
move towards our camp, which, for strategic purposes, is the
most important between Methuen’s column and De Aar. If the
enemy could take Enslin they could make things very awkward
for General Methuen, because they would then have him between
two fires. As soon as the news came our fellows, with the
Gordons, were ordered to occupy the surrounding heights. All
night long, and well on into the day, we held them until we
learned that the enemy had decided not to attack us. Had they
done so they would have paid bitterly for their rashness, for
the place is practically impregnable. A thousand resolute and
skilful men, who knew how to use both rifle and bayonet,
could hold the place against 20,000 of the finest troops in
the world, providing the defenders were not hopelessly
crushed by an immense artillery force.

General Hector Macdonald went through here the other day
to take the command of the Highland Brigade, in the place of
the late General Wauchope. The “Scots” who were with us lined
up and gave the General a thrilling welcome, whilst our
fellows, who are not usually demonstrative, crowded around
the railway line to get a look at the brilliant soldier who,
by sheer merit, dauntless pluck, and iron resolution, forced
his way from the ranks to the high place he holds. The
Australians had expected to see a gaunt, prematurely aged
man, war-worn and battle-broken, and were surprised to see a
dashing, gallant-looking man, who might in appearance
comfortably have passed for five-and-thirty. The grey-clad
men, in soft slouch hats, from the land of the Southern
Cross, lounging about with pipes in their teeth, did not
break into hysterical cheering—they are not built that way;
they simply looked at the man whose full history every one of
them knew as well as he knew the way into the front door of a
“pub.” But their flashing eyes and clenched hands told in
language more eloquent than a salvo of cheers that this was
their ideal man, the man they would follow rifle in hand up
the brimstone heights of hell itself, if need be; aye, and
stand sentry there until the day of judgment, if Hector
Macdonald gave the order.

AUSTRALIA ON THE MOVE.

RENSBURG.

A complete change has come to the Australians who are in
Africa under Colonel Hoad. We have left General Methuen’s
column, and joined that of General French. Formerly we were
at Enslin, within sound of the guns that were fired daily at
Magersfontein; now we are two hundred and twenty miles away,
and are within easy patrolling distance of Colesberg.

Before we left Methuen’s column we had one small night
affair, which, however, did not amount to a great deal,
though it has been very much exaggerated in local newspaper
circles, and will, I fear, be unduly boomed in some of the
Australian journals. The whole affair simply amounted to
this. One hundred of the Victorian Mounted Rifles went out to
make a demonstration towards Sunnyside, in Cape Colony, where
a number of rebels were known to congregate. A hundred
Queenslanders and Canadians were with them, when a corporal
and a trooper of the Victorians saw an unarmed Boer and a
nigger riding towards them in the twilight. The Boer, as soon
as he was challenged, wheeled his horse and rode off at a
gallop; our men rode after the runaway, but would not fire
upon the white man because they thought he was simply a
farmer who had got rather a bad scare at meeting armed
men.

The Boer, however, played a deep game; he rode for a bit
of a rise composed of broken ground, where, unknown to our
scouts, a party of rebels lay concealed. As soon as the
flying rebel was in safety the Boers opened fire, shooting
Peter Falla, the trooper, twice through the arm, one bullet
entering a few inches below the shoulder, the other
shattering the bone a little way above the elbow. The
corporal got away safely, taking his wounded comrade with
him. Our fellows rode out and swept the veldt for miles, but
saw no more of the enemy. So ended what has grandiloquently
been termed “an Australian engagement,” which, I may add, is
just the kind of flapdoodle our troopers do not want. What
they most desire on earth at present is an opportunity to
show what they are made of. They don’t want cheap newspaper
puffs, nor laudatory speeches from generals. They want to get
into grip with the enemy, and, as an Australian, let me say
now that Imperial federation will get a greater shock by
keeping these fine fellows out of action than by anything
else that could happen under heaven. They did not come here
on a picnic party, they did not come for a circus; they don’t
want a lot of maudlin sentiment wasted on them whilst they
stay out of the firing line to mind the jam, or give the
African girls a treat.

Mr. Chamberlain has made a good many mistakes in regard to
the war, mistakes that will live in history when his very
name is forgotten, but he need not add to them by alienating
Australian sentiment by coddling men who came across the
Indian Ocean to prove to the whole world that on the field of
battle they are as good as their sires. Our fellows have got
hold of a rumour (the prophets only could tell whence camp
rumours originate) that instructions have been received from
England that they are to be kept out of danger, and a madder
lot of men you could not find anywhere between here and
Tophet. They wanted to send a petition to Lord Roberts asking
to be allowed to face the enemy, but though the officers are
quite as sore as the men, they could not permit such a breach
of discipline. So now the men ease their feelings by jeering
at each other.

“What are we here fer, Bill?”

“Oh, get yer head felt; any fool knows why we are here.
There’s a blessed marmalade factory somewhere about, and we
are going to mind it whilst the British Tommy does the
fighting.”

“Marmalade be d——!” chirruped a voice down the lines.
“Think they’d trust us to look after anything so
important?”

“Oh, you’re a blessed prophet, you are,” snarls the little
bugler. “P’raps you’ll tell us what our game is.”

“Easy enough, little ‘un. Our officers ‘ve got to practise
making mud maps in the dust with a stick, and we’ve got to
fool around and keep the flies away.”

“I suppose they’ll keep us at this till the war’s over,
and then send us to England, ‘nd give us a bloomin’ medal,
‘nd tell us then we are gory, crimson heroes. Ugh!” grunts a
big West Australian with a face like a nightmare, and a voice
that comes out of his chest with a sound like a steam saw
coming through a wet log.

“Don’t know about England ‘nd the medal, ‘Beauty,'”
chirrups a Sydney gunner, “but I know what they’ll give us in
Australia if we go back without a fight.”

“P’raps it’ll be a mansion, or a sheep station, or a stud
of racehorses,” meekly suggests a tired-looking South
Australian, with a derisive twist of his under lip.

“No, they won’t present us with a racing stud,” lisps the
gunner, “but, by G——, they’ll shy chaff enough at us to
keep all the bloomin’ horses between ‘ere and ‘ell, and the
girls will send us a kid’s feedin’ bottle, as a mark of
feelin’ and esteem, every Valentine’s Day for ten years to
come, because of the glorious name we made for Australia on
the bloody fields of war in Africa.”

“Fields o’ war—fields o’ whisky ‘nd watermelons! Oh,
d—— it! I’m going ter stop writing ter my girl before she
writes ter tell me that a white feather don’t suit a girl’s
complexion in Australia.”

He lifts his bugle, and sounds “Feed up” so savagely that
the horses strain on their leg ropes and kick themselves into
a lather as hot as their riders’ tempers, the long,
loose-limbed troopers move off, cursing artistically in their
beards at the very thought of the roasting they will get from
the witty-tongued, red-lipped girls of Australia, when—

When we received notice to move away from Enslin down the
line through Graspan, Belmont, Orange River, to De Aar, our
fellows were naturally very wrathful; they had done splendid
work for many weeks up that way; they had dug trenches, sunk
wells, drilled unceasingly; they had watched the kopjes and
scoured the veldt, and all that they were told to do they did
like soldiers—readily and uncomplainingly. The cold nights
and the scorching days, the monotonous drudgery, found them
always ready and willing, because they believed that when the
order came for a great battle at Magersfontein, or an onward
march to Kimberley, they would be in the thick of it. But for
some reason, known only to those who gave the order, they
were sent away from the front, and they felt it keenly. From
De Aar they were sent on to Naauwpoort, and from this latter
place they were forwarded on to Rensburg.

At Naauwpoort nearly all the Australians were mounted, and
now acted as mounted infantry. The horses supplied are Indian
ponies, formerly used by the Madras Cavalry. They are a
first-class lot of cattle, well suited to the work that lies
before them, and have evidently been selected by someone who
knows his business a good deal better than a great number of
his colleagues. General French inspected the men at Rensburg
during the first day or two, and seemed fairly well satisfied
with them, though, of course, they did not make a first-class
show in their initial efforts on horseback. A great number of
them rode well, but very few of them had ever gone through a
course of mounted drill, and it will take a week or two to
knock them into shape for this work; though, when once out of
the saddle, they are not in any way inferior to the best
British regiments I have seen. But they are keen to learn,
and very willing, so that I expect to see them make
wonderfully rapid strides towards efficiency as mounted men.
They seem to feel that their only chance to get a fight is to
become high grade soldiers, and to that end they will stand
all the work that can be crowded into them. I have no idea
what their future movements will be, nor do I think anyone
else connected with the regiment has; but one thing seems
certain, that sooner or later they will fall foul of the
enemy in small skirmishing parties, as the kopjes for a
length of twenty miles are infested by little bands of Boers,
who have a knack of disappearing as soon as a British force
draws near them, only, however, to crop up again in a fresh
place, a short distance away.

For the Boer is a past master in this kind of warfare, and
knows how to play his own game to perfection. What the
Goorkha is in Indian warfare, so the Boer is in Africa. He
does not fight in our style, but that does not say that he
cannot fight, neither does it argue that he is devoid of
courage. As a matter of fact, the more I have seen of this
country, and note what the Boers have done in opposition to
all the might of Great Britain, the more I am impressed with
the idea that our alleged Intelligence Department wants
cutting down and burning root and branch, for it must have
been absolutely rotten, or unquestionably corrupt. We were
led by members of this Department to believe that the Boer
was a cowardly kind of veldt pariah, a degenerate offshoot of
a fine old parent stock. Well, the Boer is nothing of the
kind. He is not in any way degenerate. He is a good fighting
man, according to his lights. He does not wear a stand-up
collar, nor an eyeglass, nor spats to his veldtschoon. He
does not talk with a silly lisp or an inane drawl. Therefore,
the useless fellows whom Britain trusted with the important
task of watching him and sizing him up counted him as a boor
as well as a Boer—a mere country clod. But now, from the
rocky hills, these clods, these sons of semi-white savages,
laugh at us derisively, and answer our jeers with rifles that
know how to speak in a language that even the bravest of our
troops have learnt to understand—and respect.

I have a keen recollection of the last Franco-Prussian
War. I remember how the English newspapers ridiculed the
French military authorities because, whilst the Germans had
accurate maps of every province within the French borders,
the French themselves were grossly ignorant of their own
territory. Now we can eat our own sarcasms and enjoy the
bitter fruit of our own irony, for, thanks to the
Intelligence Department connected with the War Office in
Great Britain, we to-day stand precisely in the same position
towards our African enemy as France did towards Prussia. A
glance at the country through which I have recently passed
shows only too clearly that, whilst Paul Kruger and his
advisers knew our full strength to a man, we, on our part,
knew nothing about him or the men, money, or ordnance at his
command. We knew nothing of the country which had been
patiently fortified by the best skilled military engineers in
Europe. We know nothing of his rocky, well-fortified country,
which lies behind that which we have already attacked. Our
generals, instead of being supplied with maps covering every
inch of country within the enemy’s borders, have to gather
information at the bayonet’s point at a loss to the Empire in
men, money, and in prestige. If our commanders blunder, who
is to blame but the criminally negligent officials who have
supplied them with false or foolish data to work upon? The
Empire has been betrayed, either wilfully or through crass
idleness upon the part of men who have dipped deeply into the
Empire’s coffers, and the nation should demand their
impeachment, apart from their position, place, or power, and
punishment of the most drastic kind should follow speedily in
the footsteps of impeachment.

The failure of General Buller to relieve Ladysmith was not
due to any want of sagacity on the part of that General. It
was not due to any want of bravery on the part of his troops.
The General is worthy of his rank, and worthy of the
confidence of the nation, and his troops are as good as the
men who, under the same flag, taught the Russians to respect
the power of Britain. The cause of the failure lay mainly in
the want of knowledge on our part concerning the strength of
the country the Boers held, and the strength of the country
they had to fall back upon when hard pressed.

That information the “Intelligence” Department ought to
have been able to place in the hands of General Buller before
he moved forward to the relief of the beleaguered garrison in
Ladysmith. But they could not give what they had never
possessed.

Right up to the present moment, when the Boers have been
forced to meet our troops at close quarters, they have been
found to possess no other arms than the rifle. This has given
truth to the belief that the enemy as an attacking force is
next door to useless, as no men, no matter how brave and
determined, could do very much damage to first-class troops
armed with the bayonet.

However, there is a whisper in the air that the Boers are
not deficient in side-arms; it is rumoured that the President
of the Boer Republic has immense supplies of offensive as
well as defensive weapons safely placed away until they may
be required Right up to date his war policy has been to
remain passive, excepting in a few isolated positions,
allowing the British to attack his generals in almost
impregnable positions, and by so doing put heart into the
burghers, and dishearten our forces. But should the tide of
war continue to roll onward in his favour he may attempt to
put in force the oft-told Boer threat, and try to sweep the
British into the sea. Should that day dawn, it is rumoured
that the enemy will be found well supplied with side-arms and
with mercenaries trained to their use in one of the best
schools that modern times have known. Where do these rumours
come from? Well, a Boer prisoner, taunted perhaps by a guard,
loses his temper and drops a hint, or a Boer farmer, exultant
over the latest news of his countrymen’s success, lifts the
veil a little, and a jealously-guarded secret drops out; or,
again, a Boer’s wife or daughter, flinging a taunt at a
cursed “Rooinek,” allows her temper to run away with her
discretion. There are a hundred ways in which such things get
about; only straws, perhaps, but a straw can point the way
windward. A talkative Kaffir who has been reared on a Dutch
farm will at times give things away that would cost him his
life if the length of his tongue was known to his master;
especially will the nigger talk if his mouth be judiciously
moistened with Cape smoke brandy.

Information that comes to a war correspondent’s hand is of
many colours, shapes, and sizes, but if he is born to the
business he pieces the whole together and picks out what
seemeth good to his own soul at the finish. Sometimes, at the
end of a week’s hard work, he finds himself possessed of a
patchwork of information like unto Joseph’s coat of many
colours, but it is hard fortune indeed if he cannot find
something in the lot to repay him for his earnest
endeavours.

SLINGERSFONTEIN.

RENSBURG.

Scarcely had I returned from posting my last letter when
the camp was in a commotion, caused by the news that the West
Australians were in action at Slingersfontein, distant about
twelve miles from Rensburg. To saddle up and get out as fast
as horseflesh would carry a man was but the work of a very
short period of time, for the gallop across the open veldt
was not a very laborious undertaking. I soon found that the
stalwart sons of the great gold colony were in it, and
enjoying it.

Slingersfontein is an important position on the right
flank of French’s column. It is not only an important but a
very hard position to hold on account of the nature of the
country. Here there is but very little open veldt; mile after
mile is covered by small kopjes that rise in countless
numbers, until the whole country looks as if it were covered
with a veritable forest of hills. Once inside that labyrinth
of rocky excrescences, an army might easily be lost, unless
every individual man and officer knew the place thoroughly.
The Boers know the lay of the land, and, consequently, shift
from post to post by paths that are unknown to anyone else
with marvellous dexterity and incredible swiftness. Our
forces hold a small plain, which is like the palm of a
giant’s hand, with the surrounding kopjes representing the
digits. We hold those kopjes also. The shape of the camp is
in the form of a horseshoe, all around the little basin great
hills rise, and from those hills England’s watch-dogs keep a
sharp look-out on the movements of the foe; and well they
need to, for, in ground which suits him, the African farmer
is as ‘cute and cunning as a Red Indian. Behind our position,
or, rather, outside of it, there is another small tract of
open country, but beyond that, lapping around our stronghold
like a crescent, is rough, hilly ground. None of those hills
is worth dignifying with the title of mountain, but all of
them are big enough to shelter a hundred or two of the enemy,
and it is there that they play their game of hide and seek,
which is so trying to the nerves of young troops. The Boers
hold that rough country entirely, and the outer edge of their
semi-circle is not, at any given point, more than four miles
from our centre at Slingersfontein.

The outer line of kopjes which skirt their stalking ground
are bigger than the hills on the inner side, so that they
have an excellent opportunity to conceal their movements from
the observation of our most astute pickets, and the only way
in which our commanding officer can locate the enemy with any
degree of certainty is by making a reconnaissance in force,
and, if possible, drawing their fire. If the Boers fall into
this trap they invariably pay dearly for the slight advantage
they gain over the investigating force, for our guns soon
make any known position untenable. The Boer leaders know
this, however, and are very loth to allow temptation to
overcome discretion; but at times, either through the
impetuosity of their troops or through errors in generalship,
they give themselves away entirely, and that is precisely
what they did upon this occasion.

By means only known to those high up in authority, our
people had become acquainted with the fact that the enemy
intended to try to extend their line on our right flank, and
so threaten us not only upon the left flank, the direct
front, and right flank, but also in the rear. Could they
succeed in doing this they would have us in a peculiarly
tight place, as, once posted in force well down on our right
flank, they would then at least be able to harass us badly in
our communications with Rensburg, which is our main base of
operations. It is there that the General has his
headquarters; it is from there that we keep in touch, per
medium of the railway and telegraph lines, with the rest of
the British Army in South Africa. It is from there that we
draw all our supplies of fodder and ammunition. It is from
there we should draw all our additional force if we needed
reinforcements in case of a general assault by the enemy upon
our position at Slingersfontein, and it is from there that we
should be strengthened should we decide to make a forward
move on the Boers’ position. Therefore it behoved us to keep
that line of communication intact, no matter what the cost.
All these things were as well known to the Boer leader as to
us, and that is why they were as keen to get the position as
we were, and why we are keen to stop them from accomplishing
their object.

It was for the purpose of ascertaining just what the enemy
intended to do, and how many men they had to do it with, that
Major Ethoran ordered out the West Australian Mounted
Infantry, consisting of about 75 men, under Captain Moor, an
Imperial soldier in the pay of the West Australian
Government, and a small body of Inniskilling Dragoons and
Lancers, with a section of the Royal Horse Artillery and two
guns. The men moved out of Slingersfontein on Tuesday about
midday, and at once proceeded towards a farmhouse located
right under the very jowl of an ugly-looking kopje.

This farm was known as Pottsberg, and was well known as a
regular haunt of the most daring and dangerous rebels in the
whole district. The farm consisted of the usual white stone
farmhouse of five or six rooms, a small orchard, surrounded
by rough stone walls from three feet six to four feet in
height, and about two feet thick, a small cluster of native
huts, and a kraal for cattle, made of rough, heavy stones,
topped by cakes of sun-baked manure, stored by the farmers
for fuel. Some little distance from the back of the farmhouse
a stout stone wall ran down from the kopjes on to the plain.
This wall was between four and five feet in height and half a
yard across in its weakest place—an ugly barricade in
itself—behind which a few resolute men with quick-firing
rifles, which they know how to use, could make a good stand
against vastly superior numbers advancing upon them from the
open veldt.

When our fellows trotted out from camp, Captain Moor
received orders to distribute his men in small bodies all
along the edge of the kopjes between Pottsberg farmhouse and
Kruger’s Hill, a small kopje lying almost in a line with our
camp, on the right. The men were ordered to go as close as
possible to the enemy’s position, to see as much as they
could possibly see in regard to the numbers of troops in the
hills held by the enemy. If they succeeded in discovering the
rebels in large bodies they were to draw their fire and
immediately retreat at full speed. In the meantime the two
guns belonging to the Royal Horse Artillery were beautifully
placed in a dip in the veldt, where they could play upon the
Boers should they attempt to rush the West Australians at any
given point. The Lancers and Dragoons were placed in charge
of some kopjes behind the guns, in order to protect them
should a concerted onslaught be made upon them by the mounted
Boers, who were shrewdly suspected to be in hiding in strong
force behind the first row of hills, which screened the
enemy’s position.

The Australians rode out steadily, and took up their
positions with an amount of coolness that startled older
soldiers. This was absolutely their first trial on real
fighting service, and everybody connected with them was
anxious to see how they would comport themselves in the face
of the enemy. Not only was it their first fighting effort,
but it was their début in the saddle, as until a week
previous they had been simply infantrymen, and not a dozen of
them had ever been in the hands of a mounted drill
instructor. It was a big task to set such green men, but they
proved before the day was out that they were worthy of the
confidence reposed in them. Captain Moor, Lieutenant Darling,
and Lieutenant Parker each took a small section into action;
the others were under the immediate control of their
sergeants. They split up into small parties, and swept the
very edge of the kopjes, peering into gullies, climbing the
outer hills, working along the ravines with a courage and
thoroughness that would have done credit to the oldest scouts
in all the Empire. Yet nothing came of their investigations
for quite a long time. The enemy did not mean to be drawn,
and remained passive, so that the West Australians at last
became a little bit reckless, and were consequently not so
guarded as they might have been. All at once a body of scouts
ran upon a large body of the enemy near Pottsberg Farm, in a
deep and shady ravine. The enemy were trying to evade notice,
but that was now impossible. In a moment rifles were ringing
on the air, and after that first volley the little band of
Australians wheeled and galloped for the open country. To
have remained there would have meant certain death to every
one of the half-dozen who comprised the picket, so they did
their duty—they fired and rode for the veldt. In a few
seconds Boers were dashing out of the kopjes on all sides,
trying to cut the small band of Australians off or shoot them
down. But the Australians knew their game; they opened out,
so that each man was practically riding alone.

The Boers could do little with them. Those who stood by
the guns noticed that very large numbers of men in the Boer
ranks were either niggers or half-castes, and it was also
very noticeable that they knew but little about the use of
the rifle. They fired high and wide, and notwithstanding the
fact that they poured their ammunition away in wholesale
fashion, they did little harm worth mentioning, although many
of them fired at little more than pistol range. They were
simply crazed with excitement, and did not succeed in cutting
off a single member of that adventurous band. Whenever an
Australian found himself in a tight place he simply dug his
spurs into his horse’s flanks, lifted his rifle, and blazed
into the ranks of the foe. If his horse was shot dead under
him he coo-eed to his mates, and kept his rifle busy, and
every time the coo-ee rang out over the whispering veldt the
Australians turned in their saddles, and riding as the men
from the South-land can ride, they dashed to the rescue, and
did not leave a single man in the hands of the enemy. Many a
gallant deed was done that day by officers and men. Captain
Moor gave one fellow his horse, and made a dash for liberty
on foot, but he would have failed in his effort had not
Lieutenant Darling, a West Australian boy, ridden to his aid,
and together the two officers on the one horse got back to
the shelter of the guns. The enemy still blazed away in the
wildest and most farcical fashion. Had they been Boer hunters
or marksmen very few of the West Australians would ever have
got across that strip of veldt alive. As it was, only two of
them got wounded, none were killed, one or two horses were
shot dead, and then the big guns got to work in grim
earnest.

A party of Boers, however, got round one of the kopjes,
where some of the Lancers were posted, and now half a dozen
of those brave fellows are missing, and I fear they are to be
counted amongst those who will never return again. Sergeant
Watson, of the R.H., was killed, and several of his men and a
few of the Lancers were wounded, but the R.H. guns soon swept
the plain clear of the enemy, and they retired, carrying
their dead and wounded with them. The work for the day was
done, and well done, for the enemy had shown his hand. We
knew his position and his strength, and next day we went out
in force to have a word with him, but the wily Boers kept
strictly under cover, and refused on any terms to be drawn
again.

THE WEST AUSTRALIANS.

BETHANY.

I was feeling miserable as I sat in the hospital garden,
and I rather fancy I looked pretty much as I felt, for a
cheery-faced Boer nurse, with her black hair, blacker eyes,
and rose-blossom lips, came up to where I sat, bringing with
her two or three slightly wounded Boers. “I have brought some
Boers who know something of your countrymen, Mr. Australian,”
she said. “I thought you would be glad to hear all about
them.” “By Jove! yes, nurse. If I were not a married man, I
should try to thank you gracefully.” “Oh, yees; oh, yees,”
she answered, tossing back her head; “that is all right. You
say those pretty things; then, when you go away from here,
you tell your wife, and you write in your papers we Boer
girls are fat old things, who never use soap and water. All
the Rooibaatjes do that.” And off she went, laughing merrily,
whilst my friends the enemy grinned and enjoyed the little
comedy. So we fell to talking, and-half a dozen wounded
“Tommies” gathered round and chipped into the conversation,
which by degrees worked round to a deed which the West
Australians did; and as I listened to the tale so simply told
by those rough farmer men, I felt my face flush with pride,
and my shoulders fell back square and solid once more, whilst
every drop of blood in my veins seemed to run warm and
strong, like the red wine they grow on the hillside in my own
sunny land; for the story concerned men whom I knew well, men
who were bred with the scent of the wattle in the first
breath they drew, men who grew from childhood to manhood
where the silver sentinel stars form the cross in the rich
blue midnight sky. My countrymen—Australians—men with whom
I had hunted for silver in the desolate backblocks of New
South Wales; men with whom I had scoured the interior of West
Australia seeking for gold; men who had been with me on the
tin fields and opal fields. I had never doubted that they
would keep their country’s name unsullied when they met the
foe on the field of war, yet when I heard the tale the enemy
told I felt my eyes fill as they have seldom filled since
childhood, for I was proud of the western diggers, proud of
my blood; and at that moment, with British “Tommies”
sprawling on the grass at my feet, and the Boer farmers
grouped amongst them, I would sooner have called myself an
Australian commoner than the son of any peer in any other
land under high heaven.

I will take the story from the Boer’s mouth and tell it to
you, as I hope to tell it round a hundred camp fires when the
war is over, and I go back to the Australian bush once more.
“It happened round Colesberg way,” he said; “we thought we
had the British beaten, and our commandant gave us the word
to press on and cut them to pieces. Our big guns had been
grandly handled, and our rifle fire had told its tale. We saw
the British falling back from the kopjes they had held, and
we thought that there was nothing between us and victory; but
there was, and we found it out before we were many minutes
older. There was one big kopje that was the very key of the
position. Our spies had told us that this was held by an
Australian force. We looked at it very anxiously, for it was
a hard position to take, but even as we watched we saw that
nearly all the Australians were leaving it. They, too, were
falling back with the British troops. If we once got that
kopje there was nothing on earth could stop us. We could pass
on and sweep around the retiring foe, and wipe them off the
earth, as a child wipes dirt from its hands, and we laughed
when we saw that only about twenty Australians had been left
to guard the kopje.

“There were about four hundred of us, all picked men, and
when the commandant called to us to go and take the kopje, we
sprang up eagerly, and dashed down over some hills, meaning
to cross the gully and charge up the kopje where those twenty
men were waiting for us. But we did not know the
Australians—then. We know them now. Scarcely had we risen to
our feet when they loosed their rifles on us, and not a shot
was wasted. They did not fire, as regular soldiers nearly
always do, volley after volley, straight in front of them,
but every one picked his man, and shot to kill. They fired
like lightning, too, never dwelling on the trigger, yet never
wildly wasting lead, and all around us our best and boldest
dropped, until we dared not face them. We dropped to cover,
and tried to pick them off, but they were cool and watchful,
throwing no chance away. We tried to crawl from rock to rock
to hem them in, but they, holding their fire until our
burghers moved, plugged us with lead, until we dared not stir
a step ahead; and all the time the British troops, with all
their convoy, were slowly, but safely, falling back through
the kopjes, where we had hoped to hem them in. We gnawed our
beards and cursed those fellows who played our game as we had
thought no living men could play it Then, once again, we
tried to rush the hill, and once again they drove us back,
though our guns were playing on the heights they held. We
could not face their fire. To move upright to cross a dozen
yards meant certain death, and many a Boer wife was widowed
and many a child left fatherless by those silent men who held
the heights above us. They did not cheer as we came onward.
They did not play wild music, they only clung close as
climbing weeds to the rocks, and shot as we never saw men
shoot before, and never hope to see men shoot again.

“Then we got ready to sweep the hill with guns, but our
commandant, admiring those brave few who would not budge
before us in spite of our numbers, sent an officer to them to
ask them to surrender, promising them all the honours of war.
But they sent us word to come and take them if we could. And
then our officer asked them three times if they would hold up
their hands, and at the third time a grim sergeant rose and
answered him: ‘Aye, we will hold up our hands, but when we
do, by God, you’ll find a bayonet in ’em. Go back and tell
your commandant that Australia’s here to stay.’ And there
they stayed, and fought us hour by hour, holding us back,
when but for them victory would have been with us. We shelled
them all along their scattered line, and tried to rush them
under cover of the artillery fire; but they only held their
posts with stouter hearts, and shot the straighter when the
fire was hottest, and we could do nothing but lie there and
swear at them, though we admired them for their stubborn
pluck. They held the hill till all their men were safe, and
then, dashing down the other side, they jumped into their
saddles and made off, carrying their wounded with them. They
were but twenty men, and we four hundred”

A “Tommy” sitting at the speaker’s feet looked up and
said: “What are yer makin’ sich a song abart it far? Lumme,
them Horstraliars are as Hinglish has hi ham!”

IN A BOER TOWN.

BETHANY.

A Boer town is not laid out on systematic lines, as one
sees towns in America, or Canada, or Australia. The streets
seem to run much as they please, or as the exigencies of
traffic have caused them to run. I doubt if the plan of a
town is ever drawn in this country. People arrive and settle
down in a happy-go-lucky manner, and straightway build
themselves a home. Their homes are places to live in; not to
look at. There is an almost utter absence of architectural
adornment everywhere. My eyes range over a large number of
dwellings. They are nearly all alike—plain, square
structures, plastered snow white. There is a double door in
the centre of the front, and a window at each side of the
door. A stoep, about six feet wide, rises a foot from the
pathway, and there is nothing else to be seen from the
outside front. These houses look bare and bald, and are as
expressionless as a blind baby. To me most houses have an
expression of their own. In an English town a quiet walk in
the dawning, making a survey of the dwelling-places, always
leaves the impression that I have gleaned an insight into the
character of the dwellers therein. The cheeky-looking villa,
with its superabundance of ornament, is a monument in masonry
to the successful mining jobber on a small scale. The
solemn-looking, solid dwelling, standing in its own grounds,
where every flower bush has its individual prop, where the
lawn is trimmed with mathematical exactitude, and not one
vagrant leaf is allowed to stray, speaks with a kind of
brick-and-mortar eloquence of virtue that has never grasped
the sublime fulness of the Scriptural text which saith: “The
way of transgressors is hard!” That is the home of the
middle-aged Churchman, whose feet from infancy have fallen
amidst roses. He has never erred, because he has never known
enough of human sympathy and human toil and struggle to feel
temptation. The coy little cottage further on, surrounded by
climbing roses and sweet-smelling herbs, where the gate is
left just a little bit open, as if inviting a welcome, seems
to advertise itself as the home of two maiden sisters, who,
though past the giddy girlhood stage, still have hopes of
being somebody’s darling by-and-by.

But in a Boer town most of the piety is knocked out of a
man. You stare at the houses, and they stare back at you
dumbly. There is nothing pretentious or rakish about any of
them; no matter how riotous a man’s imagination might be, he
could never conjure up a “wink” from a Boer house, though I
have seen houses in other parts of the world that seemed to
“cock an eye” at a passing traveller and invite him to try
the door.

They have only two styles of roofing their
dwellings—either the old-fashioned gable roof, or the still
older kind of “lean-to,” the latter being nothing but a flat
top, high at the front and running lower towards the back, in
order that the rain water may carry off rapidly. They paint
their doors and windows a sober reddish brown, for your true
Boer has an utter contempt for anything gaudy or gay. He
leaves that sort of thing to his nigger servants, who make up
for their master’s lack of appreciation in the matter of
colour by rigging themselves out in anything that is
startling in the way of contrasts, for if the white master is
a Puritan in such things, the nigger servant, male and
female, is a perfect sybarite.

Right opposite where I am sitting a family group, or all
that is left of the family, is sitting, as the custom is at
evening, out on the stoep. On the side nearest me is a young
widow. I have made inquiries concerning her. Her husband was
killed fighting against our troops at Graspan. She, poor
thing, is dressed in deepest mourning. Her dress is made of
some heavy black material, and has no touch of white or any
colour anywhere to relieve its sombre shades. On her head she
wears a jet black cap, which rises high and wide, and falls
around her neck and shoulders. The cap is fashioned much
after the style of the sun bonnets worn by the peasant women
of Normandy, but hers is black, black as the grave. She has
rather a nice face, a good woman’s face, pale and refined by
suffering. No one looking at her can doubt that she has
suffered, and suffered as only such women can, through this
brutal, bloody war. I thought of the widows away in our own
land as I looked at her sitting there, so silently and sadly,
with her thin white hands clasped on the black folds of her
lap. On one hand I plainly saw the gold circle shining, which
a few months ago had meant so much to her; now, alas! only
the outward and visible sign of all she had been and of all
that she had lost. Behind her the snow-white wall of the
house, sparkling in the red rays of the setting sun; at her
feet only the white slate of the stoep. And well enough I
knew that under the proud Empire flag many a widow as young
and as heart-broken as this Dutch girl would watch the sun go
down as hopelessly as she, and I could not help the thought
which sprang to my soul—God’s bitter curse rest on the head
of the man, be he Boer or Briton, who brought about this
cruel war.

On the street in front of the house where the widow sat I
noticed a group of niggers. Some of them were merely local
“boys,” who worked for the townspeople. They were dressed in
the usual nigger fashion, in old store clothing, patched or
ventilated according to the wearer’s taste. One fellow had on
a pair of pants that had at some former stage belonged to a
man about four times his size. The portion of those pants
which is usually hidden when a man is sitting in the saddle
had been worn into a huge hole, which the nigger had
picturesquely filled by tacking on a scarlet shawl. As the
pants were made of navy blue serge the effect was
unquestionably artistic, especially as the amateur tailor had
done his sewing with string, most of the stitches running
from an inch to an inch and a half in length. Still, he was
only one of many in similar case, so that he did not feel in
the least degree lonely. There were other niggers
there—”boys” belonging to the mule-drivers of the army.
These “boys” nearly all sported a military jacket and some
sort of field service cap, which they had picked up somehow
in camp. The “side” these niggers put on when they get inside
odds and ends of military wearing apparel is something
appalling. They swagger around amongst the civilian niggers,
and treat them as beings of a very inferior mould, whilst the
lies they tell concerning their individual acts of heroism
would set the author of “Deadwood Dick” blushing out of
simple envy.

The nigger girls cluster round these black veterans like
flies around a western water hole in midsummer, and their
shrill laughter makes the air fairly vibrate as they bandy
jests with the cheeky herds. The girls are rather pleasing in
appearance, though far from being pretty. As a rule, they
wear clean print dresses and white aprons; they never wear
hats of any kind, but coil a showy kerchief around their
heads in coquettish fashion. They are not particular as to
colour, red, blue, yellow, or pink, anything will do as long
as it is brilliant. The skins of the girls are almost as
varied as the headgear. The Kaffir girl is very dark, almost
black. The bushman’s daughter is dirty yellow, like river
water in flood time. Some of the other tribes are as black as
the record of a first-class burglar, but they have bright
black eyes, which they roll about as a kitten rolls a ball of
wool in playtime.

But whether they are black, brown, or coffee-coloured,
they are all alike in one respect—every daughter of them has
a mouth that is as boundless as a mother’s blessing, and as
limitless as the imagination of a spring poet in love. When
they are vexed they purse that mouth up into a bunch until it
looks like a crumpled saddle-flap hanging on a hedge. When
they are pleased the mouth opens and expands like an
indiarubber portmanteau ready for packing; that is when they
smile, but when they laugh their ears have to shift to give
the mouth a chance to get comfortably to its destination.
They have beautiful teeth, the white ivory showing against
the black foreground like fresh tombstones in an old cemetery
on a dark night. It is amusing to watch them flirting with
the soldier niggers. They try to look coy, but soon fall
victims to the skilful blandishments of the vain-glorious
warriors, and after a little manoeuvring they put out their
lips to be kissed, a sight which might well make even a
Scotch Covenanter grin. They suck their lips in with a sharp
hissing breath; then push them out suddenly, ready for the
osculatory seance, the lips moving as if they were pushed
from the inside by a pole. The “boys” enjoy the picnic
immensely. As a matter of fact, these “boys” always seem to
me to be doing one of four things. They are either eating,
smoking, sleeping, or making love; and they do enough
love-making in twenty-four hours to last an ordinary everyday
sort of white man four months, even if he puts in a little
overtime. One of the most charming things noticeable about a
Boer town is the plenitude of trees in the streets. They are
often ornamental, always useful for purposes of shade. There
is no regularity about their distribution; they seem to have
been planted spasmodically at odd times and at odd positions.
There is little about them to lead one to the belief that
they receive over much care after they have been put into the
soil. I have found a very creditable library in pretty nearly
every Boer town that I have visited, and it is a noteworthy
fact that all of our most cherished authors find a place on
their book-shelves. One other thing I have also noticed,
which, though a small thing in itself, is yet very
significant. In nearly every hotel, and in many of the public
places, portraits of our Queen and members of the Royal
Family have been hanging side by side with portraits of
notable men, such as Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Mr.
Chamberlain, and Mr. Rhodes. During the course of the war all
kinds and conditions of Boers have had free access to the
rooms where those portraits were to be seen, but now I find
that no damage has been done to any of those pictures,
excepting those of Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Chamberlain. This has
not been an oversight on the part of the Boers, for I defy
any person to find a solitary picture of the two last-named
gentlemen that has not been hacked with knives. But the Queen
and Royal Family photos have in every case been treated with
respect.

BEHIND THE SCENES.

STORMBERG.

I am writing this from Stormberg, a tremendously important
military position, which was taken on Monday, the 5th, by
General Gatacre, without a blow, the enemy falling back cowed
by the British general’s tactics. Had they remained here
another twenty-four hours Gatacre would have had them in a
ring of iron, but the Boer general is no fool. He saw his
danger, and, like a wise man, he dodged it. Gatacre’s
generalship was simply superb. Let the idiotic band of
critics who sit in safety in England howl to their heart’s
content; Gatacre deserves well of his country. Had he dashed
recklessly into this hornet’s nest he would have sacrificed
four-fifths of his gallant officers and a host of his men.
Had I to write his military epitaph to-day I should say that
“he won with brains what most generals would have won with
blood.”

Strangely enough, I was a prisoner in the very room where
I am penning this epistle only last Saturday night. I left
here in the centre of a Boer commando, with a bandage over my
eyes, on Sunday morning, and returned to the spot surrounded
by British “Tommies” a few days later.

All the glory of this bloodless victory does not rest with
the general who commands the column. To Captain Tennant no
small meed of praise is due. This officer was here on secret
service before hostilities commenced, and he did his work so
thoroughly that the country is as familiar to him as paint to
a barmaid. He is one of those men, unfortunately so rare in
the British Army, combining dash and dauntless pluck with a
cool, level head. If he gets his opportunity, England will
hear more of this officer. I have been intensely struck by
the class of officers by whom General Gatacre is surrounded.
They all look like soldiers. I have not seen a single dude,
not one of those wretched fops of whom I have seen only too
many in South Africa. They speak like soldiers too. No
idiotic drawl, no effeminate lisp, no bullying, ill-bred,
coarseness of tongue; they are neither drawing-room dandies
nor camp swashbucklers, but officers and gentlemen—and, I
can assure you, the terms are not always synonymous, even
under the Queen’s cloth. I have seen mere lads in this
country leading men into action who in point of brains were
not fit to lead a mule to water, and others who, in regard to
manners, were scarcely fit to follow the mule. But, thank
God, the Boers have taught our nation this, if they have
taught us nought else—that it needs something more than an
eye-glass, a lisp, a pair of kid gloves, and an insolent,
overbearing manner to make a successful soldier.

But let me get amongst the Boers. I was only a prisoner in
their hands for about a month, yet every moment of that time
was so fraught with interest that I fancy I picked up more of
the real nature of the Boers than I should have done under
ordinary circumstances in a couple of years. I was moved from
laager to laager along their fighting line, saw them at work
with their rifles, saw them come in from more than one tough
skirmish, bringing their dead and wounded with them, saw them
when they had triumphed, and saw them when they had been
whipped; saw them going to their farms, to be welcomed by
wife and children; saw them leaving home with a wife’s sobs
in their ears, and children’s loving kisses on their lips. I
saw some of these old greyheads shattered by our shells,
dying grimly, with knitted brows and fiercely clenched jaws;
saw some of their beardless boys sobbing their souls out as
the life blood dyed the African heath. I saw some passing
over the border line which divides life and death, with a
ring of stern-browed comrades round them, leaning upon their
rifles, whilst a brother or a father knelt and pressed the
hand of him whose feet were on the very threshold of the land
beyond the shadows. I saw others smiling up into the faces of
women—the poor, pain-drawn faces of the dying looking less
haggard and worn than the anguish-stricken features of their
womanhood who knelt to comfort them in that last awful
hour—in the hour which divides time from eternity, the
sunlight of lusty life from the shadows of unsearchable
death. Those things I have seen, and in the ears of English
men and English women, let me say, as one who knows, and fain
would speak the plain, ungilded truth concerning friend and
foe, that, not alone beneath the British flag are heroes
found. Not alone at the breasts of British matrons are brave
men suckled; for, as my soul liveth—whether their cause be
just or unjust, whether the right or the wrong of this war be
with them, whether the blood of the hundreds who have fallen
since the first rifle spoke defiance shall speak for or
against them at the day of judgment—they at least know how
to die; and when a man has given his life for the cause he
believes in he is proven worthy even of his worst enemy’s
respect. And it seems to me that the British nation, with its
long roll of heroic deeds, wrought the whole world over, from
Africa to Iceland, can well afford to honour the splendid
bravery and self-sacrifice of these rude, untutored tillers
of the soil. I have seen them die.

Once, as I lay a prisoner in a rocky ravine all through
the hot afternoon, I heard the rifles snapping like hounds
around a cornered beast. I watched the Boers as they moved
from cover to cover, one here, one there, a little farther on
a couple in a place of vantage, again, in a natural fortress,
a group of eight; so they were placed as far as my eye could
reach. The British force I could not see at all; they were
out on the veldt, and the kopjes hid them from me; but I
could hear the regular roll and ripple of their disciplined
volleys, and in course of time, by watching the actions of
the Boers, I could anticipate the sound. They watched our
officers, and when the signal to fire was given they dropped
behind cover with such speed and certainty that seldom a man
was hit. Then, when the leaden hail had ceased to fall upon
the rocks, they sprang out again, and gave our fellows lead
for lead. After a while our gunners seemed to locate them,
and the shells came through the air, snarling savagely, as
leopards snarl before they spring, and the flying shrapnel
reached many of the Boers, wounding, maiming, or killing
them; yet they held their position with indomitable pluck,
those who were not hit leaping out, regardless of personal
danger, to pick up those who were wounded. They were a
strange, motley-looking crowd, dressed in all kinds of common
farming apparel, just such a crowd as one is apt to see in a
far inland shearing shed in Australia, but no man with a
man’s heart in his body could help admiring their devotion to
one another or their loyalty to the cause they were risking
their lives for.

One sight I saw which will stay with me whilst memory
lasts. They had placed me under a waggon under a mass of
overhanging rock for safety, and there they brought two
wounded men. One was a man of fifty, a hard old veteran, with
a complexion as dark as a New Zealand Maori; the beard that
framed the rugged face was three-fourths grey, his hands were
as rough and knotted by open air toil as the hoofs of a
working steer.

He looked what he was—a Boer of mixed Dutch and French
lineage. Later on I got into conversation with him, and he
told me a good deal of his life. His father was descended
from one of the old Dutch families who had emigrated to South
Africa in search of religious liberty in the old days, when
the country was a wilderness. His mother had come in an
unbroken line from one of the noble families of France who
fled from home in the days of the terrible persecution of the
Huguenots. He himself had been many things—hunter, trader,
farmer, fighting man. He had fought against the natives, and
he had fought against our people. The younger man was his
son, a tall, fair fellow, scarcely more than a stripling, and
I had no need to be a prophet or a prophet’s son to tell that
his very hours were numbered. Both the father and the lad had
been wounded by one of our shells, and it was pitiful to
watch them as they lay side by side, the elder man holding
the hand of the younger in a loving clasp, whilst with his
other hand he stroked the boyish face with gestures that were
infinitely pathetic. Just as the stars were coming out that
night between the clouds that floated over us the Boer boy
sobbed his young life out, and all through the long watches
of that mournful darkness the father lay with his dead
laddie’s hand in his. The pain of his own wounds must have
been dreadful, but I heard no moan of anguish from his lips.
When, at the dawning, they came to take the dead boy from the
living man, the stern old warrior simply pressed his grizzled
lips to the cold face, and then turned his grey beard to the
hard earth and made no further sign; but I knew well that,
had the sacrifice been possible, he would gladly have given
his life to save the young one’s.

A BOER FIGHTING LAAGER.

BURGHERSDORP.

Many and wonderful are the stories written and published
concerning the Boer and his habits when on the war-path. Most
of these stories are written by men who take good care never
to get within a hundred miles of the fighting line, but
content themselves with an easy chair, a cigar, a bottle of
whisky, and carpet slippers on the stoep of some good hotel
in a pretty little Boer town. To scribes of this calibre
flock a certain class of British resident, who is always full
to the very ears of his own dauntless courage, his deathless
loyalty to the Queen and Empire, his love for the soldier,
and his hatred of the Boer. This gallant class of British
resident has half a million excuses ready to his hand to
explain why he did not take a rifle and fight when the war
summons rang clarion-like through the land. Then he grits his
teeth, knits his eyebrows, clenches his hands in spasmodic
wrath, throws out his chest, and tells his auditors, in a
voice husky with concentrated wrath and whisky, what he
intends to do the next time the damnable Boer rises to fight.
The old British pioneer may have whelped a few million good
fighting stock in his time, but this class of animal is no
lion’s whelp; it is a thing all mouth and no manners, a
shallow-brained, cowardly creature, always howling about the
Boer, but too discreet to go out and fight him, though ready
at all times to malign him, to ridicule him as a farmer or a
fighter, and it is a perfect bear’s feast to this hybrid
animal to get hold of a gullible newspaper correspondent to
tell him gruesome tales relative to Boer fighting
laagers.

I had one of this peculiar species at me the other day in
Burghersdorp, and he painted a Boer laager so vividly,
between nips at my flask, that if I had not seen a few
laagers myself I should have felt bad over the matter. He
pictured the smell of that laager in language so intense,
with gestures so graphic, that some of his auditors had to
hold their nostrils with handkerchiefs, whilst they stirred
the circumambient atmosphere with cardboard fans, and I could
not help wondering, if the portrait of the smell was so
awful, what the thing itself must be like. Flushed with
success, the narrator pursued his subject to the bitter
extremity. He conjured up scenes of half-buried men lying
amongst the rocks surrounding the laager: here a leg, there
an arm, further on a ghastly human head protruding from
amidst the scattered boulders, until I had only to close my
eyes to fancy I was in a charnel-house, where Goths and Huns
were holding devilish revelry. The B.R. paused, and dropped
his voice two octaves lower, and the crowd on the balcony
craned their heads further forward, so that they might not
miss a single word. He told of the women in the laagers, the
wild, unholy mirth of women, who moved from camp fire to camp
fire, with dishevelled hair streaming down their backs, with
tossing arms, bare to the shoulders, and blood besmeared, not
the blood of goats or kine, but the blood of soldiers—our
soldiers. Thomas Atkins defunct, and done for by the
she-furies.

He waded in again when the shudder which shook the crowd
had died away, and hinted, as that class of shallow-souled
creature loves to hint, of orgies under the dim light of the
stars, or between the flickering light of smoking camp fires,
until the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah seemed to be crowding
all around us in a peculiarly beastly and uncomfortable
fashion. Then he lay back in his chair and sighed; but anon
he sprang upright, and, with flashing eyes and extended arms,
wanted to know what the —— Roberts meant by offering peace
with honour to such a people. “Mow them down!” he yelled.
“Shoot them on sight—no quarter for such devils! Kill ’em
off! kill ’em off! kill ’em off!” and he half sobbed, half
sighed himself into silence, whilst the audience gazed on him
as on one who knew what war, wild, red, carmine war, was. I
broke in on his stillness, as newspaper men who know the game
are apt to do, for I wanted data, I wanted facts, and I had
not swallowed his yarn as freely as he had swallowed my
whisky.

“Born in this country?” I asked.

“Yorkshire,” he answered laconically.

“Been in Africa long?”

“‘Bout five years.”

“Where did you put in most of your time before the
war?”

“Johannesburg.”

“Mines?”

“No.”

“Merchant?”

“No.”

“Hotel-keeper, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Shopkeeper?”

“No.”

“What was your calling, or profession, or business, or
means of livelihood?”

“General agent, sharebroker, correspondent for some local
papers.”

H’m; I knew the class of animal well—general jackal; do
the dirty work of any trade, and master of none.

“Where were you when the war broke out?”

He scowled savagely: “Johannesburg.”

“Have the same hatred for the Boers before the war as you
have now?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you pick up a rifle and have a hand in the
fighting?”

“I’m not a blessed ‘Tommy,’ sir! Do you take me for a
d—— ‘Tommy,’ sir?”

“No; oh, no, I assure you I did nothing of the kind.
But—er, have you been in the hands of the Boers since the
war started?”

“Yes, until our troops marched in here a day or two
ago.”

“H’m. Did they rob you?”

“No.”

“Did they ill-treat you—knock you about, and that sort of
thing?”

“No.”

“Why do you hate them so bitterly, then?”

“Oh, I can’t stand a cursed Boer at any price. Thinks he’s
as good as a Britisher all the time, and puts on side; and
he’s a cursed tyrant in his heart, and would rub us out if he
could.”

“Yes, the Boer thought himself as good a man as the
Britishers he met out this way,” I replied, “and he backed
his opinion with his life and his rifle. Why didn’t you do
the same if you reckoned yourself a better man?”

“Why should I; don’t we pay ‘Tommy’ to do that for
us?”

“Perhaps we do; but, concerning those Boer laagers you
have been telling us about: where, when, and how did you see
them; what was the name of the place; who was the Boer
general in command, or the field cornet, or landdrost? I did
not know the Boers gave British refugees the free run of
their war laagers, and I’m interested in the matter, being a
scribe myself and a man of peace. Just give me a few names
and dates and facts, will you?”

“No, I won’t,” he snarled. “You seem to doubt my word, you
do, and I’m as good a Britisher as you are any day, and you
think you can come along and pump information out of me for
nothing; but I’m too fly for that—they don’t breed fools in
Yorkshire.”

“Well, sir, as it seems to suit your temper,” I said as
sweetly as I could, “I’ll make it a business proposition.
I’ll bet you fifty pounds to five you have never put your
head inside a Boer laager in war time in your life. If you
have, just name it and give me a few facts.”

The B.R. rose wrathfully and muttered something about it
being a d—— good job for me that I was a wounded man and
had one arm in a sling, or he’d show me a heap of things in
the fistic line which I should remember for the rest of my
life; but as I only laughed he slouched off, and now, when we
meet in the street, we pass without speaking. But I got his
history, all the same, from one of the Cape Police, who told
me the beggar had refused to join a volunteer regiment when
the war broke out, and had remained the whole time in a quiet
little Boer village as a British refugee, and had not seen
the outside, let alone the inside, of a Boer fighting laager
in all his lying life. Yet such cravens at times help to make
history—of a kind.

Possibly it may interest Englishmen—and women, too, for
that matter—to know what a fighting laager is like, and as I
have seen half a dozen of them from the enemies’ side of the
wall, a rough pen and ink sketch may not be amiss. In war
time the Boer never, under any circumstances, makes his
laager in the open country if there are any kopjes about. No
matter how secure he may fancy himself from attack, no matter
if there is not a foe within fifty miles of him, the Boer
commander always pitches his laager in a place of safety
between two parallel lines of hills, so that no attack can be
made upon him, either front or rear, without giving him an
immense advantage over the attacking force, even if the enemy
is ten times as strong in numbers. By this means the Boers
make their laagers almost impregnable. If they have a choice
of ground, they pick a narrow ravine, or gully, with a line
of hills front and rear, covered with small rocky boulders
and bushes. They drive their waggons along the ravine, and
make a sort of rude breastwork across the gully with the
waggons. In between these waggons the women are placed for
safety, for it is a noticeable fact that very large numbers
of women have followed their husbands and fathers to the war,
not to act as viragoes, not to play the wanton, not to unsex
themselves, not to handle the rifle, but to nurse the
wounded, to comfort the dying, and to lay out the dead. I
have heard them singing round the camp fires in the
starlight, but it was hymns that they sang, not ribald songs.
I have seen them kneeling by the side of men in the
moonlight, not in wantonness, but in mercy, and many a man
who wears the British uniform to-day can bear me witness that
I speak the truth.

The Boer never, if he can help it, allows himself to be
separated from his horse; and these hardy little animals,
mostly about fifteen hands high, and very lightly framed, are
picketed close to the spot where the rider deposits his rifle
and blankets. If they allow them to graze on the hillsides
during the day, they run a rope through the halter near the
horse’s muzzle, and tie it close above the knee-joint of the
near fore-leg. By this means the horse can graze in comfort,
but cannot move away at any pace beyond a slow walk, and so
are easily caught and saddled if required in a hurry. The
oxen and sheep to be used for slaughtering purposes are
driven up close to the camp; a waggon or two is drawn across
the ravine above and below them, and they cannot then
stampede if frightened by anything, unless they climb the
rocky heights on either side of them, which they have small
chance of doing, as the Kaffir herdsmen sleep on the hills
above them. Having pitched his laager, the commander sends
out his scouts; some amble off on horseback at a pace they
call a “tripple”—a gait which all the Boers educate their
nags to adopt. It is not exactly an amble, but a cousin to
it, marvellously easy to the rider, whilst it enables the nag
to get over a wonderful lot of ground without knocking up. It
also allows the horse to pick his way amongst rocky ground,
and so save his legs, where an English, Indian, or Australian
horse would be apt to cripple himself in very short order. As
soon as the mounted scouts set off on their journey, holding
the reins carelessly in the left hand, their handy little
Mauser rifles in their right, swaying carelessly in the
saddle after the fashion of all bush-riders the world over,
the foot scouts take up their positions amongst the rocks and
shrubs on the hills in front and rear of the laager. Each
scout has his rifle in his hand, his pipe in his teeth, his
bandolier full of cartridges over his shoulder, and his
scanty blanket under his left arm. No fear of his sleeping at
his post. He is fighting for honour, not for pay; for home,
not for glory; and he knows that on his acuteness the lives
of all may depend. He knows that his comrades and the women
trust him, and he values the trust as dearly as British
soldier ever did. No matter how tired he may be, no matter
how famished, the Boer sentinel is never faithless to his
orders.

When the scouts are out the laager is fixed for the
night—not a very exhaustive proceeding, as the Boers do not
go in for luxuries of any kind. Here a tarpaulin is stretched
over a kind of temporary ridge pole, blankets are tossed down
on the hard earth, saddles are used for pillows, and the
couch is complete. A little way farther down the line a rude
canvas screen is thrown over the wheels of a waggon, and a
family, or rather husband and wife, make themselves at home
under the waggon; whilst the single men simply throw
themselves at full length on the ground, wrap their one thin,
small blanket round them, and smoke and jest merrily enough,
whilst the Kaffirs light the fires and make the coffee. There
is scarcely any timber in this part of Africa, and the fuel
used is the dried manure of cattle pressed into slabs about
fifteen inches long, eight inches wide, and three inches
thick. The smoke from the fires is very dense, and soon fills
the air with a pungent odour, which is not unpleasant in the
open, but would be simply intolerable in a building. The
coffee is soon made, and the simple meal begins; it consists
of “rusks,” a kind of bread baked until it becomes crisp and
hard, and plenty of steaming hot coffee. I never saw any
people so fond of this beverage as the Boers are. The
Australian bushman and digger loves tea, and can almost exist
upon it; but these Boers cling to coffee. They live, when out
in laager, like Spartans, they dress anyhow, sleep anyhow,
and eat just rusks and precious little else. Talk about
“Tommy” and his hard times, why a private soldier at the
front sleeps better, dresses better, and eats better than a
Boer general; yet never once did I hear a Boer complain of
hardships. After tea the Boers sit about and clean their
rifles; the women move from one little group to another,
chatting cheerfully, but I saw nothing in their conduct, or
in the conduct of any man towards one of them, that would
cause the most chaste matron in Great Britain to blush or
droop her eyes. There is in the laager an utter absence of
what we term soldierly discipline; men moved about, went and
came in a free and easy fashion, just as I have seen them do
a thousand times in diggers’ camps. There was no saluting of
officers, no stiffness, no starch anywhere. The general
lounges about with hands in pockets and pipe in mouth; no one
pays him any special deference. He talks to the men, the
striplings, and the women, and they talk back to him in a
manner which seems strange to a Britisher familiar to the
ways of military camps. After the chatting, the pridikant, or
parson, if there is one in the laager, raises his hands, and
all listen with reverent faces whilst the man of God utters a
few words in a solemn, earnest tone; then all kneel, and a
prayer floats up towards the skies, and a few moments later
the whole camp is wrapped in sleep, nothing is heard but the
neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle, the bleating of
sheep, and the occasional barking of a dog. There is no
clatter of arms, no ringing of bugles, no deep-toned
challenge of sentries, no footfall of changing pickets.

At regular intervals men rise silently from the ranks of
the sleepers, pick up their rifles noiselessly, and silently,
like ghosts, slip out into the deep shadows of the kopjes,
and other men, equally silent, glide in from posts they have
been guarding, and stretch themselves out to snatch slumber
whilst they may. At dawn the men toss their blankets aside,
and spring up ready dressed, and move amongst their horses;
the Kaffirs attend to the morning meal, the everlasting rusks
and coffee are served up, horses are saddled, cattle are
yoked to waggons, and in the twinkling of an eye the camp is
broken up, and the irregular army is on the march again, with
scouts guarding every pass in front, scouts watching
(themselves unseen) on every height. They travel fast,
because they travel light; they use very little water,
because they find it impossible to move it from place to
place. Many critics charge them with habits of personal
uncleanliness. It is true that in their laagers one does not
see as much soap and water used as in our camps, but this is
possibly due to want of opportunity as much as to want of
inclination. In sanitary matters they are neglectful. I did
not see a single latrine in any of their laagers, nor do I
think they are in the habit of making them, and to this cause
and to no other I attribute the large amount of fever in
their ranks. They do not seem to understand the first
principles of the laws of sanitation, and had this season
been a wet, instead of a peculiarly dry one, I venture to
assert that typhoid fever would have wrought far more havoc
amongst them than our rifles.

I saw no literature in laager except Bibles. I witnessed
no sports of any kind, and the only sport I heard them talk
about was horse-racing. I saw no gambling, heard no
blasphemy, noticed no quarrelling or bickering, and can only
say, from my slight acquaintance with life in Boer laager in
war time, that it may be rough, it may be irksome, it may not
be so fastidiously clean as a feather-bed soldier might like
it, but I have been in many tougher, rougher places, and
never heard anyone cry about it.

THROUGH BOER GLASSES.

BURGHERSDORP.

I had a good many opportunities of chatting with Boers
during the time which elapsed between my capture and
liberation, and had a long talk with the President of the
Orange Free State, Mr. Steyn; also with several of his
ministerial colleagues. Their ministers of religion, whom
they call pridikants, also chatted to me freely, as occasion
offered. I had more than one interview with their fighting
generals. Medical men in their service I found very much akin
to medical men the world over. They patched up the wounded
and asked no questions concerning nationality, just as our
own medicos do. Personally, I must say that I found the Boers
first-class subjects for Press interviews. They did not know
much about journalists and the ways of journalism. Possibly
had they had more experience in regard to “interviews,” I
should not have found them quite so easy to manage, but it
never seemed to enter their heads that a man might make good
“copy” out of a quiet chat over pipes and tobacco. One of
their stock subjects of conversation was their great General,
the man of Magersfontein—General Cronje.

“What do you Britishers and Australians think of Cronje?”
was a stock question with them. “Do you think him a good
fighter?”

“Well, yes, unquestionably he is a good fighting man.”

“Do you think him as good as Lord Roberts?”

“No. We men of British blood don’t think there are many
men on earth as good as the hero of Candahar.”

“Do you think him as good a man as Lord Kitchener?”

“No. Very many of us consider the conqueror of the Soudan
to be one who, if he lives, will make as great a mark in
history as Wellington.”

At this a joyous smile would illuminate the face of the
Boer. He would reply, “Yes, yes; Roberts is a great man, a
very great man indeed. So is Kitchener, so is General French,
so is General Macdonald, so is General Methuen. Yet all those
five men are attempting to get Cronje into a corner where
they can capture him. They have ten times as many soldiers as
Cronje has, ten times as many guns; therefore, what a really
great man Cronje must be on your own showing.”

That was before the fatal 27th of February on which Cronje
surrendered.

I often asked them how they, representing a couple of
small States, came to get hold of the idea that they could
whip a colossal Power like Great Britain in a life or death
struggle; and almost invariably they informed me that they
had expected that one of the great European Powers would take
an active part in the struggle on their behalf, and,
furthermore, they had been taught to think that Britain’s
Empire was rotten to the core, so much so that as soon as war
commenced in earnest all her colonies would fall away from
her and hoist the flag of independence, and that India would
leap once again into open and bloody mutiny. They expressed
themselves as being dumbfounded when they heard that
Australian troops were rallying under the Union Jack, and
seemed to feel most bitterly that the men from the land of
the Southern Cross were in arms against them. “We fell out
with England, and we thought we had to fight England. Instead
we find we have to fight people from all parts of the world,
Colonials like ourselves. Surely Australia and Canada might
have kept out of this fight, and allowed us to battle it out
with the country we had a quarrel with.”

“The Canadians and Australians are of British blood.”

“Well, what if they are? Ain’t plenty of the Cape
Volunteers who are fighting under President Kruger’s banner
born of Dutch parents? Yet, because they fight against
Englishmen, you call them all rebels, and talk of punishing
them when the war is over, if you win, just because they
lived on your side of the border and not on ours. Would you
ask one Boer to fight against another Boer simply because he
lived on one side of a river and his blood relation lived on
the other? You Britishers brag of your pride of blood, and
draw your fighting stock from all parts of the world in war
time, but you have no generosity; you won’t allow other
people to be proud of their blood too.”

I tried to persuade them that I did not for one moment
think that Britain would be vindictive towards so-called
rebels in the hour of victory, and pointed out that, in my
small opinion, such a course would be foreign to the
traditions of the Motherland; and was often met with the
retort that if England did so the shame would be hers, not
theirs. Many a time I was told to remember the Jameson raid
and the manner in which the Boers treated not only the
leaders of that band of adventurers, but the men also. “Look
here,” said one old fighting man to me, as he leant with
negligent grace on his rifle, “I was one of those who helped
to corner Jameson and his men, and I can tell you that we
Boers knew very well that we would have been acting within
our rights if we had shot Jameson and every man he had with
him, because his was not an act of war—it was an act of
piracy; and had we done so, and England had attempted to
avenge the deed, half the civilised world would have ranged
themselves on our side; but we did not seek those men’s
blood; we gave them quarter as soon as they asked for it, and
after that, though we knew very well they had done all that
men could do to involve us in a war of extermination with a
great nation, we sent their leader home to his own country to
be tried by his own countrymen, and the rank and file we
forgave freely. We may be a nation of white savages, but our
past does not prove it, and if Britain wins in the war now
going on she will have to be very generous indeed before we
will need to blush for our conduct.”

“Why should not the white population of South Africa be
ready to live under the protection of Britain? The yoke
cannot be so heavy when men of all creeds, colours, and
nationalities who have lived under that rule for years are
now ready to volunteer to fight for her, even against you,
who have admittedly done them no direct wrong?”

“Why should we live under any flag but our own?” replied
the old fighting man passionately. “We came here and found
the country a wilderness in the hands of savages; we fought
our way into the land step by step, holding our own with our
rifles; we had to live lives of fearful hardships, facing
wild beasts and wilder men; we won with the strong hand the
land we live in. Why should we bow our necks to Britain’s
yoke, even if it be a yoke of silk?” And as he spoke a murmur
of deep and earnest sympathy ran through the ranks of the
Boers who were standing around him.

“You, of course, blame all the Colonials, Australians and
others, for coming to fight against you?” I asked. “I don’t
know that I do, or that my people do, in a sense,” the
veteran replied. “It all depends upon the spirit which
animated them. If your Australians, who are of British blood,
came here to fight for your Motherland, believing that her
cause was a just and a holy one, and that she needed your
aid, you did right, for a son will help his mother, if he be
a son worth having; but if the Australians came here merely
for the sake of adventure, merely for sport, as men come in
time of peace to shoot buck on the veldt, then woe to that
land, for though God may make no sign to-day nor to-morrow,
yet, in His own time, He will surely wring from Australia a
full recompense in sweat and blood and tears; for whether we
be right or wrong, our God knows that we are giving our lives
freely for what we in our hearts believe to be a holy
cause.”

“What do you fellows think of Australians as
fighters?”

I asked the question carelessly, but the answer that I got
brought me to my bearings quickly, for then I learnt that
more than one gallant Australian officer dear to me had
fallen, never to rise again, since I had been taken prisoner.
The man who spoke was little more than a lad, a pale-faced,
slenderly built son of the veldt. He had tangled curly hair,
and big, pathetic blue eyes, soft as a girl’s, and limbs that
lacked the rugged strength of the old Boer stock; but there
was that nameless “something,” that indefinable expression in
his face which warranted him a brave man. He carried one arm
in a sling, and the bandage round his neck hid a bullet
wound. “The Australians can fight,” he said simply. “They
wounded me, and—they killed my father.” Perhaps it was the
wind sighing through the hospital trees that made the Boer
lad’s voice grow strangely husky; possibly the same cause
filled the blue eyes with unshed tears.

“It was in fair fight, lad,” I said gently; “it was the
fortune of war.”

“Yes,” he murmured, “it was in fair fight, an awful
fight—I hope I’ll never look upon another like it. Damn the
fighting,” he broke out fiercely. “Damn the fighting. I
didn’t hate your Australians. I didn’t want to kill any of
them. My father had no ill-will to them, nor they to him, yet
he is out there—out there between two great kopjes—where
the wind always blows cold and dreary at night-time.” The
laddie shuddered. “It makes a man doubt the love of the
Christ,” he said. “My father was a good man, a kind man, who
never turned the stranger empty-handed from his door, even
the Kaffirs on the farm loved him; and now he is lying where
no one can weep over his grave. We piled great rocks on his
grave. My cousin and I buried him. We had no shovels; we
scooped a hole in the hard earth as well as we could, a long,
shallow hole, and we laid him in it. I took his head and
Cousin Gustave carried his feet. We folded his hands on his
breast, laid his old rifle by his side, because he had always
loved that gun, and never used any other when out hunting.
Then we pushed the earth in on him gently with our hands,
breaking the hard lumps up and crumbling them in our palms,
so that they should not bruise his poor flesh. He had always
been so kind, we could not hurt him, even though we knew he
was dead, for he had been gentle to all of us in life; even
the cows and the oxen at home loved him—and now who will go
back and tell mother and little Yacoba that he is dead, that
he will come to them no more? Oh, damn the war,” the lad
called again in his pain. “I don’t know—only God
knows—which side is right or wrong, but I do know that the
curse of the Christ will rest on the heads of those who have
made this war for ambition’s sake or the greed of gold, and
the good God will not let the widow and the orphan child go
unavenged; blood will yet speak for blood, and it must rest
either on the heads of Kruger and Steyn, or Chamberlain and
Rhodes.”

“Tell me, comrade, of the Australians who fell. They were
my countrymen.”

“It was a cruel fight,” he said. “We had ambushed a lot of
the British troops—the Worcesters, I think, they called
them. They could neither advance nor retire; we had penned
them in like sheep, and our field cornet, Van Leyden, was
beseeching them to throw down their rifles to save being
slaughtered, for they had no chance. Just then we saw about a
hundred Australians come bounding over the rocks in the gully
behind us. There were two great big men in front cheering
them on. We turned and gave them a volley, but it did not
stop them. They rushed over everything, firing as they came,
not wildly, but as men who know the use of a rifle, with the
quick, sharp, upward jerk to the shoulder, the rapid sight,
and then the shot. They knocked over a lot of our men, but we
had a splendid position. They had to expose themselves to get
to us, and we shot them as they came at us. They were rushing
to the rescue of the English. It was splendid, but it was
madness. On they came, and we lay behind the boulders, and
our rifles snapped and snapped again at pistol range, but we
did not stop those wild men until they charged right into a
little basin which was fringed around all its edges by rocks
covered with bushes. Our men lay there as thick as locusts,
and the Australians were fairly trapped. They were far worse
off than the Worcesters, up high in the ravine.

“Our field cornet gave the order to cease firing, and
called on them to throw down their rifles or die. Then one of
the big officers—a, great, rough-looking man, with a voice
like a bull—roared out, ‘Forward Australia!—no surrender!’
Those were the last words he ever uttered, for a man on my
right put a bullet clean between his eyes, and he fell
forward dead. We found later that his name was Major Eddy, of
the Victorian Rifles. He was as brave as a lion, but a Mauser
bullet will stop the bravest. His men dashed at the rocks
like wolves; it was awful to see them. They smashed at our
heads with clubbed rifles, or thrust their rifles up against
us through the rocks and fired. One after another their
leaders fell. The second big man went down early, but he was
not killed. He was shot through the groin, but not
dangerously. His name was Captain McInnerny. There was
another one, a little man named Lieutenant Roberts; he was
shot through the heart. Some of the others I forget. The men
would not throw down their rifles; they fought like furies.
One man I saw climb right on to the rocky ledge where Big Jan
Albrecht was stationed. Just as he got there a bullet took
him, and he staggered and dropped his rifle. Big Jan jumped
forward to catch him before he toppled over the ledge, but
the Australian struck Jan in the mouth with his clenched
fist, and fell over into the ravine below and was killed.

“We killed and wounded an awful lot of them, but some got
away; they fought their way out. I saw a long row of their
dead and wounded laid out on the slope of a farmhouse that
evening—they were all young men, fine big fellows. I could
have cried to look at them lying so cold and still. They had
been so brave in the morning, so strong; but in the evening,
a few little hours, they were dead, and we had not hated
them, nor they us. Yes, I could have cried as I thought of
the women who would wait for them in Australia. Yes, I could
have shed tears, though they had wounded me, but then I
thought of my father, and of the mother, and little Yacoba on
the farm, who would wait in vain for him, and then I
could feel sorry for those, the wives and children of the
dead men, no longer.”

LIFE IN THE BOER CAMPS.

HEADQUARTERS, ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

It is an article of faith with many people that a Boer
commando is a mere mob, that its leaders exercise no control
over men in laager or on the field, and that punishment for
crimes is a thing unknown. But this is far from being the
case. It is quite true that a Boer soldier does not know how
to click his heels together, turn his toes to an acute angle,
stiffen his back, and salute every time an officer runs
against him. He could not properly perform any of the very
simplest military evolutions common to all European soldiers
if his immortal welfare depended upon it. That is why he is
such a failure as an attacking agent. Still, in spite of
these things, the Boer on commando has to submit to very
rigid laws. The penalty for outrage, or attempted outrage, on
a woman is instant death on conviction, no matter what the
woman’s nationality may be. For sleeping on sentry duty the
punishment is unique; it is a punishment born of long
dwelling in the wilderness. It is of such a nature that no
man who has once undergone it is calculated ever to forget.
When a clear case is made out against a burgher by trial
before his commandant the whole commando in laager is
summoned to witness the criminal’s reward. He is taken out
beyond the lines to a spot where the sun shines in all its
unprotected fierceness. He is led to an ant-hill full of
busy, wicked, little crawlers; the top of the ant-hill is cut
off with a spade, leaving a honeycombed surface for the
sleepy one to stand upon (not much fear of him sleeping
whilst he is there). He is ordered to mount the hill and
stand with feet close together. His rifle is placed in his
hands, the butt resting between his toes, the muzzle clasped
in both hands. Two men are then told off to watch him. They
are picked men, noted for their stern, unyielding sense of
duty and love for the cause they fight for.

These guards lie down in the veldt twenty-five yards away
from the victim. They have their loaded Mausers with them,
and their orders are, if the prisoner lifts a leg, to put a
bullet into it; if he lifts an arm, a bullet goes into that
defaulting member; if he jumps down from his perch
altogether, the leaden messengers sent from both rifles will
cancel all his earthly obligations. The sun shines down in
savage mockery; it strikes upon the bare neck of the
quivering wretch, who dare not lift a hand to shift his hat
to cover the blistering skin. It strikes in his eyes and
burns his lips until they swell and feel like bursting. The
barrel of his rifle grows hotter and hotter, until his
fingers feel as if glued to a gridiron. The very clothes upon
his body burn the skin beneath. He feels desperate; he must
shift one arm, for the anguish is intolerable. He makes an
almost imperceptible movement of his shoulder, and glances
towards his guards. The man on his right front lays his pipe
quickly in the grass, and swiftly lifts his Mauser to his
shoulder. The wretch on the ant-heap closes his eyes with a
groan, and stands as still as a Japanese god carved out of
jute-wood. The guard lays down his rifle and picks up his
pipe.

The sun climbs higher and higher, until it gleams down
straight into the ant-heap; the scorching heat penetrates
into the unprotected cells, and enrages the dwellers inside.
They swarm out full of fight, like an army lusting for
battle. Their home has been ravished of the protection they
had raised with half a lifetime of labour, and in their puny
way they want vengeance. They find a foe on top, a man ready
to their wrath. They crawl into his scorched boots, over his
baked feet, guiltless of stockings; they charge up the legs,
on which the trousers hang loosely, and as they charge they
bite, because they are out for business, not for a picnic.
The very stillness of their victim seems to enrage them. The
first legion retires at full speed down into the ant-heap
again. They have gone for recruits. In a few seconds up they
come again, until the very top of the heap is alive with
them. They climb one over another in their eagerness to get
in their individual moiety of revenge. Down into the
veldtschoon, up the bare, hairy legs, over the hips, round
the waist, over the lean ribs, along the spine, under the
arms, round the neck, over the whole man they go, as the
Mongolian hordes will some day go over the Western world. And
each one digs his tiny prongs into the smarting, burning,
itching poor devil on top of their homestead. He shifts a leg
the hundredth part of an inch. The guard on the left gives
his bandolier a warning twist, and glances along the long
brown barrel that nestles in the hollow of his left hand.

The commandant comes out of the circle of burghers, looks
at the victim, sees that the eyes are bloodshot and
protruding far beyond the normal position. He is not a hard
man, but he knows that the culprit has endangered the lives
and liberties of all. “You will remember this,” he says
sternly; “you will not again sleep when it is your turn to
watch.” “Never, so help me God!” gasps the prisoner. “Stand
down, then; you are free.” Quicker than a swallow’s flight is
the movement of the liberated man. He drops his rifle with a
gasp of relief, tears every stitch of clothing from his body,
throws the garments from him, and pelts his veldtschoon after
them. Some sympathetic veteran, who has possibly, in earlier
wars, been through the ordeal himself, runs up with a drink
of blessed water. He does not drink it; he pours it down his
burning throat, then sits on the grass, drawing his breath in
long, sobbing sighs, all the more terrible because they are
tearless. From head to heel he is covered with tiny red
marks, just like a schoolboy who has had the measles; in
three days there will not be a mark on him, but he won’t
forget them, all the same, not in thirty-three years, or
three hundred and thirty-three, if he happens to have a
memory of any kind at that period.

This mode of punishing recalcitrant persons was picked up,
I am told, from one of the savage tribes. I do not know if
this is so or not, but there is no doubt that the niggers
know all about it, because one day, when I found that one of
my niggers had been helping himself lavishly to my tobacco, I
promised to stand him on an ant-heap as soon as I had
finished shaving. Five minutes later my other nigger,
Lazarus, came into my tent and informed me that Johnnie had
bolted. I went out, and by the aid of my glasses I could just
espy a black dot away out on the veldt, making a rapid and
direct line for the land of the Basutos; and that was the
last I ever saw or heard of tobacco-loving, work-dodging,
truth-twisting Johnnie.

There is a distinctly humorous side to the Boer character,
which crops out sometimes in his methods of dealing out
justice to those who have done the thing that seems evil in
his sight. If there is a fellow in laager who is not amenable
to orders, one of those malcontents who desires to have
everything his own way—and there generally is one of these
cherubs in every large gathering of men all the world
over—the commandant first calls him up and warns him that he
is making himself a pest to the whole commando, and exhorts
him to mend his manners. As a general thing the commandant
throws a few slabs of Scripture appropriate to the occasion
at the disturber’s ears, and mixes it judiciously with a good
deal of worldly wisdom, all of which tending to teach the
fellow that he is about as desirable as a comrade as a sore
eye in a sand-storm. Should the exhortation not have the
desired effect, and the offender continue to stir up strife
in laager, as a lame mule stirs up mud in midstream, then the
commandant sends a guard of young men to gather in the unruly
one. He is captured with as little ceremony as a nigger
captures a hog in the midst of his mealy patch. They strip
him bare to the waist, and put a bridle on his head; the bit
is jammed into his mouth, and firmly buckled there, and then
the circus begins. One of the guards takes the reins, usually
a couple of long lengths of raw hide; another flicks the
human steed on the bare ribs with a sjambok, and he is
ordered to show his paces. He has to walk, trot, canter,
gallop, and “tripple” all around the laager several times,
amidst the badinage and laughter of the burghers, and he gets
enough “chaff” during the journey to last the biggest horse
in England a lifetime.

It is bad enough when there are only men there, but when
there are, as is often the case, a dozen or two of women and
girls present his woe is served up to him full measure and
brimming over. The men roar with laughter, and pelt him with
crusts of rusks, but the women and girls make his life an
agony for the time being. They smile at him sweetly, and ask
him if he feels lonely without a cart, or they pull up a
handful of grass and offer it to him on the end of a stick,
making a lot of “stage aside” remarks concerning the length
of his ears the while, until the fellow’s face crimsons with
shame.

They are wonderfully patriotic, these Boer girls and
women, and are merciless in their contempt for a man who will
not do his share of fighting, marching, and watching
cheerfully and uncomplainingly. The hardships and privations
they themselves undergo without murmuring, in order to assist
their husbands, brothers, and lovers, is worthy of being
chronicled in the pages of history, for they are the Spartans
of the nineteenth century. They are swift to help those who
need help, but unsparing with their scorn for those who are
unworthy. The treatment meted out to the grumbler and
mischief-maker usually presents more of the elements of
comedy than anything else, and it is his own fault if he does
not get off lightly. But if he cuts up rough, tries to strike
or kick his drivers or tormentors, or if he goes in for a
course of sulks, and flops himself down, refusing to be
driven, then the comic element disappears from the scene. Out
come the sjamboks, and he is treated precisely as a vicious
or sulky horse would be treated under similar circumstances.
As a rule, it does not take long to bring a man of that kind
to his proper senses. Should he talk of deserting or of
avenging himself later on, he is watched, and a deserter soon
learns that a rifle bullet can travel faster than he can. As
for revenge, the sooner he forgets desires or designs of that
kind the better for his own health.

For minor offences, such as laziness, neglecting to keep
the rifle clean and in good shooting order, attempting to
strike up a flirtation with a married woman, to the annoyance
of the lady, or any other little matter of the kind, the
wayward one is “tossed.” Tossing is not the sort of pastime
any fellow would choose for fun, not if he were the party to
be tossed, though it is a beanfeast for the onlookers. They
manage it this way. A hide, freshly stripped from a bullock,
smoking, bloody, and limber as a bowstring, is requisitioned;
the hairy side is turned downwards, two strong men get hold
of each corner, cutting holes in the green hide for their
hands to have a good grip; they allow the hide to sag until
it forms a sort of cradle, into which the unlucky one is
dumped neck and crop. Then the signal is given, the hide
sways to and fro for a few seconds, and then, with a skilful
jerk, it is drawn as taut as eight pairs of strong arms can
draw it. If the executioners are skilful at the business the
victim shoots upwards from the blood-smeared surface like a
dude’s hat in a gale of wind. Sometimes he comes down on his
feet, sometimes on his head, or he may sprawl face downwards,
clutching at the slimy surface as eagerly as a politician
clutches at a place in power. But his efforts are vain; a
couple more swings and another jerk, and up he goes, turning
and twisting like a soiled shirt on a wire fence. This time
he comes down on his hands and knees, and promptly commences
to plead for pity, but before he can open his heart a neat
little jerk sends him out on his back, where he claws and
kicks like a jackal in a gin case, whilst the more ribald
amongst the onlookers sing songs appropriate to the occasion,
but the more devout chant some such hymn as this:

A man is very seldom hurt at this game, though how he
escapes without a broken neck is one of the wonders of
gravitation to me. One second you see the poor beggar in mid
air, going like a circular saw through soft pine. Just when
you are beginning to wonder if he has converted himself into
a catherine-wheel or a corkscrew, he straightens himself out
horizontally, remains poised for the millionth part of a
second like a he-angel that has moulted his wings; then down
he dives perpendicularly like a tornado in trousers, skinning
forehead, nose, and chin as he kisses the drum-like surface
of the hide. No, on the whole, I do not consider it healthy
to try to fool with a married woman in a Boer fighting
laager, apart altogether from the moral aspect of the affair.
If some of the amorous dandies I wot of, who claim kindred
with us, got the same sort of treatment in Old England, many
a merry matron would be saved much annoyance.

For rank disobedience of orders, brutality of conduct,
cowardice in the face of the enemy, flagrant neglect of the
wounded, or any other very serious military crime, the
punishment is sjamboking, which is simply flogging, as it
existed in our Army and Navy not so many years ago. On board
ship they used to use the “cat,” a genteel instrument with a
handle attached. The Boer sjambok is a different article
altogether; it has not nine tails, but it gets there just the
same. The sjambok dear to the Boer soul is that made out of
rhinoceros hide. It is a plain piece of hide, not twisted in
any way; just clean cut out and trimmed round all the way
down. It is about three feet long, and at the end which the
flogger holds it is about two and a half inches in
circumference, tapering down gradually to a rat-tail point.
It is a terrible weapon when the person who wields it is bent
on business, and is not manufacturing poetry or mingling
thoughts of home and mother with the flogging. Truth to tell,
I don’t think they do much flogging—not half as much as they
are credited with—but when they do flog, the party who gets
it wants a soft shirt for a month after, and it’s quite a
while before he will lie on his back for the mere pleasure of
seeing the moon rise.

BATTLE OF CONSTANTIA FARM.

THABA NCHU.

The Battle of Constantia Farm will not rank as one of the
big events of this war, but it is worthy of a full
description, because in this battle the Briton for the first
time laid himself out from start to finish to fight the Boer
pretty much on his own lines, instead of following
time-honoured British rules of war. Before attempting to
portray the actual fighting, I think a brief sketch of our
movements from the time we left the railway line to cross the
country will be of interest to those readers of The Daily
News who desire to follow the progress of the war with
due care.

The Third Division, which had been at Stormberg, and had
done such excellent, though almost bloodless, work by
sweeping the country between the last-named place and
Bethany, rested at the latter place, and built up its full
strength by incorporating a large number of men and guns.
General Gatacre, who had retrieved his reverse at Stormberg
by forcing Commandant Olivier to vacate his almost
impregnable position without striking a blow, and later by
his masterly move in swooping down on Bethulie Bridge and
preventing the Boers from wrecking the line of communication
between Lord Roberts and his supplies from Capetown, only
remained long enough with his old command to see them
equipped in a manner fit to take the field, and then retired
in favour of General Chermside. It was under this officer
that we marched away from the railway line across country
known to be hostile to us. Almost due east we moved to
Reddersburg, about twelve and a half miles. We had to move
slowly and cautiously, because no living man can tell when,
where, or how a Boer force will attack. They follow rules of
their own, and laugh at all accepted theories of war, ancient
or modern, and no general can afford to hold them cheap. A
day and a half was spent at Reddersburg, and then the Third
Division continued its eastward course in wretched weather,
until Rosendal was arrived at. This is the spot where the
Royal Irish Rifles and Northumberland Fusiliers had to
surrender to the Boers. We had to camp there for the best
part of three days on account of the continuous downpour of
rain, which rendered the veldt tracks impassable for our
transport. To push onward meant the absolute destruction of
mules and oxen, and the consequent loss of food supplies,
without which we were helpless, for in that country every
man’s hand was against us, not only in regard to actual
warfare, but in regard to forage for man and beast.

Here we were joined by General Rundle with the Eighth
Division, which brought our force up to about thirteen
thousand men, thirty big guns, and a number of Maxims. When
the weather cleared slightly we moved onward slowly, the
ground simply clinging to the wheels of the heavily laden
waggons, until it seemed as if the very earth, as well as all
that was on top of it, was opposed to our march. Our scouts
constantly saw the enemy hovering on our front and flanks,
and more than once exchanged shots with them. General Rundle,
who was in supreme command, thus knew that he could not hope
to surprise the wily foe, for it was evident to the merest
tyro that the Boer leader was keeping a sharp eye upon our
movements, and would not be taken at a disadvantage. We
expected to measure the enemy’s fighting force at any hour,
but it was not until about half-past ten on the morning of
Friday, the 20th of April, that we were certain that he meant
to measure his arms with ours, though early on that morning
our scouts had brought in news that a commando, believed to
be about two thousand five hundred strong, with half a dozen
guns, commanded by General De Wet, was strongly posted right
on our line of march. Slowly we crept across the open veldt,
our men stretching from east to west for fully six miles.
There was no moving of solid masses of men, no solid grouping
of troops; no two men marched shoulder to shoulder, a gap
showed plainly between each of the khaki-clad figures as we
moved on to the rugged, broken line of kopjes. There was no
hurry, no bustle, the men behaved admirably, each individual
soldier seeming to have his wits about him, and proving it by
taking advantage of every bit of cover that came in his way.
If they halted near an ant-hill, they at once put it between
themselves and the enemy.

Slowly but steadily they rolled onward, like a great
sluggish, but irresistible, yellow wave, until we saw the
scouts slipping from rock to rock up the stony heights of the
first line of hills. Breathlessly we watched the intrepid
“eyes of the army” advance until they stood silhouetted
against the sky-line on the top of the black bulwarks of the
veldt. Then we strained our ears to catch the rattle of the
enemy’s rifles, but we listened in vain; and we were
completely staggered. What did it mean? Was it a trap? Was
there some devilish craft behind that apparent peacefulness?
Trap or no trap, we had not long to wait. The long, yellow
wave curled inwards from both flanks, the men going forward
with quick, lithesome steps. The mounted infantry shot
forward as if moved by magic, and, before the eye could
scarcely grasp the details, our fellows held the heights, and
men marvelled and wondered whether the Boers had bolted for
good. But they soon undeceived us, for the hills shook with
the far-reaching roar of their guns, and shells began to make
melody which devils love; but they did no harm. Not a man was
touched. Then came the short, sharp word of command from our
lines. Officers bit their words across the centre, and threw
them at the men. The Horse Artillery moved into position,
some going at a steady trot, others sweeping along the
valleys as if they were the children of the storm. The left
flank swung forward and encircled the base of an imposing
kopje. The men swarmed up with tiger-like activity, quickly,
and in broken and irregular lines; but there was no
confusion, no wretched tangle, no helpless muddle. They did
not rush madly to the top and stand on the sky-line to be a
mark for their foes. When they almost touched the summit they
paused, formed their broken lines, and carefully and wisely
topped the black brow; and as they did so the Boer rifles
spoke from a line of kopjes that lay behind the first. Then
our fellows dropped to cover, and sent an answer back that a
duller foe than the Boers would not have failed to
understand. The Mauser bullets splashed on the rocks, and
spat little fragments of lead in all directions; but few of
them found a resting-place under those thin yellow jackets.
By-and-by the shells began to follow the Mauser’s spiteful
pellets, but the shells were less harmful even than the
little hostile messengers; for, though well directed, the
shells never burst—they simply shrieked, yelled, and buried
themselves. Our gunners got the ground they wanted, and soon
gun spoke to gun in their deep-throated tones of defiance.
The Boers were not hurting us; whether we were injuring them
we could not tell.

In the meantime our whole transport came safely inside a
little semi-circular valley, and arranged itself with almost
ludicrous precision. The nigger drivers chaffed one another
as the shells made melody above their heads, and made the air
fairly dance with the picturesque terms of endearment they
bestowed upon their mules, between the welts they bestowed
with their long two-handed whips. When two of their leaders
jibbed and refused to budge, they howled and called them Mr.
Steyn and Ole Oom Paul; but when they got down solid to their
work they laughed until even their back teeth were showing
beyond the dusky horizon of their lips, and endowed them with
the names of Cecil Rhodes and Mistah Chamberlain, which may
or may not appear complimentary to the owners of those
titles—anyway, the mules did not seem to be offended. One
thing was made manifest to me then, and confirmed later on,
viz., the nigger is a game fellow; give him a little
excitement, and he is full of “devil”—it’s the doing of
deeds in cold blood that finds him out. After seeing the way
the transport was handled, I moved along to look at the
ambulance arrangements, and found them practically perfect.
The medical staff was cool and collected, the helpers were
alert and attentive to business; the waggons, with their
conspicuous red crosses, were all well and carefully
placed—though in such a fight it was a sheer impossibility
to dispose them so as to render them absolutely immune from
danger, for shells have a knack of falling where least
expected, and when they burst he is a wise man who falls flat
on his face and leaves the rest to his Creator and the
fortune of war. My next move was to secure a position on the
top of a kopje, to try to gather some idea concerning the
actual strength of the Boer position. It needed no soldier’s
training to tell a man who knew the rugged Australian ranges
thoroughly that the enemy had chosen his ground with
consummate skill. To get at the Boers our men had either to
go down the sides of the kopjes in full view of the clever
enemy, or else make their way between narrow gullies, where
shells would work havoc in their packed ranks. After they had
reached the open, level ground, they had to cross open spaces
of veldt commanded by the Boer guns and rifles, whilst the
Boers themselves sat tight in a row of ranges that ran from
east to west, mile after mile, in almost unbroken ruggedness.
If we turned either flank, they could promptly fall back upon
another line of kopjes as strong as those they held. Away
behind their position the grim heights of Thaba Nchu rose
towards the blue sky, solemn and stately. Far away to the
eastward, a little south of east perhaps, I could see the
hills that hid Wepener, distant about eighteen miles from the
Boer centre. There we knew, and the enemy knew, that the
Boers held a British force pinned in. They knew, and we knew,
that Commandant Olivier, with eight or nine thousand men and
a lot of guns, held the reins in his hands; and the men our
force were engaging knew that unless they could keep us in
check Olivier would soon be the hunted instead of the
hunter.

By-and-by the rifle fire on our left flank grew weaker and
weaker—our guns were searching the kopjes with merciless
accuracy—and before sundown it died away altogether, and we
had time to collect our wounded and ascertain our losses,
though we could not even guess how the Boers had fared Our
wounded amounted to eight men all told, none of them
dangerously hurt; of dead we had none, not one. When their
fire slackened the enemy doubtless expected to see an onward
dash of troops from our position, but it was not to be.
General Rundle had decided to play “patience” and save his
men; there was no necessity for him to rush on and force the
Boer position, and he chose the better part. Steadily our
fellows were worked into position, until every bit of ground
that could bear upon the foe was lined with British troops.
Every available point, front or flank, where a gun could be
placed to harass the foe was taken advantage of; nothing was
left to chance, nothing was rashly hurried. Carefully,
methodically the work was done. There was to be no carnival
of death on our side, no trusting to the “luck of the British
Army,” no headlong rush into the arms of destruction, no
waving line of bayonets. The Boer was to play a hand with the
cards he loves to deal. He was to be shelled and sniped. If he
wanted straight-out fighting, he had to come out into the
open and get it. He was to have no chance to sit in safety
and slaughter the British soldiers like shambled deer, as he
had so often done before. As the sun went down our men
bivouacked where they stood, and nothing was heard through
the long, cold night except at intervals the grim growling of
a gun, the sentinels’ swift, curt challenge, or the neighing
of horses as steed spoke to steed across the grass-grown
veldt.

At the breaking of the dawn I was aroused from sleep by
the simultaneous crashing of several of our batteries. It was
Britain’s morning salutation to the Boer. I hurried up to a
spot on the kopje where a regiment of Worcesters lay amongst
the broken ground, and saw that the battle was just about to
commence in deadly earnest. It was a huge, flat-topped kopje
where I located myself. The outer edges of the hill rose
higher than the centre, a little rivulet ran across tiny
indentations on the crown of that rampart, and there was
ample space for an army to lie concealed from the eyes of
enemies. If the Boers were strongly posted, so were the
British. Away past our right flank Wepener range was plainly
visible in the clear morning light, and just behind Wepener
lay the Basuto border, with its fringe of mountains. About
two thousand yards away, directly facing our centre, a white
farmhouse stood in a cluster of trees. This farmhouse gave
the battlefield its name, Constantia Farm. The enemy could be
seen by the aid of glasses slipping from the kopjes down
towards this farm and back again at intervals. Cattle,
horses, goats, and sheep went on grazing calmly, the roaring
of the guns doubtless seeming to them but as the tumult of a
storm.

Turning my eyes towards the valley behind our position, I
saw that we intended to try to turn the enemy’s left flank.
Little squads of mounted men, 95 in each group, swept along
the valley at a gallop. They were the Yeomanry and mounted
infantry, and numbered about 600. A more workmanlike body of
fellows it would be hard to find anywhere. They sat their
horses with easy confidence, and looked full of fight. Some
of them carried their rifles in their hands, muzzle upwards,
the butt resting on the right thigh; others had their guns
slung across their shoulders. Group after group went
eastward, and the Boers knew nothing of the movement, because
we were for once employing their own tactics. I watched them
out of sight, and then turned my attention to the guns. There
was very little time wasted by our people. The gunners on our
left flank poured in a heavy fire, the centre took up the
chorus, and the guns on the right repeated it. For miles
along their front the Boers must have been in deadly peril.
We seldom saw them. Now and again a group of roughly clad
horsemen would flash into view and disappear again as if by
magic, with shells hurtling in their wake. Our artillery
could not locate their main force with any degree of
certainty, nor could they place us properly. They were not
idle; their guns, of which they had a decent number, sought
for our position with dauntless perseverance. Their shells
soon began to drop amongst us, but they did no harm at all.
They fell close enough to our troops in many instances, but
they were so badly made that they would not explode, or if
they did they simply fizzed, and were almost as harmless as
seidlitz powders.

The spiteful little pom-poms cracked away and kept us on
the alert, until one grew weary of the everlasting noise of
cannon. At mid-day, tired of the monotony of the game, I
turned my horse’s head towards camp, and, in company with
three other correspondents, soon sat down to a lunch of
mealies and boiled fowl; but we were destined not to enjoy
that meal, for before the first mouthful had left my plate
there came a wailing howl through the air, then a strange
jarring noise, and a shell plunged into the earth forty yards
away from the tent. A few minutes later another visitor from
the same direction crashed on top of one of the transport
waggons within a stone’s throw of our tent. That decided me;
in a few seconds I had scrambled up the side of a kopje, with
the leg of a fowl in one hand and a soldier’s biscuit in the
other. The shells had not burst, but no man could say when
one would, and I had no particular interest in regard to the
inside of any shell myself. I was not the only one who made a
hasty exit from the camp; in ten seconds the side of the
kopje was alive with men. The shells continued to fall right
amongst the waggons every few minutes for over two hours; yet
only one man was killed, a negro driver being the victim, a
shell dropping right against his thigh. The range of the Boer
gun was absolutely perfect, but the shells were mere rubbish.
Had they been as good as ours, half our transport would have
been in ruins. The British gunners manoeuvred in all
directions in order to locate that particularly dangerous
piece of ordnance. They blazed at it in batteries; they tried
to find it by means of cross-firing; they lined men up on the
sky-line of kopjes to draw the fire; they limbered up and
galloped far out on the veldt, until the enemy’s rifle fire
drove them in again; but all in vain. The Boer leader had
placed his gun with such skill that the British could not
locate it, and it kept up its devilish jubilee until the
night set in.

That day our scouts captured one Free State flag from the
enemy; the Yeomanry and mounted infantry did not succeed in
their efforts to turn the Boers’ left flank, but they checked
the enemy from advancing in that direction, which was an
important item in the day’s work. We did not want the Boer
left to overlap our right; had they done so they could then
get behind us and harass our convoys coming from the
direction of Bethany railway station. We had very little
dread of them turning our left flank, because we knew that
General French was moving towards us on that side from
Bloemfontein, with the object of getting the Boers on the
inside of two forces, and so giving them no chance of escape.
We had only a few men wounded, one petty officer of the
Scouts killed, and a negro driver killed, which was simply
marvellous when one considers the terrible amount of
ammunition used during the day. That night all the
correspondents had to sleep, or try to sleep, with the
transport. It was a wretched night; we knew the Boers had the
range, and we fully expected to get a hot shelling between
darkness and dawn, but, curiously enough, the foe kept their
guns still all the night But the suspense made the night a
weary one.

The following day was Sunday, and at a very early hour our
scouts informed us that the Boers had made a wide detour
towards Wepener, and had overlapped our right flank. They
slipped up into a kopje, which would have enabled them to
enfilade our position in a most masterly manner; but before
they could get their guns there our artillery was at them,
and the kopje was literally ploughed up with shells. It was
too warm a corner for any man on earth to attempt to hold,
and they soon took their departure, falling back in good
order, and leaving no dead or wounded behind them. The
Yeomanry had advanced on the kopje, under the protection of
the shell firing, and when close to the position they fixed
bayonets and dashed up the hill; but when they topped it they
found that the Boers had retired. It was a quick bit of work,
neatly and expeditiously done. Had the Boers held the hill
long enough to get their guns in position they would have
played havoc with us, for they could then have swept our
whole line. From morning until night-fall we kept at them
with our big guns; whenever a cloud of dust arose from behind
a range of kopjes we dropped shells in the middle of it;
wherever a cluster of Boers showed themselves for a second a
shell sought them out. No matter how well they were placed,
they must have had a lively time of it. During the Sabbath
they scarcely used their guns at all, but they opened on our
troops with rifle fire as soon as they made a forward move at
any part of the line, showing clearly that they were watching
as well as praying. The day closed without incident of any
particular character; we had a few wounded, but no deaths,
and could form no idea how the Boers were faring. Now and
again during the night one or another of our guns would bark
like sullen watchdogs on the chain, but the Boer guns were
still.

Monday morning broke crisp and clear, and once more the
big-gun duel began, only on this occasion the Boers made
great use of a pom-pom gun This spiteful little demon tossed
its diminutive shells into camp with painful freeness. They
knocked three of the Worcesters over early in the day,
killing two and badly damaging the other. As on all other
occasions in this peculiar engagement, the Boer gunnery was
simply superb; but their shells were worthless. Shells grew
so common that the “Tommies” scarcely ducked when they heard
the report of a gun they knew was trying to reach them, but
smoked their pipes and made irreverent remarks concerning
things made in Germany. About midday a party of Boers, who
had somehow dodged round to our rear, made a dashing attempt
to raid some cattle that were grazing close under our eyes;
but they had to vanish in a hurry, and were particularly
lucky in being able to escape with their lives, for a party
of scouts darted out after them at full gallop on one side,
whilst another party of mounted infantry rode as hard as
hoofs could carry them on the other side of the bold raiders.
They unslung their rifles as they dashed across the veldt,
and the Boers soon knew that the fellows behind them were as
much at home as they were themselves at that kind of
business.

Late on Monday evening the Boers located a little to the
left of our centre moved forward a bit. Though with infinite
caution, and commenced sniping with the rifle. It was an
evidence that they were growing weary of our tactics, and
would greatly have liked us to attempt to rush their position
with the bayonet, so that they could have mowed our fellows
down in hundreds. But this General Rundle wisely declined to
do; it was victory, not glory, he was seeking, and he was
wise enough to know that a victory can be bought at far too
high a price in country of this kind against a foe like the
wily Boer. On Sunday night our strength was augmented by the
arrival of three regiments of the Guards, and on Monday night
we, knew for a certainty that General French was close at
hand. The Boer was between two fires, and he would need all
his “slimness” to pull him out of trouble. During a greater
part of the night our guns continued to rob sleep of its
sweetness, and the enemy’s pom-pom mingled with our dreams.
On Tuesday morning news came to us that Wepener had been
relieved by Brabant and Hart, and that the Boers who had
invested that place were drawing off in our direction, so
that our right flank needed strengthening. The Boers
displayed no sign of quitting their position, though they
must have known that Brabant and Hart would be on their track
from the south-east, and General French from the north-west.
They held their ground with a grim stubbornness against
overwhelming odds of men and guns, and dropped shells amongst
us in a way that made one feel that no spot could be labelled
“absolutely safe.”

At about 7 p.m. we sent a force out south, consisting of
about 4,000 men, under General Boyes. Amongst that force were
the West Kents, Staffords, Worcesters, Manchesters, all
infantry. The Imperial Yeomanry and mounted infantry also
accompanied the expedition. But there was little for them to
do except hold the enemy in check, which they did. There were
some phenomenally close shaves during the day. On one
occasion the enemy got the range of one of our guns with
their pom-pom, and the way they dropped the devilish little
one-pound shells amongst those gunners was a sight to make a
man’s blood run chill. The little iron imps fell between the
men, grazed the wheels, the carriage, and the truck of the
gun; but

Nothing short of angel-wings could have kept our fellows
safe. The men knew their deadly peril, knew that the tip of
the wand in the Death Angel’s hand was brushing their cheeks.
One could see that they knew their peril. The hard, firm grip
of the jaw, the steady light in the hard-set eyes, the manly
pallor on the cheeks, all told of knowledge; yet not once did
they lose their heads. Each fellow stood there as bravely as
human flesh and blood could stand, and faced the iron hail
with unblenching courage and intrepid coolness. Had those
khaki-clothed warriors been carved out of bronze and moved by
machinery, they could not have shown less fear or more
perfect discipline. The pom-pom is a gun which I have been
told the British War Office refused as a toy some two years
back. I have had the doubtful pleasure of being under its
fire to-day, and all I can say is that I would gladly have
given my place to any gentleman in the War Office who happens
to hold the notion that the pom-pom is a toy.

Somehow the enemy got hold of the position where General
Rundle and staff were located, and all the afternoon they
swept the plain in front of the tents, the hills above, and
the hill opposite with shells; but they could not quite drop
one in the little ravine itself. Half an hour before sundown
I had to ride with two other correspondents to headquarters
to get a dispatch away. We got across safely, but had not
been there five minutes before a grandly directed shell sent
the General and his staff off the brow of the hill in double
quick time. We delivered our dispatches, and were getting
ready for a gallop over the quarter mile of veldt, when,
pom, pom, pom, pom, came a dozen one-pounders a few
yards away right across our track. It made our hearts sit
very close to our ribs, but there was nothing for it but to
take our horses by the head, drive the spurs home, and ride
as if we were rounding up wild cattle. I want it to stand on
record that I was not the last man across that strip of
veldt. There was not much incident in the day’s fighting;
there seldom is in an artillery duel, carried on by men who
know the game, in hilly country. Once during the afternoon
the big gun belonging to the Boers became so troublesome that
half a dozen of ours were trained upon it, and for best part
of an hour it sounded as if a section of Sheol had visited
the earth, so deadly was the fire, so fierce the bursting
missiles, that not a rock wallaby, crouching in its hole,
could have lived twenty minutes in the location. We heard no
more from that gun.

As I rode from position to position our fellows greeted me
with the cry: “Any news, sir? Heard if we are going to have a
go at ’em with the spoons (bayonets)?” One midget, a bugler
kiddie, so small that an ordinary maid-of-all-work could
comfortably lay him across her knee and spank him, yawned as
he knelt in the grass, and desired to know when “we was goin’
ter ‘ave some real bloomin’ fightin’. ‘E was tired of them
bloomin’ guns, ‘e was; they made his carmine ‘ead ache with
their blanky noise. ‘E didn’t call that fightin’; ‘e called
it an adjective waste of good hammunition. ‘E liked gettin’
up to ‘is man, fair ‘nd square, ‘nd knockin’ ‘ell out of
‘im.” He meant it, too, the little beggar, and I could not
help laughing at him when I considered that lots of the old
fighting Boers I had seen could have dropped the midget into
their lunch bags, and not have noticed his weight.

The Yeomanry did a lot of useful work, and are as eager
for fight as a bull ant on a hot plate. They are as good as
any men I have seen in Africa, full of ginger, good horsemen,
wear-and-tear, cut-and-come-again sort of men. They adapt
themselves to circumstances readily, are jolly and
good-humoured under trying circumstances. Their officers are,
as a rule, first-class soldiers, equal to any emergency. On
Tuesday the Boers kept their guns going at a great rate, and
we really thought that they had made up their minds to see
the thing right out at all costs. Personally I did not for a
moment think that they were ignorant of General French’s
rapid advance. I do not believe it possible for any large
body of hostile troops to move in South Africa without the
Boers being thoroughly cognisant of every detail connected
with the move, partly because they are the most perfect
scouts in the world, and partly because the scattered
population on every hand is positively favourable to them.
Our artillery dropped a storm of shells during the day, and
that night it was whispered in camp that there was to be a
general attack next morning. On Tuesday evening General
French advanced right on to the Boer rear, and some smart
fighting took place, the enemy suffering considerably, though
our losses were small.

At dawn on Wednesday we moved forward rapidly, and in a
few hours’ time our infantry were standing in the trenches
and upon the hills that the Boers had occupied the day
before. Our mounted men rode at a gallop through the gullies,
but nothing was to be seen of the foe except a few newly dug
graves. The Boers had vanished like a dream, taking all their
guns with them. Louis Botha, the commander-in-chief, had come
in person to them, and the retreat was carried out under his
eyes. We followed to Dewetsdorp, and from there on to Thaba
Nchu (pronounced Tabancha).

On Friday night the enemy exchanged a few shots with us
from the heights beyond, but no harm was done on either side.
The Third Division, to which I had attached myself, under
General Chermside, has been ordered towards Bloemfontein.
French is in command, and, judging by his past performances,
I fully expect we shall have some busy times, though French
may go away and leave the Eighth Division under General
Rundle.

WITH RUNDLE IN THE FREE STATE.

ORANGE FREE STATE.

Since the Boers bolted from Constantia Farm we have done
but little beyond following them from spot to spot through
the Free State, in the conquered territory along the Basuto
border. At Constantia Farm they gave us a gunnery duel,
which, though incessant and continuous, did little real
damage to either side. After that, when General French joined
issue with us, the Boers shifted their ground with consummate
skill. We moved on to Dewetsdorp, and there the Third
Division, under Chermside, parted company with us. We moved
onward to Thaba Nchu, Brabant keeping well away towards the
Basuto border with his flying column. At Thaba Nchu it looked
day by day as if we were in for something hot and hard, the
Boers having, as usual, taken up a position of vast natural
strength. But Hamilton was the only one to get to close
quarters with the veldt warriors, when executing a flanking
movement. I have since learned that the enemy suffered very
severely on that occasion.

They can give some of the British journalists a wholesome
lesson in regard to manliness of spirit, these same rough
fellows, bred in the African wilds. Speaking to me of the
charge the Gordons made, when led by Captain Towse, they were
unstinted in their praises. “It was grand, it was terrible,”
they said, “to see that little handful of men rush on
fearless of death, fearless of everything.” It was bravery of
the highest kind, and they admired it, as only brave men do
admire courage in a foeman. The people of Britain who read
extracts taken from Boer newspapers, extracts which ridicule
British pluck and all things British, must not blame the
Boers for those statements. In nearly every case the papers
published inside Burgher territory are edited by renegade
Britons, and it is these renegades, not the fighting Boers,
who defame our nation, and take every possible opportunity of
hitting below the belt.

When we left Thaba Nchu, General French left us, as did
also Hamilton and Smith-Dorien. Brabant hugged the Basuto
border, and swept the land clean of everything hostile.
General Rundle (the flower of courtesy and chivalry) kept the
centre; General Boyes looked after our left wing; General
Campbell picked up the intermediate spaces as occasion
demanded; and so we moved on, trying, but trying in vain, to
draw a cordon round the ever-shifting foe. There was no
chance for a dashing forward move; the country through which
we passed was lined by kopjes, which were simply appalling in
their native strength. What prompted the Boer leaders to fall
back from them, step by step, will for ever remain a mystery
to me. It was not want of provisions, for we knew that they
had huge supplies of beef and mutton, whilst there were in
their possession almost inexhaustible stores of grain. It was
not want of fodder for their horses, for the valleys and
veldt were covered with beautiful grass, almost knee-deep.
Water was plentiful in all directions, and they apparently
possessed plenty of ammunition. Prisoners assert that
Commandant Olivier was absolutely furious when compelled to
fall back, by order of his superiors. It is also asserted
that he is now in dire disgrace on account of his refusal to
obey promptly some of his superior’s commands. It is further
stated that he is to be deposed from his command, and will
cease to be a factor of any importance in the war. It is hard
to fathom Boer tactics. It does not follow because a line of
kopjes are abandoned to-day that the burghers have retreated;
they fall back before scouting parties; their pickets watch
our scouts return to camp, knowing that they will convey the
news to headquarters that the kopjes are empty of armed men.
Then, with almost incredible swiftness, the light-armed Boers
swarm back by passes known only to themselves, and secretly
and silently take up positions where they can butcher an
advancing army. If General Rundle had been a rash, impetuous,
or a headstrong man, he could comfortably have lost his whole
force on half a dozen occasions; but he is not. He is
essentially a cautious leader, and pits his brain against
that of the Boer leaders as a good chess player pits his
against an opponent. He may believe in the luck of the
British Army, but he trusts mighty little to it. Better lose
a couple of days than a couple of regiments is his motto, and
a wise motto it is. Had he flung his men haphazard at any of
the positions where the Boers have made a stand, he would
have been cut to pieces.

Rundle plays a wise game. When the enemy looks like
sitting tight, Rundle at once commences a series of
manoeuvres directed from his centre. This keeps the enemy
busy, and gives them a lot of solid thinking to do, and
whilst they are thinking he moves his flanks forward,
overlapping them in the hope of surrounding them. The Boer
hates to have his rear threatened, and invariably falls away.
His method of falling back is unique. As soon as he smells
danger, all the live stock is sent off and all the waggons.
Cape carts are kept handy for baggage that cannot be sent
with the heavy convoy. Most of the big guns go with the first
flight; one or two, which can easily be shifted, are kept to
hold back our advance, and the deadly little pom-poms are
dodged about from kopje to kopje. The pom-pom is not much to
look at, but it is a weapon to be reckoned with in mountain
warfare. It throws only a one-pound shell, and throws it from
the most impossible places imaginable. The beauty of the
pom-pom is that it drops its work in from spots from which no
sane man ever expects a shell to come.

When the Boer finds that his position is untenable on
account of a flanking move, the horses are hitched up to the
light Cape carts, the loading is packed, and off they fly at
a gallop, and the guns follow suit; whilst the rifles hold
the heights. That is why we so seldom get hold of anything
worth having when we do take a position. Our losses have been
paltry, because the Boer is a defensive, not an offensive,
fighter. He waits to be attacked, he does not often attack;
and our general is a man who does not throw men’s lives away.
He believes in brains before bayonets, and England may be
thankful for the possession of General Rundle. Had he been a
madcap general, there would have been a few thousand more
widows in the old country to-day than there are. At the same
time, he is a man of immense personality. Should he ever get
a chance to engage the enemy in a pitched battle, he will
prove to the world that he is capable of great things. There
will be no half-hearted work in such an hour. If he has to
sacrifice men on the altar of war, he will surely sacrifice
them, but not until he is compelled to do so. Brabant is a
wild daredevil, who rushes on like a mountain torrent Boyes
is brainy; careful, and yet dashing.

I want to state here that I have never lost a single
opportunity, whilst travelling through the enemy’s country,
of looking at the “home” life of the people—and I may say
that I have been in a few back-country homes in America, in
Australia, and in other parts of the world—and I want to
place it on record that in my opinion the Boer farmer is as
clean in his home life, as loving in his domestic
arrangements, as pure in his morals, as any class of people I
have ever met. Filth may abound, but I have seen nothing of
it. Immorality may be the common everyday occurrence I have
seen it depicted in some British journals, but I have failed
to find trace of it. Ignorance as black as the inside of a
dog may be the prevailing state of affairs; if so, I have
been one of the lucky few who have found just the reverse in
whichsoever direction I have turned. After six months’, or
nearly six months’, close and careful observation of their
habits, I have arrived at the conclusion that the Boer
farmer, and his son and daughter, will compare very
favourably with the farming folk of Australia, America, and
Great Britain. What he may be in the Transvaal I know not,
because I have not yet been there; but in Cape Colony and in
the Free State he is much as I have depicted him, no better,
no worse, than Americans and Australians, and as good a
fighting man as either—which is tantamount to saying that he
is as good as anything on God’s green earth, if he only had
military training.

Ask “Tommy” privately, when he comes home, if this is not
so—not “Thomas,” who has been on lines of communication all
the time—but “Tommy,” who has fought him, and measured heart
and hand with him. I think he will tell you much as I have
told you. For “Tommy” is no fool; he is not half such a
braggart, either, as some of the Jingoes, who shout and yell,
but never take a hand in the real fighting; those wastrels of
England, who are at home with a pewter of beer in their
hands—hands that never did, and never will, grip a
rifle.

Whilst at Trummel I took advantage of a couple of days’
camping to go out three miles from camp to have a look at a
diamond mine. I found a red-whiskered Dutchman in charge, who
knew less English than I knew Dutch, and as my Dutch consists
of about twelve words we did not do much in the
conversational line; but I made him understand by pantomimic
telegraphy that I wanted to have a look round, to size up
things. He took me to a “dump,” where the ore at grass was
stored, and converted himself into a human stone-cracking
machine for my benefit, until I had seen all that I wanted to
see in regard to the “ore at grass.” He was very much like
mine managers the world over—very ready to play tricks on
anyone he considered “green” at the business. It was not his
fault that he did not know that I had been a reporter on
gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, and coal mines for about
twenty years.

Thinking, doubtless, that I was like unto the ordinary
city fellow who comes at rare intervals to look at a mine, he
made me a present of a piece of rock with some worthless
garnets in it, also a sample of country rock pregnant with
mundic; the garnets and the mundic glittered in the sunshine.
I rose to the bait, as I was expected to do, and intimated
that I would like a lot of it. This delighted the Dutchman,
and he beamed all over his expansive face, all the time
cursing me for the second son of an idiot, as is the way with
mine managers. But he stopped grinning before the afternoon
wore out, for I set him climbing and clambering for little
pieces of mundic and tiny patches of garnets in all the
toughest places I could find in that mine, and went into
ecstasies over each individual piece, until I had quite a
load of the rubbish. Then I intimated gently that I would be
back that way when the war was over, and would surely send my
Cape cart for them if he would be good enough to mind them
for me. I fancy an inkling of the truth dawned in that
Dutchman’s soul at last, for he made no further reference to
either garnets or mundic. I satisfied myself with a sample of
the matrix in which diamonds are found, and also with a
specimen of the country rock for geological reference, but
the garnets are on the heap still.

The mine, which is named the “Monastery,” is very crudely
worked; everything connected with it is primitive. A huge
quarry, about 600 feet in circumference, and about 40 feet
deep, had been opened up. There was nothing in it in the
shape of lode or reef, but a large number of disconnected
“stringers,” or leaders of rocky matter, in which diamonds
are often found. At the bottom of the quarry the water lay
fully eight feet deep, owing to the fact that the mine had
lain unworked during the war. A vertical shaft had been sunk
a little distance from the quarry to a depth of 150 feet, but
there was a hundred feet of water in it, so that I am unable
to say anything concerning the Monastery diamond mine at its
lower levels. One or two tunnels had been drawn from the
quarry into the adjoining country on small leaders, and from
what I could gather from my guide diamonds had been
discovered. Whilst I went below, I left my Kaffir boy on top
to pick up what he could in the shape of rumour or gossip
from the natives, and he informed me that the niggers had
been the cause of the opening of the mine, they having found
diamonds near the surface in some of the leaders, which
consisted of a rock known in Australian mining circles as
illegitimate granite. The white folk, fearing that the poor
heathen might become debauched if they possessed too much
wealth, had gathered those diamonds in—when they could—and
later had started mining for the precious gems, with what
success the heathen did not know. I tried the Dutchman on the
same point, but I might as well have interviewed an oyster in
regard to the science of gastronomy. He dodged around my
question like a fox terrier round a fence, until I gave him
up in despair. But, for all that, I rather fancy they have
found diamonds round that way, only they don’t want the
British to know anything about it.

RED WAR WITH RUNDLE.

NEAR SENEKAL.

In our rear lies the little village of Senekal, a shy
little place, seemingly too modest to lift itself out of the
miniature basin caused by the circumambient hills. Khaki-clad
figures, gaunt, hungry, and dirty, patrol the streets; the
few stores are almost denuded of things saleable, for friend
and foe have swept through the place again and again, and
both Boer and Briton have paid the shops a visit. At the
hotel I managed to get a dinner of bread and dripping, washed
down with a cup of coffee, guiltless of both milk and sugar.
But, if the bill of fare was meagre, the bill of costs made
up for it in its wealth of luxuriousness. If I rose from the
table almost as hollow as when I sat down, I only had to look
at the landlord’s charges to fancy I had dined like one of
the blood royal. Opposite the hotel stands the church, a
dainty piece of architecture, fit for a more pretentious town
than Senekal. It is fashioned out of white stone, and stands
in its own grounds, looking calm and peaceful amidst all the
bustle and blaze of war. Someone has turned all the seats out
of the sacred edifice, preparatory to converting it into a
hospital. The seats are not destroyed; they are not damaged;
they are stacked away under a neighbouring verandah.

I do not think it wrong so to utilise a church. It is the
only place fit to put the wounded men in in all the town. The
great Nazarene in whose name the church was erected would not
have allowed the sick to wither by the wayside in the days
when the Judean hills rang to the echo of His magnetic voice,
nor do I think it wrongful to His memory to convert His
shrine into an abiding place for the sick and suffering.

Far away on our left flank the enemy hold the heights, and
watch us moving outward, whilst between them and us,
stretching mile after mile in a line with our column, ripples
a line of scarlet flame, for the foe has fired the veldt to
starve the transit mules, horses, and oxen. Like a sword
unsheathed in the sunlight, the flames sparkle amidst the
grass, which grows knee-deep right to the kopje’s very lips.
Birds rise on the wing with harsh, resonant cries, flutter
awhile above their ravished homes, then wheel in mid-air and
seek more peaceful pastures. Hares spring up before the
crackling flames quite reach their forms, and, like grey
streaks in a sailor’s beard on a stormy day, flash suddenly
into view, and as suddenly disappear again. Here and there a
graceful springbok dashes through the smoke, with head thrown
back and graceful limbs extended, his glossy, mottled hide
looking doubly beautiful backed by that red streak of fire.
The wind catches the quivering crimson streak, and for awhile
the flames race, as I have seen wild horses, neck to neck,
rush through the saltbush plains at the sound of the
stockman’s whip. Then, as the wind drops, the flames curl
caressingly around the wealth of growing fodder, biting the
grass low down, and wrapping it in a mantle of black and red,
as flame and smoke commingle.

Here and there a pool of water, hidden from view until the
fire fiend stripped the veldt land bare, leaps to life like a
silver shield in the grim setting of the bare and blackened
plain. Small mobs of cattle stand stupidly snuffing the
smoke-laden air, until the breath of the blaze awakens them
to a sense of peril; then, with horns lowered like bayonets
at the charge, with tails stiff and straight behind them as
levelled lances, they leap onward, over or through everything
in front of them, bellowing frantically their brute beast
protest against the red ruin of war. The flames roll on; they
reach the stone walls of a cattle pen, and leap it as a
hunter takes a brush fence in his stride; onward still, until
a Kaffir kraal is reached. The soft-lipped billows kiss the
uncouth mud wall, and for a moment transfigure them with a
nameless beauty, the beauty that precedes ruin. Only a moment
or two, and then the resistless destroyer flaunts its pennons
amidst the reed-thatched roofs; the sparks leap up, the black
smoke curls towards the sky, whilst on the neighbouring hills
the negro women, with their babes in their arms, wail
woefully, for those rude huts, with all their barbarous
trappings, meant home—aye, home and happiness—to them. The
flames roll onward now in two long lines, for the Kaffir
encampment had sundered them, and now they look, with their
beautifully rounded curves sweeping so gracefully out into
the unknown, like the rich, ripe lips of a wanton woman in
the pride of her shameless beauty. All that they leave behind
is desolation, darkness, despair, ruin unutterable, only
blackened walls, simmering carcases, weeping women, and
wailing children.

Away on our right flank we can just make out the skeletons
of what a few hours before had been a cluster of smiling
farmhouses. They do not smile now; they grin horribly in the
sunlight, grin as the fleshless skulls of dead men grin on a
battlefield after those sextons of the veldt the grey-hooded,
curved-beaked vultures have screamed their final farewell to
the charnel-houses of war—noble war, splendid war, pastime
of potentates and princes, invented in hell and patented in
all the temples of sorrow.

As we look on those grim relics of this dreary time we
catch the maddening sound of distant guns. The chargers prick
their ears, and quiver from muzzle to coronet. The khaki-clad
figures on the plain throw up their heads and turn their eyes
towards the sound; the tired shoulders square themselves,
each foot seems to tread the blackened plain with firmer,
prouder tread. The sound of guns is like the rush of wine
through sluggish veins, and men forget that they are faint
with hunger, weary to the verge of wretchedness with
ceaseless marching. The sound of guns bespeaks the presence
of the foe, and those gaunt soldiers of the Queen are
galvanised to life and lust of battle by the very breath of
war. A ripple runs along the line, the farthest flanks catch
the gleam of the sun on distant rifle barrels. An order rings
out sharp and crisp; the column stands as if each man and
horse were carved in rock.

The infantry lean lightly on their guns, the cavalry crane
forward in their saddles. We pause and wait until we see the
green badge of O’Driscoll’s scouts on the hats of the
advancing riders. O’Driscoll rides towards the staff with
loosened rein, and every spur in all his gallant little troop
shows how the scouts had ridden. We strain our ears to catch
the news the Irish scout has brought. It comes at last
Clements has met the foe, and death is busy in those distant
hills.

Rundle sits silently, hard pressed in his saddle—a
gallant figure, with soldier and leader written all over him.
We wait his verdict anxiously, for on his word our fate may
hinge. We have not long to wait—Clements can hold his own;
Brabant will outflank the Boers. Forward, march! The men
droop as wheat fields droop in the sultry air of a seething
day. They are tired, deadly tired; not too tired to fight,
but weary of the endless marching from point to point to keep
the enemy from breaking through their lines and striking
southward.

Away in front of us we note the snow-crowned hills which
girdle Basutoland, snow crowned and sun kissed; every hilltop
sparkling like a giant gem, and over all a pale blue sky,
curtained by flimsy clouds of gauzy whiteness, through which
the sun laughs rosily, the handiwork of the Eternal. And
underfoot only the deep dead blackness of the blistered
veldt, ravished of its wondrous wealth of living green, the
rude, rough footprint of the god of war—sweet war; kind,
Christian war!

Now, overhead, betwixt the smoking earth and smiling sky,
flocks of vultures come and go, fluttering their great
pinions noiselessly. To them the sound of guns is merriest
music; it is their summons to the banquet board. Foul things
they look as the float over us, silent as souls that have
slipped from some ash heap in Hades, grey with the greyness
that grows on the wolf’s hide; their feathers hang upon them
in ridges, unkempt, unlovely, soiled with blood and offal.
They float above our heads, they wheel upon our flanks.

A horse drops wearily upon its knees, looks round dumbly
on the wilderness of blackness, then turns its piteous eyes
upward towards the skies that seem so full of laughing
loveliness; then, with a sob which is almost human in the
intensity of its pathos, the tired head falls downwards, the
limbs contract with spasmodic pain, then stiffen into
rigidity; and one wonders, if the Eternal mocked that silent
appeal from those great sad eyes, eyes that had neither part
nor lot in the sin and sorrow of war, how shall a man dare
look upwards for help when the bitterness of death draws nigh
unto him? The grey lines above, on flank, and front, and
rear, were with greedy speed converging to one point, until
they flock in a horrid, struggling, fighting, revolting mass
of beaks and feathers above the fallen steed, as devils flock
around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the
outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift,
backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt
amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque,
ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings
extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and
curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting
amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward
from eyeless sockets; his gutted carcass, flattened into a
shapeless streak, shrinks towards the earth, as if asking to
be veiled from the laughter of the skies. But there is
neither pity from above nor shelter from below as the red
wave of war, like the curse of the white Christ, sweeps over
the land. God grant that merry England may never witness, on
her own green meadow lands, these sights and sounds which
meet the eye and ear on African soil.

Oh, England, England, if I had a voice whose clarion tones
could reach your ears and stir your hearts in every city and
town, village and hamlet, wayside cot and stately castle, in
all your sea-encircled isle, I would cry to you to guard your
coasts! Better, it seems to me, writing here, with all the
evidences of war beneath my eyes, that every man born of
woman’s love on British soil should die between the decks, or
find a grave in foundering ships of war, than that the foot
of a foreign foe should touch the Motherland. Better that
your ships be shambles, where men could die like men, sending
Nelson’s royal message all along the armoured line; better
that our best and bravest found a grave where grey waves curl
towards our coastline, than that our womanhood should look
with woe-encircled eyes into the wolfish mouth of war. Better
that our strong men perished, with the brine and ocean
breezes playing freshly on the gaping wounds through which
their souls passed outward, than that our little maids and
tiny, tender babes should face the unutterable shame, the
anguish, and the suffering of a war within our borders.

Do not laugh the very thought to scorn and brand the thing
impossible, for fools have laughed before to-day whilst
kingdoms tottered to their fall You who stay at home miss
much that others know—and, knowing, dread. If England at
this hour could only realise what manner of men control her
destinies, then all the lion in the breed would spring to
life again. I do not know if lack-brains of a similar strain
control the supplies for England’s Navy; but if, in time of
war, it proves to be the case, then God help us, God help the
old flag and the stout hearts who fight for it.

Lend me your ears, and let me tell you how our army in
Africa is treated by the incompetent people in the good city
of London. I pledge my word, as a man and a journalist, that
every written word is true. I will add nothing, nor detract
from, nor set down aught in malice. If my statements are
proven false, then let me be scourged with the tongue and pen
of scorn from every decent Briton’s home and hearth for ever
after, for he who lies about his country at such an hour as
this is of all traitors the vilest. I will deal now
particularly with the men who are acting under the command of
Lieutenant-General Sir Leslie Rundle. This good soldier and
courteous gentleman has to hold a frontage line from Winburg,
viâ Senekal, almost to the borders of
Basutoland. His whole front, extending nearly a hundred
miles, is constantly threatened by an active, dashing,
determined enemy, an enemy who knows the country far better
than an English fox-hunting squire knows the ground he hunts
over season after season. To hold this vast line intact
General Rundle has to march from point to point as his scouts
warn him of the movements of the tireless foe. He has
stationed portions of his forces at given points along this
line, and his personal work is to march rapidly with small
bodies of infantry, yeomanry, scouts, and artillery towards
places immediately threatened. He has to keep the Boers from
penetrating that long and flexible line, for if once they
forced a passage in large numbers they would sweep like a
torrent southwards, envelop his rear, cut the railway and
telegraph to pieces, stop all convoys, paralyse the movements
of all troops up beyond Kroonstad, and once more raise the
whole of the Free State, and very possibly a great portion of
the Cape Colony as well.

General Rundle’s task is a colossal one, and any sane man
would think that gigantic efforts would be made to keep him
amply supplied with food for his soldiers. But such is not
the case. The men are absolutely starving. Many of the
infantrymen are so weak that they can barely stagger along
under the weight of their soldierly equipment. They are worn
to shadows, and move with weary, listless footsteps on the
march. People high up in authority may deny this, but he who
denies it sullies the truth. This is what the soldiers get to
eat, what they have been getting to eat for a long time past,
and what they are likely to get for a long time to come,
unless England rouses herself, and bites to the bone in
regard to the people who are responsible for it.

One pound of raw flour, which the soldiers have to cook
after a hard day’s march, is served out to each man every
alternate day. The following day he gets one pound of
biscuits. In this country there is no fuel excepting a little
ox-dung, dried by the sun. If a soldier is lucky enough to
pick up a little, he can go to the nearest water, of which
there is plenty, mix his cake without yeast or baking-powder,
and make some sort of a wretched mouthful. He gets one pound
of raw fresh meat daily, which nine times out of ten he
cannot cook, and there his supplies end.

What has become of the rations of rum, of sugar, of tea,
of cocoa, of groceries generally? Ask at the snug little
railway sidings where the goods are stacked—and forgotten.
Ask in the big stores in Capetown and other seaport towns.
Ask in your own country, where countless thousands of pounds’
worth of foodstuffs lie rotting in the warehouses, bound up
and tied down with red tape bandages. Ask—yes, ask; but
don’t stop at asking—damn somebody high up in power. Don’t
let some wretched underling be made the scapegoat of this
criminal state of affairs, for the taint of this shameful
thing rests upon you, upon every Briton whose homes,
privileges, and prosperity are being safeguarded by these
famishing men. The folk in authority will probably tell you
that General Rundle and his splendid fellows are so isolated
that food cannot be obtained for them. I say that is false,
for recently I, in company with another correspondent, left
General Rundle’s camp without an escort. We made our way in
the saddle, taking our two Cape carts with us, to Winburg
railway station; leaving our horseflesh there, we took train
for East London. Then back to the junction, and trained it
down to Capetown, where we remained for forty-eight hours,
and then made our way back to Winburg, and from Winburg we
came without escort to rejoin General Rundle at Hammonia. If
two innocent, incompetent (?) war correspondents could
traverse that country and get through with winter supplies
for themselves, why cannot the transport people manage to do
the same? These transport people affect to look with contempt
upon a war correspondent and his opinions on things military;
but if we could not manage transport business better than
they do, most of us would willingly stand up and allow
ourselves to be shot. We are no burden upon the Army; we
carry for ourselves, we buy for ourselves, and we look for
news for ourselves; and we take our fair share of risks in
the doing of our duty, as the long list of dead and disabled
journalists will amply prove.

It is not, in my estimation, the whole duty of a war
correspondent to go around the earth making friends for
himself, or looking after his personal comfort, or booming
himself for a seat in Parliament on a cheap patriotic ticket.
It is rather his duty to give praise where praise is due,
censure where censure has been earned, regardless of
consequences to himself. Such was the motto of England’s two
greatest correspondents—Forbes and Steevens—both of whom
have passed into the shadowland, and I would to God that
either of them were here to-day, for England knew them well,
and they would have roused your indignation as I, an unknown
man, dare not hope to do. But though what I have written does
not bear the magical name of Steevens or of Forbes, it bears
the hallmark of the eternal truth. Our men on the fields of
war are famishing whilst millions worth of food lies rotting
on our wharves and in our cities, food that ought with
ordinary management to be within easy reach of our fighting
generals. Britain asks of Rundle the fulfilment of a task
that would tax the energies and abilities of the first
general in Europe; and with a stout heart he faces the work
in front of him, faces it with men whose knees knock under
them when they march, with hands that shake when they
shoulder their rifles—shake, but not with fear; tremble, but
not from wounds, but from weakness, from poverty of blood and
muscle, brought about by continual hunger. Are those men fit
to storm a kopje? Are they fit to tramp the whole night
through to make a forced march to turn a position, and then
fight as their fathers fought next day?

I tell you no. And yours be the shame if the Empire’s flag
be lowered—not theirs, but yours; for you—what do you do?
You stand in your music-halls and shout the chorus of songs
full of pride for your soldier, full of praise for his
patience, his pluck, and his devotion to duty; and you let
him go hungry, so hungry that I have often seen him quarrel
with a nigger for a handful of raw mealies on the march. It
is so cheap to sing, especially when your bellies are full of
good eating; it costs nothing to open your mouths and bawl
praises. It is pleasant to swagger and brag of “your fellows
at the front;” but why don’t you see that they are fed, if
you want them to fight? Give “Tommy” a lot less music and
flapdoodle, and a lot more food of good quality, and he’ll
think a heap more of you. It is nice of you to stay in
Britain and drink “Tommy’s” health, but there would be far
more sense in the whole outfit if you would allow him to “eat
his own” out here.

THE FREE STATERS’ LAST STAND.

SLAP KRANZ.

At last the blow has fallen which has shattered the Boer
cause in the Free State. There will be skirmishes with
scattered bands in the mountain gorges beyond Harrismith, but
the backbone of the Republic has been broken beyond
redemption. Sunday, the 30th of July, was big with fate,
though we who sat almost within the shadow of the snow
enshrouded hills of savage Basutoland at the dawning of that
day knew it not. It was a joyful day for us, though pregnant
with sorrow for the veldtsmen who had fought so long and well
for their doomed cause, for on that day our generals reaped
the harvest which they had sown with infinite patience and
undaunted courage. General Hunter, to whom the chief command
had just been given, was there, surrounded by his staff, a
soldierly figure worthy of a nation’s trust; Clements, keen
faced, sharp voiced, with alertness written in each
lineament; Paget, whose fiery spirit spoke from his mobile
face, his blood, hot as an Afghan sun, flashing the workings
of his mind into his face as sunlight flashes from steel; and
Rundle, hawk-eyed and stern, no friend to Pressmen, but a
soldier every inch, one of those men whose hands build
empires. Had he been stripped of modern gear that day, and
placed in Roman trappings, one would have looked behind him
to see if Cæsar meant to grace the show; but
Cæsar was not there.

One of the greatest soldiers since the world began was
missing from our ranks, the hero Roberts, whose great
intellect had planned the coup which his generals had
carried to maturity. Yet, though Lord Roberts planned each
general move, an immense amount of actual work was left to
the generals. The country they had to pass through was rugged
and inhospitable. The foe they had to fight was brave,
resourceful, and well supplied with all munitions of war; a
single mistake on the part of any one of them would have
wrecked the magnificent plan of the Commander-in-Chief. But
no mistakes were made; each general worked as if his soul’s
salvation depended upon his individual efforts. Where all are
good, as a rule it is hard to make a distinction; but in this
instance one man stands out above his fellows, and that man
is General Sir Leslie Rundle, the commander of the Eighth
Division. His task from the first was herculean. He had to
hold a line fully one hundred miles in length; day after day,
week after week, the enemy tried to break that line and pour
their forces into the territory we had conquered. Had they
succeeded, they would have shaken the whole of South Africa
to its very centre. This task kept Sir Leslie Rundle busy
night and day. Wherever he camped, spies dogged his
footsteps; black men and white men constantly upon his track.
His every move was rapidly reported to our ever-watchful
enemies. But, quick as the enemy undoubtedly were in all
their movements, General Rundle nullified their efforts by
his rapidity. So terribly hard did he work his men that they
nicknamed him “Rundle, the Tramp.” How the men stood it I
cannot understand. I know of no other men in all the world
who would have gone on as they did, obeying orders without a
murmur or a whimper. They were savage at times over the food
they got, and small blame to them, but they never blamed
their general. They knew that he gave them plenty of the
class of food that he could lay hands upon. Had the general’s
supplies been in this part of the country, instead of being
tied up in red-tape packages on the railway line, General
Rundle would have kept his Division fully supplied. The only
food which he could command, beef and mutton, he gave without
stint. Had the War Office authorities attended to their end
of the work with the same commendable zeal, half the
hardships of the campaign would have been averted.

If ever war was reduced to an absolute science, it was
upon this occasion. On the one hand, some six thousand Boers
on the defensive, armed with the handiest quick-firing rifle
known to modern times, with from eight to ten guns, well
supplied with food and ammunition, and backed by some of the
most awful country the eye of man ever rested upon—a country
which they knew as a child knows its mother’s face. On the
other hand, an attacking force of 30,000 men and guns. To
read the number of the opposing forces one would think the
Boer task the effort of madmen, bent upon national
extinction; but one glance at the country would upset those
calculations entirely. Every kopje was a natural fortress,
every sluit a perfect line of trenches, and every donga a
nursery for death.

To attempt to go into every move made by our troops during
the months of May, June, and the early parts of July would
only prove wearisome to the average reader; suffice it to say
that finally we got the burgher forces into the Caledon
Valley. This valley is about twenty-eight miles in length,
and from fourteen to fifteen miles across its widest part.
Properly speaking, it was not a valley at all, but a series
of valleys interspersed by great kopjes, nearly all of which
presented an almost impregnable appearance. The valley had a
number of outlets, which the Boers fondly believed our people
to be unacquainted with. These outlets were known as “neks,”
and were, without exception, terribly rough places for a
hostile force to attack. Commando Nek was upon the
south-east, facing towards Basutoland. This was merely a
narrow pass, running up over a jagged kopje, with two greater
kopjes on each side of it. The hills all round it were so
placed that a number of good marksmen, hidden in the rocks,
could easily sweep off thousands of an enemy who attempted to
take it by storm. But that pass had to be taken before we
could claim to hold the Free State in the hollow of our hand.
Slabbert’s Nek was merely a huge gash in the face of a cliff.
It was the Boers’ causeway towards the north, their highway
to safety. Retief’s Nek lay to the westward, and formed a
grinning death trap for any general who might try the foolish
hazard of a single-handed attack Naauwpoort Nek, ugly and
uninviting, faced south-east towards Harrismith. Golden Gate,
named by a satirist—or a satyr—was merely a narrow chasm
worn by wind and weather through the girdle of mountains. It
looked towards the east, and was a mere pathway, which none
but desperate soldiers, driven to their last extremity, would
think of using.

The Boers never dreamed that it was possible for our
troops to move with such machine-like precision as to hold
every nek at our mercy. But whilst Rundle held the ground to
the south, and kept the Boers for ever on the move by his
restless activity, Clements and Paget moved on Slabbert’s
Nek, Hunter swept down on Retief’s Nek, Naauwpoort Nek was
invested by Hector Macdonald, Bruce Hamilton closed in upon
Golden Gate, and the great net was almost perfect in its
meshes. The enemy did not realise their danger until it was
too late for the great bulk of their force to escape.
Commandant De Wet saw the impending peril at the eleventh
hour, and tried hard to get his countrymen to follow him in a
dash through Slabbert’s Nek; but very few of the burghers
would believe that the sword of fate was hanging by so slim a
thread over their heads. In vain this able soldier of the
Republic harangued them. Vain all his threats and
protestations. They could not and would not believe him.
Sullenly they sat in their strongholds and watched
Rundle—they could see him, and that danger which was present
to their eyes was the only danger they would believe in; and
day by day, hour by hour, the cordon of Britain’s might drew
closer and closer, until every link in the vast chain was
practically flawless. Then Commandant De Wet gathered around
him about 1,800 of his most devoted followers, and with
Ex-President Steyn in their ranks they passed like ghosts of
a fallen people through Slabbert’s Nek on towards the
Transvaal. How they managed to elude the incoming khaki wave
some other pen must tell. It was a splendid piece of work on
the Republican Commandant’s part, and history will not
begrudge him the full measure of praise due to him. Had
General Prinsloo and his burghers been guided by him, these
pages had never been written, for where De Wet took his 1,800
burghers he could as easily have taken 6,000.

Scarcely had De Wet made his escape ere the truth was
borne in upon the burghers with an iron hand that their doom
was sealed. General Rundle’s force, which all along had been
essentially a blocking force, and not a striking force, made
a move on the 23rd of July. All day the cannons spoke to the
burghers from Willow Grange, all day long the rifles rippled
their leaden waves of death. We could see but little of the
enemy; they lay concealed behind the loose rocks, and our men
had little else to do but lift their rifles and pull the
trigger, trusting to the powers that rule the destinies of
war to speed the bullets to some foeman’s resting place. But
we knew they were there if we could not see them, for the
snap and snarl of the Mauser rifles came readily to our ears,
and the booming of their guns answered ours, as hound answers
hound when the scent grows hottest. We pounded them with
shrapnel and pelted them with common shell until the air
around them rained iron. Our guns were six to one, yet those
brave veldtsmen held their own with a stubborn courage worthy
of the noblest traditions in all the red pages of war. They
gave us a parting shot at sundown, and at night, when the
thick mists from the snow-draped mountains behind us came
down upon the land and added to the darkness of the winter’s
night, they moved their gun and fell back with it to a place
where they could renew the battle on the morrow. And at the
dawning they testified their vitality by dropping a couple of
shells right into the midst of the Imperial Yeomanry
camp.

Whilst we were busy at Julies Kraal, drawing the Boers’
attention from other points, feinting as if we intended to
push right on into Commando Nek, General Sir Archibald Hunter
made a dash at Relief’s Nek with his force, and our cannon
were busy at almost every point around the valley where the
Boers were stationed. General Prinsloo, who was in supreme
command of the enemy’s forces, had no means of knowing where
the British really meant to strike. In vain he pushed men to
anticipate Rundle’s threatened move, vainly he turned like a
trapped tiger towards Hunter’s marching men. Turn where he
would, the khaki wave met him, rolling resistlessly inward
and onward. Hunter broke through with small loss, for the
force which should have checked him at Retief’s Nek was
waiting at Commando Nek for Rundle and the Eighth Division.
It was a master stroke, for when once Hunter was upon the
inside of the valley he was in a position to threaten the
rear of the Boer forces at Commando Nek, and that was a state
of affairs which the enemy could not stand upon any terms. A
number of them, under clever Commandant Olivier, slipped away
through Golden Gate. They did not face the more open country
even inside the big valley, but made their way through a
piece of ground known as Witzies Hoek, and thence through a
ravine which almost beggars description. Later on I went with
Driscoll’s Scouts in search of the tracks of these men, and
followed along the same road they had taken. The ravine was a
long, narrow gap between mountain ranges of immense height.
The sides of the mountains were covered with loose boulders,
sufficient to protect the whole Boer army from our artillery
fire. The only track which a horseman could possibly follow
wound in and out alongside the face of the cliffs, so narrow
that even the horses bred in the country found it difficult
to keep their feet upon it, and could only proceed, at
funeral pace, in single file. A handful of men could have
held that place against an army. With De Wet and Olivier
gone, half our task was over. The Boers made a blind rush,
first to one nek, then to the next, only to find that
Britain’s sons guarded them all. Small bodies of men might
escape, but the vast supplies of mealies, waggons, guns, and
all the cumbrous appliances of war, without which an army is
useless, were penned in. The hand of the Field-Marshal was on
them. The blocking forces held the neks, and now those forces
which had to strike were ordered to move. No sooner did
General Rundle receive his orders to advance than he rolled
forward with the impetuosity of a storm breaking upon a
southern coast. They on the spot knew that all the enemy’s
hopes lay centred round a town in the middle of the valley.
This town was Fouriesburg. The general who could strike that
town first would deal the death blow to the Boer forces in
the Free State. Rundle was furthest from the town; the
pathway his troops would have to pursue was rougher and more
rugged than that which lay open to the rest of the
forces.

But Rundle knew his men; he knew their mettle; he had
tried them with long, weary marching, and he knew that they
were worthy of his trust. He gave his orders. The Leinsters
and the Scots Guards, tall, gaunt, hunger-stricken warriors,
whose ribs could be counted through their ragged khaki coats,
swung out as cheerily as if they had never known the absence
of a meal or the fatigue of a dreary march. The Irishmen
chaffed the Scots, and the Scots yelled badinage back to the
sons of Erin, and onward they went, onward and upward, over
the rock-strewn ground, through the narrow passes, fixing
their bayonets where the ground looked likely to hold a
hidden foe, ready at a moment’s notice to charge into the
blackness that lay engulfed in those dreary passes. But the
enemy did not wait for them. As the Eighth Division advanced,
making the rocky headlands ring with the rhythm of their
martial tread, the Boers fell back like driven deer, and the
bugle spoke to the Scottish bagpipe until the silent hills
gave tongue, and echo answered echo until the wearied ear
sickened for silence. Onward we swept, until Commando Nek lay
like a grinning gash in the face of nature far in our rear.
When we did halt the men threw themselves down on the
freezing earth, and wolfed a biscuit; then, stretching
themselves face downwards on the grass, they slept with their
rifles ready to their hands, their greatcoats around them,
and above only the stars, that seemed to freeze in the
boundless billows of eternal blue. Onward again, before the
silver sentinels above us had faded before the blushing face
of the dawning. With faces begrimed with dirt, with feet
blistered by contact with flinty boulders, with tattered
garments flapping around them like feathers on wounded
waterfowl, officers and men faced the unknown, as their
fathers faced it before them. Meanwhile Hunter was pressing
towards Fouriesburg from Relief’s Nek, his scouts—the
well-known “Tigers,” under Major Remington—well in advance
of his main column.

Rundle gave an order to Driscoll, Captain of the Scouts,
who had done such good service to the Eighth Division. What
passed between the general and the Irish captain no man
knows, probably no man will ever know. But when Driscoll rode
up at the mad gallop so characteristic of the man there was
that in his hard, ugly, wind-tanned face which spoke of stern
deeds to be done. He did not ride alone, this Irish-Indian
Volunteer captain—Rundle’s own aide, Lord Kensington,
of the 15th Hussars, was on his right hand, and on his left
Lieutenant Roger Tempest, of the Scots Guards, for a squad of
the Scots Guards who had been learning scouting under
Driscoll were to accompany Driscoll’s Scouts. That little
group was characteristic of the future of the British Empire.
Two aristocrats riding shoulder to shoulder with a wild
dare-devil, whose rifle had cracked over half the earth.
England, Ireland, and Scotland rode alone in front of the
adventurous band that day. It was a reckless ride; the
captain, on his grey stallion, half a length in front. They
darted through gullies, drew rein and unslung rifles up hill,
now standing in the stirrups to ease their cattle, now
sitting tight in the saddle to drive them over the open
veldt, taking every chance that a dare-devil crew could take,
pausing for nothing, staying for nothing. Right into the town
of Fouriesburg they galloped, down from their saddles they
leaped, up went the rifles; the foe poured in a few shots,
and, appalled by the devilish audacity of the deed, fled
before a handful. It was a proud moment then, when, in the
last stronghold of the foe in all the Free State, Kensington,
the aide of the General of the Eighth Division, with a
little band of officers grouped around him, with the Scouts
and Scots Guards lying behind cover, rifle in hand, pulled
down the Orange Free State flag in the very teeth of the foe.
Only a little band of officers—Kensington, Driscoll, Davies,
and Tempest. May their names be remembered when the wine cups
flow!

On the night of the 28th of July Colonel Harley, Chief
Staff Officer Eighth Division, led two companies of the
Leinsters and the full strength of the Scots Guards in a
night attack on De Villier’s Drift, which was to clear the
way for the whole of the Eighth Division towards Fouriesburg.
The movement had been well and carefully planned, and was
neatly and expeditiously carried out. The following day we
advanced in open order over the rolling veldt; now and again
a man paused, lurched a little to one side, staggered and
fell, as shot and shell dropped amongst us, but the march
forward never ceased, never paused Paget and Hunter were with
us now, and the lyddite guns seemed to drive all the fight
out of the foe. They would not stand. Paget’s artillerymen
dashed forward, unlimbered, and loosed on the enemy with a
recklessness of personal safety that was almost wanton.

Every branch of the Service was vying with its neighbour
to see who could take the most chances in the game of war,
and the very recklessness of the men was their safeguard, for
their dash whipped the foe, who now seemed to realise that
their evil hour had at last dawned. They sent in a flag of
truce, asking for the terms on which they might
surrender.

On the evening of the 29th July we knew that the enemy
were negotiating for terms of peace, though things were kept
as secret as possible until the following day. Then we saw
General Prinsloo ride in with his aide and surrender.
He met General Rundle first, and a few minutes later General
Hunter, and the three leaders rode through the lines
together. They were closeted closely for some hours before
the final agreement could be arrived at. Prinsloo wanted
terms for his men which the British generals would not
concede, the final agreement being that the burghers were to
ride in and throw down their arms under our flag. They were
to be allowed a riding hack to convey them to the railway
station, and each man was to remain in possession of his
private effects. More than this General Hunter would not
concede upon any terms. At one period of the negotiations
things became so strained that hostilities were almost
renewed, but the Hoof Commandant was wise enough to realise
that destiny had decided against him and his burgher band. He
came from the conclave at last, and gave an order in Dutch to
his aide, and in a moment the horseman was flying
towards the Boer laager with the news that, so far as they
were concerned, the great war of 1899 and 1900 was at an
end.

Our troops had been drawn up in long parallel lines, up
over the slopes, over the crest, and along the edge of
“Victory Hill.” They formed a lane of blood and steel, down
which the conquered veldtsmen had to march. Their guns were
on their flanks, the generals grouped in the centre.
Everything was hushed and still; there was no sign of
braggart triumph, no unseemly mirth, no swagger in the
demeanour of the troops. They had worked like men; they
carried their laurels with conscious power and pride, but
with no offensive show. It was a sight which few men ever
behold, and none ever forget. The glory of the skies, where
everything that met the eye was brightest blue, edged with
stainless whiteness, was above us; and beneath our feet, and
to right and left, were great valleys—not smiling like our
English vales, where sunlight runs through shadows like
laughter through tears, but vast uncultivated gaps that
grinned in sardonic silence at conqueror and conquered, as
though to remind us that we were but puppets in a passing
show. Kopjes and valleys may have looked upon many a grim
page in war’s history. Savage chiefs, backed by savage
hordes, have swept across them many a time and oft. Possibly,
if the rocks had tongues, they could tell us much of ancient
armies, for this land of Africa is old in blood and warlike
doings. But few more remarkable sights than this upon which
my eyes rested upon the 30th July, 1900, have ever graced
even this land of many wonders.

I looked along our lines, and saw our soldiers standing
patiently waiting for the curtain to fall. I was proud of
them, and of the men who led them, for they had won without
one cruel stroke. No single human life had wantonly been
wasted, no dishonourable deed had smirched their arms, no
smoking ruins cried aloud to God for retribution, no outraged
women sobbed dry-eyed behind us, no starving children fled
before the khaki wave; and in this last hour, an hour
pregnant with humiliation and pain to our enemies, there was
the steady manliness which spoke of the great dignity of a
great nation. Out from the stillness a bugle spoke from the
lines of the Leinsters; the Scottish bagpipes, far away down
the hillside, took up the note with a shrill scream of
triumph, like the challenge of an eagle in its eyrie. A
rustle ran along the lines. We caught the hum of many voices,
then the tramp of horses’ hoofs. A soldier slipped towards
the spot where our country’s flag was furled and ready; a
moment later the Union Jack spread out and hugged the
breezes. Our foemen rode towards the flag between the lines
of those whose hands had placed it there, and when they came
abreast of it they dropped their rifles and their bandoliers,
and with bent heads passed onwards.

Some were boys, so young that rifles looked unholy things
in hands so childlike; others were old men, grey and
grizzled, grim old tillers of the soil, who looked as hard as
the rocky boulders against which they leant, many were in the
pride of manhood; but old or young, grey beard or no beard,
all of them seemed to realise that they were a beaten people.
All day, and for many days, they came to us and laid their
arms aside, until fully 4,000 men had owned themselves our
prisoners. We gathered in the flocks and herds which had been
held by them as army stores, and then we set to work to give
the Free State peace and peaceful laws. Our next step was to
march upon Harrismith, which was merely an armed promenade,
for the real work of the campaign had been completed when, on
Victory Hill, near Slap Kranz, Commandant Prinsloo
surrendered with all his forces, excepting the few who fled
with De Wet and Olivier. Our flag is the symbol of victory in
every village and town. May it always be the symbol of
even-handed justice, for no power in all the world, unless
backed by wise and pure laws, will hold Africa for twenty
years.

I have never before attempted to express an opinion upon
the future of Africa, yet now, when I have been nine months
at the front, when I have marched through the Free State from
border to border, noting carefully the demeanour of the
people we have conquered, and the conduct of our troops
towards those people, I may be allowed by the more tolerant
of the British public to express an opinion. I do not see
“white winged peace” brooding over this country. I see a
people beaten, broken, out-generalled, and out-fought. I see
a people who, even when whipped, maintain that the war has
been an unholy war, brewed and bred by a few adventurers for
sordid motives; and in my poor opinion there is little in
front of us in South Africa but trouble and storm, unless
someone with a cleaner soul than the ordinary politician
remains in Africa to represent our nation. Only one man seems
to me to stand out as fitted by God and nature with the high
qualities which the ruler of Africa should possess. He is a
man who has the gift of leadership as few men—ancient or
modern—ever possessed it, a man whose word is known to be
unbreakable, whose hands are clean, whose record is
stainless—the Field-Marshal, Lord Roberts. The man who is to
rule South Africa must be a great soldier, not a tyrant, not
a martinet, not a bundle of red tape tied up with a Downing
Street bow and adorned with frills. The negro trouble is
looming large on the African borders, and the negro chiefs
know that in Lord Roberts they have their master. We must not
pander to them to the injury of the Dutch, or how are we to
weld Dutch and British into a national whole? Our generals
have so conducted this campaign, especially this latter part
of it, that not only does the Dutchman know that we can
fight, but he knows that we can be generous with the splendid
generosity of a truly great people. Our generals, with few
exceptions, have left that record behind them, for which a
nation’s thanks are due; and few have done more than the
commander of the Eighth Division, Sir Leslie Rundle, who can
say that not only did he never lose an English gun, but that
never did the enemy of his country succeed in breaking
through his lines. Few men, placed as he was, week after
week, month after month, would have been able to make so
proud a boast.

These are possibly the last lines I shall ever write in
connection with the Eighth Division. Their work is
practically over here. My own is done, for my health is badly
broken, and I shall follow this to England. But if I cannot
march home with them, when they come back in triumph to
receive from a grateful country the praise they have won, I
can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that for many
months I shared their vicissitudes, if not their glory.

CHARACTER SKETCHES IN CAMP.

THE CAMP LIAR.

In the days of my almost forgotten boyhood I remember
reading in the Book of all books that the Wise Man, in a fit
of blank despair, declared that there were several things
under heaven which he could neither gauge nor understand,
viz., “The way of a serpent upon a rock, and the way of a man
with a maid,” and I beg leave to doubt if Solomon, in all his
wisdom, could understand the little ways of a camp liar in
his frisky glory. Whence he cometh, whither he goeth, and why
he was born, are conundrums which might tax the ingenuity of
all the prophets, from Daniel downwards, to solve. I have
sought him with peace offerings in each hand, hoping to
beguile him from his sinful ways, and have located him not. I
have risen in the chilly dawn, and laid wait for him with a
gun, but have not feasted mine eyes upon him. I have lain
awake through the still watches of the night planning divers
surprises for him, but success has not come nigh unto me. I
have cursed the camp liar with a fervour born of long
suffering, and I have hired a Zulu mule-driver to curse him
for me; but my efforts have come to nought, and now I am sore
in my very bones when I think of him. All men whose fate it
is to dwell under canvas know of his work, but no man hath
yet laid hand or eye upon him. A man goeth to his blankets at
night time feeling good towards all mankind, satisfied in his
own soul that he has garnered in all the legitimate news that
he is in any way entitled to handle for the public benefit;
and lo! when he ariseth in the dawning he finds that the camp
liar has neither slept nor slumbered, for the very air is
full of stories concerning battles which have not been fought
and victories which have not been won. From mouth to mouth,
all along the lines, the stories run as fire runs along fuse,
and no man born of woman can tell whence they came or where
they will stop. Each soldier questioned swears the tale is
true, because “’twas told to him by one who never lied.” Yet,
at evening, when the weary wretch who works for newspapers
returns to his tent, with his boots worn through with
fruitless search for the author of the “news,” he learns that
once again he has been the dupe of the “camp liar”; and he
may well be forgiven if he then heaps a whole continent of
curses on the invisible shape which, forming itself into a
lie, is small enough to enter a man’s mouth, and yet big
enough to permeate a whole camp. What is a camp liar? It is
not a man, neither is it a maid, neither is it dog nor devil.
It is a nameless shadow, which flits through the minds of
men, fashioned by the Father of Evil to be a curse and a
scourge to war correspondents. A mining liar is an awful
liar, but he takes tangible form, and one can grapple with
him when he appears upon a prospectus. A political liar is a
pitiful liar, and vengeance finds him out upon the hustings,
and eggs and the produce of the kitchen garden are his
reward. A legal liar is a loquacious liar, but he is bounded
by his brief and the extent of his fees. But the camp liar
has no bounds, and is equally at home in all languages, at
one moment dealing with an army in full marching order, and
the next battening festively upon one man in a mudhole. There
is no height to which the camp liar dare not ascend, there is
nothing too trivial for it to touch. It has neither sex nor
shape; but, like a fallen angel ousted from Heaven, and not
wanted in Hades, it flits through camp a mental microbe,
spawning falsehoods in the souls of soldiers.

The camp liar concocts a story of a fearful fight, and
fills the air with the groans of the dying, and makes a weird
picture out of the grisly, grinning silence of the ghastly
dead. Kopjes are stained a rich ripe red with the blood of
heroes, and arms, and legs, and skulls, and shattered jaw
bones hurtle through the air midst the sound of bursting
shells, like straws in a stable-yard when the wind blows
high. The very poetry of lying is touched with a master hand
when charging squadrons sweep across the veldt and the
sunlight kisses the soldier’s steel. Then comes the pathos
dear to the liar’s soul—the farewells of the dying, sobbed
just seven seconds before sunset into comrades’ ears; the
faltering voice, the tear-dimmed eyes, the death rattle in
the throat, the last hand clasps, the last deep-drawn breath,
in which—mother—Mary—and Heaven are always mingled; and
then the moonlight and the moaning of the midnight
wind!——The war correspondent leaps from the tent, springs
into his saddle with his note-book in his mouth and an
indelible lead pencil in each hand, and rides over kopje and
veldt ten dreary miles to gaze upon the scene of that awful
battle, and finds—one dead mule, and a nigger driver, dead
drunk. Then, if he has had a religious education, he climbs
out of the saddle, sinks on his knees, and prays for the
peace of the camp liar’s immortal soul. But if, as is often
the case, he has had a secular upbringing, he spits on the
dead mule, kicks the nigger, slinks back to camp by a
roundabout route, and swears to everyone that he has been
forty miles in another direction in a railway truck.

Four or five days later, just at that hour in the morning
when a man clings most fondly to his blankets, another rumour
breaks the early morning’s limpid silence, a rumour of a
battle of great import raging eighteen miles away, just
within easy riding distance for a smart correspondent. But
the man of ink and hardships chuckles this time. He has been
fooled so often by the imp of camp rumours; so murmurs just
loud enough to be heard in heaven, “That infernal camp liar
again,” and rustles his blankets round his ears and drops
cosily back into dreamland; but when, later on, he learns
that an important battle has been fought, and he has missed
it all because he did not want to be fooled by the camp liar,
then what he mutters is muttered loud enough to be heard in a
different place, and the folk there don’t need ear trumpets
to catch what he says either.

CHARACTER SKETCHES IN CAMP.

THE NIGGER SERVANT.

It is raining outside my tent. It has rained for three
days and nights, and looks quite capable of raining for three
days more; everything is simply sodden. You try to look
around you at the men’s camps. At every step your boots go up
to the ankle, squelch, in the black mud. You slip as you
walk, and go down on your hands and knees in the slimy filth;
that brings out all the poetry in your nature. If you have
had a Christian training in your youth, you think of David
dodging Saul, and your sympathies go out towards the stupid
king. The mud is everywhere; the horses have trodden it to
slime in many places, in others the feet of the soldiers have
transformed it to batter. Everything is cold, dreary, dismal;
even the tobacco is damp, and leaves a taste in a man’s mouth
like the receipt of bad news from home. I look at the
soldiers hanging around like sheep round a blocked-up shed in
a snow-storm, and I feel sympathetic. Their puttees are wet,
and there is a suggestion of future rheumatism in every fold
that encircles their calves; I can’t see much more of them
except their weather-beaten faces. They wear their helmets
and their blue-black overcoats, but both are wet. They don’t
look happy, and the cause is not hard to find: they have
slept out for three nights without tents. Their blankets are
like sponges that have been left in a tub. Each blanket seems
to hold about three gallons of water.

I arrived at this computation by watching the men wringing
their bedding. Two men got hold of a blanket, one at each
end; they twist it different ways, and the water runs out in
a stream. The soldiers relapse into language. Most of their
adjectives have a decidedly pink tinge, and I shouldn’t
wonder if they became scarlet if this sort of weather
continued.

My nigger slops along through the slush and tells me that
my lunch is ready. He is not a happy-looking nigger by any
means. A white man looks bad enough in the mud and cold, but
a nigger presents a pitiful spectacle. His face goes whitish
green, with an undercurrent of slatey grey running through
it. The brilliancy leaves the coal-black eyes, and they
become as lifeless and limp as a professional politician at a
prayer meeting. The mouth goes agape, the thick lips become
flabby, and fall away from the teeth. The mouth does not seem
to fit the face, but hangs on to it like a second-hand suit
on a backyard fence. My nigger is no better, and no worse,
than the rest of them. He looks like a chapter in
Lamentations, and is about as much at home in the sodden camp
as a bar of wet soap in a sand heap. Just now he is good for
nothing except to sing doleful hymns in a key sad enough to
frighten a transit mule away from a bag of mealies. When he
is not singing sadly he is quoting Scripture and thinking
about his immortal soul. When the sun comes out to-morrow and
the day after, he will be dancing a most unholy dance or be
making love to “Dinah,” filling in the intervals by cursing
in three different languages stray horses that steal our
fodder.

It is really astonishing what a difference the weather
makes to the morals of the South African nigger. Give him
plenty of sunshine, and he forgets he ever had a soul, and
throws slabs of blasphemy, picked up from the Tommies around
him, with painful liberality. When he gets tired of English
oaths, he drops into Cape Dutch, and some of the curses
contained in that language are solid enough to hurt anything
they hit. Later on he drifts into his native tongue, raises
his voice a couple of octaves, and streaks the atmosphere
with multi-coloured oaths, until you imagine you are
listening to a vocal rainbow. But take away the sunshine,
give him a wet hide and a wet floor to camp on, and he
straightway becomes all penitence and prayer. His face,
peering out dismally between the upturned collar of his
weather-stained coat and the down-drawn brim of his battered
hat, looks like a soiled sermon, and he is altogether
woeful.

When the weather is warm he decks himself out in any piece
of gaudy finery he can lay hands upon. He loves to wear a
glaring yellow roll of silk or cloth around his hat, a blue
or green ‘kerchief about his throat, and a crimson girdle
encircled about his loins. Then he thinks he is a midsummer
sunset, and swaggers round like a peacock in full plumage,
looking for something to “mash.” He has no sense of the
eternal law of averages. It does not trouble him if the whole
seat of his most important garment is represented by a hole
big enough to put a baby in, if he only has the artistic
decorations I have mentioned above. Nor does he see anything
out of the way in the fact that one of his feet is encased in
an officer’s top boot and the other in a remnant of a Boer
farmer’s cast-off veldtschoon. His soul yearns towards
feathers. He will pluck a grand white plume from the tail of
an ostrich if he gets a favourable opportunity, and place it
triumphantly in his torn and soiled slouch hat, or he will
pick up a discarded bonnet from a dust pile and rob it of
feathers placed there by feminine hands, in order that he may
look a black Beau Brummell.

His manners, like his morals, change with the weather.
When the barometer registers “fine and clear,” you may expect
a saucy answer if you rate him for a late breakast; when it
registers “warm, and likely to be warmer,” you may consider
yourself lucky if you get a morning meal at all. But when it
indicates “hot,” and the mercury still rising, you know that
the time has arrived for you to climb out of your coat and
commence cooking for yourself, unless you feel equal to the
task of spreading a saucy nigger in sections around the
adjacent allotments. It is not always healthy to adopt the
latter plan, especially if your “boy” happens to be a Basuto
or a Zulu. Should he belong to either of those tribes,
threaten him as much as you like, but don’t hurry to put your
threats into practice; or the nigger may do the scattering,
and you may do the penitent part of the business. You may
bully him as much as you like when the barometer is falling,
for then the life is all out of him, and he has not
sufficient spirit left in him to resent any sort of
insult.

Even “Tommy” knows this, and on a cold day will call a big
Zulu servant by a name which implies that the Zulu’s father
and mother were never legally married. The Zulu will only
smile dismally, and tell “Tommy” that he will pray for the
salvation of his soul. Three days later, when the air is
dancing in the heat-rays, if Mr. Atkins, emboldened by former
success, repeats the speech, the Zulu will rise and confront
him with blazing eyes, showing at the same time a wide range
of beautiful white teeth, set in a savage snarl, and give Mr.
Atkins a choice of titles which it would be hard to improve
upon even in a Dublin dockyard, and he will not be slow to
back his mouth with his hands should the argument become
pressing, as more than one of her Majesty’s lieges have found
out to their deep and lasting humiliation.

When a combination of rain and religion has depressed him
the nigger servant is one of the most abject-looking mortals
that ever wore clothes, and makes as sad a spectacle as a
farmyard fowl on a front fence in a thunderstorm. But he must
not be judged altogether by his appearance on such occasions.
He can be loyal to his “boss,” and when fit and well he will
fight when roused as a devil might fight for the soul of a
deacon. He loves to ride or drive a horse, but he is not fond
of horses, as I understand the term. He has no idea of making
a pet of his charge. A horse is to him merely something to
get about upon, and he cannot understand our fondness for our
equine friends. I have noticed the same trait in the Boer
character. To a Boer a horse is usually merely a means of
transit from spot to spot; not a comrade, not a companion. I
was not astonished to find this feeling amongst the niggers,
because I have noticed it among the natives in every colony
in Australia, and even amongst such inveterate horsemen as
the Sioux Indians of America and the Maories of New Zealand;
but I was surprised to note how little sympathy existed
between the Boer and his equine helper.

The nigger servant is a sporting sort of party, and never
loses an opportunity to indulge his tastes in this direction.
I had an excellent chance the other day to note how fond he
is of a bit of hunting. We had camped before sundown in a
rather picturesque position, and I was watching the effect of
the declining sun on the gloomy kopjes, when I noticed a
commotion in all the camps, in front, at the rear, and on
both flanks. In ten seconds every nigger in the whole camp
had deserted his work and was frantically dashing out on to
the veldt. They uttered shrill cries as they ran, and every
man had some sort of weapon in his hand, either a tomahawk, a
billet of wood, or a rock. With marvellous celerity they
formed a huge circle, though what they were after was a
puzzle to me. I fancied for awhile that one of their number
must have run “amuck,” and the rest meant to send him to
slumber. Quickly they narrowed the circle, the whole body of
them moving as if linked together and propelled by unseen
mechanism. When the circle got about the third the size of an
ordinary cricket ground I saw what they were after. A brace
of hares had caught their eyes, and this was their method of
capturing the fleet-footed, but stupid, “racers of the
veldt.” First one nigger and then another detached himself
from the circle, and, darting in, had a shy at the quarry
with whatever missile he had with him. If he missed—and a
good many of them missed—the speedy little bit of fur, he
returned crestfallen to the circle again, amidst jeers and
laughter from the rest. The hares darted hither and thither
in that ever narrowing circle of foes, until a couple of
well-aimed shots, one with a rock as big as a cricket ball,
and one with a tomahawk, laid them out, and they became the
prize of the successful marksmen. The nigger “boy” has to be
paid one pound a week and his “scoff,” and, taking him all in
all, in spite of his faults, which are many, I verily think
he earns it.

CHARACTER SKETCHES IN CAMP.

THE SOLDIER PREACHER.

(Written at Enslin Battlefield.)

He was standing at eventide facing the rough and rugged
heights of Enslin. The crimson-tinted clouds that emblazoned
the sky cast a ruddy radiance round his head and face, making
him appear like one of those ancient martyrs one is apt to
see on stained-glass windows in old-world churches in Rome or
Venice. His feet were firmly planted close to the graves of
the British soldiers and sailors who had fallen when we beat
the Boers and drove them back upon Modder River.

In one hand he held a little, well-worn Bible; his other
hand was raised high above his close-cropped head, whilst his
voice rang out on the sultry, storm-laden air like the clang
of steel on steel:

“Prepare ter meet yer God!”

No one who looked at the neat, strong figure arrayed in
the plain khaki uniform of a private soldier, at the
clean-shaven, square-jawed face, at the fearless grey-blue
eyes, could doubt either his honesty or earnestness. Courage
was imprinted by Nature’s never-erring hand on every
lineament of his Saxon features. So might one of Cromwell’s
stern-browed warriors have stood on the eve of Marston
Moor.

“Prepare ter meet yer God!”

To the right of him the long lines of the tents spread
upwards towards the kopje; to the left the veldt, with its
wealth of grey-green grass, sown by the bounteous hand of the
Great Harvester; all around him, excepting where the graves
raised their red-brown furrows, rows of soldiers lounged,
listing to the old, old story of man’s weakness and eternal
shame, and Christ’s love and everlasting pity. On the soldier
preacher’s breast a long row of decorations gleamed, telling
of honourable service to Queen and country. Before a man
could wear those ribbons he must have faced death as brave
men face it on many a battlefield. He must have known the
agonies of thirst, the dull dead pain of sleepless nights and
midnight marches, the tireless watching at the sentry’s post,
and the onward rush of armed men up heights almost
unscalable. On Egypt’s sun-scorched plains he must have faced
the mad onslaughts of the Dervish hosts, and rallied with the
men who held the lines at Abu Klea Wells, where gallant
Burnaby was slain. The hills of Afghanistan must have
re-echoed to his tread, else why the green and crimson ribbon
that mingled with the rest? His eyes had flashed along the
advancing lines of charging impi, led by Zulu chiefs. Yet
never had they flashed with braver light than now, when,
facing that half-mocking, half-reckless crowd, he cried:

“Prepare ter meet yer God!”

Rough as the thrust of a broken bayonet was his speech,
unskilled in rhetoric his tongue, his periods unrounded as
flying fragments of shrapnel shell; yet all who listened knew
that every word came from the speaker’s soul, from the
magazine of truth. Some London slum had been his cradle, the
gutters of the great city the only University his feet had
known, the costers’ dialect was native to his tongue; yet no
smug Churchman crowned with the laurels of the schools could
so have stirred the blood of those wild lads, fresh from the
boundless bush and lawless mining camps beneath Australian
suns.

“Prepare ter meet yer God!”

And even as he spoke we, who listened, plainly heard the
rolling thunder of our guns as they spoke in sterner tones to
the nation’s foes from Modder River. It was no new figure
that the soldier preacher placed before us. It was the same
indignant Christ that swept the rabble from the Temple; the
same great Christ who calmly faced the seething mob in
Pilate’s judgment hall; the same sweet Christ who took the
babes upon His knee; the same Divine Christ who, with hyssop
and gall, and mingled blood and tears, passed death’s dread
portals on the dark brow of Calvary. The same grand figure,
but quaintly dressed in words that savoured of the London
slums and of the soldier’s camp, and yet so hedged around
with earnest love and childlike faith that all its grossest
trappings fell away and left us nothing but the ideal
Christ.

Once more we heard the distant batteries speak to those
whose hands had rudely grasped the Empire’s flag, and every
rock, and hill, and crag, and stony height took up the echo,
like a lion’s roar, until the whispering wind was tremulous
with sound. Then all was hushed except the preacher’s
voice.

“Prepare ter meet yer God! I’ve come ter tell yer all
abart a General whose armies hold ther City of Eternal Life.
If you are wounded, throw yer rifles down, ‘nd ‘e will send
the ambulance of ‘is love, with Red Cross angels, and ‘is
adjutant, whose name is Mercy, to dress yer wounds. Throw
down yer rifles ‘nd surrender. No rebels can enter the City
of Eternal Life. You can’t storm ther walls, Or take ther
gates at ther point of ther baynit, for ther ramparts are
guarded ‘nd ther sentries never sleep. When ther bugles sound
ther larst reville you will ever ‘ear, ‘nd ther colonel,
whose name is Death, gives the order ter march, you’ll have
nothink to fear abart, if yer bandoliers are full o’ faith
‘nd yer rifles are sighted with good works. Yer uniforms may
be ragged, and you may not even have a corporal’s stripe to
show; but if yer can pass ther sentries fearlessly, you’ll
find a general’s commission waitin’ for yer just inside ther
gate. But yer earn’t fool with my General. Remember this:
ther password is, ‘Repentance,’ ‘nd nothink else will do. The
sentry on duty will see you comin’ and will challenge you.
‘Who goes there?’ ‘Friend!’ ‘Advance, friend, ‘nd give ther
counter-sign!’ If you say, ‘Good works,’ you’ll find ‘is
baynit up against yer chest. If yer say you forgot to get it,
you’ll be in ther clink in ‘ell in ther twinklin’ of an eye;
but if yer say, loud ‘nd clear, ‘Repentance,’ ‘e will lower
‘is baynit ‘nd say, ‘Pass, friend. All’s well!'”

PRESIDENT STEYN.

Out on the veldt, far from the wife and home he loves so
well, he stands, our country’s bold, unyielding foe. And even
as he stands he knows that the finger of Fate has written his
own and his country’s doom in letters large and deep on the
walls of time. Yet, with unblenching brow, he waits the
falling of the thunderbolt, a calm, grand figure, fit to live
in history’s pages when every memory of meaner men has passed
into oblivion, M.T. Steyn, President of the shattered Free
State of South Africa. Around this man the human jackals howl
to try with lying lips to foul his memory. Yet, as a rock,
age after age, throws back with contemptuous strength the
waves that break against its base, so every action of his
manly life gives the lie to tales which cowards tell.

He is our foe, no stabber in the dark, moving with
stealthy steps amidst professions of pretended peace, but in
the open, where the gaze of God and man can rest upon him, he
stands, defiant, though undone. He staked his country’s
freedom, his earthly happiness, and his high position in the
great game of war; staked all that mortal man holds dear;
staked it for what? For love of gain! May he who spawned that
lie to stir our people’s hearts to boundless wrath against
this falling man live to repent in sackcloth and in tears the
evil deed so done… Staked it for what? To feed his own
ambition! I tell you no; the undercurrent which brought forth
the deed sprang from a nobler and a higher source. His
country stood pledged in time of peace to help in time of war
a sister State, and when the bond fell due he honoured it,
though none knew better than this noble man that when he
loosed the dogs of war he crossed a lion’s path.

Now he is tottering to his fall, amidst the ruins of a
crumbling State, forsaken by the Powers that egged him on
with covert promises of armed support, abandoned to the
tender mercies of his foes by those on whose behalf he drew
the sword. Yet, even now, the dauntless spirit of the man
rises above the wreckage of disaster. A little band of heroes
ring him round. Though every man in all that fearless few is
England’s foe, yet we, who boast the Vikings’ blood in every
vein, can we not honour them? So did our forefathers stand
round Harold when Norman William trod with armed heel on
English soil. So stood our fathers when Blucher’s laggard
step hung back from Waterloo. Are we not great enough to look
with pride upon a gallant foe? Or has our nation fallen from
its high estate, has chivalry departed from our blood, and
left us nothing but the dregs which go to make a nation of
hucksters? If so, then let us leave the battlefields to
better men, and train our children solely for the
market-place. But these are idle words, born of the spleen
which such a thought engenders. Full well I know the temper
of our people, terrible in their wrath, but swift to see the
nobleness in those who face them boldly.

And these be noble men, my masters. They rally round their
chief, as you and yours would rally round a British leader if
foreign hordes swept with resistless might over England’s
historic soil. All that they loved they’ve lost, and nothing
now remains to them but honour and a patriot’s grave; and in
the grim game of war it is our stern task to give them what
they seek—a soldier’s death beneath the doomed flag which,
in their stubborn pride, they will never forsake. But even
whilst we hem them round with bristling bayonets, ready for
the last dread act in this red drama, let us pay them the
tribute due to all brave men; for he who gives his life to
guard a cause he holds most dear is worthy of our admiration,
though he be ten thousand times our foe. What should we think
of men who, left to guard the Kentish fields, threw down
their arms and sued for peace to any leader of an invading
host because our cause seemed lost? Should we not curse them
as a craven crowd, and teach our lisping babes to mock their
memory? Would any fair-faced girl in all the British Isles
wed any man who would not fight until the sinews slackened
with slaying in defence of the homeland? If so, they are not
fashioned of the metal of which their granddames were
made.

And what we honour as the prince of virtues in a Briton
shall we condemn as vice in this little band of Free State
Boers and their leader, loyal to a lost cause? No, England,
no! It is not you that shriek anathemas to the weeping skies
because the foe dies hard. The gutter gamin and the brutal
lout who never owned a soul fit to rise above the level of
the kettle singing on the hearth may brand the name of Steyn
and his stout burghers with infamy; but the clean-souled
people of the Motherland, the people from whose ranks our
greatest fighters and thinkers spring, will not endorse that
cry. No, not though every slanderous throat shall shriek
until they cannot wail an octave higher.

It is not from such great men as Roberts that we hear
these pitiful tales concerning those who give us battle. He
who has been a man of war from childhood to old age would
never stoop to soil his manly lips to woo the fleeting
favours of a mob, and he has proved himself as wise in
council as upon the death-strewn fields of war. So wise, so
brave, so loyal to his word, that even those whom he, at his
country’s call, has had to crush, lift their hats reverently
at the mention of his name, because he wears upon his hero
soul the white flower of a blameless life. Would Kitchener,
whose dread name strikes terror to the heart of every
burgher, would he befoul his foeman’s fame? I tell you no,
though whilst a foe remains in arms he strikes with all a
giant’s force and spares not; but when the blow has fallen,
he of all men would preserve his enemies’ fair fame intact.
So it should be whilst those who stand in arms against our
country and our country’s flag refuse the terms we offer. We
should make war so terrible that every enemy should dread the
sound of British bugles as they would dread the trump of
doom. When once the country’s voice has called for war, then
war should sweep with resistless might over land and sea,
until sweet peace should seem a boon to be desired above all
earthly things by those who stand in arms against us. If
Steyn and those who with heroic hearts hedge him round refuse
to bow to destiny and the God of Battles, then he and they
must fall before the bayonets of our soldiery as growing corn
falls before the sickle of the reaper. But even in their fall
they can claim as their heaven-born heritage our nation’s
deepest admiration for their dauntless devotion to their love
of country, home, and kindred. And we will but add laurels to
the renown our soldiers have won if we, with unsparing hand,
mete out to them the praises due to manly foes. Ours be the
task to slay them where they stand; not ours the task to rob
them of the glory they have won.

LOUIS BOTHA,
COMMANDANT-GENERAL OF THE
BOER ARMY.

Louis Botha, who has cut so deep a mark in the pages of
history, is only a young man yet, being about
seven-and-thirty years of age. He is a “fine figure of a
man,” standing in the neighbourhood of six feet in his boots.
His face is handsome, intellectual, and determined; his
expression kindly and compassionate. The razor never touches
his face, but his brown beard is always neatly trimmed, for
the young Commandant-General is particular in regard to his
personal appearance in a manly way, though in no respect
foppish. He is now, and always has been, an excellent
athlete, a good rifle shot, and a first-class horseman; not
given at any time to indoor pastimes over much, though fond
of a quiet game of whist. He was born in Natal, of Dutch
parents, and married to Miss Emmett, a relative of Robert
Emmett, the Irish Revolutionist. Young Botha was educated at
Greytown, and though a good, sound commercial scholar, he
gave no evidence in his schoolboy days of what was in him. No
one who knew him then would have dreamed that before he was
forty years of age he would be the foremost soldier of his
country. His folk were moderately well off, but the
adventurous spirit of the future general sent him inland from
Natal when a large number of Natal and Free State Boers
enlisted under the flag of General Lucas Meyer, who was bent
upon making war upon a powerful negro tribe in the
neighbourhood of Vryheid. During the fighting young Botha was
his general’s right-hand man, displaying even at that early
age a cool, level head and a stout heart. When the Boers were
firmly settled upon the land Vryheid was declared a Republic,
and Lucas Meyer was elected first President. But the new
Republic lasted only about three years, and was then, by
mutual consent, merged into Transvaal territory, and both
Lucas Meyer and Louis Botha were elected members of the
Volksraad. Louis Botha retained his seat right up to the time
hostilities broke out between Great Britain and the Republics
under Mr. Kruger and Mr. Steyn.

During the many stormy scenes which preceded the actual
declaration of war Louis Botha proved that he possessed the
coolest and most level head in the Volksraad. He opposed the
war, and, with prophetic eye, foresaw the awful devastation
of his country which would follow in the footsteps of the
British army. But when the time came, and his country was
irretrievably pledged to war, he was not the man to hang
back. He was one of those who had much to lose and little
indeed to gain by taking up arms against us, for, by honest
industry, he had become a wealthy farmer and stockbreeder. At
the first call to arms he threw aside his senatorial duties,
and took up his rifle, rejoining his old commando at Vryheid
as commandant under General Lucas Meyer. It is said that at
the battle of Dundee General Meyer, feeling convinced that
the God of Battles had decided against him and his forces,
decided to surrender to the British, but Louis Botha fiercely
combated his general’s decision, and point-blank refused to
throw down his arms or counsel his men to do so. What
followed all the world knows, and Botha went up very high in
the estimation of the better class of fighting burghers. At
the Tugela, before the first big battle took place, General
Meyer was taken ill, and had to retire to Pretoria, and Louis
Botha was then elected assistant-general, and the planning of
the battle was left entirely to him.

It was a terribly responsible position to place so young a
man in, for he was face to face with the then
Commander-in-Chief of the British army, Sir Redvers Buller, a
general of dauntless determination and undoubted ability.
Experience, men, and all the munitions of war were in favour
of the British general; but the awful nature of the country
was upon the side of the newly fledged Boer leader, and he
made terrible use of it. The day of Colenso, when Sir Redvers
Buller received his first decisive check, will not soon be
forgotten in the annals of our Army. A man of weaker fibre
than the British leader would have been daunted by the
disasters of that day, for there he lost ten guns and a large
number of men. But Buller carried in his blood all the old
grit of our race, and the heavier the check the more his soul
was set upon ultimate victory. I have been over that battle
ground, and have looked at the positions taken up by Louis
Botha. They were chosen with consummate skill, born of a
thorough knowledge of the nature of the country and inherent
generalship.

I have looked at the country Sir Redvers Buller had to
pass through to get at his wise and skilful adversary. The
man who dared make the attempt that Buller made must have had
nerves of steel, and a soul that would not blench if ordered
to storm the very gates of Hades. The worst fighting ground
that I saw in all the Free State was but a mockery of war
compared to the ground around Colenso, and I have seen some
terrible places in the Free State. But a man has to see the
ground Buller fought in to realise the magnitude of the task
the Empire set him at the beginning of the war. Great as Lord
Roberts is, I doubt if he would have done more than Buller
did under the same circumstances.

That battle of Colenso made young Louis Botha famous, and
from that hour the eyes of the burghers were turned towards
him as the one man fit to lead them. At Spion Kop, when the
Boer leader, Schalk Burger, vacated the splendid position he
had been ordered to take up, Louis Botha’s genius grasped the
mighty import of the situation, and he at once realised that
Schalk Burger had blundered terribly, and it was he who
retook those positions with such disastrous consequences to
our forces. His fame spread far and near, and his name became
a thing to conjure with. When the Commandant-General of the
Boer Army, General Joubert, lay dying, he was asked who was
the best man to fill his place. And he, the grey veteran, did
not hesitate for a second, but with his dying breath gasped
out the name of Louis Botha. The Boer Government promptly
appointed him to the position, and from that day to this he
has been the paramount military power in the Boer lines. He
is not the only one of his line fighting under the Transvaal
flag. There are four other brothers in the field, one of
whom, Christian Botha, is now a general, and a good fighter.
As a soldier Louis Botha has proved himself a foeman worthy
the steel of any of our generals; as a man his worst enemy
can say nothing derogatory concerning him, for in all his
actions he has borne himself like a gentleman. He is generous
and courteous in the hour of victory, stout-hearted and
self-reliant in the time of disaster—just the type of
soldier that a great nation like ours knows how to esteem,
even though he is an enemy in arms against us.

WHITE FLAG TREACHERY.

Few things have astonished me more during the progress of
this war than the number of charges levelled against our foes
in reference to the treacherous use of the white flag. Almost
every newspaper that came my way contained some such account;
yet, though constantly at the front for nine months, I cannot
recall one solitary instance of such treachery which I could
vouch for. I have heard of dozens of cases, and have taken
the trouble to investigate a good many, but never once
managed to obtain sufficient proof to satisfy me that the
charge was genuine. On one occasion I was following close on
the heels of our advancing troops, and had for a comrade a
rather excitable correspondent. When within about fourteen
hundred yards of the kopjes we were advancing to attack, the
Boers opened a heavy rifle fire; and, though we could not see
a solitary enemy, our fellows began to drop. It was very
evident that the enemy were secreted in the rocks not far
from a substantial farmhouse, from the roof of which floated
a large white flag (it turned out later to be a tablecloth
braced to a broom handle).

“There’s another case of d—— white flag treachery,”
shouted my companion. “I wonder the general don’t turn the
guns on that farm and blow it to Hades.”

“What for?” I asked.

“What for! Why, they are flying the white flag, and
shooting from the farmhouse. Isn’t that enough?”

“Quite enough, if true,” I replied. “But how the devil do
you know they are shooting from the farmhouse?”

“They must be shooting from the farmhouse,” he yelled.
“Why, I’ve been scouring all the rocks around with my
glasses, and can’t see a blessed Boer in any of ’em. No, sir,
you can bet your soul they are skulking in that farm. They
know we won’t loose a shell on the white flag—-the
cowards!”

I did not think it worth while to argue with a man of that
stamp, but kept my glasses on that farm very closely during
the fight that followed. Right up to the time when our men
rushed the kopjes and surrounded the farmhouse I did not see
a man enter or leave the house, and when I rode up I found
that two women and three children were in possession.
Furthermore, on examination, I soon discovered that, as the
doors and windows faced the wrong way, it would have been
impossible for a Boer to do much shooting at our men, unless
the walls at the gable end were loopholed, which they were
not, I know, for I examined them minutely. Fortunately for
the credit of the British Army, most of our generals are
coolheaded men who do not allow the irresponsible chatter of
the army to influence them. Otherwise our guns would have
been trained upon many a homestead on charges quite as flimsy
and groundless as the one quoted above.

I suppose that cases of treachery have really occurred
during the war. In a mixed crowd like that which composes the
burgher army, there are sure to be some mortals fit to do any
mean trick, just as sure as there are men fit to do or say
anything in the British Army, But I cannot, and I will not,
believe that the great bulk of these men are such paltry
cowards as to make the “white flag” act a common one. It may
be news to British readers to know that the burghers complain
of the behaviour of our troops as bitterly as we complain of
theirs; and I think, from personal observation, that their
charges are as groundless as are some charges made by the
same class of hysterical individuals, though of different
nationality. Their pet hatred, when I was a prisoner in their
hands, was the Lancers. They used to swear that the Lancers
never spared a wounded man, but ran him through as they
galloped past him. I was told this fifty times, and each time
told my informant flatly that I declined to believe the
assertion, and should continue to disbelieve it until I had
undeniable proof, for it would take a good deal to convince
me that a British soldier would strike a fallen foe even in
the heat and stress of battle. One day they asked me to come
and look at the dead body of one of their field cornets, whom
they alleged to have been done to death whilst wounded by our
Lancers. I went and saw the man, and at a glance saw that the
wounds were not lance wounds at all, but ripping bullet
wounds. He had been sniped by some Australian riflemen from a
high kopje whilst in a valley. I tried to explain this to the
excited burghers, but they only sneered at me for my trouble,
until one of their own doctors coming along had a look at the
corpse, and promptly verified my statements. That calmed them
considerably, and they looked at the thing in cooler blood,
and soon saw that it was really absurd to put the blame of
the man’s death on the shoulders of the Lancers, though they
stoutly maintained that our cavalry were at times guilty of
such monstrous conduct. I have often heard them solemnly
swear never to give a Lancer a chance to surrender if they
once got him within rifle range.

Personally, I could never see just what the Boers would
gain by the white flag business. As a rule, our troops did
not want coaxing into rifle range; they marched within
hitting distance readily enough, and did not require a white
flag to lure them into a tight place, so that the object to
be gained by the enemy by such disgraceful tactics never
seemed to me to be too apparent. If they had ever by such
means been able to entrap an army, or to bring about the
wholesale slaughter of our men, I could understand things a
bit better; but they had little to gain and an awful lot to
lose by such tactics. There is no slight risk attached to the
act of firing on an advancing army treacherously under cover
of the white flag. Such a deed rouses all the slumbering
devil in the men, and the foe found guilty of such a deed
would get more bayonet than he would find conducive to his
health when it came to his turn to be beaten.

THE BATTLE OF MAGERSFONTEIN.

MAGERSFONTEIN.

The Australians, after relieving Belmont from the Boer
commando, suddenly received orders to march upon Enslin, as
the Boers had attacked that place, which was held by two
companies of the Northamptonshires under Captain Godley; the
latter had no artillery, whilst the enemy, who were over
1,000 strong, had one 12-pounder gun with them, but the
sequel proved that the Boer is a poor fighter in the open
country. He is hard to beat in hilly and rocky ground when
acting on the defensive, but he is not over dangerous as an
attacking power. Let him choose his ground, and fight
according to his own traditions, and the best soldiers in the
world will find it no sinecure to oust him. As soon as the
Boers put in an appearance at Enslin, Lieutenant Brierly, of
the Northumberland Fusiliers, who is attached to the
Northamptons, made his way to a kopje, which had formerly
been held by Boer forces, and a mere handful of men fairly
held the enemy in check at that point for over seven hours.
The enemy made frantic efforts to dislodge this gallant
little band, but failed dismally, and they had not the heart
to try to take the kopje by storm, though there were enough
of them around the hill to have eaten the little band of
Britishers. In the meantime Captain Godley and his men held
the township. Again and again the enemy threatened to rush
the place, but their valour melted before the determined
front of the besieged, and they drew off, taking their gun
with them, their scouts having warned them that the
Australians, with a section of the Royal Horse Artillery and
two guns, were coming upon them from the direction of
Belmont, whilst a body of the 12th Lancers and a battery of
artillery were dashing down from Modder River. The
Australians, who are now 720 strong, the New South Wales
Company of 125 men having joined Colonel Head’s forces,
remained at Enslin, and entrenched there in order to keep
open the line of communication between General Methuen’s army
and Orange River; a section of Royal Horse Artillery and two
guns is with them. On half a dozen occasions the Boers have
threatened to sweep down upon them from the hilly country
adjacent, but up to the time of writing nothing serious has
occurred.

On Sunday last we heard the sound of heavy firing coming
from the direction of Modder River; scouts coming in informed
us that an engagement between General Methuen’s force and the
enemy, under the astute General Cronje, had commenced. Seeing
that Australia was liable to remain idle for the time being,
I determined to push on with my assistant, Mr. E. Monger, of
Coolgardie, West Australia. When we arrived at Modder River
we found the fight raging at a spot about four and a half
miles beyond Modder River bridge. Our forces were in
possession of the river and the plain beyond; but General
Cronje had entrenched himself in a line of ranges stretching
for several miles across the veldt. So well had the Boer
general chosen his ground, and such good use had he made of
the natural advantages of his position, that the British
found themselves face to face with an African Gibraltar. The
frowning rocks were bristling with rifles, which commanded
the plain below, trenches seamed the hillsides in all
directions, and in those trenches lay concealed the picked
marksmen of the veldt—men who, though they know but little
of soldiering from a European point of view, yet had been
familiar with the rifle from earliest boyhood; rough and
uncouth in appearance, dressed in farmers’ garb, still under
those conditions, fighting under a general they knew and
trusted, amidst surroundings familiar to them from infancy,
they were foemen worthy of the respect of the veteran troops
of any nation under heaven.

At every post of vantage Cronje, with consummate
generalship, had posted his artillery so that it would be
almost impossible for our guns to silence them, whilst at the
same time he could sweep the plains below should our infantry
attempt to storm the heights at the point of the bayonet. At
the bottom of the kopjes, right under the muzzle of his guns,
he had excavated trenches deep enough to hide his riflemen,
but he had thrown up no earthworks, so that our guns could
not locate the exact spot where his rifle trenches lay. All
the earth from the trenches had been very carefully removed,
and the low blue bush which covers these plains completely
screened his trenches from view. In front of the trenches,
and extending some considerable distance out in front of the
veldt, the clever Boer leader had placed an immense amount of
barbed wire entanglement, so fashioned that no cavalry could
live amongst it, whilst even the very flower of our infantry
would find it hard work to charge over it, even in daylight.
The Boer forces are variously estimated at from 12,000 to
15,000 men. The number and nature of their guns can only be
guessed at, but that the enemy’s men are well supplied in
that respect there can be no question. Our forces I estimate
at about 11,000 men of all arms, including the
never-to-be-forgotten section of the Naval Brigade, to whom
England owes a debt of gratitude too deep for words to
portray; for their steadiness, valour, and accuracy of
shooting saved England from disaster on this the blackest day
that Scotland has known since the Crimea.

Our troops extended over many miles of country. Every move
had to be made in full view of the enemy upon a level plain
where a collie dog could not have moved unperceived by those
foemen hidden so securely behind impregnable ramparts. During
the whole of Sunday our gunners played havoc with the enemy,
the shooting of the Naval Brigade being of such a nature that
even thus early in the fight the big gun of the bluejackets,
with its 42-pound lyddite shell, struck terror into the
hearts of the enemy. But the Boers were not idle. Whenever
our infantry, in manoeuvring, came within range’of their
rifles, our ranks began to thin out, and the blood of our
gallant fellows dyed the sun-baked veldt in richest
crimson.

During the night that followed it was considered expedient
that the Highland Brigade, about 4,000 strong, under General
Wauchope, should get close enough to the lines of the foe to
make it possible to charge the heights. At midnight the
gallant, but ill-fated, general moved cautiously through the
darkness towards the kopje where the Boers were most strongly
entrenched. They were led by a guide, who was supposed to
know every inch of the country, out into the darkness of an
African night. The brigade marched in line of quarter-column,
each man stepping cautiously and slowly, for they knew that
any sound meant death. Every order was given in a hoarse
whisper, and in whispers it was passed along the ranks from
man to man; nothing was heard as they moved towards the
gloomy, steel-fronted heights but the brushing of their feet
in the veldt grass and the deep-drawn breaths of the marching
men.

So, onward, until three of the clock on the morning of
Monday. Then out of the darkness a rifle rang, sharp and
clear, a herald of disaster—a soldier had tripped in the
dark over the hidden wires laid down by the enemy. In a
second, in the twinkling of an eye, the searchlights of the
Boers fell broad and clear as the noonday sun on the ranks of
the doomed Highlanders, though it left the enemy concealed in
the shadows of the frowning mass of hills behind them. For
one brief moment the Scots seemed paralysed by the suddenness
of their discovery, for they knew that they were huddled
together like sheep within fifty yards of the trenches of the
foe. Then, clear above the confusion, rolled the voice of the
general—”Steady, men, steady!”—and, like an echo to the
veterans, out came the crash of nearly a thousand rifles not
fifty paces from them. The Highlanders reeled before the
shock like trees before the tempest. Their best, their
bravest, fell in that wild hail of lead. General Wauchope was
down, riddled with bullets; yet, gasping, dying, bleeding
from every vein, the Highland chieftain raised himself on his
hands and knees, and cheered his men forward. Men and
officers fell in heaps together.

The Black Watch charged, and the Gordons and the
Seaforths, with a yell that stirred the British camp below,
rushed onward—onward to death or disaster. The accursed
wires caught them round the legs until they floundered, like
trapped wolves, and all the time the rifles of the foe sang
the song of death in their ears. Then they fell back, broken
and beaten, leaving nearly 1,300 dead and wounded just where
the broad breast of the grassy veldt melts into the embrace
of the rugged African hills, and an hour later the dawning
came of the dreariest day that Scotland has known for a
generation-past. Of her officers, the flower of her chivalry,
the pride of her breeding, but few remained to tell the
tale—a sad tale truly, but one untainted with dishonour or
smirched with disgrace, for up those heights under similar
circumstances even a brigade of devils could scarce have
hoped to pass. All that mortal men could do the Scots did;
they tried, they failed, they fell. And there is nothing left
us now but to mourn for them, and avenge them; and I am no
prophet if the day is distant when the Highland bayonet will
write the name of Wauchope large and deep in the best blood
of the Boers.

All that fateful day our wounded men lay close to the Boer
lines under a blazing sun; over their heads the shots of
friends and foes passed without ceasing. Many a gallant deed
was done by comrades helping comrades; men who were shot
through the body lay without water, enduring all the agony of
thirst engendered by their wounds and the blistering heat of
the day; to them crawled Scots with shattered limbs, sharing
the last drop of water in their bottles, and taking messages
to be delivered to mourning women in the cottage home of
far-off Scotland. Many a last farewell was whispered by
pain-drawn lips in between the ringing of the rifles, many a
rough soldier with tenderest care closed the eyes of a
brother in arms amidst the tempest and the stir of battle;
and above it all, Cronje, the Boer general, must have smiled
grimly, for well he knew that where the Highland Brigade had
failed all the world might falter. All day long the battle
raged; scarcely could we see the foe—all that met our eyes
was the rocky heights that spoke with tongues of flame
whenever our troops drew near. We could not reach their
lines; it was murder, grim and ghastly, to send the infantry
forward to fight a foe they could not see and could not
reach. Once our Guards made a brilliant dash at the trenches,
and, like a torrent, their resistless valour bore all before
them, and for a few brief moments they got within hitting
distance of the foe. Well did they avenge the slaughter of
the Scots; the bayonets, like tongues of flame, passed above
or below the rifles’ guard, and swept through brisket and
breastbone. Out of their trenches the Guardsmen tossed the
Boers, as men in English harvest fields toss the hay when the
reapers’ scythes have whitened the cornfields; and the human
sheaves were plentiful where the British Guardsmen stood.
Then they fell back, for the fire from the heights above them
fell thick as the spume of the surf on an Australian
rock-ribbed coast. But the Guards had proved to the Boers
that, man to man, the Briton was his master.

In vain all that day Methuen tried by every rule he knew
to draw the enemy; vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to
induce those human rock limpets to come out and cut them off.
Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic laugh played
round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native
fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners
dropped the lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along
his lines, until the trenches ran blood, and many of his guns
were silenced. In the valley behind his outer line of hills
his dead lay piled in hundreds, and the slope of the hill was
a charnel-house where the wounded all writhed amidst the
masses of the dead; a ghastly tribute to British gunnery. For
hours I stood within speaking distance of the great naval gun
as it spoke to the enemy, and such a sight as their shooting
the world has possibly never witnessed. Not a shell was
wasted; cool as if on the decks of a pleasure yacht our tars
moved through the fight, obeying orders with smiling
alacrity. Whenever the signal came from the balloon above us
that the enemy were moving behind their lines, the sailors
sent a message from England into their midst, and the name of
the messenger was Destruction; and when, at 1.30 p.m. of
Tuesday, we drew off to Modder River to recuperate we left a
ghastly pile of dead and wounded of grim old Cronje’s men as
a token that the lion of England had bared his teeth in
earnest.

Three hundred yards to the rear of the little township of
Modder River, just as the sun was sinking in a blaze of
African splendour on the evening of Tuesday, the 13th of
December, a long, shallow grave lay exposed in the breast of
the veldt. To the westward, the broad river, fringed with
trees, ran murmuringly, to the eastward, the heights still
held by the enemy scowled menacingly, north and south, the
veldt undulated peacefully; a few paces to the northward of
that grave fifty dead Highlanders lay, dressed as they had
fallen on the field of battle; they had followed their chief
to the field, and they were to follow him to the grave. How
grim and stern those dead men looked as they lay face upward
to the sky, with great hands clenched in the last death
agony, and brows still knitted with the stern lust of the
strife in which they had fallen. The plaids dear to every
Highland clan were represented there, and, as I looked, out
of the distance came the sound of the pipes; it was the
General coming to join his men. There, right under the eyes
of the enemy, moved with slow and solemn tread all that
remained of the Highland Brigade. In front of them walked-the
chaplain, with bared head, dressed in his robes of office,
then came the pipers, with their pipes, sixteen in all, and
behind them, with arms reversed, moved the Highlanders,
dressed in all the regalia of their regiments, and in the
midst the dead General, borne by four of his comrades. Out
swelled the pipes to the strains of “The Flowers of the
Forest,” now ringing proud and high until the soldier’s head
went back in haughty defiance, and eyes flashed through tears
like sunlight on steel; now sinking to a moaning wail, like a
woman mourning for her first-born, until the proud heads
dropped forward till they rested on heaving chests, and tears
rolled down the wan and scarred faces, and the choking sobs
broke through the solemn rhythm of the march of death. Right
up to the grave they marched, then broke away in companies,
until the General lay in the shallow grave with a Scottish
square of armed men around him, only the dead man’s son and a
small remnant of his officers stood with the chaplain and the
pipers whilst the solemn service of the Church was
spoken.

Then once again the pipes pealed out, and “Lochaber No
More” cut through the stillness like a cry of pain, until one
could almost hear the widow in her Highland home moaning for
the soldier she would welcome back no more. Then, as if
touched by the magic of one thought, the soldiers turned
their tear-damp eyes from the still form in the shallow grave
towards the heights where Cronje, the “lion of Africa,” and
his soldiers stood. Then every cheek flushed crimson, and the
strong jaws set like steel, and the veins on the hands that
clasped the rifle barrels swelled almost to bursting with the
fervour of the grip, and that look from those silent, armed
men spoke more eloquently than ever spoke the tongues of
orators. For on each frowning face the spirit of vengeance
sat, and each sparkling eye asked silently for blood. God
help the Boers when next the Highland pibroch sounds! God
rest the Boers’ souls when the Highland bayonets charge, for
neither death, nor hell, nor things above, nor things below,
will hold the Scots back from their blood feud. At the head
of the grave, at the point nearest the enemy, the General was
laid to sleep, his officers grouped around him, whilst in
line behind him his soldiers were laid in a double row,
wrapped in their blankets. No shots were fired over the dead
men resting so peacefully, only the salute was given, and
then the men marched campwards as the darkness of an African
night rolled over the far-stretching breadth of the veldt. To
the gentlewoman who bears their General’s name the Highland
Brigade sends its deepest sympathy. To the mothers and the
wives, the sisters and the sweethearts, in cottage home by
hillside and glen they send their love and good wishes—sad
will their Christmas be, sadder the new year. Yet, enshrined
in every womanly heart, from Queen Empress to cottage girl,
let their memory lie, the memory of the men of the Highland
Brigade who died at Magersfontein.

SCOUTS AND SCOUTING.
DRISCOLL, KING OF SCOUTS.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

I have a weakness for scouts. Good scouts seem to me to be
of more importance to an army in the field than all the
tape-tied intelligence officers out of Hades. They don’t get
on well with the regular officers as a rule, because scouts
are like poets—they are born, not manufactured. They are
people who do not feel as if God had forsaken them for ever
if they don’t get a shave and a clean shirt every morning,
they are just a trifle rough in their appearance and manners;
but they ride as straight as they talk, and shoot straighter
than they ride. They have to be built for the business. All
the training in the world won’t make a scout unless nature
has commenced the job; mere pluck is not worth a dog’s bark
in this line of life, though without pluck no scout is worth
a wanton woman’s smile. A good scout wants any amount of
courage; he wants a level head—a head of ice, and a heart of
fire. He wants to know by instinct when to rush onward and
chance his life to the heels of his horse and the goodness of
God, and he wants to know with unfailing certainty when to
crawl into cover and hide. He must understand how to ride
with no other guide than the lay of the country, the course
of the sun, or the position of the stars. He must have eyes
that note every broken hill, every little hollow, every
footprint of man or horse on the veldt.

He must be an excellent judge of distance, of time, of
numbers. He must be able to tell at a glance whether a cloud
of dust is caused by moving troops or by the action of the
elements. Above all, he must be truthful, not given to
exaggeration of his friends’ strength or his enemy’s
weakness. When he makes his report it should need no
corroboration. If a scout is worth his salt, his advice
should be accepted and acted upon promptly.

I often go out with the scouts; they are the eyes of the
army. A man who knocks around with scouting parties knows
more, sees more, hears more of the real state of affairs than
nine-tenths of the staff officers ever know, hear, or see.
Men fresh from the Old Country seldom make good scouts. Take
the Yeomanry, for instance. They are plucky enough, but not
one in a hundred of them has the making of a scout in him.
All his fathers and his grandfather’s and his
great-grandfather’s breeding trends in other directions, and
there is an awful lot more in the breeding of men than most
folk imagine. The American makes a good scout. If he knows
nothing of the life, he soon picks it up. So does the
Australian, and the Canadian, and the Colonial-born South
African. Something in the life appeals to them. They get the
“hang” of it with very little trouble. There are some
English-born men, however, who develop into rattling great
scouts. These men are mostly adventurous fellows, who have
roamed about the world, and had the corners knocked off them.
I have two of them in my mind’s eye just at present. One of
them is an Irishman named Driscoll, Captain of the Scouts who
are the eyes and ears of Rundle’s army. The other is an
Englishman named Davies, a captain in the same gallant little
band. The first lieutenant is a Cape colonial of English
extraction, named Brabant, a gallant son of a gallant
general. Captain Driscoll is a typical Irishman, just such a
man as the soul of Charles Lever would have revelled in, a
man of dauntless daring, with a heart of iron, and a face to
match. Strangely enough, the captain does not pride himself a
bit on his pluck, but he thinks a deuce of a lot of his
beauty. As a matter of fact, he has the courage of ten
ordinary men, but he would not take a prize in a first-class
beauty show. (Lord send I may be far from the reach of his
revolver when this reaches his eye.) He has that dash of
vanity in his composition which I have found in all good
Irishmen, and he prides himself far more on the execution his
eyes have done amidst the Dutch girls than of the work his
deadly rifle has wrought in the ranks of the Dutch mea Yet,
if you want to know if Driscoll can shoot, just go to Burmah,
where for ten years he held the position of captain in the
Upper Burmah Volunteer Rifles. That was where I heard of him
first, as the most deadly rifle and revolver shot in all the
East.

The Boers know him now as the prince of rifle shots and
the king of scouts. He is standing in the wintry sunlight
just in front of my tent as I am writing, one hand on the
bridle of his horse, rapping out Dutch oaths with a strong
Cork accent to a nigger who has not groomed his pet animal
properly. The nigger is very meek, for past experience has
told him that Irish blood is hot, and an Irishman’s boot
quick and heavy. He is a picturesque figure, this Celtic
scout leader, just such a picture as Phil May could bring to
life on a sheet of paper with a few strokes of his master
hand. He is about eleven stone in weight, and, roughly, five
feet eight, clean cut and strong, with a face which tells you
he was born in Cork, and had knocked about a lot in tropic
lands; eight-and-thirty if he is a day, though he swears at
night around the camp fire that the pretty Dutch girls have
guessed his age as twenty-seven. He wears a slouch hat,
around which a green puggaree coils lovingly. In his right
hand his rifle rests as if it felt at home there. His coat is
worn and shabby, khaki in colour; riding pants of roughest
yellow cords, patched in places unspeakable, leggings around
his sinewy calves, and feet planted in neat boots make up the
whole man. He is clean shaven except for a moustache, dark
brown in colour, which sprouts from his upper lip.

In his softer moments Driscoll tells us that it used to
“cur-r-r-l” before he had the “faver” in Burmah, and on such
occasions we assure him that it “cur-r-rls” even yet. It is
more polite to agree with him than to cross him—and a lot
safer. He is as full of anecdote as heaven is of angels, and
I mean to use him in the sweet days of peace, unless some
stay-at-home journalist niches him from me in the meantime.
Driscoll and Davies are fast friends. The Englishman is not
such a picturesque figure as the Irishman. Englishmen seldom
are, somehow; but he is a man, a real white man, all over. He
is rather a good-looking, well set-up young fellow, who
always looks as if he had just had a bath; not a dude by any
manner of means, but a fellow with a soft eye for a pretty
ankle, and a hard fist for a foe—one of those quiet chaps a
man always likes to find close beside him in a row. Driscoll
almost weeps over him to me sometimes. “He’s the devil’s own
at close quarters,” says the Irishman. “Never want a better
chum when it comes to bashing the enemy. If he could only
shoot a bit ‘straighther and talk a bit sweether to the
colleens he’d be perfect.” All the same, I have, and hold, my
own opinion concerning the “talking.” Many a smile which the
gallant Celt appropriated to himself as we rode out of a
conquered town seemed to me to belong of right to the
rosy-faced Welsh lad on the off-side. To hear these two men
chatter over a glass of hot rum in my tent at night one would
think they had never faced danger. Yet never a day goes by
but one or the other of them has to run the gauntlet of Boer
rifles; whilst Jack Brabant, who is death on cigars or
anything else that will emit smoke, and who curls up and says
little, has been near death so often that it will be no
stranger to him when it comes in all its finality.

Driscoll was in Burmah when the news came of the first
disaster to the Irish troops in South Africa. He threw up his
business as lightly as a coquette throws up a midsummer
lover, and started for the war. At Bombay he was stopped by a
yard or two of red tape, and had to go back to Calcutta,
where he used his Irish tongue to such purpose that he got a
permit to leave India, and made his way to the scene of
trouble. He first joined General Gatacre as orderly officer.
Later he was attached to the Border Mounted Rifles as
captain, and did splendid service at the battles of Dordrecht
and Labuschagne’s Nek In the latter place he was the first
man to gallop into the Boer laager before the fight had
ceased. Captain, then Lieutenant, Davies was as close to his
side as a shadow to a serpent, and they only had fourteen men
with them at the time. After this Driscoll, whose skill as a
scout had been remarked on all sides, was ordered to form a
body of fifty scouts to act as the very eyes of the rapidly
moving Colonial Division under General Brabant. This was
promptly done, most of the men picked being Colonial-born
Britishers. Soon after the formation of his band, Driscoll,
with fifty men, attacked Rouxville from four sides at once.
Dashing in, he demanded surrender of the place, as if he had
an army at his back to enforce his demands, a piece of Irish
impudent valour that would have cost every man amongst the
little band his life had the Boers known that he was
unbacked. But they did not know it, and consequently
surrendered, and he hoisted the British flag and disarmed the
residents—a really brilliant piece of work, for which
Driscoll’s Scouts have up to date received no public
credit.

The Scout and his men took a warm part in the, very warm
fight at Wepener, where many a good Briton fell. He had lost
a good few fellows in the many fights, but Driscoll’s name
soon charmed others to his little band. At Jammersberg Drift
the Scouts were so badly mauled that over a fourth of their
number were counted out, but the places of the fallen men
were soon filled, and to-day the number is almost complete.
Driscoll has one especially good quality. He never speaks
slightingly of his enemy unless he well deserves it. Few men
have had so many hand-to-hand encounters with the burghers as
he has; few men have held their lives by virtue of their
steady hand on a rifle as frequently as this wild,
good-natured, merry Irishman has done. Yet of the Boer as a
fighter he speaks most highly. “He don’t like cold steel, and
shmall blame to’m,” says Driscoll, “but for the clever
tactics he’s a devil of a chap, ‘nd the men who run him down
are mostly the men who run away from him. They’re not all
heroes, any more than all women are angels. Some of ’em are
fit only for a dog’s death, but most of ’em are good men; and
if I wasn’t an Irishman I wouldn’t mind being a Boer, for
they’ve no call to hang their heads and blush when this war
is over.”

I asked him if he had ever of his own knowledge come into
contact with anything savouring of white flag treachery.
“Once I did,” said the great scout, and for a while his eyes
were filled with a sombre fire which spoke of the volcano
under the genial human crust. “Onct,” and he lapsed into the
brogue as he spoke; “only onct, and there’s a debt owin’ on
it yet which has got to be paid. It was at Karronna Ridge. I
was out wid me scouts, ‘nd I saw a farmhouse flying the white
flag—a great flag it was, too, as big as a bed sheet. I’m
not sure that it was not wan, too. I rode towards it,
thinking the people wanted to surrender, and sent two of me
men, two young lads they were—good boys, eager for duty. I
sent ’em forward to ask what was the matther inside; and when
they got within fifteen paces of the house the Boers inside
opened fire from twenty rifles, and blew ’em out of the
saddle. I had to ride with me little troop for dear life
then, for the rocks all around us were alive with rifles.
That house still stands; but if Driscoll’s name is Driscoll
it’s going to burn, and the cur who flew the white flag in
it, if I can get him, for the sake of the dead boys out on
the veldt there. That’s the only dirty trick I knew them
play, and they must have been a lot of wasters, not like the
general run of their fighters.”

Three nights ago Driscoll, Davies, Brabant, and twenty men
camped in a farmhouse a long way from the British lines, for
these men scour the country for many miles in all directions.
The night was cold and rough, a bleak wind whistling amidst
the kopjes half a mile away. Just as the scouts were sitting
down to supper, the farmer’s wife rushed in, and said to
Driscoll, in a voice between a sob and a scream, “Do you
know, sir, that our burghers are in the kopjes, and are
watching the farm?” and as she spoke she wrung her hands
wildly. The Irish scout rose from the table and bowed, as
only an Irish scout can bow, for the “vrow” was about thirty
years of age, and pleasing to the eye beyond the lot of most
women. “I am awfully glad to hear it, madam,” he said in his
execrable Dutch. “I’ve been looking for that commando for a
week past. As they have doubtless sent a message by you,
please send this back for me. Tell their officers, if they
will accept an offer to come and dine with Driscoll’s Scouts
here to-night, they shall be made welcome to the best we have
in the way of kindness. For it must be cold waiting outside
in the wind. Tell them they shall go as they come, unmolested
and unwatched, and in the morning we’ll come out and give ’em
all the fight they want in this world.” Then, sweeping the
floor with a graceful wave of his green puggareed soft slouch
hat, Driscoll bowed the astonished dame out of the
dining-room, whilst his officers and men nearly choked
themselves with their hot soup, as they noticed him
surreptitiously drawing a pocket mirror from his breeches
pocket. For well they knew that the dare-devil leader was
thinking far more of the effect his looks had had on the
Dutch housewife than of the effect of his message on the
enemy. Yet, at the first promise of dawn, he unrolled himself
from his blanket on the hard floor, and was the foremost man
to show in the open, where the enemy’s rifles might reach
him. But no rifles sounded, for the Boers had declined the
invitation both to supper and breakfast.

HUNTING AND HUNTED.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

There is a funny side to pretty nearly every kind of
tragedy if one only has the humorous edge of his nature
sufficiently well developed to see it. Not that the humour is
always apparent at the time—that comes later. I am led to
these reflections as I watch Lieutenant “Jack” Brabant, of
the Scouts, dancing a wild war dance round our little camp
fire. He is a picturesque figure in the firelight, this
thirty-year-old son of the renowned General Brabant, ten
stone weight I should say, all whipcord and fencing wire,
rather a hard-faced man; no feather-bed frontiersman this,
but a tough, hard-grained bit of humanity, who has fought
niggers and hunted for big game at an age when most young
fellows are thinking more of poetry and pretty faces than of
hard knocks and harder sport. I know him for a rattling good
shot at either man or beast, a fine bushman, and a dandy
horseman. He is a rather quiet fellow, as a rule, but all the
quietness is out of him to-night, and he only wants to be
stripped of his tight yellow jacket, cord breeches, leather
gaiters, soft slouch hat with green puggaree, and then, given
a coat of black paint, he would pass well for some warrior
chief doing a death dance in the smoke. He is boiling with
passion, his left fist, clenched hard as the head of an axe,
moves up and down, in and out, like the legs of a kicking
mule midst a crowd of cart-horses. In his right he swings his
Mauser carbine, and a man don’t need to be a descendant of a
race of prophets to know that something has gone gravely
wrong with the lieutenant, otherwise he would not be making a
circus of himself in this fantastic fashion.

I lay my pencil aside for a minute or two to catch what he
is saying, and when I have got the hang of the story I don’t
wonder he feels as mad as a wooden-legged man on a wet
mud-bank. He had been out all day since the very break of
dawn with a couple of scouts, searching the kopjes for a
notorious Boer spy, whose cleverness and audacity had made
him a thorn in our side. If there was a man in the British
lines capable of running the “slim” Boer to earth, that man
was Lieutenant Jack Brabant. It had been a grim hunt, for the
spy was worthy of his reputation, and the pursuers had to
move with their fingers on their triggers, and a rash move
would have meant death. All the forenoon he dodged them, in
and out of the kopjes, along the sluits, up and down the
dongas; sometimes they pelted him at long range with flying
bullets, sometimes he sent them a reminder of the same sort.
And so the day wore on; but at last, towards evening, they
fixed him so that he had to make a dash out across the veldt.
He was splendidly mounted, and when the time came for a dash
he did not waste any time making poetry. Neither did Brabant
and his two men; they galloped at full speed after the
fleetly flying figure, and when they saw that a broad and
deep donga ran right across his track, cutting him off from
the long line of kopjes for which he was making, they counted
him as theirs. He only had one chance, to gallop into the
donga, jump out of the saddle and fire at them as they closed
in on him; and, as they rode far apart, it was a million to
one on missing in his hurry in the fading light. But the gods
had decided otherwise, for the whiplike crack of rifles
suddenly cut the air, and the bullets fell so thick around
the pursuers that the three men could almost breathe lead.
Half a mile away, on the far side of the donga, appeared a
squad of Yeomanry, blazing away like veritable seraphs at
Brabant and his men, whilst they let the flying Boer go free.
Brabant whipped out his handkerchief, and waved it
frantically; but the lead only whistled the faster, and he
had only one chance for his life, and that was to wheel and
ride at full speed for the nearest cover, where he and his
men hid until the Yeomen rode up. Then Brabant hailed them,
and asked them what the devil they meant by trying to blow
him and his men out of the saddle.

There was a pause in the ranks of the Yeomen, then a voice
lisped through the gathering gloom, “Are you fellahs
British?”

“Yes, d—n you; did you think we were springbok?”

“No, by Jove, but we thought you were beastly Booahs.
Awfully sorry if we’ve caused you any inconvenience. What
were you chasing the other fellah foah, eh?”

“Oh!” howled the disgusted backwoodsman with a snort of
wrath, “we only wanted to know if he’d cut his eye tooth
yet.”

“Bah Jove,” quoth the Yeoman, “you fellahs are awfully
sporting, don’t yer know.”

“Yes,” snarled the angry South African, “and the next time
you Johnnies mistake me for a Booah and plug at me, I’ll just
take cover and send you back a bit of lead to teach you to
look before you tighten your finger on a trigger.”

Talking of the Yeomen brings back a good yarn that is
going round the camps at their expense. They are notorious
for two things—their pluck and their awful bad bushcraft.
They would ride up to the mouth of a foeman’s guns coolly and
gamely enough, but they can’t find their way home on the
veldt after dark to save their souls, and so fall into Boer
traps with a regularity that is becoming monotonous. Recently
a British officer who had business in a Boer laager asked a
commander why they set the Yeomen free when they made them
prisoners. “Oh!” quoth the Boer, with a merry twinkle in his
eye, “those poor Yeomen of yours, we can always capture them
when we want them.” This is not a good story to tell if you
want an encore, if you happen to be sitting round a
Yeoman table or camp fire.

But it is time I got back to the subject which lay in my
mind when I sat down to write this epistle. The lieutenant’s
war dance took me off the track for a while, but I thought
his story would come in nicely under the heading of “Hunting
and Hunted.” Camp life gets dull at times, so does camp food,
the eternal round of fried flour cakes and mutton makes a man
long for something which will remind him that he has still a
palate, so when one of the scouts came in and told me that he
had seen three herds of vildebeestes, numbering over a
hundred each, and dozens of little mobs of springbok and
blesbok, within ten miles of camp, away towards Doornberg, I
made up my mind to ride out next day, and have a shot for
luck. My friend Driscoll, captain of the Scouts, rammed a lot
of sage advice into me concerning Boers known to be in force
at Doornberg. I assured him that I had no intention of
allowing myself to drift within range of any of the
veldtsmen, so taking a sporting Martini I mounted my horse
and set forth, intending to have a real good time among the
“buck.” At a Kaffir kraal I picked up a half-caste “boy,” who
assured me that he knew just where to pick up the “spoor” of
the vildebeeste, and he was as good as his boast, for within
a couple of hours he brought me within sight of a mob of
about fifty of the animals, calmly grazing. I worked my way
towards them as well as I could, leaving the “boy” to hold my
horse; but, though I was careful according to my lights, I
was not sufficiently good as a veldtsman to get within
shooting distance before they saw me or scented me. Suddenly
I saw a fine-looking fellow, about as big as a
year-and-a-half-old steer, trot out from the herd. He came
about twenty yards in my direction, and I had a grand chance
to watch him through my strong military glasses. He looked
for all the world like a miniature buffalo bull, the same
ungainly head and fore-quarters, big, heavy shoulders, neat
legs, shapely barrel, light loin, and hindquarters, the same
proppy, ungainly gait. I unslung my rifle to have a shot at
him, when he wheeled and blundered back to the herd, and the
lot streamed off at a pace which the best hunter in England
would have found trying, in spite of the clumsiness of their
movements. The half-caste grinned as he came towards me with
the horses, grinned with such a glorious breadth of mouth
that I could see far enough down his black and tan throat to
tell pretty well what he had for breakfast. This annoyed me.
I like an open countenance in a servant, but I detest a mouth
that looks like a mere burial ground for cold chicken. We
rode on for a mile or two, and then saw a pretty little herd
of springbok about eighteen hundred yards away on the left.
Slipping down into a donga, I left the horse and crawled
forward, getting within nice, easy range. I dropped one of
the pretty little beauties. I tried a flying shot at the
others as they raced away like magic things through the
grass, which climbed half-way up their flanks, but it was
lead wasted that time.

My coffee-coloured retainer gathered up the spoil, and
paid me a compliment concerning my shooting, though well I
knew he had sized me up as a “wastrel” with a rifle, for his
shy eyes gave the lie to his oily tongue. We hunted round for
awhile, and then from the top of a little kopje I saw a
beautiful herd of vildebeestes one hundred and sixteen in
number, lumbering slowly towards where we stood. The wind
blew straight from them towards us, so that I had no fear on
the score of scent. Climbing swiftly down until almost level
with the veldt, I lay cosily coiled up behind a rock, and
waited for the quarry. They came at last, Indian file, about
a yard and a half separating one from the other, not a
hundred and twenty yards from where I lay. I had plenty of
time to pick and choose, and plenty of time to take aim, so
did not hurry myself. Sighting for a spot just behind the
shoulder, I sent a bit of lead fair through a fine beast, and
expected to see him drop, but he did nothing of the kind. For
one brief second the animal stood as if paralysed; then, with
a leap and a lurch, he dashed on with his fellows. I fired
again, straight into the shoulder this time, and brought him
down; but he took a third bullet before he cried
peccavi. I had a good time for pretty near the whole
of that day, and was lamenting that I had not brought a Cape
cart and pair of horses with me to bring home the spoil,
when, happening to look into the face of my brown guide, I
saw that his complexion had turned the colour of blighted
sandalwood. He did not speak, but swift as thought ripped out
his knife, and cut the thongs which bound the springbok and
other trophies of the day’s sport to his saddle, letting
everything fall in an undignified heap on to the veldt. Then,
without a word of farewell, or any other kind of word for
that matter, he drove his one spur into the flank of his
wretched nag, and fled round the bend of a kopje, which,
thank Providence, was close handy, and as he went I saw
something splash against a rock a dozen yards behind him. I
had glanced hurriedly over the veldt the moment I caught that
queer expression on the saffron face of my assistant, but as
far as the eye could reach I could see nothing. Now, however,
looking backwards, I saw three or four men riding out of a
donga two thousand five hundred yards away.

Twenty-five seconds later I had caught and passed my
fleeing servant, who was heading for some kopjes, which lay
right in front, about a mile and a half away. As I passed him
he yelled, “Booers, baas, Booers! Ride hard, baas, ride hard;
there are three hundred in the donga.” When I heard that item
of news I just sat down and attended strictly to business,
and I am free to wager that never since the day he was foaled
had that horse covered so much ground in so short a space of
time as he did by the time he reached the kopjes. My servant
had adroitly dodged into a sluit which hid him from view, and
I knew that he could work his way out far better than I
could. Besides, if they captured him, the worst he would get
would be a cut across the neck with a sjambok for acting as
hunting-guide to a detested Rooitbaaitje; whilst as for me,
they would in all probability discredit my tale concerning
the hunting trip, and give me a free, but rapid, pass to that
land which we all hope to see eventually, but none of us are
anxious to start for; because a correspondent has no right to
carry a rifle during war time, a thing I never do unless I am
out hunting. I gave my tired horse a spell, whilst I searched
the veldt with my glasses, then slipping through a gully I
made my way out on to the veldt, got in touch with a donga
that ran the way I wanted to travel, got into its bed, gave
my horse a drink, and rode on until dark; then I made my way
into camp, and religiously held my peace concerning the
doings of that day, because I did not want the life chaffed
out of me. A few days later I happened to call at the
Colonial camp, and was asked to dine by one of the
officers.

“Like venison?” he asked cheerily.

“Yes, when it comes my way,” I replied.

“Got some to-day,” he said. “It’s nicely hung, too; not
fresh from the gun.”

“Shoot it yourself, eh?”

“Well, no, not exactly; was out on patrol on Monday, and
saw a couple of lousy Dutchmen. They didn’t think we were
round, so were enjoying themselves shooting buck. We nearly
got one of ’em with a long shot.”

“Didn’t they show fight?” I asked innocently.

“Fight?” he said, with scorn unutterable in his accent.
“Not a bit of it. They dropped their game, and cleared as if
a thousand devils were after them. I never saw men ride so
fast.”

“Positive they were Dutchmen?” I ventured.

“Yes,” he laughed; “why, I’d know one of those ugly devils
five miles off.”

That settled me, and I said no more.

WITH THE BASUTOS.

When the Eighth Division was skirting the borders of
Basutoland I thought it would not be a waste of time to cross
the border, and if possible interview one of the chiefs. My
opportunity came at last. Our general decided to give his
weary men a few days’ rest, so getting into the saddle at
Willow Grange I rode to Ficksburg, and there crossed the
River Caledon, whose yellow waters, like an orange ribbon,
divide Basutoland from the Free State. At this point the
river runs between steep banks, and when I crossed it was
about deep enough to kiss my horse’s girths, though I could
well believe that in the flood season it becomes a most
formidable torrent. An artificial cutting has been made on
both sides to facilitate the passage of traders, black and
white, but even there the ford is so constituted that the
Boers on the one side and the blacks on the other could
successfully dispute the passage of an invading army with a
mere handful of men.

Once across the river one soon felt the influence of
Jonathan, the “black prince.” The niggers, naked except for
the loin cloth, swaggered along with arms in their hands, and
grinned with insolent familiarity into our faces. They may
have an intense respect and an unbounded love for the
British—I have read scores of times that they have—but I
beg leave to doubt it. Physically speaking they are a superb
race of men, these sable subjects of our Queen. Their heads
sit upon their necks with a bold, defiant poise, their
throats are full, round, and muscular, their chests
magnificent, broad and deep, tapering swiftly towards the
waist. Their arms and legs are beautifully fashioned for
strong, swift deeds. Strip an ordinary white man and put him
amongst those black warriors, and he would look like a human
clothes rack. They walk with a quick, springy step, and gave
me the impression that they could march at the double for a
week without tiring. But they are at their best on horseback.
To see them barebacked dash down the side of a sheer cliff,
plunge into the river, swim their horses over, and then climb
the opposite bank when the face of the bank is like the face
of a wall is a sight worth travelling far to see.

There are many things in this world that I know nothing at
all about, but I do know a horseman when I see him, for I was
bred in a land where nine-tenths of the boys can ride. But
nowhere have I seen a whole male population ride as these
Basuto warriors ride, and the best use England can make of
them is to turn them into mounted infantry. Give them six
months’ drill, and they will be fit to face any troops in
Europe. I never saw them do any fighting, but they carry the
fighting brand on every lineament—the bold, keen eye, the
prominent cheek-bone, the hard-set mouth, the massive jaw,
the quivering nostril, the swing and spring of every
movement, all speak the fighting race.

And their women; what of them? From the back of the head
to the back of the heel you could place a lance shaft, so
straight are they in their carriage. Their dress is a bunch
of feathers and the third of a silk pocket handkerchief, with
a copper ring around the ankle and another around the wrist.
They do most of the daily toil, such as it is, though I know
of no peasant population in any other part of the world who
get a living as easily as these folk. The men allow the women
to do most of the field labour, but when the grain is bagged
the males place it in single bags across the back of a pony,
and so take it to market. They walk beside the tiny little
ponies and balance the grain slung crosswise on the animal’s
back, and when the grain has been sold or bartered they bound
on to their ponies and career madly homewards, each one
trying to outdo his neighbour in deeds of recklessness in the
hope of winning favour in the eyes of the dusky maidens. They
are mean in regard to money or gifts, and know the intrinsic
value of things just as well as any pedlar in all England.
Judging the “nigger” merely as a human being, irrespective of
sentiment, colour, and so forth, I can only say that in my
estimation he and his are far better off in every respect
than the average white labourer and his family in England.
These folk have plenty to eat, little to do, and are very
jolly. They would be perfectly happy if they only had a
sufficient number of rifles and a large enough supply of
ammunition to enable them to drive every white man clean away
from their borders.

When I arrived at Jonathan’s village that warrior was away
with a band of his young men, so that I could not see him,
though I saw his son at a wedding which was being held when I
reached the scene. I was taken through rows of naked,
grinning savages, of both sexes, to be introduced to the bride
and bridegroom, whom I found to be a pair of mission
converts. When I saw the pair the shock nearly shook my boots
off. The bride, a full-blooded young negress, was dressed in
a beautiful white satin dress, which fitted her as if it had
been fired at her out of a gun. It would not meet in front by
about three inches, and the bodice was laced up by narrow
bands of red silk, like a foot-baller’s jersey. In her short,
woolly hair she had pinned a wreath of artificial orange
blossoms, which looked like a diadem of snow on a mid-winter
mudheap. Down her broad back there hung a great gauzy lace
veil, big enough to make a fly-net for a cow camel in summer.
It was not fixed on to her dress, nor to her wreath, but was
tied on to two little kinky curls at each side of her head by
bright green ribbons, after the fashion of a prize filly of
the draught order at a country fair. Her hands were encased
in a pair of white kid gloves, man’s size, and a pretty big
man at that, for she had a gentle little fist that would have
scared John L. Sullivan in his palmiest days.

When I was introduced to the newly shackled matron she put
one of those gloved hands into mine with a simpering air of
coyness that made me feel cold all over, for that hand in the
kid glove reminded me of the day I took my first lesson from
Laurence Foley, Australia’s champion boxer, and he had an
eight-ounce glove on (thank Heaven!) on that occasion. In her
right hand the bride carried a fan of splendid ostrich
feathers, with which she brushed the flies off the groom. It
was vast enough to have brushed away a toy terrier, to say
nothing of flies, but it looked a toy in that giant fist.

The groom hung on to his bride’s arm like a fly to a
sugar-stick. He was a tall young man, dressed in a black
frock coat, light trousers, braced up to show that he wore
socks, shoes, white gloves, and a high-crowned hat. He
carried his bride’s white silk gingham in one hand, and an
enormous bunch of flowers in the other. He tried to look
meek, but only succeeded in looking sly, hypocritical, and
awfully uncomfortable. At times he would look at his new
spouse, and then a most unsaintly expression would cross his
foxy face; he would push out his great thick lips until they
threw a shadow all round him; open his dazzling white teeth
and let his great blood-red tongue loll out until the chasm
in his face looked like a rent in a black velvet gown with a
Cardinal’s red hat stuffed in the centre. He may have been
full of saving grace—full up, and running over—but it was
not the brand of Christianity that I should care to invest my
money in. When he caught my gaze riveted upon him, he tried
to look like a brand plucked from the burning; he rolled his
great velvet-black eyes skyward, screwed up the sluit which
ran across his face, and which he called a mouth, until it
looked like a crumpled doormat, folded his hands meekly over
his breast, and comported himself generally like a fraudulent
advertisement for a London mission society.

From him I glanced to his “Pa,” who had given him away,
and seemed mighty glad to get rid of him. “Pa” was dressed in
pure black from head to heel—just the same old suit that he
had worn when he struck this planet, only more of it. He was
guiltless of anything and everything in the shape of dress
except for a large ring of horn which he wore on top of his
head. He did not carry any parasols, or fans, or geegaws of
any kind in his great muscular fists. One hand grasped an
iron-shod assegai, and the other lovingly fondled a
battle-axe, and both weapons looked at home where they
rested. He was not just the sort of father-in-law I should
have hankered for if I had been out on a matrimonial venture;
but I would rather have had one limb of that old heathen than
the whole body of his “civilised” son, for with all his
faults he looked a man. A chum of mine who knew the ways of
these people had advised me to purchase a horn of snuff
before being presented to the bride and groom, and I had
acted accordingly.

When the ceremony of introduction was over, and I had
managed to turn my blushing face away from “Ma” and the bevy
of damsels, as airily clothed as herself, I offered the snuff
box to the happy pair. The groom took a tiny pinch and smiled
sadly, as though committing some deadly sin. The bride,
however, poured a little heap in the palm of her hand about
as big as a hen’s egg, regardless of her nice white kid
gloves. This she proceeded to snuff up her capacious nostrils
with savage delight, until the tears streamed down her cheeks
like rain down a coal heap. Then she threw back her head,
spread her hands out palm downwards, like a mammoth duck
treading water, and sneezed. I never heard a human sneeze
like that before; it was like the effort of a horse after a
two-mile gallop through a dust storm. And each time she
sneezed something connected with her wedding gear ripped or
gave way, until I began to be afraid for her. But the wreck
was not quite so awful as I had anticipated, and when she had
done sneezing she laughed. All the crowd except the groom
laughed, and the sound of their laughter was like the sound
of the sea on a cliff-crowned coast.

A little later one of the bridesmaids, whose toilet
consisted of a dainty necklace of beads and a copper ring
around one ankle, invited me to drink a draught of native
beer. The beer was in a large calabash, and I felt
constrained to drink some of it. These natives know how to
make love, and they know how to make war, but, as my soul
liveth, they don’t know how to make beer. The stuff they gave
me to drink was about as thick as boardinghouse cocoa; in
colour it was like unto milk that a very dirty maid of all
work had been stirring round in a soiled soup dish with an
unwashed forefinger. It had neither body nor soul in it, and
was as insipid as a policeman at a prayer meeting. Some of
the niggers got gloriously merry on it, and sang songs and
danced weird, unholy dances under its influence. But it did
not appeal to me in that way, possibly I was not educated up
to its niceties. All I know is that I became possessed of a
strange yearning to get rid of what had been given me—and
get rid of it early.

The wedding joys were of a peculiar nature. Bride and
bridegroom, linked arm in arm, marched up and down on a pad
about twenty yards in length, a nude minstrel marched in
front, and drew unearthly music from a kind of mouth organ.
Girls squatting in the dust en route clapped their
hands and chanted a chorus. The groom hopped first on one leg
and then on the other, and tried to look gorgeously happy;
the bride kicked her satin skirts out behind, pranced along
the track as gracefully as a lady camel in the mating season;
behind the principal actors in the drama came a regiment of
youths and girls, and the antics they cut were worthy of the
occasion. Now and again some dusky Don Juan would dig his
thumb into the ribs of a daughter of Ham. The lady would
promptly squeal, and try to look coy. It is not easy to look
coy when you have not got enough clothes on your whole body
to make a patch to cover a black eye; but still they tried
it, for the sex seem to me to be much alike on the inside,
whether they dress in a coat of paint or a coat of
sealskin.

By-and-by the groom took his bride by the arm, and made an
effort to induce her to leave her maids of honour and “trek”
towards the cabin which henceforth was to be her home. The
lady pouted, and shook his hand off her arm; whilst the
maidens laughed and clapped their hands, dancing in the
dust-strewn sunlight with such high kicking action as would
win fame for any ballet dancer in Europe. The young men
jeered the groom, and incited him to take charge of his own.
He hung down his ebony head and looked sillily sullen, and
the bride continued to “pout.” Have you ever seen a savage
nigger wench pout, my masters? Verily it is a sight worth
travelling far to see. First of all she wraps her mouth in a
simper, and her lips look like a fold in a badly doubled
blanket. Then slowly, she draws the corners towards, the
centre, just as the universe will be crumpled up on the Day
of Judgment. It is a beautiful sight. The mouth, which, when
she smiled, looked like a sword wound on the flank of a
horse, now, when the “pout” is complete, looks like a
crumpled concertina. The groom again timidly advanced his
hand towards the satin-covered arm of his spouse, and the
“pout” became more pronounced than ever. The white of one eye
was slyly turned towards the bridesmaids, the other rolled
with infinite subtlety in the direction of him who was to be
her lord and master; and the “pout” grew larger and larger,
until I was constrained to push my way amidst the maids to
get a look behind the bride, for I fancied the back of her
neck must surely have got somehow into the front of her face.
When I got to the front again the “pout” was still growing,
the rich red lips in their midnight setting looking like some
giant rose in full bloom that an elephant’s hoof had trodden
upon. So the show proceeded. At last one of the bridesmaids
stepped from amidst her sisters, and playfully pushed the
bride in the direction of her home. Then the “pout” gave way
to a smile, the white teeth gleaming in the gap like
tombstones in a Highland churchyard. I had been a bit scared
of her “pout,” but when she smiled I looked round anxiously
for my horse. After a little manoeuvring, the blissful pair
marched cabinwards, with the whole group of naked men and
maids circling round them, stamping their bare feet, kicking
up clouds of dust like a mob of travelling cattle. The men
yelled some barbarous melody, flourished their arms, smote
upon their breasts, and anon gripping a damsel by the waist
circled afar like goats on a green grass hill slope. The
maids twisted and turned in fantastic figures, swaying their
nobly fashioned bodies hither and thither, whilst they kept
up a continuous wailing, sing-song cry. So they passed from
my sight into the regions of the honeymoon, and the clubbings
and general hidings which follow it.

I only stayed a few days amongst these savages, but, short
as my stay was, I arrived at the conclusion that the sooner
they are disarmed the better. There are hundreds of white
women living upon isolated farms within easy riding distance
of the Basuto villages, and as we are disarming the husbands
and brothers of these women it is our solemn duty to see that
the savage warriors have not the means within their reach to
injure or outrage those whom we have left practically
defenceless. It is true that these women are the wives,
daughters, and sisters of our enemy, but surely in all
England there does not breathe a man so poor in spirit as to
wish to place them at the mercy of a horde of barbarians.
Ours is a grave responsibility in regard to this matter. Just
at present the native warriors are quiet in their kraals, but
a day will surely dawn when the younger and more turbulent
fighting men will lust for the excitement of war. They look
upon the Boer farmers who dwell near their borders as so many
interlopers, whose title deeds were signed by the rifle, and
they long for the time to come when they can sweep them
backwards with the strong arm. They never speak of the land
close to their border as the Free State. They call it with
deadly significance the “conquered territory,” and the idea
of reconquest is strong in their minds. Of old time the Boer
farmers stood ever ready to defend what they had conquered
with the rifle, and the nigger had learned to dread the Dutch
rifle as he dreads few things in this world. To-day he knows
that the Boer is helpless, and is unsparing in his insolence
to his old-time foe. Later on friction between the white man
and the black is certain to ensue, and if he has the upper
hand the black man will not stop at mere insolence.

I don’t know how the Imperial Parliament may feel about
it, but I do know that if there is wrong done the Boers by
the blacks, the South African farmers of British blood will
rise like one man to defend the men and women of their own
colour. They will never permit the black man to dominate the
white, and that will cause friction between the Colonists and
the Imperial Government. There is more in this than may meet
the eye at the first glance, for if the Colonists rise to
battle with the blacks the Imperial troops will have to
assist them whether the Government of the day likes or
dislikes it, or else we shall see the Colonists of our own
blood clamouring for the withdrawal of British rule in South
Africa, and we shall hear again the cry for a South African
Republic. Not a “Dutch” South African Republic next time, but
a blended nationality, and Colonial Britons and Colonial
Dutchmen will be found fighting side by side under one flag,
for one common cause.

Surely, if it is not wise to allow the whites to carry
arms, it is not wise or right to allow sixty thousand fierce
fighting men to remain fully equipped and mounted. To me it
seems that now, whilst we have two hundred and fifty thousand
fighting men in Africa to overawe and intimidate the
warriors, we should take from them, by force if necessary,
everything in the shape of warlike weapons. White men are not
permitted in any of our Colonies to ride or strut about the
country armed to the teeth. Therefore, I ask, why should
these negroes be privileged to do what Australians or
Canadians are forbidden to do? They have no valid excuse for
being in possession of weapons of war. They have now no
enemies capable of attacking them upon their borders. There
is no animal life of a savage or dangerous character near
them, and their armament is a menace to the public safety. If
their young men will not settle down to the peaceful calling
of husbandmen, tillers of the soil, and breeders of stock,
let them be drafted into our Army for service abroad. If
there is not enough for the more elderly men to do in the
farming line, let them turn their energies towards the
development of the diamond mines and gold mines that lie
within their borders—mines which at present they will not
work themselves nor allow any white man to work.

I have spent a good many years of my life exploring new
mineral territory, and have seen much of the best auriferous
country known to modern times; but that Basuto country,
presided over and held by a mere gang of black barbarians,
ought, in my estimation, to be one of the richest gems in the
British diadem. That good payable gold-bearing rock exists
there I know beyond question. I also know beyond all doubt
that diamonds are to be easily won from the soil, and I am
thoroughly cognisant of the fact that at least one, and I
believe many, quicksilver mines can be located there. Others
who know the country well have told me of coal and tin and
silver mines, and samples have been shown to me which made my
mouth water. Yet, all this wealth, which nature’s generous
hand has scattered so liberally for the use of mankind, is
jealously locked away year by year by men who, in their
savage state, have no use for it themselves, yet will not,
upon any consideration whatever, grant a mining concession to
a white man, no matter what that white man’s nationality may
be. Verily, the heathen badly want educating, and we have now
250,000 of the right kind of schoolmasters within handy reach
of them.

MAGERSFONTEIN AVENGED.

THABA NCHU.

When, a few months ago, I stood upon the veldt almost
within the shadow of the frowning brow of Magersfontein’s
surly heights, and looked upon the cold, stern faces of
Scotland’s dead, and listened to the weird wailing of the
bagpipes, whilst Cronje gazed triumphantly down from his
inaccessible mountain stronghold upon his handiwork, I knew
in my soul that a day would dawn when Scotland would demand
an eye for an eye, blood for blood. I read it written on the
faces of the men who strode with martial tread around the
last sad resting-place Of him they loved—their chief, the
dauntless General Wauchope. Vengeance spoke in the sombre
fire that blazed in every Scotsman’s eye. Retribution was
carved large and deep on every hard-set Scottish face; it
spoke in silent eloquence in the grip of each hard, browned
hand on rifle barrels; it found a mute echo in each knitted
brow, and leapt to life in every deep-drawn breath; it
sparkled in each tear that rolled unheeded and unchecked down
war-scarred cheeks, and thundered in the echo of the men’s
tread across the veldt, right up to Cronje’s lines, as they
marched campwards. The Highland Brigade had gazed upon its
dead; and neither time, nor change, nor thought of home, or
wife, or lisping babe, would wipe the memory of that sight
away until the bayonet’s ruthless thrust gave Scotland
quittance in the rich, red blood of those who did that
deed.

That hour has come. The men who sleep in soldiers’ graves
beside the willow-clad banks of the Modder River have been
avenged. Or, if the debt has not been paid in full, the
interest owing on that bond of blood has at least now been
handed in. It was not paid by our Colonial sons; not from
Australian or Canadian hands did the stubborn Boers receive
the debt we owed. They were not Irish hearts that cleared old
Scotland’s legacy of hate on that May Day amidst the African
hills; it was not England’s yeoman sons who did that deed.
But men whose feet were native to the heather, men on whose
tongues the Scottish burr clung lovingly—the bare-legged
kilted “boys” whom the lasses in the Highlands love, the
gallant Gordons.

Let the tale be told in Edinburgh Town; let it ring along
the Border; let the lass, as she braids the widow’s hair,
whisper the story with love-kissed breath; let the lads, as
they come from their daily toil, throw out their chests for
the sake of their breeding; let the pessimist turn up the
faded page of history, written when the world was young, and
find, if he can, a grander deed done by the sons of men since
the morning stars sang together.

So to my tale. It was the 1st of May. We had the Boers
hard pressed in Thaba Nchu in a run of kopjes that reached in
almost unbroken sequence farther than a man’s eye might
reach. The flying French was with us, chafing like a leashed
greyhound because he could not sweep all before him with one
impetuous rush. Rundle, too, was here, with his haughty,
handsome face, as keen as French, but with a better grip on
his feelings. Six thousand of the foe, under Louis Botha,
cool, crafty, long-headed, resourceful, have held the kopjes.
Again and again we manoeuvred to trap them, but no wolf in
winter is more wary than Botha, no weasels more watchful than
the men he commanded. When we advanced they fell back, when
we fell back they advanced, until the merest tyro in the art
of war could see that a frontal attack, unless made in almost
hopeless positions, was impossible. So Hamilton swept round
their right flank, ten miles north of Thaba Nchu, and gave
them a taste of his skill and daring, whilst Rundle held
their main body here at Thaba Nchu. Rundle made a feint on
their centre in strong force, and they closed in from both
flanks to resist him. Then he drew off, as if fearing the
issue. This drew the Boers in, and they pounded our camp with
shells until one wondered whether the German-made rubbish
they used would last them much longer. Then we threatened
their left flank quickly and sharply, giving Hamilton time to
strike on their right; and he struck without erring, whipping
the enemy at every point he touched, driving them out of
their positions, and holding them firmly himself, so
threatening their rear and the immense herds of sheep and
oxen they have with them, making a footing for the British to
move on and cut Botha off from his base at Kroonstad.

Whether he will now stand his ground and fight or make a
break for the main army of the Boers is hard to calculate,
for the Boer generally does just what no one expects he will
attempt to do. It was during Hamilton’s flanking effort that
the Gordons vindicated their character for courage. Captain
Towse, a brave, courteous soldier and gentleman, whom I had
had the pleasure of meeting at Graspan, and whose guest I had
been on several occasions, was the hero of the hour. He is a
fine figure of a man, well set up, good-looking, strong,
active. He was, I think, about the only soldier I have seen
who could wear an eye-glass and not lose by it. In age he
looked about forty. I remember snapping a “photo” of him as
he was “tidying up” the grave of gallant young Huddart, an
Australian “middy,” who lay buried on the veldt; but the
Boers collected that portrait from me later on, worse luck.
On this fateful day Captain Towse, with about fifty of the
Gordons, got isolated from the main body of British troops,
and the Boers, with that marvellous dexterity for which they
are fast becoming famous, sized up the position, and
determined upon a capture. They little dreamt of the nature
of the lion they had snared in their toils. With fully two
hundred and fifty men they closed in on the little band of
kilted men, and in triumphant tones called upon them to throw
down their arms and surrender. It was a picture to warm an
artist’s heart. On all sides rose the bleak, black kopjes,
ridge on ridge, as inhospitable as a watch-dog’s growl. On
one hand the little band of Highlanders, the picturesque
colours of their clan showing in kilt and stocking, perfect
in all their appointments, but nowhere so absolutely flawless
as in their leadership. Under such leaders as he who held
them there so calm and steady their forbears had hurled back
the chivalry of France, and had tamed the Muscovite pride,
and they were soon to prove themselves men worthy of their
captain.

On the other side rose the superior numbers of the Boers.
A wild and motley crew they looked compared with the gem of
Britain’s army. Boys stood side by side with old men, lads
braced themselves shoulder to shoulder with men in their
manhood’s prime, ragged beards fell on still more ragged
shirt fronts. But there were manly hearts behind those ragged
garments, hearts that beat high with love of home and
country, hearts that seldom quailed in the hour of peril.
Their rifles lay in hands steady and strong. The Boer was
face to face with the Briton; the numbers lay on the side of
the Boer, but the bayonet was with the Briton.

“Throw up your hands and surrender.” The language was
English, but the accent was Dutch; a moment, an awful second
of time, the rifle barrels gleamed coldly towards that little
group of men, who stood their ground as pine trees stand on
their mountain sides in bonny Scotland. Then out on the
African air there rang a voice, proud, clear, and high as
clarion note: “Fix bayonets, Gordons!” Like lightning the
strong hands gripped the ready steel; the bayonets went home
to the barrel as the lips of lover to lover. Rifles spoke
from the Boer lines, and men reeled a pace from the British
and fell, and lay where they fell. Again that voice with the
Scottish burr on every note: “Charge, Gordons! Charge!” and
the dauntless Scotchman rushed on at the head of his fiery
few. The Boer’s heart is a brave heart, and he who calls them
cowards lies; but never before had they faced so grim a
charge, never before had they seen a torrent of steel
advancing on their lines in front of a tornado of flesh and
blood. On rushed the Scots, on over fallen comrades, on over
rocks and clefts, on to the ranks of the foe, and onward
through them, sweeping them down as I have seen wild horses
sweep through a field of ripening corn. The bayonets hissed
as they crashed through breastbone and backbone. Vainly the
Boer clubbed his rifle and smote back. As well might the wild
goat strike with puny hoofs when the tiger springs. Nothing
could stay the fury of that desperate rush. Do you sneer at
the Boers? Then sneer at half the armies of Europe, for never
yet have Scotland’s sons been driven back when once they
reached a foe to smite.

How do they charge, these bare-legged sons of Scotia? Go
ask the hills of Afghanistan, and if there be tongues within
them they will tell you that they sweep like hosts from hell.
Ask in sneering Paris, and the red records of Waterloo will
give you answer. Ask in St. Petersburg, and from Sebastopol
your answer will come. They thought of the dreary morning
hours of Magersfontein, and they smote the steel downwards
through the neck into the liver. They thought of the row of
comrades in the graves beside the Modder, and they gave the
Boers the “haymaker’s lift,” and tossed the dead body behind
them. They thought of gallant Wauchope riddled with lead, and
they sent the cold steel, with a horrible crash, through
skull and brain, leaving the face a thing to make fiends
shudder. They thought of Scotland, and they sent the wild
slogan of their clan ringing along the line until the British
troops, far off along the veldt, hearing it, turned to one
another, saying: “God help the Boers this hour; our Jocks are
into ’em with the bay’nit!”

But when they turned to gather up those who had fallen,
then they found that he whose lion soul had pointed them the
crimson path to duty was to lead them no more. The noble
heart that beat so true to honour’s highest notes was not
stilled, but a bullet missing the brain had closed his eyes
for ever to God’s sunlight, leaving him to go through life in
darkness; and they mourned for him as they had mourned for
noble, white-souled Wauchope, whose prototype he was. They
knew that many a long, long year would roll away before their
eyes would rest upon his like again in camp or bloody field.
But it gladdened their stern warrior hearts to know that the
last sight he ever gazed upon was Scotland sweeping on her
foes.

And when our noble Queen shall place upon his breast the
cross which is the soldier’s diadem, their hearts will throb
in unison with his, for their strong hands on that May Day
helped him to win what he is so fat to wear; and when our
Sovereign honours him she honours them, and well they know
it. And when the years have rolled away, and they are old and
grey, and spent with wounds and toil, fit for nothing but to
dandle little grand-babes on their knees, young men and maids
will flock around, and pointing out the veteran to the
curious stranger say, with honest pride, “He was with Towse
the day he won the cross.”

THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

There are hundreds of men lying in unmarked graves in
African soil to-day who ought to be alive and well, others
who have been done to death by the crass ignorance, the
appalling stupidity, the damnable conceit which will brook no
teaching. I have seen men die like dogs, men who left
comfortable homes in the old land to go forth to uphold the
power and prestige of our nation’s flag. I have seen them
gasping out their lives like stricken sheep, just in the
springtide of their manhood, when the glory and the lust of
life should have been strong upon them I have watched the
Irish lad with the down upon his brave boyish face pass with
the last deep-drawn quivering sob over the border line of
life, into the shadows of the unsearchable beyond, a wasted
sacrifice upon the grim altar of incapacity. I have seen the
kilted Scottish laddie lie, with hollow cheeks and sunken
eyes, waiting for the whisper of the wings of the Angel of
Death. I have seen the death damp gather on his unlined brow,
and watched the grey pallor creep upwards from throat to
temple; until my very soul, wrung with anguish unutterable,
has risen in hot revolt against the crimes of the
incapable.

I have knelt by England’s fair-faced sons, the child of
the cities, the boy from the fens, the youth from the farm,
and watched the shadows creeping over eyes that mothers loved
to look upon. I have seen the wasted fingers, grown clawlike,
plucking aimlessly at the rude blankets as if weaving the
woof of the winding-sheet, and have listened with aching
heart to the aimless babbling of the dying, in which home and
friends were blended, until the tired voice, grown aweary
with the weight of utterance, died out like the crooning of a
lisping child, as the soul slipped through the golden gateway
that leads to the glory beyond the grave. I have watched them
pile the earth above the last home of Cambria’s sons, the
gallant children of the old Welsh hills. I have seen them
laid to sleep, as harvest hands will lay the sheaves in
undulating rows when the summer shower has passed; and over
every shallow grave I have sent a curse for those whose
brutish folly caused the flower of Britain’s army to wither
in the pride of their peerless boyhood.

For the men who fall in battle we can flush our tears with
pride, and though our hearts may ache for those we love, yet
is there an undercurrent of hot joy to know they fell as
soldiers love to fall, face forward to the foe. But for those
who die, as more than half of Britain’s dead have died in
this last war, stricken by pestilence brought about by
ignorance and indolence, we have only sorrow and tears and
prayers, blended with hate and contempt for the triple-dyed
dandies and dunces who robbed us of those who should have
been alive to-day to be the bulwark of the Empire, the pride
of the nation, and the joy of many homes.

Why did they die, these strong young soldiers of our
Queen? Was it because their hearts failed them in the
presence of hardship and danger? I tell you, No. The
hardships of the campaign only roused them to greater
exertions. Bravely and uncomplainingly they answered every
call of duty, ready by night or day to go anywhere, or do
anything, if only they were led by men worthy of our Queen’s
commission, worthy of the cloth they wore. Why did they die?
Was it because of poisoned or polluted water, left in their
path by the enemy whom they were fighting? Not so. No, not
so. The Boers left no death-traps in our path. Why did they
die? Was it because the country through which we marched lent
itself climatically to the propagation and dissemination of
fever germs? No, England, no! In all the world there is no
finer climate than that in which our gallant soldiers died
like rotting sheep. Wherever else the blame may lie, no
truthful man can lay the blame of those untimely graves upon
the climate or the country of our enemies.

I will tell you why they died, and tell you in language so
plain that a wayfaring man, even though a fool, cannot
misunderstand me, for the time has arrived when the whole
Empire should know the truth in all its native hideousness.
Those men were done to death by wanton carelessness upon the
part of men sent out by the British War Office. They were
done to death through criminal neglect of the most simple
laws of sanitation. Men were huddled together in camp after
camp; they were allowed to turn the surrounding veldt and
adjacent kopjes into cesspools and excreta camps. In some
camps no latrines were dug, no supervision was exercised. The
so-called Medical Staff looked on, and puffed their
cigarettes and talked under their eye-glasses—the fools, the
idle, empty-headed noodles. And whilst they smoked and talked
twaddle, the grim, gaunt Shadow of Death chuckled in the
watches of the night, thinking of the harvest that was to
follow.

Then the careless soldiers passed onward, leaving their
camp vacant, and later came another batch of soldiers.
Perhaps the men in charge would be men of higher mental
calibre; they would order latrines to be dug, and all garbage
to be burnt or buried. But by this time the germs of fever
were in the air, the men would sicken and die, just as I have
seen them sicken and die upon a score of mining fields away
in the Australian bush; and all for the want of a little
honest care and attention, all for the want of a few grains
of good, wholesome, everyday common sense. Had proper care
been taken in regard to these matters, four-fifths of those
who now fill fever graves in South Africa would be with us,
hale and hearty men, to-day.

But, England, you must not complain. “Tommy” is a cheap
article; he only costs a few pence per day, and if he dies
there are plenty more ready and willing to take his place.
Don’t think of him as a human being. Don’t think of him as
some woman’s husband and breadwinner. Don’t think of him as
some grey-haired widow’s son, whose support he has been.
Don’t think of him as some foolish girl’s heart’s idol. But
think of him as a part of the country’s revenue. Think of him
as “One-and-fourpence a day.”

What excuse can or will be made by the authorities for the
wholesale murder of our men I know not. Possibly those high
and haughty personages will sniff contemptuously and decline
to give any explanation at all. And you, who hold the remedy
in your own hands, what will you do? Will you at election
times put a stern question to every candidate for the
Commons, and demand a straight and unqualified answer to your
questions. Remember this: You supply the men who do the
fighting; the nation at a pinch can do without a Roberts, a
Duller, or a Kitchener, but, as my soul liveth, it cannot do
without “Tommy.”

If you want Army reform, you must commence with the “Press
gang”; you must stand in one solid mass firmly behind those
war correspondents who have not feared to speak out plainly.
You must send men to the Commons pledged to stand behind them
also, men who will not flinch and allow themselves to be
flouted by every scion of some ancient house; for if you do
not support the war correspondents of the great newspapers,
how are you ever to know the real truth concerning the doings
of our armies in the field? I tell you that you have not
heard one-millionth part of the truth concerning this South
African enterprise, and now you never will know the truth.
Had the abominable practice of censorship been abolished
prior to this war, most of the abuses which have made our
Army the laughing stock of Europe would have been set right
by the correspondents, for they would have pointed out the
evils to the public through the medium of their journals, and
an indignant people would have clamoured for reform in a
voice which would brook no denial. As things are at present,
the military people during the progress of the war have their
heel upon the necks of the journalists, and the public are
robbed of what is their just right, the right of knowledge of
passing events; only that which suits the censor being
allowed to filter over the wires. Had it been otherwise,
hundreds of young widows in Ireland, Scotland, England, and
Wales would be proud and happy wives to-day.

But do not let me rouse your phlegmatic blood, my Britons;
sit down, with your thumbs in your mouths, my masters, and
allow a coterie to flout you at will, whilst the Frenchmen,
the Germans, the Russians alternately laugh at and pity you.
Pity you, the sons of the men who chased their fathers half
over Europe at the point of the blood-red bayonet! Have you
grown tame, have you waxed fat and foolish during these long
years of peace? Is the spirit that swept the legions of
France through the Pyrenees and carried the old flag up the
heights of Inkerman in the teeth of Russian chivalry—is it
dead, or only sleeping? If it but slumbers, let me cry,
Sleeper, awake, for danger is at the gates! Not the danger
due from foreign foes, but a greater danger—the danger of
unjust government, for where evil is hidden injustice
reigns.

Our military friends tell us that censorship of Press work
is necessary for the welfare of the Army. They urge that if
we correspondents had a free hand the enemy might gain
valuable information regarding the movements of our troops.
To us who for the greater portion of a year have been at the
front there is grim irony in that assertion. Fancy the Boer
scouts wanting information from us which might filter through
London newspapers! That flimsy, paltry excuse can be
dismissed with a contemptuous laugh. That is not why the
military people want our work censored. The real reason is
that their awful blunders, their farcical mistakes, and their
criminal negligence may not reach the British public. Just
try for one brief moment to remember some of the “censored”
cables that have been sent home to you during the war, and
then compare it with such a cable as this, which would have
come if the Press men had a free hand:

The military folk would, doubtless, designate such a
telegram “a piece of d——d impudence.”

But the latrines would be dug, the camp would be kept free
from foulness, and the new draft would not die untimely
deaths, but would live to fight the enemies of their
country.

Why the camps in South Africa were not models of
cleanliness passes my comprehension. There was no need to
harass “Tommy” by setting him to do the work. Every Division
was accompanied by swarms of niggers, who drew from
Government £4 10s. per month and their food. These
niggers had a gentleman’s life. They waxed fat, lazy, and
cheeky. Four-fifths of them rode all day on transport wagons,
and never earned a fourth of the wages they drew from a
sweetly paternal Government. Why could not those men have
been used in every camp to make things safe and comparatively
comfortable for “Tommy,” who had to march all day, with his
fighting kit upon his back march and fight, and not only
march and fight, but go on picket and sentry duty as well?
Those niggers ought to have, been turned out to dig and fill
in latrines for our soldiers, they ought to have been
compelled to do all the menial work of the camps; but they
never did anything of the sort “Tommy” was treated for the
most part like a Kaffir dog, whilst the saucy niggers led the
lives of fightingcocks, and to-day any ordinary Army Service
nigger thinks himself a better man than “Tommy,” and doesn’t
hesitate to tell you so. It would be instructive to know the
name of the genius who fixed the scale of nigger wage at
£ 4 10s. per month, with rations. Fully half that sum
could with ease have been saved the British taxpayer, and the
nigger would have taken it with delight, and jumped at the
chance of getting it. As a matter of fact, the nigger has had
a huge picnic, and has been well paid for attending it. He
has never been kept short of food. He has never had to march
until his feet were almost falling off him. He has not had to
fight for the country that fed and clothed him. Poor
“Tommy!”

HOME AGAIN.

I stood where Nelson’s Column stands—a stranger, and
alone. Alone amidst a mighty multitude of men and maids. I
saw a people drunk with joy. I looked from face to face, and
in each flashing eye, and on each quivering lip, a nation’s
heart lay bared to all the world, for England’s capital was
but the throbbing pulse of England’s Empire. Our nation spoke
to the nations that dwell where the sea foam flies, and woe
to them who do not heed the tale that the city told. There
was no sun, the city lay enveloped in silvery shadows, like
some grey lioness that knows her might and is not quickly
stirred to wrath or joy, like meaner things. I looked above,
and saw the monument of him whose peerless genius gave us
empire on the seas. I looked below, and saw, far as my eyes
could range, a seething mass of men, as good, as gallant, and
as great of heart as those who fought and fell beneath his
flag, and in my blood I felt the pride of empire stirring,
and knew how great a thing it is to call one’s self a
Briton.

I looked along that swaying mass of human flesh and blood,
and saw the best that England owns waiting to welcome, with
heart-stirring cheers, the gallant lads whose lion hearts had
carried London’s name and fame along the rough-hewn tracks of
war. I saw the cream of Britain’s chivalry and Britain’s
beauty there. Men and women from the countryside, from
Ireland and from Scotland, all eager to pay tribute to the
London lads who had so proudly proved to all the world that
it was not for a soldier’s pay, not for the love of gain, but
for a nation’s glory that they had risked limb and life
beneath an African sun. Then, as I looked, I caught a distant
hum of voices—a far-off sound, such as I have heard amid
Pacific isles when wind and waves were beating upon coral
crags, and foam-topped rollers thrashed the surf into the
magic music of the storm-tossed sea. It was the roar of
London’s multitudes welcoming home her own; and what a sound
it was! I have heard the music of the guns when our nation
spoke in the stern tones of battle to a nation in arms; I
have heard the crash of tempests on Southern coasts when
ships were reeling in the breath of the blast, and souls to
their God were going; I have crouched low in my saddle when
the tornado has swept trees from the forest as a boy brushes
flowers with his footsteps. But never had I heard a sound
like that. It was the voice of millions, it was the great
heart-beats of a mighty nation, it was a welcome and a
warning—a welcome to the descendants of the ‘prentice lads
of Old London, a warning to the world. I caught the echoes in
my hands, I hugged them to my heart, I let them pour into my
brain, and this is the tale they told: “Sluggish we are, ye
people, slow to wake, strong in the strength of conscious
might. Jibe at us, jeer at us, flout us and threaten us; but
beware the day we turn in our strength. We have sent forth a
few of our children, but they were but as a drop in the
ocean. All Britain sent two hundred and fifty thousand strong
men to Africa; London, if need be, can send five hundred
thousand more to the uttermost parts of the earth. Aye, and
when they have died, as these would have died if need be, we
can open our hearts and send five hundred thousand more, and
yet be strong for our home fighting.” It was a nation
speaking to the nations, and that is the tale it told. Let
the nations take heed and beware, for the language was the
language of truth.

I listened; and lo! through the storm of cheering, through
the cries of women and the strong shouting of men in their
prime, I caught another sound, a sound I knew and loved—the
sound of marching men. Music hath charms to stir the blood
and make men mad, but there is no music in all the earth like
the trained tread of men who have marched to battle. I knew
the rhythm of that tread; I knew that the “boys” of Old
London were coming, and my nostrils seemed filled with the
fumes of fighting. I looked again, and, saw them, hard faced,
clean limbed, close set, as soldiers should be who have faced
the storm and stress of war, as proud a band as Britain ever
had, soldier and citizen both in one, fit to be a nation’s
bulwark and a nation’s trust; and in the crowd around them
there were a thousand thousand men as good, as game, as
gritty, as they, for they were the children of the people,
the men of the shop-counter, the men of the city office, the
men of every artisan craft, the very vitals of London. They
had sprung from the womb of the city, and the city could give
birth to a million more if need be.

I saw them pass amidst a storm of cheers, and I, who had
seen them out on the African veldt under the foeman’s guns,
lifted up my voice to cheer them onward, for well I knew that
there was nothing in the gift of England that they were not
worthy of, those children of the “flat caps,” those offspring
of the ‘prentice lads of London. I knew how they had starved;
I knew how they had suffered through the freezing cold of the
African winter; I knew how gallantly, how uncomplainingly,
they had marched with empty bellies and aching limbs, ready
to go anywhere, to do anything, ready to fight, and, if it
were the will of the great God of Battles, ready to lay down
their young lives and die. I knew those things, and, knowing
them, gave them a cheer for the sake of Australia, for the
sake of the kinship which binds us as no bonds of steel could
bind us and them. I heard a voice at my knee whimpering, the
voice of a gutter kid, who had dodged in there out of the way
of the police. I looked at his ragged clothes, looked at his
grimy face, looked at his hands, which looked as if they had
never looked at soap, and I said: “What are you yelping for,
kiddie?” And he, looking up at me through his tears, fired a
voice at me through his sobs, and said: “I’m yelping, mister,
because I’m only a little ‘un, and can’t see me mates come
home from the war.” Then I laughed, and tossing him up on my
shoulder let him jamb his dirty fist on the only silk hat I
possess, whilst he looked at his “mates” march home; for they
were his mates—he was a child of London, and some day—who
knows?—he may be a general.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE,

LONDON, E.C.

10.101.