THE GREAT BOER WAR

Important: Refer to this map in order to understand the nature of the war. Take special notice of the location of NATAL, Ladysmith and Kimberly

CHAPTER 1: THE BOER NATIONS

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country forever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen on earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper on their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent patriotism. Combine these qualities and you have the modern Boer--the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.[1]

Up until the Boer War British military history has largely consisted in conflicts with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.[2]

Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the centre of the British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into Africa? It is a twice-told tale, and yet it must be told once again if this story is to have even the most superficial of introductions. No one can know or appreciate the Boer who does not know his past, for he is what his past has made him.

It was about the time when Oliver Cromwell was at his zenith--in 1652, to be accurate--that the Dutch made their first lodgment at the Cape of Good Hope. The coast on which they settled reeked with malaria. A hundred miles of poisonous marsh separated it from the healthy inland plateau. For centuries these pioneers of South African colonization strove to obtain their footing, but save along the courses of rivers they made little progress. Fierce natives and an enervating climate barred their way inland.

Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat.[3] And so the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust climate.

They built themselves houses, and they supplied the Dutch East India Company with food and water, gradually budding off little townlets and pushing their settlements up the long slopes which lead to that great central plateau which extends for fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Karoo to the Valley of the Zambesi.

Then came the Huguenot emigrants, the best blood of France thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul to the solid Teutonic strain.[4] Again and again in the course of history, with the Normans, the Huguenots, the Émigrés, one can see the great hand dipping into that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the same splendid seed.[5] France has not founded other countries, like her great rival, England, but she has made other countries richer by the mixture with her choicest and best.

For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld which lay to the north of them. Cattle became an industry, but in a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms were necessary. Six thousand acres was the usual size of a ranch.

The diseases which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and Australia, been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox cleared the country for the newcomers.[6] Further and further north they pushed, founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale of the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of control and detachment from Europe which has been their most prominent characteristic. The first local uprising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm which followed the General French Revolution. After twenty years, during which the world was shaken by the titanic struggle between England and France the Cape Colony was added to the British Empire in 1814.

In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We had the land by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase. In 1806 our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took possession of Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to the Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American land. As a house of call on the way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself was looked on as unprofitable.

What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which we were buying for our six million pounds?[7] The inventory would have been a mixed one of good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace and prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men.

The British deeds to South Africa are good ones, but there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch at liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of the Anglo-Celtic colonists? In that question lay the germ of all the trouble to come.[8]

An American would realize the point at issue if he could conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the west and established fresh communities under a new flag. Then, when the Americans overtook these western States, they would be face to face with the same problem which Britain has had to solve. If they found these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely unprogressive, they would experience that aggravation with which our statesmen have had to deal.

At the time of their transference to the British flag the Afrikaners numbered some thirty thousand. The Afrikaners were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as themselves. The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British and the original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they were of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be distinguished by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance.[9]

Five thousand British emigrants landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders of the colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but steady influx of English colonists. The colonial government had the historical faults and virtues of British rule. It was mild, clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found them. But to change the habits of the Teutonic races[10] was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to the troubled history of South Africa.

The British Imperial Government has always taken an honorable and philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating when urged by a London philanthropist on men whose whole society has been built on the assumption that the black is the inferior race.[11] Such a people like to find morality for themselves, not to have it imposed on them by those who live under entirely different conditions. They feel--and with some reason--that it is a cheap form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered household in Beacon Street[12] prescribes what the relation shall be between a white employer and his half-savage, half-childish Black retainers.

The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the Black natives. It was on this point that the first friction appeared between the Boers and the British.[13] A rising with bloodshed followed the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave. It was suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged at Slagter's Nek. This punishment was unduly severe and injudicious. A brave race can forget the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold. The making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship. It is true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the prisoners were Dutch, and Afrikaners the British Governor interfered on the side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to make capital out of the incident.

It is typical of the enduring resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid, it seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged, the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to Pretoria, the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in 1816.[14] Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the British Government and the Afrikaners.

The separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious generosity, the English Government gave lenient terms to the Kaffir tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. In this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire, which fanned smoldering discontents into an active flame.[15]

It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist was willing to pay for what he thought was right. It was a noble national action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its time, that the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of twenty million pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders for their lost property. It was as well that the thing should have been done when it was, for had we waited till the colonies affected had governments of their own it could never have been done by constitutional methods. With many a grumble the good British householder drew his purse from his fob, and he paid for what he thought to be right. If any special grace attends the virtuous action which brings nothing but tribulation in this world, then we may hope for it over this emancipation. We spent our money, we ruined our West Indian colonies, and we started a disaffection in South Africa. Yet if it were to be done again we should doubtless do it. The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.[16]

But the details of the measure were less honorable than the principle. It was carried out suddenly, so that the country had no time to adjust itself to the new conditions. Three million pounds were ear-marked for South Africa, which gives a price per slave of from sixty to seventy pounds, a sum considerably below the current local rates. Finally, the compensation was made payable in London, so that the farmers sold their claims at reduced prices to middlemen.

Meetings were held in every little townlet and cattle camp on the Karoo. The Dutch spirit was up, the spirit of the men who cut the dykes.[17] Rebellion was useless. But a vast untenanted land stretched to the north of them. The nomad life was congenial to them, and in their huge ox-drawn wagons they had vehicles and homes and forts all in one.

One by one they were loaded up, the women were seated inside, the men, with their long-barreled guns, walked alongside, and the great exodus was begun. Their herds and flocks accompanied the migration, and the children helped to round them in and drive them. One tattered little boy of ten cracked his whip behind the bullocks. He was a small item in that singular crowd, but he was of interest to us, for his name was Paul Stephanus Kruger.[18]

The Great Trek, as it was called was a strange exodus, only comparable in modern times to the sallying forth of the Mormons on their search for the promised laud of Utah. The country was known and sparsely settled as far north as the Orange River, but beyond there was a great region which had never been penetrated save by some daring hunter or adventurous pioneer. It chanced that a Zulu conqueror had swept over this land and left it untenanted, save by the dwarf bushmen, the hideous aborigines, lowest of the human race.[19]

There was fine grazing and good soil for the Boers. They traveled in small detached parties, but their numbers were considerable, from six to ten thousand or nearly a quarter of the population of the colony. Some of the early bands perished miserably. A large number made a trysting-place at a high peak in what later became the Orange Free State.[20] One party of the emigrants was cut off by the formidable Zulu nation. The survivors declared war on them, and showed in this campaign, their extraordinary ingenuity in tactics.

The command which rode out to do battle with the Zulu numbered a hundred and thirty-five farmers. Their adversaries were twelve thousand spearmen. They met at the Marico River, near Mafeking. The Boers combined the use of their horses and of their rifles so cleverly that they slaughtered a third of the Zulu without any loss to themselves. Their tactics were to gallop up within range of the enemy, to fire a volley, and then to ride away again before the spearmen could reach them. When the savages pursued the Boers fled. When the pursuit halted the Boers halted and the rifle fire began anew. The strategy was simple but effective. When one remembers how often since then our own horsemen have been pitted against savages in all parts of the world, one deplores that ignorance of all military traditions save our own which is characteristic of our service.[21]

This victory of the 'voortrekkers' cleared all the country between the Orange River and the Limpopo, the sites of what has been known as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In the meantime another body of the emigrants had descended into what is now known as Natal, and defeated Dingaan, the great Chief of the Zulus.

Being unable to employ the cavalry tactics which had been so effective against the Matabeli, they used their ingenuity to meet this new situation, and received the Zulu warriors in a square of laagered wagons, the men firing while the women loaded. Six burghers[22] were killed and three thousand Zulus. Had such a formation been used forty years afterwards against these very Zulus, we should not have had to mourn the disaster of the Battle of Isandhlwana.[23]

After overcoming the difficulties of distance, nature, and savage enemies, the Boers saw at the end of their travels the very thing which they desired least--that which they had come so far to avoid--the flag of Great Britain. The Boers had occupied Natal from within, but England had previously done the same by sea, and a small colony of Englishmen had settled at Port Natal, now known as Durban. The British Government, asserted the doctrine that a British subject could not at will throw off his allegiance, and that, go where they might, the wandering Boer farmers were still only the pioneers of the British.

To emphasis the fact three companies of soldiers were sent in 1842 to what is now Durban. This handful of men was waylaid by the Boers and cut up. The survivors fortified themselves, and held a defensive position until reinforcements arrived and the farmers dispersed. It is singular how in history the same factors will always give the same result. Here in this first skirmish is the epitome of all our military relations with these people. The blundering headstrong attack, the defeat, the powerlessness of the farmer against the weakest fortifications--it is the same tale over and over again in different scales of importance.

Natal from this time onward became a British colony, and the majority of the Boers trekked further north with bitter hearts to tell their wrongs to their brethren of the Orange Free State and of the Transvaal.

Had they any wrongs to tell? It is difficult to reach that height of philosophic detachment which enables the historian to be impartial when his own country is a party to the quarrel.[24] At least we may allow that there is a case for our adversary, the Boer. Our annexation of Natal had been by no means definite, and it was they and not we who first broke that bloodthirsty Zulu power which threw its shadow across the country. It was hard after such trials and such exploits to turn their back on the fertile land which they had conquered, and to return to the bare pastures of the upland veld. They carried out of Natal a heavy sense of injury, which has helped to poison our relations with them ever since. It was, in a way, a momentous episode, this little skirmish of soldiers and emigrants, for it meant the heading off of the Boer from the sea and the confinement of his ambition to a landlocked country. Had it gone the other way, a new formidable flag might have been added to the maritime nations.[25]

The emigrants who had settled in the huge tract of country between the Orange River in the south and the Limpopo in the north numbered some fifteen thousand souls. This population was scattered over a space as large as Germany. Their form of government was individualistic and democratic to the last degree compatible with any sort of cohesion. Their wars with the Kaffirs and their fear and dislike of the British Government appear to have been the only ties which held them together. The Transvaal was full of lusty little communities, who quarreled among themselves as fiercely as they had done with the authorities at the Cape. In the south, between the Orange River and the Vaal, there was no form of government at all, but a welter of Dutch farmers living in a chronic state of turbulence, recognizing neither the British authority to the south of them nor the Transvaal to the north. The chaos became unendurable, and in 1848 a garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district incorporated into the British Empire. The emigrants made a futile resistance and after a single defeat allowed themselves to be drawn into the settled order of civilized rule.

At this period the Transvaal, where most of the Boers had settled, desired a formal acknowledgment of their independence, which the British authorities decided to give them. The great barren country, which produced little save marksmen, had no attractions for Britain. A Convention was concluded between the two parties, known as the Sand River Convention, which is one of the fixed points in South African history. By it the British Government guaranteed to the Boer farmers the right to manage their own affairs, and to govern themselves by their own laws without any interference on the part of the British. It stipulated that there should be no slavery, and with that single reservation washed its hands finally of the whole question. So the South African Republic, (Transvaal) formally came into existence.

In the year after the Sand River Convention a second republic, the Orange Free State, was created by the withdrawal of Great Britain from the territory which she had for eight years occupied. British statesmen felt their commitments were heavy in every part of the world, and the South African annexations had always been a doubtful value. We withdrew our troops as amicably as the Romans withdrew from Britain, and the new republic was left with absolute and unfettered independence. Whatever historical grievance the Transvaal may have against Great Britain, we can at least, save perhaps in one matter, claim to have a clear conscience concerning our dealings with the Orange Free State. Thus in 1852 and in 1854 were born those sturdy States who were able for a time to hold at bay the united forces of the British Empire.

In the meantime The British Cape Colony prospered exceedingly, and her population--English, German, and Dutch--had grown by 1870 to over two hundred thousand souls, the Dutch still slightly predominating. According to the Liberal colonial policy of Great Britain, the time had come to cut the cord and let the young nation conduct its own affairs. In 1872 complete self-government was given to it, the Governor, as the representative of the Queen, retaining a nominal unexercised veto on legislation. According to this system the Dutch majority of the colony could, and did, put their own representatives into power and run the government on Dutch lines. Already Dutch law had been restored, and Dutch put on the same footing as English as the official language of the country. The extreme liberality of such measures, and the way in which they have been carried out, however distasteful the legislation might seem to English ideas, are among the chief reasons which made the illiberal treatment of British settlers in the Transvaal so keenly resented at the Cape. A Dutch Government was ruling the British in a British colony, at a moment when the Boers would not give an Englishman the vote.[26] Unfortunately, however, 'the evil that men do lives after them,' and the ignorant Boer farmer continued to imagine that his southern relatives were in bondage, just as the descendant of the Irish emigrant still pictures an Ireland of penal laws and an alien Church.

For twenty-five years after the 1852, Sand River Convention the burghers of the South African Republic had pursued a strenuous and violent existence, fighting incessantly with the natives and sometimes with each other. The semi-tropical sun was waking strange ferments in the placid Friesland blood, and producing a race who added the turbulence and restlessness of the south to the formidable tenacity of the north. Strong vitality and violent ambitions produced feuds and rivalries worthy of medieval Italy.

Disorganization ensued. The burghers would not pay taxes and the treasury was empty. One fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from the north, and the Zulus on the east. It is an exaggeration of English partisans to pretend that our intervention saved the Boers, for no one can read their military history without seeing that they were a match for Zulus and Sekukuni combined. But certainly a formidable invasion of Boer territory by Afrcan tribes was pending, and the scattered farmhouses were as open to the Kaffirs as our farmers' homesteads were in the American colonies when the Indians were on the warpath.

Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British Commissioner, after an inquiry of three months, solved all questions by the formal annexation of the Transvaal. The fact that he took possession of it with a force of some twenty-five men showed the honesty of his belief that no armed resistance was to be feared. This, then, in 1877 was a complete reversal of the Sand River Convention and the opening of a new chapter in the history of South Africa.[27]

There did not appear to be any strong feeling at the time against the annexation. The people were depressed with their troubles and weary of contention. A memorial against the measure received the signatures of a majority of the Boer inhabitants, but there was a fair minority who took the other view. Kruger himself accepted a paid office under the British Government. There was every sign that the Boers would settle down under the British flag. It is even asserted that they would themselves have petitioned for annexation had it been longer withheld. With immediate constitutional government it is possible that even the most recalcitrant of them might have been induced to lodge their protests in the ballot boxes rather than in the bodies of our soldiers.

But the empire has always had poor luck in South Africa, and never worse than on that occasion. Through no bad faith, but simply through preoccupation and delay, the promises made were not instantly fulfilled. Simple primitive men do not understand the ways of our offices, and they ascribe to duplicity what is really red tape and stupidity. If the Transvaalers had waited they would have had their Volksraad and all that they wanted.[28] But the British Government had some other local matters to set right, the breaking of the Zulus, before they would fulfill their pledges. The delay was keenly resented.

And we were unfortunate in our choice of Governor. The burghers like an occasional cup of coffee with the man who tries to rule them. The three hundred pounds a year of coffee money allowed by the Transvaal to its President is by no means a mere form. A wise administrator would fall into the sociable and democratic habits of the people. The old governor, Sir Theophilus Shepstone did so, the new one, Sir Owen Lanyon, did not. There was no Volksraad and no coffee, and the popular discontent grew rapidly.

In addition, in three years the British had broken up the savage hordes which had been threatening the land and the finances had been restored. Ironically, reasons which had made so many favor annexation in the first place were weakened.

In this annexation Great Britain had no obvious selfish interest in view. There were no Rand gold mines in those days, nor was there anything in the country to tempt the most covetous. An empty treasury and two native wars were the reversion which we took over. It was honestly considered that the country was in too distracted a state to govern itself, and had, by its weakness, become a danger to its neighbors. There was nothing sordid in our action, though it may have been high-handed.

In December 1880 the Boers rose. Every farmhouse sent out its riflemen, and the trysting-place was the outside of the nearest British fort. All through the country small detachments were surrounded and besieged by the farmers. Standerton, Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Lydenburg, and Marabastad were all under siege and all held out until the end of the war.

In the open country we were less fortunate. At Bronkhorst Spruit[29] a small British force was taken by surprise and shot down. The surgeon who treated them recorded that the average number of wounds was five per man. At Laing's Nek an inferior force of British endeavored to rush a hill which was held by Boer riflemen. Half of our men were killed and wounded.

Finally came the defeat of Majuba Hill, where four hundred British infantry on a mountain were defeated and driven off by a swarm of sharpshooters who advanced under the cover of boulders. Of all these actions there was not one which was more than a skirmish, and had they been followed by a final British victory they would now be hardly remembered. It is the fact that they were skirmishes which succeeded in their object which has given them an importance which is exaggerated.

At the same time they may mark the beginning of a new military era, for they drove home the fact--only too badly learned by us--that it is the rifle and not the drill which makes the soldier. It is bewildering that after such an experience the British military authorities continued to serve out only three hundred cartridges a year for rifle practice and that they still encouraged that mechanical volley firing which destroys all individual aim. With the experience of the first Boer war behind them little was done, either in tactics or in musketry, to prepare the British soldier for the second. The value of the mounted rifleman, the shooting with accuracy at unknown ranges, the art of taking cover--all were neglected.

The defeat at Majuba Hill was followed by the complete surrender of the British government under Prime Minister Gladston, an act which was either the most pusillanimous or the most magnanimous in recent history. It is hard for the big man to draw away from the small before blows are struck but when the big man has been knocked down three times it is harder still. An overwhelming British force was in the field, and the General declared that he held the enemy in the hollow of his hand. On paper, at least, it looked as if the Boers could have been crushed without difficulty. So the public thought, and yet they consented to the upraised sword being stayed.

The motive was undoubtedly a moral and Christian one. They considered that the annexation of the Transvaal had evidently been an injustice, that the farmers had a right to the freedom for which they fought, and that it was an unworthy thing for a great nation to continue an unjust war for the sake of a military revenge. It was the height of idealism.

An armistice was concluded on March 5th, 1881, which led up to a peace on the 23rd of the same month. The British government, after yielding to force what it had repeatedly refused to friendly representations, made a clumsy compromise in their settlement. A policy of idealism and Christian morality should have been thorough if it were to be tried at all. It was obvious that if the annexation were unjust, then the Transvaal should have reverted to the condition in which it was before the annexation, as defined by the Sand River Convention. But the Government for some reason would not go so far as this. They quibbled and bargained until the State was left as a curious hybrid thing such as the world has never seen. It was a republic which was part of the system of a monarchy, dealt with by the Colonial Office, and included under the heading of 'Colonies' in the news columns of the 'Times.' It was autonomous, and yet subject to some vague suzerainty, the limits of which no one has ever been able to define. The Convention of Pretoria appears to prove that our political affairs were as badly conducted as our military in this unfortunate year of 1881.

It was evident from the first that so illogical and contentious an agreement could not be a final settlement, and indeed the ink of the signatures was hardly dry before an agitation was on foot for its revision. The Boers considered that if they were to be left as undisputed victors in the war then they should have the full fruits of victory. On the other hand, the English-speaking colonies had their allegiance tested to the uttermost. The proud Anglo-Celtic stock is not accustomed to being humbled, and yet they found themselves through the action of the British Government a beaten race. It was well for the citizen of London to console his wounded pride by the thought that he had done a magnanimous action, but it was different with the British colonist of Cape Town, who by no act of his own, and without any voice in the settlement, found himself humiliated before his Dutch neighbor. An ugly feeling of resentment was left behind, which might perhaps have passed away had the Transvaal accepted the settlement in the spirit in which it was meant, but which grew more and more dangerous as during eighteen years our people saw, or thought they saw, that one concession led always to a fresh demand, and that the Dutch republics aimed not merely at equality, but at dominance in South Africa.

Kruger became President of the Transvaal, an office which he held for eighteen years. His career as ruler vindicates the wisdom of that wise but unwritten provision of the American Constitution by which there is a limit to the tenure of office. Continued rule for half a generation must turn a man into an autocrat. Kruger said in his homely but shrewd way, that when one gets a good ox to lead the team it is a pity to change him. If a good ox, however, is left to choose his own direction without guidance, he may draw his wagon into trouble.

During the next three years the Transvaal showed signs of a tumultuous activity. Considering that it was as large as France and that the population could not have been more than 50,000, one would have thought that they might have found room without any inconvenient crowding. But the Boers passed beyond their borders in every direction. The President cried aloud that he had been shut up in a kraal,[30] and he proceeded to find ways out of it. To the east they raided Zululand, and succeeded in tearing away one third of it and adding it to the Transvaal. To the west they invaded Bechuanaland and set up the new republics of Goshen and Stellaland.

So outrageous were these proceedings that Great Britain was forced to fit out in 1884 a new expedition under Sir Charles Warren for the purpose of turning these freebooters out of the country. The upshot of these trespasses was the scene on which every drama of South Africa rings down. Once more the purse was drawn from the pocket of the unhappy taxpayer, and a million or so was paid out to defray the expenses of the police force necessary to keep these treaty-breakers in order.

In 1884 a deputation from the Transvaal visited England, and at their solicitation the Treaty of Pretoria was altered into the Convention of London. The changes in the provisions were all in favor of the Boers. Their name was altered from the Transvaal to the South African Republic. The control of Great Britain over their foreign policy was relaxed, though a power of veto was retained.

This, then, is a synopsis of what occurred up to the signing of the Convention, which finally established, or failed to establish, the position of the South African Republic. We must now leave the larger questions, and descend to the internal affairs of that small State, and especially to that train of events which has stirred the mind of our people more than anything since the Indian Mutiny.

Answer these questions about this chapter in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

Why was South Africa valuable to the British even before gold was discovered?
Describe the attitude of the Boers and the British towards Black Africans.
What was the Great Trek?
Name the two Boer countries in South Africa.
Who was the first president of the Transvaal?

CHAPTER 2: THE CAUSE OF QUARREL

There might seem to be some connection between the barrenness of a surface and the value of the minerals which lie beneath it. The craggy mountains of Western America, the arid plains of West Australia, the ice-bound gorges of the Klondyke, and the bare slopes of the Witwatersrand veld--these are the lids which cover the great treasure chests of the world.

Gold had been known to exist in the Transvaal before, but it was only in 1886 that it was realized the deposits which lie thirty miles south of the capital are of an extraordinary and valuable nature. A conservative estimate of the value of the gold has placed it at seven hundred millions of pounds.

Such a discovery produced the inevitable effect. A great number of adventurers flocked into the country, some desirable and some the reverse. There were circumstances, however, which kept away the rowdier element. It was not a class of mining which encouraged the individual adventurer. There were none of those nuggets which gleamed through the mud to recompense the forty-niners in California. It was a field for elaborate machinery, which could only be provided by capital. Managers, engineers, miners, technical experts, and the tradesmen and middlemen who live on them, these were the Uitlanders, [31] drawn from all the races under the sun, but with the Anglo-Celtic vastly predominant. The best engineers were American, the best miners were Cornish, the best managers were English and the money to run the mines was largely from England. Soon the population of the mining centers became greater than that of the whole Boer community.

The situation was an extraordinary one. I have already attempted to bring the problem home to an American by suggesting what if the Dutch of New York had trekked west and founded an anti-American and highly unprogressive State. To carry out the analogy we will now suppose that the gold of California attracted a large inrush of American citizens, who came to outnumber the original inhabitants, that these citizens were heavily taxed and badly used, and that they deafened Washington with their outcry. That would be a fair parallel to the relations between the Transvaal, the Uitlanders and the British Government.[32]

That these Uitlanders had real grievances no one could deny. To recount them all would be a formidable task, for their whole lives were darkened by injustice. There was not a wrong which had driven the Boer from Cape Colony which he did not now practice on the Uitlanders.

The Pretoria Government in the Transvaal became a corrupt oligarchy, venal and incompetent. Officials handled the stream of gold which came in from the mines, while the unfortunate Uitlander who paid nine-tenths of the taxation were fleeced at every turn, and met with laughter and taunts when he endeavored to win the franchise.[33]

The Uitlanders were not an unreasonable people. On the contrary, they were as patient as capital is likely to be when it is surrounded by rifles. But his situation was intolerable, and after successive attempts at peaceful agitation, and numerous petitions to the Volksraad, The Uitlandres began at last to realize that they would never obtain redress unless they could find some way of winning it for themselves.

Without attempting to enumerate all the wrongs which embittered the Uitlanders, the more serious of them may be summed up in this way.

1. Uitlanders were heavily taxed and provided about seven-eighths of the revenue of the country.

2. In spite of this prosperity they had brought the majority of the inhabitants of the country, were left without a vote. Such a case of taxation without representation has never been known.[34]

3. Uitlanders had no voice in the choice officials. Men of the worst character were placed over valuable interests. On one occasion the Minister of Mines attempted himself to jump a mine.

4. No power of municipal government. Watercarts instead of pipes, filthy buckets instead of drains, a corrupt and violent police, a high death-rate in what should be a health resort--all this in a city which they had built themselves.

5. Despotic government in the matter of the press and of the right of public meeting.

6. Disability from service on a jury.

7. Continual harassing of the mining interest by vexatious legislation.

8. The liquor laws, by which one-third of the Kaffirs were allowed to be habitually drunk

9. The incompetence and extortions of the State-owned railway.

Imagine how difficult it is for a free born progressive man, an American or a Briton, to live under sudh conditions. The Uitlanders were not ardent politicians. They only desired to have a share in the government for the purpose of making their daily lives more endurable. A superficial view may recognize the Boers as the champions of liberty, but a deeper insight must see that they have in truth stood for all that history has shown to be odious in the form of exclusiveness and oppression. Their conception of liberty has been a selfish one, and they have consistently inflicted on others far heavier wrongs than those against which they had themselves rebelled.

The continental Uitlanders were more patient of that which was unendurable than the American and the Briton.[35] The Americans, however, were in so great a minority that it was on the British that the brunt of the struggle for freedom fell. Apart from the fact that the British were more numerous than all the other Uitlanders combined, there were special reasons why they should feel their humiliating position more than the members of any other race. In the first place, many of the British were British South Africans, who knew that in the neighboring countries which gave them birth the most liberal institutions had been given to the kinsmen of the Boers. Every Briton knew that Great Britain claimed to be the paramount power in South Africa, and as citizens of the paramount power, it was galling that they should be held in political subjection. The British, therefore, were the most persistent and energetic of the agitators.

But it is a poor cause which cannot bear to fairly state and honestly consider the case of its opponents. The Boers had made great efforts to establish a country of their own. They had traveled far, worked hard, and fought bravely. After all their efforts they were fated to see an influx of strangers into their country who came to outnumber the original inhabitants. If the franchise were granted to these it was only a question of time before the newcomers would dominate the Landraad and elect their own President. Were the Boers to lose by the ballot-box the victory which they had won by their rifles? Was it fair to expect it? These newcomers came for gold. They got their gold. Was not that enough to satisfy them? If they did not like the country why did they not leave? No one compelled them to stay. But if they stayed, let them be thankful that they were tolerated at all, and not presume to interfere with the laws of those by whose courtesy they were allowed to enter the country.

That is a fair statement of the Boer position, and at first sight an impartial man might say that there was a good deal to say for it; but a closer examination would show that, though it might be tenable in theory, it is unjust and impossible in practice.

A handful of people by the right of conquest take possession of an enormous country over which they are dotted at such intervals that it is their boast that one farmhouse cannot see the smoke of another, and yet, though their numbers are so disproportionate to the area they refuse to admit any other people on equal terms, but claim to be a privileged class who shall dominate the newcomers completely. They are outnumbered in their own land by immigrants who are far more educated and progressive than they and yet they hold them down in a way which exists nowhere else on earth.

What is their right? The right of conquest. Then the same right may be justly invoked to reverse so intolerable a situation. This they would themselves acknowledge. 'Come on and fight! Come on!' cried a member of the Volksraad when the franchise petition of the Uitlanders was presented. 'Protest! Protest! What is the good of protesting?' said Kruger to Mr. Campbell; 'you have not got the guns, I have.' There was always the final court of appeal. Judge Creusot and Judge Mauser were always behind the President.[36]

The argument of the Boers would be more valid had they received no benefit from these immigrants. If they had ignored them they might fairly have stated that they did not desire their presence. But even while they protested the presence of the Uitlanders they grew rich at the Uitlander's expense. They could not have it both ways. It would be consistent to discourage him and not profit by him, or to make him comfortable and build the State on his money; but to ill-treat him and at the same time to grow strong by his taxation must surely be an injustice.[37]

The whole argument is based on the narrow racial supposition that every naturalized citizen not of Boer extraction must necessarily be unpatriotic. This is not borne out by the examples of history. The newcomer soon becomes as proud of his country and as jealous of her liberty as the old. Had President Kruger given the franchise to the Uitlander, his pyramid would have been firm on its base. The republic would have become stronger and more permanent. Whether such a solution would have been to the advantage of British interests in South Africa is another question. In more ways than one President Kruger has been a good friend to the empire.

The details of the long struggle between the seekers for the franchise and the refusers of it may be quickly sketched. At the time of the Convention of Pretoria (1881) the rights of burghership might be obtained by one year's residence. In 1882 it was raised to five years, the reasonable limit which obtains both in Great Britain and in the United States. Had it remained so, it is safe to say that there would never have been either an Uitlander question or a Boer War. Grievances would have been righted from the inside without external interference.

In 1890 the inrush of outsiders alarmed the Boers, and the franchise was raised so as to be only attainable by those who had lived fourteen years in the country. The Uitlanders, who were increasing rapidly in numbers and were suffering from the formidable list of grievances, perceived that their wrongs were so numerous that it was hopeless to have them set right seriatim,[38] and that only by obtaining the leverage of the franchise could they hope to remove their heavy burden.

In 1893 a petition of 13,000 Uitlanders was submitted to the Raad, but met with contemptuous neglect. Undeterred by this failure, the National Reform Union drew up another petition which was signed by 35,000 adult male Uitlanders, a greater number than the total Boer male population of the country. A small liberal body in the Raad supported this memorial and endeavored in vain to obtain some justice for the Uitlanders. Mr. Jeppe was the mouthpiece of this select band.

They own half the soil, they pay at least three quarters of the taxes. They are men who in capital, energy, and education are at least our equals. What will become of us or our children on that day when we may find ourselves in a minority of one in twenty without a single friend among the other nineteen, among those who will then tell us that they wished to be brothers, but that we by our own act have made them strangers to the republic?

Such reasonable and liberal sentiments were combated by members who asserted that the signatures could not belong to law-abiding citizens, since they were agitating against the law of the franchise. Others challenged the Uitlanders to come out and fight. The champions of exclusiveness and racial hatred won the day. The petition was rejected by sixteen votes to eight, and the franchise law was actually made more stringent, being framed in such a way that during the fourteen years of probation the applicant should give up his previous nationality, so that for that period he would really belong to no country at all.

No hopes were held out that the Uitlanders could soften the determination of the Boers. Anyone who remonstrated was led outside the State buildings by the President, who pointed up at the national flag. 'You see that flag?' said he. 'If I grant the franchise, I may as well pull it down.' His animosity against the immigrants was bitter. 'Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers, newcomers, and others,' was the opening of one of his public addresses.

Though Johannesburg is only thirty-two miles from Pretoria, and though the State of which he was the head depended for its revenue on the gold fields, he paid it only three visits in nine years.

This settled animosity was deplorable, but not unnatural. A man imbued with the idea of a chosen people, and unread in any book save the one which cultivates this very idea, could not be expected to have learned the historical lessons of the advantages which a State reaps from a liberal policy. To him it was as if the Ammonites and Moabites had demanded admission into the twelve tribes.[39] He mistook an agitation against the exclusive policy of the State for one against the existence of the State itself. A wide franchise would have made his republic firm-based and permanent. It was a small minority of the Uitlanders who had any desire to come into the British system. They were a cosmopolitan crowd, only united by the bond of a common injustice. But when every other method had failed, and their petition for the rights of freemen had been flung back at them, it was natural that their eyes should turn to that flag which waved to the north, the west, and the south of them--the flag which means purity of government with equal rights and equal duties for all men.[40]

Constitutional agitation was laid aside, arms were smuggled in, and everything prepared for an organized uprising. It had been arranged that the town was to rise on a certain night, that Pretoria should be attacked, the fort seized, and the rifles and ammunition used to arm the Uitlanders. It is conceivable that the rebels might have held Johannesburg until the universal sympathy which their cause excited throughout South Africa would have caused Great Britain to intervene. Unfortunately they had complicated matters by asking for outside help. Mr. Cecil Rhodes was Premier of the Cape, a man of immense energy, and one who had rendered great services to the empire. The motives of his action are obscure--certainly, we may say that they were not sordid, for he has always been a man whose thoughts were large and whose habits were simple. But whatever they may have been--whether a desire to consolidate South Africa under British rule, or a burning sympathy with the Uitlanders, it is certain that he allowed his lieutenant, Dr. Jameson, to assemble the mounted police of the Chartered Company, of which Rhodes was director for the purpose of co-operating with the rebels at Johannesburg. Moreover, when the revolt at Johannesburg was postponed, on account of a disagreement as to which flag they were to rise under, it appears that Jameson forced the hand of the conspirators by invading the country with a force absurdly inadequate to the work which he had taken in hand.

Five hundred policemen and three field guns[41] made up the forlorn force that crossed the Transvaal border on December 29th, 1895. On January 2nd they were surrounded by the Boers near Dornkop, and after losing many of their number killed and wounded they were compelled to lay down their arms. Six Boers lost their lives in the skirmish.

The Uitlanders have been severely criticized for not having sent out a force to help Jameson in his difficulties, but it is impossible to see how they could have acted in any other manner. They had done all they could to prevent Jameson coming to their relief, and now it was rather unreasonable to suppose that they should relieve their reliever. Indeed, they had an entirely exaggerated idea of the strength of the force which he was bringing, and received the news of his capture with incredulity. When it became confirmed they rose, but in a halfhearted fashion which was not due to want of courage, but to the difficulties of their position. On the one hand, the British Government disowned Jameson entirely, and did all it could to discourage the rising; on the other, the President had the raiders in his keeping at Pretoria, and let it be understood that their fate depended on the behavior of the Uitlanders. They were led to believe that Jameson would be shot unless they laid down their arms, though, as a matter of fact, Jameson and his people had surrendered on a promise of quarter. So skillfully did Kruger use his hostages that he succeeded, with the help of the British Commissioner, in getting the thousands of excited Johannesburgers to lay down their arms without bloodshed. Completely out-maneuvered by Kruger, the leaders of the reform movement used all their influence in the direction of peace, thinking a general amnesty would follow; but the moment they and their people were helpless armed Boers occupied the town, and sixty of their number were hurried to Pretoria Gaol.[42]

To the raiders themselves the President behaved with great generosity. Perhaps he could not find it in his heart to be harsh to the men who had managed to put him in the right and won for him the sympathy of the world. His own oppressive treatment of the Uitlanders was forgotten in the face of this illegal inroad of filibusters. The true issues were so obscured by this intrusion that it has taken years to clear them, and perhaps they will never be wholly cleared.

It was forgotten that it was the bad government of the country which was the real cause of the raid. From then onwards the government might grow worse and worse, but it was always possible to point to the Jameson Raid as justifying everything.

Were the Uitlanders to have the franchise? How could they expect it after the raid? Would Britain object to the enormous importation of arms and obvious preparations for war? They were only precautions against a second raid. For years the raid stood in the way of all progress. Through an action over which they had no control, and which they had done their best to prevent, the British Government was left with a weakened moral authority.

The raiders were sent home, where the rank and file were released, and the chief officers were condemned to terms of imprisonment which did not err on the side of severity. Cecil Rhodes was left unpunished, he retained his place in the Privy Council, and his Chartered Company continued to have a corporate existence. This was illogical. As Kruger said, 'It is not the dog which should be beaten, but the man who set him on to me.' It is clear that the Boers bitterly resented, and with justice, the immunity of Rhodes.

President Kruger had shown a greater severity to the prisoners from Johannesburg than to the armed followers of Jameson. The nationality of these prisoners is interesting and suggestive. There were twenty-three Englishmen, sixteen South Africans, nine Scotchmen, six Americans, two Welshmen, one Irishman, one Australian, one Hollander, one Bavarian, one Canadian, one Swiss, and one Turk. The prisoners were arrested in January, but the trial did not take place until the end of April. All were found guilty of high treason. Lionel Phillips, Colonel Rhodes (brother of Cecil Rhodes), George Farrar, and Mr. Hammond, the American engineer, were condemned to death, a sentence which was afterwards commuted to the payment of an enormous fine.

The other prisoners were condemned to two years with a fine of 2000 pounds. The imprisonment was of most arduous and trying. One of the unfortunate men cut his throat, and several fell seriously ill, the diet and the sanitary conditions being unhealthy.

Altogether the Transvaal Government received in fines from the prisoners the sum of 212,000 pounds. A certain comic relief was immediately afterwards given to so grave an episode by the presentation of a bill to Great Britain for 1,677, 938 pounds 3 shillings and 3 pence--the greater part of which was under the heading of moral and intellectual damage.

The raid was past and the reform movement was past, but the causes which produced them remained. But Paul Kruger had hardened his heart, and was not to be moved. The grievances of the Uitlanders became heavier than ever. The one power in the land to which they had been able to appeal for some sort of redress was the law courts. Now it was decreed that the courts should be dependent on the Volksraad. The Chief Justice protested against such a degradation of his high office and he was dismissed without a pension. The judge who had condemned the reformers was chosen to fill the vacancy, and the protection of a fixed law was withdrawn from the Uitlanders.

A commission appointed by the State was sent to examine the condition of the mining industry and the grievances from which the newcomers suffered. The chairman was Mr. Schalk Burger, one of the most liberal of the Boers, and the proceedings were thorough and impartial. The result was a report which amply vindicated the reformers, and suggested remedies which would have gone a long way towards satisfying the Uitlanders. But the President and his Raad would have none of the recommendations of the commission. The rugged old autocrat declared that Schalk Burger was a traitor to his country for having signed such a document, and a new committee was chosen to report on the report. Words and papers were the only outcome of the affair. No amelioration came to the Uitlanders.

But at least they had again put their case publicly on record, and it had been endorsed by the most respected of the Boers. Gradually the Jameson Raid was ceasing to obscure the issue. More and more clearly it was coming out that no permanent settlement was possible where the majority of the population was oppressed by the minority. They had tried peaceful means and failed. They had tried warlike means and failed. What was there left for them to do? Their own country, the paramount power of South Africa, had never helped them. Perhaps if it were directly appealed to it might do so. It could not, if only for the sake of its own imperial prestige, leave its children for ever in a state of subjection. The Uitlanders determined on a petition to the Queen, and in doing so they brought their grievances out of the limits of a local controversy into the broader field of international politics. Great Britain must either protect them or acknowledge that their protection was beyond her power.

A direct petition to the Queen praying for protection was signed in April 1899 by twenty-one thousand Uitlanders. From that time events moved inevitably towards the one end. Sometimes the surface was troubled and sometimes smooth, but the stream always ran swiftly and the roar of the fall sounded ever louder in the ears.

Answer these questions about this chapter in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

What is an Uitlander?
What happened in 1886 that made the situation in South Africa both more profitable and more dangerous?
Name two ways the Boers mistreated the Uitlanders?
Describe the causes and outcome of the Jamison Raid.
Why did the Boers fear giving the vote to the Uitlanders?

CHAPTER 3: THE NEGOTIATIONS

The British Government and the British people do not desire any direct authority in South Africa. Their one supreme interest is that the various states there should live in prosperity, and that there should be no need for the presence of a British redcoat within the whole peninsula.[43]

Our foreign critics, with their misapprehension of the British colonial system, can never realize that whether the four-coloured flag of the Transvaal or the Union Jack of a self-governing colony waved over the gold mines would not make the difference of one shilling to the revenue of Great Britain. The Transvaal as a British province would have its own legislature, its own revenue, its own expenditure, and its own tariff against the mother country, as well as against the rest of the world, and England would be none the richer.

Great Britain had every reason to avoid so formidable a task as the conquest of the South African Republic. At the best she had nothing to gain, and at the worst she had an immense deal to lose. There was no room for ambition or aggression. It was a case of shirking or fulfilling a most arduous duty.[44]

There could be no question of a plot for the annexation of the Transvaal. In a free country the Government cannot move in advance of public opinion, and public opinion is influenced by and reflected in the newspapers. One may examine the files of the press during all the months of negotiations and never find one reputable opinion in favor of such a course, nor did one in society ever meet an advocate of such a measure. But a great wrong was being done, and all that was asked was the minimum change which would set it right, and restore equality between the white races in Africa.

Let Kruger only be liberal in the extension of the franchise, and he will find that the power of the republic will become infinitely more secure. Let him give the majority of the resident males the full vote, and he will have given the republic a stability and power which nothing else can. If he rejects all pleas of this kind, and persists in his present policy, he may possibly preserve his cherished oligarchy for another few years; but the end will be the same.

For a year correspondence had been going on between Dr. Leyds, Secretary of State for the South African Republic, and Mr. Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, on the existence or non-existence of the suzerainty.[45]

The Transvaal contended that the substitution of a second convention had annulled the first. The British contended that the preamble of the first applied also to the second. If the Transvaal was correct Great Britain had been tricked since she had received no quid pro quo in the second convention, and even the most careless of Colonial Secretaries could hardly have been expected to give away a substantial something for nothing.

The contention throws us back on the question of what suzerainty is. The Transvaal admitted a power of veto over their foreign policy, and this admission in itself, unless they openly tore up the convention, must deprive them of the position of a sovereign State. On the whole, the question must be acknowledged to have been one which might very well have been referred to arbitration.

Now to this debate came the question of the wrongs against the Uitlanders. Sir Alfred Milner, the British Commissioner in South Africa, commanded the respect of all parties. To him the matter was referred, and a conference was arranged between himself and President Kruger at Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State. They met on May 30th.

Kruger declared that all questions might be discussed except the independence of the Transvaal, but in practice it was found that the parties could not agree as to what did or what did not threaten this independence. Milner asked for a five years' retroactive franchise, with adequate representation for the mining districts. Kruger offered a seven years' franchise, coupled with numerous conditions which whittled down its value very much, promised five members out of thirty-one to represent a majority of the male population.

The proposals of each were impossible to the other, and by June Sir Alfred Milner was back in Cape Town and President Kruger in Pretoria, with nothing settled except the extreme difficulty of a settlement. The current was running swift, and the roar of the fall was already sounding louder in the ear.[46]

On June 12^th Sir Milner reviewed the situation. ‘The principle of equality of races was,’ he said, ‘essential for South Africa.[47] The one State where inequality existed kept all the others in a fever. Our policy was one not of aggression, but of singular patience, which could not, however, lapse into indifference.’

Two days later Kruger addressed the Raad. 'The other side had not conceded one tittle, and I could not give more. God has always stood by us. I do not want war, but I will not give more away. Although our independence has once been taken away, God has restored it.' He spoke with sincerity no doubt, but it is hard to hear God invoked with such confidence for the system which encouraged the liquor traffic to the natives, and bred the most corrupt set of officials that the modern world has seen.

A dispatch from Sir Alfred Milner, giving his views on the situation, made the British public recognize how serious the position was, and how essential it was that an earnest national effort should be made to set it right. In it he said:

The case for intervention is overwhelming. The policy of leaving things alone has been tried for years, and it has led to their going from bad to worse. It is not true that this is owing to the Jamison Raid. The situation was going from bad to worse before the raid. We were on the verge of war before the raid, and the Transvaal was on the verge of revolution. The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots,[48] undermines the influence and reputation of Great Britain.

A section of theBoer press, preaches the doctrine of a republic embracing all South Africa, and supports it by references to the armaments of the Transvaal, its alliance with the Orange Free State. I regret to say that this doctrine is producing a great effect on a large number of our Dutch colonists. Language is frequently used which seems to imply that the Dutch have some superior right, even in this colony, to their fellow-citizens of British birth. Thousands of men peaceably disposed, and if left alone perfectly satisfied with their position as British subjects, are being drawn into disaffection, and there is a corresponding exasperation on the part of the British.

I can see nothing which will put a stop to this mischievous propaganda but some striking proof of the intention of her Majesty's Government not to be ousted from its position in South Africa.

Such were the grave words with which the British pro-consul warned his countrymen of what was to come. He saw the storm-cloud piling in the north, but even his eyes had not yet discerned how near and terrible was the tempest.

Throughout the end of June and the early part of July much was hoped from the mediation of the heads of the Afrikander Bond, the political union of the Dutch Cape colonists. On the one hand, they were the kinsmen of the Boers; on the other, they were British subjects, and were enjoying the blessings of those liberal institutions which we were anxious to see extended to the Transvaal. 'Only treat our folk as we treat yours! Our whole contention was compressed into that prayer.

The suggestion has been criticized as an unwarrantable intrusion into the internal affairs of the Tranvaal. But then the whole question from the beginning was about the internal affairs of the Tranvaal. It is futile to suggest analogies, and to imagine what France would do if Germany were to interfere in a question of General French franchise. Supposing that France contained as many Germans as Frenchmen, and that they were ill-treated, Germany would interfere quickly enough and continue to do so until some fair modus vivendi was established.[49]

The fact is that the case of the Transvaal stands alone and that no previous precedent can apply to it, save the general rule that a minority of white men cannot continue indefinitely to tax and govern a majority. Sentiment may incline to the smaller nation, but reason and justice are all on the side of England.

On all sides there came evidence that Boer preparations for war, which had been going on even before the Jameson raid, were now being accelerated. Enormous sums were being spent on military equipment by the Boers. Cases of rifles and boxes of cartridges streamed into the Tranvaal, not only from Delagoa Bay, but even, to the indignation of the English colonists, through Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Huge packing-cases, marked 'Agricultural Instruments' and 'Mining Machinery,' arrived from Germany to find their places in the forts of the Tranvaal. Men of many nations but of a similar type showed their martial faces in the Boer towns. The condottieri[50] of Europe were as ready as ever to sell their blood for gold.

For three weeks and more during which Mr. Kruger was silent these preparations went on. But beyond them there was one fact which dominated the situation. A burgher cannot go to war without his horse, his horse cannot move without grass, grass will not come until after rain, and it was still some weeks before the rain would be due.

Negotiations, then, must not be hurried while the veld was a bare russet-coloured dust-swept plain. Mr. Chamberlain and the British public waited week after week for their answer. But there was a limit to their patience, and it was reached on August 26th, when the Colonial Secretary showed, with a plainness of speech which was unusual in diplomacy, that the question could not be hung up for ever.

The sands are running down in the glass,' said he. 'If they run out, we shall not hold ourselves limited by that which we have already offered, but, having taken the matter in hand, we will not let it go until we have secured conditions which once for all shall establish which is the paramount power in South Africa, and shall secure for our fellow-subjects there those equal rights and equal privileges which were promised them by President Kruger when the independence of the Transvaal was granted by the Queen.

Lord Salisbury, a little time before, had been equally emphatic.

No one in this country wishes to disturb the conventions so long as it is recognized that while they guarantee the independence of the Transvaal on the one side, they guarantee equal civil rights for settlers of all nationalities on the other.

The patience of Great Britain was beginning to show signs of giving way. In the meantime a fresh dispatch arrived from the Transvaal which offered as an alternative proposal that the Boer Government should grant the franchise proposals of Sir Alfred Milner on condition that Great Britain drop her claim to a suzerainty, agree to arbitration, and promise never again to interfere in the internal affairs of the Republic. To this Great Britain answered that she would agree to arbitration, that she hoped never again to have occasion to interfere for the protection of her own subjects, but that with the grant of the franchise all occasion for such interference would pass away, and, finally, that she would never consent to abandon her position as suzerain power.

Mr. Chamberlain's dispatch ended by reminding the Government of the Transvaal that there were other matters of dispute between the two Governments apart from the franchise, and that it would be as well to have them settled at the same time. By these he meant such questions as the position of the native races and the treatment of Anglo-Indians.[51]

On September 2^nd the answer of the Transvaal Government was returned. It was short and uncompromising. They withdrew their offer of the franchise and re-asserted the non-existence of British suzerainty.

The negotiations were at a deadlock. It was difficult to see how they could be re-opened in view of the arming of the Boers.

The small British garrison of Natal had been taking up positions to cover the frontier. The Transvaal asked for an explanation of their presence. Sir Alfred Milner answered that they were guarding British interests, and preparing against contingencies. The roar of the fall was sounding loud and near.

On September 8^th a message was sent to Pretoria,[52] offering the basis for a peaceful settlement. It begins by repudiating the claim of the Transvaal to be a sovereign State in the same sense in which the Orange Free State was one. Any proposal made conditional on such an acknowledgment could not be entertained. The British Government, however, was prepared to accept the five year franchise. Acceptance of these terms would remove tension between the two Governments.

Such was the message, and Great Britain waited for the answer. But again there was a delay, while the rain came and the grass grew, and the veld was as a mounted rifleman would have it. The Boers were in no humor for concessions. They knew their own power, and they concluded with justice that they were the strongest military power in South Africa. 'We have beaten England before, but it is nothing to the licking we shall give her now,' cried a prominent citizen, and he spoke for his country as he said it.

So the British Empire waited and debated, but the sounds of the bugle were already breaking through the wrangles of politicians, and calling the nation to be tested once more by that hammer of war and adversity by which Providence fashions us to some nobler and higher end.

CHAPTER 4: THE EVE OF WAR

The message sent from the Cabinet Council of September 8^th was the precursor either of peace or of war. The cloud must either burst or blow over. As Britain waited in hushed expectancy for a reply it spent some of its time examining and speculating on those military preparations which might be needed. The War Office had made certain dispositions which appeared to them to be adequate, but which our future experience was to demonstrate to be far too small for the matter in hand.

Under July 7^th comes the first glint of arms. On that date two companies of Royal Engineers with supplies and ammunition were being dispatched. Who could have foreseen that they were the vanguard of the greatest army which has ever crossed an ocean?

The British forces in South Africa were absurdly inadequate for the defense of our frontier. Such a fact must open the eyes of those who persist that the war was forced by the British. A statesman who forces a war usually prepares for a war, and this is exactly what Mr. Kruger did and the British authorities did not. Engaland had, scattered over a huge frontier, two cavalry regiments, three field batteries, and six infantry battalions--say six thousand men. The Boers could put in the field fifty thousand mounted riflemen, whose mobility doubled their numbers, and a most excellent artillery, including the heaviest cannons which have ever been seen on a battlefield.

The Boers could have made their way easily either to Durban or to Cape Town. It is extraordinary that our authorities seem never to have contemplated the possibility of the Boers taking the initiative.

In July Natal had taken alarm and a strong representation had been sent from the prime minister of the colony to the Governor, Sir W. Hely Hutchinson. It was known that the Transvaal was armed to the teeth, that the Orange Free State was likely to join her, and that there had been strong attempts made, both privately and through the press, to alienate the loyalty of the Dutch citizens of both the British colonies.[53]

Many sinister signs were observed by those on the spot. The veld had been burned unusually early to ensure a speedy grass-crop after the first rains, there had been a collecting of horses, a distribution of rifles and ammunition. Everything pointed to approaching war, and Natal refused to be satisfied even by the dispatch of another regiment. On September 6^th a second message was received at the British Colonial Office, which states the case with great clearness.

'The Prime Minister desires me to urge on you that sufficient troops be dispatched to Natal immediately to enable the colony to be placed in a state of defense against an attack from the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. I am informed by the General Officer Commanding, Natal, that he will not have enough troops, even when the Manchester Regiment arrives, to do more than occupy Newcastle and at the same time protect the colony. Laing's Nek, Ingogo River and Zululand must be left undefended. My Ministers know that every preparation has been made, both in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which would enable an attack to be made on Natal at short notice. My Ministers believe that the Boers have made up their minds that war will take place and their best chance will be to deliver a blow before reinforcements have time to arrive. Information has been received that raids in force will be made with a view to striking the railway and cutting off communications of troops and supplies. Reliable reports have been received of attempts to tamper with loyal natives, and to set tribe against tribe in order to create confusion in the colony. Both food and warlike stores in large quantities have been accumulated at Volksrust. Persons who are believed to be spies have been seen examining the bridges on the Natal Railway.

In answer to these remonstrances the garrison of Natal was gradually increased, by troops from Europe, and India. Their arrival late in September raised the number of troops in South Africa to 22,000, a force which was inadequate to a contest in the open field, but which proved to be strong enough to stave off overwhelming disaster.

As to the disposition of these troops a difference of opinion broke out between the ruling powers in Natal and the military chiefs at the spot. Even while our papers were proclaiming that this time we would not underrate our enemy, we were most seriously underrating him.

The northern third of Natal is a vulnerable a military position. It runs up into a thin angle, culminating at the apex in a difficult pass, the Laing's Nek. Each side of this angle is open to invasion, the one from the Transvaal and the other from the Orange Free State. A force up at the apex is in a perfect trap, for the mobile enemy can flood into the country to the south of them, cut the line of supplies, and throw up a series of entrenchments which would make retreat a difficult matter.

To us, who are endowed with that profound military wisdom which only comes with a knowledge of the event, it is obvious that with a defending force which could not place more than 12,000 men in the fighting line, the true defensible frontier was the line of the Tugela River. Ladysmith was a place almost indefensible as it is dominated by high hills.

At the time the military situation was precarious. Twenty-two thousand regular troops were on the spot who might hope to be reinforced by some ten thousand colonials, but these forces had to cover a great frontier. The attitude of Cape Colony was by no means whole-hearted and might become hostile, while the black population might conceivably throw in its weight against us. Only half the regulars could be spared to defend Natal, and no reinforcements could reach them in less than a month from the outbreak of hostilities. If Mr. Chamberlain was really playing a game of bluff, it must be confessed that he was bluffing from a weak hand.

For purposes of comparison we may give some idea of the forces which Mr. Kruger and Mr. Steyn[54] could put in the field, for by this time it was evident that the Orange Free State, with which we had had no shadow of a dispute, was going to throw in its weight against us. The press estimate of the forces of the two republics varied from 25,000 to 35,000 men. It is probable, however, that the fighting strength of the Transvaal alone was 32,000 men, and of the Orange Free State 22,000. With mercenaries and rebels from the colonies they would amount to 60, 000, while a considerable rising of the Cape Dutch would bring them up to 100,000. In artillery they were known to have about a hundred guns, many of them more modern and powerful than any which we could bring against them.

Of the quality of this large force there is no need to speak. The men were brave, hardy, and fired with a strange religious enthusiasm. Mounted on their hardy little ponies, they possessed a mobility which made it an impossibility to outflank them. As marksmen they were supreme. Add to this that they had the advantage of acting on internal lines with shorter communications, and one gathers how formidable a task lay before the soldiers of the empire.[55]

When we turn from such an enumeration of their strength to contemplate the 12,000 men, split into two detachments, who awaited them in Natal, we may recognize that, far from bewailing our disasters, we should rather congratulate ourselves on our escape from losing that great province which, situated as it is between Britain, India, and Australia, must be regarded as the keystone of the imperial arch.

At the risk of a tedious but essential digression, something must be said here as to the motives with which the Boers had for many years been quietly preparing for war. There is a large body of evidence to show that into the heads of some of the Dutch leaders there had entered the conception of a single Dutch commonwealth, extending from Cape Town to the Zambesi, in which flag, speech, and law should all be Dutch. They all aimed at one end, and that end was the final expulsion of British power from South Africa and the formation of a single large Dutch republic.[56]

The large sum spent by the Transvaal in secret service money would give some idea of the subterranean influences at work. An army of agents, and spies were certainly spread over the British colonies. Newspapers were subsidized also, and considerable sums spent on the press in France and Germany.

In the nature of things a huge conspiracy of this sort to substitute Dutch for British rule in South Africa is not a matter which can be definitely proved. Such questions are not discussed in public documents. But there is plenty of evidence of the ambition of prominent men in this direction. Mr. J.P. FitzPatrick, in 'The Transvaal from Within' narrates how in 1896 he was approached by Mr. D.P. Graaff, formerly a member of the Cape Legislative Council, with the proposition that Great Britain should be pushed out of South Africa. The same politician made the same proposal to Mr. Beit. Compare with this the following statement of Mr. Theodore Schreiner, the brother of the Prime Minister of the Cape:

'I met Mr. Reitz, then a judge of the Orange Free State eighteen years ago. It must be patent to every one that at that time England had no intention of taking away the independence of the Transvaal, for she had just "magnanimously" granted the same; no intention of making war on the republics, for she had just made peace; no intention to seize the Rand gold fields, for they were not yet discovered. Mr. Reitz did his best to get me to become a member of his Afrikander Bond, but, after studying its constitution, I refused to do so, whereupon the following colloquy took place between us:

'REITZ: Why do you refuse? Is the object of getting the people to take an interest in political matters not a good one?

'MYSELF: Yes, it is but I see quite clearly that the ultimate object aimed at is the overthrow of the British power and the expulsion of the British flag from South Africa.

'REITZ: Well, what if it is so?

'MYSELF: You don't suppose, do you, that flag is going to disappear from South Africa without a tremendous struggle?

'REITZ: Well, I suppose not; but even so, what of that?

'MYSELF: Only this, that when that struggle takes place you and I will be on opposite sides; and what is more, the God who was on the side of the Transvaal in the late war, because it had right on its side will be on the side of England, because He must view with abhorrence any plotting and scheming to overthrow her power and position in South Africa, which have been ordained by Him.

'Thus the conversation ended, but during the seventeen years that have elapsed I have watched the propaganda for the overthrow of British power in South Africa being ceaselessly spread by every possible means--the press, the pulpit, the schools, the Legislature--until it culminated in the present war, of which Mr. Reitz and his co-workers are the cause.'

Compare with these utterances of a Dutch politician of the Cape, and of a Dutch politician of the Orange Free State, the following passage from a speech delivered by Kruger in the year 1887:

'I think it too soon to speak of a United South Africa under one flag. Which flag was it to be? The Queen of England would object to having her flag hauled down, and we, the burghers of the Transvaal, to hauling ours down. What is to be done? We are now small and of little importance, but we are growing, and are preparing the way to take our place among the great nations of the world.'

'The dream of our life,' said another, 'is a union of the States of South Africa, and this has to come from within, not from without. When that is accomplished, South Africa will be great.'

The fairest and most unbiased historian cannot dismiss the conspiracy as a myth. And to this one may retort, why should they not conspire? Why should they not have their own views as to the future of South Africa? Why should they not endeavor to have one universal flag? Why should they not win over our colonists, if they can, and push us into the sea?

I see no reason why they should not. Let them try if they will. And let us try to prevent them. But let us have an end of talk about British aggression, of capitalist designs on the gold fields, of the wrongs of a pastoral people, and all the other veils which have been used to cover the issue. Let those who talk about British designs on the republics turn their attention for a moment to the evidence which there is for republican designs on the colonies. Let them reflect that in the one system all white men are equal, and that on the other the minority of one race has persecuted the majority of the other, and let them consider under which the truest freedom lies, which stands for universal liberty and which for reaction and racial hatred. Let them ponder and answer all this before they determine where their sympathies lie.

Leaving these wider questions of politics and dismissing for the time those military considerations which were soon to be of such vital moment, we may now return to the diplomatic struggle between the Transvaal and the British. On September 8th a final message was sent to Pretoria, which stated the minimum terms which the British Government could accept as being a fair. A definite answer was demanded, and the nation waited with somber patience for the reply.

There were few illusions as to the difficulties of a Transvaal war. It was clearly seen that little honor and immense vexation were in store for us. The first Boer war still smarted in our minds, and we knew the prowess of the Boers. But our people were none the less resolute, for that national instinct which is beyond the wisdom of statesmen had borne it in on them that this was no local quarrel, but one on which the whole existence of the empire hung. The cohesion of that empire was to be tested. Men had emptied their glasses to it in time of peace. Were they ready to pour their hearts' blood in time of war? Had we really founded a series of disconnected nations, with no common sentiment or interest, or was the empire an organic whole, as ready to harden into one resolve as the United States of America?[57]

Already there were indications that the colonies appreciated the fact that the contention was no affair of the mother country alone, but that she was upholding the rights of the empire as a whole, and might fairly look to them to support her in any quarrel which might arise from it. As early as July 11th, Queensland had offered a contingent of infantry with machine guns; New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia followed. Canada, with the strong but more deliberate spirit of the north, was the last to speak, but spoke the more firmly for the delay. Her citizens were the least concerned of any. None the less, she cheerfully took her share of the common burden.

From all the men of many hues who make up the British Empire, from Hindoo Rajahs, from West African Houssas, from Malay police, from Western Indians, there came offers of service. But this was to be a white man's war, and if the British could not work out their own salvation then it were well that empire should pass from such a race. The magnificent Indian army of 150,000 soldiers, many of them seasoned veterans, was for the same reason left untouched.

On September 18^th the official reply of the Boer Government to the message sent from the British Cabinet was published in London. It was a complete rejection of all British demands. It refused to recommend to the Raad the five years' franchise.

The British Government stated in their last dispatch that if the reply should be negative they reserved the right to reconsider the situation and to formulate their own proposals for a final settlement. The reply had been both negative and on September 22^nd a council met to determine what the next message should be. It was short and firm, but so planned as not to shut the door on peace. Its purport was that the British Government expressed regret at the rejection of the proposals and they would shortly put forward their own plans for a settlement.

In the meantime, on September 21st the Raad of the Orange Free State met, and it became more and more evident this republic, with whom we had no quarrel, intended to throw its weight against Great Britain. An alliance had been concluded between the Transvaal and the Orange Free State which must appear to have been a singularly rash and unprofitable bargain for the Orange Free State. She had nothing to fear from Great Britain, since she had been voluntarily turned into an independent republic and had lived in peace with her for forty years. Her laws were as liberal as our own. But by this suicidal treaty she agreed to share the fortunes of a State which was deliberately courting war. The tone of President Steyn at the meeting of the Raad, and the support which he received from the majority of his Boers, showed unmistakably that the two republics would act as one. In his opening speech Steyn declared that his State was bound to the Transvaal by everything which was near and dear.

Sir Milner communicated to President Steyn that there was no cause to disturb the good relations between the Free State and Great Britain. We were animated by the most friendly intentions towards them. To this the President returned a somewhat ungracious answer, to the effect that he disapproved of our action towards the Transvaal, and that he regretted the movement of troops, which would be considered a menace by the Boers.

Among the military precautions which could no longer be neglected by the British was the sending of some small force to protect the long line of railway which lies just outside the Transvaal border from Kimberley to Rhodesia.

Everywhere came the news of martial preparations. At the end of September armed Boers were gathering on the frontier, and the most incredulous were beginning at last to understand that the shadow of a great war was really falling across them. Artillery, munitions, and stores were being accumulated at Volksrust on the Natal border, showing where the storm might be expected to break. Twenty-six military trains were reported to have left Pretoria for that point. At the same time news came of a concentration on the Bechuanaland border, threatening the railway line and the British town of Mafeking.

On October 3rd there occurred what was in truth an act of war, although the British Government refused to regard it as such. The mail train from the Transvaal to Cape Town was stopped at Vereeniging, and the week's shipment of gold for England, amounting to about half a million pounds, was taken by the Boer Government. In a debate at Cape Town on the same day the Afrikaner Minister of the Interior admitted that as many as 404 trucks had passed from the Government line over the frontier and had not been returned. Taken in conjunction with the passage of arms and cartridges through the Cape to Pretoria this incident aroused the deepest indignation among the Colonial English and the British public. The Raads had been dissolved, and the old President's last words had been a statement that war was certain, and a stern invocation of the Lord as final arbiter.

On October 9th the proceedings of the British Colonial Office were brought to a head by the arrival of an unexpected ultimatum from the Boer Government. The document was firm and explicit, but the terms were so impossible that it was evidently framed with the deliberate purpose of forcing war. It demanded that the troops on the borders of the republic should be withdrawn, that all reinforcements which had arrived within the last year should leave South Africa, and that those who were now on the sea should be sent back without being landed. Failing a satisfactory answer within forty-eight hours, 'the Transvaal Government will with great regret be compelled to regard the action of her Majesty's Government as a formal declaration of war, for the consequences of which it will not hold itself responsible.' The audacious message was received throughout the empire with a mixture of derision and anger. The answer was dispatched next day through Sir Alfred Milner.

10th October.--Her Majesty's Government have received with great regret the demands of the Government of the South African Republic. You will inform the Government of the South African Republic that the conditions demanded by the Government of the South African Republic are impossible to discuss.

And so we have come to the end of the long road, past the battle of the pens and the wrangling of tongues, to the arbitration of the Lee-Metford and the Mauser.[58]

It was pitiable that it should come to this. These people (the Boers) were as near akin to us as any race . They were of the same stock which peopled our own shores. In habit of mind, in religion, in respect for law, they were as ourselves. Brave they were and hospitable, with those instincts dear to the Anglo-Celtic race. There was no people in the world who had more qualities which we might admire, and not the least of them was that love of independence which it is our proudest boast that we have encouraged in others as well as exercised ourselves. And yet we had come to this pass, that there was no room in all South Africa for both of us.

We cannot hold ourselves blameless in the matter. 'The evil that men do lives after them,' and it has been told in this small sketch where we have erred in the past in South Africa. On our hands is the Jameson Raid, carried out by Englishmen and led by officers who held the Queen's Commission. These are matches which helped to set the great blaze alight, and it is we who held them. But the fagots which proved to be so inflammable were not all of our setting. They were the wrongs done to half the community, the settled resolution of the minority to tax and vex the majority, the determination of a people who had lived two generations in a country to claim that country entirely for themselves. Behind them all there may have been the Dutch ambition to dominate South Africa. It was no petty object for which Britain fought. When a nation struggles uncomplainingly through months of disaster she may claim to have proved her conviction of the justice and necessity of the struggle. Should Dutch ideas or English ideas of government prevail throughout that huge country? The one means freedom for a single race, the other means equal rights to all white men beneath one common law.

This was the main issue to be determined from the instant the clock struck five on the afternoon of October the eleventh, 1899. That moment marked the opening of a war destined to determine the fate of South Africa, to work great changes in the British Empire, to seriously affect the future history of the world, and incidentally to alter many of our views as to the art of war. It is the story of this war which, with limited material but with much aspiration to care and candor, I shall now endeavor to tell.

Answer these questions about this chapter in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

How did the Boers feel about the Uitlanders?
What effect of climate and geography caused the Boers to delay the war?
According to Doyle, what was one possible Boer goal for the war? What did the Boers hope of accomplish if they won?
Forgetting the Transvaal for a moment, why did the Orange Free State go to war with Great Britain?
Who was the president of the Orange Free State?

CHAPTER 5: The Battle of TALANA HILL

It was on the morning of October 12th, 1899, amid cold and mist that the Boers rode to the war. Some twelve thousand of them, all mounted, with two batteries of eight Krupp guns each. It was an hour before dawn that the guns started, and the riflemen followed close behind. A spectator on the occasion says of them: 'Their faces were a study. For the most part the expression worn was one of determination. No sign of fear there. Whatever else may be laid to the charge of the Boer, it may never be said that he is a coward.' The words were written early in the campaign, and the whole empire will endorse them today. Could we have such men as willing fellow-citizens, they are worth more than all the gold mines of their country.

This main Transvaal body consisted of the command of Pretoria, which comprised 1800 men, an excellent and highly organized body who were provided with the best guns that have ever been brought on to a battlefield. Besides their sixteen Krupps, they dragged with them two heavy six-inch Creusot cannons, which were destined to have a very important effect in the earlier part of the campaign. In addition to these native forces there were a certain number of European auxiliaries. The greater part of the German corps were with the Free State forces, but a few hundred came down from the north. There was a Hollander corps of about two hundred and fifty and an Irish--or perhaps more properly an Irish-American-corps of the same number, who rode under the green flag and the harp.

The men might, by all accounts, be divided into two different types. There were the town Boers, smartened and perhaps a little enervated by prosperity and civilization, men of business, more alert and quicker than their rustic comrades. These men spoke English rather than Dutch. But the others, the most formidable both in their numbers and in their primitive qualities, were the back-veld Boers, the sunburned, full-bearded farmers, men of the Bible and the rifle, imbued with the traditions of guerrilla warfare. These were perhaps the finest natural warriors on earth, marksmen, hunters, accustomed to hard fare and a harder couch. They were rough in their ways and speech, but, in spite of many calumnies and some few unpleasant truths, they might compare with most disciplined armies in their humanity and their desire to observe the usages of war.

A few words here as to the man who led this singular host. Piet Joubert was a Cape Colonist by birth--a fellow countryman, like Kruger himself, of those whom the narrow laws of his new country persisted in regarding as outside the pale. He came from that French Huguenot blood which has strengthened and refined every race which it has touched, and from it he derived a chivalry and generosity which made him respected and liked even by his opponents. In many native broils and in the British campaign of 1881 he had shown himself a capable leader. Tall and burly, with hard grey eyes and a grim mouth half hidden by his bushy beard, he was a fine type of the men whom he led. He was now in his sixty-fifth year, and the fire of his youth had, as some of the Boers urged, died down within him; but he was experienced, crafty, and warwise, never dashing and never brilliant, but slow, steady, solid, and inexorable.

Besides this northern army there were two other bodies of Boers converging on Natal. One, consisting of the commandoes from Utrecht and the Swaziland districts, had gathered at Vryheid on the flank of the British position at Dundee. The other not less than seven thousand men were from the Orange Free State. The total force may have been between twenty and thirty thousand men. By all accounts they were of an astonishingly high heart, convinced that a path of easy victory lay before them, and that nothing could bar their way to the sea.

A few words now as to the disposition of the British forces, concerning which it must be borne in mind that General George White, though in actual command, had only been a few days in the country before war was declared, so that the arrangements fell to General Penn Symons.

The main position was at Ladysmith, but an advance post was held at Glencoe, which was five miles from Dundee and forty from Ladysmith. The reason for this dangerous division of force was to secure each end of the Biggarsberg railway.

The positions chosen seem to show that the British commander was not aware of the number and power of the Boer cannons, for each was vulnerable to an artillery attack. In the case of Glencoe it was particularly evident that cannons on the hills above would render the British position untenable. Altogether the Glencoe camp contained some four thousand men.

The main body of the British army remained at Ladysmith. The whole force, some eight or nine thousand strong, was under the command of Sir George White, with Sir Archibald Hunter, General French, and General Ian Hamilton as his lieutenants.

The first shock of the Boers, then, must fall on 4000 men. If these could be overwhelmed, there were 8000 more to be defeated or masked. Then what was there between them and the sea? Some detachments of local volunteers, the Durban Light Infantry at Colenso, and the Natal Royal Rifles, with some naval volunteers at Estcourt.

With the power of the Boers and their mobility it is inexplicable how the colony was saved. We are of the same blood, the Boers and we, and we show it in our failings. Over-confidence on our part gave them the chance, and over-confidence on theirs prevented them from instantly availing themselves of it. It passed, never to come again.

The outbreak of war was on October 11^th. On the 12^th the Boer forces crossed the frontier on the north and on the west. On the 13^th they occupied Charlestown at the top angle of Natal. On the 15^th they reached Newcastle, a larger town some fifteen miles inside the border. Watchers from the houses saw six miles of canvas-tilted Boer wagons winding down the passes, and learned that this was not a raid but an invasion. At the same date news reached the British headquarters of an advance from the western passes, and of a movement from the Buffalo River on the east. On the 15^th six of the Natal Police were surrounded and captured. On the 18^th our cavalry patrols came into touch with the Boer scouts, these being the voortrekkers of the Orange Free State. The cloud was drifting up, and it could not be long before it would burst.

Two days later, on the early morning of October 20^th, the forces came at last into collision. At half-past three in the morning, well before daylight, a mounted infantry picket was fired into by the Doornberg command. Two companies of the Dublin Fusiliers were sent out, and at five o'clock the whole of Symons's force was under arms with the knowledge that the Boers were pushing towards them. The khaki-clad lines of fighting men stood in their long thin ranks staring up at the curves of the hills to the north and east of them, and straining their eyes to catch a glimpse of the enemy. In a hollow on one flank were the 18th Hussars and the mounted infantry. On the other were the eighteen motionless guns, limbered up and ready, the horses fidgeting and stamping in the raw morning air.

And then suddenly--could that be they? An officer with a telescope stared intently and pointed. Another and another turned a steady field glass towards the same place. And then the men could see also, and a little murmur of interest ran down the ranks.

Talana Hill stretched away in front of them. At the summit it rose into a rounded crest. The mist was clearing, and the curve was hard-outlined against the morning sky. On this, some three miles off, a little group of black dots had appeared. They clustered into a knot then opened again. There had been no smoke, but there came a long crescendo hoot, rising into a shrill wail. The shell hummed over the British soldiers like a great bee, and sloshed into soft earth behind them, then another and yet another, but there was no time to heed them, for there was the hillside and there the enemy.

So at it again with the good old murderous obsolete heroic tactics of the British tradition! There are times when, in spite of science and book-lore, the best plan is the boldest plan, and it is well to fly straight at your enemy's throat, facing the chance that your strength may fail before you can grasp it. The cavalry moved off round the enemy's left flank. The guns dashed to the front, unlimbered, and opened fire. The infantry were moved round in the direction of Sandspruit, passing through the little town of Dundee, where the women and children came to the doors and windows to cheer them. It was thought that the hill was more accessible from that side. The Leicesters and one field battery were left behind to protect the camp. At seven in the morning all was ready for the British assault.

Two military facts of importance had already been disclosed. One was that the Boer percussion-shells were useless in soft ground, as hardly any of them exploded; the other that the Boer guns could outrange our fifteen-pounder field gun, which had been the one thing perhaps in the whole British equipment on which we were prepared to pin our faith.

At 7:30 the British infantry were ordered to advance. The Dublin Fusiliers formed the first line. The first thousand yards of the advance were over open grassland, where the range was long, and the yellow brown of the khaki blended with the withered veld. There were few casualties until the wood was reached, which lay halfway up the long slope of the hill. On the left side of this wood there stretched a long hollow, which ran perpendicular to the hill, and served more as a conductor of bullets than as a cover. So severe was the fire at this point that the British troops lay down to avoid it.

The gallant Symons, who had refused to dismount, was shot through the stomach and fell from his horse mortally wounded. With an excessive gallantry, he had not only attracted the enemy's fire by retaining his horse, but he had been accompanied throughout the action by an orderly bearing a red pennon. 'Have they got the hill? Have they got the hill?' was his one eternal question as they carried him dripping to the rear.

In the shelter of the wood the more eager of the three battalions pressed to the front until the fringe of the trees was lined by men from all of them. So hot was the fire that for a time the advance was brought to a standstill, but the 69th battery, firing shrapnel at a range of 1400 yards, subdued the Boer rifle fire, and about half-past eleven the British infantry was able to push on once more.[59]

Above the wood there was an open space some hundreds of yards across, bounded by a rough stone wall built for herding cattle. A second wall ran at right angles to this down towards the wood. An enfilading rifle fire had been sweeping across this open space, but the wall in front was not occupied by the enemy, who held the kopje above it. To avoid the cross fire the soldiers ran in single file under the shelter of the wall, which covered them to the right, and so reached the other wall across their front. Here there was a second delay, the men dribbling up from below, and firing over the top of the wall and between the chinks of the stones.

The air was so full of bullets that it seemed impossible to live on the other side of this shelter. Two hundred yards intervened between the wall and the crest of the kopje.[60] And yet the kopje had to be cleared if the battle were to be won.

Out of the huddled line of crouching men an officer sprang shouting, and a score of soldiers vaulted over the wall and followed at his heels. It was Captain Connor, of the Irish Fusiliers, but his personal magnetism carried up with him some of the Rifles as well as men of his own command. He and half his little forlorn hope were struck down--he, alas! to die the same night--but there were other leaders as brave to take his place. 'Forrard away, men, forward away!' cried Nugent, of the Rifles. Three bullets struck him, but he continued to drag himself up the hill. Others followed. From all sides they came running. For a time they were beaten down by their own shrapnel striking into them from behind.

It was here, between the wall and the summit, that Colonel Gunning, of the Rifles, and many other brave men met their end, some by our own bullets and some by those of the enemy, but the Boers thinned away in front of them, and the onlookers from the plain below saw the waving helmets on the crest, and learned at last that all was well.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory.[61] We had our hill, but what else had we? The Boer cannons had been removed from the kopje. It is probable that there were not more than a thousand Boer combatants on the hill. Of this number about fifty were killed and a hundred wounded. The British loss at Talana Hill itself was 41 killed and 180 wounded, but among the killed were many whom the army could ill spare. The loss of officers was out of all proportion to that of the men.[62]

An incident which occurred immediately after the action did much to rob the British of the fruits of the victory. Our artillery had pushed up the hill and had unlimbered on Smith's Nek, from which the enemy, in broken groups of 50 and 100, could be seen streaming away. A fairer chance for the use of shrapnel has never been. But at this instant there ran from an old church, which had been used all day as a Boer hospital, a man with a white flag. It is probable that the action was in good faith, and that it was simply intended to claim a protection for the ambulance party which followed him. But the too confiding gunner in command appears to have thought that an armistice had been declared, and held his hand during those precious minutes which might have turned a defeat into a rout. The chance passed, never to return. The double error of firing into our own advance and of failing to fire into the enemy's retreat makes the battle one which cannot be looked back to with satisfaction by our gunners.

In the meantime some miles away another train of events had led to a complete disaster to our small cavalry force--a disaster which robbed our dearly bought victory of much of its importance. That action alone was undoubtedly a victorious one, but the net result of the day's fighting cannot be said to have been certainly in our favor. It was Wellington[63] who asserted that his cavalry always got him into scrapes, and the whole of British military history might furnish examples of what he meant. Here again our cavalry got into trouble.

One company of mounted infantry had been told to form an escort for the British cannons. The rest of the mounted infantry with part of the 18th Hussars had moved round the right flank until they reached the right rear of the enemy. Such a movement was obviously taking a grave risk to allow the cavalry to wander too far from support. They were soon entangled in broken country and attacked by superior numbers of the Boers. There was a time when they might have exerted an important influence on the action by attacking the Boer ponies behind the hills, but the opportunity was allowed to pass.

An attempt was made to get back to the army, and a series of defensive positions were held to cover the retreat, but the enemy's fire became too hot to allow them to be retained. Every route save one appeared to be blocked, so the horsemen took this, which led them into the heart of a second command of the enemy. Finding no way through, the force took up a defensive position, part of them in a farm and part on a kopje which overlooked it.

The party consisted of two troops of British Hussars[64] and two companies of mounted infantry of the Dublin Fusiliers,[65] about two hundred men in all. They were subjected to hot fire for some hours, many being killed and wounded. Guns were brought up by the Boers and fired into the farmhouse. At 4:30 the British force, being in a hopeless position, laid down their arms. Their ammunition was gone and they were hemmed in by superior numbers so not the slightest slur can rest on the survivors for their decision to surrender, though the movements which brought them to such a pass are more open to criticism.

The battle of Talana Hill was a tactical victory but a strategic defeat. It was a crude frontal attack without any attempt at even a feint of flanking,[66] but the valor of the troops, from general to private, carried it through.

Despite the victory the British army was in a poor position. From all points Boer commandoes were converging on it. At four in the afternoon a heavy Boer gun opened from a distant hill, beyond the extreme range of our artillery, and plumped shell after shell into our camp. It was the first appearance of the great Creusot.[67]

An officer with several men of the Leicesters, and some of our few remaining cavalry, were hit. The British position was clearly impossible, so at two in the morning of the 22^nd the British army moved south of the town of Dundee.

The command had fallen to Colonel Yule, who believed his men were dangerously exposed, and that the correct strategy was to fall back and join the main army at Ladysmith, even at the cost of abandoning the two hundred sick and wounded who lay with General Symons in the hospital at Dundee. It was a painful necessity, but no one who studies the situation can have any doubt of its wisdom. The retreat was no easy task, a march by road of some sixty or seventy miles through a rough country with an enemy pressing on every side. Its successful completion without any loss or any demoralization of the troops is perhaps as fine a military exploit as any of our early victories.

On October 26 they marched, sodden with rain, plastered with mud, dog-tired, but in the best of spirits, into Ladysmith amid the cheers of their comrades. A battle, six days without sleep, four days without a proper meal, winding up with a single march of thirty-two miles over heavy ground and through a pelting rain storm--that was the record of the Dundee column.

They had fought and won, they had striven and toiled to the utmost capacity of manhood, and the end of it all was that they had reached the spot which they should never have left. But their endurance could not be lost--no worthy deed is ever lost. Like the Light Brigade[68] they leave a memory and a standard behind them which is more important than success. It is by the tradition of such sufferings and such endurance that others in other days are nerved to do the like.

Answer these questions about this chapter in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

Where did the Boers attack first?
Who was the commanding general in charge of the British troops in South Africa?
How did the British underestimate the Boers?
What made the Boer soldiers so deadly?
Which side won the Battle of Talana Hill?

CHAPTER 6: The Battle of ELANDSLAAGTE

While the Glencoe force had struck furiously at the Boer army its comrades at Ladysmith had drawn off the attention of the enemy and kept the line of retreat open.

On October 20^th the same day as the Battle of Talana Hill--the line was cut by the Boers at a point midway between Dundee and Ladysmith. A small body of horsemen were the forerunners of a considerable Boer Army who had advanced into Natal under the command of General Koch. They had with them two Maxim-Nordenfelds cannons.

On the evening of that day General French, with a strong reconnoitering party had defined the enemy's position. On the next morning he returned, but either the Boers had been reinforced during the night or he had underrated them the day before, for the force which he took with him was too weak for any serious attack. He had one battery of the Natal artillery, with their little seven-pounder popguns, five squadrons of the Imperial Horse and in the train which slowly accompanied his advance, half a battalion of the Manchester Regiment. Elated by the news of Talana Hill the little force moved out of Ladysmith in the early morning.

It was about eight o'clock on a bright summer morning that the small British force came in contact with a few scattered Boer outposts, who retired before the British Imperial Light Horse.

Down at the red brick railway station the Boers could be seen swarming out of the buildings in which they had spent the night. The little Natal guns, firing with obsolete black powder, threw a few shells into the station, one of which, it is said, penetrated a Boer ambulance which could not be seen by the gunners. The accident was to be regretted, but as no patients could have been in the ambulance the mischance was not a serious one.

But the busy, smoky little seven-pounder guns were soon to meet their master. Away up on the distant hillside, a thousand yards beyond their furthest range, there was a sudden bright flash. No smoke, only the throb of flame, and then the long sibilant scream of the shell, and the thud as it buried itself in the ground. Bang came another, and another, and another, right into the heart of the battery. The six little guns lay back at their extremist angle, and all barked together in impotent fury. Another shell pitched over them, and the officer in command lowered his field-glass in despair as he saw his own shells bursting far short on the hillside.

General French’s soon came to the conclusion that if those fifteen-pounders desired target practice they should find some other mark than the Natal Field Artillery. A few curt orders and his whole force was making its way to the rear.

There, out of range of those perilous guns, they halted, the telegraph wire was cut, a telephone attachment was made, and General French whispered his troubles into the sympathetic ear of Ladysmith. He did not whisper in vain. What he had to say was that where he had expected a few hundred riflemen he found something like two thousand, and that where he expected no guns he found two excellent ones. The reply was that by road and by rail as many men as could be spared were on their way to join him.

Soon they began to drop in, those useful reinforcements--first the Devons, quiet, business-like, reliable; then the Gordons, dashing, fiery, brilliant. Two squadrons of the 5th Lancers, the 42nd R.F.A., another squadron of Lancers, a squadron of the 5th Dragoon Guards--General French began to feel that he was strong enough for the task in front of him. He had a decided superiority of numbers and of guns. But the Boers were on their favorite defensive position, on a hill. It would be a deadly fight.

It was late after noon before the advance began. It was hard, among those billowing hills, to make out the exact limits of the enemy's position. All that was certain was that they were there, and that we meant having them out if it were humanly possible. 'The enemy are there,' said Ian Hamilton to his infantry; 'I hope you will shift them out before sunset--in fact I know you will.' The men cheered and laughed. In long open lines they advanced across the veld, while the thunder of the two batteries behind them told the Boer gunners that it was their turn now to know what it was to be outmatched.

The idea was to take the Boer position by a front and a flank attack, but there seems to have been some difficulty in determining which was the front and which the flank. General White with his staff had arrived from Ladysmith, but refused to take the command out of General French's hands. It is typical of White's chivalrous spirit that he refused to identify himself with a victory when it was within his right to do so, and took responsibility for a disaster at which he was not present. For now he rode amid the shells and watched the dispositions of his lieutenant.

About half-past three the action had fairly begun. In front of the advancing British there lay a rolling hill, topped by a further one. The lower hill was not defended, and the infantry advanced over it. Beyond was a broad grassy valley which led up to the main position, a long kopje flanked by a small sugar-loaf one behind the green slope which led to the ridge of death.

The men pressed on in silence, the soft thudding of their feet and the rattle of their sidearms filling the air with a low and continuous murmur. An additional solemnity was given to the attack by that huge black cloud which hung before them.

The British cannons had opened at a range of 4400 yards, and now there came the quick smokeless Boer reply. It was an unequal fight, but gallantly sustained. A shot and another to find the range; then a wreath of smoke from a bursting shell exactly where the guns had been, followed by another and another. Overmatched, the two Boer pieces relapsed into a sulky silence. The British cannons turned their attention away from them, and began to search the ridge with shrapnel and prepare the way for the advancing British infantry.

The scheme was that the Devonshires should hold the Boer in front while the main attack from the left flank was carried out by the Gordons, the Manchesters, and the Imperial Light Horse. The words 'front' and 'flank,' however, cease to have any meaning with so mobile and elastic a force as the Boers and the attack, which was intended to come from the left, became a frontal one, while the Devons found themselves on the right flank of the Boers.

At the moment of the advance a torrent of rain lashed into the faces of the men. Slipping and sliding on the wet grass, they advanced to the assault. And now amid the hissing of the rain there came the fuller, more menacing whine of the Mauser bullets, and the ridge rattled from end to end with the rifle fire. Men fell fast, but their comrades pressed hotly on. There was a long way to go, for the summit of the position was nearly 800 feet above the level of the railway. The hillside, which had appeared to be one slope, was really a succession of undulations, so that the advancing infantry alternately dipped into shelter and emerged into a hail of bullets. The line of advance was dotted with khaki-clad figures, some still in death, some writhing in their agony.

Amid the litter of bodies a major of the Gordons, shot through the leg, sat philosophically smoking his pipe. Plucky Colonel Chisholm, of the Imperials, had fallen with two mortal wounds as he dashed forward waving a coloured sash in the air. So long was the advance and so trying the hill that the men sank panting on the ground, and took their breath before making another rush.

Men of the Manchesters, Gordons, and Imperial Light Horse surged upwards in one long ragged fringe, Scotchman, Englishman, and British Afrikaner keeping pace in that race of death. And now at last they began to see their enemy. Here and there among the boulders in front of them was the glimpse of a slouched hat, or a flushed bearded face which drooped over a rifle barrel. There was a pause, and then with a fresh impulse the British gathered themselves together and flung themselves forward.

Dark figures sprang up from the rocks in front. Some held up their rifles in token of surrender. Some ran with heads sunk between their shoulders, jumping and ducking among the rocks. The panting breathless climbers were on the edge of the plateau. There were the two guns which had flashed so brightly, silenced now, with a litter of dead gunners around them and one wounded officer standing by a trail.

A small body of the Boers resisted. Their appearance horrified our men. 'They were dressed in black coats and looked like seedy business men. It seemed like murder to kill them.'

Their leader Koch, an old gentleman with a white beard, lay amidst the rocks, wounded in three places. He was treated with all courtesy and attention, but died in Ladysmith Hospital some days afterwards.

In the meanwhile the Devonshire Regiment had waited until the attack had developed and had then charged the hill on the flank, while the artillery moved up until it was within 2000 yards of the enemy's position. The Devons met with a less resistance than the others, and swept up to the summit in time to head off some of the fugitives. The whole of our infantry were now on the ridge.

But even so these dour fighters were not beaten. They clung desperately to the further edges of the plateau, firing from behind the rocks. There had been a race for the nearest gun between an officer of the Manchesters and a drummer sergeant of the Gordons. The officer won, and sprang in triumph on to the piece.

Men of all regiments swarmed round yelling and cheering, when on their astonished ears there sounded the 'Cease fire' and then the 'Retire.' It was incredible, and yet it pealed out again, unmistakable in its urgency. With the instinct of discipline the men were slowly falling back. And then the truth of it came on the minds of some of them. The crafty enemy had learned our bugle calls. 'Retire be damned shrieked a little bugler, and blew the 'Advance' with all the breath that the hillside had left him.[69]

The men, who had retired a hundred yards flooded back over the plateau, and in the Boer camp which lay beneath it a white flag showed that the game was up. A squadron of the 5^th Lancers and of the 5^th Dragoon Guards, under Colonel Gore of the latter regiment, had prowled round the base of the hill, and in the fading light they charged through the retreating Boers, killing several, and making from twenty to thirty prisoners. It was one of the few occasions in the war where the mounted Briton overtook the mounted Boer. On the whole, this brilliant little action may be said to have shown that, brave as the Boers were there is no military feat within their power which is not equally possible to the British.

We had more to show for our victory than for the previous one at Dundee. The two captured Boer Maxim-Nordenfeld cannons were a welcome addition to our artillery. Two hundred and fifty Boers were killed and wounded and about two hundred taken prisoners. Our own casualty list consisted of 41 killed and 220 wounded.

In the hollow where the Boer tents had stood, amid the wagons of the vanquished and a constant drizzle of rain, the victors spent the night. Sleep was out of the question, for all night the wounded were being carried in. Camp-fires were lit and soldiers and prisoners crowded round them, and it is pleasant to recall that the warmest corner and the best of their rude fare were always reserved for the downcast Boers, while words of rude praise and sympathy softened the pain of defeat. It is the memory of such things which may in happier days be more potent than all the wisdom of statesmen in welding our two races into one.

Having cleared the Boer force from the line of the railway, it is evident that General White could not continue to garrison the point, as he was aware that considerable forces were moving from the north, and his first duty was the security of Ladysmith. Early next morning (October 22nd), therefore, his weary but victorious troops returned to Ladysmith.

CHAPTER 7: THE FIRST BATTLE OF LADYSMITH and Nicholson's Nek

Sir George White found himself in command of a formidable little army some twelve thousand in number with six batteries of excellent field artillery. No general could have asked for a more compact and workmanlike little force.

It had been recognized by the British General from the beginning that his tactics must be defensive, since he was largely outnumbered and since also any considerable mishap to his force would expose the whole colony of Natal to destruction. The Battle of Elandslaagte was forced on him in order to disengage his compromised detachment, but now there was no longer any reason why he should assume the offensive. He knew that out on the Atlantic a trail of British transports were drawing near, with an army from England. In a fortnight or less the first of them would be at Durban. It was his game, therefore, to keep his army intact, and to let those whirling propellers do the work of the empire. Had he entrenched himself up to his nose and waited, it would have paid him best in the end.

But so tame and inglorious a policy is impossible to a fighting soldier. He could not with his splendid force permit himself to be shut in without an action. What policy demands honor may forbid. On October 27^th there were Boers on every side of him. Joubert with his main body was moving across from Dundee. The Freestaters were to the north and west. Their combined numbers were uncertain but it was proved that they were more numerous and more formidable than had been anticipated. We had had a taste of their artillery also, and the pleasant delusion that it would be a mere useless encumbrance to a Boer force had vanished for ever. It was a grave thing to leave the town in order to give battle, for the mobile enemy might swing round and seize it behind us. Nevertheless White determined to make the venture.[70]

On the 29^th the Boers were converging on the town. From a high hill within rifle shot of the houses a watcher could see no fewer than six Boer camps to the east and north. The British had inflated and sent up a balloon, to the amazement of the back-veld Boers; its report confirmed the fact that the enemy was in force in front of and around them.[71]

General French, with his cavalry, pushed out feelers, and coasted along the edge of the advancing host. His report warned White that if he wanted to strike before all the scattered bands were united he must do so at once.

On the evening of the same day the Boers tried to cut the water supply of the town. The Klip River however runs through Ladysmith, so that there was no danger of thirst.

On the 29^th General White detached two of his best regiments to advance under cover of the darkness and seize a long ridge called Nicholson's Nek, which lay about six miles to the north of Ladysmith. Having determined to give battle on the next day, his object was to protect his left wing against those Freestaters who were still moving from the north and west, and also to keep a pass open by which his cavalry might pursue the Boer fugitives in case of a British victory. This small detached column numbered about a thousand men.

At five o'clock on the morning of the 30^th the Boers, who had developed a perfect genius for hauling heavy cannon up the most difficult heights, opened fire from one of the hills which lie to the north of the town. Before the shot was fired, the forces of the British had already streamed out of Ladysmith to test the strength of the invaders.

White's army was divided into three columns. On the extreme left was the small Nicholson's Nek detachment under the command of Colonel Carleton. On the right British flank Colonel Grimwood commanded a brigade of the King's Royal Rifles. In the centre Colonel Hamilton commanded the Devons, the Gordons, and the 2nd battalion of the Rifle Brigade, which marched direct into the battle from the train which had brought them from Durban.

Six batteries of artillery were massed in the centre under Colonel Downing. General French with the cavalry and mounted infantry was on the right, but found little opportunity for the use of the mounted arm that day.

The Boer position was a formidable one. Their center lay on Signal Hill, about three miles from the town. Here they had two forty-pounders and three other lighter guns, but their artillery strength developed both in numbers and in weight of metal as the day wore on. Of their dispositions little could be seen. An observer looking westward might discern with his glass sprays of mounted riflemen galloping here and there over the downs, and possibly small groups where the gunners stood by their guns, or the leaders gazed down at that town which they were destined to have in view for such a weary while. On the dun-coloured plains before the town, the long thin lines, with an occasional shifting sparkle of steel, showed where Hamilton's and Grimwood's infantry were advancing.

The scrambling, inconsequential, unsatisfactory action which ensued is as difficult to describe as it must have been to direct. The Boer front covered some eight miles, with kopjes, like chains of fortresses, between. They formed a huge semicircle and they were able from this position to pour in a converging artillery fire which grew steadily hotter as the day advanced.

Huge shells--the largest that ever burst on a battlefield--hurled from distances which were unattainable by our fifteen-pounders, enveloped our batteries in smoke and flame. One enormous Creusot gun on Pepworth Hill threw a 96-pound shell a distance of four miles, and several 40-pound howitzers outweighed our field guns. And on the same day on which we were so roughly taught how large the guns were which labor and good will could haul on to the field of battle, we learned also that our enemy was more in touch with modern invention than we were, and could show us not only the largest, but also the smallest, shell which had yet been used. Would that it had been our officials instead of our gunners who heard the devilish little one-pound shells of the Vickers-Maxim automatic gun, exploding with a continuous string of crackings and bangings, like a huge cracker, in their faces and about their ears![72]

Up to seven o'clock our infantry had shown no disposition to press the attack, for with so huge a position in front of them, and so many hills which were held by the enemy, it was difficult to know what line of advance should be taken.

Shortly after that hour the Boers decided the question themselves. With field guns, Maxims, and rifle fire, they closed rapidly. The centre column was drafted off, regiment by regiment, to reinforce the right. The Gordons, Devons, Manchesters, and three batteries were sent over to Grimwood's relief, and the 5th Lancers, acting as infantry, assisted him to hold on.

At nine o'clock there was a lull, but it was evident that fresh commandoes and fresh guns were continually streaming into the firing line. The engagement opened again with redoubled violence, and Grimwood's three battalions fell back, abandoning the ridge which they had held for five hours. The reason for this withdrawal was not that they could not continue to hold their position, but it was that a message had just reached Sir George White that the Boers were about to rush the town of Ladysmith from the other side.

Crossing the open in some disorder, they lost heavily, and would have done so more had not the 13th Field Battery dashed forward, firing shrapnel at short ranges, in order to cover the retreat of the British infantry. Amid the bursting of the huge 96-pound shells, and the snapping of the vicious little automatic one-pounders, British batteries swung round their muzzles, and hit back, flashing and blazing, amid their litter of dead horses and men.

When their work was done and the retiring infantry had straggled over the ridge, the covering British cannons whirled and bounded after them. So many horses had fallen that two pieces were left until the teams could be brought back for them. The action of these batteries was one of the few gleams of light in a not too brilliant day's work. With splendid coolness and courage they helped the retreating infantry to safety.

General White must have been now uneasy for his position, and it had become apparent that his only course was to fall back and concentrate on the town. His left flank was up in the air[73] and the sound of distant firing, wafted over five miles of broken country was the only message which arrived from them.

His right had been pushed back, and, most dangerous of all, his centre had ceased to exist, for only the 2nd Rifle Brigade remained there. What would happen if the enemy burst through and pushed straight for the town? It was more possible, as the Boer artillery had now proved itself to be far better than ours. That terrible 96-pounder, sitting safe and out of range, was plumping its great projectiles into the masses of retiring British troops.

The men had had little sleep and little food, and this unanswerable fire was an ordeal for a force which is retreating. A retirement may rapidly become a rout under such circumstances. It was with some misgivings that the officers saw their men quicken their pace and glance back over their shoulders at the whine and screech of the shell. They were still some miles from home, and the plain was open. What could be done to give them some relief?

And at that moment there came the opportune and unexpected answer. That plume of engine smoke which the watcher had observed in the morning had drawn nearer and nearer, as the heavy train came puffing and creaking up the steep inclines. Then, almost before it had drawn up at the Ladysmith siding, there had sprung from it a crowd of merry bearded fellows, with ready hands and strange sea cries, pulling and hauling, with rope and purchase to get out the long slim guns which they had lashed on the trucks. Singular carriages were there, specially invented by Captain Percy Scott, and laboring and straining, they worked furiously to get the 12-pounder quick-firers into action. Then at last it was done, and the long tubes swept upwards to the angle at which they might hope to reach that monster on the hill at the horizon. Two of them craned their long inquisitive necks up and exchanged repartees with the big Creusot.[74]

And so it was that the weary and dispirited British troops heard a crash which was louder and sharper than that of their field guns, and saw far away on the distant hill a great spurt of smoke and flame to show where the shell had struck. Another and another and another--and then they were troubled no more. Captain Hedworth Lambton and his men had saved the situation. The Boer gun had met its master and sank into silence, while the somewhat bedraggled field force came trailing back into Ladysmith, leaving three hundred of their number behind them. It was a high price to pay, but other misfortunes were in store for us which made the retirement of the morning seem insignificant.

In the meantime we may follow the unhappy fortunes of the small column which had been sent out by Sir George White to prevent the junction of the two Boer armies and threaten the right wing of the Boer force which was advancing from Dundee.

The causes of the failure of this force were undoubtedly the results of pure ill-fortune. But it is evident that the plan which would justify the presence of this column at Nicholson's Nek was based on the supposition that the main army would win their action at Lombard's Kop. In that case White might swing round his right and pin the Boers between himself and Nicholson's Nek. But if he should lose his battle--what then? What was to become of this detachment five miles up in the air? How was it to be extricated? The White seems to have waved aside the very idea of defeat. An assurance was given to the leaders of the column that by eleven o'clock next morning they would be relieved and so they would have if White had won his action, but he did’nt.

The force chosen to operate independently consisted of four and a half companies of the Gloucester regiment, six companies of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and a Mountain Battery of six seven-pounder screw-guns. Colonel Carleton, of the Fusiliers commanded the column. On the night of Sunday, October 29^th, they tramped out of Ladysmith, a thousand men, none better in the army. Little they thought, as they exchanged a jest or two with the outlying pickets, that they were seeing the last of their own armed countrymen for many a weary month.

The road was irregular and the night was moonless. On either side the black loom of the hills bulked vaguely through the darkness. The column tramped along, the Fusiliers in front, the guns and Gloucesters behind. At last, in the black cold hours which come between midnight and morning, the column swung to the left out of the road. In front of them, hardly visible, stretched a long black kopje. It was the very Nicholson's Nek which they had come to occupy. Carleton and Adye heaved a sigh of relief. The force was but two hundred yards from the position, and all had gone without a hitch. And yet in those two hundred yards there came an incident which decided the fate both of their enterprise and of themselves.

Out of the darkness there blundered and rattled five horsemen, their horses galloping, the loose stones flying around them. In the dim light they were gone as soon as seen. Whence coming, whither going, no one knows, nor is it certain whether it was design or ignorance or panic which sent them riding so wildly through the darkness.

Somebody fired. A sergeant of the Fusiliers took the bullet through his hand. Some one else shouted to fix bayonets. The mules which carried the spare ammunition kicked and reared. There was no question of treachery, for they were led by our own men, but to hold two frightened mules, one with either hand, is a feat for a Hercules. They lashed and tossed and bucked themselves loose, and an instant afterwards were flying helter skelter through the column. Nearly all the mules caught the panic. In vain the men held on to their heads. In the mad rush they were galloped over and knocked down by the torrent of frightened creatures. In the gloom of that early hour the men must have thought that they were charged by cavalry. The column was dashed out of all military order as effectively as if a regiment of dragoons had ridden over them. When the cyclone had passed, and the men had with many a muttered curse gathered themselves into their ranks once more, they realized how grave was the misfortune which had befallen them. There, where those mad hoofs still rattled in the distance, were their spare cartridges, their shells, and their cannon. Some of the cartridges were strewn on the road. Most were on their way back to Ladysmith. There was nothing for it but to face this new situation and to determine what should be done.

It has been often and naturally asked, why did not Colonel Carleton make his way back at once on the loss of his guns and ammunition, while it was still dark? One or two considerations are evident. In the first place, it is natural to a good soldier to endeavor to retrieve a situation rather than to abandon his enterprise. His prudence, did he not do so, might become the subject of public commendation, but might also provoke some private comment. A soldier's training is to take chances, and to do the best he can with the material at his disposal. Again, Colonel Carleton and Major Adye knew the general plan of the battle which would be raging within a few hours, and they quite understood that by withdrawing they would expose General White's left flank to attack from the forces who were coming from the north and west. He hoped to be relieved by eleven, and he believed that, come what might, he could hold out until then. These are the most obvious of the considerations which induced Colonel Carleton to determine to carry out so far as he could the programme which had been laid down for him and his command. He marched up the hill and occupied the position.

His heart, however, must have sunk when he examined it. It was very large--too large to be effectively occupied by the force which he commanded. The length was about a mile and the breadth four hundred yards. Shaped roughly like the sole of a boot, it was only the heel end which he could hope to hold. Other hills all round offered cover for Boer riflemen.

He set his men to work at once building sangars with the loose stones. With the full dawn and the first snapping of Boer Mausers from the hills around they had thrown up some sort of rude defenses which they might hope to hold until help should come.

But how could help come when there was no means by which they could let White know the plight in which they found themselves? They had brought a heliograph[75] with them, but it was on the back of one of those accursed mules. The Boers were thick around them, and they could not send a messenger. And there in the clear cold morning air the balloon hung to the south of them where the first distant thunder of White's guns was beginning to sound. If only they could attract the attention of that balloon! Vainly they wagged flags at it. Serene and unresponsive it brooded over the distant battle.

And now the Boers were thickening round them on every side. Christian de Wet,[76] a name soon to be a household word, marshaled the Boer attack. At five o'clock the fire began, at six it was warm, at seven warmer still. Bullets fell among the men, and smacked up against the stone breastwork. An incessant rattle and crackle of rifle fire came from all round, drawing slowly but steadily nearer. Now and then the whisk of a dark figure from one boulder to another was all that ever was seen of the attackers. The British fired slowly and steadily, for every cartridge counted, but the cover of the Boers was so cleverly taken that it was seldom that there was much to aim at. 'All you could ever see,' says one who was present, 'were the barrels of the rifles.'

During those weary hours lying on the bullet-swept hill and listening to the eternal hissing in the air and clicking on the rocks, the British soldiers could see the fight which raged to the south of them. It was not a cheering sight, and Carleton and Adye with their gallant comrades must have felt their hearts grow heavier as they watched. The Boers' shells bursting among the British batteries, the British shells bursting short of their opponents. The Long Toms[77] laid at an angle of forty-five plumped their huge shells into the British guns at a range where the latter would not dream of unlimbering. And then gradually the rifle fire died away also, crackling more faintly as White withdrew to Ladysmith. At eleven o'clock Carleton's column recognized that it had been left to its fate. As early as nine a heliogram had been sent to them to retire as the opportunity served, but to leave the hill was certainly to court annihilation.

The men had then been under fire for six hours, and with their losses mounting and their cartridges dwindling, all hope had faded from their minds. But still for another hour, and yet another, and yet another, they held doggedly on. Nine and a half hours they clung to that pile of stones. The Fusiliers were still exhausted from the effect of their march from Glencoe and their incessant work since. Many fell asleep behind the boulders. Some sat doggedly with their useless rifles and empty pouches beside them. Some picked cartridges off their dead comrades. What were they fighting for? It was hopeless, and they knew it. But always there was the honor of the flag, the glory of the regiment, the hatred of a proud and brave man to acknowledge defeat. And yet it had to come. There were some in that force who were ready for the reputation of the British army, and for the sake of an example of military virtue, to die stolidly where they stood, or to lead one last death-charge with empty rifles against the unseen enemy. They may have been right, these stalwarts. Leonidas and his three hundred did more for the Spartan cause by their memory than by their living valor.[78] But a counsel of perfection is easy at a study table. There are other things to be said--the responsibility of officers for the lives of their men, the hope that they may yet be of service to their country. All was weighed, all was thought of, and so at last the white flag went up. The officer who hoisted it could see no one unhurt save himself, for all in his sangar were hit, and the others were so placed that he was under the impression that they had withdrawn altogether. Whether this hoisting of the flag necessarily compromised the whole force is a difficult question, but the Boers instantly left their cover, and the men in the sangars behind, some of whom had not been so seriously engaged, were ordered by their officers to desist from firing. In an instant the victorious Boers were among them.

It was not, as I have been told by those who were there, a sight which one would wish to have seen or care now to dwell on. Haggard officers cracked their sword-blades and cursed the day that they had been born. Privates sobbed with their stained faces buried in their hands. Of all tests of discipline that ever they had stood, the hardest to many was to conform to all that the cursed flapping handkerchief meant to them. 'Father, father, we had rather have died,' cried the Fusiliers to their priest. Gallant hearts, ill paid, ill thanked, how poorly do the successful of the world compare with their unselfish loyalty and devotion!

But the sting of insult was not added to their misfortunes. There is a fellowship of brave men which rises above the feuds of nations, and may at last go far, we hope, to heal them. From every rock there rose a Boer--strange, grotesque figures many of them--walnut-brown and shaggy-bearded, and swarmed on to the hill. No term of triumph or reproach came from their lips. 'You will not say now that the Boer cannot shoot,' was the harshest word which the least restrained of them made use of.

Between one and two hundred dead and wounded were scattered over the hill. Those who were within reach of human help received all that could be given. Captain Rice, of the Fusiliers, was carried wounded down the hill on the back of one giant, and he has narrated how the man refused the gold piece which was offered him. Some asked the soldiers for their embroidered waist-belts as souvenirs of the day. They will for generations remain as the most precious ornaments of some colonial farmhouse. Then the victors gathered together and sang psalms, not jubilant but sad and quavering. The prisoners, in a downcast column, weary, spent, and unkempt, filed off to the Boer laager at Waschbank, there to take train for Pretoria. And at Ladysmith a bugler of Fusiliers, his arm bound, the marks of battle on his dress and person, burst in on the camp with the news that two veteran regiments had covered the flank of White's retreating army, but at the cost of their own annihilation.

Answer these questions in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

During the early days of the war which side had the advantage in manpower and cannon?
Why was Ladysmith so important to the British?
What was the major advantage the Boers had over the British at Ladysmith?
What last minute event occurred that saved the British at Ladysmith?
What unlucky event occurred at Nicholson’s Nek, that left the British force in such a bad position and caused their eventual defeat?

CHAPTER 8: The battles of Belmont, Enslin and Modder River

At the end of a fortnight of hostilities in Natal the situation seriously alarmed the British public and caused an almost universal chorus of ill-natured delight from the press of European nations. Whether the reason was hatred of Britian or the sporting instinct which backs the smaller against the larger it is certain that the continental papers have never been so unanimous in their rejoicings over what they imagined to be a damaging blow to the British Empire.[79]

France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were equally venomous against us. Great Britain was roused out of her habitual disregard for foreign opinion by this chorus of execration, and braced herself for a greater effort in consequence. She was cheered by the sympathy of her friends in the United States, and by the good wishes of smaller nations of Europe, notably Italy, Denmark, Greece, Turkey, and Hungary.

The situation at the end of this fortnight was that a quarter of the colony of Natal and a hundred miles of railway were in the hands of the Boers. Five distinct actions had been fought. Of these one had been a British victory, two had been indecisive, one had been unfortunate, and one had been a positive disaster. We had lost about twelve hundred prisoners and a battery of small guns. The Boers had lost two fine guns and three hundred prisoners. Twelve thousand British troops had been shut up in Ladysmith, and there was no serious force between the Boers and the sea. Only in those distant British ships steaming to Africa were there hopes for the safety of Natal and the honor of the Empire.

Leaving Ladysmith for now, the narrative must pass to the western side of the war, and give an account of the events which began with the siege of Kimberley and the efforts of Lord Methuen to relieve it.

On the declaration of war two important movements had been made by the Boers on the west. One was the advance of a considerable body under the formidable Cronje to attack Mafeking. The other was the investment of Kimberley by a force under the command of Wessels and Botha. Kimberley was defended by Colonel Kekewich with the help of Cecil Rhodes. As the founder and director of the great De Beers diamond mines Rhodes desired to be with his people in the hour of their need, and it was through his initiative that the town had been provided with the rifles and cannon.

The troops Colonel Kekewich had at his disposal consisted of four companies of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. In addition there were the local forces, a hundred and twenty men of the Cape Police, two thousand Volunteers, a body of Kimberley Light Horse, and a battery of light seven-pounder guns. There were also eight Maxims which formed most efficient fortresses.

Several thousand Boers with artillery had assembled round Kimberley, and the town was cut off.

The first collision between the opposing forces at this part of the war was on November 10^th, when Colonel Gough made a reconnaissance from Orange River to the north. He came on a detachment of Boers with a cannon. The British mounted infantry galloped round their flank passing close to a kopje occupied by sharpshooters. A deadly fire crackled suddenly out from among the boulders. Of six Britons hit four were officers, showing how cool were the marksmen and how dangerous those dress distinctions are on the field of battle. The troops returned to camp without any good object having been attained, but that must be the necessary fate of many a cavalry reconnaissance.

On November 12^th Lord Methuen arrived at Orange River and proceeded to organize the army which would advance to the relief of Kimberley. Extreme mobility was needed and neither tents nor comforts of any sort were permitted to the British officers or soldiers. This is no light matter in a climate where a tropical day is followed by an arctic night.

At daybreak on November 22^nd the British army, numbering about eight thousand men, set off. The distance to Kimberley was sixty miles. Not one man in the force imagined how long that march would take or how grim the experiences would be. Lord Methuen came into touch with a Boer position that same day. Plans to attack were made to attack.

The force of the Boers was some three thousand, but the strength of their position gave them an advantage. A double row of steep hills lay across the road to Kimberley, and it was along the ridges, snuggling closely among the boulders, that the Boers was waiting for us.

In their weeks of preparation they had constructed shelter from which they could lie in safety while they swept the ground with rifle fire. In these shelters the Boer marksmen crouched and waited as the day broke on the morning of the 23^rd.

The British troops advanced towards them in grim silence. In the light of the rising sun the men set their teeth and dashed up the hills, scrambling, falling, cheering, swearing, gallant men, gallantly led, their one thought to close with that grim bristle of rifle-barrels which fringed the rocks above them.

Lord Methuen's intention had been an attack from front and from flank, but whether from the Grenadiers losing their bearings, or from the mobility of the Boers, which made a flank attack an impossibility, it all became frontal. The battle resolved itself into a number of isolated actions in which the various kopjes were rushed by different British regiments.

The Boers held on desperately and fired their rifles in the faces of the British. One young officer had his jaw blown to pieces by a rifle which almost touched him. Another was shot dead by a wounded Boer to whom he was offering his water-bottle. At one point a white flag was waved by the Boers, on which the British left cover, only to be met by a traitorous volley. The man who raised the flag was captured, and it says much for the humanity of British that he was not bayoneted on the spot. Yet it is not fair to blame a whole people for the misdeeds of a few, and it is probable that the men who descended to such devices, or who deliberately fired on our ambulances, were as much execrated by their own comrades as by ourselves.[80]

The British won the day but the victory was an expensive one, for fifty killed and two hundred wounded lay on the hillside and like so many of our skirmishes with the Boers, it led to small material results.

We captured some fifty prisonersbut most of the Boers galloped comfortably away after the action, leaving a fringe of sharpshooters among the kopjes to hold back our pursuing cavalry.

The next morning an advance was made to Enslin, some ten miles further on. Here lay the plain of Enslin, bounded by a formidable line of kopjes. The cavalry scouts reported that the hills were strongly held. Some more hard slogging was in front of the relievers of Kimberley.

General Methuen had advanced to Kimberley Railway. This permitted an armoured train with a naval gun to accompany the British troops. It was six o' clock on the morning of the 25^th that this gun came into action against the kopjes, closely followed by the guns of the field artillery.

At Enslin a single large kopje formed the key to the Boer position, and considerable time was expended sweeping the face of it with shrapnel fire to hopefully kill the Boer hidden amoung the boulders. After the bombardment the infantry advance was ordered.

The Northumberlands and Yorkshires worked round on the right and cleared the trenches in their front. The honors of the assault, however, must be awarded to the sailors and marines who underwent such an ordeal as men have seldom faced and yet come out as victors. To them fell the task of carrying the formidable hill which had been so scourged by our artillery.

With a grand rush they swept up the slope, but were met by a horrible fire. Every rock spurted flame and the front ranks withered away before the storm of the Boer Mauser. An eye-witness recorded that the brigade was hardly visible amid the sand knocked up by the bullets. For an instant they fell back into cover, and then, having taken their breath, up they went again, with a deep-chested sailor roar.

There were but four hundred in all, two hundred seamen and two hundred marines, and the losses in that rapid rush were terrible. Yet they swarmed up, their gallant officers, some of them little boy-middies, cheering them on.[81]

It was on these gallant marines, the men who are ready to fight anywhere and anyhow that the heaviest loss fell. When at last they made good their foothold on the crest of that murderous hill they had left behind them three officers and eighty-eight men out of a total of 206. With such men under the white ensign we leave our island homes in safety behind us.[82]

The battle of Enslin cost us some two hundred of killed and wounded yet it is difficult to say what advantage we had from it. We won the kopjes, but we lost our men. The Boer killed and wounded were less than half of our own, and the weakness of our cavalry prevented us from capturing their cannons. In three days the men had fought two exhausting actions in a waterless country and under a tropical sun. Their exertions had been great and yet were barren of result.

The troops were in need of a rest, so on Saturday night and Sunday they remained at Enslin. On the 27^th the march to Kimberley resumed. For once a whole day's march was made without coming in touch with the enemy. Hopes rose that two successive defeats had taken the heart out of the Boers and there would be no further resistance. Those who knew Cronje and his formidable character, took a more realistic view of the situation. And this perhaps is where a few words might be said about the celebrated leader who played on the western side of the seat of war the same part which Joubert did on the east.

Commandant Cronje was sixty-five years of age, a hard, swarthy man, quiet of manner, fierce of soul, with a reputation among a nation of resolute men for unsurpassed resolution. His dark face was bearded and virile, but sedate and gentle in expression. He spoke little, but what he said was to the point and he had the gift of those fire-words which brace and strengthen men. In hunting expeditions and in native wars he had won the admiration of his countrymen by his courage and his fertility of resource.

In the First Boer War of 1880 he had led the Boers who besieged Potchefstroom, and he had pushed the attack with a relentless vigor which was not hampered by the chivalrous usages of war. Eventually he compelled the surrender of the place by concealing from the garrison that a general armistice had been signed, an act which was afterwards disowned by his own government. In the succeeding years he lived as an autocrat and a patriarch amid his farms and his herds, respected by many and feared by all.

This was the man who lay with a formidable army across the path of Lord Methuen's soldiers. It was a fair match. On the one side the hardy men of the Veld; on the other the British infantry, known for their duty, discipline, and fiery courage.

With a high heart the British column moved over the dusty veld. But the British had made a mistake. The British army had been reinforced and so great was their confidence and so lax the scouting that a Boer force equaling their numbers had assembled with many guns within seven miles of them without their knowing.

On the morning of November 28^th, the British troops were told they would march at once, and have their breakfast when they reached the Modder River--a grim joke to those who lived to appreciate it.

It was a cloudless morning, and the sun rose in a deep blue sky. The men, though hungry, marched cheerily, the reek of their tobacco-pipes floating up from their ranks. It cheered them to see that the murderous kopjes had, for the time, been left behind, and that the great plain inclined downwards to the river. On the further bank were a few scattered buildings, with one hotel used as a week-end resort by the businessmen of Kimberley. It lay now calm and innocent, with its open windows looking out on a smiling garden; but death lurked at the windows and death in the garden, and the little dark man who stood by the door, peering through his glass at the approaching column, was the minister of death, the dangerous Cronje.

In consultation with him was one who was to prove even more formidable, and for a longer time. Semitic in face, high-nosed, bushy-bearded, and eagle-eyed, with skin burned brown by a life of the veld--it was De la Rey,[83] one of the trio of fighting chiefs whose name will always be associated with the gallant resistance of the Boers. He was there as adviser, but Cronje was in supreme command.

His dispositions had been masterly. He had concealed his men on both banks, placing, as it is stated, those in whose staunchness he had least confidence on the British side of the river, so that they could only retreat under the rifles of their companions. The trenches had been so dug with such a regard for the slopes of the ground that in some places a triple line of fire was secured. His artillery consisted of several heavy pieces and a number of machine guns. The whole position covered between four and five miles.

An obvious question must here occur to the mind of every non-military reader--Why should this position be attacked at all? Why should we not cross higher up where there were no such formidable obstacles?' The answer, so far as one can answer it, must be that so little was known of the dispositions of our enemy that we were hopelessly involved in the action before we knew of it, and by then it was more dangerous to extricate the army than to push the attack. A retirement over that open plain at a range of under a thousand yards would have been a dangerous and disastrous movement. Having once got there, it was wisest and best to see it through.

The dark Cronje waited in the hotel garden. Across the veld streamed the British infantry, the poor fellows eager, after seven miles of that upland air, for the breakfast which had been promised them. It was a quarter to seven when our patrols of Lancers were fired on. There were Boers between them and their meal. The artillery was ordered up, the Guards were sent forward on the right, the 9^th Brigade on the left. They swept onwards into the fatal fire zone and only then did they realize, from general to private, that they had walked unwittingly into the fiercest battle yet fought in the war.

Before the position was understood the Guards were within seven hundred yards of the Boer trenches, and the other troops about nine hundred, on the side of a gentle slope which made it difficult to find any cover. In front of them lay a serene landscape, the river, the houses, the hotel, no movement of men, no smoke--everything peaceful and deserted save an occasional quick flash and sparkle of flame. But the noise was horrible and appalling. Men whose nerves had been steeled to the crash of the big guns, or the monotonous roar of Maxims found a new terror in the malignant 'ploop-plooping' of the automatic quick-firer. The Maxim of the Scots Guards was caught in the hell-blizzard from this thing--each shell no bigger than a large walnut, but flying in strings of a score--and men and gun were destroyed in an instant. As to the rifle bullets the air was humming and throbbing with them, and the sand was mottled like a pond in a shower. To advance was impossible, to retire was hateful. The men fell on their faces and huddled close to the earth.

The British infantry fired also, but what was there to fire at, an occasional eye or hand over the edge of a trench or behind a stone?

The cavalry was useless, the infantry was powerless--there only remained the cannons. When any arm is helpless and harried it always casts an imploring eye on the big guns, and rarely indeed is it that the gallant guns do not respond. The Field Batteries came rattling and dashing to the front, and unlimbered at one thousand yards. The naval guns were working at four thousand, but the two combined were insufficient to master the fire of the pieces were opposed to them.

Lord Methuen must have prayed for guns as Wellington did for night, and never was a prayer answered more dramatically. A strange battery came lurching up from the British rear, unheralded, unknown, the weary gasping horses panting at the traces, the men, caked with sweat and dirt, urging them on into a last spasmodic trot. The bodies of horses which had died of fatigue marked their course. It was the 62nd Field Battery, which had marched thirty-two miles in eight hours, and now, hearing the crash of battle in front of them, had with one last desperate effort thrown itself into the firing line. Great credit is due to Major Granet and his men. Not even those gallant German batteries who saved the infantry at Spicheren could boast of a finer feat.[84]

Now it was guns against guns, and let the best gunners win. We had eighteen field-guns and the naval pieces against the concealed cannon of the Boers. Back and forward flew the shells, howling past each other in mid-air. The roar of the cannon was deafening, but gradually the British were gaining the upper hand. Here and there the little knolls on the further side which had erupted into constant flame lay cold and silent. One of the heavier guns was put out of action, and the other had been withdrawn five hundred yards. But the Boer infantry fire still crackled along the trenches and the guns could come no nearer. It was long past midday, and that unhappy breakfast seemed further off than ever.

As the afternoon wore on, a curious condition of things was established. The guns could not advance for fear of anemy fire. The 75th Battery had lost three officers out of five, nineteen men, and twenty-two horses. The infantry could not advance and would not retire.

The British on the right were prevented from getting round the enemy's line, by the presence of the Riet River which joins the Modder at a right angle. All day they lay under a blistering sun, the sleet of bullets whizzing over their heads.

The men gossiped, smoked, and many of them slept while under fire. They lay on the barrels of their rifles to keep them cool enough for use. Now and again there came the dull thud of a bullet which had found its mark, and a man gasped, or drummed with his feet; but the casualties at this point were not numerous, for there was some little cover, and the piping bullets passed for the most part overhead.

But a development on the left would turn the action into a British victory. At this side there was ample room to extend, and the 9^th Brigade spread out, feeling its way down the enemy's line, until it came to a point where the fire was less murderous and the approach to the river more in favor of the attack.

Here the Yorkshires, Highlanders and Fusiliers had forced their way, led by their Brigadier in person. This body of 500 infantry were assailed both by the Boer riflemen and by their fellow soldiers who were unaware that the Modder had been successfully crossed. A small hamlet called Rosmead formed a point d'appui,[85] and to this the infantry clung tenaciously, while reinforcements dribbled across to them from the farther side. 'Now, boys, who's for otter hunting?' cried Major Coleridge, of the Lancashires, as he sprang into the water. Gladly on that baking, scorching day did the men jump into the river and splash over, to climb the opposite bank.

And so between three and four o'clock a strong party of the British had established their position on the right flank of the Boers, and were holding on like grim death with an appreciation that the fortunes of the day depended on their retaining their grip.

And now, as the long weary scorching day came to an end, the Boers began at last to flinch from their trenches. The shrapnel was finding them out and this force on their flank filled them with vague alarm and with fears for their precious guns. And so as night fell they stole across the river, the cannon were withdrawn, the trenches evacuated, and next morning, when the weary British and their anxious General turned themselves to their grim task once more, they found a deserted village and a litter of empty Mauser cartridge-cases to show where their tenacious enemy had stood.

Lord Methuen, in congratulating the troops on their achievement, spoke of 'the hardest-won victory in our annals of war.’ It is hypercritical to look too closely at a term used by a wounded man with the flush of battle still on him and yet it was the third battle which the troops had fought within the week, they were under fire for ten or twelve hours, were waterless under a tropical sun, and weak from want of food. For the first time they were called on to face modern rifle fire and modern machine guns in the open.

The result tends to prove those who believe, from now on, it will be impossible to make frontal attacks against an entrenched enemy, are justified in their belief. It is beyond human hardihood to face the pitiless beat of bullet and shell which comes from modern quick-firing weapons.[86]

Had our flank not made it across the river, it is impossible that we could have carried the position. Once more it was demonstrated how powerless the best artillery is to disperse resolute and well-placed riflemen.

So it ended, this long pelting match, Cronje withdrawing under the cover of darkness with his resolute heart filled with fierce determination for the future, while the British soldiers threw themselves down on the ground and slept the sleep of exhaustion.

Answer these questions in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

Why did some countries like German and France see to enjoy British losses in the war?
How did the Boers use the landscape to their advantage during the first small battle on the way to Kimberley?
Which group of British soldiers suffered the most losses at Enslin?
Describe the layout of the battlefield around the Modder River.
What is shrapnel?

CHAPTER 9: BATTLE OF MAGERSFONTEIN.

The British under Lord Methuen had now fought three actions in the space of a single week, losing in killed and wounded about a thousand men. Had there been evidence that the enemy were demoralized, the General would no doubt have pushed on at once to Kimberley some twenty miles distant. However the information which reached him was that the Boers had fallen back on the strong position of Spytfontein and they were full of fight and strongly reinforced. Under these circumstances Lord Methuen felt he had no choice but to give his men a well-earned rest, and to await reinforcements.

It was necessary that Methuen should strengthen his position, since with every mile which he advanced the more exposed did his line of communications become to a raid from the Orange Free State. Any serious danger to the railway behind them would leave the British Army in a critical position.

It was well that this was so, for on the 8^th of December Commandant Prinsloo, of the Orange Free State, with a thousand horsemen and two light seven-pounder guns, appeared suddenly at Enslin and attacked the two companies of the Northampton Regiment who held the station. At the same time they destroyed a couple of culverts and tore up three hundred yards of the permanent way. For some hours the Northamptons under Captain Godley were closely pressed, but a telegram was dispatched to Modder Camp, and the 12^th Lancers were sent to their assistance. The Boers retired with their usual mobility, and in ten hours the line was completely restored.

British reinforcements were now reaching the Modder River force. Four howitzers had come to strengthen the artillery. It appeared that there was the material for an overwhelming advance; but the ordinary observer had not yet appreciated how great is the advantage given by modern weapons to the force which acts on the defensive. With enormous pains Cronje and De la Rey were entrenching a formidable Boer position in front of the British advance.

On the morning of December 9^th General Methuen made an attempt to find out what lay in front of him. He sent out a reconnaissance in the early morning. The force returned to camp no wiser than when it left.

There was one sight visible every night to all men which might well nerve the rescuers in their enterprise. Over the northern horizon, behind those hills there quivered up in the darkness one long, flashing, quivering beam, which swung up and down like a seraphic sword-blade. It was the British town of Kimberley praying for help. Anxiously, their searchlight dipped and rose. And back across the twenty miles of darkness there came an answering beam. 'Be of good heart, Kimberley. We are here! The Empire is behind us. We have not forgotten you. It may be days, or it may be weeks, but rest assured that we are coming.'

On December 10^th the force which was intended to clear a path for the army through the lines of Magersfontein moved out on what proved to be its desperate enterprise. It was raining hard, and the men with one blanket between two soldiers bivouacked on the cold damp ground, three miles from the Boer position. At one o'clock, without food, and drenched, they moved forwards through the drizzle and the darkness to attack those terrible lines.

Clouds drifted low in the heavens, and the falling rain made the darkness impenetrable. With many a trip and stumble the ill-fated detachment wandered on, uncertain where they were going and what it was that they were meant to do.

General Wauchope knew but his voice was soon to be stilled in death. There are some who claim on the night before to have seen on his face that shadow of doom. The hand of coming death may already have lain cold on his soul.

Out there, close beside him, stretched the long Boer trench, fringed with its line of fierce, eager faces, and its bristle of gun-barrels. The Boer knew he was coming. They were ready. They were waiting. But still, with the dull murmur of many feet, the dense column, nearly four thousand strong, wandered onwards through the rain and the darkness, death and mutilation crouching on their path.

It matters not what gave the signal, whether it was the flashing of a lantern by a Boer scout, or the tripping of a soldier over wire, or the firing of a gun in the ranks. However this may be, in an instant there crashed out of the darkness into their faces a roar of point-blank fire, and the night was slashed with the throbbing flame of the rifles. The order to extend had just been given, but the men had no had time to act on it. The storm of lead burst on the head and right flank of the column, which broke to pieces under the murderous volley.

Wauchope was shot, struggled up, and fell once more for ever. Men went down in swathes, and a howl of rage and agony swelled up from the struggling crowd. By the hundred they dropped. It was a horrible business. At such a range and in such a formation a single Mauser bullet may well pass through many men. A few dashed forwards, and were found dead at the edges of the trench.

The rest of the Highlanders brigade fled out of that accursed place. Who shall blame them for retiring when they did? It may well have been the best thing which they could do. Dashed into chaos, separated from their officers, with no one who knew what was to be done, the first necessity was to gain shelter from this deadly fire, which had already stretched six hundred of their number on the ground.

Within half an hour of the break of day the Highland regiments had re-formed and prepared to renew the contest.

Some attempt at an advance was made on the right but for the most part the men lay on their faces, and fired when they could at the enemy; but the cover which the latter kept was so excellent that an officer who expended 120 rounds has left it on record that he never once had seen anything positive at which to aim.

Lieutenant Lindsay brought the Seaforths' Maxim into the firing-line and though all her crew except two were hit, it continued to do good service during the day. The British howitzers threw lyddite at 4000 yards. The guns kept down the rifle-fire, and gave the wearied Highlanders some respite. But the artillery only kept the battle going. The British infantry could not advance and would not retire.

As the day wore on reinforcements of infantry came up. The Gordons arrived and the artillery was moved nearer to the enemy's position. At the same time, as there were some indications of an attack on our right flank, the Grenadier Guards were moved up in that direction, while the Yorkshiremen secured a drift over which the enemy might cross the Modder. This threatening movement on our right flank was gallantly held back all morning.

While the Grenadiers and the Yorkshire Light Infantry were holding back the Boer attack on our right flank the indomitable Gordons advanced straight against the trenches and succeeded in getting within four hundred yards of them. But a single regiment could not carry the position, and anything like a general advance on it was out of the question in broad daylight after the punishment which we had received.

They had been roughly handled in this, which was to most of them their baptism of fire, and they had been without food and water under a burning sun all day. They fell back rapidly for a mile, and the guns were for a time left partially exposed. Fortunately the lack of initiative on the part of the Boers came in to save us from disaster and humiliation. It is due to the brave unshaken face which the Guards presented to the enemy that our repulse did not deepen into something still more serious.

The Gordons and the Scots Guards were still in attendance on the guns, but they had been advanced close to the enemy's trenches, and there were no other troops in support. Under these circumstances it was imperative that the Highlanders should rally, and Major Ewart with other surviving officers rushed among the scattered ranks and strove hard to gather and to stiffen them. The men were dazed by what they had undergone, and Nature shrank back from that deadly zone where the bullets fell so thickly. But the pipes blew, and the bugles sang, and the poor tired fellows, the backs of their legs so flayed and blistered by lying in the sun that they could hardly bend them, hobbled back to their duty. They worked up to the guns once more, and the moment of danger passed.

But as the evening wore on it became evident that no attack could succeed, and there was no use in holding the men in front of the enemy. The dark Cronje, lurking among his ditches and his barbed wire, was not to be approached.

About half-past five the Boer guns, which had for some unexplained reason been silent all day, opened on the cavalry. Their appearance was a signal for the general falling back of the centre, and the last attempt to retrieve the day was abandoned.

The loss of Magersfontein cost the British nearly a thousand men, killed, wounded, and missing, of which over seven hundred belonged to the Highlanders.

CHAPTER 10: THE BATTLE OF STORMBERG.

The British under Lord Methuen had now fought three actions in the space of a single week, losing about a thousand men, or rather more than one-tenth of its total numbers. The information which reached him was that the Boers had fallen back on the strong position of Spytfontein, that they were full of fight, and that they had been reinforced. Under these circumstances Lord Methuen had no choice but to give his men a well-earned rest, and to await reinforcements.

Reinforcements were now reaching the British Modder River force. Four five-inch howitzers had come to strengthen the artillery. It appeared to the public that there was the material for an advance; but the ordinary observer did not appreciate how great is the advantage given by modern weapons to the force which acts on the defensive. Cronje and De la Rey were entrenching a formidable position in front of the British.

Over the northern horizon, behind those hills of danger, there quivered up in the darkness one long, flashing, quivering beam, which swung up and down, and up again like a seraphic sword-blade. It was the British held town of Kimberley praying for help. Anxiously, the great De Beers searchlight dipped and rose. And back across the twenty miles of darkness there came that other southern column of light which answered, and promised. 'Be of good heart, Kimberley. We are here. We have not forgotten you. Rest assured we are coming.'

Meanwhile other Generals were fighthing other battles. The British force which faced the Boers around Stormberg was commanded by General Gatacre, a man with a reputation for fearlessness though he had been criticized for having called on his men for undue exertion.

General Gatacre was falling back before the Boer advance and in December he found himself at Sterkstroom, while the Boers occupied the strong position of Stormberg, some thirty miles to the north. With the enemy so near him it was Gatacre's nature to attack, and on the night of December 9th he did with a force of under 3000 men.

It was nine o'clock and pitch dark when his column moved out of Molteno and struck across the veld, the wheels of the guns being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. The distance was not more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and the guides were still unable to say that they had reached their point it became evident they had missed their way. The men were dog-tired, a long day's work had been followed by a long night's march, and they plodded along drowsily through the dark. The weary soldiers stumbled as they marched. Daylight came and revealed the column still looking for its objective, the fiery General walking in front and leading his horse behind him.

It was evident that his plans had miscarried, but his energetic and hardy temperament would not permit him to turn back without a blow being struck. One cannot but stand aghast at his dispositions. The country was wild and rocky, the very places for those tactics of the surprise and the ambush in which the Boers excelled. And yet the column plodded aimlessly on in its dense formation, and if there were any attempt at scouting ahead and on the flanks the result showed how ineffectively it was carried out.

It was at a quarter past four in the clear light of a South African morning that a shot, and then another, and then a rolling crash of musketry, told that we were to have one more rough lesson. High up on the face of a steep line of hill Boer riflemen lay hid, and from a short range their fire scourged our exposed flank.

Even now, in spite of the surprise, the situation might have been saved had the officers known exactly what to do. It is easy to be wise after the event, but it appears now that the only course that could commend itself would be to extricate the troops from their position, and then, if thought feasible, to plan an attack.

Instead of this a rush was made at the hillside, and the British infantry made their way some distance up it only to find that there were positive ledges in front of them which could not be climbed. The advance was at a dead stop, and the men lay down under the boulders for cover from the hot fire which came from inaccessible marksmen above them. Meanwhile the British artillery opened behind them, and its fire was more deadly to friends than foes.

The question now, since the assault had failed, was how to extricate the men from their position. Many withdrew down the hill, running the gauntlet of the enemy's fire as they emerged from the boulders on to the open ground, while others clung to their positions, some from a soldierly hope that victory might finally incline to them, others because it was clearly safer to lie among the rocks than to cross the bullet-swept spaces beyond. Those portions of the force who extricated themselves do not appear to have realized how many of their comrades had remained behind, and so as the gap gradually increased between the men who were stationary and the men who fell back all hope of the two bodies reuniting became impossible. All the infantry who remained on the hillside were captured. The rest rallied at a point fifteen hundred yards from the scene of the surprise, and began an orderly retreat to Molteno.

Fatigue took all the fire and spirit out of the British. They dropped asleep by the roadside and had to be prodded up by their exhausted officers. Many were taken prisoners in their slumber by the enemy who gleaned behind them. Units broke into small straggling bodies, and it was a sorry and bedraggled force which about ten o'clock came wandering into Molteno.

Our losses in killed and wounded were not severe. Twenty-six killed, sixty-eight wounded--that is all. But six hundred had been left as prisoners and two cannons lost in the retreat.

It is not for the historian to aggravate the pain of that brave man who, having done all that personal courage could do, was seen afterwards sobbing on the table of the waiting-room at Molteno. He had a disaster. But the one good thing of a disaster is that by examining it we may learn to do better in the future, and so it would indeed be a perilous thing if we agreed that our reverses were not a fit subject for open and frank discussion. The idea of an attack on Stormberg was excellent--the details of the operation are open to criticism.

So in the Stormberg district, as at the Modder River, the same humiliating position of stalemate was established.

CHAPTER 11: BATTLE OF COLENSO.

Serious defeats had been inflicted on the British in South Africa. Cronje, lurking behind his trenches and his barbed wire entanglements barred Methuen's road to Kimberley, while in the northern part of Cape Colony Gatacre's weary troops had also been defeated.

The public at home steeled their hearts and fixed their eyes on Natal. There was General Buller and there the main body of British troops. As brigade after brigade and battery after battery landed at Cape Town it was evident that it was in this quarter that the supreme effort was to be made, and that there the light might at last break. Wherever men met and talked--the same words might be heard: 'Wait until Buller moves.' The hopes of Great Britian lay in the phrase.

On October 30th General White had been thrust back into Ladysmith. On November 2nd telegraphic communication with the town was interrupted. On November 3rd the railway line was cut. On November 10th the Boers held Colenso and the line of the Tugela. On the 14th was the affair of the armoured train.

Sir Redvers Buller was massing his troops at Chieveley in preparation for a great effort to cross the river and relieve Ladysmith. But the task was as severe a one. On the southern side the banks formed a long slope which could be shaved as with a razor by the rifle fire of the enemy. How to advance across that broad open zone was a problem. And then they came to a broad and deep river, with a single bridge. Beyond the river was tier after tier of hills, crowned with stone walls and seamed with trenches, defended by thousands of the best marksmen in the world, supported by admirable artillery.

Add to this, that the young and energetic Louis Botha was in command of the Boers. It was a desperate task, and yet honor forbade that the garrison at Kimberley should be left to its fate. The venture must be made.[87] Buller determined on a frontal attack on the formidable Boer position, and he moved out of camp for that purpose at daybreak on December 15th.

The force which General Buller led into action was the finest any British general had handled since the battle of the Alma.[88] One squadron was composed almost entirely of Texans who had been drawn by their own gallant spirit into the fighting line of their kinsmen.

Cavalry was General Buller's weakest arm, but his artillery was strong both in its quality and number of guns. There were five batteries (30 guns) of the Field Artillery and no fewer than sixteen naval guns. The whole force numbered about 21,000 men.

The work which was allotted to the army was simple in conception, however terrible it might prove in execution. There were two points at which the river might be crossed, one three miles off on the left, named Bridle Drift, the other straight ahead at the Bridge of Colenso. The Irish Brigade was to cross at Bridle Drift then to work down the river bank on the far side so as to support the English Brigade which was to cross at Colenso. The 4th Brigade was to advance between these, so as to help either. Meanwhile on the extreme right the mounted troops under Dundonald were to cover the flank and to attack Hlangwane Hill, a formidable position held strongly by the enemy on the south bank of the Tugela River.

The remaining brigade of infantry was to support this movement on the right. The cannons were to cover the various attacks, and if possible gain a position from which the trenches might be enfiladed.[89] This, simply stated, was the work which lay before the British army.

In the bright clear morning sunshine, under a cloudless blue sky, the British advanced with high hopes to the assault. Before them lay the long level plain then the curve of the river, and beyond, silent and serene stretched the gently curving hills.

It was five o'clock in the morning when the naval guns began to bay, and huge red dust clouds from the distant foothills showed where the lyddite was bursting. No answer came back, nor was there any movement on the sunlit hills. It was almost brutal, this furious violence to so gentle and unresponsive a countryside. In no place could the keenest eye detect a sign of guns or men, and yet death lurked in every hollow and crouched behind every rock.

It is difficult to make a modern battle intelligible, especially when fought over a front of eight miles. It is best to take each column in turn, beginning with the left flank, where Hart's Irish Brigade had advanced to the assault of Bridle Drift.

Under an unanswered fire from the heavy guns the Irish infantry moved forward. Incredible as it may appear after the recent experiences of Stormberg, the men appear to have advanced in quarter column, and not to have deployed until after the enemy's fire had opened. Had shrapnel struck this close formation the loss of life would have been severe.

On approaching the drift the British troops had to advance into a loop formed by the river, so that they were exposed to a heavy cross-fire on their right flank, while they were rained on by shrapnel from in front. No sign of the enemy could be seen, though the men were dropping fast. It is a soul-shaking experience to advance over a sunlit countryside while the path which you take is marked behind you by sobbing, gasping, writhing men, who can only guess by the position of their wounds whence the shots came which struck them down.

All round, like the hissing of fat in the pan, was the crackle of the Mausers. The air was full of it but no one could define exactly whence it came. Into such a hell-storm as this it was that the soldiers have again and again advanced in the course of this war. It may be questioned whether they will not prove to be among the last of mortals to be asked to endure such an ordeal. Other methods of attack must be found or attacks must be abandoned, for smokeless powder, quick-firing guns, and modern rifles make it all odds on the defense![90]

The gallant Irishmen pushed on, flushed with battle and careless of their losses with nothing left but their gallant spirit and their desire to come to grips with the enemy. Rolling on in a broad wave they never winced from the fire until they had swept up to the bank of the river.

The bank of the river had been gained, but where was the ford? The water swept broad and unruffled in front of them, with no indication of shallows. A few dashing fellows sprang in, but their cartridges and rifles dragged them to the bottom. The British troops could find no ford, and they lay down, as had been done in so many previous actions, unwilling to retreat and unable to advance, with the same merciless pelting from front and flank. In every fold and behind every anthill the Irishmen lay thick and waited for better times.

There are many instances of their cheery and uncomplaining humor. Colonel Brooke fell at the head of his men. Private Livingstone helped to carry him into safety, and then, his task done, he confessed to having 'a bit of a rap meself,' and sank fainting with a bullet through his throat. Another man sat with a bullet through both legs. 'Bring me a tin whistle and I'll blow ye any tune ye like,' he cried. Another with his arm hanging by a tendon puffed morosely at his short black pipe. Every now and then, in face of the impossible, the fiery Celtic valor flamed furiously upwards. 'Fix bayonets, men, and let us make a name for ourselves,' cried a colour sergeant, and he never spoke again. For five hours, under the tropical sun, the grimy parched men held on to the ground they had occupied. British shells pitched short and fell among them. A regiment in support fired at them, not knowing that any of their fellows were so far advanced. Shot at from the front, the flank, and the rear, the 5th Brigade held grimly on.

But fortunately their orders to retire were at hand, and it is certain that had they not reached them the regiments would have been destroyed where they lay. As they retreated there was no haste and panic, but officers and men were hopelessly jumbled up. General Hart, whose judgment may occasionally be questioned, but whose cool courage was beyond praise, had hard work to reform his brigade. Between five and six hundred of them had fallen.

Passing from the misadventure of the 5th Brigade we move from left to right on the 4th, or Lyttelton's Brigade, which was instructed to support the attack on either side. With the help of the naval guns it did what it could to extricate and cover the retreat of the Irishmen, but it could play no important part in the action, and its losses were insignificant.

On its right Hildyard's English Brigade had developed its attack on Colenso and the bridge. The enemy had evidently anticipated the main attack on this position, and not only were the trenches on the other side exceptionally strong, but their artillery converged on the bridge.

Advancing under heavy fire the brigade experienced the same ordeal as Hart's brigade, which was mitigated by the fact that from the first they preserved their open order in columns of half-companies extended to six paces, and that the river in front of them did not permit that right flank fire which was so fatal to the Irishmen. With a loss of some two hundred men the leading regiments succeeded in reaching Colenso, and the West Surrey, advancing by rushes of fifty yards at a time, had established itself in the station, but a catastrophe had occurred at an earlier hour to the artillery which was supporting it which rendered all further advance impossible.

For the reason of this we must follow the fortunes of the next unit on their right. This consisted of the important body of artillery who had been told to support the main attack. It comprised two field batteries under the command of Colonel Long, and six naval guns under Lieutenant Ogilvy. Long has the record of being a most zealous and dashing officer, whose handling of the Egyptian artillery at the battle of the Atbara had much to do with the success of the action. Unfortunately, these barbarian campaigns, in which liberties may be taken with impunity, leave an evil tradition. Our own close formations, our adherence to volley firing, and in this instance the use of our artillery all seem to be legacies of our savage wars.[91]

At an early stage of the action Long's guns whirled forwards, outstripped the infantry brigades on their flanks and unlimbered within a thousand yards of the enemy's trenches. From this position he opened fire on Fort Wylie, which was the centre of the Boer position.

But his two unhappy batteries were destined not to turn the tide of battle, as he had hoped, but rather to furnish the classic example of the helplessness of artillery against modern rifle fire. The horse teams fell in heaps. One driver, crazed with horror, sprang on a leader, cut the traces and tore madly off the field. But a perfect discipline reigned among the majority of the gunners, and the words of command and the laying and working of the guns were all as methodical as at Okehampton. Not only was there a most deadly rifle fire, partly from the lines in front and partly from the village of Colenso on their left flank, but the Boer automatic quick-firers found the range to a nicety, and the little shells were crackling and banging continually over the batteries. Already every gun had its litter of dead around it, but each was still fringed by its own group of furious officers and sweating desperate gunners.

Poor Long was down, with a bullet through his arm and another through his liver. ‘We don't abandon guns,’ was his last cry as they dragged him into the shelter of a little donga.[92] Captain Goldie dropped dead. So did Lieutenant Schreiber. Colonel Hunt fell, shot in two places. Officers and men were falling fast. The guns could not be worked, and yet they could not be removed, for every effort to bring up teams from the shelter ended in the death of the horses.

The survivors took refuge from the Boer fire in that small hollow to which Long had been carried, a hundred yards or so from the line of bullet-splashed cannon. One gun on the right was still served by four men who refused to leave it. They seemed to bear charmed lives, these four, as they strained and wrestled with their beloved 15-pounder, amid the spurting sand and the blue wreaths of the bursting shells. Then one gasped and fell against the trail, and his comrade sank beside the wheel with his chin on his breast. The third threw up his hands and pitched forward on his face; while the survivor, a grim powder-stained figure, stood at attention looking death in the eyes until he too was struck down. A useless sacrifice, you may say; but while the men who saw them die can tell such a story round the camp fire the example of such deaths as these does more than clang of bugle or roll of drum to stir the warrior spirit of our race.[93]

For two hours the little knot of officers and men lay in the shelter of the donga and looked out at the bullet-swept plain and the line of silent guns. Many of them were wounded. Their chief lay among them, still calling out in his delirium for his guns. They had been joined by the gallant Baptie, a brave surgeon, who rode across to the donga amid a murderous fire, and did what he could for the injured men. Now and then a rush was made into the open, sometimes in the hope of firing another round, sometimes to bring a wounded comrade in from the pitiless pelt of the bullets. How fearful was that lead-storm may be gathered from the fact that one gunner was found with sixty-four wounds in his body.

The hope to which they clung was that their guns were not really lost, but that the arrival of infantry would enable them to work them once more. Infantry did at last arrive, but in such small numbers that it made the situation more difficult instead of easing it. Colonel Bullock had brought up two companies but such a handful could not turn the tide. They also took refuge in the donga, and waited for better times.

In the meanwhile the attention of Generals Buller and Clery had been called to the desperate position of the guns, and they made their way to the rear where the remaining horses and drivers were. 'Will any of you volunteer to save the guns?' cried Buller. Corporal Nurse, Gunner Young, and a few others responded. The desperate venture was led by three aides-de-camp of the Generals. Two gun teams were taken down; the horses galloping frantically through an infernal fire, and each team succeeded in getting back with a gun. But the loss was fearful. Congreve has left an account which shows what a modern rifle fire at a thousand yards is like.

'My first bullet went through my left sleeve and made the joint of my elbow bleed, next a clod of earth caught me smack on the right arm, then my horse got one, then my right leg one, then my horse another, and that settled us.' The gallant fellow managed to crawl to the group of castaways in the donga.

In the meanwhile Captain Reed, of the 7th Battery, had arrived with two spare teams of horses, and another determined effort was made under his leadership to save some of the guns. But the fire was too murderous. Two-thirds of his horses and half his men, including himself, were struck down, and General Buller commanded that all further attempts to reach the abandoned batteries should be given up. Both he and General Clery had been slightly wounded, and there were many operations over the whole field of action to engage their attention.

We have now, working from left to right, considered the operations of Hart's Brigade at Bridle Drift, of Lyttelton's Brigade in support, of Hildyard's and of the luckless batteries which were to have helped him. There remain two bodies of troops on the right, Dundonald's mounted men who were to attack Hlangwane Hill and Barton's Brigade which was to support it.

Dundonald's force was too weak for such an operation as the capture of Hlangwane Hill and it is probable the movement was meant as a reconnaissance rather than an assault. He had not more than a thousand men and the position which faced him strong, entrenched, with barbed-wire and automatic guns. But the gallant colonials were out on their first action, and their fiery courage pushed the attack home. Leaving their horses, they advanced a mile and a half on foot before they came within range of the hidden Boer riflemen, and learned the lesson which had been taught to their comrades, that given equal numbers the attack in the open has no chance against a concealed defense.

And so the first attempt at the relief of Kimberley came to an end. At twelve o'clock all the British troops were retreating for camp. There was not a rout or panic. The withdrawal was as orderly as the advance; but the fact remained that we had just 1200 men killed, wounded, and missing, and had gained absolutely nothing.

So much for Colenso. A more unsatisfactory action is not to be found in British military history. There is sequel to the action which put a severe strain on the charity which the British public is prepared to extend to a defeated General. Losing all heart at his defeat, General Buller, although he had been officially informed that White had provisions for seventy days, sent a heliogram advising the surrender of the garrison at Ladysmith.

Message December 16th 1899.

I tried Colenso yesterday, but failed; the enemy is too strong for my force except with siege operations, and these will take one full month to prepare. Can you last so long? I suggest you fire away as much ammunition as you can, and make the best terms you can. I can remain here if you have alternative suggestion, but unaided I cannot break in. I find my infantry cannot fight more than ten miles from camp, and then only if water can be got, and it is scarce here.

General Buller

White's brave reply was to the effect that he believed the Boers had been tampering with Buller's messages. Much allowance is to be made for a man who is staggering under the shock of defeat and the physical exertions which Buller had endured. That the Government made such allowance is clear from the fact that he was not instantly recalled. And yet the cold facts are that we had a British General, at the head of 25,000 men, recommending another General, at the head of 12,000 men only twelve miles off, to lay down his arms to an army which was inferior in numbers to the total British force; and this because he had once been defeated and despite the fact that Buler knew the whole resources of the British Empire were pouring into Natal in order to prevent so shocking a disaster. The fate not only of South Africa but of the Empire hung on the decision of the old soldier in Ladysmith, who had to resist the proposals of his own General as sternly as the attacks of the enemy. It was a tremendous test, and General White came through it with a staunchness which saved us not only from overwhelming present disaster, but from a hideous memory which would have haunted British military annals for centuries to come.[94]

Answer these questions in Complete sentences and turn in your answers to me. I will allow you to replace a daily class grades with this grade.

What was the British purpose for the Battle of Colenso?
Why was it so difficult for the British to find and kill the Boers at Colenso?
In military terms what is a flank?
What was wrong with General Buller advising General White to surrender at Kimberley

CHAPTER 12: THE DARK HOUR.

The week of December 10th to December 17th, 1899, was the blackest one of the war and the most disastrous for British arms of the century. We had in seven days lost three separate actions. The total loss amounted to about three thousand men and twelve guns.

It is interesting to glance at the extracts from the European press at that time and observe the delight with which our reverses were received.[95] That this should occur in the French journals is not unnatural, since our history has been largely a contest with that Power. Russia too has a natural antagonism to English power and democracy. The same poor excuse may be made for the Vatican.[96] But what are we to say of the insensate railing of Germany, a country whose ally we have been for centuries? In the days of Marlborough, in the darkest hours of Frederick the Great, in the great world struggle of Napoleon, we have been the brothers-in-arms of these people, so with Austria also. If both these countries were not swept from the map by Napoleon, it is largely to British subsidies and tenacity that they owe it. And yet these are the folk who turned most bitterly against. Never again will a British guinea be spent or a British soldier or sailor shed his blood for such allies.[97] The political lesson of this writer has been that we should make ourselves strong within the empire, and let all outside it, save our kinsmen of America, go their own way and meet their own fate.

In the British Islands the opposition to the war decreased. It had become absurd to contend that a struggle had been forced on the Boers when every fresh detail showed how thoroughly they had prepared for war and how much we had to make up. The nation rose to the effort. Misfortune had solidified us where success might have caused a sentimental opposition.[98]

On December 18th, two days after Colenso, the following provisions were made for carrying on the campaign.

1. The supervision and direction of the campaign should be placed in the hands of Lord Roberts, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff. Thus the famous old soldier and the famous young one were called together to the assistance of the country.

2. All the remaining army reserves should be called out.

3. Considerable reinforcements, including a howitzer brigade, should go out.

4. Patriotic offers of further contingents from the colonies be gratefully accepted.

By these measures it was calculated that a hundred thousand men would be added to our South African armies, the numbers of which were already near a hundred thousand. But if there were any who doubted that this ancient nation still glowed with the spirit of its youth his fears must soon have passed away. For this far-distant war there were so many volunteers that the authorities were embarrassed by their numbers and their pertinacity. It was a stimulating sight to see those long queues of young men who waited their turn with as much desperate anxiety as if hard fare, a veld bed, and Boer bullets were all that life had that was worth the holding.

Many could ride and not shoot, many could shoot and not ride, more candidates were rejected than were accepted, and yet in a short time men from every class were wearing the grey coats and bandoliers. This singular and formidable force was drawn from every part of England and Scotland. Noblemen and grooms rode knee to knee in the ranks. Well horsed and well armed, a better force for the work in hand could not be imagined.

Without waiting for these distant reinforcements, the Generals in Africa had two divisions to look to, one of which was actually arriving while the other was on the sea. These formed the 5th Division under Sir Charles Warren, and the 6th Division under General Kelly-Kenny. Until these forces should arrive it was best that the three armies wait.

There was therefore a lull in the war, during which Methuen strengthened his position at Modder River, Gatacre held his own at Sterkstroom, and Buller built up his strength for another attempt at the relief of Ladysmith.

As for the Boers, Cronje had extended his position and strengthened the works which we had already found so formidable.

In this way a condition of inaction was established which was much to our advantage, since Methuen retained his communications by rail, while all supplies to Cronje had to come a hundred miles by road. The British troops were badly in need of rest. General Hector Macdonald, whose military record had earned the soldierly name of 'Fighting Mac,' was sent for from India.

The monotony of the long wait was broken by one dashing raid carried out by a detachment from Methuen. This force consisted of 200 Queenslanders, 100 Canadians, 40 mounted Munster Fusiliers and 200 Light Infantry. This singular force, so small in numbers was under the command of Colonel Pilcher. Moving out suddenly from Belmont, it struck at the extreme right of the Boer line, which consisted of a laager[99] occupied by the rebels.

Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm of the men at the prospect of action. 'At last!' was the cry which went up from the Canadians when they were ordered to advance. The result was an absolute success. The rebels broke and fled, their camp was taken, and forty of them fell into our hands. Our own loss was slight, three killed and a few wounded. The flying column occupied the town of Douglas and hoisted the British flag there; but it was decided that the time had not yet come when it could be held, and the force fell back on Belmont. The rebel prisoners were sent down to Cape Town for trial.

In the meantime General Buller had also been playing a waiting game and secure in the knowledge that Ladysmith could still hold out, he had been building up his strength for a second attempt to relieve the hard-pressed garrison. After the repulse at Colenso, Hildyard's and Barton's brigades remained at Chieveley with the mounted infantry, the naval guns, and two field batteries. The rest of the force retired to Frere, some miles in the rear. Emboldened by their success, the Boers sent raiding parties over the Tugela on either flank, which were only checked by our patrols being extended from Springfield on the west to Weenen on the east. A few plundered farmhouses and a small list of killed and wounded horsemen on either side were the sole result of these spasmodic and half-hearted operations.

Time here as elsewhere was working for the British. Reinforcements were steadily coming to Buller's army. By the new year Sir Charles Warren's division was nearly complete. Batteries of artillery came to strengthen Buller's force, which amounted to more than 30,000 men.

It was not until January 11^th that General Buller's plans for advance could be set into action. Before describing what these plans were and the disappointing fate which awaited them, we will return to the story of the siege of Ladysmith, and show how narrowly the British escaped the humiliation of seeing the town fall. That this did not occur is due to the fierce tenacity and endurance of the men who held on to the frail lines which covered it.

CHAPTER 13: THE SIEGE OF LADYSMITH.

Ladysmith lies in a hollow dominated by a ring of hills. The near ones were in our hands, but the outer hills were in the hands of the enemy. After the First Battle of Ladysmith and the retreat of the British, the Boers set about the investment of the town.[100]

On November 2^nd the last train escaped Ladysmith under a brisk fire. On the same day the telegraph line was cut, and the town settled down to the task of holding off the Boers until the relieving army should appear. From general to private they trusted in the valor of their comrades and in the luck of the British Army.

One example of that luck was ever before their eyes in the shape of those naval guns which had arrived so dramatically at the crisis of the fight, in time to check the Boers on Pepworth Hill and to cover the retreat of the British army. But for those guns the besieged must have lain impotent under the muzzles of the huge Boer Creusots.

When every hill flashed and smoked, and the great 96-pound Boers shells screamed over the town, it was to the long thin 4.7's and to the hearty bearded men who worked them, that townsfolk looked for help. These British navel guns supplemented by two old-fashioned 6.3 howitzers did all that was possible to keep down the fire of the heavy Boer guns. If they could not save, they could at least hit back and punishment is not so bad to bear when one is giving as well as receiving.

By November the Boers had established their circle of fire. On the east of the Ladysmith, broken by the loops of the Klip River, is a broad green plain. Beyond it rises the famous Bulwana, on which lay one great Creusot and several smaller guns. To the north, on Pepworth Hill, was another Creusot, and between the two were the Boer batteries on Lombard's Kop.

The first few days of the siege were clouded by the death of Lieutenant Egerton of the 'Powerful,' one of the most promising officers in the Navy. One leg and the other foot were carried off, as he lay on the sandbag parapet watching the effect of our fire. 'There's an end of my cricket,' said the gallant sportsman, and he was carried to the rear with a cigar between his clenched teeth.

The town had settled down to the routine of the siege. Boer General Joubert, with the chivalry which had always distinguished him, permitted the British to send the non-combatants to a place called Intombi Camp where they were safe from the shells, though the burden of their support still fell on the British. The hale and male of the townsfolk refused for the most part to avoid the common danger, and clung tenaciously to their village.

Fortunately the river has worn down its banks until it runs through a deep channel, in the sides of which it was found to be possible to hollow out caves which were practically bomb-proof. Here for some months the townsfolk led a troglodytic existence, returning to their homes on that much appreciated seventh day of rest which was granted to them by their Sabbatarian besiegers.[101]

The Boer cannons, even at a range of five miles weres exceedingly accurate. And at the same time their riflemen became more venturesome. On November 7th, the Boers made a half-hearted attack on Ladysmith which was driven back without difficulty. On the 9th their attempt was of a more serious and sustained character.

It began with a heavy shell-fire. With the dawn it was found that the Boer riflemen were within eight hundred yards of the town. Two British regiments were able to hold them off all day with.

The failure of this attempt on Ladysmith seems to have convinced the Boers that a waiting game, in which hunger, shell-fire, and disease were their allies, would be surer and less expensive than an open assault. From their distant hilltops they continued to bombard the town, while the citizens of Ladysmith sat and learned to endure the crash of the 96-pound shells. The supplies were adequate and the besieged were fortunate in the presence of a first-class organizer, Colonel Ward who systematized the issue of all food so as to stretch it to its utmost.

The British soldiers waited through the weary weeks for the relief which never came. On some days there was more shell-fire, on some less; on some there was sniping, on some none; on some they sent a little feeler of cavalry and guns out of the town, on most they lay still--such were the ups and downs of life in Ladysmith.

Had Ladysmith fallen, and twelve thousand British soldiers with a million pounds' worth of stores fallen into the hands of the Boers, we should have been faced with the alternative of abandoning the struggle, or of reconquering South Africa from Cape Town northwards. South Africa is the keystone of the Empire, and for the instant Ladysmith was the keystone of South Africa. But the courage of the troops who held the shell-torn town and the confidence of the public who watched them, never faltered for an instant.

December 8^th was marked by a gallant exploit on the part of the British garrison. At ten o'clock a band of men slipped out of the town. There were six hundred of them, under the command of Hunter, youngest and most dashing of British Generals. Edwardes and Boyston were the subcommanders. The men had no knowledge of where they were going or what they had to do, but they crept silently along under a quarter moon. In front of them was Gun Hill from which one of the great Creusots had plagued them.

Four hundred men were left at the base of the hill and the others crept upwards with Major Henderson as guide. Higher and higher the men crept, the silence broken only by the occasional slip of a stone or the rustle of their own breathing.

Suddenly a Mauser crack and a spurt of flame--then another and another! 'Come on, boys! Fix bayonets!' yelled Davies. At the word the British were off. In front of the storming party loomed the enormous gun.

Out with the huge breech-block! Wrap the long lean muzzle round with a collar of gun-cotton! Keep the guard on the run until the work is done! Hunter stood by with a night light in his hand until the charge was in position, and then, with a crash which brought both armies from their tents. The huge tube reared up on its mountings and toppled backwards into the pit. A howitzer lurked beside it, and this also was blown into ruin. The attendant Maxim was dragged back by the exultant captors, who reached the town amid shoutings and laughter with the first break of day.

One man wounded, the gallant Henderson, is a cheap price for the most dashing exploit of the war. So easily was the enterprise carried out and so defective the Boer watch, it is probable that if all the guns had been simultaneously attacked the Boers might have found themselves without a single piece of ordnance in the morning.[102]

There were heart burnings among the Regulars that the colonial troops should have gone in front of them. Their martial jealousy was allayed three nights later by the same task being given to them. Four companies were the troops chosen under the command of Colonel Metcalfe. A single gun, the 4.7 howitzer on Surprise Hill, was the objective. Again there was the stealthy advance through the darkness, again the support was left at the bottom of the hill, again the two companies carefully ascended, again there was the challenge, the rush, the flight, and the gun was in the hands of the stormers.

Our own casualties were eleven dead, forty-three wounded, and six prisoners, but the price was not excessive for the howitzer and for the morale which arises from such exploits.

Amid the shell-fire, the scanty rations and the dysentery, one ray of comfort had always brightened the garrison. Buller was only twelve miles away--they could hear his guns--and when his advance came in earnest their sufferings would be at an end.

But now in an instant this single light was shut off and the true nature of their situation was revealed to them. Buller had been defeated at the BATTLE OF COLENSO and the siege was not ending but beginning. With heavier hearts but undiminished resolution the army and the townsfolk settled down to the long struggle. The Boer replaced their shattered guns and drew their lines closer round the stricken town.

A record of the siege onwards until the break of the New Year centers on the sordid details of the sick returns and of the price of food, fifty on one day, seventy on the next. The air was poisoned by foul sewage and dark with flies. Eggs were a shilling each, cigarettes sixpence, whisky five pounds a bottle: a city more free from gluttony and drunkenness has never been seen.

On the top of all other troubles it was now known that the heavy ammunition was running short and must be husbanded for emergencies. There was no surcease, however, in the constant hail which fell on the town. Two or three hundred shells were a not unusual daily allowance.

The monotonous bombardment with which the New Year had commenced was soon to be varied by a most gallant and spirit-stirring clash of arms. On January 6th the Boers delivered their great assault on Ladysmith--an attack so gallantly made and gallantly met that it deserves to rank among the classic fights of British military history. It is a tale which neither side need be ashamed to tell. Honor to the sturdy infantry who held their grip so long, and honor also to the rough men of the veld who stretched us to the utmost capacity of our endurance.

The Boer storming party consisted of some hundred picked volunteers led by de Villiers. They were supported by several thousand riflemen, who might secure their success or cover their retreat. Eighteen heavy guns had been trained on the long ridge, one end of which has been called Caesar's Camp and the other Waggon Hill. This hill, three miles long, lay to the south of the town, and the Boers had early recognized it as being the most vulnerable point.

At two in the morning crowds of barefoot Boers were threading their way, rifle in hand, among the mimosa-bushes and scattered boulders which cover the slope of the hill. Some working parties were moving guns into position. The attack came as a complete surprise.

The outposts were driven in, and the stormers were on the ridge almost as soon as their presence was detected. The line of rocks blazed with the flash of their guns. Caesar's Camp was garrisoned by one sturdy regiment aided by a Colt automatic gun. The defense had been arranged in the form of small sangars, each held by from ten to twenty men. Some few of these were rushed in the darkness, but the Lancashire men pulled themselves together and held on strenuously. The crash of musketry woke the sleeping town and the streets resounded with the shouting of the officers and the rattling of arms as the men mustered in the darkness and hurried to the points of danger.

Three companies of the Gordons had been left near Caesar's Camp, and these, under Captain Carnegie, threw themselves into the struggle. Four other companies of Gordons came up in support. Later four companies of the Rifle Brigade were thrown into the firing line, and a total of two and a half infantry battalions held that end of the position. It was not a man too much.

With the dawn of day it could be seen that the Boers held the southern and we the northern slopes, while the narrow plateau between formed a bloody battle ground. Along a front of a quarter of a mile fierce eyes glared and rifle barrels flashed from behind every rock, and the long fight swayed a little back or a little forward with each upward heave of the stormers or rally of the soldiers. For hours the combatants were so near that a stone or a taunt could be thrown from one to the other. Some scattered sangars still held their own, though the Boers had passed them. One such, manned by fourteen privates of the Manchester Regiment, remained untaken, but had only two defenders left at the end of the bloody day.

With the coming of the light the 53rd Field Battery, the one which had already done so admirably at Lombard's Kop, again deserved well of its country. It was impossible to get behind the Boers and fire straight at their position, so every shell fired had to skim over the heads of our own men on the ridge and so pitch on the reverse slope. Yet so accurate was the fire, carried on under an incessant rain of shells from the big Dutch gun on Bulwana, that not one shot miscarried. Major Abdy and his men succeeded in sweeping the further slope without loss to our own fighting line.

The same feat was equally well performed at the other end of the position by Major Blewitt's 21st Battery. Anyone who has seen the iron endurance of British gunners and marveled at the answering shot which flashes out through the very dust of the enemy's exploding shell will understand how fine must have been the spectacle of these two batteries working in the open, with the ground round them sharded with splinters.

Eye-witnesses have left it on record that the sight of Major Blewitt strolling up and down among his guns, and turning over with his toe the last fallen section of iron, was one of the most vivid and stirring impressions which they carried from the fight. Here also it was that the gallant Sergeant Bosley, his arm and his leg stricken off by a Boer shell, cried to his comrades to roll his body off the trail and go on working the gun.

At the same time as the onslaught on Caesar's Camp a similar attack was made on Waggon Hill. Barefooted Boers burst suddenly with a roll of rifle-fire into the little garrison of Imperial Light Horse. Mathias and Dennis showed courage. They and their men were surprised but not disconcerted, and stood desperately to a slogging match at the closest quarters. Seventeen Sappers went down out of thirty and more than half the little body of irregulars.[103]

Two companies of the 60th Rifles and a small body of the ubiquitous Gordons happened to be on the hill and threw themselves into the fray, but they were unable to turn the tide. Of thirty-three Gordons under Lieutenant MacNaughten thirty were wounded. The Gordons and the Sappers were there that morning to escort one of Lambton's 4.7 guns, which was to be mounted there. Ten seamen were with the gun, and lost three of their number in the defense.

As our men retired under the shelter of the northern slope they were reinforced by another hundred and fifty Gordons under Miller-Wallnutt, a man cast in the mould of a Berserk Viking. To their aid also came two hundred of the Imperial Light Horse, burning to assist their comrades. Another half-battalion of Rifles came with them.

At each end of the long ridge the situation at the dawn of day was almost identical. In each the stormers had seized one side, but were brought to a stand by the defenders on the other, while the British guns fired over the heads of their own infantry to rake the further slope.

It was on the Waggon Hill side, however, that the Boer exertions were most continuous and strenuous and our resistance most desperate. There fought the gallant de Villiers, while Ian Hamilton rallied the British defenders and led them in repeated rushes against the Boer line.

The Boers fought with extraordinary resolution. Never will any one who witnessed that Homeric contest question the valor of our foes. It was a murderous business on both sides.

In a gun-emplacement a strange encounter took place at point-blank range between a group of Boers and Britons. De Villiers of the Free State shot Miller-Wallnut dead, Ian Hamilton fired at de Villiers with his revolver and missed him. Young Albrecht of the Light Horse shot de Villiers. A Boer named de Jaeger shot Albrecht. Digby-Jones of the Sappers shot de Jaeger. Only a few minutes later the gallant lad, who had already won fame enough for a veteran, was himself mortally wounded, and Dennis, his comrade in arms and in glory, fell by his side.

There has been no better fighting in our time than that on Waggon Hill on that January morning, and no better fighters than the Imperial Light Horsemen who formed the centre of the defense.

At four o'clock a huge bank of clouds burst suddenly into a terrific thunderstorm with vivid lightning and lashing rain. The fighting men took no more heed of the elements than would two bulldogs who have each other by the throat. Up the greasy hillside, foul with mud and blood, came the Boer reserves and up the northern slope came our own reserve.