Richard Harding Davis

Scribner’s/August, 1900

PRETORIA reposes drowsily at the bottom of a basin, a great bowl made of hills. There is a crack in the bowl, and it is through this crack that the British army, when it comes, will enter the capital. In the meantime Pretoria, shut in from the outside world not only by her circle of hills but by censors, armies, and a blockade of warships, waits tranquilly. For none of these, even while it increases her isolation, can disturb her calm. A session of the Volksraad, when it meets here next week, may arouse her, because that is of interest to every man over sixteen years of age in the republic; but the fact that one hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers are advancing from Bloemfontein upon her, limping, it is true, but still advancing, is a circumstance too foreign to her experience to ruffle her composure.

From any elevation Pretoria is a beautiful place, a great park of tall, dark-green poplars, with red roofs shining through, and the towers of the public buildings and the gilded figure of Liberty rising over all. From a distance Pretoria has almost the look of Florence. The hills about her are so high that the white, sun-lit clouds are near enough when they pass to write their names upon them; and they continue for so great a distance that they turn, as they draw away, from a light green to a purple, and then to a misty, turquoise blue.

Pretoria down in the basin itself is not so beautiful. It is throughout half suburb and half city, with corrugated zinc cottages next to a bank building, and a State museum adjoining the meat-market, but with trees and flowers and running water everywhere. The houses are of one story, each of them set in gardens of rose bushes and many of the older ones roofed with thatch; but the Government buildings, the shops, the banks and business houses are metropolitan. They suggest a new city of our West, and some of them, the banking houses around the city square, are of the best style of architecture as it is adapted to homes of business. But the red dust, the chief characteristic of South Africa, and the ox-cart, the moving home of the Boer, destroy the illusion of a city.

The trek-wagons are as incongruous as are the costers’ donkey-carts in Piccadilly. They are the most picturesque relics which remain to us from the days of the emigrant and of the pioneer. The caravan of camels still obtains, but it belongs to a people who have never left anything behind them, who have never progressed one stride in advance of the camel, and to whom the caravan with its rolled-up tents and bales of merchandise is still a part of their daily life. But the trek-wagon exists in a land of railroads and telegraphs, and rubs wheels with victorias and tram-cars. It is much like the great hooded carts which the empire makers of our West drove across the prairie, the real “ships of the desert,” that carried civilization with them, and that blazoned forth on their canvas as the supreme effort of the pioneer, “Pike’s Peak or Bust.” The ox-cart is the most typical possession of the Boer, and it and the lion, and the man with the rifle in his hand, are the three emblems of the national coat of arms.

The cart is drawn by from five to ten pair of oxen led by a small Kaffir, the “voortrekker,” and belabored from behind by another Kaffir, with a whip as far reaching as a salmon line. In the front seat sits the head of the family and behind him are his women folk in a mysterious zenana, from which they emerge clad in white starched linen, showing that the cart must contain, besides its bunks and mattresses, as many ingenious wardrobe-boxes and cubby-holes as the cabin of a ship. At the back of the long wagon sit the Kaffir women and their naked, beaded children. The rifle hangs ready at hand beside the box-seat; water-kegs, pots, and pans swing between the wheels, and tools and fodderboxes hang from either side.

The calm of the Pretoria streets is the calm of the people. In travelling from Ladysmith to Pretoria I have found nothing to be in greater contrast than the composed acceptance of the war by the Boer with the Englishman’s complete absorption in it. In London, Cape Town, in Durban, in Ladysmith, on the steamers, in the field, the Englishman reads, talks, thinks of nothing else. Here the chief men of the Government find time to meet at a club twice a day to smoke and talk on almost any other subject. Yet each of them has been to the front for a month at a time, or for three months together, and each of them is going back again, but he speaks of his having been there without boasting or excitement, much as though he were a neutral who had run down to the battlefield to take photographs and collect exploded shells as souvenirs. I have heard one of them secure the entire attention of every man in the club by recounting his adventures on a hunting trip which he had taken during his leave of absence from his commando, and his friends were much more keen to know how his pointers and setters had behaved than what his men had done in the firing line. I commented on this, and one of them told me that during a reconnaissance which the British made from Ladysmith and when the burghers were firing upon them, a couple of deer ran from the hills back of the Boer position. Instantly almost every burgher whirled about, and turning his back to the enemy, opened a fusillade on the deer. Owing to this diversion the English made a considerable advance.

What makes the remarkable resistance which the Boer has shown to the British forces, the more remarkable, is this fact of his leisurely indifference to it all. He goes from the farm to the firing-line and back again to the farm almost at will, and what is even more surprising is the fact that when he is in the field he apparently only takes part in an engagement when he feels inclined to do so. I have been told again and again by men of all nationalities who have been frequently with the Boers in action, that it is a usual thing for a hundred of them to lie in a trench protecting the position, and opposed sometimes to a thousand men, while the remaining three or four hundred of their comrades, who do not wish to fight, will be seated a hundred yards down the kopje smoking and eating. At Sand River, within three hundred yards of the artillery which was firing desperately on Lord Roberts’s advancing column, I saw a thousand Boers, and not one of them was apparently conscious that a battle was going forward or that his services were badly needed. They sat among the rocks and talked together, or slept in the shade of a mesquite bush, or mounted their ponies and rode away. The small number of men required to hold one of these defensive positions seems almost incredible, and I am convinced that throughout the war one man to ten has been the average proportion of Boer to Briton, and that frequently the British have been repulsed when their force outnumbered that of the Boers twenty to one. What terrible losses the burghers would have caused had they occupied the trenches in force is something the nations which next meditate going to war with modern magazine rifles should weigh deeply. The Boers tell you casually when leading up to some other point, that at such and such a fight they placed ten men on one kopje and on another twenty. At Spion Kop the attack on the hill was made by forty men, so few indeed, so they claim, that one of the English colonels surrendered, and then on seeing, when the Boers left cover, to what a small force he was opposed, threw down the white flag and cried, “No, we’ll not surrender,” and fired on the Boers who were coming up to receive his rifles. One can imagine what an outcry such an incident as this would have called forth from the English papers had it been the Boer who first raised the white flag and then thought better of it. But the comment the Boer made on this “treachery” was, “It was probably a mistake. Perhaps someone without authority raised the white flag, and the colonel did not know that. He wounded seventeen of our men, but I believe it was a mistake.”

A number of Pretorians were at Nicholson’s Nek, and they tell that at that place their men were so few in proportion to the eleven hundred British soldiers who surrendered, that when the burghers sent a detachment from the trenches to take the Englishmen’s arms, their own men were entirely swallowed up in the crowd, and they lost sight of them altogether. Every burgher, which means every man over sixteen years of age who can carry a rifle, is allowed twelve days’ leave of absence out of each three months. If he overstays his leave, which the women, who are even more keen than the men, seldom permit him to do, he is brought back to his regiment or “commando” under arrest. But for this there appears to be very little punishment. What there is consists of fines, which the burghers cannot pay and which are remitted indefinitely until “after the war,” and of enforcing pack drill, and police work around the camp. It is almost always the same men who force the fighting, that is, the same forty men out of a commando of three hundred will always volunteer to fight in the trenches, while the remainder help them from time to time exactly as they see fit. Knowing this, the wonder grows as to what would have happened to the British forces if the Boer had been a relentless foe with a taste for blood-letting and slaughter, instead of one quite satisfied to hold his position with the least possible exertion, and with the least danger to himself. The accounts of his successful marksmanship are undoubtedly correct. It is to this and to his ability to judge distances in this peculiarly deceptive atmosphere that has made his fire, coming though it does from so few rifles, so fatally effective. Eighty per cent of the men in each commando are what we should consider sharp-shooters; and as opposed to them the Boers tell me that after a charge they have often picked up the English rifles where the soldiers have fallen a hundred yards from the Boer trench, and found that the sights on the Lee-Metfords were adjusted for eight hundred to eleven hundred yards. Of course with sights at that range no sharp shooter, certainly no Tommy, could hit a Boer at a hundred yards, even if the burgher stood up and made a target of himself.

But I hope to tell more of the Boer in the field in another article. This one must continue to treat of the Boer capital, and of the most interesting man in it, Paul Kruger, who is possibly also the man of the greatest interest in the world today; a man who, while he will probably rank as a statesman with Lincoln, Bismarck, and Gladstone, lives in the capital of his republic as simply as a village lawyer. Every day, for the few brief moments during which he is driven from his cottage to the Government buildings, surrounded by a mounted guard of honor, he rises to a degree of state to which our own President does not attain. But for the remainder of the day he sits on his front porch or in his little parlor and arranges the affairs of his Government with as little display as that shown by the poorest of his burghers. On the stoop, separated from the sidewalk by only a bed of flowers, and guarded by two white marble lions and two policemen, you may at almost any hour you pass see the President smoking his pipe and sipping his coffee. This simplicity and democracy adds infinitely to the interest he holds for you as a man. It is, of course, much more effective than any show of state. The man is so much bigger than his surroundings that his gilded carriage and troop of helmeted police do not in any way increase his dignity, neither to the burgher who never before has seen a gilt carriage, nor to the High Commissioner of Her Majesty, who has ridden in a gilt carnage of his own. The first time I heard him speak was when he received the Irish-Americans who came from Chicago to join the Transvaal Army. They were drawn up along the front of the cottage in a double file, and while he waited for the arrival of the State Secretary, Mr. Reitz, who was to act as interpreter, the President sat on the porch and regarded them through his black spectacles. When Mr. Reitz came, the President walked out to the sidewalk, and Colonel Blake, the commander of the Irish brigade, introduced Captain O’Connor of the Chicago contingent. The President said that it was to be expected that men should come from the country which had always stood for the liberty and for the independence of the individual; that the cause for which they had come to fight was one upon which the Lord had looked with favor; and that even though they died in this war they must feel that they were acting as His servants and had died in His service. He then instructed them, much as a father talking to a group of school-boys, that they must obey their commanders and that their commanders must obey the generals of the Transvaal. Then he spoke more rapidly and inarticulately, so that we guessed it was something of great moment that we were about to hear ; but it proved on translation that he was enjoining them to be very careful of their ponies, not to ride them too hard, nor to lame them. Mr. Reitz translated this rather grudgingly, as though he wished the President would speak a few more words of welcome and of thanks for the sacrifice the men were about to make. But the President had the care of the State’s ponies at heart and reiterated his injunctions concerning them. He then bowed and turned into his cottage. I think he left the Irish boys a little puzzled, as they had expected oratory of an unusual order; but nevertheless they cheered him very heartily, and then O’Shea, who is the tenor of the troop, cleared his throat and sang a hymn. Possibly had the President known the Irish boys better he would have been as much surprised by this act on their part as his own performance had puzzled them. “Jerusalem” was the hymn O’Shea sang, and the picture the men made as they stood under the trees joining in the chorus was a very curious one. They were all armed and with bandoliers crossed over their chests, and gathered around them were a few Boers and a crowd of school-children who had ridden up on their bicycles to see what was going forward. I do not know whether they sang “Jerusalem” in order to please the President or as a sort of battle-hymn, but whatever the motive, it was very effective. They said afterward that they thought President Kruger was a very fine gentleman, but that somehow he had “scared” them.

My first meeting with President Kriiger Was very brief, and I learned little from it of him then which has not been made familiar to everyone. Mr. Reitz brought me to his house and we sat on his porch, he loading and re-loading his cavernous pipe the while and staring out into the street. The thing that impressed me first was that in spite of his many years his great bulk and height gave you an impression of strength and power which was increased by the force he was able to put into his abrupt gestures. He gesticulated awkwardly but with the vigor of a young man, throwing out his arm as though he were pitching a quoit, and opening his great fingers and clinching them again in a menacing fist, with which he struck upon his knee. When he spoke he looked neither at the State Secretary nor at me, but out into the street; and when he did look at one, his eyes held no expression, but were like those in a jade idol. His whole face, chiefly, I think, because of the eyes, was like a heavy waxen mask. In speaking, his lips moved and most violently, but every other feature of his face remained absolutely set. In his ears he wore little gold rings, and his eyes, which were red and seared with some disease, were protected from the light by great gold-rimmed spectacles of dark glass with wire screens.

So many men had come to see him and to ask him to talk on a subject for which the day for talk was past, that he had grown properly weary of it all; and before I could ask him for the particular information I hoped to obtain, he said, “I say what I have said before, we are fighting for our independence.” He kept repeating this stubbornly several times, and then spoke more specifically, saying, “They are two hundred thousand, we are thirty thousand.” “They have turned the black men on the border against us.” “We have all their prisoners to feed.” “It is like a big bully fighting a boy.” I asked him in what way he thought the United States could have assisted him. “By intervention,” he answered. “It can intervene.” I pointed out that the President had already offered to intervene and had been snubbed for so doing, and that it was not at all probable he would do so again, but that there was much sympathy in America; that there were many people anxious to help the Transvaal, and I asked him to suggest how they might put their sympathy to account. “They have sent us a great deal of money for the Red Cross,” he said, “and many of them have come to fight; but we cannot pay the passage money for others to come here, and we cannot ask for help. If they give us sympathy, or money, or men, that is good, and it is welcome. We thank them. But we “will not ask for help.” He struck his knee and pointed out into the street, talking so rapidly and violently that the words seemed as though they must be unintelligible to everyone. But Mr. Reitz said that the President had returned again to the simile of the big bully and the little boy.

“Suppose a man walking in the street sees the big bully beating the boy and passes on without helping him,” was what the President had said when he spoke so excitedly. “It is no excuse for him to say after the boy is dead, ‘The boy did not call to me for help.’ We shall not ask for help. They can see for themselves. They need not wait for us to ask.”

He talked on other subjects, but the greater part of what he said was a repetition of what I have written—the injustice of the English, the fact that his people fought only to protect their liberty, and the unfairness of the odds against them. In many ways he reminded me greatly of one of our own presidents, Mr. Cleveland. Both men have a strangely similar energy in speaking, a matter of stating a fact as aggressively and stubbornly as though they were being contradicted. There is also something similar in the impressiveness of their build and size which seems fitting with a big mind and strong will; something similar even in the little trick each has of shaking his head when an idea is presented to him which annoys him, as though he could brush away its truth with a gesture, and in the way neither of them looks at the person to whom he speaks. Resolution, enormous will-power, and a supreme courage of conviction are the qualities in both which after you have left them are still uppermost in your memory.

Strangely enough, the chief sign of war in Pretoria is not shown by the Boers themselves but in the presence at the capital of the English prisoners. Every night when the town is hidden in darkness there arise from outside its narrow boundaries the two great circles of electric lights which shine down upon the Pretoria racecourse, and the camp of the British officers. When you drive home from some dinner, when you bid the visitor “good-night,” and turn for a look at the sleeping town, the last thing that meets your eyes are these blazing, vigilant policemen’s lanterns, making for the prisoner an endless day, pointing out his every movement, showing him-in a shameless glare.

Early in the war General Buller declared his intention of eating his Christmas-dinner in Pretoria, and so frequently did his officers and men surrender, and in such large numbers, that at one time it looked as though, unless he was exceedingly careful, his boast would come true.

When the first of the prisoners began to arrive they were placed in the Pretoria race-course, which had also been the temporary home of the Jameson Raiders; but later the officers were moved into the residential quarter of the town, which is a pretty suburb called Sunnyside.

There they were given accommodations in the Model School House, until for several reasons they again were moved, this time into a camp especially prepared for them on the side of a hill, at the opposite edge of the town. In the meanwhile the number of captured Tommies had increased to such proportions that they were taken several miles from the city to an immense camp at Waterval, and the race-course was reserved for civil prisoners and as a hospital for those who were sick or wounded.

The officers were very comfortable at the Model School House, and in comparison with what the camp offers them the change was for the worse. The School House is just what its name suggests, a model school, with high, well-ventilated, well-lighted rooms, broad halls, and, what must have been particularly welcome to the Englishman, a perfectly appointed gymnasium and a good lawn tennis court. It is a handsome building outside, and when the officers used to sit reading and smoking on its broad verandas, one might have mistaken it for a club. They were given a piano and all the books and writing material they wanted, they could see the calm life of Pretoria passing in the street before them, and, on the whole, were exceedingly well off. And, so far as I can learn, they have no one to thank for their removal to their present undesirable quarters save themselves. It is the tradition of many wars that the generous enemy treats his prisoners with a consideration equal to or even greater than that which he gives to his own men. The moment his enemy surrenders he becomes his guest, and the Boers certainly provided much better accommodations for the officers than those to which their own men are accustomed either in the field or at home. The attitude of the prisoner to his enemy should be no less courteous. But the British officers, in their contempt for their captors, behaved in a most unsportsmanlike, ungentlemanly, and, for their own good, a most foolish manner. They drew offensive caricatures of the Boers over the walls of the schoolhouse, destroyed the children’s copy-books and text-books, which certainly was a silly performance and one showing no great sign of valor, and were rude and “cheeky” to the Boer officials, boasting of what their fellow-soldiers would do to them when they took Pretoria. Their chief offence, however, was in speaking to and shouting at the ladies and young girls who walked past the school-house. Personally, I cannot see why being a prisoner would make me think I might speak to women I did not know; but some of the English officers apparently thought their new condition carried that privilege with it. I do not believe that every one of them misbehaved in this fashion, but it was true of so many that their misconduct brought discredit on all. Some people say that the young girls walked by for the express purpose of being spoken to; and a few undoubtedly did, and one of them was even arrested, after the escape of a well-known war correspondent, on suspicion of having assisted him. But, on the other hand, any number of older women, both Boer and English, have told me that they found it quite impossible to pass the school-house on account of the insulting remarks the officers on the veranda threw to one another concerning them, or made directly to them. At last the officers grew so offensive that a large number of ladies signed a petition and sent it to the Government complaining that the presence of the Englishmen in the heart of the town was a public nuisance, and in consequence of this they were removed from their comfortable quarters and sent to the camp.

When I went to see them there, the fact that I was accompanied by a Boer officer did not in the least deter them from abusing and ridiculing his countrymen to me in his presence, so that what little service I had planned to render them was made impossible. After they had sneered and jeered at the Boer official in my hearing, I could not very well turn around and ask him to grant them favors. It was a great surprise to me. I had thought the English officer would remain an officer under any circumstances. When one has refused to fight further with a rifle, it is not becoming to continue to fight with the tongue, nor to insult the man from whom you have begged for mercy. It is not, as Englishmen say, “Playing the game.” It is not “cricket.” You cannot ask a man to spare your life, which is what surrendering really means, and then treat him as you would the gutter-snipe who runs to open the door of your hansom. Some day we shall wake up to the fact that the Englishman, in spite of his universal reputation to the contrary, is not a good sportsman because he is not a good loser. As Captain Hanks said when someone asked him what he thought of the Englishman as a sportsman, “He is the cheerfulest winner I ever met.” There were many sober-minded ones among the prisoners, and one of these devoted himself to covering the walls of a room in the school-house with maps of Natal and of the Orange Free State. These maps were so remarkably well executed that the Director of the school has preserved them for the education of the children. He even wrote to the Government officials asking them to invite the officer who had made the maps to return daily from the camp and complete one he had begun of the Transvaal. I told the officer in the camp of this, and he was much amused and pleased, and said he would be only too happy to oblige them.

The escape of Winston Churchill also helped toward the removal of the officers from the centre of Sunnyside to a more secluded spot, although the difficulty of the escape really began after Churchill was clear of Pretoria. His first danger, which was in leaving the school-house, was made feasible by the fact that when he slipped over the fence the sentry was looking the other way, either by accident or “for revenue only,” as is variously stated. After Churchill was once in the street he was comparatively safe, as there are so many strange uniforms in the Boer army that a man in full khaki might today walk through the streets of Pretoria unchallenged. It was the long journey through the country which made the leave-taking of Churchill, and later of three brother officers, remarkable.

The chances of escape from the camp are almost impossible. It might be done, however, by tunneling under the fence, or by cutting the wires of the tell-tale electric lights, and, after throwing mattresses over the barbed-wire entanglements, scrambling over them into the darkness. If this were done at many different points along the fence, some men would undoubtedly get away, and the others would undoubtedly be shot.

I visited the camp only once and found it infinitely depressing. The officers are enclosed in a rectangular barbed-wire fencing about as high as a man’s head and one hundred and fifty yards in length, and about fifty yards across at either end. At one corner of this is a double gate studded with barbed-wire and guarded by turnkeys. The whole is a sort of a pen into which the officers are herded like zebras at the zoo. Innumerable electric lights are placed at close intervals along the line of this wire fencing, and make the camp as brilliant as a Fall River boat by night. There is not a corner in it in which one could not read fine print. In the middle of the enclosure is a long corrugated zinc building with a corrugated zinc roof. It is hot by day and cold by night and is badly ventilated. At one end are some excellently arranged bathrooms with shower-baths, and at the other the kitchen and mess-room. The messroom is as bare as an earth floor, deal tables and benches, and zinc walls can make it. In the sleeping apartment one hundred and forty-two cots are placed almost touching each other. They are in four long rows with two aisles running between. There is no flooring to this building, but slips of oil-cloth stretch down the two aisles. In between the cots the dust settles freely. There is, of course, no possible privacy, although some of the men have surrounded their beds with temporary screens, and the wall at the head of almost every cot is covered with a strip of blanket or colored cloth, and on these the owner of the bed has pinned pictures from the illustrated weekly papers. It makes the long room look less like a barrack than the children’s ward of a hospital. If one can decide from the number of their portraits, the Queen and Marie Studholme seemed to be, with the imprisoned officers, the most popular of all English people, with Lord Roberts a close third. In judging the treatment the Boers have meted out to their prisoners one must remember that the cots in the zinc shed, the mess-hall, and the bathrooms are as luxurious as anything to which the majority of the Boers are accustomed. We must take his point of view as to what is comfortable and luxurious, not that of men accustomed to White’s and Bachelors. It is also to be considered that had the officers been decently civil to the Boers, which need not have been difficult for gentlemen—for I have never met an uncivil Boer—they might have been treated with even greater leniency. The camp seemed to me worse than any prison of stone and iron bars that I have ever visited, because it showed freedom so near at hand. The great hills, the red-roofed houses, the trees by the spruit which runs only a hundred yards below the camp, the men and women passing at will, beyond the dead line of fifty yards, the cattle grazing, the clouds drifting overhead, all seemed to tantalize and mock at the men, who are not shut off from it by a blind wall, but who can see it clearly through the open cat’s cradle of tangled wire.

I went to the prison with Captain Von Loosberg of the Free State Artillery. He himself had taken several prisoners at Sannahspost and was returning to them a Bible and two prayer-books which he had found in their captured kit and which had been given to these officers before they left England by their children. From this the officers could not have thought that he had come to gloat over them, and the fact that he was in an equally bad plight with themselves, with his head in bandages and his arm in a sling owing to their shrapnel and Lee-Metfords, might have appealed to them in his favor. But in spite of his reason for coming, one of them was so exceedingly insulting to him that Von Loosberg told the man that if he had him on the outside of the barbed wire he would thrash him. His brother officers ordered the fellow to be quiet and hustled him away. It seemed so strange to hear a British officer insulting a man when he himself was in a position in which he could not be touched nor chastised. And besides, there are so few circumstances when one can insult a man with his arm in a sling.

I was surprised to find that the habitual desire of the Englishman to be left severely to himself did not follow him into prison. I had expected that I should walk around with the Boer officer, who was sent with me to see that I did not say anything to the officers which I should not, in as lonely state as though I wore a cloak of invisibility. On the contrary almost all of the prisoners came up at once like children rushing to a Punch and Judy show, and gazed and asked questions. Their eagerness over the slight variety which our coming brought to the awful routine of the prison-camp, their desire to learn some new thing, to get a fresh whiff of knowledge from the outside world, was so pathetic and disturbing that I do not know that I ever spent a more uncomfortable hour. The Commission on Prisoners do not allow the officers to hear any news of the war except as it is misrepresented in the Volksstem, a single sheet of no value. It is a foolish and unnecessarily hard restriction, but as it exists I had to obey it and was not able to tell the officers anything that they cared to know. Some of them played the game most considerately, appreciating that I could not answer certain questions; but others, when I did not answer, or pretended not to hear, abused the Boers violently, which made it most unpleasant for the Boer officer with me, and did not help to make me more loquacious. But these men were the exception. The majority were only too glad to gain any information from outside without wasting time abusing anybody.

Before the electric lights were lit we stood outside the zinc shed near the gate, and as it grew dark they separated me from my Boer guide and crowded in closer, so that in the dusk I could only see vague outlines of figures and hear voices whispering questions without seeing from where they came. Those nearest me under cover of these voices from the outside circles pressed me for some word as to the chance of their release, the probable length of their imprisonment, the nearness of the attacking column, and the safety of friends and relatives. They were so little of the class with which one connects imprisonment, their voices were so strongly reminiscent of the London clubs, the Savoy, and the Gaiety, and so strange in this cattle-pen, that one felt supremely selfish, and, when going away, both mean and apologetic. The fact of being able to pass the barbed wire while they still stood watching one seemed like flaunting one’s own good fortune and freedom.

What I liked best about them was their genuine and keen interest in the welfare of the Tommies of their several commands who were imprisoned at Waterval.

“Is it true they’re sleeping on the ground?” they whispered. “Do you know if they have decent medicines ?” “Do they get their money?” “Won’t you go and see them, and tell us how they are?”

It was good to find that most of them suffered for their men even more keenly, because unselfishly, than for themselves. For these I wished to do anything which might help the dreary torture of the camp, but in what I tried to do I was unsuccessful.

They form the most picturesque, the most painful, and, as I have said, the only war-like feature of Pretoria. For nights after my visit to them I was haunted by the presence of that crowd pressing close and whispering questions, speaking eagerly from far back in the darkness. “Can you tell me was General Hilyard wounded at Pieters? He is my father.” “Is it true my brother was shot at Spion Kop? He was with Thorneycroft.” “Do my people know I am here?” “Will you tell Hay I must see him?” “Will you cable my people that I am all right?” “Do the papers blame us for surrendering ? It was not the Colonel’s fault that we had no outposts!”

In the dusk, they were like a chorus of ghosts, of imprisoned spirits, of “poor little lambs who had lost their way,” and who, caged on the side of a Boer kopje, were trying to get back into the fold of the great world again.