Edward P. Lowry

“ Not only our fighting-men—soldiers of high degree and low degree alike—but non-combatants, chaplains, army scripture readers, war correspondents, doctors, and army nurses, it remorselessly claimed and victimised. In such a campaign the fighting line is not the chief point of peril, nor the fighting soldiers the only sufferers. Hospital work has its heroes, though not its trumpeters, and many a man of the Royal Army Medical Corps has as faithfully won his medal as any that handled rifle. ”

“ The Transvaal was at that time a barren land, given over to wild beasts, and to Boers who seemed equally uncontrollable. An Ishmael life was theirs, their hand against every man's and every man's hand against them. Every little township was a law unto itself and almost every homestead; so the British Government threw up the thankless task of governing the ungovernable, as soon as a life and death struggle with Russia appeared inevitable. The Sand River Convention gave to the Transvaal absolute independence save only in what related to the treatment of the natives. ”

“ Yet, appositely enough, as, that same evening, I was being driven back to town in a buggy and four, a little maiden—perchance like the maiden of the locket—wonderingly exclaimed as she watched the sun sink in (p. 022) radiance behind a neighbouring hill: "Why! just look! The sky is English!" "How so?" asked her father. "Can't you see?" said the child; "it is all red, white, and blue!" which indeed it was!
The price of milk.
But our title to this newly-conquered territory was by no means quite so unchallenged as such a complacent and complimentary sky might have led one to suppose. ”

“ It was two o'clock before the Guards' Brigade reached this saluting point, but till nearly midnight one continuous stream of men and horses, of guns and ambulances, passed through the streets to their respective camping grounds. These well fagged troops by their fitness, even more than by their numbers, astonished many an onlooker who was by no means a "raw Kaffir"; and one old Dutchman expressed the thought of many minds when he said, "You seem able to turn out soldiers by machinery, all of the same age!" ”

“ The fiery hostility of Kruger, like the quenchless hate of Napoleon a hundred years ago, has not been without beneficent influence on our national character and destiny, and these two years of war have seemingly done more for the consolidation of the empire than twenty years of peace. Whether he and Steyn used the Africander Bond as their tool or were themselves its tools the outcome of the war is the same. To Great Britain it has so bound Greater Britain in love-bonds and mutual loyalty as to make all the world wonder. ”

“ The whole empire at last awoke to a sense of its essential oneness. Australians and Canadians, men from Burma, from India and Ceylon, speedily joined hands on the far distant veldt in defence of what they proudly felt to be their heritage as well as ours. Their presence in the very forefront of the fray betokened the advent of a new era. Nobler looking men, or men of a nobler spirit, were never brought together at the unfurling of any banner. ”

“ Lord Roberts' rapid march rescued from impending destruction the costly machinery and shafting of the Witwaterrand gold mines, in which capital to the extent of many millions had been sunk, and out of which many hundreds of millions are likely to be dug. By some strange freak of nature this lofty ridge, lying about 6000 feet above the sea level, and forming a narrow gold-bearing bed over a hundred miles long, is by universal confession the richest treasure-house the ransackers of the whole earth have yet brought to light. ”

“ New broods of these same wild geese found their way to the Transvaal, and there made for themselves a name, not as resistless fighters, but as irrestrainable looters. These men linked to the bywoners, or squatters, the penniless Dutch of South Africa, did little to help the cause they espoused, but many a time have caused every honest God-fearing burgher to blush by reason of their irrepressible lawlessness. ”

“ Yet no fighting was going on. The town was undefended, and the Boers in full retreat. This sniper was at last discovered hiding almost close at hand in a big patch of tall African grass. He turned out to be a Hollander schoolmaster, who, finding himself surrounded, sprang upon his knees, threw up his arms and laughingly cried, "All right, khakis, I surrender!" But that was his last laugh; and he lies asleep to-day in the same cemetery as his three victims. ”

“ That, to the famine-haunted imagination of the troops, was precisely what many a well-fed porker on the veldt seemed to say, but as a rule say in vain. After thousands of troops had gone by, I have with my own eyes seen that lucky porker still there, with ducks of unruffled plumage still floating on the farmhouse pond, and fat poultry quite unconscious how perilous an hour they had just passed. Yet the owner of the aforesaid pig and poultry was out on commando, his mauser charged with a messenger of death, which any moment might wing its way to any one of us. ”

“ It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, was beyond all others well versed in the bewildering ways of the veldt. He apparently had no skill for the conducting of set battles, but for ambushing convoys, for capturing isolated detachments, for wrecking trains, and for himself eluding capture when fairly ringed round with keen pursuers beyond all counting, few could rival him. ”

“ All the Boer guns were elsewhere; and a little way behind our own busy naval guns, though hidden by the crest of the hill, lay the Grenadier Guards awaiting orders to take their place and part in the fray.
Presently a sharp succession of Boer shells, intended for the aforesaid naval guns, came flying over our heads, and dropping among our men. One hit a horse, which no man will ride again; one struck an ambulance waggon, and scared its solitary fever patient almost out of his senses ”

“ For such high-handed proceedings the Transvaal Government clearly cannot be held responsible, for at that time it had ceased to exist, and more than ever the head of each commando had become a law unto himself. It would be false to say that a fine sense of honour did not anywhere exist in the now defunct Republic, but it is perfectly fair to assert that on the warpath our troops were compelled to tread it was not often found. Yet in every department of life he that contendeth for the mastery is never permanently crowned unless he contend lawfully. ”

“ Traps and tricking, not to say treachery, and shooting from behind absolutely safe cover, are the essential points in a hunter's tactics. Caution to him is more than courage, and it is precisely along those lines the Boers make war. In almost every case when they ventured into the open it was the doing of their despised foreign auxiliaries. The kind of courage required for the actual conquest of the colonies the Boers had never cultivated or acquired. The men who in six months and six days could not rush little Mafeking hoped in vain to capture Cape Town, unless they caught it napping. ”

“ We owe not a little of our religious liberty to the personal influence and example of our much lamented Queen; and we, therefore, show ourselves worthy to have been her subjects, only when we shun utterly all indifference concerning things divine, yet give no place to bigotry; when we seek out not the worst, but the best, in every man, and honestly strive to make the best of that best. ”

“ All greatness perishes that is not broad based on godliness. The best gift for this new era that God Himself can bestow upon our people, is the grace of deep-toned repentance, an impassioned love of righteousness, a never flinching resolve to walk in newness of life ”

“ But it must be remembered that our men and officers, regular and irregular alike, were as inexperienced as the Boers in many of the novel duties this war devolved upon them; that the Transvaal lends itself as scarcely any other country under the sun could do to just such surprises, and that the ablest generals served by the trustiest scouts have in the most heroic periods of our history sometimes found themselves face to face with the unforeseen. We are assured, for instance, that even on the eve of Waterloo both Blucher and Wellington were caught off their guard by their great antagonist. ”

“ Its traders had levied heavy toll on the soldiers' slender pay; and no fabled monster of ancient times ever claimed so sore a tribute of human lives. It was not on the veldt but under it that hundreds of our lads found rest; and hundreds more were soon to share their fate. The victors had become victims, and the vanquished were avenged. Seldom have troops taken possession of any city with such unmixed satisfaction, or departed from it with such unfeigned eagerness. ”

“ Even accumulated locomotives to the number of about fifty had been in some cases elaborately mutilated, or caught, and twisted out of all utility, by the devouring flames. So wanton is the waste war begets. The torch has played a comparatively small part in this contest; but it is food supplies that have suffered most from its ravages, and the Boers, with a slimness that baffled us, having thus burned their food, bequeathed to us their famished wives and children. Thousands of these innocents drew full British rations, when thousands of British soldiers were drawing half rations. ”

“ So here at Heilbron the troops, fresh from the fray, and on their way to further furious conflicts, actually provided an open-air concert for the benefit of a local church charity in the very neighbourhood, and among the very people they were in the very act of conquering. It is a topsy-turvy world that war begets: but most of all this war, in which while the kopjes welcomed us with lavish supplies of explosive bullets, the towns and villages welcomed us with proffered fruit and the flaunting of British flags ”

“ Royal etiquette required that the Queen should herself select the lover destined to share the pleasures and responsibilities of her high position, and her choice fell not on one renowned for gaiety, for wealth or wit, but on one in whom she recognised the double gift of abounding good sense and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. For a choice so supremely wise, and for a marriage so supremely happy, all thoughtful Englishmen still render thanks to God. ”

“ The fatal symptoms were evidently of a specially alarming type, for he was hastily buried with all his belongings, his slippers, his iron mug, his boots, his haversack, and the very stretcher on which he lay; then over all was poured some potent disinfectant. It was a gruesome sight! So to-day he lies in the self-same cemetery where rests many a British soldier who fell not far away in the fights of fifty years ago. It was British soil in those distant days, and is British soil again, but at how great cost we were now about to learn.
That guardsman was the first fruits of a vast ingathering. ”

“ Throughout the Transvaal in every town and hamlet, the House of God is invariably the central building, as also it is the centre of the most potent influence. In both Republics the minister was emphatically "a Master in Israel"; and in the welcome shadows of this great church I waited to witness one of the most interesting events of the century—the proclaiming of Pretoria a British city by the official hoisting in it, as earlier in Bloemfontein, of the British flag; and by the stately "march past" of the British troops. ”

“ The Boers in the day of their uprising against British rule found "The Man" in Paul Stephanus Kruger. To all South Africa a veritable "man of Destiny" has he proved to be; and for eighteen successive years, as their honoured President he has ruled his people with an absoluteness no European potentate could possibly approach. By birth a British subject, and for a brief while after the annexation a paid official of the British Government, he yet seems all his life to have been a consistent hater of all things British. ”

“ It was an ever memorable scene I witnessed in the Kirk Square when the Union Jack was once more formally hoisted in the midst of armed men, a miscellaneous crowd of cheering civilians, and an important group of Basuto chiefs who had been specially invited to witness the ceremonious annexation of the conquered territory and to hear proclaimed the Royal pleasure that the erstwhile "South African Republic" should henceforth be known by the new, yet older, title of "The Transvaal." ”

“ A bayonet at the end of his rifle is to him of no use. He seldom comes to close quarters with hunted men or beasts till the life is well out of them; and so in this war he has shown himself a not too scrupulous sportsman, rather than a soldier, to the undoing of many a scout; and in this fashion, as well as by white flag treachery, the adventurous Australians have distressingly often been victimised. At Manana, four miles east of Lichtenberg, one of their officers, Lieutenant White, was thus treacherously shot while going to answer the white flag displayed by the Boers. ”

“ So, before the eyes of one dying on the blood-stained veldt did visions of home and loved ones flit. Life's last look turned thither! In war, the cost in cash is clearly the cost that is of least consequence. Who can appraise aright the price of that one locket? ”

“ So Pretoria witnessed a stately funeral, the like of which South Africa had never seen before, as the Queen's own kinsman was borne, by the martial representatives of the whole empire, to the quiet cemetery which this war had so enlarged and so enriched.
Disease and fatal woundings combined cost us in this strangely protracted conflict, scarcely more lives than the one great fight at Waterloo, where on the English side alone 15,000 fell,—for the most part to rise no more. In this South African war, up to January 31st, 1901, about 7700 of our men had died of disease ”

“ Not a single town or stronghold to which they laid siege had they succeeded in capturing; the very last of the series was safe at last, and after all that had been said about British blunderings, this event surely called for something more than commonplace congratulations. Hereward the Wake was wont to say, "We are all gallant Englishmen; it is not courage we want: it is brains"; but at Mafeking for once brains triumphed over bullets. A new Wake had arisen in our ranks, and so Mafeking has found a permanent place among the many names of renown in the long annals of our island story. ”

“ They staggered us most of all by letting slip so many opportunities for staggering us indeed. Day after day we marched through a country superbly fitted for defence, a country where one might check a thousand and two make ten thousand look about them. Our last long march was through an absolutely waterless and apparently pathless bush. Yet there was none to say us nay! From Waterval Onder onwards to Koomati Poort not a solitary sniper ventured to molest us. A more complete collapse of a nation's valour has seldom been seen. ”