Boers

“ Having driven the Boers from pillar to post, hounded them, preyed upon them and robbed and murdered them for 250 years, and then deprived them of their liberty and independence, England now expects them to forgive and forget because there is no longer any reason for ill-feelings. ”

“ Thus when the Boers found that they could agitate with impunity, they naturally enough continued to agitate. Anybody who knows them will understand that it was very pleasant to them to find themselves in possession of that delightful thing, a grievance, and, instead of stopping quietly at home on their farms, to feel obliged to proceed, full of importance and long words, to a distant meeting, there to spout and listen to the spouting of others. ”

“ We did not like this, so we mounted our horses, rode down the arroya about 300 yards till we came to the wagon road that led to the farm settlement, and then put spurs and were away at full gallop. The English stood with their necks stretched like a flock of geese and gazed intently at us, but never fired a shot. We passed near five Boers in a kopje who were about firing on us, but seeing our pack horses they refrained. They could not understand how we could be Boers and come from the English lines, yet they knew that none but Boers had pack horses. ”

“ Young and old, sick and healthy, servants and masters, country-folk and townsmen, sailors and soldiers deserting their calling; and Dutch Boers, with their whole families, yielded to the impulse to migrate to the alluring scene that had suddenly become so famous. ”

“ Supposing that another five years sees sixty or seventy thousand English diggers at work in the Transvaal, is it to be believed that these men will in that event allow themselves to be ruled by eight or nine thousand hostile-hearted Boers? Is it to be believed, too, that the Boers will stop to try and rule them? ”

“ This Transvaal region was, as already seen, redeemed from the natives by the Boers, who are mostly devoted to farming, but many to a pastoral life like that of the old patriarchs, living in wagons or tents and leading, or rather following, about immense herds of cattle and sheep. They are a hardy, strong, brave people, and in subduing them and annexing their beautiful and fertile country, it is very doubtful whether Great Britain has done herself credit or humanity benefit. Boers may not be all that modern civilization could desire. ”

“ Among the Boers there are no discipline, no drilling, no inspections, no roll calls, every man feeling himself a general with full authority to do as he pleases. So they began the war, so they prosecuted the war, and so they finished the war. The severe cold and apparent confusion and disorder among the Boers, as they cantered off like so many Apache Indians toward Laing's Nek, did not seem to make the slightest impression on the boys of the Irish Brigade. ”

“ It has so happened, therefore, that the Boers, as the ruling and dominant class, have hopelessly failed to master or comprehend the new conditions with which they have been called upon to deal. They have not, as a body, shown either capacity or desire to treat the new developments with even a remote appreciation of their inherent value and inevitable trend. The Boer has simply set his back against the floodgates, apparently oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the hugely accumulating forces behind must one day burst every barrier he may choose to set up. ”

“ I will not declare that every Boer is a saint, or that every one is a model of cleanliness or virtue, but I make bold [11] to say that the majority of the Boers are not a fraction less moral, cleanly, or virtuous than the majority of Americans or Englishmen, albeit they may be less progressive and less handsome in appearance than we imagine ourselves to be. ”

“ I have myself been an eye-witness of Boers coming to a village, and, according to their usual custom, demanding twenty or thirty women to weed their gardens, and have seen these women proceed to the scene of unrequited toil, carrying their own food on their heads, their children on their backs, and instruments of labor on their shoulders. Nor have the Boers any wish to conceal the meanness of thus employing unpaid labor ”

“ The canard that the Boers go to bed without undressing is as absurd as the one of like origin that an entire family sleeps in one bed. Yet these fictions constantly appear, and frequently over the names of persons who have penetrated into South Africa no farther than Cape Town.
The Boer here depicted is the representative Boer--the one who shoulders his rifle and fights for his country; the one who watches his cattle on the plains and pays his taxes; the one who tries to improve his condition, and takes advantage of every opportunity for advancement that is offered. ”

“ How it was the Boers did not succeed at the very outset in driving the British into the sea, when we had only skeleton forces to oppose them, was best explained to me by a son of the late State Secretary, who penned the ultimatum, and whom I found among our prisoners in Pretoria. The Boers are not farmers. Speaking broadly there is scarcely an acre of ploughed land in all the Transvaal. ”

“ Boers are past-masters at hiding their real feelings and affecting any that they think will be acceptable. It is a trait which has become a national characteristic, and the craft, dissimulation, the slimness, as it is called, of the Boers is a by-word. I suppose it comes from the political situation, the close neighbourhood of a rival race, stronger and more energetic, which fosters in the stolid Dutchman, by way of buckler, this instinctive reticence and cunning. ”

“ It was a supremely dashing attack against a supremely steady resistance, for among all their gallant deeds the Boers have never fought better than on that February evening. Amid such a smashing shell fire as living mortals have never yet endured they stood doggedly, these hardy men of the veld, and fired fast and true into the fiery ranks of the Irishmen. The yell of the stormers was answered by the remorseless roar of the Mausers and the deep-chested shouts of the farmers. Up and up surged the infantry, falling, rising, dashing bull-headed at the crackling line of the trench. ”

“ The Boers are people whose hardihood, bravery, manliness, high spirit, marksmanship with the rifle, attachment to the soil, and content as farmers, fortified with solemn appreciation of religious duty, compel respect, but they are at fault in their attitude of determined obstruction of progress in the Dark Continent that is chiefly committed to the English. ”

“ That with good government and under more civilized conditions, they are capable of better things is undoubted. Among the Boers of Natal (especially in the Umvoti District) , of the Cape Colony, and even of certain districts of the Free State, I have met many Boers, who, though of a rather low order of intellect, and incapable of any achievements in the higher departments of our mental life, were in all other respects as high-toned, upright and courteous gentlemen as anyone would desire to meet. ”

“ All these things I find in the Boers, and it is these things which destroy people, to make an end of them in the country. The custom of the Boers has always been to cause people to be sold, and to-day they are still selling people. ”

“ British and Dutch salute and exchange the news with lazy mutual tolerance. The British are storekeepers and men of business; the Boers ride in from their farms. They are big, bearded men, loose of limb, shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy ”

“ In contending with such an unscrupulous and God-banished government as the British, they must remember that their rifles and artillery must take first place. The Boers are by nature intensely humane and religious, and command the respect and admiration of all who know them, but they must remember that when at war with the English, they are fighting a lot of savages, and that by way of retaliation they must play the savage, too. ”

“ Do you, Capper and Carmichael, put yourselves twenty or thirty yards apart; you are our best shots. When the Boers get within a thousand yards, which is as near as they will do if they keep the line they are going, open fire upon them and keep it up steadily, but not too fast. When they see that only two men are firing they will think that you are a couple of farmers whose place they have plundered, and who are determined to have their revenge. ”

“ Lord Roberts arrived, and at the head of his troops made his entry. There was no looting or plundering. The British Army, always famous for its rigid discipline in war, filed in in perfect order, and paid for everything which it took. Military police patrolled the streets; sentries stood in front of every store. The hungry and thirsty khaki-clad men bought up all the bread and milk that they could get, and the Boers began almost to bless a war which had brought them such customers. ”

“ So far as I have seen of the Boers, there is scarcely a family without one of its members being so afflicted. This is purely from never washing themselves; they have a natural horror of water touching their persons. ”

“ Long before, at the very beginning of the war, the Boers, as we have often been reminded, promised to stagger humanity, and during this period of the strife they came strangely near to fulfilling their purpose. ”

“ These notices of the Boers are not intended to produce a sneer at their ignorance, but to excite the compassion of their friends. They are perpetually talking about their laws; but practically theirs is only the law of the strongest. ”

“ Here the newcomers found abundance of food, and a land of such pastoral wealth that the farm animals they brought increased abundantly. For years a steady stream of Boers continued to enter and settle in this land, deserting their farms in the British territory, harnessing their cattle to their long, lumbering wagons, and bringing with them food for the journey, and a good supply of powder and lead for use in their tried muskets. Their active hunting experience brought them in time to rank among the best marksmen in the world. ”

“ The Boers live entirely on the country through (p. 438) which they pass, not only taking all the food they can lay hands upon on the farms—grain, forage, horses, cattle, etc., but looting the small village stores for clothes, boots, coffee, sugar, etc., of all of which they are in great need. Our forces, on their side, are compelled to denude the country of everything moveable, in order to frustrate these tactics of the enemy. ”

“ His Boers, the backbone of the country, are perishing off the land; hundreds have become impoverished loafers, landless hangers-on of the town population. In his own interests he should recruit his Republic with new blood—and the sands are running out. I say this irrespective of agitation about Uitlanders. ”

“ Stead’s class, whose knowledge is apparently derived from a superfluous stock of sentimentality, try to persuade their readers and hearers that the Boers are a clean-living race, puritanical in their morals, and worthy on those grounds alone of our highest respect and admiration. ”

“ They were forced to fight on the defensive and the Boers made them do plenty of fighting. Without horses and mules what could the English do but spend their time in throwing up earthworks to defend themselves against Boer attacks, and I tell you the English were kept pretty busy from morn till night. The Boers were having a first class picnic with them, and had not the English Government in Washington, D.C., lent a helping hand, the British army in South Africa would have been hopelessly lost in the struggle. ”

“ The colonist came to Paris, and, after giving European life a fair trial, became homesick for his vineyard and his farm, and—perhaps impelled by that attraction which seems to draw back to the Cape those who have once lived under its bright sky—decided in favour of his old-fashioned life, and, resigning all his ancestral rights, went joyfully home to the rough surroundings of his childhood.
Although the Boers are fine, well-built, handsome men, their feminine relatives, far from equalling them in good looks, are as fat and ungraceful as any inmates of Turkish harems. ”

“ But the Boers are soldiers who love liberty and their Country, and therefore are not men to run and lay down their guns because some high butcher at the head of 300,000 men threatens to banish them forever from their country if they do not. ”

“ The Boers are all farmers, and, according to their own statements, a poverty-stricken people. They plead poverty before an English merchant because they fancy it will have the effect of reducing prices. Fortunately, the merchants possess rather an accurate knowledge of such customers, and in consequence they lose nothing. One would as soon believe the generality of Boers, as walk into the shaft of a coal mine. He has a reputation for lying, and he never brings discredit upon that reputation. ”

“ It must be understood that the Boers were the one certain difficulty, and one of the possible dangers, to be encountered on our road, for at no time are they are pleasant people to deal with, and just now they are remarkably unpleasant towards Englishmen. ”

“ The Boers, who had hitherto followed pastoral and hunting pursuits, were now called upon to fulfil one of the most difficult tasks in the world, namely, the management of a complicated administration, and the government of a large digging population, which had sprung up suddenly under the most extraordinary circumstances. ”