Part 6 (1/2)

The following week I went to Harrismith to spend a week with my family, so that I was not on commando when the English broke through at Pieter's Heights and at last relieved Ladysmith. I can therefore say nothing of that, to us, ill-fated battle. I can only say in pa.s.sing, that the great mistake there seems to have been that General Botha was not in command.

When he arrived on the scene at the commencement of the battle, he strongly disapproved of no measures having been taken to prevent the English from taking Klanwane--the wooded ridge to the east of Colenso.

”If the English once get on that hill--we have no chance,” he said. And what he had said proved true.

The English took the kop and placed their naval guns on it, and they then had the key to Ladysmith. It was then all over with us! From Klanwane they could direct a terrific bombardment on all the Boer positions. And the Boers were overpowered by the overwhelming odds of cannon as well as men.

After besieging Ladysmith for four months, the siege was given up and our forces retired to the north.

The commandos trekked with all speed through the mud--for the weather was rainy: the Transvaalers to the Biggarsberg and the Free Staters to the Drakensberg.

I visited the Harrismith burghers a few days after they had pitched their camp on the great mountain range. What thoughts pa.s.sed through my heart on thinking how different was our position four months ago when we had descended from those towering mountains into Natal. During the four that had elapsed we had been very successful, except during the last month, when we began to have disaster on disaster. Cronje had surrendered at Paardeberg. Kimberley, Ladysmith, and Mafeking had been relieved; and just after I arrived in the laager, the report came that Lord Roberts had occupied Bloemfontein without firing a shot. Was this the beginning of the end? I asked myself.

Those were dark days! And yet no one was utterly cast down. ”Matters will take a turn,” so everyone said; and notwithstanding all that had happened, we looked forward hopefully.

And how much help, too, did not the men receive from their wives. Those who obtained leave to go home for a few days, found their wives as courageous as ever. They found, too, that their womenfolk had performed the labour of men on the farms, while they had been in Natal. They had seen that the fields were ploughed by the Kaffirs, and in many cases they had themselves scattered the seed in the furrows; and now the men would commence to reap what the women had sown, to reap so plentifully that man and beast would live for months upon the harvest.

What n.o.ble women are the wives of the Boers! They are the very embodiment of the love of liberty. They have ever been ready to stand by the sides of their husbands, in the holy cause of freedom. In former days they moulded bullets for their husbands, while these were repulsing a fierce onslaught of Kaffirs; and now they had managed the entire farm-work, while the men were absent, fighting for their country. And in the future--alas! that such a future should lie before them--they will have to suffer inexpressible sorrows, because they will choose to be the true-hearted mothers of a free nation. Because of their steadfastness they will have to suffer as the women of no civilised nation have ever suffered at the hands of the soldiers of another civilised nation. They will refuse to call back their husbands from the heroic strife; and for that they will have to submit to humiliation and insult; for that they will be driven from their homes like cattle; for that they will have to yield their lives in concentration camps; they will have to see their homes burnt, and the food taken out of the mouths of their children, and all this because they have held their Liberty dearer than anything. We knew not then, during those dark days on the Drakensberg, that such a future lay before our women. But we saw enough of their indomitable courage, to know that with such heroines for mothers, wives, sisters, daughters--it was impossible for us to give up the struggle at the first sign of adversity. That was a source of consolation to us in the sorrowful days of March 1900.

PART II

_ENDURANCE_

CHAPTER I

TO NAUWPOORT

This second part of my notes, like the first, is not cast in the form of a journal. The reason is that my diary was lost on the 6th of June 1901 at Graspan, near Reitz, where I was captured by the English and remained in their hands for seven hours.[2] I escaped with nothing more than the clothes on my back. When, some days after, I arrived at Fouriesburg I began to rewrite what I could recollect, and succeeded in this better than might have been expected. I prepared a calendar of the Sundays, and this helped me to recall to memory, for every day of the week, almost everything I had noted down. It became evident, however, that I could not now write a journal, but a narrative. This, as I knew, would be less attractive for the future historian, to whom a chronicle, however dry, is of more importance, but it would be, in regard to form, more pleasing to the general reader.

[Footnote 2: How I was released will be described later.]

Girding myself to the task, I discovered when I began to write that what I was recording afresh was perfectly reliable. I succeeded better than I expected. Entire pages appeared almost word for word. This was no doubt due to my having written my journal over several times at Zwart Klip, in the months of January and February 1901.

I shall now proceed to relate what I witnessed during the war subsequent to the events which had happened when I made my last notes in Natal.

When the burghers of the Free State had to retire from Natal, a large number of them were ordered to go as reinforcements to our forces who were endeavouring to prevent Lord Roberts with his immense army from penetrating farther into our country. The burghers, however, of Harrismith, Vrede, and Heilbron, under Chief-Commandant Marthinus Prinsloo, were to remain on the Drakensberg to guard the border. They lay along those mountains from Oliviershoek on the west as far as De Beer's Pa.s.s to the east. Subsequently the burghers of Heilbron were also called away; and when General Prinsloo shortly after went away to our commandos in the neighbourhood of Lindley and Senekal, Commandant Hattingh of Vrede was elected Chief-Commandant.

I spent nearly the half of my time in visiting these burghers. On Sundays I held divine service in the church at Harrismith, and on week-days I was in one or other of the laagers on the Drakensberg.

It was very irksome for our burghers to lie there inactive, without ever coming into contact with the enemy; for from Natal the English made no advance.

Our men stood guard day and night, and now and then a patrol went down the mountain; but further than this nothing was done. The spare time was employed in building sod-stables for the horses, and making ”yoke-skeys”

and handsome walking-sticks from the wood of beautiful trees which were ruthlessly felled in the large forests which grow on the Natal side of the Drakensberg mountains. For the rest the younger men amused themselves with swimming, cricket, football, and quoits, and so summer glided away into autumn, and autumn into winter.

Sad waste of energy and time, one might say, whilst the other burghers were engaged in a life-and-death struggle in the middle of the State.

Undoubtedly so! But the order had been given: Guard the frontier! And as in obeying this command the burghers of Vrede and Harrismith had also the advantage of protecting their own districts, it was by no means against their will that they thus lay inactive from month to month along the border.

But there came a change in this condition of things when, towards the middle of July 1900, an order was issued by the President that all the forces on the Drakensberg mountains should proceed to Nauwpoort.[3] The border guard immediately raised the objection that it was not advisable to remove all the forces from the frontier, and thus leave the only two districts in the Free State--Vrede and Harrismith--that had not yet been devastated, open to invasion from the side of Natal, and unprotected against Kaffir ”raids,” and they asked the President if he would not change his decision in this matter. After some correspondence, the President agreed that a small body of men should be left as a guard along the border under Mr. Jan Meyer, who for this purpose was appointed Acting Chief-Commandant; but at the same time gave very strict orders that all the other burghers should without delay proceed to Nauwpoort.

[Footnote 3: This was the order. When General de Wet pa.s.sed through Slabbert's Nek, the following arrangement was decided on: General de Wet was to proceed on the 15th to Heilbron, and General Roux the day after to the south of the State. It was further arranged that General Marthinus Prinsloo should remain in command of a small body of men stationed on the Roodebergen from Commando Nek to Nauwpoort in order to guard the grain districts. General Crowther had on the same day as General Roux to go to Witkop and stay there until he could join General Hattingh, under whom he was then to operate in the districts of Vrede and Harrismith. The unfortunate spirit, however, which, immediately after the departure of the President, arose among the officers at Nauwpoort upset all these arrangements.]