CHAPTER VIII

PRISONERS OF WAR

Pretoria:  November 24, 1899.

The position of a prisoner of war is painful and humiliating.  A man tries his best to kill another, and finding that he cannot succeed asks his enemy for mercy.  The laws of war demand that this should be accorded, but it is impossible not to feel a sense of humbling obligation to the captor from whose hand we take our lives.  All military pride, all independence of spirit must be put aside.  These may be carried to the grave, but not into captivity.  We must prepare ourselves to submit, to obey, to endure.  Certain things—­sufficient food and water and protection during good behaviour—­the victor must supply or be a savage, but beyond these all else is favour.  Favours must be accepted from those with whom we have a long and bitter quarrel, from those who feel fiercely that we seek to do them cruel injustice.  The dog who has been whipped must be thankful for the bone that is flung to him.

When the prisoners captured after the destruction of the armoured train had been disarmed and collected in a group we found that there were fifty-six unwounded or slightly wounded men, besides the more serious cases lying on the scene of the fight.  The Boers crowded round, looking curiously at their prize, and we ate a little chocolate that by good fortune—­for we had had no breakfast—­was in our pockets, and sat down on the muddy ground to think.  The rain streamed down from a dark leaden sky, and the coats of the horses steamed in the damp.  ‘Voorwaerts,’ said a voice, and, forming in a miserable procession, two wretched officers, a bare-headed, tattered Correspondent, four sailors with straw hats and ‘H.M.S.  Tartar’ in gold letters on the ribbons—­ill-timed jauntiness—­some fifty soldiers and volunteers, and two or three railwaymen, we started, surrounded by the active Boer horsemen.  Yet, as we climbed the low hills that surrounded the place of combat I looked back and saw the engine steaming swiftly away beyond Frere Station.  Something at least was saved from the ruin; information would be carried to the troops at Estcourt, a good many of the troops and some of the wounded would escape, the locomotive was itself of value, and perhaps in saving all these things some little honour had been saved as well.

‘You need not walk fast,’ said a Boer in excellent English; ’take your time.’  Then another, seeing me hatless in the downpour, threw me a soldier’s cap—­one of the Irish Fusilier caps, taken, probably, near Ladysmith.  So they were not cruel men, these enemy.  That was a great surprise to me, for I had read much of the literature of this land of lies, and fully expected every hardship and indignity.  At length we reached the guns which had played on us for so many minutes—­two strangely long barrels sitting very low on carriages of four wheels, like a break in which horses are exercised.