’You attempt the impossible.  Pretoria will be taken by the middle of March.  What hope have you of withstanding a hundred thousand soldiers?’

‘If I thought,’ said the younger of the two brothers vehemently, ’that the Dutchmen would give in because Pretoria was taken, I would smash my rifle on those metals this very moment.  We will fight for ever.’  I could only reply: 

’Wait and see how you feel when the tide is running the other way.  It does not seem so easy to die when death is near.’

The man said, ‘I will wait.’

Then we made friends.  I told him that I hoped he would come safely through the war, and live to see a happier and a nobler South Africa under the flag which had been good enough for his forefathers; and he took off his blanket—­which he was wearing with a hole in the middle like a cloak—­and gave it to me to sleep in.  So we parted, and presently, as night fell, the Field Cornet who had us in charge bade us carry a little forage into the shed to sleep on, and then locked us up in the dark, soldiers, sailors, officers, and Correspondent—­a broken-spirited jumble.

I could not sleep.  Vexation of spirit, a cold night, and wet clothes withheld sweet oblivion.  The rights and wrongs of the quarrel, the fortunes and chances of the war, forced themselves on the mind.  What men they were, these Boers!  I thought of them as I had seen them in the morning riding forward through the rain—­thousands of independent riflemen, thinking for themselves, possessed of beautiful weapons, led with skill, living as they rode without commissariat or transport or ammunition column, moving like the wind, and supported by iron constitutions and a stern, hard Old Testament God who should surely smite the Amalekites hip and thigh.  And then, above the rain storm that beat loudly on the corrugated iron, I heard the sound of a chaunt.  The Boers were singing their evening psalm, and the menacing notes—­more full of indignant war than love and mercy—­struck a chill into my heart, so that I thought after all that the war was unjust, that the Boers were better men than we, that Heaven was against us, that Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley would fall, that the Estcourt garrison would perish, that foreign Powers would intervene, that we should lose South Africa, and that would be the beginning of the end.  So for the time I despaired of the Empire, nor was it till the morning sun—­all the brighter after the rain storms, all the warmer after the chills—­struck in through the windows that things reassumed their true colours and proportions.

CHAPTER IX

THROUGH THE DUTCH CAMPS

Pretoria:  November 30, 1899.