All the glory of this bloodless victory does not rest with the general who commands the column.  To Captain Tennant no small meed of praise is due.  This officer was here on secret service before hostilities commenced, and he did his work so thoroughly that the country is as familiar to him as paint to a barmaid.  He is one of those men, unfortunately so rare in the British Army, combining dash and dauntless pluck with a cool, level head.  If he gets his opportunity, England will hear more of this officer.  I have been intensely struck by the class of officers by whom General Gatacre is surrounded.  They all look like soldiers.  I have not seen a single dude, not one of those wretched fops of whom I have seen only too many in South Africa.  They speak like soldiers too.  No idiotic drawl, no effeminate lisp, no bullying, ill-bred, coarseness of tongue; they are neither drawing-room dandies nor camp swashbucklers, but officers and gentlemen—­and, I can assure you, the terms are not always synonymous, even under the Queen’s cloth.  I have seen mere lads in this country leading men into action who in point of brains were not fit to lead a mule to water, and others who, in regard to manners, were scarcely fit to follow the mule.  But, thank God, the Boers have taught our nation this, if they have taught us nought else—­that it needs something more than an eye-glass, a lisp, a pair of kid gloves, and an insolent, overbearing manner to make a successful soldier.

But let me get amongst the Boers.  I was only a prisoner in their hands for about a month, yet every moment of that time was so fraught with interest that I fancy I picked up more of the real nature of the Boers than I should have done under ordinary circumstances in a couple of years.  I was moved from laager to laager along their fighting line, saw them at work with their rifles, saw them come in from more than one tough skirmish, bringing their dead and wounded with them, saw them when they had triumphed, and saw them when they had been whipped; saw them going to their farms, to be welcomed by wife and children; saw them leaving home with a wife’s sobs in their ears, and children’s loving kisses on their lips.  I saw some of these old greyheads shattered by our shells, dying grimly, with knitted brows and fiercely clenched jaws; saw some of their beardless boys sobbing their souls out as the life blood dyed the African heath.  I saw some passing over the border line which divides life and death, with a ring of stern-browed comrades round them, leaning upon their rifles, whilst a brother or a father knelt and pressed the hand of him whose feet were on the very threshold of the land beyond the shadows.  I saw others smiling up into the faces of women—­the poor, pain-drawn faces of the dying looking less haggard and worn than the anguish-stricken features of their womanhood who knelt to comfort them in that last awful hour—­in the hour which divides time from eternity, the sunlight of lusty life from the shadows