of unsearchable death.  Those things I have seen, and in the ears of English men and English women, let me say, as one who knows, and fain would speak the plain, ungilded truth concerning friend and foe, that, not alone beneath the British flag are heroes found.  Not alone at the breasts of British matrons are brave men suckled; for, as my soul liveth—­whether their cause be just or unjust, whether the right or the wrong of this war be with them, whether the blood of the hundreds who have fallen since the first rifle spoke defiance shall speak for or against them at the day of judgment—­they at least know how to die; and when a man has given his life for the cause he believes in he is proven worthy even of his worst enemy’s respect.  And it seems to me that the British nation, with its long roll of heroic deeds, wrought the whole world over, from Africa to Iceland, can well afford to honour the splendid bravery and self-sacrifice of these rude, untutored tillers of the soil.  I have seen them die.

Once, as I lay a prisoner in a rocky ravine all through the hot afternoon, I heard the rifles snapping like hounds around a cornered beast.  I watched the Boers as they moved from cover to cover, one here, one there, a little farther on a couple in a place of vantage, again, in a natural fortress, a group of eight; so they were placed as far as my eye could reach.  The British force I could not see at all; they were out on the veldt, and the kopjes hid them from me; but I could hear the regular roll and ripple of their disciplined volleys, and in course of time, by watching the actions of the Boers, I could anticipate the sound.  They watched our officers, and when the signal to fire was given they dropped behind cover with such speed and certainty that seldom a man was hit.  Then, when the leaden hail had ceased to fall upon the rocks, they sprang out again, and gave our fellows lead for lead.  After a while our gunners seemed to locate them, and the shells came through the air, snarling savagely, as leopards snarl before they spring, and the flying shrapnel reached many of the Boers, wounding, maiming, or killing them; yet they held their position with indomitable pluck, those who were not hit leaping out, regardless of personal danger, to pick up those who were wounded.  They were a strange, motley-looking crowd, dressed in all kinds of common farming apparel, just such a crowd as one is apt to see in a far inland shearing shed in Australia, but no man with a man’s heart in his body could help admiring their devotion to one another or their loyalty to the cause they were risking their lives for.

One sight I saw which will stay with me whilst memory lasts.  They had placed me under a waggon under a mass of overhanging rock for safety, and there they brought two wounded men.  One was a man of fifty, a hard old veteran, with a complexion as dark as a New Zealand Maori; the beard that framed the rugged face was three-fourths grey, his hands were as rough and knotted by open air toil as the hoofs of a working steer.