Foolish men attribute all the moral courage in the world to the soldiers of their own country, but nature made a wise distribution of that gift, and not all the Boers were cowards.  Boer generals with only a few hundred men time and again attacked thousands of British soldiers, and frequently vanquished them.  General Botha’s twenty-five hundred men held out for a week against General Buller’s thirty or forty thousand men, and General Cronje with his four thousand burghers succumbed to nothing less than forty thousand men and a hundred and fifty heavy guns under Field-Marshal Lord Roberts.  Those two examples of Boer bravery would suffice to prove that the South African farmers had moral courage of no mean order if there were not a thousand and one other splendid records of bravery.  The burghers did not always lie behind their shelter until the enemy had come within several hundred yards and then bowl them over with deadly accuracy.  At the Platrand fight near Ladysmith, on January 6th, the Boers charged and captured British positions, drove the defenders out, and did it so successfully that only a few Boers were killed.  The Spion Kop fight, a second Majuba Hill, was won after one of the finest displays of moral courage in the war.  It requires bravery of the highest type for a small body of men to climb a steep hill in the face of the enemy which is three times greater numerically and armed with larger and more guns, yet that was the case with the Boers at Spion Kop.  There were but few battles in the entire campaign that the Boer forces were not vastly outnumbered by the enemy, who usually had from twice to twenty times their number of cannon, yet the burghers were well aware of the fact and did not allow it to interfere with their plans nor did they display great temerity in battling with such a foe.  When Lord Roberts and his three thousand cavalry entered Jacobsdal there were less than one hundred armed Boers in the town, but they made a determined stand against the enemy, and in a street-fight a large percentage of the burghers fell, and their blood mingled with that of those they had slain.  Large bodies of Boers rarely attacked, and never resisted the enemy on level stretches of veld, not because they lacked courage to do so, but because they saw the futility of such action.  After the British drove the Boers out of the kopjes east and north-east of Bloemfontein the burghers had no broken country suited to their particular style of warfare, and they retreated to the Vaal without much effort to stop the advance of the enemy.  The Boer generals knew that the British were equipped with innumerable cannon, which could sweep the level veld for several miles before them and make the ground untenable for the riflemen—­the mainstay of the Boer army.

[Illustration:  SPION KOP, WHERE BOERS CHARGED UP THE HILLSIDE]