and necessity of the struggle.  Should Dutch ideas or English ideas of government prevail throughout that huge country?  The one means freedom for a single race, the other means equal rights to all white men beneath one common law.  What each means to the coloured races let history declare.  This was the main issue to be determined from the instant that the clock struck five upon the afternoon of Wednesday, October the eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine.  That moment marked the opening of a war destined to determine the fate of South Africa, to work great changes in the British Empire, to seriously affect the future history of the world, and incidentally to alter many of our views as to the art of war.  It is the story of this war which, with limited material but with much aspiration to care and candour, I shall now endeavour to tell.

CHAPTER 5.

Talana hill.

It was on the morning of October 12th, amid cold and mist, that the Boer camps at Sandspruit and Volksrust broke up, and the burghers rode to the war.  Some twelve thousand of them, all mounted, with two batteries of eight Krupp guns each, were the invading force from the north, which hoped later to be joined by the Freestaters and by a contingent of Germans and Transvaalers who were to cross the Free State border.  It was an hour before dawn that the guns started, and the riflemen followed close behind the last limber, so that the first light of day fell upon the black sinuous line winding down between the hills.  A spectator upon the occasion says of them:  ’Their faces were a study.  For the most part the expression worn was one of determination and bulldog pertinacity.  No sign of fear there, nor of wavering.  Whatever else may be laid to the charge of the Boer, it may never truthfully be said that he is a coward or a man unworthy of the Briton’s steel.’  The words were written early in the campaign, and the whole empire will endorse them to-day.  Could we have such men as willing fellow-citizens, they are worth more than all the gold mines of their country.

This main Transvaal body consisted of the commando of Pretoria, which comprised 1800 men, and those of Heidelberg, Middelburg, Krugersdorp, Standerton, Wakkerstroom, and Ermelo, with the State Artillery, an excellent and highly organised body who were provided with the best guns that have ever been brought on to a battlefield.  Besides their sixteen Krupps, they dragged with them two heavy six-inch Creusot guns, which were destined to have a very important effect in the earlier part of the campaign.  In addition to these native forces there were a certain number of European auxiliaries.  The greater part of the German corps were with the Free State forces, but a few hundred came down from the north.  There was a Hollander corps of about two hundred and fifty and an Irish—­or perhaps more properly an Irish-American-corps of the same number, who rode under the green flag and the harp.