In the following
pages I have endeavoured to present an accurate picture of the Boers in
war-time. My duties as a newspaper correspondent carried me to the Boer
side, and herein I depict all that I saw. Some parts of my narrative may not
be pleasing to the British reader; others may offend the sensibilities of
the Boer sympathisers. I have written truthfully, but with a kindly spirit
and with the intention of presenting an unbiased account of the struggle as
it was unfolded to the view from the Boer side. I shall be criticised, no
doubt, for extolling certain virtues of the Boers, but it must be noticed
that their shortcomings are not neglected in these lines.
In referring to Boer
deeds of bravery I do not mean to insinuate that all British soldiers were
cowards any more than I mean to imply that all Boers were brave, but any man
who has been with armies will acknowledge that bravery s not the exclusive
property of the peoples of one nation. The Boers themselves had thousands of
examples of the bravery of their opponents, and it was not an extraordinary
matter to hear burghers express their admiration of deeds of valour by the
soldiers of the Queen. The burghers, it may be added, were not bitter
enemies of the British soldiers, and upon hundreds of occasions they
displayed the most friendly feeling toward members of the Imperial forces.
The Boer respected the British soldier’s ability, but the same respect was
not vouchsafed to the British officer, and it was not unreasonable that a
burgher should form such an opinion of the leaders of his enemy, for the
mistakes of many of the British officers were so frequent and costly that
the most unmilitary man could easily discern them. On that account the
Boers’ respect for the British soldier was not without its mixture of pity.
There are those who
will assert that there was no goodness in the Boers and that they conducted
the war unfairly, but I shall make no attempt to deny any of the statements
on those subjects. My sympathies were with the Boers, but they were not so
strong that I should tell untruths in order to whiten the Boer character.
There were thieves among them—I had a horse and a pair of field-glasses
stolen from me on my first journey to the front—but that does not prove that
all the Boers were wicked. I spent many weeks with them, in their laagers,
commandos, and homes, and I have none but the happiest recollections of my
sojourn in the Boer country. The generals and burghers, from the late
Commandant-General Joubert to the veriest Takhaar, were extremely courteous
and agreeable to me, and I have nothing but praise for their actions. In all
my experiences with them I never saw one maltreat a prisoner or a wounded
man, but, on the contrary, I observed many of their acts of kindness and
mercy to their opponents.
I have sought to
eliminate everything which might have had a bearing on the causes of the
war, and in that I think I have succeeded. In my former book, dealing with
the Boers in peaceful times, I gave my impressions of the political affairs
of the country, and a closer study of the subject has not caused me to alter
my opinions. Three years before the war began, I wrote what has been almost
verified since—
“The Boers will be
able to resist and to prolong the campaign for perhaps eight months or a
year, but they will finally be obliterated from among the nations of the
earth. It will cost the British Empire much treasure and many lives, but it
will satisfy those who caused it, the South African politicians and
speculators.”
The first part of the
prediction has been realised, but at the present time there is no indication
that the Boer nation will be extinguished so completely or so suddenly,
unless the leaders of the burghers yield to their enemy’s forces before all
their powers and means of resistance have been exhausted. If they will
continue to fight as men who struggle for the continued existence of their
country and government should fight, and as they have declared they will go
on with the war, then it will be three times eight months or three times a
year before peace comes to South Africa. Presidents Kruger and Steyn have
declared that they will continue the struggle for three years, and longer if
necessary. De Wet will never yield as long as he has fifty burghers in his
commando, and Botha will fight until every British soldier has been driven
from South African soil. Hundreds of the burghers have made even firmer
resolutions to continue the war until their cause is crowned with victory.
There may be some among them who fought and are fighting because they
despise Britons and British rule, but the vast majority are on commando
because they firmly believe that Great Britain is attempting to take their
country and their government from them by the process of theft which we
enlightened Anglo-Saxons of America and England are wont to style
“benevolent assimilation.” They feel that they have the right to govern
their country in accordance with their own ideas of justice and equality,
and, naturally, they will continue to fight until they are victorious, or
might asserts itself over their conception of right. If they have the power
to make Great Britain feel that their cause is just, as our forefathers in
America did a hundred years ago, then the Boers have vindicated themselves
and their actions in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. If they
lack in the patriotism which men who fight for the life of their country
usually possess, then the Boers of South Africa will be exterminated from
among the nations of the world and no one will offer any sympathy to them.
We Anglo-Saxons of
America and Great Britain have a habit of calling our enemies by names which
would arouse the fighting blood of the most peaceable individual, and when
there is a Venezuelan question to be discussed we do not hesitate to
practice this custom, born of our blood-alliance, by making each other the
subjects of the vituperative attacks. During the Spanish-American war we
made most uncomplimentary remarks concerning our short-lived enemy, and more
recently we have been emphasising the vices of our protégés, the Filipinos,
with a scornful disregard of their virtues. The Boers, however, have had a
greater burden to bear. They have had cast at them the shafts of British
vituperation and the lyddite of American venom. In a few instances the
lyddite was far more harrowing than the shafts, and in the vast majority of
instances both were born of ignorance. There are unclean, uncouth, and
unregenerate Boers, and I doubt whether any one will stultify himself by
declaring that there are none such of Britons and Americans. I have been
among the Boers in times of peace and in times of war, and I have always
failed to see that they were in any degree lower than the men of like rank
or occupation in America or England. The farmers in Rustenburg probably
never saw a dress suit or a décolleté gown, but there are innumerable
regions in America and Great Britain where similarly dense ignorance
prevails. I have been in scores of American and British homes which were not
more spotlessly clean than some of the houses on the veld in which it was my
pleasure to find a night’s entertainment, and nowhere, except in my own
home, have I ever been treated with more courtesy than that which was
extended to me, a perfect stranger, in scores of daub and wattle cottages in
the Free State and the Transvaal. I will not declare that every Boer is a
saint, or that every one is a model of cleanliness or virtue, but I make
bold to say that the majority of the Boers are not a fraction less moral,
cleanly, or virtuous than the majority of Americans or Englishmen, albeit
they may be less progressive and less handsome in appearance than we imagine
ourselves to be.
As I have stated, the
politics of the war has found no part in the following pages, and an honest
effort has been made to give an impartial account of the proceedings as they
unfolded themselves before the eyes of an American. The struggle is one
which was brought about by the politicians, but it will probably be ended by
the layman who wields a sword, and who knows nothing of the intricacies of
diplomacy. The Boers desire to gain nothing but their countries’
independence; the British have naught to lose except thousands of valuable
lives if they continue in their determination to erase the two nations.
Unless the Boers soon decide to end the war voluntarily, the real struggle
will only begin when the Imperial forces enter the mountainous region in the
north-eastern part of the Transvaal, and then General Lucas Meyer’s prophecy
that the bones of one hundred thousand British soldiers will lay bleaching
on the South African veld before the British are victorious may be more than
realised.
One word more. The
English public is generous, and will not forget that the Boers are fighting
in the noblest of all causes—the independence of their country. If
Englishmen will for a moment place themselves in the position of the Boers,
if they will imagine their own country overrun by hordes of foreign
soldiers, their own inferior forces gradually driven back to the wilds of
Wales and Scotland, they will be able to picture to themselves the feelings
of the men whom they are hunting to death. Would Englishmen in these
circumstances give up the struggle? They would not; they would fight to the
end.
Howard V Hillegas,
New York City,
August 1, 1900.
