Many and wonderful are the stories written and published concerning the
Boer and his habits when on the war-path. Most of these stories are written
by men who take good care never to get within a hundred miles of the
fighting line, but content themselves with an easy chair, a cigar, a bottle
of whisky, and carpet slippers on the stoep of some good hotel in a pretty
little Boer town. To scribes of this calibre flock a certain class of
British resident, who is always full to the very ears of his own dauntless
courage, his deathless loyalty to the Queen and Empire, his love for the
soldier, and his hatred of the Boer. This gallant class of British resident
has half a million excuses ready to his hand to explain why he did not take
a rifle and fight when the war summons rang clarion-like through the land.
Then he grits his teeth, knits his eyebrows, clenches his hands in
spasmodic wrath, throws out his chest, and tells his auditors, in a voice
husky with concentrated wrath and whisky, what he intends to do the next
time the damnable Boer rises to fight. The old British pioneer may have
whelped a few million good fighting stock in his time, but this class of
animal is no lion's whelp; it is a thing all mouth and no manners, a
shallow-brained, cowardly creature, always howling about the Boer, but too
discreet to go out and fight him, though ready at all times to malign him,
to ridicule him as a farmer or a fighter, and it is a perfect bear's feast
to this hybrid animal to get hold of a gullible newspaper correspondent to
tell him gruesome tales relative to Boer fighting laagers.
I had one of this peculiar species at me the other day in Burghersdorp, and
he painted a Boer laager so vividly, between nips at my flask, that if I
had not seen a few laagers myself I should have felt bad over the matter.
He pictured the smell of that laager in language so intense, with gestures
so graphic, that some of his auditors had to hold their nostrils with
handkerchiefs, whilst they stirred the circumambient atmosphere with
cardboard fans, and I could not help wondering, if the portrait of the
smell was so awful, what the thing itself must be like. Flushed with
success, the narrator pursued his subject to the bitter extremity. He
conjured up scenes of half-buried men lying amongst the rocks surrounding
the laager: here a leg, there an arm, further on a ghastly human head
protruding from amidst the scattered boulders, until I had only to close my
eyes to fancy I was in a charnel-house, where Goths and Huns were holding
devilish revelry. The B.R. paused, and dropped his voice two octaves lower,
and the crowd on the balcony craned their heads further forward, so that
they might not miss a single word. He told of the women in the laagers, the
wild, unholy mirth of women, who moved from camp fire to camp fire, with
dishevelled hair streaming down their backs, with tossing arms, bare to the
shoulders, and blood besmeared, not the blood of goats or kine, but the
blood of soldiers--our soldiers. Thomas Atkins defunct, and done for by the
she-furies.
He waded in again when the shudder which shook the crowd had died away, and
hinted, as that class of shallow-souled creature loves to hint, of orgies
under the dim light of the stars, or between the flickering light of
smoking camp fires, until the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah seemed to be
crowding all around us in a peculiarly beastly and uncomfortable fashion.
Then he lay back in his chair and sighed; but anon he sprang upright, and,
with flashing eyes and extended arms, wanted to know what the ---- Roberts
meant by offering peace with honour to such a people. "Mow them down!" he
yelled. "Shoot them on sight--no quarter for such devils! Kill 'em off!
kill 'em off! kill 'em off!" and he half sobbed, half sighed himself into
silence, whilst the audience gazed on him as on one who knew what war,
wild, red, carmine war, was. I broke in on his stillness, as newspaper men
who know the game are apt to do, for I wanted data, I wanted facts, and I
had not swallowed his yarn as freely as he had swallowed my whisky.
"Born in this country?" I asked.
"Yorkshire," he answered laconically.
"Been in Africa long?"
"'Bout five years."
"Where did you put in most of your time before
the war?"
"Johannesburg."
"Mines?"
"No."
"Merchant?"
"No."
"Hotel-keeper, perhaps?"
"No."
"Shopkeeper?"
"No."
"What was your calling, or profession, or business, or means of
livelihood?"
"General agent, sharebroker, correspondent for some local papers."
H'm; I knew the class of animal well--general jackal; do the dirty work of
any trade, and master of none.
"Where were you when the war broke out?"