The War Office published these documents plain,
To the joy of their foes, and the grief of the sane;
And while they were reading them, all the world wondered,
And promptly concluded that everyone blundered.
Humorous relief was provided by the report that Krüger had encouraged his burghers by circulating the news that London had been captured by the Russians, a method foreshadowing the imaginative exploits of the Germans in the late war. It was based, however, on an incontestable fact—our unpopularity in both hemispheres. The Boer delegates had been welcomed in America, though Punch sought to discount the effect of their propaganda by a cartoon in which Columbia reassures John Bull: "Don't mind those noisy boys of mine. You know, my dear, it's Election Time."
The Anglophobe feeling was much more vocal in France, and Punch gives a curious account of the Transvaal section of the Paris Exhibition in October, where signatures were invited and freely appended to addresses to the two Presidents, the bust of Krüger was crowned with palm branches, poetic eulogies were circulated, and the walls covered with "Mort aux Anglais," "Chamberlain est un vache," etc. Meanwhile, Mafeking had been relieved, and Punch had defended the "loud extremes of passionate joy" which added the now well-nigh forgotten verb "to Maffick" to our current vocabulary. Lord Roberts's uninterrupted advance to Pretoria had moved Punch, with many others, to declare very prematurely on June 6th that the war was practically over, though it lasted nearly two years longer, and the slow progress of "rounding up" the Boers actually prompted the suggestion from a leading paper that Lord Kitchener should be recalled and Lord Roberts sent out again. President Krüger's flitting is illustrated in a cartoon in which "Oom Paul" is seen in a small boat, with two millions of treasure, quitting the sinking ship Transvaal; while in a set of verses, written after reading of his triumphal progress through France, Punch prophesies for him a green old age in Grosvenor Square. The C.I.V.'s returned in the autumn and were welcomed by the City of London; and shortly afterwards "a Mr. Williams offered respectful apologies to Satan for mentioning him in the same breath with Lord Kitchener." Punch, even in his most Chauvinistic mood, never indulged in such abuse of the Boer generals, and at the end of 1900 paid a well-deserved compliment to the elusive De Wet in his cartoon of "De Wet o' de Wisp."
China and Australia
Before dealing with the subsequent progress of the "guerrilla war," we may turn aside for a moment to other developments overseas. In an epigram on "The Millennium" in August, 1900, Punch writes:—
In some problematic day