EENDRACT MAAKT MAGT,
which, being interpreted means, "Right makes Might"; and that motto, as every Britisher could see, precisely explained our presence there that day. Inside there still remained, in its accustomed place, the state chair of the departed President, in which, later on, I ventured to sit; and all around were ranged the, to me, eloquent seats of his departed senators. In that very hall, just nine months before, those senators, in secret session, had resolved to hurl defiance at the might of Britain; and so precipitated a war by which two sister Republics were, as such, hurried out of existence. Now the very corridors by which I approached that hall were crowded with Boers wearied with the fruitless fight, and eager to hand in their weapons.
In the waiting crowd outside I found a friend who courteously supplied me with a copy of a quite unique photograph—the only photograph taken of the solemn burial, a few hundred yards from where I stood, of a Union Jack, when that flag was hauled down in the Transvaal, and the British troops ingloriously retired. As shown in the photograph, over the grave was erected a slab, and on that slab was this most notable inscription:—
In Memory
OF
THE BRITISH FLAG
in the Transvaal; which departed this life
August 2nd, 1881.
Aged 4 years.
In other lands none knew thee
But to love thee.
RESURGAM.
No such burial had the world seen before, and few bolder prophecies than that "I shall rise again," can be found in the history of any land; but a few minutes it became my memorable privilege to witness the actual fulfilment of that patriotic prediction. As in Johannesburg, so here, it was Lady Roberts' pocket edition of the Union Jack that was used; and we looked on excitedly; but the Statue of Liberty looked down benignly, while that tiny flag crept up nearer and nearer to its golden feet. Liberty has never anything to fear from the approach of that flag!
While in Pretoria the following story was told me by the soldier to whom it chiefly refers:—
A Striking Incident.
At the Orange River a corporal of the Yorkshire Light Infantry received a pocket copy of the New Testament from a Christian worker, and placed it in his tunic by the side of his "field dressing." A godless man, who had been driven into the army by heavy drinking, he merely glanced at a verse or two, and then forgot its very presence in his pocket till he reached the battlefield of Graspan a few days later on. Then a Boer bullet passed right through the Testament and the dressing that lay beside it, was thereby deflected from its otherwise fatal course, and finally made a long surface wound on his right thigh. That wound he at once bound up with one of his putties, but for two hours was unable to stir from the place where he fell.