Men so devoted when on duty, don't transform themselves, the drink being absent, into incarnate demons when off duty; and no dominion, therefore, has more cause to be proud of its defenders than our own![Back to Contents]
CHAPTER X
PRETORIAN INCIDENTS AND IMPRESSIONS
Pretoria is manifestly a city in process of being made, and has probably in store a magnificent future, though at present the shanty and the palace stand "cheek by jowl." Even the main roads leading into the town seemed atrociously bad as judged by English standards, and the paving of the principal streets was of a correspondingly perilous type. Yet the public buildings already referred to were not the only ones that claimed our commendation as signs of a progressive spirit. The Government Printing Works are remarkably handsome and complete; and while for educational purposes there is in Pretoria nothing quite comparable to Grey College at Bloemfontein, the secondary education of the late Republic's metropolis was well housed.
The State's Model School.
There is, however, one building provided for that purpose which has acquired an enduring interest of quite another kind, and which I visited, when it became a hospital, with very mingled emotions. The State's Model School, during the early stages of the war, was utilised as a prison for the British officers captured by the Boers. How keenly these brave men felt and secretly resented their ill-fortune they were too proud to tell, but one of the noblest of them had become, through the terrors of a disastrous fight, so piteously demented for a while that he actually wore hanging from his neck a piece of cardboard announcing that it was he who lost the guns at Colenso. Some of them would rather have lost their lives than in such fashion have lost their liberty, and the story which tells how three of them regained that liberty by escaping from this very prison is one of the most thrilling among all the records of the war. Most noted of the three is Winston Churchill, whose own graphic pen has told how he eluded the most vigilant search and finally reached the sea. But the adventures of Captain Haldane and his non-commissioned companion reveal yet more of daring and endurance. Captured at the same time as Churchill, and through the same cause—the disaster on November 13th to the armoured train at Chieveley—these two effected their escape long after the hue and cry on the heels of Churchill had died away. Within what was supposed to be a day or two of the removal of all the officers to a more secure "birdcage" outside the town, those two gentlemen vanished under the floor of their room, through a kind of tiny trap-door that I have often seen, but which was then partly concealed by a bed, and was apparently never noticed by their Boer custodians. In this prison beneath a prison, damp and dark and dismal beyond all describing, and where there was no room to stand erect, these two officers found themselves doomed to dwell, not for days merely, but for weeks. They were of course hunted for high and low, and sought in every conceivable place except the right place. Food was guardedly passed down to them by two or three brother officers who shared their secret, and at last, more dead than alive, they emerged from their dungeon the moment they discovered the building was deserted, and then daringly faced the almost hopeless, yet successful, endeavour to smuggle themselves to far-distant Delagoa Bay. Evidently the element of romance has not yet died out of this prosaic age!
Rev. Adrian Hoffmeyer.
Strangely sharing the fate of these British prisoners in this Model School was a godly and gifted minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A Boer among Boers. He was never told why he was arrested by his brother Boers, and though kept under lock and key for months, he was never introduced to judge or jury. An advocate of peace, he was suspected of British leanings, and so almost before the war commenced rough hands were laid upon him. There was in the Transvaal a reign of terror. Secret service men were everywhere, and no one's reputation was safe, no one's position secure. In this land of newly-discovered gold men were driven to discover that the most golden thing of all was discreet silence on the part of those who differed from "the powers that be." So he who simply sought to avert war was suspected of British sympathies, and to his unutterable surprise presently found himself the fellow prisoner of many a still more unfortunate British officer.
Of those officers, their character and intellectual attainments, he speaks in terms of highest praise. Their enforced leisure they devoted to various artistic and intellectual pursuits, and I have myself seen an admirably elaborate and accurate map of the Republics, covering the whole of a large classroom wall, drawn presumably from joint memory by these officers, who by its aid were able to trace the progress of the war as tidings filtered through to them by an ingenious system of signalling practised by sympathetic friends outside.
By those same officers this Dutchman was invited to become their unofficial chaplain, and he writes of the devotional services consequently arranged as among the chief delights of his life, the favourite hymn he says being the following:—