Lord Lytton tells us that in the days of Edward the Confessor the rage for psalm singing was at its height in England so that sacred song excluded almost every other description of vocal music: but though in South Africa a similar trend revealed itself among the troops, their camp fire concerts, and the concerts in the Pretoria Soldiers' Home, were of an exclusively secular type. At one which it was my privilege to attend, Lady Roberts and her daughters were present as well as the general, who generously arranged for a cigar to be given to every man in the densely crowded hall when the concert closed. All the songs were by members of the general's staff, and were excellent; but one, composed presumably by the singer, was topical and sensational in a high degree. It was entitled: "Long as the world goes round"; and one verse assured us concerning "Brother Boer," with only too near an approach to truth,
He'll bury his mauser,
And break all his vows, sir,
Long as the world goes round!
Another verse reminded us of a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, was beyond all others well versed in the bewildering ways of the veldt. He apparently had no skill for the conducting of set battles, but for ambushing convoys, for capturing isolated detachments, for wrecking trains, and for himself eluding capture when fairly ringed round with keen pursuers beyond all counting, few could rival him. Like hunted Hereward, he seemed able to escape through a rat hole, and by his persistence in guerilla tactics not only seriously prolonged the war and enormously increased its cost, but also went far to make the desolation of his pet Republic complete. So there Lord Roberts sat and heard this sung by one of his staff:—
Of all the Boers we have come across yet,
None can compare with this Christian De Wet;
For him we seem quite unable to get—
(Though Hildyard and Broadwood,
And our Soudanese Lord should)—
Long as the world goes round!
They should have got him, and they would have got him, if they could; but when Lord Roberts, long months after, set sail for home, he left De Wet still in the saddle. Then Kitchener, our Soudanese Lord, took up the running, and called on the Guards to aid him, but even they proved unequal to the hopeless task. "One pair of heels," they said, "can never overtake two pair of hoofs." Then our picked mounted men monopolised the "tally-ho" to little better purpose. De Wet's guns were captured, his convoys cut off, but him no man caught, and possibly to this very day he is still complacently humming "Tommies may come and Tommies may go, but I trot on for ever."
Cordua and his Conspiracy.
The last verse of this sensational song had reference to yet another celebrity, but of a far more unsatisfactory type. All the earlier part of that Thursday I had spent in the second Raadsaal, attending a court-martial on one of our prisoners of war, Lieutenant Hans Cordua, late of the Transvaal State Artillery, who, having surrendered, was suffered to be at large on parole. In my presence he pleaded guilty, first to having broken his parole in violation of his solemn oath; secondly, to having attempted to break through the British lines disguised in British khaki, in order to communicate treasonably with Botha; and thirdly, to having conspired with sundry others to set fire to a certain portion of Pretoria with a view to facilitating a simultaneous attempt to kidnap Lord Roberts and all his staff. Cordua was with difficulty persuaded to withdraw the plea of guilty, so that he might have the benefit of any possible flaw his counsel could detect in the evidence; but in the end the death sentence was pronounced, confirmed, and duly executed in the garden of Pretoria Gaol on August 24th. It was from that court-martial I came to the Soldiers' Home Concert, sat close behind Lord Roberts, and listened to this song:—
Though the Boer some say is a practised thief,
Yet it certainly beggars all belief,
That he slimly should try to steal our Chief.
But no Hollander mobs
Shall kidnap our Bobs
Long as the world goes round!
Hospital Work in Pretoria.
Historians tell us that the hospital arrangements in some of our former wars were by no means free from fault. Hence Steevens in his "Crimean Campaign" asserts that while the camp hospitals absolutely lacked not only candles, but medicines, wooden legs were supplied to them from England so freely that there were finally four such legs for every man in hospital. Clearly those wooden legs were consigned by wooden heads. Even in this much better managed war the fever epidemic at Bloemfontein, combined with a month of almost incessant rain, overtaxed for a while, as we have seen, the resources and strength and organizing skill of a most willing and fairly competent medical staff.