"Ah! they don't know what is before them, poor lads! Either death, or, if they escape that, imprisonment till the war is over and we allow them to go away. I do not say that your soldiers are not brave. They astonished us at Belmont and Graspan. But those were mere skirmishes."
"But we crossed the Modder in your teeth."
"Yes," the Boer admitted reluctantly, "it looked like it; but we did not want to stop you altogether there, only to encourage you to march against our real position at Spytfontein. We knew you had no chance there, and intended to annihilate you."
"Yes, but you did not do it," Yorke said with a smile. "We suffered heavily from blundering up against your trenches, of whose existence we knew nothing; but there was no annihilation about it. It is the opinion of many that if we had pushed forward all along the line in the afternoon, we should have won the position; at any rate, your men were very careful not to make a counter attack."
"We are only waiting for Ladysmith and Kimberley to fall," the Boer said; "then we shall all advance into Cape Colony, break up the railways, and, joined by the whole of the Dutch people, sweep all before us to Cape Town."
"It is a good programme," Yorke agreed; "but neither Ladysmith nor Kimberley have fallen yet."
"They cannot hold out much longer," the man replied. "When the people of Kimberley learn that help has failed to come to them, they will not be fools enough to starve any longer. As for Ladysmith, it is as good as taken; the garrison cannot hold out many days longer. Then Joubert will advance with his whole army, and drive Buller down to the ships at Durban."
"Well, we shall see," Yorke said. "We are not likely to convince each other. Where do you send your prisoners to?"
"To Pretoria. A good many of them are already there—seven or eight hundred from Natal, six hundred from Stormberg—and this is only the beginning. We have a few others we picked up here; I expect you will all be sent off in a day or two. I don't think you will be badly off at first; but when we get Buller's men and the men here, safely stowed away, you will hardly be as well off, for I should say that there will be a difficulty in getting provisions for twenty thousand men or so. But perhaps there won't be so many, for I hear that we have killed over twenty thousand, and we have only lost twenty or thirty men."
"But I should think that at least you here cannot believe the last item," Yorke said. "Something like a hundred bodies have been fished out of the Modder, and there is no doubt that a still greater number were carried off the field. I don't say that you lost as heavily as we did; but when I say that you had two hundred killed, without counting Magersfontein, I feel sure that I am under the mark."