"Where do you suppose they will send me?" he asked.
"The orders are to send all prisoners to Pretoria; but most likely, in the first place, they will send you to Bloemfontein, and from there you can be taken up by rail. All the prisoners taken in Natal are sent up that way—not, of course, through Bloemfontein, but by the line through Standerton. I don't suppose you will be there very long, for, of course, as soon as we have driven all your soldiers out of the country, we shall send the prisoners after them."
"Don't count your chickens before they are hatched," Yorke laughed. "The war has been going on two months, and you have not done much towards it yet."
"No," one of the guard admitted, "but we have killed thousands and thousands of your troops in Natal, and we shall finish with those on the Modder directly they advance again. All our people in Cape Colony are only waiting for orders, when they will rise to a man. We are expecting every day to hear that Ladysmith has fallen. Then Joubert will drive your people to take to their ships at Durban. We shall leave enough men here to starve your garrison, and shall then march to Cape Town with the Transvaalers. We don't expect any fighting on the way, because our people will have risen and captured the place long before we arrive there."
"It all sounds easy enough, doesn't it? But at present you see, you have not taken Ladysmith; you have not defeated Buller's army; you have not starved Kimberley; you have not even taken Mafeking; and the Dutch in Cape Colony have not risen. When all these things have happened, you may find it clear sailing. But you must remember that, although you were all prepared for war, Britain was not. At present we have not more than fifty thousand men here, and you have found it difficult to deal with them. She could send, and will send, if necessary, five hundred thousand more."
"That would be a big lot," the Boer said doubtfully; "but with the Dutch in Cape Colony we should not be afraid of them."
"Well, you have seen that they can fight, anyhow," Yorke said. "You have the advantage in all being mounted, and in the nature of the country; that is all in your favour while we are attacking you, but it would be in our favour were you attacking us. Besides, I don't see what you men of the Free State have to do with it. If we were driven out, and you had a republic, Kruger would be president, and the Transvaal the master. You were a great deal better off as you were. You know, everyone knows, how hard their government is. Kruger and his people would keep all the riches for themselves. Do you think that you would get a higher price for your cattle, and would be in any way better off for the change?
"I think that you would not; there would be monopolies of everything, as in the Transvaal. You would have to pay twice as much for the goods you wanted to buy as you do now. Perhaps you do not know the story of the monkey who took a cat and made it pull the chestnuts out of the fire for him. Well, I think that if you drive us out of South Africa, you will find that the Transvaal would be the monkey, and the Free State the cat. If we win, which is possible, unlikely as it seems to you, you will certainly lose your independence, for, without a shadow of cause of complaint, you have wantonly taken up arms against us. You will have lost a great number of lives, and be worse off than you were at the beginning, though nothing like so badly off as if you had been under Kruger. You know very well that under our rule the Dutch in Cape Colony have nothing to complain of. The government are Dutch, the Dutch have as free a voice as the English in electing their assembly and making their own laws; and we may be sure that were the Free State annexed, you would, after a time, be as free as are the Dutch in our colony."
"It is a bad business," one of the men said. "I wish Steyn and Reitz had been anywhere before they dragged us into it. However, now we are in it, we have got to go through with it, but I can tell you a good many of us would not have come out on commando but that we had to choose between doing so and being shot. Well, I hope that it will soon be over one way or other, and that I can get back to my farm."
"Who is commandant at Boshof? Is he a Transvaaler or a Free Stater?"