“I believe he does, but he was not there to-day. Mr Bacon told me he had gone to Durban—went about a week ago.”
“Indeed. Do you know what took him there?”
“I fancy he was sent for to make some report of the state of things in this neighbourhood. You know he now holds an official position of some importance.”
“Yes, which you might have had if you had liked it, George. He has the credit of having given them warning at Rorke’s Drift in time to prepare themselves for the defence of the place. But it was you who brought them that information.”
“I did not want the post, Redgy; and, if I had, Hardy was the person really entitled to it. I did not know the way from Isandhlwana to Rorke’s Drift, and could not have found it. And to say the truth, I should not have thought of the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, if he had not reminded me of it. No, he fully deserved his appointment, and I am heartily glad he got it. But I believe, when he gets to Durban, he will warn the Government that the Transvaal is not merely in a condition of discontent and disloyalty, but on the verge of an armed outbreak.”
“Do you think it goes so far as that, George? An armed outbreak means a war with England, remember. What possible hope can they have in succeeding in that?”
“No reasonable hope, of course. The hundredth part of England’s power would be enough to crush them. I don’t suppose the Boers could bring 5000 men into the field, and England could easily send five times that number, or twenty times that number, if she chose. The Boers have but little discipline or material of war, or knowledge of strategy. England is a first-rate power in all those respects. It would be as absolute madness for the Transvaal to go to war with England, as it would be for a terrier dog to provoke a lion to fight with it. But, however great the madness, it does not follow that they will not do it.”
“What can induce them?”
“Their profound ignorance of the relative strength of the two countries. I was talking with a Boer of some intelligence, who, I found, really believed that Holland was one of the Great Powers in Europe—the equal, if not the superior of England. He knew nothing of history, apparently, since the times of Van Trompe and Admiral Blake. He fancied Isandhlwana had only been redeemed by a desperate and exhausting effort, which would make it impossible for us to engage in any other war for a generation to come. The accidental circumstance that a quantity of newly-coined money had been sent out here to pay the troops was enough to convince him that England was bankrupt, and driven to expend its last guinea. People who know no more than that of the true state of things may perpetrate any act of folly.”
“No doubt, George; and I daresay also they argued that the disasters at Isandhlwana and Intombe proved that the English were not so formidable in the field as their own troops had always been. They had repeatedly fought these Zulus, remember, and always with complete success.”