"My name is Viljoen. You have probably heard a great deal about me, if not much that is good. Some of your countrymen in the Transvaal thought me a very bad lot, and as they are now with the Imperial Light Horse in Ladysmith, I daresay there are many queer stories told about me; but I am not quite so bad as they make out. Your presence here without papers, however, is very awkward, and I have no alternative but to make you a prisoner."
"Oh, that's d——d nonsense," said Major King. "I had no wish to come here, but your men insisted on bringing me. My only object was to find out what had become of a brother-officer who should have got back to camp long before this. I give you the word of a soldier that I did not want to find out anything about your position, and whatever I may have seen, which is precious little, will be told to no one."
The commandant was in a difficulty, but agreed to send for one who is his senior in rank and submit the case to him. During the messenger's absence Major King was hospitably entertained, and his hosts, or captors, talked about sport, suggesting that some day might be set apart for an armistice, so that Boers and English might have a friendly race-meeting. The commandant, by way of showing that he does not bear resentment for the things that have been said about him, described his experiences after the battle of Elandslaagte, from which he was a fugitive, and said:
"I walked that night until I could go no farther, thinking that the Colonial volunteers were in pursuit. If I had known they were English cavalry I should have given myself up, for I was nearly done."
As pronounced by him, "Fiyune," his name does not sound familiar to English ears, and it was therefore not until some time afterwards that Major King knew he had been entertained by the notorious Ben Viljoen, who was first reported among the killed at Elandslaagte, then as wounded and a prisoner, but who in fact got away from the fight almost unscathed, and now holds a command in the Boer force outside Ladysmith. Interviews with a senior commandant, who was by no means complaisant, and finally with Schalk-Burger, followed. The latter, after raising many difficulties and dangling prospects of imprisonment in Pretoria before Major King, finally consented to release that officer on condition that he would not take any military advantage of what he had seen or heard in the Boer lines. That condition has been honourably kept, but the Major does not feel himself bound to make any secret of the fact that while the Boers kept him under detention they treated him "devilish well." This way of putting it may seem a little ambiguous, but those who know General Hunter's light-hearted A.D.C. will understand the sincerity of his tribute to the hospitality of Commandants Schalk-Burger and Ben Viljoen.
Another Boer, who may be credited with a desire to say pleasant things, was talking under a flag of truce with an English officer about the prospects on each side. "We admit," he said, "that the British soldiers are the best in the world, and your regimental officers the bravest, but—we rely on your generals."
Even on the battlefield, when men are apt to be carried away by the lust of fighting, many incidents have happened that touch the chords of sympathy. The Boers have curious notions about white flags and Geneva Crosses, but so far as our experience goes nobody can accuse them of inhumanity to a fallen or helpless foe, except in the matter of firing on hospitals when they think there are military reasons to justify them. They shelled the Town Hall of Ladysmith persistently while sick and wounded were lying there and the Red Cross flag waved above its clock-tower. In reply to a protest from Sir George White, Commandant Schalk-Burger defended his gunners on the plea that we had no right to a hospital in Ladysmith while there was a neutral camp at Intombi Spruit for their reception. The contention was, of course, preposterous, and based moreover on the insulting assumption that our General had been guilty of sheltering effective combatants behind an emblem which all civilised nations have agreed to respect. Possibly the enemy may seek to show that we are not above suspicion in such things, by reference to a skirmish in which one of our batteries did open from a position directly in front of ambulance waggons. These were outspanned near a field hospital when the affair began, and as it was thought necessary to get the wounded out of possible danger quickly, they had to be removed some little distance in dhoolies. Meanwhile the Boers were getting guns on to a kopje where they might have enfiladed one of our most important lines of defence. To stop them in time a battery had to be brought into action, and the only ground from which it could have shelled the kopje, to frustrate the enemy's purpose of mounting a gun there, was just in front of the ambulance waggons. Care, however, had been taken in that case to lower the Red Cross flag, so that our artillery cannot be accused of using it as a "stalking horse," though each waggon bears the same symbol painted conspicuously on its canvas awning. These are matters about which some ill-feeling has been aroused, but they do not lessen our appreciation of acts by which individual Boers have shown magnanimity while smarting under losses that must have been bitterly humiliating to them.