Everywhere the slimy, slippery ranchers and tavern-keepers and merchants welcomed us with the heartiest speech, and always were we fooled by it. They had been born in the country, half the people or more in all that great region were out "on commando," no man except a pro-Boer or a born Boer could have been where we found these double-faced people, with their Judas-like pretence of friendship. It was self-evident that they must have been siding with our enemies. Had they been for us when our backs were turned, the Boers would have offered them a choice between joining their fighting forces or losing their property and their right to stay in the land. Capetown, Durban, and Port Elizabeth were crowded by the refugees who had taken an open stand for the British side, and been obliged to leave their homes. Nothing of this needed telling; it was indisputable, it was logical, it was common knowledge.
At last we came to fighting battles that were surprises—to meeting Boer forces where we were told there were no Boers. When, at Modder River, Mr. Knox, of Reuter's, and I saw a large force of Boers ahead, and rode back to tell our friends in the army what we had seen, we were informed that what we announced was ridiculous. There were only "three hundred Boers within a dozen miles," and these would be quickly dislodged by our Ninth Lancers. We were to meet the Boers at Spytfontein, miles and miles ahead. Nevertheless, in fifteen minutes we began one of the chief battles of the war, against the largest force that had up to that time opposed our army.
The next day saw us in the village of Modder River, welcomed by the men of the place, whose shops and taverns had been preserved in the very midst of the Boer army by—by what shall we say? It must have been either by the force of comradeship with the Boers or by miraculous and Divine intervention; one or the other, for there is no explanation of the phenomenon outside of these two alternatives. Did a single man from that village manage to cross the drift and warn us that six miles of trenches were ready to be filled by Boers when we should reach there? And why did no single individual among all these "friends" do us that service? Our guides and others rode far forward, and were gone for hours. What did they see or find, and why did they not discover the facts?
We were fooled! fooled!! fooled!!!
Without martial law in force behind us, as it should have been in force from Capetown to Kimberley, at the very beginning of the war, without maps of the country, surrounded by malignant enemies, who were the more dangerous in that they declared themselves friends. Knowing nothing, but betrayed in everything, we stumbled on—into Modder battle, up against Maghersfontein Kopje—fooled and tricked and played with for months on end.
We caught one of two men who fired at us from beneath the white flag at Belmont. The other one our soldiers killed, but the one we caught—what of him? The quicker he was hanged and left hanging on top of a high kopje the sooner would have ended the contempt of the Boers for our methods, and the sooner would have come the end of the war. But I never was able to learn that he was treated otherwise than were the rest of our prisoners.
When we came to a village like Modder River, where the Boers had been entertained and assisted in bridge-destroying and trench-digging, did we reconcentrado the little population? What a lesson to the disloyal, what a strength to our arms that would have been! We did nothing; we left them in their homes; we found them with Boer warrants for pay for forage on their persons; we saw them slipping to and from our camp at night, while by day they loitered around our headquarters and told us how loyal they were. Fooled were we—to the brim, up to our eyes, past all understanding.
Lord Roberts came, and the Boers tried the same old tricks. It is true that he maintained the same mistaken course of leniency—making war as light as possible for the Boers while they heaped its terrors upon us—but this mischievous, war-prolonging policy was so unvarying from Capetown to Bloemfontein that I always suspected it to have been ordered from home—perhaps by whoever it was that "preferred unmounted men" to catch the De Wets of the veldt. I cannot believe that Lord Roberts fought England's enemies in India in that way, or that he is blamable for that policy in South Africa. He was fooled, however, but not as others had been, nor did he evince the same fondness for being victimised as did certain of his subordinates. From the outset he took all ordinary precautions against treachery and double-dealing, and he was the first general to insist that the coloured native (very often a Boer spy) should be kept under supervision and should be at least as orderly, civil, and well behaved as white men were required to be.
It was while we were at Bloemfontein that the Boers presumed too much upon our credulity and trustfulness at last. They did this by the most barefaced and wholesale act of hoaxing ever practised upon a modern army. We sent out our forces, small and large, over the whole southern half of the Free State, distributing Lord Roberts' promise of protection to all who surrendered their arms and signed an agreement to fight us no more. Gaily and trustingly our troops went here and there, and everywhere the people came out to meet them in apparently the same cordial spirit of goodwill. As they handed in their grandfathers' old elephant rifles and whatever other fire-arm curios had been thrown aside in their garrets, they assured us that they were sick of the war, that they had been tricked by Steyn, that they had only fought to prevent the Transvaalers from confiscating their cattle and perhaps to save themselves from being murdered. It was a beautiful spectacle of erring brotherhood repentant—for those who enjoy being played upon and laughed at.
Even while the old junk was being brought to the railway we began to hear that wherever, in isolated cases, a man had honestly given up his Mauser and signed the British papers he was being plundered and persecuted by his neighbours, most of whom were still either fighting or awaiting orders to resume hostilities. My printers told me of friends whom they believed to have been shot for failing to take part in the hoax, and for seriously giving up the contest.