But in the great Civil War in America it was the women who kept the strife in progress fully a year and a half, if not two years, after their husbands and brothers realised it was useless, and that the North must win. "Go, and do not come back while there is a Yankee alive!" they said to sweethearts, sons, and brothers. So has it ever been in times of war. The women, roused from their quiet lives and excited by the animosities which develop war and the horrors which go with it, remain undisturbed by the considerations which cause men, with their wider interests and experiences, to waver in their faith. And among the savage peoples of the earth it is, as a rule, the women who garnish war with its most fearful accessories. The bucks and braves do the fighting, the women follow after them to torture the wounded and mutilate the dead.
Think you that this is a terrible indictment of a sex? Do you see in this nothing but the anger and the cruelty that lie on the surface? Then you are to be pitied, for the moral of these reflections is that in womanhood are treasured the faith which inspires mankind, the convictions that nerve our arms in a world which progresses only through strife, the enthusiasm which not even the hell of war can destroy.
The leader of April 14th was my own, entitled "Mr. Lecky on the War." Again we had a complete newspaper full of the too-often delayed or strangled Reuter despatches, which told us of other wars, in Ashantee and the Philippines, of the Queen's visit to Ireland, of the Prince's narrow escape from an assassin, and of all that was going forward in our own little contention with the Boers.
This number was singular in containing no original verse. It did, however, contain something more full of sentiment, and, if possible, more unexpected and foreign to war; to wit: a notice of a wedding:—
MARRIED.
By special license, on the 11th inst., by the Rev. Franklin, at her father's house, Alexandra Cornelia, youngest daughter of W. H. v. B. Van Andel, Orphan Master, to Arthur M. Stone, eldest son of the late T. C. Stone, Esq., from Folkestone, England. No cards.
Orange-blossoms might, possibly, be looked for in the Orange State, but blended with the bandages and laurels of war they seem peculiar. One cynic asked us, when he read the wedding notice, "Is this prophetic of concord, or is it merely strife breaking out in a new place?" He was a soulless man. I am sorry I have quoted or noticed one so deficient in feeling, poetry, humanity, and sentiment.
In furtherance of the knowledge that the Army was tired of being fooled, and growing weary of the upstart behaviour of the too often treacherous negro natives, we published a notice by Assistant Provost-Marshal Burnett-Hitchcock: "No pass is sufficient for a native to pass through the outpost lines unless countersigned by a Staff Officer, and it should state where and whence the native is going." Other rigid restrictions upon the freedom of the negroes are enforced by this order.
The same energetic officer also forbade the selling of any article within the town by hawkers and camp sutlers, under a penalty of fine on conviction. This was in order to protect the local tradesmen from army competition—including those who barricaded their shops when the Boer combatants fled from the town, lest we should loot their stores of goods, who then calmly told us they put up the barricades because "the Boers were such thieving scoundrels," and who, now that they knew our temper only too well, regaled us with accounts of how, while they were in commando, they had fought us at Belmont, Graspan, Modder, and a dozen other places.