Julian Ralph.
Among the first men in Bloemfontein and the first to make the acquaintance of this maiden was Mr. Gwynne, of The Friend. Foreseeing Sunday, and scenting a chance to revive the best memories of civilised life, he proposed to gather two army friends if she would invite two of her feminine friends for a drive and a luncheon on the veldt on Sunday. He invited James Barnes, the talented American correspondent, and myself. In two Cape carts we called for the young ladies at their homes. They proved to be the very blond young woman, a fourteen-year-old friend, and a little girl of ten or eleven years of age.
I confess that I never would have asked mere children upon such an outing; but it is equally true that I could not have experienced either the same or as great and peculiar pleasure with others of older growth. They were frank and free, and merry as grigs. They came as near to having us killed or captured by the Boers as I wanted to be, and from them we learned most interesting and valuable information about the enemy and about the town as it was before we captured it. We proposed to visit the home of one of the girls, a farm which the girls said was "quite close." It proved to be miles beyond the British outposts in a country that seemed to us to be uncomfortably peopled with Boers and which proved afterwards to have been alive with them. Of the danger to us which lay in such a situation the girls took no account. They had been born there. They had seen nothing of war, and did not understand it. The Boers were their lifelong neighbours. And, in a word, they were going to visit friends and to have fun, and nothing else entered their minds.
When we were miles away and among some very suggestive little kopjes we discovered that our friends had lost their way and that we were adrift on the veldt. Boers dashed up to the crests of the hills, saw us and disappeared. Boers were on every hand. Why we were not gobbled up and sent to Pretoria none of us can explain. Eventually, with only one mishap—the overturning of one of the carts—which seemed for a moment more terrible than capture by the enemy—we reached the farm-house, and aided by several tiny boys and the farmer and his wife, spent a happy hour and a half. We made our way back to Bloemfontein in the evening, and within a day or two Colonels Crabbe and Codrington and Captain Trotter were wounded and the Honourable Edward Lygon was killed, at the Glen—a rifle shot from where we had picnicked!
The adventures and hairbreadth escapes in war are apt to take only three or four well-ordered forms. This adventure was in no way like those of the stereotyped kinds.
Monday came, and, with it, the third number of The Friend. It was now of the enlarged size, which it retained to the end—a sheet 19 inches wide by 32 inches in length. We continued to do the editorial work in the old dustbin, as at first, but we had discovered that the Express works were more modern and capable of turning out a paper of the size we preferred. The Express works were two blocks away from our little den, in a side street behind the main thoroughfare of the town. They belonged to Frau Borckenhagen, but had been seized by order of Lord Roberts and sealed up. The printing office and engine and press rooms were afterward made over to us, the bindery was used by the military, and only the office of the departed editor, whence had proceeded the most mischievous reflections of Krugerism and the policy of the insidious Afrikander Bond, remained sealed. Frau Borckenhagen sent her agents to the military to ask leave to recover some of her husband's private papers. By this means she showed us that, like all other Boers, she put the very lowest valuation upon our intelligence. But in this case she only succeeded in turning the attention of the military to her husband's papers without getting the shading of a degree nearer to the possession of what must have been—and I think I have heard, really proved—of the utmost interest to us.
However, we were able by using the commandeered property of the Boer frau, to produce a newspaper of pretentious size and considerable importance.
The Friend now began to bristle with proclamations, and their number appeared to be doubled because each one was repeated in the Taal language under the heading "Proclamatie." In one "I, Frederick Sleigh Baron Roberts of Kandahar, K.P., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., V.C., Field Marshal and Commanding-in-Chief the British forces in South Africa, appoint George Anosi Falck Administrator of the Civil Posts and Telegraphs in such portions of the Orange Free State as have been or may hereafter be occupied by British troops."
Another proclamation related to bills of exchange and promissory notes; and a third, by General Pretyman, appointed James Allison Collins as "Landdrost of Bloemfontein to administer the ordinary civil and criminal laws." In this proclamation the landdrost's court was ordered to resume its work on Monday, March 19th. A district surgeon, clerk, receiver, and second clerk to the landdrost's court were also appointed.