One hears the women talk. Their ideas about the war are peculiar, for they all maintain that they will succeed in the long-run in asserting their independence, and seem to think that things are going quite satisfactorily for them. "Of course we shall go on fighting," they say, quite with surprise. "How long?" "Oh, as long as may be necessary. Till you go away." It is curious coming to household after household and finding the whole lot of them, women and children, so unanimous, so agreed in the spirit in which they face their afflictions. Husbands and sons in the hill fighting. Homes in the valley blazing, and they sitting and watching it all, almost always with the same fortitude, the same patience, and the same resolve. I am impressed, for I have never seen anything of the sort before. It is not often in these days that you see one big, simple, primitive instinct, like love of country, acting on a whole people at once. Many of our officers, the thoughtful and candid-minded ones, do these people justice; but many don't. Many catch at any explanation but the true one, and attribute every kind of motive save the only one that will explain the facts. They refuse to call the Boers patriots, but that the Boers are prepared to face a slow extermination in defence of their country is now evident. It has become more evident since the war has assumed its present character of individual, personal effort. I much respect and admire them for it.
It is time to bring this long letter to an end. I wish I could see an end to the campaign. When I come home "an old, old, aged and infirm old man," I mean to pass the evening of my days in a quiet cottage with its full allowance of honeysuckle and roses. There I shall grow sweet williams and, if I can stand the extra excitement, perhaps keep a pig. They tell me the Times has pronounced the war over. I would be glad to pay £5 out of my own pocket to have the man who wrote that out here on the veldt with us for a week. We have just heard that Dewetsdorp has fallen, and that there is a rising in the Colony near Aliwal North. Vogue la galère!
LETTER XXV
THE SITUATION
CAMP ON THE VAAL,
NEAR KLERKSDORP,
December 23, 1900.
We are encamped close to the Vaal, which is here a fine stream, as wide as the Thames at Richmond. I have just been bathing in it. It is early morning, and I am sitting under a thicket of great weeping willows by the river. The banks slope down and make a trough for the stream a good deal below the level of the plain, and in this hollow, hidden till you are close to it, congregates all the verdure there is for miles, especially a quantity of willow trees, with gnarled black trunks leaning down to the stream, sometimes bending over and burying themselves in the ground and then shooting up again, making arches and long vistas, with green grass below and silvery foliage waving above. After our long marches on the veldt, the contrast here is wonderfully refreshing. One seems to drink in the coolness and greenness of the scene with eyes that have grown thirsty for such things. The trees straddling down the bank are rather like figures of men, giants that have flung themselves down, resting on hands and elbows, delighted, one would think, as I am, to come and rest near water again.
I can hardly believe that it only wants two days to Christmas. Our last Christmas we spent on the Modder. I remember it well; a wet night, and all night long we sat on a steep kopje watching the lights of a Boer laager and expecting to be attacked. Methuen's little campaign strikes one now as a sort of prelude, or overture, to the main show; but how very much surprised we should have been that November morning when we marched from Orange River Camp if you had told us we should ever be looked at in that light. Ten thousand men was a big army in those days.
We have been on the trek now for about six weeks with Bruce-Hamilton, and though we have not so far been seriously engaged, there has been almost daily fighting round the fringes and skirts of the column ("skirt-fighting," you may call it).
"November 17.—Left Lindley. This neighbourhood quite as disturbed as ever. Shooting.