With Rimington

by L. March Phillipps

"November 18.—More shooting. Boers in all hills.

"November 19.—More shooting and galloping about. Reached Heilbron.

"November 20.—Left for Frankfort. Boers in attendance as usual. Our two guns and pompom very useful."

Those were the last entries I made in my diary. The day's events became too monotonous to chronicle, but very much the same sort of entries would have applied to almost every day since. Sometimes there are exciting incidents. Yesterday half-a-dozen Boers hid in a little hollow which just concealed them until our column came along, and opened fire at close range on the flank guard. One or two men were hit and several horses. My friend Vice had five bullets through his horse and was not touched himself, which was rather lucky for him (or unlucky for the horse). A few days before that we were camped on the river and had a picket on the other side. Two or three Boers crept up the river right between our picket and the main body, and then walked straight to the picket as if coming from us and fired into it at point-blank range. They mortally wounded one of our men and in the dusk escaped. They are as cunning as Indians. Sometimes, as in these cases, they show great coolness and daring, while at others they are easily dispersed; but they are generally pretty keen, and you have to be very much on the alert in dealing with them.

You at home will probably be annoyed to find the war dragging on so. About election time the papers were announcing that it was over. It had been a hard job, they said, but it was finished at last. A good deal was occurring out here which did not quite tally with that theory, but those things were ignored or very slightly referred to, so that we on the spot wondered to see the war drop out of sight, and were puzzled to read in the Times that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line blown up in ten different places. The continuance of the war must strike you as a renewal, but there was never a lull really.

People who think the war can be ended by farm-burning, &c., mistake the Boer temper. I scarcely know how to convey to you any idea of the spirit of determination that exists among them all, women and even children as well as men. The other day I picked up at a farmhouse a short characteristic form of prayer, written out evidently by the wife in a child's copybook, ending thus: "Forgive me all my sins for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, in whom I put all my trust for days of sorrow and pain. And bring back my dear husband and child and brothers, and give us our land back again, which we paid for with blood from the beginning." Simple enough as you see, and no particular cant about it, but very much in earnest. At another farm a small girl interrupted her preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at us on an old piano. We were carting the people off. It was raining hard and blowing—a miserable, hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing along her children to the ox-waggon outside, and this poor little wretch in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final defiance. One smiled, but it was rather dramatic all the same, and exactly like a picture. These are straws, but one could multiply them with incidents from every farm we go to. Their talk is invariably, and without so far a single exception, to the same effect—"We will never give in, and God sooner or later will see us through."

And then I see a speech of Buller's explaining that the war is being carried on by a few mercenaries and coerced men, and that it is in no sense a patriotic war. He is emphatic on this point and his audience cheer him. One realises the difficulty of getting you to understand. The breaking up of the big commandoes and the change to guerilla tactics, in which every man fights on his own account, shows in a way there is no mistaking that it is the personal wish of each man to fight out the quarrel to the last. It is just because they are so individually keen that this sort of warfare of theirs is so hard to cope with. These men are uncoerced. Spontaneously and one by one they turn out to fight us as soon as we show ourselves in their neighbourhood, and all the suffering we can inflict only serves to harden their resolution.

Yet we certainly inflict a great deal. Boer families usually average up to a dozen. They stick together, and grow up on their farms, which are of enormous extent, and which they get to love with the instinctive force of people who have never seen any other place. Love of family and love of home are their two ruling affections. The household life of a big family on a 20,000 acre farm—three and often four generations represented—is usually uninterrupted for weeks at a time by the sight of a strange face or a bit of outside news. Their lives are altogether bound up, in their serene and stolid way, with each other and with their homes. Anything that breaks up a family is felt by them more grievously than would be the case with most people; and, in the same way, anything that severs them from "the land" would be more profoundly felt too. It amounts to an entire dislocation of their ideas of life.

This must make the war at present very hard to bear. "My dear husband and child and brothers" are away fighting. One or two of them very likely killed by this time, or in Ceylon or St. Helena. "And as for the others who are still in the field, we are in constant terror of hearing the bad news, which we know, if the war continues, must some day come." So the family is quite broken up, and now the home is being destroyed and the occupants carried off, so that altogether the chances of ever renewing the old life again in the old place seem very remote indeed.

All this should be enough to break Boer hearts, and there is no doubt they feel it very much. I can recall many scenes and incidents which show that—scenes which, if you saw them out of your peaceful, natural life, you would perhaps be never able to forget. But yet, in spite of all they have to suffer, their determination remains just the same. Anything like loud lamentations or complaints are almost unheard. They rise to the occasion, and though naturally a very simple people, who express openly what they feel, they act now in this crisis with a constant composure which I have often thought most remarkable.