Taking out an immense pipe from one of his pockets, Christian Uys filled it with leaf tobacco, lit up, and began to smoke.
The commandant was evidently in a tender mood, for his thoughts were in distant Winburg, where his wife and the children left to him were being sheltered in a concentration camp, created by his arch-enemies, the British.
His was a strange compound of human nature. At times generous and kind, at others he was fierce, implacable, and relentless. Like his famous leader, General Joubert, at the outset he had realised that the struggle in which his country had engaged was a hopeless one, but with the obstinacy characteristic of his race, when once his hand was put to the plough, there was no turning back.
Christian Uys had already lost three sons in the war. His youngest, a boy of fifteen, and the flower of the commandant's family, had been shot in the stomach at Senekal. The brave boy hid his wound and continued on the march, although a trail of blood marked the path along which he rode, until he fell exhausted from his saddle, and with his dying breath, and a look of intense love in his eyes, said, "Father, I can fight no more, I am done." These were the brave lad's last words, and like others on both sides, yielded up his spirit for the cause in which he thought he was righteously fighting.
An older brother had been with the fierce Cronje in the honeycombed banks of the Modder, amidst the brown sulphurous smoke of bursting lyddite shells, and while bringing water for a wounded comrade from the polluted stream, had been struck squarely in the chest by a Lee-Enfield bullet, and had fallen on his face, never to rise again.
The last to die was the oldest boy of the family. A delicate youth at the best, he had gone on commando with his father when the vierkeleur was first hoisted in the field. For several months he had fought and roughed it with the rest, until foul enteric seized him, and the ranks of the Boer army knew him no more. He found a last resting-place in a shallow grave on the veldt, not many miles from his birthplace.
Christian Uys woke up from his reverie and took a stroll round the laager. Here was Jan Steen, once a well-to-do jeweller of Winburg, who before war broke out was always immaculately dressed, with ample starched shirt front and bejewelled fingers; there Van Sterck, the learned medico of the same town. Neither had had a change of raiment for months, and both looked correspondingly miserable. Yonder stood Louis Bredon, the dandy of Harrismith, now a veritable scarecrow in trousers made of sacking on which the address of a large milling concern in Johannesburg was branded in staring black letters. Bredon, like the rest of the commando, was weary of the daily trekking, discomfort, and misery incidental to warfare, and his mind was wandering back to the time when he used to walk down the shady side of Harrismith's main street, the cynosure of the belles of the Free State town.
"You look discontented, Bredon," said Uys. "I am afraid you are like most of my burghers. We cannot give in now, after we have endured so much. There has not been sufficient fighting of late to keep up your martial spirit. We want horses, Bredon, and they must be obtained, if we are to reach Port Nolloth. Otherwise we had better surrender."
"I have no objection, Commandant," replied Bredon somewhat brusquely. "I've had enough of the war. We ought never to have been drawn into it."
"You speak like a patriot," observed Uys sarcastically. "I undergo the same hardships as other burghers. You have suffered nothing as yet. In what respect have you endured more than the rest of us?"