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A HOLIDAY IN SOUTH AFRICA.

BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR H. MORTIMER DURAND,

G.C.M.G., K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.

COMMEMORATION DAY · THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE WAR OF 1899-THE BATTLEFIELDS OF NATAL -THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA.

V. COMMEMORATION DAY.

IT was All Saints Day, a beautiful cloudless day of the Transvaal summer, hardly hotter than an English June day. A soft northerly breeze was blowing.

In the cemetery among the pines were gathered three or four hundred people, Dutch and English, men and women and children. With them were a few soldiers in khaki uniforms, and in a corner under some trees stood a British cavalry band, whose services had been lent to the Dutch Town Mayor.

The people were moving about between the gravestones, reading the inscriptions or laying wreaths and flowers on the graves, for it was what South Africans call "Decoration Day." The Dutch and English graves were separate, not I think from any intentional wish to separate them, but because the cemetery had been used by the Dutch for many years, and a new piece of ground had been added to it during the war, when there were many burials.

The Dutch graves were mostly those of the town population. They bore Dutch inscriptions and texts, and many were ornamented with

quaint old-fashioned carvings and vases of flowers. The English graves were mostly those of soldiers. They were sad enough to see. Many of the men had died very young, at twenty or thereabouts. Perhaps the most usual inscription on the headstones was, "Died of enteric." Others bore the words, "Killed in action," or

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Accidentally drowned," and the like. A few were the graves of Canadians, and were marked by a head wreath of maple leaves carved in marble. One too frequent inscription went straight to one's heart. There was a low iron cross with a circular plate in the centre, on which were the words, "For King and Empire. Here lies a British Soldier." No name, poor boys. Not even their names were known to us, and they had died for us.

The great American President, Abraham Lincoln, once used words which I think we in England should do well to remember:

"This extraordinary war in which we are engaged falls heavily upon all classes of people, but the most heavily upon the soldier. For it has been said, 'all that a man hath will he give for his life,' and while all con

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When the wreaths and flowers had all been laid on the graves, the women, led by the Dutch mayoress, who was head of the Loyal Women's Guild, came together under the trees where a group of clergymen were standing. Two, I think, were English, of different Churches, and two were Dutch.

There were some prayers in English and Dutch, and the regimental band played three hymns, "Lead, Kindly Light," "Peace, Perfect Peace," "For all the Saints who from their Labours rest." Not saints, perhaps, some of our soldier boys in their lives, but their death had hallowed them. So one felt as the blended voices rose together into the cloudless sky, the pauses in the music filled by the whisper of the breeze in the pines overhead, like the distant sound of the sea. The service was closed by a short address from an English clergyman, advocating the union of the two races, and forecasting a happy future for the country.

The address was good, but in the course of it my thoughts wandered away to other scenes. Five years before, when I was in America, I had crossed the Potomac for a visit to the battlefields of Virginia. With out knowing it I had happened to choose the time when the Americans also put flowers on the graves of the dead, "Commemoration Time"; and the

ceremony is carried out with intense feeling. Immediately after the train had passed the river, the old boundary line between North and South, I was surprised to see in every direction the crimson battleflag of the Confederacy, the famous "Stars and Bars." It was flying from the roofs and the balconies of houses, and shown in the shop windows, and almost every woman one met bore it in miniature on the breast of her dress.

At Lexington, where the two great heroes of the war, Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson, are buried, there had been a great gathering, and their graves were heaped with flowers.

The thought of Commemoration in Virginia recalled to my mind another ceremony in Washington, the capital of the Union.

A few years ago an American General, "Joe" Wheeler, died in the northern States, and was buried in the national cemetery at Arlington. He was a southerner by birth, and had fought for the Confederacy until the close of the war. Long afterwards, when hostilities broke out between America and Spain, he, with other Confederate officers, volunteered for service, and his offer was accepted. He was given a command in Cuba, and served with credit under the Stars and Stripes. Americans in Washington used to tell the story that when he first led his men into action against the Spaniards he thought himself back in one of his old battlefields, and gave the order for an advance with the cry, "Now,

boys, give it them; give the Yanks H-1!" No one thought the worse of him. The story was told with laughter and applause by the "Yanks" themselves. That sort of breezy good-humour is one of the pleasant characteristics of the Yank.

When the General died I was British Ambassador in Washington, and having

known him in life I walked down to the church where his body was lying, opposite the White House, to pay my last respects to him in death. When I got there I found that large numbers of people were defiling past the coffin in the chancel where he lay, his face very white and waxen. Looking up as I passed him, I saw that immediately behind the coffin was a large representation in flowers of the "rebel" battle-flag.

He was borne to his grave, if my memory serves me right, by old soldiers in Confederate grey, and Union troops fired the volley over his grave.

All these things came back to me among the graves of the Dutch and English under the African pines, and it seemed to me that the reconciliation of the North and South held for us a hope and a lesson. Of course the two cases are not altogether alike. The men in grey were Americans as well as the men in blue, and it was, no doubt, easier for both sides to come together when the war was over than it can ever be for Dutch and British, who have not the same blood or the same speech and traditions.

VOL. CLXXXVIII.-NO. MCXLII.

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There is distrust, and even some dislike, on both sides. Bryce wrote of the Boers fifteen years ago, that they regarded us with hatred and a measure of contempt; and one of the latest writers on the subject, Colquhoun, believes that the present leaders of the Dutch desire, by keeping alight the fires of Dutch nationalism, to bring South Africa under the rule of a Dutch majority, and then to "out the painter."

This is the belief of many people of British blood in South Africa, who regard the Dutch as utterly irreconcilable.

But while every one must admit that there is a difference between the two cases, and that the problem in South Africa now is more difficult than was the problem in America at the close of the Civil War, still, we should, I think, do well not to exaggerate the difference. It is to be remembered that the extreme bitterness of feeling between the Dutch and British in South Africa is a thing of comparatively recent growth; that there has been in the past considerable admixture between the two races; and that not so

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very long ago there seemed to be a fair prospect of a practical obliteration of the race- line. Moreover, although the people of the southern states of America were mainly of the same blood as the people of the north, much bitterness of feeling had grown up between them before the war broke out. Colquhoun says they were "more antagonistic even than Boer and Briton." That bitterness was increased by the war until it became something akin to hatred. There is no hatred now, but there was, and the reasons for it are easy to understand. Listen to a Northerner talking about the Confederate prison-camps, or the "treachery" with which Jefferson Davis and his friends began the war. Listen to a Southerner telling how regiments of black men his former slaves-were raised by the North to fight against him, or describing the horrors of the Reconstruction period, when the South was ruled by northern politicians and negroes.

Does anyone suppose that the Lost Cause is forgotten? Forgotten! The names of Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson are worshipped, not only by the old men who followed them, but by the young men who never saw them, and above all by the women, who hand down to their children the memory of the great days. It is fortyfive years now since the last shot was fired in that desperate conflict, but there is no forgetting.

And yet, in spite of all this, there is no more patriotic

American now than the Southerner, no man who would resent more fiercely any insult to the national flag, or shed his blood more freely in defence of it. I have heard more than one of them- men whose most cherished possession was perhaps a strip of shot - torn colours, or button from Stonewall Jackson's coatsay that all had been for the best, that they would not reverse the verdict now if they could. The Northerners saved the Union, the men in blue who fought on so doggedly through two long years of defeat, until at length their constant valour stemmed the tide of war, and the last great wave of Southern invasion broke upon the slopes of Gettysburg. Now all are for the Union, North and South alike. And in America as elsewhere the men who fought retain no anger against each other. They are full of the camaraderie of the soldier. It is a delightful thing to hear old Union officers and old Confederates exchanging war stories, and to see how much respect and goodwill have grown up between them. The fact that the Dutch are not of our race does make a great difference, but is it too much to hope that the mutual respect begotten by the war will in time lay the foundation of a common nationality? May we not believe that there are among the Boers some broad-minded and patriotic men acting in the spirit of Robert Lee, who, once he had laid down the sword, devoted himself with his whole heart to the work of the peacemaker?

The Lost Cause of 1899 will not be forgotten; but we need not wish that it should be forgotten. If only war is remembered in the right spirit, 88 the Americans remember their Civil War, as the Canadians remember the deeds of Montcalm and Wolfe, with honour for the brave men on both sides who fought on behalf of what they believed to be the

right, there is nothing more ennobling. A nation which has no war memories to stir the blood and kindle the courage of her boys is hardly a nation.

South Africa has many such memories. Some day I believe they will be thrown into a common stock, as they have been on the other side of the Atlantic.

VI. THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE WAR OF 1899.

These pages were in type when by chance I came upon a paper which touches the question from an American point of view. It is a pamphlet by Charles Francis Adams, published in 1901, and entitled The Confederacy and the Transvaal. A people's obligation to Robert E. Lee.' The object of the writer, a Northerner, is to prove how deeply indebted the reunited nation is to General Lee for his refusal to continue the war after it had become clear that the Army of Northern Virginia could no longer hope to keep the field, as an organised military body, against the armies of the Union.

those now in South Africa, inasmuch between communities of the same as here it was a civil war, a conflict race and speech. . . . It might also possibly be claimed that the bitter

ness of civil war is not so insurmountable as that of one involving a question of race dominance. Yet it is difficult to conceive bitterness

of greater intensity than existed between the sections at the close of our civil war."

And the writer proceeds to quote from the book of a Southerner a description of the feeling in the South when that most magnanimous of men, President Lincoln, was murdered.

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"For four years we had been fighting. In that struggle all we loved had been lost. Lincoln incarnated to us the idea of oppression and conquest. arguWe greeted his death in a spirit of reckless hate, and terness to those who were the cause hailed it as bringing agony and bitof our own agony and bitterness. To us Lincoln was an inhuman monster, Grant a butcher, and Sherman a fiend."

In the course of his ment the writer shows what were at that time the position and feelings of the South.

"When they laid down their arms they had before them, first, a military government, and, after that, the of their former slaves. supremacy

A harder fate for a proud people to accept could not well be imagined. The bitterness of feeling, the hatred, was, too, extreme. It may possibly be argued that the conditions in this country then were different from

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