exceeded the hatred which the Southerner felt against the Northerner in 1865. Yet we see now where that hatred has gone. Now the Lees and the Stonewall Jacksons are serving in the Union Army side by side with the Grants and Shermans, serving perhaps in Washington itself on the personal staff of Lincoln's successor. That was literally the case when I was there. And it is to be remembered that the Boers had to face after the war no such ruin and humiliation as the men of the South. It was no question for them of the supremacy of their former slaves. When they laid down their arms at last, after waging for many months the irregular warfare which Lee refused to countenance, their former enemy not only helped them to restock their farms and begin life afresh, but, in a spirit of goodwill which has, I believe, no historical precedent, actually awarded them compensation for the losses they had incurred in fighting against him. Surely in time such action must bear fruit, if it has not already done so. VII. THE BATTLEFIELDS OF NATAL. The "garden colony" has seen some hard fighting during the last eighty years, and her sons, Dutch as well as British, have good reason to be proud of the share they have borne in it. Whether in breaking the power of the fierce Zulu warriors who have done the white man so much harm at times, or more lately in resisting the invasion of their country by the Boer commandoes, they have shown themselves fine soldiers, and have proved the value of colonial training for service in South Africa. It was a great help when visiting the battlefields of the Boer wars to have the company of a typical Natal officer who had himself seen some of the fighting. Keen and smart and soldierly, and the most pleasant of companions, Captain Tanner made one understand much that without his aid would have been hard to disentangle. The war cemeteries of Natal are very carefully kept, and it was a satisfaction, if a sad one, to see how well the authorities had looked after the little enclosure at Chievely, where we left the train to visit the grave of one whom I had known, Lieutenant Roberts, brave son of a brave father, who gave up his life in the attempt to save our guns at Colenso. Roses and other flowers were growing about the grave, upon which white wreaths had been laid on Commemoration day. A few miles miles farther up the railway line is the spot where he fell. Everyone in England remembers that time of mourning when our people were making their desperate attempts to force the line of the Tugela and the mountains in its rear, and to relieve the garrison of Ladysmith, which the Boers had surrounded and beleaguered at the beginning of the war. The ground to the south of the river over which they had to advance is a green rolling plain, much of it as bare as a cricket-field, and the Boer riflemen in their trenches upon the hills immediately behind the river could sweep it with terrible effect. There are a few scattered clumps of mimosa close to the river, but these offered little cover at best, and at the spot where our guns came into action the plain was quite treeless. Anyone who has used a rifle, if he climbs the boulder-strewn hill by the railway bridge, and looks from the Boer trenches across the river be low him to the monuments which mark the position of our guns, will see at once that unless the Boer fire had been very bad, batteries of artillery coming into action there could hardly hope to escape destruction. The whole thing is intensely saddening: the guns abandoned to the enemy after the sacrifice of so many gallant lives; the little detachments of infantry in the mimosa - bushes, unable to retire across the open, surrendering in batches and rushing into the river to quench their raging thirst; the shattered force recoiling from a hopeless attempt. But there is always one consolation the courage and discipline shown - by officers and men, which made them ready to try again and again until at last they broke through the mountain barrier. It was long before they succeeded; and the hill at Spionkop, where another desperate attempt was made far away to our left, is also a sad place to visit. We were SO near success, with the bloodstained hill in our hands and Ladysmith in sight across the open plain, when darkness came down on the fight. It is not for any civilian to judge whether the night retirement was proper. But the pity of it, when all seemed within our grasp ! the A young farmer who lived close by guided us over hill. Leaving our horsesAfrican fashion with their reins on the ground, to crop the grass of the rolling plateau among the innumerable wild flowers, we walked with him over the open slope where our men had held on all through that long day. It lay facing the Boer guns. on the hills opposite, and the huge shells searched it all over, shattering the boulders and the low lines of hastily reared shelter trench, and ploughing out great pits in the hillside. Under that awful fire our men had to lie hour after hour, beating off the attack of the Boer riflemen. They were tormented by wounds and thirst, and by the sight of the ceaseless slaughter around them; but they held on until nightfall, and it is generally said in Natal that the Boers had given up all hope of retaking the hill, when they were surprised in the morning by the news of our withdrawal. At one point, close to the right of the line held by our most advanced parties, our guide showed us in a fold of the grassy hillside a spring which formed a deep pool of cool clear water, and overflowed down a little rocky channel. He said he had known of it, and told a British General before the attack; but that he had been distrusted as a possible enemy, and that some of our men, suffering miserably from want of water, had lain all day within easy reach of the spring and never discovered it. This is conceivable, for the spring is hidden between two steep slopes. Like most South Africans who have lived an outdoor sporting life, our guide was rather contemptuous about the "helplessness" of our soldiers, but he was full of admiration for their courage and discipline. Ladysmith itself, with the little church bearing on its memorial tablets the names of many hundreds of Englishmen who fell in the siege, brings some sad reflections too, but there is not the same sense of failure to intensify the feeling. Still, Colenso and Spionkop, saddening as they are to remember, were after all, like many of our misfortunes in the Boer war, merely repulses. There is one field far more humbling to an Englishman's pride, where the Boers had a strong position to attack and our men failed to hold it. Very rarely indeed in the course of our wars with them have they attempted to do the things which our men were called upon to do time after time; and when they did make any attempt of the kind, they were almost always repulsed with ease. It was not their method of fighting. Brave as they were, they had the training of sportsmen rather than the training of soldiers, and though at times they were the more formidable on that account, it was in a different way. As Mahan puts it, "The craft of the hunter is not the skill of the warrior." Yet once at least they did a a thing in that way of which any soldiers might well have been proud,-a thing of which our men would have been proud, and justly proud, if they had done it. It was a beautiful morning in November when we got out of the train at the little frontier village of Charlestown, where Natal and the Transvaal meet. We drove three or four miles over rolling grassy country, and found ourselves at the foot of the famous hill which has earned for itself such a name in South African history-Amajuba, the hill of doves. Over our heads it rose, steep and massive, a thousand feet or more; so, leaving our cart and horses at an English farmhouse, we set off to climb the hill on foot. From where we started it looked a formidable position to attack: a mass of boulders about the base, then a steep slope of grass rising to a collar of apparently perpendicular rock, and above this scarp a grassy summit. The path to the top, if path it can be called, zigzagged upward, through a break in the collar, where the scarp had fallen and formed a fan of broken rocks. As a matter of fact there are several breaks in the scarp, and several tracks leading to the summit, but this we could not see. It was a stiff walk, and as we toiled up by the side of a little rivulet which watered the farm below, it seemed to us almost incredible that any assaulting force could get up the hill against the fire of a determined enemy. At the summit is an irregular grassy hollow, two or three hundred yards across, with stony outcrops at the sides. Near one end of the hollow are some graves in a rough enclosure of piled stones and wire. This did not seem so carefully kept as the cemeteries down below. A few yards away a little separate square of piled stones shows where the British leader was shot down. In the centre is a white iron cross three feet high, bearing the words, "This marks the spot where General Colley fell." Upon the arms and foot of the cross some men, Englishmen, have scrawled their ignoble names. All round it, among the rocks and the grass, grow many wild-flowers, immortelles in clumps, and white daisies, and silverweed, and the yellow six - pointed stars of the "tulip." I had known General Colley many years before in India, when he was private secretary to Lord Lytton, and standing by the cross I thought of him as I had so often seen him, a fine bearded man in a Norfolk jacket striding round the hill roads at Simla, a long ironshod stick in his hand, full of energy and confidence. He was always brave to a fault, and believed that British soldiers could do anything. It must have been a moment of unspeakable bitterness when he saw the ranks of his men, massed in the grassy hollow about him, melting away under the murderous fire of the Boer marksmen, who had lined the rim of the hollow. But the bitterness was short, for as he stood facing the enemy a Boer bullet struck him in the forehead, and the gallant life was over. As all know, our men were shot down in scores, until the remnant broke and fled in hopeless panic down the steep hillside they had laboriously climbed in the darkness a few hours earlier. How it all came to happen is incomprehensible, except upon the supposition that the Boers could shoot straight and kill, and our men could not. The grassy plain where the Boers were encamped 1500 feet below is clearly visible, and their movements must have been seen. Looking over the hillside, it seems as if two or three hundred riflemen firing down the slope could have destroyed double their number clambering up over the boulders and grass. Yet the Boers got up with very little loss. They were helped, no doubt, by the very steepness of the ground, which led to the fire going over their heads; and they knew how to take advantage of the cover afforded by the rocks. Apparently the bulk of our men remained in the hollow, massed for a bayonet charge, while the enemy working their way up, not by one side only but by several, gradually surrounded the hollow and lined the rim of it. Then, of course, the fight could only end in one way. No one, probably, will ever know the exact causes of the disaster, for disaster it was, both in itself and in its consequences. Four hundred of our best troops, commanded by a brave and distinguished officer, among them two companies of that grand regiment the 92nd Highlanders, fresh from the victories of the Afghan War, were fairly driven off the hilltop, with heavy loss in killed and wounded and prisoners, by less than their own number of Boers: the feeling of the enemy became one of contempt for the English fighting man whom they had so easily defeated; and when to their astonishment the defeat was followed, not by any attempt to retrieve it, but by a peace which surrendered to them the independence they had claimed, that contempt was extended to the English Government and the English people. It seems to me impossible for any man who studies the evidence on the subject to resist the conviction that the spirit then engendered among the Boers led directly to the great war of 1899. It was a contemptible surrender, for although the talk of "magnanimity" was not wholly insincere, our real reason for making peace was the fear that the war might spread throughout South Africa; and England paid for that surrender twenty years later with thousands of brave young lives. As we lay on the grass at the top of the mountain and looked away on all sides of us, the view was very calm and beautiful. To the north was the broad grassy valley leading up to the Transvaal, with a wooded village here and there; to the south and east the rolling uplands and blue hills of Natal, stretching away into the distant haze; to the west and south-west the long range of the Drakensberg. This range is even finer when seen from Spionkop. Above Majuba, which is close to the water-parting between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, the range almost fades away; but as seen from Spionkop it is a grand broken line of towers and walls and pinnacles, especially about the sources of the Tugela. Between Spionkop and the range are great lonely valleys, with a few dark clumps of trees; and rare white farms and villages; and red tracks winding over the far away "Neks"; and here and there in the blue depths the smoke of a grass fire. It is hard to picture to oneself the fierce storm of modern battle rolling over these peaceful solitudes. |