own upon the lines of the English army advancing for
three miles across the plain, one could hardly blame them. The burghers
did not even raise their Mausers. One bullet, the size of a broken
slate-pencil, falling into a block three miles across and a mile deep,
seems so inadequate. It was like trying to turn back the waves of the
sea with a blow-pipe.

It is true they had held back as many at Colenso, but the defensive
positions there were magnificent, and since then six months had passed,
during which time the same thirty thousand men who had been fighting then
were fighting still, while the enemy was always new, with fresh recruits
and re-enforcements arriving daily.

As the English officers at Durban, who had so lately arrived from home
that they wore swords, used to say with the proud consciousness of two
hundred thousand men back of them: "It won't last much longer now. The
Boers have had their belly full of fighting. They're fed up on it;
that's what it is; they're fed up."

They forgot that the Boers, who for three months had held Buller back at
the Tugela, were the same Boers who were rushed across the Free State to
rescue Cronje from Roberts, and who were then sent to meet the relief
column at Fourteen Streams, and were then ordered back again to harass
Roberts at Sannahspost, and who, at last, worn out, stale, heartsick, and
hopeless at the unequal odds and endless fighting, fell back at Sand
River.

For three months thirty thousand men had been attempting the impossible
task of endeavoring to meet an equal number of the enemy in three
different places at the same time.

I have seen a retreat in Greece when the men, before they left the
trenches, stood up in them and raged and cursed at the advancing Turk,
cursed at their government, at their king, at each other, and retreated
with shame in their faces because they did so.

But the retreat of the burghers of the Free State was not like that.
They rose one by one and saddled their ponies, with the look in their
faces of men who had been attending the funeral of a friend and who were
leaving just before the coffin was swallowed in the grave. Some of them,
for a long time after the greater number of the commando had ridden away,
sat upon the rocks staring down into the sunny valley below them, talking
together gravely, rising to take a last look at the territory which was
their own. The shells of the victorious British sang triumphantly over
the he