ed to be so inflammable,
they were not of our setting. They were the wrongs done to half the
community, the settled resolution of the minority to tax and vex the
majority, the determination of a people who had lived two generations in
a country to claim that country entirely for themselves. Behind them all
there may have been the Dutch ambition to dominate South Africa. It
was no petty object for which Britain fought. When a nation struggles
uncomplainingly through months of disaster she may claim to have proved
her conviction of the justice and necessity of the struggle. Should
Dutch ideas or English ideas of government prevail throughout that huge
country? The one means freedom for a single race, the other means equal
rights to all white men beneath one common law. What each means to
the coloured races let history declare. This was the main issue to
be determined from the instant that the clock struck five upon the
afternoon of Wednesday, October the eleventh, eighteen hundred and
ninety-nine. That moment marked the opening of a war destined to
determine the fate of South Africa, to work great changes in the
British Empire, to seriously affect the future history of the world, and
incidentally to alter many of our views as to the art of war. It is the
story of this war which, with limited material but with much aspiration
to care and candour, I shall now endeavour to tell.

CHAPTER 5. TALANA HILL.

It was on the morning of October 12th, amid cold and mist, that the Boer
camps at Sandspruit and Volksrust broke up, and the burghers rode to the
war. Some twelve thousand of them, all mounted, with two batteries of
eight Krupp guns each, were the invading force from the north, which
hoped later to be joined by the Freestaters and by a contingent of
Germans and Transvaalers who were to cross the Free State border. It
was an hour before dawn that the guns started, and the riflemen followed
close behind the last limber, so that the first light of day fell upon
the black sinuous line winding down between the hills. A spectator upon
the occasion says of them: 'Their faces were a study. For the most part
the expression worn was one of determination and bulldog pertinacity.
No sign of fear there, nor of wavering. Whatever else may be laid to the
charge of the Boer, it may never truthfully be said that he is a coward
or a man unworthy of the Briton's steel.' The words were written early
in the campaign, and the whole empire wi