rge Creusot guns, two Krupps, one
Vickers-Maxim quick firer, two pompoms and four mountain guns.

CHAPTER 30. THE CAMPAIGN OF DE WET.

It had been hoped that the dispersal of the main Boer army, the capture
of its guns and the expulsion of many both of the burghers and of
the foreign mercenaries, would have marked the end of the war. These
expectations were, however, disappointed, and South Africa was destined
to be afflicted and the British Empire disturbed by a useless guerilla
campaign. After the great and dramatic events which characterised the
earlier phases of the struggle between the Briton and the Boer for the
mastery of South Africa it is somewhat of the nature of an anticlimax to
turn one's attention to those scattered operations which prolonged the
resistance for a turbulent year at the expense of the lives of many
brave men on either side. These raids and skirmishes, which had their
origin rather in the hope of vengeance than of victory, inflicted much
loss and misery upon the country, but, although we may deplore the
desperate resolution which bids brave men prefer death to subjugation,
it is not for us, the countrymen of Hereward or Wallace, to condemn it.

In one important respect these numerous, though trivial, conflicts
differed from the battles in the earlier stages of the war. The British
had learned their lesson so thoroughly that they often turned the tables
upon their instructors. Again and again the surprise was effected, not
by the nation of hunters, but by those rooineks whose want of cunning
and of veld-craft had for so long been a subject of derision and
merriment. A year of the kopje and the donga had altered all that. And
in the proportion of casualties another very marked change had occurred.
Time was when in battle after battle a tenth would have been a liberal
estimate for the losses of the Boers compared with those of the Briton.
So it was at Stormberg; so it was at Colenso; so it may have been at
Magersfontein. But in this last stage of the war the balance was
rather in favour of the British. It may have been because they were
now frequently acting on the defensive, or it may have been from an
improvement in their fire, or it may have come from the more desperate
mood of the burghers, but in any case the fact remains that every
encounter diminished the small reserves of the Boers rather than the
ample forces of their opponents.

One other change had come over the war, which cause