oad of papers.... When he returned he was
chuckling to himself. 'General Cronje wants to assault Mafeking,' he
said. 'He has wired that he can take the town in a hand-to-hand fight,
but the old President won't listen to it. He says the place is not
worth the lives of fifty burghers, and has just issued an order that
Cronje is to continue the siege and simply see to it that Colonel
Baden-Powell and his troops do not escape. The Council was divided;
some thought that Cronje should be permitted to storm the place. The
President has just ordered that one of the big siege-guns shall be
sent to Cronje.'"[10]

[Footnote 10: _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, May,
1900, p. 827.]

Time {p.123} apparently was of no account. The burghers and the Boers
had only to wait open-mouthed for plums to drop--at Mafeking, at
Kimberley, at Ladysmith. Mafeking very possibly was not in itself
worth the lives of fifty burghers; but it was worth a great deal more
if it was to be the means of detaining them before its little worth to
their exclusion from action concentrated elsewhere, which their
numbers would have gone to make overpowering, and which by proper
direction would have been decisive--not perhaps of ultimate
issues--but of those prolonged delays in which lies the best hope of a
defence. It is an interesting commentary on Kruger's decision that, at
the moment these lines are writing, the deliverance of Mafeking is
known to have been preceded immediately by a fruitless assault of the
burghers, which cost more than that presumed for the attack at the
outset, which a competent general on the spot believed then would be
successful. Control at a distant capital, exercised by an obstinate,
overbearing old man, who, though unquestionably shrewd and acute, was
equally unquestionably narrow with the narrowness of contracted
experience and {p.124} limited military knowledge, boded ill for the
Boer cause. While Cronje at Mafeking, and Wessels at Kimberley, and
Joubert at Ladysmith were waiting for a moment that never came, time
was flying, the hostile reinforcements were speeding forward 300 miles
a day, and the very danger of the three places was goading the British
people into wide-awake activity.

Yet more imminent was the nearer opportunity, fast disappearing into
the nearer danger, ultimately to become the established and fatal
centre of ruin--at De Aar. "This was not the sort of fighting-ground
the Boer i