e. Your Lord Methuen cannot advance here; he has had to retire
twice."

We knew that they would thus interpret Lord Roberts's delay and his
contradictory orders to Lord Methuen, but it was rather galling not to
be able to deny it.

"We have no dislike for the English," the man went on; and it was at
least true of him and many of the Free Staters whom I met, although it
was not true of all the Transvaalers. "You are brave soldiers and you
fight well and we can respect you, but you are led astray by Joe
Chamberlain." His face darkened when he uttered the name; I had a
glimpse of a man hated by a nation.

"Rhodes, too," he said, but with less hatred and more contempt. "If we
had caught him in Kimberley we should have killed him, but if _we_ don't
kill him----" and he named an alternative in which he clearly saw a
Providence working on behalf of the wronged.

I asked him a little later what he thought of our generals and of whom
he was most afraid? He was quite ready with an opinion.

"There is no difference," he said, with a lofty air, "it makes no
difference to us; we take them as they come. First come first served."
He was even impartial. "Your Lord Methuen has been blamed for
Magersfontein, but the English do not know that we were as much
surprised and scared as he was when his troops stumbled on us in the
dark. It was a very near thing for us. We are not afraid of Kitchener of
whom you talk so much. Roberts? Yes, he is a fairly good general, but
alone we do not fear him. Roberts and Kitchener together are good; we
do not like them. But alone we will take them on any day."

Although we talked for a long time I did not really learn much from
these Boers, who represented the most unthinking class. Just as I had
found the English colonists to conduct their arguments in a circle and
constantly to bring forward the same old statements, so I found these
Boers repeating the same assertions over and over again: that the Lord
was on their side; that they must prevail in the end; that they could
not trust us; that we had played them false; that we were really after
their gold-fields; "if there had been no gold in South Africa there
would have been no war." They spoke as men who repeated a lesson; yet I
am bound to say that they spoke with sincerity, and although they seemed
to speak parrot-wise, they probably accepted current forms of speech as
giving the best expression to a deep and universal conviction.

We had been ri