retreated along the railway line through the Orange River Colony,
which was not his own, he became quite miserly in his use of dynamite
when the Transvaal was reached, which was his own, and which would
infallibly be restored to him, so he reckoned, when the war was over.
So was it to be with Pretoria too! To the very last the fighting Boer
believed that whatever his fate in the field of battle, if he were
only dogged enough, and in any fashion prolonged the strife
sufficiently, British patience would tire, as it had tired before;
British plans and purposes and pledges would all be abandoned as
aforetime they had been abandoned, and he would thus secure, even in
the face of defeat, the fruits of victory. The importunate widow is
the one New Testament character "the brother" implicitly believes in
and imitates. Her tactics were his before the war, in the matter of
the Conventions; and the wasteful prolonging of the war was a part of
the same policy. Great Britain was to be forced by sheer weariness to
give back to the Transvaal in some form its coveted independence, and
with it, of course, Pretoria also. So he would on no account consent
to let the city be bombarded. Our peaceful occupation was the best
possible protection for property that would presently be again his
own; and while he still went on with his desultory fighting we were
quite welcome, at our own expense, to feed every Boer family we could
find.

Thus, like our own hunted Pretender, he held that however long
delayed, the end was bound to restore to him his own; and he had not
far to look for what justified the fallacy. In 1881, for instance, as
one among many illustrations, an English general at Standerton
formally assured the Boers that the Vaal would flow backward through
the Drakenberg Hills before the British would withdraw from the
Transvaal. Three successive Secretaries of State, three successive
High Commissioners, and two successive Houses of Commons deliberately
endorsed that official assurance; yet though the Vaal turned not back
Great Britain did; and to that magnanimous forgetting of the nation's
oft-repeated pledge was due in part this new war and its intolerable
prolonging. It does not pay thus to say and then unsay. Thereby all
confidence, all sense of finality, is killed.

[Sidenote: _Taking possession._]

"Take your Grenadiers and open the ball," said Sir John Moore, as he
appointed to his men their various positions in the famous fight